December 1, 2010 At Work Lynda Barry on ‘Picture This’ By Nicole Rudick Lynda Barry is many things: a cartoonist, best known for her long-running strip, Ernie Pook’s Comeek; the author of two illustrated novels, Cruddy and The Good Times Are Killing Me; and the sought-after instructor of the workshop “Writing the Unthinkable.” In her two memoir-cum-workbooks—2008’s What It Is and Picture This, published last month by Drawn & Quarterly—Barry puts her many talents into play. The books’ dense collages, lively cartoons, and hand-drawn text use autobiographical tidbits and philosophical flights of fancy to explore the creative impulse, asking such questions as What is an image? and Why do we stop drawing? Barry, a friend of Matt Groening’s since their days at the Evergreen State College in the seventies, agreed to meet me for breakfast, where we talked art, writing, and cigarettes. One of the themes of Picture This is forgetting in order to remember, which seems pretty counterintuitive. When you combine it with Don’t—the name of the cigarettes, which are a running gag throughout—the meaning of the lines becomes very contradictory. Forget to remember to forget to remember, or remember to forget to remember to forget. Yeah, it just makes your brain go uuuuuuuhhh. That’s exactly what I wanted: to get to the point where you realize you don’t know what you’re looking at. Plus, it’s fun coming up with slogans. “What would you do for a don’t?” “Don’t consider it.” I stumbled on these magazines called Grade Teacher, which were sent to grade-school teachers every month, and I have a pile of them from the late twenties to the sixties. They have stuff like “Fun Things to Draw” or “Let’s Do Our Bulletin Board.” But the big ad sponsorship is from coal companies and asbestos companies: “Free giant charts for your class about how wonderful coal is!” The weirdest things are the art projects with asbestos powder, like “Lets make beads and make necklaces and wear them.” I am not joking. Read More
November 9, 2010 At Work Guy Deutscher on ‘Through the Language Glass’ By Mark de Silva Guy Deutscher, right. Photograph by Janie Steen. Have you ever asked someone if the hot water is in the uphill tap? Maybe you’ve warned a friend of the fire ants north of his foot. Or perhaps you’ve merely suggested, with all delicacy, that your date might like to brush the cake crumbs from her mountainward cheek. Doesn’t make any sense? Maybe that’s because you don’t speak Tzeltal, Guugu Yimithirr, or Balinese. In Through the Language Glass, Guy Deutscher discusses these and other differences in thought and perception occasioned by the world’s many tongues. He is currently an honorary research fellow at the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures at the University of Manchester. Recently, he answered some of my questions about his new book via e-mail. In the introduction to your book, you point out the many ways the general public overestimates the influence of language on thought and experience. Why do you think that is? And are there any respects in which ordinary people underestimate language’s influence? Can it be that we tend to overestimate the influence of language partly because we so often underestimate the intelligence of other people? Think about common arguments on the lines of “if you call something X, people will believe it’s X just because of the name.” We rarely hear, “If you call something X, I will start believing it’s X just because of the name.” I obviously know better. But others don’t. This type of overestimation has a long history. One of the earliest discussions of the influence of language on thought was an essay by the Bible scholar Johann David Michaelis from 1760, which won the prize of the of the Prussian academy. In it, Michaelis explains that if, for example, one gave completely different names to two vegetables which are in reality quite similar, “the people” would never suspect that they are similar. He’d obviously not heard of clementines, mandarins, tangarines, and satsumas. On the other hand, it is also true that we underestimate the influence of language, as I tried to show in the book. What we are not sufficiently aware of is the force of the habits that language can create, through the distinctions that it trains us to make and the types of information that it trains us to be attentive to from an early age. And ironically, the areas where the mother-tongue can make a real impact on thought are exactly where common sense would expect all languages to be the same, for instance in the way we describe the space around us or the way we talk about colors. Read More
October 28, 2010 At Work Dinaw Mengestu By Thessaly La Force Photograph by David Burnett. How to Read the Air is the second novel by Dinaw Mengestu. It’s narrated by a young American Ethiopian named Jonas Woldemariam. Jonas’s disintegrating marriage to his wife, Angela, forces him to retrace the steps his parents, Yosef and Miriam, took when they first emigrated from Ethiopia to the United States. Their abusive and loveless marriage stands in stark contrast to the hopes of the American dream. But in distinguishing their past from his life, Jonas may be closer to understanding his own failures. I recently spoke to Mengestu in the Penguin offices before the start of his book tour. Why did you set part of your novel in Peoria, Illinois, the same town where you grew up? I always wanted to write about the Midwest. I’m also very aware of the idea of “immigrant literature” and how it is excluded from the traditional category of the American literary novel; there’s the American literary novel and then there’s the immigrant novel, which is seen as a derivation, and not a natural extension of what someone like Saul Bellow and other American immigrants traditionally have been doing. Beginning my novel in the Midwest was deliberate; I was staking its claim in America. I wanted Jonas, the narrator, not to be an immigrant but to be someone who was undeniably born in America. Read More
