..:S...P...I...D...E...R...B...I...T...E...S:..

Thursday, September 11, 2003

"You know that there picture? Could you draw another one? You know what i truly like is lions. but not no lion in a jungle, a lion in a castle."

"I think i see what you're getting at, he's like an archetype of certain male aggressive power-"

"Huh? Now i don' t want a picture of the lion fucking her but the lion could fuck her if he wanted to..."

-Stephen Hunter Dirty White Boys



Why i Drew/Why i Wrote/Why i Write:


When i was about seven i started drawing. i was doodling before that, but eight was about the age when you could identify some things, when eyes started popping up in the middle of the squiggles. In third grade, i drew a bunch of animals all over the blackboard and when the teacher saw what i’d done, she brought other teachers into the room and they all stood there wide-eyed and staring. Then a couple of days later, this teacher took me out of the classroom and there were these men i'd never seen before. They had a desk set up right there in the hallway (i seem to remember it being in the middle of the hallway, but i'm probably wrong) and they handed me some crayons and a piece of paper and said, "draw someting." i got all freaked out and wouldn't do it. Mostly because i assumed that the desk, alone there in the middle of the hallway, would be mine from now on.

i'm not sure what happened afterwards (the whole scene was probably just other teachers trying to encourage me or something, but i was a dramatic kid and it all seemed very sinister back then) although i remember being kind of a celebrity among the teachers in my small school after that. i drew things for other kids, i came up with variations on those games you played by flicking your pencil, i drew a series of comics called "Galactic Grapes" and the "Bionic Banana" fighting villains like the "Treacherous Tomato" or the "Wicked Watermelon," or (gasp!) even themselves (when the grapes were outside too long they became "Retched Raisins") and i even managed to trade some of these homemade comics for some lunch money. Eventually, through a special program, i was able to spend time outside of class using rubber cement, cardboard and some staples putting together a sticky little collection of all these comics. i was back in a desk in the hallway again, alone this time, and now i wanted to stay out there. i had special permission to work on this comic book as long as i wanted and i managed to drag out it’s massive construction for weeks.

My parents started to encourage me too, buying me various art supplies and books on drawing. Then my mom took me to my great-grandmother, who was herself an artist, making some extra money painting animals and landscapes, to see what she thought of my skills. She put me down in front of some canvas (where’s the paper? i thought), handed me a piece of charcoal (where the pencil?) and gave me a picture of a lion to sketch (what does that mean?) and she walked away. i'd never done anything like this before, and i sure didn't understand how you "sketched" with a dusty little stick, but i tried it anyway. i moved in with my nose about one inch from the picture, held the stick all wrong in my fist, and went to work. And after about an hour, i had charcoal all over my hands, up my arms, in my nose, and about half a lion finished on the canvas in front of me. My great-grandma came in (my mom was still outside, trimming grandma's hedges or something i think) and she looked at what i'd done, making suggestions, showing me how to hold the stick, showing me how to turn the stick, how to rub and smear the picture into a more realistic lion. And in the process, she drew the ear and nostril onto the other half of my picture. Then she went outside again and in another hour i was done. My mom came back with her and they were stunned and proud and going on and on at how good that lion looked. i wasn't so sure. Then my mom took it to downtown Toledo and stuck it in some kind of art show sponsored by my dad’s job. i saw it down there and noticed they’d fucked up the title card, calling it "lion and charcoal" instead of "lion in charcoal.” Nobody bought it and eventually it ended up on the wall in our house.

i drew a lot of things in the next couple years, and i won a bunch of art shows at school up against clay bird nests and construction paper trains and glitter turkeys 'n shit. Still, most of the stuff i drew were spaceships and monsters. And everything i drew had to be something i was looking at (i never could draw anything from memory). i would start out with something off a book cover, then i'd draw something else off another book cover, then i would try to make them fight. But it never looked right, the monsters were posing for the cover, not doing battle, so when i forced guns and chainsaws and swords into their hands, they were facing the wrong way. And their arms looked like they wanted to do anything but fight. Can you believe it? Monsters that wouldn't fight?

