October 6, 2008
A Dialogue Doodle
Scene: The seafood counter of my local supermarket. I’ve just ordered a fresh trout for dinner and the clerk, a young man, is removing the head and tail.
Characters: Male Seafood Clerk; Female Produce Clerk. The Produce Clerk enters from stage left and speaks first.
Produce Clerk (to Seafood Clerk): Where’s Tishea at?
Seafood Clerk: Oh, she went and got another job—administrative assistant to some bigwig over at the YMCA.
Produce Clerk: Frosty! The girl can proper that.
Seafood Clerk: That’s right.
Produce Clerk: That Tishea—she can proper her act real fast.
The above text is a recreation of a snippet of conversation overheard by Your Faithful Blogger. What intrigued me about the exchange were two words I had not heard used in this way before. It took me a while to figure out that in this case “frosty” was meant as an intensifier, becoming “cool”-squared. And “proper,” an adjective, becomes a verb indicating Tishea’s ability to act out any role she’s given—and doing so in ways my dictionary defines as, “Displaying exaggerated propriety or gentility.” This small slice of grammatical time has been slightly edited and/or expanded, and rendered in script form for your reading pleasure.
Copyright © 2008 Jim Sizemore.
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Posted by Jim
September 22, 2008
A Dialogue Doodle
The scene: A park bench, late afternoon. A very young couple (she with a serious expression, he looking distressed) are deep in conversation and oblivious to a man (me) passing by.
He: What can I say? I don’t know how to respond when you—
She (interrupting): Look, rather than have you guessing about what I’m thinking, I’d rather be up front and honest and tell you straight out what I’m observing about your behavior.
He: What? What did I do that was so—
She (interrupting): You know what I’m talking about. You do it all the time. Constantly. Constantly.
He: Huh?
The above text is a recreation of a snippet of conversation overheard on the fly. I find it intriguing because it suggests what may have gone before and what may follow. This slice of time has been slightly edited and/or expanded and put in script form for (I hope) your reading pleasure. Copyright © 2008 Jim Sizemore.
3 Comments | doodles, fiction, non-fiction, theater, writing | Tagged: behavior, conversation, couples, dialogue, dialogue doodles, doodler, doodles, doodling, park, playwriting, relationships, scene, text, time, writing | Permalink
Posted by Jim
September 17, 2008
Based On Real People
Six in a series of “talking heads” done quickly—perhaps 30 to 60 seconds each— from the television screen on a Sunday afternoon. These folks most likely appeared on CSPAN2 Book TV, my source for people who hold still, more-or-less. Speed was the point here, not the likeness (although that would have been nice), nor was the “who,” “what,” “where” or “when” the point of the exercise. . . So a reasonable question then becomes: What was the point? Copyright © 2008 Jim Sizemore.
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Posted by Jim
September 4, 2008
The following represents an e-mail exchange I had today with a fairly well-known “B-list” cartoonist and humorous illustrator about the “Marginalia #2″ piece directly below this post. To save embarrassment (to him) I’ll use our initials to indicate which e-mail writer is which. RD began with a snarky one-word critique of my post:
RD: Dull.
JS: Mean.
RD: Honest.
JS: Sad.
RD: My feelings exactly. I love to doodle…as do all cartoonists..but “real” doodles come form the subconscious..often leading to creations of ideas you would never have had otherwise. I’m always amazed at what doodles can often lead to. Your doodles lack that spontaneity. I’m not being mean, I’m just trying to be honest. If you don’t want a response…don’t ask for it.
JS: The funny thing is I totally agree with you about what constitutes “real” doodling. What you don’t get is I’m just having fun with it by doing an “analytical” number on it. It’s satire. Lighten up.
The fact that I had to explain what I was up to indicates that my mild attempt at satire failed, or perhaps it was too clever by half and simply went over RD’s head. But the thing I still can’t understand is why he would go to the trouble to send a mean-spirited response to it in the first place. I don’t understand pettiness in any form. (There was a bit more to today’s exchange, but in the later stuff RD went completely off the doodle track and began to critique my gag cartoons in political terms as “right wing.” Having self-identified my whole adult life as a left-leaning hyper-progressive but fiscally conservative liberal, that’s where he really lost me.)
Copyright © 2008 Jim Sizemore.
