Our second year at the Center for Cartoon Studies kicks off today with Alec Longstreth’s Professional Practice class! Yahoo! I’m very excited about this year and all of the opportunities ahead, but also determined to make the most of my time and the work I have to do. David Macaulay has agreed to be my thesis advisor for the year, resuming his role as a mentor and editor from my days at RISD as a sophomore and junior. He is insightful, encouraging, and very critical; it’s all about the work to him, and I deeply appreciate his objectivity. I think it will be a great fall!
Madame Bovary!
September 19th, 2009
Chick Lit! The very first!
I have just finished reading Flaubert’s classic masterpiece for the first time and I am not at all ashamed to say that I truly enjoyed it. How can one resist such a ‘vulgar’ protagonist as Emma Bovary, who finally yields to her lover’s advances with the “real” (translation: “obscene”) scenario of an eight-hour ride in the back of a carriage?
“Without any fixed plan or direction, [the cab] wandered about at hazard… From time to time the coachman on his box cast despairing eyes at the public-houses. He could not understand what furious desire for locomotion urged these individuals never to wish to stop. He tried now and then, and at once exclamations of anger burst forth behind him. Then he lashed his perspiring jades afresh… demoralised, and almost weeping with thirst, fatigue, and depression” (227).
Scandal! Can you imagine?! That kind of flagrant sex scene in media today?!
Emma is a cross-dressed version of Flaubert himself who lusts for the romance of gods and fairy tales while bound to her adoring bovine husband. She writes letters to her lover “in virtue of the notion that a woman must write to her lover,” but meanwhile loses sight of the man himself beneath the abundance of his attributes (296). Flaubert has clearly used his own lust and Parisian lovers to navigate the events of his plot, and the novel is just as “real” today as it was in the 1850′s. Thank God for the censors and critics, and the trial that launched the book into fame and infamy.
Today, romance genre literature apparently make up fifty percent (50%!!!) of the publishing industry. What are we all doing in cartooning?!
Language, and matters of the soul
September 26th, 2009
Flaubert wrote to his lover in his second year of working on Madame Bovary that “everything one invents is true,” and that “poetry is just as precise as geometry. Induction is as valid as deduction, and after a certain point, one is never wrong about matters of the soul.”
Roald Hoffman, Nobel Prize winning chemist, finds that science has a great deal in common with poetry. “The language of science is a language under stress. Words are being made to describe things that seem indescribable in words– equations, chemical structures and so forth. Words do not, cannot mean all that they stand for, yet they are all we have to describe experience. By being a natural language under tension, the language of science is inherently poetic. There is metaphor aplenty in science. Emotions emerge shaped as states of matter and more interestingly, matter acts out what goes on in the soul. One thing is certainly not true: that scientists have some greater insight into the workings of nature than poets… Poetry soars, all around the tangible, in deep dark, through a world we reveal and make.”
Graphic designer turned rock star Chip Kidd states in an interview that books are very much theater of the mind, and that “writing is really designing with words, taking language to create a pure experience in the reader’s mind.”
I like all of these ideas.
They inspire me to be a better writer, a better designer, and a better visual storyteller.
Now back to work!