Scott McCloud and the Tribes of Art

This image found by way of Silliman's Blog, which in turn led to an article in The Guardian. Thoughts?

EDIT: I should say that my own journey to this image progressed from Silliman's Blog to the Guardian article. I believe the publishing trail actually leads in the reverse. I should also note that these categories are enlivened by the summary of each in the article.

ENGL235, this is your reading for Monday

Bubble-gum Cameos, Pop-tab Cars, and Kansa the Buffalo by Aubrey Streit


Relations by Eula Biss

Pay attention to details. Enough said.

The Butterfly Wins, But Paint Fumes Prevent It From Flying Tonight

OK, I'm not even extending the poll for a full week. Between online votes and people coming up to me/IMing me/calling me, it's clear that everybody prefers the butterfly.

Since it's more of a "real" album cover, I'm going to proceed with the insert idea. That is, I'll make up a PDF that acts as an e-booklet to accompany the album.

Unfortunately, I ache and am dizzy with paint fumes. We're on day...something of too many...getting the house ready for sale. All that remains is the kitchen, the front and back doors, and tidying the trim in the bedroom (this last item is still on my agenda for tonight). We're all ready to beat each other with sticks. Probably paint sticks. The ones used for mixing. Nevermind, you knew which ones.

See? Paint fumes. I remember once more why I don't do drugs.

Dizzily,
JeFF

Too Easy Ethics?

Today went smoothly. A bit too smoothly.

Normally the ethics day provokes more argument among my students. I toss out questions like "Is there anything we shouldn't write about?" It's a serious question, not a rhetorical one. I use it to make sure we're all on the same page about what might come up in class and to get a baseline for how comfortable different people are with different subjects. Generally speaking, there are a handful of very vocal free-speechers who want everything to be fair game (either "we're adults who can handle it" or "this is a university and things ought to be open") and a number of "well, whatever s/he says" students.

Most of the responses today were either measured or lukewarm. "So long as you're respectful" was perhaps the winner. I say this is either measured or lukewarm because being "respectful" in one's writing is often an excuse for choking off one's writing. We agreed that the classroom is not the real world, and so writing here may (and perhaps should) differ from writing in the real world. At the same time, it might be a betrayal of the intent of personal growth that is supposed to come out of this class. If we remain so concerned with what others will think, we'll never put out that personal story that could truly move someone, or that disturbing bit, or that political manifesto that will empower someone. We batted that idea around a bit, but the shorter class period stuck us in a limbo of abstraction. They chafed for specific examples, so I laid out a few:

*Drug use - so long as it only affects the writer, I'll avoid calling the cops. I mentioned a former student (not by name) who wrote better when stoned, noting that I don't think drugs actually help in writing as a rule and so won't encourage drug use.
*Politics and sexuality - I remain neutral. I'll try to help you say what you say.

Thus far everybody continued to nod and agree. This seems to suggest that the others will follow the same guidelines in responding. Then came:

*Self-harm - If you're a cutter, or write something that implies you're suicidal, I will talk to you about seeing a counselor. It's not high school, and I don't call parents, but this is a serious matter. It goes beyond writing and into the rest of your life.
*Harming others - In an appropriate story, a war piece or whatnot, OK. Anything involving anyone in class, explicitly forbidden. A couple of the students were shocked that my mind even goes here, but it's not as though there's never been a writing class where a student wrote violent (murder or rape) fantasies and tried to pass them off as burgeoning literature. It destroys the trust that develops among classmates, even if intended as a joke (in very poor taste).

Aside from the shock (shock) that anybody would write a violent story about the person next to them, most of the class skimmed along. Took everything pretty easily. No major complaints. No searching for loopholes. No arguments. Possibly very mature.

Now, it may be that the subjects of ethics really is boring. It may be that the classroom is warm. It may be the time of day. It may be that it's the first week. About a third of the class got involved in discussion somehow or another, so we'll see if that raises up a bit on Friday (we'll finally get to the mechanics of John J. Stazkinski's "Lessons in Amateur Stalking," which will do double-duty as a segue into ethical considerations of the writer and a segue into nonfiction as a whole).

The Butterfly is Back

You'll notice that I missed Monday's post. The recap:

Class went as usual. Syllabus blah blah blah, then play Apples to Apples in small groups. Writing assignment for Wednesday - two pages recounting the game you just played from someone else's point of view. Those students who needed examples were given ideas from past students: the person sitting across from you, a person sitting behind you who can only hear the exclamations but not the normal content of the conversation, an ant crawling on the wall. They now know about this blog, and one student wrote down the address, so someone may come across this post which reveals that it's all a sneaky way to get them to talk about the ethics of writing. Yep, you read that correctly. Wednesday is going to be a discussion about ethics - whether or not it's OK to write as someone else, what the limits and expectations of research are, do fiction and poetry adhere to the same rules as nonfiction for certain things, is there anything we can't/shouldn't write about, the same question specifically applied to the classroom, etc.

