I read this great comic by Lynda Barry that's in McSweeny’s 13 (and also in The Best American Comics Anthology).
I don’t know about you but I love comics and I don’t always look that closely at them - at the drawings - but I still always have an acute impression of the style - I do look at them of course - but I have to make myself study them in detail because it's not the natural, just go ahead and do it the way you do it without thinking much about it way that I read comics usually - only when I get some notion that I should do I study the drawings closely - and when I do I appreciate the work in detail - but it's not the way I normally read comics - and I certainly don't do anything like that when I first read the comic - only after I have read it once will I scrutinize the drawing in that way - and of course then I'm usually amazed by things - especially by the thought of how much work goes into the little details - and how much work, how much time and effort, goes into making the whole thing - I think it is astounding - but when I read them in the way I usually read them, which is a pleasure, I just take it all in - their personality, or "comicality" - their presence - or their comic being - their being as comic - I think it's quite unique the way that they are, all of it, the drawing, and the frame, and the layout, and the text, and the dialogue - all of that is voice - which is to say like countenance, character or charm or personality or presence - and all of that is writing insofar as all of it is read - so reading comics is reading all of that -
Anyway, I really do love Lynda Barry's work - for a long time I've been reading stuff she does - I haven't read her novels, but I'd like to read her novels - but I've read her comics for a long time - Ernie Pook's Comeek - there is something about it that I really am attracted to - and there is a very interesting comic by her in McSweeny's 13 (which is an amazing issue of that journal with a lot of great comics in it - an anthology edited by the amazing Chris Ware (although you need a magnifying glass to read his stuff) - it is a piece about her creative process and its history, and the history or cycle of her thinking all about it, and wondering about and knowing and forgetting and remembering again what it's all about - a riddle that I relate to as a writer and which resonates more generally also with me in a philosophy of living and/or being sort of way -
It reminds me of one of my favourite lectures by one of my favourite wirters - Gertrude Stein - from a piece called What are master-pieces and why there are so few of them - there is a part in that lecture that syncs up with the part in Lynda Barry's piece when she discovers the power and necessity of "I don't know" - that is, she rediscovers it - continually as part of being who she is making comics - and each time that she does rediscover it, it is a liberating thing -
In Gertrude Stein's piece there is a bit about not remembering what you are about to write when you are creating it - and it is very interesting to me - it has been very interesting to me for a very long time - she says "At the moment when you are you you are you without the memory of yourself because if you remember yourself while you are you you are not for the purposes of creating you." - and this is a lot like Lynda Barry asking all the time what is it, and is it good. or does it suck, and then knowing that it’s best when she doesn't know and only cares to do it, to create the drawing, story, thing -
There's a Lynda Barry comic where she says - "Weird the feeling it gives you, to find a person in a book who is the way you are - Even if it is a made-up story by a lady who is dead now. Weird the feeling, and good very, very good" - and a book or story or a thing can also be like the way you are - it's different but similar and good very, very good.
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