I’m not reading anything right now. I’m working on the comic. It has a deadline now: all finished by midsummer (24 June 2008). So no reading - if you can be reading you can be working. Work work work. I spent January reading the first four Dune books. A spillover from last May that I spent repeatedly watching the special edition Lynch Dune on on demand, combined with Half Price Books having all four of them for a buck fifty apiece when I was in there after xmas. I didn’t so much read them as shovel them into my mouth like sand flavored cheetos.
It was all fun and games till I got to God Emperor Dune. I always heard it said around that in the event you ever decide to read the Dune books, stop at three, because after that you are on your own. And boy o if ever that isn’t the truth, I don’t know what is. I spent the duration of the book with my soul being kind of aghast at what it was witnessing. The worm lives underground for a reason people. I wouldn’t trade it though, I’m almost curious enough to seek out the rest, but I think I’m OK with leaving it where it is for now.
I was nicely working away on page 60 earlier. Well, going over the script trying to figure out how I’m going to pull it off, and crucifix pose pops up again. I feel like pulling up the word doc and doing a search, getting the numbers on how many times “crucifix pose” is in a scene description, but it would only come up with not enough times to make it funny and just the right ammount of times to make it especially horrible. It seems like I am always getting crucified or staring into the face of the worm in the course of drawing scripts for Kieron. Duke Leto II would laugh at this joke.
Human life is truly a short affair. It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like. But it is important never to tell this to young people as it is something that would be harmful if incorrectly understood.
Personally, I like to sleep. And I intend to appropriately confine myself more and more to my living quarters and pass my life away sleeping.
– The Hagakure
Every year my jolly friend A.E.W-M and I attempt to go on some sort of adventure to a new city together. One trip ago we were kind of half broke and having to do something on the cheap and not too far away, so we decided to go to Columbus the weekend of S.P.A.C.E. (a small but cute comic-con- I got a blue bunny there that is still decorating my inspiration board.)
Columbus itself was kind of on the dreary and depressing side, but after a couple hours of driving around we managed to find the good independent bookstore, a rambling almost musty old house stuffed full of used, bargain, and strange books of all kinds.
The way to go bookshopping is to wander through and look around till something calls you, it took me two times through all manner of windy hallways and crowded rooms till I saw it. e.e. cummings? I always notice his name because it looks so ridiculous. is that poetry or something? no - it’s a novel. The Enormous Room. Hm, I didn’t know he had a novel. This looks interesting. It got read almost immediately upon returning home, and has never really left me since.
It’s an account of mr. cumming’s adventures serving in an ambulance corps during WWII. Well not exactly - he had a best friend and a smart mouth and a good old time, till they annoyed the boss that had a severe hate on for them so much that he got cummings and his best friend sent off to a french concentration camp on some kind of trumped up “they have a treasonous attitude” charges.
I guess something like this could have been pretty scary, but they were young and arrogant enough still to relax into the absurdity of the experience. Throughout the book cummings goes in to great detail about the people and conditions and daily life of being a prisoner at that time and in that place, all the colorful characters they met, and all the dramas that played out before their eyes, but he never directly talks about himself or his best friend. It seems more like the book was about all of the things that he and his friend talked about to amuse each other while they were there. A recounting of a years worth of private jokes.
Towards the end of the book cumming’s friend gets sent off to the very bad and scary prison where no one that goes there ever comes back from alive, and the sense of heartbreak coming out of the book after that happens is almost unbearable. The day that the box of gorgeous leatherbound Shakespeare editions that he and his friend finangled for months trying to get their hands on arrived, e.e. just shoved them away and didn’t look at them at all. And I just keep feeling sad for that box full of Shakespeare that missed being read by those crazy and brilliant young men to a bunch of illiterate war orphan hoodlums in an enormous wet room at the tail end of WWII. That probably would have been a lot of fun.
