Why Stop With the 2nd Dimension?

When we can toss music into the mix?

This newsletter began as my effort to explore how best to combine text and images to better tell a story — specifically, a memoir with graphic novel tendencies (or, a graphic novel with memoir inclinations). The primary topic was meant to be about growing up with my artist father, how my artist dad saw/captured/deciphered his world in dozens of sketchbooks. Or something. All that led to a flurry of scribbles — drawings that took the three-dimensional world and flattened it onto a 2-dimensional surface.

It was cool to experiment with perspective drawing and various techniques that help lead the eye deeper into the page/closer to the horizon.

All that was good as far as it went, but when you are trying to capture someone’s life on the page, well, it doesn’t take long before you venture into abstract territory - time, death, memory. Some of my own sketchbook experiments took a decidedly abstract turn.

And then, I went back to school with my daughter, Dani. We’ve been reading about (among other things) time, memory, and death. Each week we’ve had to prepare a written response to submit and as part of that weekly process, Dani and I have created a podcast. Intellectual Magpies exists in yet another dimension - that of sound. Ethereal, transient and of the moment, it’s a weekly conversation tracking our progress in grad school.

We ‘ve been recording and editing, and between recording sessions, debating whether or not we should click upload and release our musings into the world.

Questions, questions, and more questions
Each week, the submitted written response we send over to our prof must also include a question inspired by the reading assignment, and that collection of student questions forms the core of the class discussion. That, as you can imagine, leads to lively conversations and, fun by-products, the creation of rich new memories (and thoughts about death, time, and the nature of the universe).

Lucretius had some pretty impressive ideas despite a lack of high-tech equipment. Thinking the universe was made up of tiny particles called atoms was one of them.

Needless to say, all of that has meant I’ve been a bit distracted and my focus here in the newsletter has veered off from What comic panel/s could I create to explore XYZ incident in my father’s life? Part of the problem (if I can call it a problem) is that I’ve been plagued with more, bigger, broader questions (the result of these readings and class discussions) and want to integrate those into the memoir project somehow.

Titus Lucretius Carus (ca. 99 BC – ca. 55 BC) is one of the dudes keeping me company on my journey back into the halls of academia. -[Image courtesy Wikipedia under a CC license.]

I thought it would be simple to keep the content rolling out as I was going to be posting a link to our weekly podcast episode here, but we’ve decided to keep recording and then upload a whole season (semester) at a time. Good news for those of you who like to binge, but not so helpful for those of us attempting to stick to a more or less regular posting schedule.

What To Do?
I was grumbling about this current state of affairs and Dani (trying to be helpful) suggested that I post my weekly reflection, which seems to me to be a bit like sharing a dream with the passenger trapped beside me in the front seat of the car on a long road trip. Who really wants to hear the details of my weekly efforts at making some sense of stuff written centuries in the past?

But hey - this is a process newsletter. The road to a finished creative product is rarely straight. Working on the graphic novel/enhancing the Dad story with images led me to explore whether it’s possible to capture abstract concepts (time, death, memory, the Epicurean Universe) visually.

My head spins trying to keep up with the reading… fun, yes - but a tad overwhelming at times.

I’ve also made a couple of trips back to the coast (and Dad’s studio) since I started school, so in my head, it’s all part of one, big, jumbled, and interconnected glob of raw creative clay. So, now that I know I don’t know where this is all going, I feel as though I can get back on track with more regular newsletter writing.

Come back in a day or two and I should have organized my Sappho thoughts sufficiently to share those with you (along with a dirge). Because, you know, if you can’t sing as part of your weekly assignment, you’re maybe not having as much fun as you could be.