Shaun Tan on the fundumental strangeness of reality

"Everything is really fundamentally mysterious. In learning to recognize meaning and familiarize ourselves with our everyday world — to make sense of it all, and manage our lives — we tend to overlook this basic fact. Things become familiar, obvious, self-evident. For me, the practice of drawing and writing is an opportunity to consider what is otherwise, to look at certain objects, qualities, and situations at length and interrogate them to the point where you can appreciate their fundamental strangeness, or uniqueness. Art is about getting to that point of stopping and examining something for long enough that you actually see how unique and weird it is."

-Shaun Tan interview in Locus Magazine

Tan is a new favorite of mine, his recent book The Arrival is an absolutely beautiful wordless novel about a man immigrating to a new place. He does an amazing job showing the reader what it is like to be immersed in a forign culture with a different language, and a different way of life. By creating a world that is slightly fantastic, he lets us realize how strange our own world is when we are new to it.


Related posts:
Richard Vander Wende on the Fantasy of Reality

something about the trees: a pantoum

Check out this Linda Pastan poem:

"I remember what my father told me:
There is an age when you are most yourself.
He was just past fifty then,
Was it something about the trees that make him speak?

There is an age when you are most yourself.
I know more than I did once.
Was it something about the trees that make him speak?
Only a single leaf had turned so far.

I know more than I did once.
I used to think he'd always be the surgeon.
Only a single leaf had turned so far,
Even his body kept its secrets.

I used to think he'd always be the surgeon,
My mother was the perfect surgeon's wife.
Even his body kept its secrets.
I thought they both would live forever.

My mother was the perfect surgeon's wife,
I can still see her face at thirty.
I thought they both would live forever.
I thought I'd always be their child.

I can still see her face at thirty.
When will I be most myself?
I thought I'd always be their child.
In my sleep it's never winter.

When will I be most myself?
I remember what my father told me.
In my sleep it's never winter.
He was just past fifty then."

I found it in a book of interviews with (my favorite living poet)
Richard Wilbur. Apparently the form is called a Pantoum (wiki).

That is so amazing. It's fun to read over and over. I wonder if that
 form could be used in say, comics, or film or music?

Each line means something slightly different in it's second context,
and as with rhyming, but to a greater degree, you know what is
coming next.

free book on aesthetics of video games

If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, then perhaps writing about video games is like meditating about explosions.

Nonetheless, Steve Poole is giving away his book Trigger Happy: the Inner Life of Video Games for free as a PDF.

He describes it as "a book about the aesthetics of videogames — what they share with cinema, the history of painting, or literature; and what makes them different, in terms of form, psychology and semiotics."

I checked it out from a library once after reading Earnest Adam's article the game designer's library.

prerequisite and reward.

These are some old notes from James McMullan's High-Focus Drawing: A Revolutionary Approach to Drawing the Figure, which apparently now is out of print.

"Much of this book will deal with the issue of pleasure as a necessary part of perception in drawing."

"The pleasure was contained within the moment itself and not projected out into future hopes of praise. I had stumbled however momentarily, into the state of 'here-and-nowness' that is both the prerequisite and reward of drawing."

-John McMullan

I find that fascinating.

Can something be both a prerequisite and reward?
Is pleasure a necessary part of accurate perception?

If you believe in any kind of objective beauty, then it would make sense that love would be a part of seeing. (Leithart has a couple posts on love and knowledge: here and here.)

This also reminds me of my favorite quote from Hart's the Beauty of the Infinite:

"Thus, for Christian thought, to know the world truly is achieved not through a positivistic reconstruction of its 'sufficient reason', but through an openness before glory, a willingness to orient one's will toward the light of being, and to receive the world as gift, in response to which the most fully 'adequate' discourse of truth is worship, prayer, and rejoicing. Phrased otherwise, the truth of being is 'poetic' before it is 'rational'-indeed is rational precisely as a result of its supreme poetic coherence and richness of detail-and cannot truly be known if the order is reversed. Beauty is the beginning and end of all true knowledge: really to know anything, one must first love, and having known one must finally delight; only this 'corresponds' to th trinitarian love and delight that creates."

-David Bently Hart

After typing out that quote, I now realize that it has been wandering around in the back for a while influencing how I read things.

Gaudi on man as co-creator

"One of his most significant statements... is that creation continues through the involvement of men, since it is not men that create, but through investigation discover the laws of nature and with them continue the work of their Creator. It doesn't involve inviting anything new, but rather studying what already exists and trying to improve on it."

-Gaudi: The Entire Works

This reminds me of Tolkien's view of man as sub-creator. Also, I like the deep continuity it gives to nature and culture. Culture (done right) is the continuation of nature.

The editor of the book also notes that Gaudi's favorite book on architecture was "the tree he could see through the window of his studio."