I'll finish the Batman bit later. If any of my students are checking out this blog, they'll quickly note that it's pretty bad writing. I stand by the concept, but the writing is bad. Not a good impression of your professor for the first week of class. Maybe I'll post samples of work I've published in Fence or 88 or Borderlands later.

The big news on the artistic front, besides an acceptance from Rhino (which is pretty cool, my second time in that journal), is that Guillaume Provost (rOmy) emailed me about his art. I can use it for the cover of Arts & Crafts if I want. So here's a poll. I think I can put up a poll here. Which do you prefer - the butterfly or the typography?

Breaking 'til Monday

Kate got back from a conference in Philadelphia at 2:30 this morning (she got back at 2:30, not that the conference was at 2:30). We're both tired, my parents are coming in from Chicago tomorrow to help us paint the house (if you didn't know we're moving to New Hampshire, hey, we're moving to New Hampshire...more on that in a future post), we need to meet with the real estate agent today and buy paint and rent a power washer and various other things. Come Monday, I'll weigh in with the final Batman installment and perhaps some reflections on the first day of class (teaching Intro to Creative Writing again - very excited).

-JeFF

Day and Night

A continuation of my ideas for Year of the Bat (or at least that's what I think would make a great title for this third/final installment in Christopher Nolan's Batman series)..

We now continue, having left off with someone, apparently Batman, blowing up every wannabe supervillain in Gotham in one swift motion...


That night. Wayne Manor. Bruce Wayne walks into the kitchen. Alfred confronts him about his recent change. "You didn't mean to kill Mr. Dent, sir. But these others. The ones since then. You can't call that an accident. Batman was supposed to stand for something." As Alfred continues talking, the camera closes in on Wayne's face, and Alfred's voice fades out, replaced with words from the Joker, "You complete me. You complete me. You complete me." Wayne shakes out of the reverie and explains to Alfred that when the mob was around, he had purpose. With the Joker, he had purpose. But now, he's lost that purpose. Batman is no longer an incorruptible symbol. He's just another freak. The people are as scared of Batman as they are of the villains. Maybe even more so. And worse, he's inspired normal criminals to step up and try to be the next Joker or Batman. That's why he did what he did. He's tearing out the weed at the root. Alfred interjects that all those would-be villains aren't the root. Wayne pauses and says, "I know."

The next morning, Gordon surveys the ruins of the warehouse. One of his men delivers an initial report that "dozens" were killed. Gordon holds his hand to his eyes. "Even the Joker didn't get that many," he sighs.

The officer who delivered the report, looking around with a more hardened expression, interjects, "But these were bad guys, sir. It's not like the Bat Man's killing innocent people."

"And if he had," asks Gordon, "If he had, could you have stopped him?"

That night, a drug dealer waits on the corner. The street is unusually quiet. He starts to walk away from his post, looking over his shoulder. He's convinced someone is following him. He ducks into an alley and peeks back at the street. Nothing. When he turns back to the alley, he's suddenly sucked into the darkness. The camera pulls back from the alley to the sound of blows landing and muffled screams.

Cut to Wayne Manor, the next morning. A newspaper slams down next to Bruce Wayne's head. Alfred is shouting at him about the front page item, a low level drug dealer who was beaten so badly he's in critical condition at the hospital, and how one of Batman's symbols was left at the scene. Wayne shrugs and begins to monologue about the power of fear, how when it isn't just the bosses, but any thug who can be hurt by Batman, they won't dare to. Alfred cuts him off, arguing that if people are too afraid to do wrong, that doesn't mean that they're good or right. It just means they're scared. And that's no different than how it used to be.

Cut to Gordon, who is fielding various questions from the press about Batman: whether he's really being pursued by the police, whether Gordon think he's making the city safer. He answers that Batman was once a symbol of hope. Now he's a symbol of fear. Gordon wants people to think of the police as the new symbol of... He is cut off as a body swings into the window, much as the fake Batman in The Dark Knight. It is the officer who reported to Gordon at the warehouse. He's alive, but badly beaten. A piece of paper in the shape of a bat is pinned to his shirt.

Cut to Wayne Manor. Bruce approaches Alfred. "I need you to do something for me."


OK, this middle portion has been the hardest for me. Obviously I want Batman to descent lower and lower, taking on criminals and police alike, and becoming hated/feared by the general populace of Gotham. In the next installment, I'll outline Batman's final plans, how they go awry, the grand cinematic climax, and the muted dramatic climax.