Briefly considered picking up some more Stephenson, but decided to keep that ended on a high note for a while. On to Kevin Murphy’s A Year at the Movies: One Man’s Filmgoing Odyssey which was nice and cosy like a blanket. I laughed and I cried and even got a tummy ache on the last chapter where he rips on the Tolkien fans. Took a while to get through because I’ve been a tad on the listless side lately. Everyday things fill up all the dream spaces and I feel more machine than man, twisted and evil? Something like that. Am attempting to pick up Moorcock and read through the Elric saga, but it’s turning to dust, so probably going to take a break from reading for a while and go back to work. Sometimes it seems like you’d do anything but the right thing. Although I did quit smoking between now and the previous entry. Almost by accident, like it got lost in the past and I can’t find it anymore. Taste and smell are welcome back, confronting feelings instead of smoking them to death, somewhat less so, but probably better in the long run. Breathing is nice, and sometimes that is enough!
A few months ago on a bookstore wander, I reached down to the bottom shelf and picked up a mass market paperback copy of Cryptonomicon. Cheap, thick and filled to the brim with tiny smeary print. Yay!
The moment that sticks is in the beginning part when the current Waterhouse avatar is standing in the middle of some vast math problem with a fanny pack full of freedom (not that it lasted long). & he def. gives good WW II.
Picked up the first book of Quicksilver not long after, and the walks through London were worth it. Also old Daniel on the ship, that was some good ship.
Now it’s after a night at half price books, picking up Snow Crash on a whim. Figure I’ve gone along with him through the recent past, and the Past Past, the future might be an adventure. Then it’s The Deliverator. This is real dumb, dear god, I hate it, but kind of like “air conditioning repair man” dumb, maybe, so I’m on for the rest- we’ll see how it goes. **TIME LAPSE**
I commented to Jeff when finishing up the first chapter “Novels not exactly best vehicle for extended car chase scenes”, rolled my eyes and kept reading in spite. Laughing later when Hiro gets in another and author is like “chase scene goes here” then skips to the next scene. I was mad for a while that I was liking this book where the main characters were named Hiro Protagonist and Y.(ours) T.(ruly), I mean come on, but I can’t stop, I loved every minute of it. I kept thinking - man, this would make a great comic, I wish I could make a comic of this - only to fall on the first words of the afterword “This was meant to be a graphic novel” - but they couldn’t make it work. Well duh, It’s too bad he doesn’t know me, I could have made it work. Alas.
“This session was, I believe, an event unique to Warner Bros. Unique at that time, perhaps anytime. Because this was not a brainstorming session in the usual sense, it was a “yes” session, not an “anything goes” session. Anything went, but only if it was positive, supportive, and affirmative to the premise. No negatives were allowed. If you could not contribute, you kept quiet. For want of a better term, I have always called it . . . THE “YES” SESSION. Again, the “yes” session is not a brainstorming session; repeat, it is not a session in which anything goes. The purpose is to advance an idea or ideas, not an emotional outburst for the emotional benefit of the participants or as a story man’s confession of a buried affair with a girl’s track shoe. The “yes” session only has one objective: to write a story.
The “yes” session imposes only one discipline: the abolition of the word “no.” Anyone can say “no.” It is the first word a child learns and often the first word he speaks. It is a cheap word because it requires no explanation, and many men and women have acquired a reputation for intelligence who know only this word and have used it in place of thought on every occasion. The “yes” session lasts only for two hours, but a person who can only say “no” finds it an eternity. Negative-minded people have been known to finally inflate and burst with accumulated negatives and say something positive, because it is also true that a person who heretofore can only say “no” is also a person who must say something.
A “no” is defined by any negative: “I don’t like it.” “There must be a better way.” “I don’t like to criticize but . . .” “I’ve heard that one before.” “I don’t know.” Or: “Oh for Christ’s sake, Chuck.” All are roadblocks impeding the advancement and exploration of the value of an idea and are forbidden.
Of course, all story ideas are not good or useful, and if you find you cannot contribute, then silence is proper, but it is surprising how meaty and muscular a little old stringy “yes” (which is another name for a premise) can become in as little as fifteen or twenty minutes, when everyone present unreservedly commits his immediate impulsive and positive response to it. And, of course, the enlightened self-interest of pouring your contributions unreservedly out in another director’s story session is sufficient motivation; your turn will inevitably come to present an idea to the group in another session, and at such a time you, too, will want, need, and expect full cooperation. A good premise always generates the most astonishing results.”
-Chuck Jones, from CHUCK AMUCK, THE LIFE AND TIMES OF AN ANIMATED CARTOONIST
