“As cartoonists and comics still attempt to acquaint themselves with not only how to express real human emotion but also try to decide exactly what human emotions are worth expressing, the most facile and immediate way to do it is to write about oneself”
micro
The Notebook of William Blake
N50
“This folio is one of the most closely filled in the notebook. In the centre, we see a naked figure of a man, on the point of stabbing himself with a dagger held in his right hand. In a later emblem in the notebook, Blake suggests that those who take their own lives cannot go to heaven, yet here the man is turning his face towards heaven with a hopeful – and possibly ironic – gaze.”
N99 & N98
“We see workings here of several poems for which the notebook has been rotated to enter fair copies of poems. We see workings here of several poems, including ‘Several Questions Answerd’ in the top left, with lines salvaged from previous drafts in the notebook (see N103). To the right of this poem, ‘Let the Brothels of Paris be opened’ is a strongly felt criticism of the overindulgent French monarchy. The poet’s attack on Marie Antoinette in the final stanza (‘The Queen of France just touchd this Globe And the Pestilence darted from her robe’) distorts Edmund Burke’s romantic description of the French Queen and Court in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790): ‘surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision.'”
Jack Kerouac’s 30 Beliefs and Techniques For Writing Modern Prose
- Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
- Submissive to everything, open, listening
- Try never get drunk outside yr own house
- Be in love with yr life
- Something that you feel will find its own form
- Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
- Blow as deep as you want to blow
- Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
- The unspeakable visions of the individual
- No time for poetry but exactly what is
- Visionary tics shivering in the chest
- In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
- Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
- Like Proust be an old teahead of time
- Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
- The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
- Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
- Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
- Accept loss forever
- Believe in the holy contour of life
- Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
- Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
- Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
- No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
- Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
- Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
- In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
- Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
- You’re a Genius all the time
- Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven”
The Comic Strip Art of Lyonel Feininger
Of all the “Masters of American Comics”, Lyonel Feininger is clearly the least well known. Who is this artist placed between Winsor McCay and George Herriman? He’s best known as a “fine” artist, having taught at the famous Bauhaus school.
Study for Metastaseis, c. 1953.
“Metastaseis was inspired by the combination of an Einsteinian view of time and Xenakis’ memory of the sounds of warfare, and structured on mathematical ideas by Le Corbusier. Music usually consists of a set of sounds ordered in time; music played backwards is hardly recognizable. Messiaen’s similar observations led to his noted uses of non-retrogradable rhythms; Xenakis wished to reconcile the linear perception of music with a relativistic view of time. In warfare, as Xenakis knew it through his musical ear, no individual bullet being fired could be distinguished among the cacophony, but taken as a whole the sound of “gunfire” was clearly identifiable. The particular sequence of shots was unimportant: the individual guns could have fired in a completely different pattern from the way they actually did, but the sound produced would still have been the same. These ideas combined to form the basis of Metastaseis.”
(via)
Walton Ford
‘An enthusiast of the watercolors of Audubon, Ford celebrates the myth surrounding the renowned naturalist-painter while simultaneously repositioning him as an infamous anti-hero who, in reality, killed more animals than he ever painted. Each of Ford’s animal portraits doubles as a complex, symbolic system, which the artist layers with clues, jokes, and erudite lessons in colonial literature and folktales.’
— via Ingoing
The Ripley Scroll
Image from Wiki
More info from Peacay:
“The remarkable Ripley Scroll is, in simple terms, an alchemical manuscript that shows in pictorial cryptograms the production of the philosopher’s stone (the elusive ingredient that produces incorruptible gold out of lesser metals; and/or the elixir of life).”
connect the pieces
“Folk songs were the way I explored the universe. They were pictures, and the pictures were worth more than anything I could say. I knew the inner substance of the thing. I could easily connect the pieces. Most of the other performers tried to put themselves across, rather than the song. But I didn’t care about doing that. With me it was about putting the song across.”
– Bob Dylan (Chronicles (Volume One))
Paul Greer 