A Break from Dissertating, or Why Everybody Else Is Wrong About The Next Dark Knight Villain

While everybody on the internet and their mothers are speculating as to which member of the Rogues Gallery will be the villain in the next Batman movie (exhibit A), I'd like to take this moment to shout into the Abyss:

There shouldn't be another villain!

At least nobody is arguing for Calendarman yet.

Nolan isn't just retelling the Batman story. He's recreating it. Sure, there are over the top moments, but his Batman exists in a real world, not a serial. That means that when people die, they die. When Batman makes a choice, he has to deal with its consequences. And when the baddest bad guy of all makes his appearance, you simply cannot top it.

This is the existential problem in Nolan's created world, and frankly, it should be the guiding problem of whatever movie follows The Dark Knight.

This Batman series has emphasized symbolism from the beginning, taking special care to show that the idealism of the first movie could in fact be twisted. It turns out, ironically, that Bruce Wayne had it only partially right when he said that as a symbol, he could be incorruptible. It's actually the man behind the mask who resists corruption in The Dark Knight, and the symbol that becomes tarnished. In fact, that's one reason the Bruce Wayne/Batman character is so relatively boring in the second movie. Call me a cynic (I am), but I say it's time to take this to its extreme and logical end: Batman must be the villain of the third and final movie. More than that, the symbol must die, and the man must learn what it is to give up everything to achieve his goal.

I give to you my concept, in varying degrees of detail, for the last Batman movie:


Our first shot opens on a pair of scruffy wingtip shoes waddling away from us. The camera pans up slightly, just enough to let us see that the man wearing them is obese and carrying an umbrella.

Cut to the back of a woman's head, well-coiffed. She's at an expensive restaurant, seated with a group of women dressed in businesswear. She holds a cat.

Cut to a side view of a man wearing a purple top hat. He stares at a group of children on a playground.

Cut to a woman wearing a labcoat. She drops a fly into a waiting Venus Fly Trap.

Cut back to the original man, who enters a convenience store and tries to hold up the clerk using his umbrella. The umbrella is awkwardly rigged to fire a gun, but it doesn't work. He runs out of the store and into an alley, panting. Someone hands him a piece of paper. [The cuts begin to increase in pace] The woman with the cat begins to call her lunch meeting to order when the waiter hands her a piece of paper. She opens it and sees a coded message. The man in the hat is looking at his paper, a few letters of which he's deciphered. The botanist has completed half of the message. The message is quickly revealed to be an invitation to a "Rogues' Gallery" by someone calling himself "The Riddler."

Cut to Commissioner Gordon having a conversation with an underling about proliferation since the Joker's capture. "Every two-bit nut is putting on a costume and calling himself a supervillain. There's no room left for the normal people in this town."

Cut to assembled villains in a warehouse (here's your chance to stick Calendarman in the movie). There is a huge round table, big enough to seat them all. In the center is a note in the shape of The Riddler's mask. Most of the villains eye each other warily. A few are talking themselves up to their neighbors, the rest are annoyed by the amateurish efforts. Finally the Penguin jumps up on the table and waddles towards the note. He picks it up, and the note tears to reveal a smaller piece of paper in the shape of a bat. The villains look around worriedly.

Cut to outside of warehouse. It explodes.

Tune in tomorrow, same Bat-channel, for continuing developments in this story...

Designing a Cover for an Intangible Album

A good-looking book has always appealed to me, as has good cover art on a CD or LP - though the font often appears to be an afterthought on many album covers. I really got the bug working at Cushing Memorial Library and Archives at Texas A&M. You don't understand how amazing solid typography can be until you've been able to flip through the Kelmscott Chaucer. I'm also fond of more creative typography, from calligraphic (there's some amazing work in Arabic and Chinese, whose alphabets lend themselves more readily to organic visuals) to graffiti.

For Arts & Crafts, I've been mulling over the cover concept about as long as I've had the album concept. I originally wanted some kind of art that would reflect the dual nature of the album. As a combination of poetry and essays, the visuals should combine two seemingly-opposed elements. This could be elemental, like fire and water, or conceptual, like old and new.

My first choice was to adapt a wallpaper created by rOmy over at customize.org. I wanted to crop the wallpaper to the correct size, orient the butterfly on the right half, and fill in the title in the upper left, just off the wing:



Conceptually, I was thinking something like art/nature as the binary. It was also just a striking image, and one that would show up well on an iPod (more on this later). Unfortunately (or fortunately), I haven't been able to get hold of the artist to get permission.

