{"id":70610,"date":"2021-09-13T11:45:12","date_gmt":"2021-09-13T15:45:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/?p=70610"},"modified":"2021-09-13T13:02:15","modified_gmt":"2021-09-13T17:02:15","slug":"i-arrogantly-recommend-by-tom-bowden-20","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/2021\/09\/13\/i-arrogantly-recommend-by-tom-bowden-20\/","title":{"rendered":"i arrogantly recommend… by Tom Bowden"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Anatomie Narrative<\/strong>
\nSamplerman
\nION Edition<\/a>
\nImages \u00a9 ION \/ Samplerman<\/p>\n

Samplerman (n\u00e9e Yvan Guillo) makes hyper-Pop Art eye candy based on fragmented and re-constituted comics art broken into almost fractal-like components, as if negative space must send him into anaphylactic shock. In his latest collection, Anatomie Narrative<\/strong>, Samplerman fills in the outlines of various portions of the human body. Symmetry and chaotic juxtaposition mesh into an overall single picture that compel viewers to stare and lose themselves in the patterns and motifs.<\/p>\n

The images are energetic and crazy, and yet familiar, thanks to the source material. Like the principles of generative music\u2014which may be based on a dozen or fewer simple phrases each of which repeats at different rates to the others\u2014each piece is simultaneously familiar and unpredictable.<\/p>\n

Q&A with Samplerman<\/strong><\/p>\n

What are your source materials, and how do you organize them? What qualities, for you, make an image ideal to repeat, splice, or otherwise alter?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I am digging into the public domain comics from the \u201930s to the \u201950s available on websites like the Digital Comics Museum<\/a> and many others. My obsession with comics met the idea that was pushed by the founders of the Internet Archive<\/a> around the first decade of this century that all this forgotten material digitized and available had to live again through art or any new creative way to display it.<\/p>\n

I am slowly collecting the graphic elements I find interesting, organizing them by themes. What makes them interesting for me at first is their beauty. I discovered that making a composition of beautiful things put together can create something monstrous and beautiful at the same time. My other criterion for making a choice is just “I need a table a chair and a door” or [something] completely irrational.
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\nHow much of each page is planned out and how much is improvised once you have a basic idea? <\/strong><\/p>\n

I am trying to always change my process to keep it exciting and surprising. But most of the time I start with a template\u2014this can be a comics page with empty panels or a geometrical shape or an anatomic board. The “content” of digitally cut-out scans of old printed comics and how they are displayed is never and cannot be planned out and is what brings life to the page.<\/p>\n

I peruse through my growing collection of samples and select the ones that can fit; at the same time, I still look for new ones, so I go on downloading and looking at everything I can from what is available on the web.<\/p>\n

I am making folders of “heads,” “furniture,” “cars,” “trees,” etc., so I can improvise while directing my collages toward certain themes, subjects, or moods.<\/p>\n

Your new book is called Anatomie Narrative<\/em>. I can see the anatomy, but am I missing a narrative? To me the images mesh symmetry and balanced color with (apparent) chaos. Is there really a story there or are you just enjoying the juxtapositions and the overall (literal) big picture you\u2019re creating?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I sometimes struggle with the idea of telling something more or less approaching the shape of a story. Other times I leave it to the reader to decide if there is a story or not. The practice of collage brings a tension between the linear story I would like to tell and the multidirectional and elusive meaning due to the gathering of all these elements. Also, ION Editions, which publishes this book, are known for taking the less narrative works from artists who make more conventionally narrative comic books with other publishers. So, in that case I wasn’t feeling any constraint to telling a story.<\/p>\n

Perhaps in the future I will be able to control the course (or the curse?) of the stories by making them more minimalistic and with the help of some meaningful texts and dialogues. In the [book\u2019s] summary (in French) I tried mirroring the visuals in words by a collision\u2014or a mix\u2014of scientific, anatomic (more or less accurate) descriptions and often-used vocabulary from popular literature titles.<\/p>\n

Your pictures seemed designed to give viewers much to look at\u2014they open over time as one\u2019s eyes acclimate to the details: they seem meant to be stared at and puzzled out. Is that an approach inspired by other cartoonists or artists who\u2019ve influenced your style?<\/strong><\/p>\n

As much as I love comics, I have to admit in the case of my collage comics that I may have been more influenced by the music than the visual arts in my interest to rhythms and repetition (for example). Of course, I also love the psychedelics and surrealism that can be encountered in many comics from the \u201860s and \u201870s. I want to be graphically as generous as I can to [let viewers] drown inside my pages.\"\"<\/a>
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\"\"<\/a>Principles of Cerebral Mechanics<\/strong>
\nCharles Cros (Doug Skinner, trans.)
\nWakefield Press<\/a><\/p>\n

