ONE THING LEADS TO ANOTHER THING

Recent mention by Marja-Leena and Cassandra Pages and Tasting Rhubarb of La Vie en Rosé   led to a very welcome upsurge in my stats which, like every other blogger in blogdom, I obsessively check now and then - oh allright, very frequently - to see whether I am loved more than I am ignored. Come to think of it, that's a life-long preoccupation.

Anyway, Dorothee Lang who, amongst many other things, is editor of the Blueprint Review noted Jean's mention of the Augustine comic strips and invited me to join mycomics.de   an online community of comics creators. Of course I was happy to do so and, thanks to Dorothee's help, my complete INERTIA strip is now uploaded there.The site is mainly in German but comics from other countries also appear and international participation is encouraged. Gradually I will be posting more strips to this friendly and well-designed site. 

Yesterday was the christening of Lewis - my niece Sarah and her husband Elliott's second baby - and the occasion was blessed by fabulous Spring weather and perfect location: an English village's 13th Century church with great pub across the road where we all gathered for lunch after a cheerful Anglican service during which the round infant, dressed in pinstriped mini-waistcoat, white shirt, green socks and black corduroy trousers, seemed puzzled but smiled graciously. 

When the guests were eating lunch at long wooden tables in the pub garden, I remembered part of a dream I had about a week or so ago in which the same image appeared. I've been thinking about so-called pre-cognitive dreams, which I have fairly often. The pre-cognitive bit is usually quite banal, just ordinary scenes from ordinary life which I see in a dream and then, a variable time later, encounter in waking life. I'm aware of the theories, debates, experiments etc. on this subject but I want to follow my own ruminations about it and see where they lead. 

I'm starting from the premise that some dreams can foresee events/scenes which have not yet taken place in 'real time': how would this process work? My intuition says that there's nothing supernatural about it but that it's an actual process happening constantly although we are rarely aware of it. Here's the gist of notes I was writing while having breakfast this morning:

Suppose the events of our day are like the successive frames in a film - say, 24 frames per second or some other fps - but we don't see separate frames, only one continuous strip. Suppose something different happens when we're asleep and dreaming: the film speeds up and the gaps between frames narrows, they become somewhat compressed. But our perception remains the same as it was when awake so we're actually seeing some of the next frames because they overlap. So maybe what seems like foreseeing a future event is simply looking at the present that we haven't caught up with yet in 'real time' because 'dream-time' goes faster. 

Yes, I know there are all sorts of  problems with this conjecture but it's only a start. I will expand it with some animation/video experiments when I've worked out how to do it. These are the kinds of questions that really excite me and it doesn't bother me that I'm not qualified to explore them - no degrees in physics, neurology, psychology, biology, you-name-it-ology. So? Who's gonna stop me?

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NOT ONE-TRACK-MINDED

One-track-minded people are those who achieve things - sometimes great things, sometimes terrible things. They are the ones you hear about because they'll have discovered something momentous or solved a problem nobody's ever solved or gone spectacularly insane or committed some particularly atrocious crime. Their locomotive brain drives them relentlessly along that one track they've chosen and doesn't stop at all the little stations along the way to have a coffee and a look around.

I am not one-track-minded, as my record shows. But I've always thought I should/would/could be if only I...um...stuck to one track. Oh yes, for short periods of time I can enter that zone where it's always four in the morning and breakfast is at nine pm and the outside world is really really outside and the mind is totally focused on the idea, the task, the problem. It's a marvellous zone to be in, exciting, challenging, even if it's totally obsessive and egocentric, shutting out anything and anyone who is a distraction. But I can't stay there, distractions rush in like noisy children, new tracks appear out of the blue - which one to follow? It's a fairground out there, irresistible and irrelevant distractions all over the place.

Know what I mean?

Anyway, I'll get back to La Vie en Rosé very shortly as soon as the deck is cleared of other unfinished business. Meanwhile my non-winning comic strip, along with other non-winners, is at Forbidden Planet, and there's a plan afoot to collectively publish a book of the non-winning graphic entries, a kind of Salon des Refusés. You can see some of the other entries on flickr here. Any Londoners interested in comics (ie sequential art: more sophisticated title) are very welcome to attend the next forum of Laydeez Do Comics on Monday 30th November, 6:30pm, details on their website. I'll be doing a short (10 minute) visual presentation there.

I've made a new section to post my POEMPICTURES . I was inspired by this new site.

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WOMEN IN COMICS CONFERENCE, CAMBRIDGE NEW HALL, 25 October 2009

Chuffed to discover that Sarah McIntyre has posted some of my sketches on her blog . She was one of the speakers at this conference which I was very glad to have been able to attend on my return from France. I am not at all qualified to review such a comics-erudite event since my relationship to comics is intermittent and I'm an outsider in the vast family of comics creators who work in this medium full time and have made their mark in it. The sequential format does interest me very much indeed and I want to explore it much further (in my always-to-be-continued graphic novel) but there's a great deal of activity and information related to comics culture that I tend to pass by, probably to my detriment.
http://www.dominique-goblet.be/

Having been an artists' book-maker for a long time, the creators I respond to most are those whose approach and ideas are in that vein and who use sequential images as part of their visual/verbal art practice rather than as comics per se. Pages filled with small frames, each loaded with tiny text and drawings, no matter how appealing the story or concept irritate my eyes and brain. I prefer layouts which spread over the available space, flowing in and out of consciousness as time itself does. Such an artist is Dominique Goblet whose work I was excited to discover at the conference. I saw some of her books on the tables and bought one immediately: Souvenir D'Une Journée Parfaite - atmospheric, quirky, melancholy and moving on different levels of time, space, memory and emotion, beautifully expressed in monochrome drawings and an evocative, scratchily handwritten text. Hearing her later in conversation with Paul Gravett (top right in the photos below) confirmed the impression that my concerns and aims were very much in tune with hers. We will keep in touch and I hope to visit her studio in Brussels some time.

About Paul Gravett, no praise can ever be too high: he is responsible for stimulating interest in comics, encouraging innumerable comics artists in the UK and elsewhere and writing about comics critically, perceptively and knowledgeably. Back in the 1980's when I was producing and self-publishing my mini-series The Augustine Adventures (Small Packages) Paul was one of the first to review them in his magazine Escape and he has always been supportive. I think he has a pair of wings tucked away behind his shoulder blades, enabling him to appear wherever and whenever comics creators are assembled, lighting up the place with his good will and open-minded attention.

Sarah Lightman (who organised the conference along with Dr. Laurence Grove of the University of Glasgow) is another artist I've recently met whose work resonates with me. An exhibition of her diary drawings, In Memoriam, is currently in New Hall, focusing on ordinary objects (packets of biscuits, lace, toothbrush etc.) sensitively drawn in pencil, as conduits for autobiographical reflection. Each image has a pithy caption which leads you out of the object represented and into the artist's mind as she was drawing it. Sarah, along with illustrator Nicola Streeten, recently founded Laydeez Do Comics , a forum focusing on comic works based on life narrative, meeting once a month. I went along to one meeting and will be back for more.

I could write more about the conference but I'm going to stop here as I want to post this and get on with where I left off before I disappeared to France.

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