thenearsightedmonkey:

Photos:

Writer Ryan Knighton speaking at the Chazen Museum on February 22, 2012 

What It Is class member, the Two of Diamonds, speaking about the trade-offs we make when we take a drawing from one stage to the next, February 23, 2012

Photos by Bucca, Four of Hearts.

February 25, 2012

Hello my dear ‘What It Is’ class,

Here’s your homework that is due Tuesday and the synopsis of our 9th and 10^th classes

Professor Lynda

HOMEWORK For Tuesday-

Writing

Continue keeping your daily diary page, listing what happened, what you saw, and what you heard people say the day before. I encourage you to take notes as you go about your day to help with this.

Continue doing your daily writing exercise using second person, present tense.

Instead of using random words, please use the 3^rd image listed on the many lists you’ve made from previous writing exercises. Do them in order—starting with your ‘car’ list and moving forward through your composition notebook. If you feel yourself resisting a particular image because it seems boring or blank, that’s when I want you to be especially tenacious about completing the assignment. If it’s boring so be it. There is no way to know until you write it out. You should have three or four stories done this way by Tuesday.

If you’d like to read your work over sooner after you’ve written it, you may do so— but only if you read it out loud. You don’t have to read it to anyone. Just read it out loud all the way through without stopping.

I’m hoping to have the 9 minute writing video up on YouTube by Saturday evening. Once it’s up, please use this video instead of the seven and a half minute one.

REMINDER: Skip a line as you go so your page is ‘double spaced’— this is very important.

Picture Making

Draw three 16-panel pages on 8.5 x 11 paper,  (scrap paper is especially good for this) much like the exercise we did the week before. You can orient the paper any way you wish. Remember to draw the panel borders in the paper crease with your Flair pen when it comes time to ink the pictures. There should be no words or writing in any of the panels with the exception of signs that might be in a scene you’re drawing.

New requirement: Something in each panel must be colored solid black. You can use your Flair pen to color in the black, or your black Prismacolor pencil.

Subject Matter for drawing pages

Page One: In the style of Ivan Brunetti, draw four super-hero or cartoon or comic strip characters four times from memory in non-photo blue pencil – spending between about a minute or less on each non-photo blue sketch- Ink in the panel lines and the picture with your Flair pen. Don’t look up the character for reference.

Page Two: Same thing, except instead of super-heroes or cartoon characters, draw four pictures of yourself doing four different things.

Page Three: Same thing, except draw four pictures of your mother doing four different things.

Reminder: No words in these pictures except ones that might be on signs that are in the scene you are drawing.

 

WEEK IN REVIEW:

9th class, Tuesday, February 21^th, 2012

 We started by looking over some of the 1,248 drawings we did between Thursday and Tuesday, using an exercise adaped from Ivan Brunetti’s “Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice” We made them by folding an 8.5 x 11 inch sheet of paper into sixteen panels and then drew different subjects four times. We started with a nun, an astronaut and a student, drawing these images together in class. You were asked to complete three pages, drawing each subject four times.

Ryan Knighton joined us for the entire class on Tuesday. Professor Lynda introduced Ryan by reading some of their email interchanges outloud, such as

Ryan,

One of the things my class is about is seeing. Not the passive working eyeball kind of seeing. Like— how your writing makes me see places, totally see the place you’re talking about, a place you didn’t see, and I’m trying to figure out that kind of seeing — I think it’s more being in a place than looking at a place. My class is about how it is we transfer these places from one mind to the next.

I’d like your take on this article. Note that the research is about eye movement, not seeing, but about the physical motion of the eyeballs affecting thought.

I’m curious about the emphasis on eye motion here. I don’t know if they looked into blind people and their use of eye movement but it would be interesting to know if part of the reason we moving our eyes around when we’re trying to figure something out is because it helps us solve problems.

Lynda

Eye Movement Can Affect Problem-Solving, Cognition

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070924122919.htm

ScienceDaily (Sep. 24, 2007) — A pair of Beckman Institute researchers has discovered that by directing the eye movements of test subjects they were able to affect the participants’ ability to solve a problem, demonstrating that eye movement is not just a function of cognition but can actually affect our cognitive processes.  