Leave a Comment » | cartooning, doodles, illustration, writing | Tagged: analytical, cartoonists, doodler, doodles, doodling, dull, e-mail, embarrassment, fiscally conservative, honest, humorous illustrator, hyper-progressive, ideas, left-leaning, liberal, marginalia, mean, pettiness, response, sad, satire, spontaneity, subconscious | Permalink
Posted by Jim
September 4, 2008
The Tale of the Hare
If I were playing the part of a movie pulp fiction detective (think Bogart’s “Sam Spade”), and a leggy blond perched on the end of my desk asked me to take the “Too Happy for Words” case, a mystery in the form of an essay, the first question I would have is: Why in the world did someone (me, in real life) doodle a guy chasing a hare (or is it a rabbit?) on the last page of an otherwise straightforward essay about marriage, motherhood and fiction writing? I’m sure of one thing, the real me didn’t unconsciously doodle the image as an audition to illustrate the text. If by some chance I were to get such a gig, a rabbit would be the last thing to occur to me. I just re-read the McDermott essay (excellent, by the way), and there are no rabbits or hares in it; and discounting human babies, no small animals of any description. So far, then, my investigation has dead-ended.
The “Too Happy for Words” essay by novelist Alice McDermott (“A Bigamist’s Daughter, “That Night,” “Charming Billy”), is collected in the book The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work, a paperback published in 2003. From the rereading I’ve concluded that the essay is concerned mainly with the different attitudes to marriage and motherhood held by some wary young feminists and their older “sisters,” many of whom have married and are, on the surface at least, happily raising kids. It seems the question the younger women are asking (and some of the older women are asking themselves), is to what extent, if at all, does familial devotion stunt their ambition and creativity. Here’s how Ms. McDermott puts it: “I wonder if it’s superstition: if we feel that to admit to such contentment in life would compromise our status as artists—perhaps recalling the poor actress in The Portrait of Dorion Gray who fell in love and lost her talent.” And Ms. McDermott goes on, “As a writer I recognize that much of this can be accounted for by the demands of plot—no doubt all happy mothers are like happy families: alike. And as Tolstoy warned us, sustained joy doesn’t make much of a story.”
This final McDermott quote I marked provides the clue I need to solve the case. On the last page, just above my doodle, she writes: “Fiction requires the attendant threat, the dramatic reversal, not only because these are the things that make for plot and tension and a sense of story, but because without them any depiction of our joy might appear overstated. We hesitate to include in our fiction what so often strikes us in life as something too good to be true.”
Put another way, Ms. McDermott is talking about conflict, the device that drives all story telling. And with that I think I’ve found my little insight, the knowledge which logically leads to a solution of the original query. Rabbits are famous for having lots of babies, right? In fact, they are the very symbol of fecundity—motherhood squared, so to speak? And is there anything cuter than little bunnies hop, hop, hopping in a field of flowers or down the road? But what happens when you add a man pursuing the bunny with something else in mind, perhaps something sinister like dinner? With those questions in mind I think I can say that the mystery of the connection between and among marriage, motherhood, fiction writing, and my doodle, is solved. My unconscious illustrator seems to have come up with an idea my conscious mind would have surly missed, or rejected: The “attendant threat” of a man on the hunt, and the joy he finds in that, contrasted by the sheer terror felt by his prey. Case closed.
“The Tale of the Hare” is the second in a series of occasional posts under the title Marginalia. In these posts I will display and comment upon a full-page scan from one of my personal library books on which I’ve doodled and/or underlined—or, as some would claim, otherwise defaced a scared text (to the true bibliophile all text is scared). These folks, shocked by the desecration, predict (and seem to wish), that I will suffer some vile punishment for my transgressions. Copyright © 2008 Jim Sizemore.
Leave a Comment » | doodles, fiction, illustration, marginalia, non-fiction, writing | Tagged: Alice McDermott, ambition, animals, attendant threat, contentment, creativity, doodle, doodles, doodling, dramatic reversal, essay, familial devotion, fecundity, feminists, fiction, hare, hunt, idea, insight, joy, kids, life, marginalia, marriage, motherhood, mystery, non-fiction, novelist, plot, prey, pulp fiction, rabbit, story, superstition, tale, tension, terror, text, The Writing Life, Too Happy for Words, writing | Permalink
Posted by Jim
August 27, 2008
The Doodling Life
If you’re at all like me you love to write in the margins of books, or doodle there, or both. (And what’s the difference?) And if you are really, really like me, the marginal writing and/or doodling may or may not have anything to do with the text printed on that particular page, or in the book generally. Our mad jottings may be provoked by what the author has written, but in many cases—especially when it comes to the visual doodles—the connection, if any, will be all but undetectable. While reading the fascinating essays in The Writing Life, pictured here (click for a larger view), in addition to the usual underlinings and asterisk-starring, I found myself in some sort of creative zone and doing an instant doodle on five different pages. These quick images, thematically connected, will lead off the series in which I’ll present full pages of text on which I’ve sketched and/or written something, plus I’ll add speculative comments about what I think the image may or may not mean. I’ll also include comments on, and quotes from, the essay I was reading; a sort of short essay about the essay. And of course, as always, you’ll be encouraged to comment and make of it all what you will. The first Marginalia begins below.
