Book One, Chapter Two Written and Illustrated by Jimmy Riordan
SOWSEAR SOWSEAR SOWSEAR SOWSEAR bork.com/
copyright Chad Myer http://www.jey
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SOWSEAR
R R R R
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It is ancient Greece. Simonides has just finished reciting his poem.
As he walks out the door the building collapses behind him.
Everyone inside is crushed.
A heap of ruble and corpses. The mourners cannot identify the dead.
Unrecognizable, their bodies cannot be buried properly.
Simonides closes his eyes.
He imagines the room in which he once stood. He can recall his audience.
Where each guest sat.
So Simonides walks around the wreckage that was the banquet hall and identifies each body from memory.
From their location.
Giving order to memory. Can it be like assigning seats at a table?
Visualize the layout of a familiar space. Use this place as a mnemonic system. Organize your thoughts. Mentally associate ideas with specific physical locations.
Now take a walk.
Remember what you left where.
An idea that started with Simonides.
Okemah , Oklahoma
A taxi from the city must have cost a fortune.
I see the bus every day. If you’d called, we’d have picked you up.
un huh. -- You
like BBQ sauce?
That’s what I said. -- you’ll wanna try some of this.
He said the bus wasn’t running anymore.
Um...
Where ’ s the bathroom?
Down the hall and to your right. Try not to get lost.
www.aklightbrigade.com
Logo designed by Craig Updegrove
Is this th e lin e fo r the toilet?
What’s that?
Would you Like a piece of watermelon ?
“ Yeah.
Ok, thanks.”
“ it doesn’t get any
better than Oklahoma watermelon, you know? ”
All because of the heat. Makes ‘em real sweet.
Thats why it’s the state vegetable.
Vegetable?
“ My first summer job was on
my uncle’s watermelon farm. ”
“ It was hot.”
“ Hot enough to
make the insides of those melons boil. It was my job to keep ’em cool.”
“ Boy it was hot. ”
“ I’d walk
through the fields with a bucket of paint. Paint the tops of all the melons white. It’d stop ‘em from exploding. ”
“ Oh... no. Thanks. I have a long way to drive. “
“ You need a place
to stay tonight? ”
MARG Like the last issue and all those to come, this chapter of Held Up is structurally based on the corresponding chapter of Le Roman du Lievre. The memorable line from Chapter Two (at least for me) is “and the night passed in eating and in love.” Like Chapter One, nothing is really revealed about our protagonist. We don’t get to hear what he is thinking for another few months. At this time I am re-working the old Le Roman du Lievre Wordpress blog (www.leromandulievre.wordpress.com). I mention this here because I plan to use it to chart the process of creating this comic. Mostly fleshing out each chapter’s notes and some of the abstract ideas contained in the less narrative parts of each issue. The blog has much more space for visual aids. If time permits, I will also include some short online comics on the blog. Additions that I will not print until completing Book One. A few of the notes below mention content that I hope will be on the blog by the time you read this. This blog already contains Le Roman du Lievre in French and English, along with all of the blog entries from the Marginalia show. NOTES: 1: A quote from Le Roman du Lievre Chapter Two. 3: This half of the spread, along with part of page 1, is based on a letterpress piece I did right after the Marginalia show in 2009 (see blog). 4,5: This story is credited as the origin of the Memory Palace memory enhancement technique. 6: An extremely brief explanation of the Memory Palace, an idea that is taking root in this comic and the Le Roman du Lievre project in general. I have included an awesome TED Talk video by Joshua Foer on the blog. 10-12: We return to pi�atas and the blindfold (see last issues notes) at the MTS Gallery in Mountain View, Anchorage, AK. The floor plan is based on a drawing from Elysa Lozano’s Autonomous Organization Proposal. Which was her contribution to the Marginalia Exhibit. MTS no longer exists. The building was leveled during