Everyone was still all impressed, teachers wanted me to draw things on their blackboards (but i never could do that again, because there was nothing to look at up there but a black wall; i'm still not sure how i did it that first time) and the ribbons stacked up for a while. Then i realized i wasn't that good at it after all. i would look at that damn lion that i'd sketched years ago and all i could see was the ear and the nostril that my great-grandma had done on her side of its face. Her lion ear and lion nostril were so good, that i wanted to crack the glass and bury it somewhere (did i mention that my mom spent two hundred 1978 dollars to frame the thing) or sometimes i’d consider cracking it open in order to change my ear and my nostril to match hers. So i stopped drawing. Oh yeah, one more thing, my great-grandma showed me how to sign my name to it, and she put this swirl around the two D's in my signature that looked better than the whole damn picture. it was never really my name that was on it
after that.

i guess i didn't stop drawing all at once though, i just started doodling again instead. No more pictures of squirrels and cats from magazines that looked . . . a lot like the pictures in the magazines. instead i'd draw little scribbles that didn't look like anything at all. And it was real easy to get them to fight. i started making long violent comic strips and passing them around the school. i made some short violent comic strips and stuck them in our shitty Jr. High school newspaper. i did some real nasty ones that only a couple of kids got to see. Then the balloons above their heads got bigger and bigger (seriously, it was just like Crumb's brother in the movie Crumb, except my talk-balloons didn't end up filling the page by the end, squeezing out his cartoons, and i didn't go fucking bonkers and kill myself, when i saw that movie i got a chill) and eventually the story got more important than the drawing. And not just because i knew that all those cartoons i drew without looking at anything . . . didn't look like anything. i started to write some stories without any drawing at all, but they were like the real nasty cartoons i'd done, and the shitty little newspaper wouldn't print them (violent cartoons OK, violent storiesnot OK).

i remember two of those early stories very well. One was called On The Beach and it was about these giant sandcrabs that killed people on the beach under the shadow of the Davis Besse Nuclear Power Plant. My dad worked there whenever they did their refueling.

And the first story i wrote was about these special spiders that injected eggs into the bottoms of your feet when you stomped on them. Of course, who the hell would stomp on a spider with bare feet? Guess what the story was called? That’s right. Even though is was more like a spider sting than a spider bite.

i started getting into this writing thing after that story. i started a book in high school called The Justice Cycle about some vigilante kid killing someone with a post-hole digger (my dad was building a new deck on our house at the time) and it seemed like i could do anything i wanted in these stories. There was nobody i knew around that had any interest in it, so it seemed like i was the best again. i would look at other artwork and know that they had more skill than me, but when i read other people stuff (even though i was young and arrogant and not ready to admit that i wasn't understanding quite a bit of what i was reading) i would think, "fuck this shit, i can do this, why aren't they fighting? why aren’t they arguing?" and i'd think, "this sucks! why did he do that? why didn't he do that? why didn't she hit him?” Seemed like the only writing that i’d admit was good was when Tom Sawyer ran away and pretended he was dead so he could go to his own funeral. I was upset i didn’t think of that first.

So i'd write stories where everyone would do what i wanted them to do. everything they stopped just short of doing in books and movies. i guess it's as simple as that, i started writing because i wanted characters in other books and stories to do what i wanted them to do. i wanted that punch, revenge, or spit in the face. i wanted to write what i wanted to read. Still liked writing about spiders though. sometimes flies. sometimes both. And i never looked at anything i wrote and saw an ear or a nostril that i didn't do. An ear and a nostril that i knew would always be better than mine.

Once, i called attention to that lion's ear (the nostrils were harder to tell apart, and by then it seemed more symbolic or something if i just dwelled on one thing instead of two). it was a couple years ago when i finally pointed it out on a day when my mom was moving the lion to the end of the hall. i said "you know, when you were outside that day, i did that ear and grandma did that ear." Like it was some big fucking confession or something. She just did what moms do, she said, "Oh, well i like your ear better." Liar. Later i got into watching movies, and my stories turned from things i wanted to read, into things i wanted to see. Not sure what's next. Maybe i'll grow out of wanting to see them fight. Haven't yet though.

::: david - 9:44 PM [+] :::
...