They report in the August  2007 issue of Psychonomic Bulletin and  Review that by occasionally guiding the eye movements of participants with a tracking task unrelated to the problem, they were able to “substantially affect their chances of problem-solving success” to the point where those groups outperformed every control group at solving the problem. These results, they conclude, demonstrate that “it is now clear that not only do eye movements reflect what we are thinking, they can also influence how we think.”
 

Lynda:

I can talk to this yes. We engage the mind/eye cognition by blinding or distracting our eyes —-so we look up to think, etc. I think we look away to lie because lying is problem solving.
Art is lying so it is also problem solving of a kind

Ryan

And this email from Ryan to Professor Lynda:

Lynda:

I’m in Rochester to give a talk. This place is fucked. Fuck-ed! Wow. Like, in a good way. Like so bad it’s better than good. Check this. Radison bar lounge. Me at the bar. Only Pap’s Blue Ribbon on tap. I’m feeling legit working class. Better still. Three different sports games on TV, but all seem to be football of some kind. My head struggles to detangle the sounds. Then, bam, three, count ‘em three, viagra commercials come on at the break. Not all at once, mind you. But it seems that one network would air one, then take a break and sell me some insurance, and the other network would take that opportunity to take up the Viagra cause. And so on. Like they take turns. Then it’s back to six football teams and their erectile disfunction. Wow. What’s even better is that the music playing over all of this is a muzak version of Herbie Hancock’s Rock It, the breakdancing tune from 1982, performed this time by pan flutes.I’m in awe of this land.”

Professor Lynda asked students to color in their 16-panel pages while she read a piece called “Twitch” from Ryan’s upcoming travel memoir, “Nothing to See Here: Around the World in Four Senses”. The story is about attending a rattlesnake round up in Sweet Water Texas where Ryan not only hunts rattle snakes but ends up skinning one.

Excerpt from “Twitch”

 

The gate opened, and a big man guided me in to take my turn, and to touch the thing I am most afraid of.

“You ready, son?” he said. “Here’s the knife. You’re safe. The head’s already gone. Worst is over. Now you just got to carry on, alright?”

What stays with me is neither the cold, nor the feeling of flesh and skin. The coiling and uncoiling spasms of the headless body asked all my strength to keep it taut. I’ll spare you the details, because what really impressed itself upon me was something smaller.

When I was finished, my guide, Mark, opened my hand and dropped something into my palm. The snake’s heart. It felt like a tangerine. Then it beat. And then it beat again. I hate to admit it, but the sensation was beautiful. Just the primitive rhythm that keeps us alive. And there it was, a surprise every time. Beat. When will it stop? Beat. I waited, but it kept going. To think, life comes of something so unremarkable. Just a twitch. That’s it.”

Thursday, February 23, 2012, our 10^th class

We talked about Ryan’s visit and then put up the pages we’d colored talked about what changes when we ink over the photo blue pencil and then what changes when we color a picture in.

Some members of the class liked the first stage of drawing best and felt that inking it in took something away. Others liked the inking part but felt coloring the pictures in took something away. Others liked the coloring part best.

The Two of Diamonds summed it up beautifully when he said that each stage in making those pictures involved a trade of some sort. We trade something in exchange for something else as we move the drawing along. Identifying what we’re trading out and what we’re getting in exchange is a great way to think about what is going on in these little 2 x 2.5 inch panels on our page.

We wrote two stories together, increasing our writing time to 9 minutes. Instead of words we used an image on the word lists from previous writing exercises.

During the last hour we read comics, changing books every seven minutes.

Then the class was over. Professor Lynda drove through a snow storm, got home, ate beef jerky, drank beer, and missed you all terribly.

I’m sorry that I missed Ryan’s talk while he was here in Rochester. His assessment is 100% accurate. It is totally fucked here.

I’m sad I haven’t finagled my way into a Lynda Barry class yet, but I will. Someday. 

allthegoodthingsinlife:

miscellanymatters:

ohsh1tdani:

I have never laughed so hard and been turned on at the same time…

this is pretty much the best thing ever.

I don’t even…

wow