Q&A: Lynda Barry, reading tonight @ the Free Library

Tonight, Lynda Barry will read from her new memoir, Picture This: The Near-Sighted Monkey Book, at the Free Library. We caught up with her earlier this week to hear her thoughts on drawing, fake dancing and why we need a good book at a Jiffy Lube.

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Q&A: Lynda Barry, reading tonight @ the Free Library

POSTED: Thursday, March 17, 2011, 4:00 PM

Filed Under: Events | Interview Arts News

Self portrait (Lynda Barry)

As Will Stone mentions in this week's Agenda section, Lynda Barry will read from her new memoir, Picture This: The Near-Sighted Monkey Book, at the Free Library tonight. We caught up with her earlier this week to hear her thoughts on drawing, fake dancing and why we need a good book at a Jiffy Lube.

City Paper: What prompted you to write this follow-up to your first graphic memoir, What It Is?

Lynda Barry: My two books, What It Is and Picture This are siblings. Both look into the question — what is an image. What It Is used writing as a way of exploring that, and Picture This used drawing; those are very tied together – drawing and writing – because they both use what I like to call the original digital devices – your fingers. Both books are trying to understand why we do that.

CP: For example …

LB: Yeah, for instance, when you’re at a meeting, and you’re bored—why do you doodle? Why is it that people want to make things? And why is it that, when we’re little, we can do these without hesitation. Or even when you’re with a kid. Say, you’re generally a grumpy old uncle, but you really dig your little nephew; you’ll dance, sing, and make sculptures, as long as you’re with the kid.

Why is that? Okay, well, it’s not intimidating to be around a little kid, but also I think it is a language that they both can speak. The arts are a kind of language. As far as evolution, why do we keep the arts? I mean, it takes a lot of energy to make art, and what would be the point if it didn’t have any biological function? I think of the arts as the corollary to our immune system and our autonomous nervous system; in the same way that the two systems keep our bodies healthy, an image system makes us want to keep living.

When your hand is moving, it actually improves your experience of time; it becomes less like a cheese grater and more of a Brillo pad, which is still not terrific, but it’s a hell of a lot better.

CP: Who did you imagine reading your book?

LB: I wanted to make a book that is like a kids book. I picture someone looking at this book while sitting in a jiffy lube, waiting for their oil to get changed

CP: But your book encourages being active. Did you see it having more of a function for readers than passing the time?

LB: For sure, I want to make their finger get itchy. I mean when you’re at a jiffy lube, no one is expecting anything; you’re just expecting it to be a drag. I thought It’d be fun to help someone forget how much things sucks at the moment.

CP: Why do people need so much encouragement to draw?

LB: When I’m outside painting, people generally come over and are interested. I always ask people to try, but of course they don’t want to, until I say to them, “ Okay, we’re going to draw lines, and we’ll pretend that if the lines touch, you get electrocuted. So it becomes a game. And immediately people are cool with that. It’s only the minute someone thinks they have to do art that they get scared. It’s like thinking that every time you get on a bike you to be Lance Armstrong.

CP: Is this fear of a drawing an age-old problem? Or a more recent cultural development?

LB: Up until this time in the world, I think that handicraft has had a larger role in peoples’ lives. I’m particularly interested in the hand brain eye connection. What’s gazing about? What’s looking about? I know that in our…milieu—which is a word I never say— in our situation, man, at a certain point usually starting around the 3rd or 4th grade, that piece of paper changes. Have you noticed how little kids are always doing the sound effects and whatnot when they draw? I think that the piece of paper and the pen transform from an experience to a thing. On some level, I believe it’s a cognitive development as well. That’s one of those challenges were constantly running up against— they call it self-consciousness, which I never got, because we’re mostly conscious of other people. What’s interesting in Western culture, though, is that when people bump up against that, they just stop.

In a paper I recently read, they discuss how drawing actually sets the brain up for certain insights, emotions and all other sorts of important underlying structures. I always think of drawing as a pop-out room

CP: Sorry, a what?

LB: You know, a pop-out space; I wanted one when I was a kid. For instance, when we go to a modern dance performance, we leave the performance and have nothing leftover, expect some memories. With drawing, we worry that there is always a leftover, and it’s either good or bad, and that encompasses the experience. They used to have cow fences to prevent them from crossing the road. Then, one day, they realized they could just paint stripes and the cows still wouldn’t be afraid to cross the lines. I feel that people are often the same way about drawing. I worry that we forget how deeply enjoyable the simple act of drawing a spiral can be.

What’s so wonderful about drawing is that it’s available to all of us. If you watch people sitting, their hands are almost never sitting still. Now, we have iPhones, to occupy our hands. I’m very curious about how mobile devices have led to a lack of personal eye contact. I love to watch a parent and a child at someplace like an airport, and see how much eye contact happens. Once, I watched a mother and her young son sitting next to each other, and they didn’t made eye contact once in 20 minutes. We’re probably in one of the few, if not the only, moment in human civilization, when a mother is more worried about looking at her Blackberry than her child.

CP: Your book, What It Is, is about the challenges of writing. Did the first book shape how you went about writing Picture This?

LB: I came to realize that writing is a lot like being on the dance floor. You know when the music changes, and you start fake dancing, because you’ve fallen out of the groove. And everyone else is dancing, and you’re smiling and pretending you’re totally in sync. It took me a long time to realize writing was like that as well.

CP: Picture This seems to emphasize the healing power of drawing. Do you imagine it as a sort of self-help book? Or is that not quite how you want to categorize it?

LB: I don’t mind that title at all. I think that is the biological function of the creative urge, and it’s how we deal with the jerks and the horrible situations we run into in the world. Drawing provides us with another word. I mean, where are Batman and Scrooge? They are in an image world, and that world is a particularly strange place. You can put things in, but you can’t really get them out. It’s a useful world. In some ways, we really do create another body for ourselves. So self-help is correct, because the help is in our self, in our hands, in our movement.

CP: Monkeys play a staring rolling in your book. Why is that?

LB: They’re really fun to draw. But some of the book deals with tragedy. Around 911, I lost all these friends and I couldn’t draw. It wasn’t even sadness, it was just a dead feeling. One day, though, I drew this monkey while on my way to a funeral, and I felt better. And every time I drew the monkey, I felt a bit better. It’s kind of like how people pray, or when they’re in junior high school and they play that one song over and over. So the monkeys are the ones that showed up. Making What It Is made me understand my own relationship with drawing.

CP: The cigarette brand in your book is labeled “Don’t.” But many of your characters are big smokers. Why the mixed message?

LB: Imaginary cigarettes are an okay thing to smoke. I smoked when I was in my 20s, eventually I stopped. But I found that drawing a cigarette onto anything always improved it. You try it sometime; draw a cigarette on an orange—I promise it’ll make you laugh your ass off. In the book, I wanted to piggyback on the idea that not drawing is just as bad as smoking.

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