Tag Archives: learning

SSS: What it Is, Lynda Barry

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With school starting I decided to pick the Barry book “What it Is” as my Secular Sunday Study. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Lynda Barry, she’s an award winning cartoonist and a professor. I want to say “of art” but her class is soooo much more than just art. You can follow her class, and even participate by following her Tumblr or Twitter account. She utilizes social media in a very interesting way. Anyway, everyone should follow her tumblr and buy a BUNCH of her books.

This book in particular is a facsimile of pages of her journals and sketchbooks along with her writings on art, creativity, and the nature of images. The whole package is a delight in both images, Barry’s voice, as well as her writing. If you took this book and wrote and made art around the main topics or questions she’s posed for herself, you could spend years thinking about art and life. BarryPG38I chose to muse on pages 38 and 39. I’ve included a few image of these pages so you can think on them too. I think page 38’s quote, “But paper and ink have conjuring abilities of their own. Arrangements of lines and shapes, of letters and words on a series of pages make a world we can dwell and travel in.” Is there a better description for journaling ever written? As a child I drew and wrote in my journal as way to escape the boring reality of rural life, and liven up my mind with things I thought great. I wrote poetry (bad) and stories (better) and drew. I wrote letters to friends that I never sent and glued them into the pages of my journal. I lived in my journal but I also had impossible adventures. In a way, I continue these adventures to this day by adding more lines, shapes and words to the pages of my journal and envisioning new adventure.
barryPG39The quote I’ve included from page 39, which is too long for me to copy over, includes the phrase that comments on adults dealing with children who are sensitive, “ when these two come together you get a fairy tale, a kind of story with hopelessness in it.” This is just such a wonderful commentary on our (US centrism here) cultural obsession with making kids hard, less sensitive, and =able to deal with the realities of this world. Rather than teach kids that their sensitive emotions are useful, we smash it out of them, make ‘em tough enough, hard enough to make their way in the world. Not realizing that allowing a child/person to be sensitive to the world around them allows them to experience the world in a full and meaningful manner. No one needs to be hard to live, but in fact by learning to feel we can learn to live fully.

I had more musings but I’ll leave it be, ‘cause it’s up to you to read through this book (and you really must) and have your own musings. The final 72 pages are devised as a workbook that works quite nicely with Barry’s book Syllabus or it could be used on it’s own. Either way, it’s a good book. You should get it.

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Reflection: I Write Heaps of Words

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For those of you who have followed my blog for any period of time, you know I write. I write many words, some of them go here. Many of them are wrapped up in half finished art guides that need editing and photography to be finished. While cleaning my office, I came upon one of these manuscripts. The large binder clip that held it together was stretched to gaping, and the stack of paper was marked up with my favorite blend of Noodler’s red inks; Nikita and Fox red. It looked as though I had cut an artery open on the page. Each page with edits had a orange post it tab letting me know they were on that page.

It brought me back to the frustration of making the edits, knowing that an edit was on page 55 when I made the edit wasn’t helped by the fact that by the time I’d made the 100 edits before suddenly it was on page 75, and thus hard to find.The back and forth of editing has never been my favorite part of writing. While it is something I’m perfectly capable of doing, I’ve avoided it out of annoyance. That is why you get blog posts with misspellings, various typos, and grammatical errors. I lack patience.

I started writing a novel a few months ago. It began as a way to unwind from all the heavy reading and writing I’ve been doing. Because I’ve been reading heavy nerdy stuff, it’s definitely getting to be heavier than intended. It is also slow going because I had no process on how to write. I was sort of throwing ideas on the page and seeing what I liked and as I went I  developed my characters. I got 10,000 words into it and realized it would never work as a novel because, well it just wasn’t readable. As an exercise in writing, well it was something else. I realized I needed to write my novel like I write my researched papers. Start with an idea, flesh it out, make an outline of the points i need to hit, then flesh those out, and soon enough I have my 10 pages of researched goodness.

Except with a novel I’m creating a world, and shit needs to be consistent, and ideas need to be right for the character. Anyway, I’m figuring this stuff out and it’s a necessary distraction from all the heavy stuff I’m reading. I’m relaxing my brain and with the relaxed, creative mind I’m finding new ways of thinking about the heavy stuff I’m reading. I’m able to come up with better ideas, my papers are flowing more smoothly, and I think my writing has gotten better. well, not my blog writing. This stuff could still  you some serious editing.

Anyway, my novel may never end up being anything serious, right now it’s serving it’s purpose by helping to relax my mind,  but who knows what the future holds?