the summer of 2011, so those parts of the building that were not included in Elysa’s drawing were drawn from memory. 15, 16: I drove a 1986 Ford F250 diesel pickup truck (named Baby by its new owners) 13,000 miles from Anchorage to New York returning artwork to the North American artists that participated in Marginalia (see Marginalia: 2009 and Return to Me: 2010 at www.leromandulievre.com). On the way back the truck broke down in Okemah, Ok. This wonderful story about painting watermelon white to keep them cool during the hot Oklahoma summer was told to me a year later, when I picked the truck back up from the generous mechanic who repaired it. 16: In 2004 I drove from Oregon to New York, by way of New Orleans with the girl I was seeing at the time (lets call her K). We had made a similar drive, in reverse, the previous year. The copy of Romance of the Rabbit (the original English translation of Le Roman du Lievre) that inspired this entire project was in the trunk of my car for both trips (it was lost almost immediately after the drives completion). We camped right outside Sallisaw, OK on our way east. It was there that we first suspected she might be pregnant. An event that shaped much of who I am today. I initially intended to include a fictional episode based on this experience in this issue right where these notes are, but couldn’t make it work. If and when I do finish this episode I will include it on the blog and in the collected version of Book One. 18,19,23: A quote from Le Roman du Lievre Chapter Two. 24: The text on this page is an amalgamation of 2 conversations. The first was had with K on our first drive west, from New York to Oregon in 2003. We were bemoaning the fact that every word we used to discuss our relationship seemed to have either a positive or negative value. Neutral seemed impossible. (contInued on Inside back cover)
Hello ? Who? Oh, really... wow.
It’s been a while. What are you--�
Oh, wow. That sounds exciting.
Me? Oh... Living
Un-huh. Yeah. Sorry, I just --
No�... No. You know�
I understand.
Well, good luck.
OK... bye.
-
Who was that?
Huh? Oh...
Nobody. I mean somebody...
“... a person I hadn’t thought
about in a long time. ”
Relationships are so often viewed in terms of similarity and difference, negative and positive.
Step back. See it for what it is. Remove these objects from culture and custom. See that it is in fact only this context that gives them value. Which you can take away. This is how a watermelon can be both a fruit and a vegetable.
Next Issue: I‛M GOING TO TELL THAT HARE HOW I FEEL.
HOW ARE YOU TODAY?
SHOOT!
(ContInued From PG 17) The second conversation took place with Lindsay Clark, Cara Fraver, Luke Deikis, and I this last New Year. We were discussing whether a watermelon was a fruit. Luke and Cara argued that using the botanical definition of fruit to define the watermelon was misguided, since vegetable is not a botanical term. I would also like to mention a few things regarding Held Up chapter One. Soon after releasing it I realized that I had gotten an important fact incorrect. Actually I didn’t realize it myself. An older man (as he was described to me, it would not have been surprising if he had been around Anchorage as a child when Rogers and Post visited) pawed through the issue and pointed out that Post and Rogers were on their way to Point Barrow (not point Hope) when they crashed their plane. “Something any self respecting Alaskan should know.” I was told about this mistake right about the same time that I learned the Anchorage Museum had an exhibit on Arctic Aviation opening in February (Another coincidence in line with the ethos of Le Roman du Lievre). In celebration of this coincidence the museum decided to carry copies of Held Up in their shop for the dura-
tion of the exhibit. Why not? Post and Rogers are on the cover. I printed a batch of corrected comics for the Museum. This second edition was a bit smaller, which I liked. All further issues, including this one, will be printed at these dimensions, which are closer to that of a standard comic size. I have been reading more and more about the Alaskan adventures of Will Rogers and Wiley Post, and Post in general and find myself daydreaming about ways in which I can continue to include them in this story, even though, at this point, their connection to the narrative is almost entirely linked to the Oklahoma City Airport, named after Rogers, and the fact that they died in Alaska. I am thinking about having the majority of Chapter Three take place at the Anchorage Museum’s Arctic Aviation show. If this happens the two of them will probably sneak in. Even if this doesn’t happen, Wiley is beginning to take on saintly proportions for me and this story has room for a saint. So we will see him again. For now he might have to stay on the sidelines, taking on the role of Brer Wolf in a Peanuts themed telling of Uncle Remus’ Tar Baby story (above).
“Misfortunes never come singly.” -Wiley Post
$4.50 US / MORE IN CA Copyright Rabbit Rabbit Press, March 2013 www.leromandulievre.com