The Angst of Garfield

I remember as a youngster arguing with a friend of mine about who was the cooler cartoon cat: Garfield or Heathcliff. That friend was Shane Baucom. We were friends before kindergarten but have lost touch, which is sad, but I feel free to drag his name through the geeky murk of the blogosphere because I know he doesn’t touch computers—probably still doesn’t have an email address. If only he were on Facebook, I could just friend him and be done with it—friendship saved in a mouse click.

I digress. I, sadly, was on the losing end of that Garfield/Heathcliff fight. Now, I would argue that Heathcliff, the tougher and saucier of the two, was an allusion to the gloomy and doomed Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights and thus a superior literary creation. But at the time, my primary reason for siding with the alley cat was that my parents bought most of my cartoon books from garage sales and people were dumping the Heathcliff collections like stock in mortgage companies. So after I caught up with the exploits of Garfield a few years later through the discards of other children, I concurred: he was the funnier cartoon cat.

Until, of course, Jim Davis became a man driven to appear in every newspaper in America and so had to appeal the lowest common denominator. His brilliant epiphany? People, on the whole, are slow. Too many characters, too many continuing plotlines, too many running gags, and your audience is reduced to a loyal fan base. So he cut all the side characters (Doc Boy? Lyman? etc.), reduced Garfield, Odie, and Jon to a few quirks, and played the same simple gags endlessly in a loop (you kill those spiders Garfield!)—a strip so easy it’s produced via assembly line. And presto! A super successful comic strip suckfest.

Garfield minus Garfield, which removes the cat Garfield from the strip, has restored my interest in Garfield. As the intro to the site states once the corporate cuteness of the cat is taken out, what’s left is a disturbing and artful cartoon on the existential horror of life. It reminds me of the brilliant strip Red Meat (compare the two below). Except Garfield without Garfield may have an advantage because of seeing the iconic Jon Arbuckle in this new light.

Other People’s Writerly Advice Tip #2

Today's advice comes to us not from some old stodgy book, but from my former professor in grad school Philip Gerard. He gave a reading at the Museum today and will give a reading at the University tonight and stopped by my Intro to Creative Writing class between.

He told my students if they wrote down anything from the class it should be: "Backstory drives present action." He had interesting things to say about how we have to consider what has happened before the story to understand the present scene. I fear that when writers (even good ones) think about backstory it manifests itself in the present action through flashbacks that slow or stop that action. Or--worse--writers want to excuse present action on past events, the armchair psychobabble way. Oh, he was a bad guy now because he was sexually abused then.

I liked better when Gerard told the students to pretend they are movie producers with a set budget when writing a story. So they couldn't just have anyone say anything. You have to pay speaking parts more than extras, so if a character has dialogue that character should play an important role in the story. Don't build (describe) an elaborate set location if you're not going to have action occur there.

I only fear my imagination is impoverished, limiting my budget.

The Theater!

Last week was a crazed week of theater and socializing. I like the former and am lukewarm to the other. The theater is great because there are all these living breathing people all around you saying pleasant things to listen to and they have no desire to hear from you. The first was the BareBones Theater Group's Invasion of 24-Hour Theatre Project—a crazy feat where playwrights are given a prompt the night before, auditions are held in the morning, and the play is put on that night. Heather (with nothing to say about bananas) starred (for me she was the star) in one of the ten minute plays. The next play was mid-week: August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean at The Actor’s Theatre. Great…long, but great. My favorite line: “Oh, I burned it down!” And then there was the set with a ship in the background, one with sailing masts—I want a ship with masts in my place. And then there was the university’s production of Proof. I’m always amazed at the quality of the student performances. You can tell that I’m beat. That doesn’t even include seeing my friends from Florence, SC, an Oscar get-together, and etc. Etc.

Go Bananas

So I talked bananas with Heather again. She got a leg cramp and said she needed to eat one for potassium. Then, spacing out a little, she said, "I'm going to freak out with the next banana I get. I'll just stare at it, thinking: I've eaten you before...." This led to her telling me that it's easier to open a green banana from the bottom. I call it the bottom--and I'm sure all right-thinking people will agree with me--because the stem is clearly the top of the banana. Monkeys know this trick of opening the banana from the bottom, but see, that's what separates us from the animals--we do things the hard way.

This Just In: Blue People

No, it's not the anniversary of the Smurfs--well, it is actually...the 50th even. No, the blue people I want to talk about are in the hills of Kentucky (or was it West Virginia?) and are actually people and actually blue. This fact, is in fact, old news and not "just in," but was brought to my attention at a Wii party tonight (we all can't be Kevin Keck going to Purgatory). Turns out there was a family with Methemoglobinemia, a blood disorder that turns you the color blue (see the Fugate family pictured).

What You Talking About, Poe?

So I’m researching epitaphs. Why? Because it beats the hell out of writing. Some of course are amusing:

Here lies the body of our Anna
Done to death by a banana
It wasn't the fruit that laid her low
But the skin of the thing that made her go.

Heather tells me, by the way, that NPR told her that the bananas we eat will disappear in 30 years due to Panama disease. I miss them already. She further tells me that bananas are sterile and so are essentially clones of one another. We are all eating one banana. I have to quit talking bananas with Heather because she is blowing my mind.

But getting to the famous epitaphs I find Poe’s: “Quoth the Raven, Nevermore.” Why does that make me so sad? Am I the only one who had a morbid teacher who made us play the come up with your obiturary? I can swear the same teacher made us draw a tombstone and write our own epitaph, but you know the betrayer memory…tricky bastard. I was both frightened out of my mind my these exercises in mortality and offended that I could (at some insanely young age) sum up my life in a sentence.

And that’s Poe’s: Quoth the Raven, Nevermore. It’s perfect, some would say. Fitting. But my problem is that it’s cliché. I know you can’t judge that time then from the standards of now. But I can only react now and that’s like Gary Coleman’s epitaph being “What you talking about, God?” Wait, is that his epitaph? No, that’s right, he didn’t die recently…he got married—totally different. Unless you were in a Poe story where death and marriage might be something akin.

For Mel

My friend Melody Clayton sent me this evocative picture. She's been a great friend since the grad school days. The couch daze. And her husband Alex--encyclopedia of all things cool. They introduced and continue to introduce me to all the good stuff in life.

She's working also on a novel which will be much better than THE NOVEL I've been pecking at. But you should know she's already an atmospheric master short story writer as witnessed here.