The Dance Story
The ecstatic cartoon guy above may visually represent the feeling a man has while he’s in the “dance zone” at a wedding reception, fully in that happy moment and in sync with his partner and the music—or it may simply show him home alone and transported by rock and roll on the radio. If either situation is true, though, you may ask what it has to do with Jonathan Raban’s essay “Notes From The Road,” on the final page of which we find the image? Why did the essay reader (me) choose to doodle that particular figure in that particular spot? Or was it a conscious choice at all?
The Raban essay, collected in The Writing Life: Writers On How They Think and Work, has not one word to say about dance, dancers or dancing. The essay is, for the most part, simply about making notes. Specifically, it’s about the obsessive note-taking done by many “serious” writers. For example, here is Raban on the writer as he dines alone: “So it’s scribble, scribble, scribble all through dinner. Into the notebook go long descriptions of landscape and character; some fuzzy intellection; scraps of conversation; diagrammatic drawings; paras from the local paper; weather notes; shopping lists; inventories of interiors (the sad cafe gets grimly itemized); skeletal anecdotes; names of birds, trees and plants, culled from the wonderfully useful Peterson guides; phone numbers of people whom I’ll never call; the daily target-practice of a dozen or so experimental similes.”
That last bit is so good it deserves repeating: ” . . . the daily target-practice of a dozen or so experimental similes.” Any of us who write know how true that is, how we struggle to find just the right word or phrase, and how it just comes to us sometimes from we know not where. So of course the essay is also very much about the act of writing, which often feeds off, if not directly from, those random notes. Later in his text Raban ties the note-taking habit in with writing a particular book, but comes at that issue from an interesting angle. He says: ” . . . the act of writing itself unlocks the memory-bank, and discovers things that are neither in the notebooks nor to be found in the writer’s conscious memory.” Then he goes on, quoting the painter Jean Francois Millet: “‘One man may paint a picture from a careful drawing made on the spot, and another may paint the same scene from memory, from a brief but strong impression; and the last may succeed better in giving the character, the physiognomy of the place, though all the details may be inexact.’”
In his essay Jonathan Raban appears to be saying that the best writing, or at least the best parts of a writer’s output—especially its most creative aspect—is free-form, intuitive and impressionistic. If that is what he means, I agree. And with my small impressionistic doodle above, I claim that it’s exactly the same for a guy (or gal) on a dance floor. Copyright © 2008 Jim Sizemore.
6 Comments | cartooning, doodles, illustration, non-fiction, writing | Tagged: art, author, books, cartoon, cartooning, creative, creativity, dance, dancer, dancing, doodles, doodling, doodling life, drawing, essay, impressionism, Johnathan Raban, marginalia, memory, music, non-fiction, notebooks, notes, Notes From The Road, painting, rock and roll, scene, similes, text, The Writing Life, writing | Permalink
Posted by Jim
August 23, 2008
Copyright © 2008 Jim Sizemore.
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Posted by Jim
August 13, 2008
While doodling this image my goal (as far as I can remember, and to the extent I even had a goal), was to see how many visual clichés I could cram into one phony comics page: I wanted closeups, long shots and silhouettes; thought and dialogue balloons, speed lines, labels, exclamatory words and symbols; one non sequitur after another, etc., etc. Actually, now that I think about it, other than the pleasure it gave me to doodle it, the whole exercise was pointless. Which, I guess, is the pure purpose of doodling in the first place. Anyway, I like it. Someday I may even do a cleaner version and try to pass it off as finished “art.” (Click image for a larger view.)
Copyright © 2008 Jim Sizemore.
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Posted by Jim
July 19, 2008
After reading my July 18, 2008 request for doodles, Mort Cohen sent along the above caricature attached to an e-mail message. (Many thanks, Mort.) He says he was playing around in Photoshop, electronically doodling, trying to figure out different ways to color the image, and came up with this enhancement to our own Vice President Cheney. I think it’s a very good likeness and I’m also intrigued by the “fog” or “mist” of color from which the VP appears to be emerging. Since Mort doesn’t tell us what it is, we’re free to speculate. Does the fog/mist represent Truth, Beauty and the American Way, or is our VP wandering around in some sort of moral fog? It’s always fun when an artist gives us an opportunity to participate in his or her creative process. Mort didn’t nail it down so we get to collaborate; it’s our call. What do you think the blue mist is? Meanwhile, if you’d like to have your own doodle published on DoodMeister.com, send it to: jimscartoons@aol.com. Your submission will be my permission to post.
2 Comments | cartooning, doodles, illustration | Tagged: Add new tag, Beauty, caricature, collaborate, collaboration, creative process, doodle, doodles, doodling, editorial cartooning, electronic doodling, moral fog, moral mist, Photoshop, The American Way, Truth, Vice President Cheney | Permalink
Posted by Jim
