Video: Maurice Sendak on The Colbert Report

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Mark

Maurice Sendak is a hilarious interviewee in Colbert’s hands, riffing on Newt Gingrich, writing for children, and Where the Wild Things Are 2 – Still Wildin’ (featuring Vin Diesel) Check it out.

Stephen Colbert: Why write for children?

Maurice Sendak: I don’t write for children. I write. And somebody says, “that’s for children.” I didn’t set out make children happy, or make life better for them, or easier for them.

Stephen Colbert: Do you like them?

Maurice Sendak: I like them as few and far between as I do adults. Maybe a bit more, because I don’t like adults at all, practically.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Maurice Sendak is the author of Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen, and Seven Little Monsters. His most recent book, Bumble-Ardy, was published by Knopf in September 2011.

Drawing William Gibson

Posted on January 10, 2012 by Mark

Distrust that Particular Flavor by William Gibson

iPad portrait of William Gibson, Distrust that Particular Flavor

If you’re a fan of William Gibson’s particularly slick, technologically savvy, and culturally cool flavor of fiction, you’re going to want to pick up Distrust that Particular Flavor, his long-overdue collection essays, articles, and reviews out this month. It contains a few gems (I mention some of my favorite bits here), and it made me want go back and read his older fiction – particularly the Bridge trilogy, beginning with Idoru. Can I get an Amen?

William Gibson’s favorite words:
quotidian
protean
liminal

Zipperhead

Posted on January 9, 2012 by Mark

As I close my book and subsequently my eyes, my seatmate, who moments before was quietly enthralled with her mobile device, devolves into an epileptic fit of zipping and/or unzipping various compartments on her handbag and/or her coat. She has evidently taken frantic note of my attitude of repose, and she is suddenly very concerned that I might actually be asleep five minutes hence when we reach her bus stop, so concerned in fact that she is frantically attempting to send all sorts of signals – anything but actual verbal communication – to alert me to her impending intention to de-bus.

She is deluded. Her impending human interaction emergency is nonexistent, because her stop is my stop, too. And all I want is five minutes of shuteye – a catnap – before our arrival, but I won’t be getting that with all of her clamoring for my attention. Drastic measures are called for.

“Please stop that,” I say clearly, turning my head a few degrees in her direction in order to make the vaguest of eye contact. She is aghast.

“What? I…” her hand is frozen in mid-zip.

“The zipping. Please. No more.” I hold her gaze for a couple seconds before turning to face front and soundlessly dropping into a soft, fuzzy, zipless silence for our remaining minutes together.

Kim Jong Il is dead. Long live Kim Jong Il.

Posted on December 19, 2011 by Mark

World leaders may be uncertain reacting to the death of Kim Jong Il, but the way forward for artists is clear.

Blueprints of the Afterlife by Ryan Boudinot

Posted on December 19, 2011 by Mark

Ryan Boudinot’s Blueprints of the Afterlife (Black Cat, January 2012) reads a bit like a genetic graft between David Foster Wallace’s The Broom of the System and Mark Leyner’s My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist. It is often hilarious, sometimes disturbing, and frequently challenging. There are androids and clones, wee software development monks, and a giant celestial head; there is a marauding sentient glacier that wipes out the major cities in North America; and there is a exact replica of Manhattan emerging in Puget Sound.

Above, I drew the novel’s first scene, in which dishwashing champion, Woo-jin Kan stumbles a dead girl on his way home from work, at which point his “three-quarters of a burger and fries rose up through his trunk and horizontally departed his face.” Weirdness ensues.

Every Person in Boulder

Posted on December 1, 2011 by Mark

One area I’d like to develop in is quick sketch technique, particularly that of drawing people. I find that my attempts to draw people are lengthy and fraught with internal criticism, and that they tend to become overwrought. And I only tend to want to draw people from pictures because I feel self-conscious, otherwise, and besides, no one is going to sit still long enough for me to draw them.

In something I read recently – perhaps Hannah Hinchman’s book about journaling – a quick sketching technique for drawing people, in which a simple outline was the basis and perhaps even the whole of the drawing, was described. That’s what I tried to do here with this couple sitting on a rock in Boulder’s Chautauqua Park. You’ll note that their backs are to me, and I didn’t take very long in outlining them at all.

Jason Polan seems to do a very good job at capturing human form this way in
his blog, Every Person in New York. I’d like to emulate that. Every Person in Boulder?

Tree sketch before today’s hike.

Posted on November 26, 2011 by Mark

It was cold today at the Gregory Canyon trail, West of Boulder’s Chautauqua Park, so for the 10 minutes I had to wait for Pam, I walked 200 steps up the trail and turned left at the yellow-bagged dog poop to climb a mildly-trailed ridge and sit in the sun before this tree.

_{Four color pen on brochure courtesy of the Colorado Division of Wildlife.}

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A blog about books.