Charles Cros was a 19th<\/sup>-century scientist who, according to the book\u2019s flyleaf, \u201cdrank with Verlaine,\u201d \u201cprovided housing to Rimbaud,\u201d and \u201cinvented the phonograph . . . and color photography.\u201d (Although he was beaten to the patent on both accounts, the French still name their version of the Grammys after him). Thus, the Principles of Cerebral Mechanics<\/strong> is an earnest effort to reverse engineer, or theorize, the biological mechanics of perception. In 1872, when he wrote this paper, microscopes were not yet advanced enough to research the topic at the levels he theorizes upon.<\/p>\n

What ensues is a logical argument, based on what was known at the time, that parses the various components of vision and assumes that all senses function according shared principles. In Cros\u2019s estimation, the fundamental principles should be derivable from, say, the retina\u2019s reception of color, to the input\u2019s transformation of the color into information to be interpreted, to the body\u2019s reaction (if any) to that interpretation.<\/p>\n

Principles of Cerebral Mechanics<\/strong> serves readers today less as an example of a failed<\/em> explanation than as a good<\/em> explanation based on limited resources and rational-sounding assumptions that science later demonstrated false, in whole or part. Useful information may be garnered from negative results, although many people equate negative results as a competency-based failure. Why read something by an incompetent twit?<\/p>\n

You read Cros because he was anything but incompetent. Isaac Newton practiced alchemy, a fact that many now find puzzling but no longer sneer at. Although Cros and Newton both turned out wrong about certain key phenomena, the larger point is that insights can be gained from bright persons\u2019 mistakes\u2014understanding where, why, and how they went wrong; which mistakes were preventable at the time; and which could be changed only via hindsight. If only others shared Cros\u2019s own modesty towards personal error rather than moral revulsion:<\/p>\n

I am either mistaken or I have seen rightly. Therefore, either my book will pass without consequence, and I shall have been nothing but a failure\u2014not to be pitied, for I believed I was doing good<\/strong>\u2014or it will open an unexpected path to knowledge and human power. [My emphasis\u2014TB]<\/p>\n

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Q&A with translator Doug Skinner<\/strong><\/p>\n

This was the first work I’ve read by Cros. Once I read of his scientific achievements and his connections in the literary world, I wondered how I had never heard of or noticed him before. When I began looking around for more information about Cros, I quickly found that you’ve translated several works by him. How did you find out about him, and what about his works attracts you? What do you hope a new audience will discover in him?<\/strong><\/p>\n

In fact, I’ve translated only two other books by Cros: a collection of the comic monologues he wrote for the actor Coquelin Cadet, and a collection of stories written with the poet \u00c9mile Goudeau (plus some solo stories that are related). I think I first encountered Cros with Edward Gorey’s illustrated version of his verse “The Salt Herring,” and then with Andr\u00e9 Breton’s appreciation of him in the “Anthology of Black Humor<\/a>.” I’ve also read a number of the writers affiliated with Le Chat Noir, and translated several books by the humorist Alphonse Allais, and Cros’s name keeps coming up. I like his imagination, originality, and high spirits, and his poetry is often surprising and affecting. His work remains popular in France (he’s even in the Pl\u00e9iade), so I assume Anglophone readers will enjoy it too.<\/p>\n

I’ve spent numerous years teaching engineering students the basics of writing and presenting technical information: characterize the problem, propose a method to solve the problem, state the results of implementing the method, and derive conclusions about how well the method solved the problem, from which revisions to refine the method could be proposed. I’ve also told them that valuable information can be gleaned from negative results. Cros’s essay embodies both, although the negative results weren’t discovered until later. What is Cros’s status in the sciences, and how does it compare to his reputation as a poet?<\/strong><\/p>\n

As a scientist, I think Cros is mostly remembered for his work on the phonograph. The French equivalent of the Recording Academy is even named the Acad\u00e9mie Charles Cros<\/a> in his memory. His work on color photography was dogged and extensive, but frustrated a number of backers by continuing to be promising but not good enough to be profitable; I think he’s admired for his historical importance in this field rather than for his accomplishments. He also developed an ambitious plan to seek out extraterrestrial life by sending giant light signals into space, which is recognized as being far ahead of its time. His poetry is probably more widely read, if only because more people read poetry than scientific papers.<\/p>\n

How does a guy who spends his time inventing color photography and the phonograph ending up hanging out with Verlaine and Rimbaud? Can you see influences of poetry in Cros’s science or science in his poetry?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The 1880s and 1890s were exciting times in Paris, in both the arts and sciences. Cros’s two brothers were also polymaths, and led him into bohemian circles. His friend and champion Allais began his career as a pharmacist, and patented a formula for instant coffee, as well as helping Cros with some of his experiments. Cros’s poetry and fiction often do intersect with his scientific work. Both the phonograph (which he tellingly called the Pal\u00e9ophone) and the photograph were methods of preserving past impressions, of fixing memory, which is a theme that recurs in his poetry. He wrote some examples of early science fiction, too, including a romance between a man from Earth and a woman from Venus, and “La Science de l’amour,” in which a scientist has an affair with a woman in order to study sexuality.
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