October 25, 2010 At Work Nick Flynn and ‘The Ticking Is the Bomb’ By Chad Parmenter Photograph by Geordie Wood. The Ticking Is the Bomb, the second memoir by nonfiction writer and poet Nick Flynn, describes his experiences with fatherhood, writing, and the Abu Ghraib torture victims, some of whom he met personally. It also covers territory explored in his first memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: addiction in his own and his family’s lives and the ongoing need for a relationship with the past that doesn’t let it off too easily. I recently asked Nick about his book by e-mail. You’ve mentioned that The Ticking Is the Bomb originally started as poems and evolved into memoir. What was that process like? That book started as a meditation on the Abu Ghraib photographs; the moment I first saw them, they snagged on something in my subconscious landscape, and I spent the next six years following the thread of it. As I reluctantly dug into the unpleasant topic of state-sponsored torture, specifically America’s long role in it, one thing I noticed was how each element—earth, air, fire, and water—were used to torture. People were buried, suffocated, burned, and waterboarded. The first poems were these element poems, which will now be in a book of poems called The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands, coming out in February from Graywolf. The four element poems were the scaffolding of the eventual memoir, which emerged from behind these poems. Read More
October 21, 2010 At Work Paul Murray and ‘Skippy Dies’ By Miranda Popkey Photograph by Cormac Scully. Paul Murray’s second novel, Skippy Dies—recently longlisted for the Booker Prize—is more than six hundred pages long and tackles subjects ranging from string theory to World War I. Set at an Irish boarding school, the darkly comic tale (Skippy actually does die in the first chapter) is populated by a sharply drawn cast of confused, self-destructive teens and self-involved, irresponsible adults. Recently, Murray spoke to me from his home in Dublin. Did you draw any of the characters and themes from your own experiences? Were you bullied at school? I went to quite an illustrious school in Ireland called Blackrock College, and Seabrook College, the school in the book, physically resembles the school that I went to. But other than that, it wasn’t hugely autobiographical. I wasn’t bullied or anything; I wasn’t brutalized in any way. There were much nerdier kids in my school, and they would draw more of the fire, but I could see it going on around me. It wasn’t an evil place. But there was such a limited view of the world. It was a big rugby school, and I was incredibly bad at rugby. They would make you play it until you were about fifteen, no matter how incredibly pointless that was. So if you weren’t any good at rugby, then you sort of didn’t really have any kind of standing in the school. I think being a teenager is really, really hard. You’re caught in this double bind: You’re struggling to establish your own identity, and at the same time you have absolutely zero of the tools that you need. You’re completely dependent on your parents, you have no money, and your day is mapped out for you from beginning to end. My school was a boys’ school; there were no girls, so life really felt kind of pointless in that regard. You’ve got these huge sexual transformations happening, but if there are no girls, obviously all the energy is just going to be turned into brutalizing whoever is smaller than you. There was also a real emphasis on grades. The school would push students to perform well on exams and get a lot of points and get into good universities and so forth. The education system in Ireland is a real sausage factory. You go into class and you learn as many facts as you can and you regurgitate them in your exams, and there’s not a huge amount of respect for learning or a huge amount of respect for education. And because a lot of the kids were quite wealthy, some of them looked down on teachers. And the combination of a might-makes-right brutality and also getting a glimpse of the economic hierarchy that held sway in the country—all those things were really disappointing lessons to learn as a kid. It felt like my life began as soon as I left school. Read More
October 19, 2010 At Work Laura Kipnis and a Theory of Scandal By Natalie Jacoby Laura Kipnis is not a scandalous person. The Northwestern Professor of media studies has written five books, received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, and is a contributor to Harper’s, Slate, and The New York Times. In her latest book, How to Become a Scandal: Adventures in Bad Behavior, she develops a “theory of scandal.” The book does not include the latest tabloid gossip; rather, Kipnis takes an academic approach in understanding the psychology behind stories of people like Linda Tripp and James Frey. I recently interviewed Kipnis in her New York apartment (where I was happy to see a set of The Paris Review interview series on her shelves). There doesn’t seem to be a lot of writing on the “theory of scandal.” What kind of research did you do for this book? There’s a currently little-read psychoanalyst named Theodor Reik, a student of Freud’s, who wrote on what he called social masochism, which involves people using society as an instrument of self-punishment, acting things out in public in a way that guarantees some kind of social retribution. I found this incredibly fascinating and useful, since the big question of the book ends up being about self-destruction, about people organizing their own downfalls. Reik isn’t very in fashion anymore, I don’t know why. He’s also written a lot of very counterintuitive stuff on guilt and revenge, which I draw on in a number of the chapters. René Girard’s book on scapegoats was also helpful in thinking about the social dynamics of scandal. What I didn’t find was much on scandal itself that was particularly useful, but that’s also exciting as a writer: You get to invent the terrain. Read More