I realized that for this project, unlike the jacket I did for my chapbook Riff Raff, I should rely on my own work. The next attempt was to split the cover into halves:



My wife quickly pointed out that the blurry photo on the right looked bad, and she was right. Back to the drawing board... Which of course was part of the problem. I'm not a great drawer. I can't paint or even sketch very well. Photography, sometimes. But I'd been swimming upstream in my attempt to emphasize a picture as the visual. Why not place the emphasis on the words?

I tried out a free layout program called Scribus, which allowed me to get a good look at the text (it is superior, in this aspect, to the GIMP, a free image-editing program). Taking some inspiration from excellent books by presses like Kelmscott and Unicorn and from broadsides and posters at deviantart, I came up with a simple block, 2cm smaller on each side than a CD case. By using the track listing as a visual element, I could fill the space with words in a pleasing manner.

This last bit, the track listing, led me to a realization. I'd been working on a back cover and an insert so that readers/listeners could "roll their own" CD, as it were, a DIY cover set. However, this isn't a CD. It's an album, a discrete set of tracks to be listened to in a particular order (at least in certain cases). It's going to be distributed for free over the internet. I'm including in the mp3 tags certain information, such as which track is which, lyrics (for the poems), and so forth. If you load up the tracks in Amarok, iTunes, Winamp, Windows Media Player, or whatever, they'll automatically show up in the right order. No need for a track listing or table of contents. No need for an insert, at least with Amarok or iTunes, as the lyrics are contained within the file itself.

The dualism I was going for, then, is partly present in the contrast between a traditional concept (the track listing/table of contents) and the fact that such a thing is not necessary for the medium in which I'm distributing. The cover of the album looks good, and I think it will remain good-looking (meaning both that it will be aesthetically pleasing and that it will stand out from other album covers) in a very small format, such as on an iPod or Zune. If it's close to anything out there as far as album art, I'd compare it to something like Paul Simon's Graceland. But, like the capital Fs in my name, it's very much a surface game. There's a little depth, otherwise I couldn't have written this entry. I suppose I could go on in more detail, developing the theoretical basis behind the cover. But for most people looking at it, it will simply be a little paradoxical.

Of course, I may, now that I have a template developed, write up a PDF "booklet" to accompany the album. I'm also halfway tempted to blow the image up to around 20" by 20". I think it would make a nice broadside/poster. Thoughts?

Arts & Crafts samples

In the interest of

A) trying to keep at this blog on a regular basis
B) show off something interesting
and C) practice my html skills

today's entry consists of two samples from Arts & Crafts. The first is my poem "There will be no reinvention of the wheel," which was a featured poem on Indiefeed's Performance Poetry podcast (show #396 if you want to get specific). If you listen to the podcast, you'll hear bits of an essay I wrote and posted regarding "There will be no reinvention of the wheel." I informally expanded on that essay in audio form, and on the forthcoming "album" they will be tracks 2 and 3. More on track order and intangible albums in the next post...

In the meantime, this should, if it works, offer you the choice to stream the audio or download it.



Download "There will be no reinvention of the wheel"



Download "Persona (essay)"

If you're able to listen to this in the blog (i.e. using those nice embedded Google media players), would you let me know? Linux is acting up on me, and I can't seem to load them myself.

-JeFF

UPDATE: OK, it's confirmed. The media players aren't working. Does anyone out there know of a good embedded player I can use here or on my website?

A Piecemeal Poet(ry)

Piecemeal seems appropriate.

I work in fits and starts, on a number of projects at once. I'm particularly fond of writing poetic sequences, which are brief poems that, when grouped together, outline a longer narrative arc or arcs. A blog is an interrupted series of narratives, glimpses into the bits and pieces the blogger chooses to reveal. It works.

What are you going to see here?

I'm not totally sure yet. I expect I'll keep the world (though it will likely be a tiny world) abreast of some of my projects.

For example, here's a sample cover image for Arts & Crafts, a series of poems and essays in audio and video format I'll be releasing soon. Both the album and the cover are a work in progress, but a blog seems the perfect place to put bits of it out there a little at a time.



I may incorporate teaching elements into the blog (e.g. "For next week's readings, check out my blog"). Teaching is a constantly-new experience, and my creative writing classes in particular always come up with some interesting way to make my syllabuses* inadequate, so this may prove a useful way to keep the class up to date with itself. I'm new to this whole blogging thing, so it's up in the air right now.

We'll see where it lands (and in how many pieces).

JeFF

*Yes, I'm aware that I just linked to Wikipedia. Mea culpa, mea culpa. I'd have used the Oxford English Dictionary to prove that "syllabuses" is a proper plural of the word "syllabus," but not all my readers will have access to the OED online.