Another New Direction for Science!

I have often waxed rhapsodic on the magic of books, but only to close relatives or my own offspring. I myself am a reader who would never advise other people to read, because even in a democracy like the US, where an uneducated electorate can take your money and wreak havoc, I would prefer to always feel like the smartest person in the room.  And for that reason I don't like children's books about books where characters emerge from the books, emitting magic sparkles and preparing to fill someone with wonder. 

Well actually that's not the reason. I find them vapid and saccharine. That's the reason.   And I believe they're useless as far as encouraging people to read. 

So what are we to make of this picture of a little book town?  

Drawn by someone who doesn't like those kind of pictures?  I honestly don't know. I'm almost fifty and I still can't explain myself. Pathological immaturity and laziness, but maybe I'm flattering myself. There may have been a book or two sitting inside the toy train track circle, that inspired me with the notion to draw a little book town. I do remember having a vague idea for some kind of neat representation of book people coming out of the books, little letter people with serif hands and bow ties, or perhaps the characters of every book, magically come alive and on whimsical foray beyond the edge of their flat papery home.   They would have sparkly dust floating around them to signify they were magic, and would speak in rhyme. 

I'd like to say I didn't do that because it's an overdone idea that other people, many other people, had already beaten to death, over and over again, in countless children's books. But it appears that I started to do it in this picture and then gave up for reasons of laziness, leaving the little people without sparkles or indication of the wonders of reading. They're just little figures that could possibly be descendants of silverfish, completely illiterate, and slowly devouring the pages of the gigantic books they shelter in, caring no more for the inky gibberish that appears on their food than we would for the stems and leaves that we wash off our fruits and veggies before we eat.  Perhaps they would enjoy and prefer the rare blank pages as we enjoy a seedless watermelon, delicious food that can be savored without annoyance.   

And it appears I did try the same thing again a week or so later on another sketchbook page:

I'm breaking a rule, my own rule, to include this second picture in the same post, but I don't like this second picture and it doesn't deserve its own post. I honestly don't know why I include pictures in the posts at all, if only to continually remind my family that I wanted to be an artist, that they might share my sense of failure. This second picture features the magic of words, or letters at least, coming to whimsical life to bring a little magic to our sad lives.  I usually critique my own pictures with the ferocity of a doting grandparent on their only grandchild, but I can barely stand to look at this one, and it has forced me to re-appraise the meandering unfocused nature of this project.  If I were a young man again, 30 years old and living in my parents basement without a job or a care in the world, I could well believe that a yearlong project to produce two random doodles a week might indeed yield a plethora of astounding art, and the unfocused and free range thinking would allow my sexually repressed and angry young brain to conceive revolutionary artistic themes, drawing upon intuition and passion, not the cold reason of my dry, jaded middle age. Yes, the artistic time of my life has passed. Like my father before me I have a house and family and a job that I'm ashamed to tell my children about, and see modern art as a huge scam and literature as a tired, dull magic trick. I have completely lost that delightful cluelessness and ignorance that make art possible. I view movies as an irritated skeptic, like Siskel and Ebert with a painful hernia and an inflamed prostate, unable give a thumbs up to anything longer than fifteen minutes. I roll my eyes at the opening credits, and I find every ending is either lazy or forced. 

And so I have decided to change the entire direction of this project: A scientific study of my life, where it went shatteringly wrong and why, told in graphic form. This will not be a graphic novel. I have grown weary of the recent spate of graphic novel memoirs. This will not be a story to warm the heart and inspire. I envision a cold, dispassionate dissection of my youth, a treatise, absent of the rich, painfully honest detail that the Norwegian guy filled his autobiography with. Only a Scandinavian would do that.  They watch shows about trains in Norway. Not Thomas the Train, not stories about people riding a train. Just a video of a train going on its track for hours. Not even funny videos of commuters fighting as the doors close, or neat speeded up shots of people going in and out of the station like koyanaskatsi. 

 I've covered the years between my work at the radio station and family life, and the final collapse of my artistic pretensions, in the sklogs. I've graphically covered my inner world from mid twenties to the radio station, the aftermath of my college failure, the life chapter I've entitled "Flight into Delusion", in the ballpoint illustrations that I later sold at local festivals. Now for the science. Beginning with college, before I gave up on being a writer. This won't be a chronologically-ordered study. We'll go back and forth, like pulp fiction or Doctor who. We'll begin next week, after I've prepared some graphics about my college years. This will be statistically intensive, but I'm assuming anyone reading this has read their prerequisites