This weekend was gigantic and life feels huge, and I’m having a hard time 1) condensing it into bite-size epiphanies for myself and 2) updating the internet about it in a satisfying way. It’s not actually huge news in the blatant excursions of life, but more in the ramparts of my own growth. Because hell, we all know adulthood is fated to happen, and this growth after college graduation has been spurned mostly by my own strange, huge, distant yet droolingly palpable ambitions. But recent events have finally made me burst with realization, and the power of it all continues to strike me, over and over, to the point where once an hour I scream into fits of giggling at the truth that I know something now, something I had intellectually known but hadn’t truly felt before.

Here’s a drawing I did at my friend Caitlin’s house Saturday night, after the Book Arts Fest at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts (MCBA). The drawing was on her to-do list and grew unreasonably, so she graciously let me have the whole page (click to view larger):

But let’s start with Friday night. Here’s a photo of me with John Darnielle, the frontman and oftentimes only member of the band The Mountain Goats. He is an artist on my short-short list of people who are incredibly influential and important to me:

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Mild romantic-slash-encroaching gestures coupled with a chaotic atmosphere, notably riots in London that I feel oddly connected to, from relationships I have with people over there, and relationships I’ve had. There is a lot of anger, spit and quips from the liberal media that lie useless in my ears and but bring tears to my eyes. Every situation is messy, every situation is political, and all I can manage to do is cower in my food shelf volunteer position once-a-week, and look eye-to-eye with the community I’m a part of. The notch made in my guilt fills tenfold and causes me to tremble harder below my designer sunglasses.

I am processing graduation and the real world by taking up writing long emails to my friends. Lots of long emails to friends. I feel like I’m going to start swooning, and proclaiming “Alas!,” like the heroine of Mary Shelley’s novella Mathilda.

That story had a strange impact on me when I read it last year. It’s a nervously long account of a woman’s sadness and mourning, with little actually taking place after the first few chapters. I felt drawn to it at the time, and drawn to it now, because although we seem to enjoy making fun of the concept of “emo” as a culture, we don’t seem to actually account what takes place during a mourning, lonely period.

The story begins with Mathilda on her death bed, explaining her current depressed state. The story goes on to explain how she got there, and then meanders into her dwelling in that state, unable to return, until she dies. It’s incredibly Romantic.

You can read Mathilda for free, online here: click. (I myself bought my copy in Paris, which is funny to think, now.)

I don’t feel so emotionally and mentally distraught as Mathilda does, but it’s interesting to have read something so intensely dramatic, all from a person’s interior state. It helps you understand yourself. There are purposes to all sorts of stories: escapism, humor. This is a story that explains grief to you.

…Wow, I went impressively off-topic with this one. I was honestly just going to talk about writing letters to my friends. It’s fascinating, the different layers of writing we all participate in. Personal journals just for ourselves, holding our secrets. Letters to friends, which are meant for one person only. Then there’s the internet, which is for everyone.

And then I suppose there’s art, which is for anyone who is willing to look at it.

Self Portrait as a Knight upon the Completion of a Great Quest

In this post I talk about:

Lately I’ve been thinking about Arthurian Legends. It started with a conversation with my friend about the graphic novel I am currently working on, Jeremiah. The comic has nothing to do with medieval knighthood (it takes place in modern-day Iowa), but he made some comparisons to the figure from the legends called the Fisher King. Inspired by this conversation, I later wrote a thesis paper drawing huge comparisons between the Fisher King and Jeremiah, but the one that struck the deepest chord with me was this: The notion that there is no “good” and “evil,” but in all decisions, there is the better choice. The goal for everyone is to attempt to always make the better choice.

Dichotomies do not exist within Arthurian legends. The best knights are not simply warriors, but are also wise. The concept of illumination, the gathering of information, is vital in a lot of the stories. Contemporarily, we seem to boil the legends down to good vs. evil, knight vs. dragon, etc., but it was more complicated than that. Just like real people, no one has one side to themselves. The complication of people’s lives is made into the vast metaphors of the legends.

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