An exercise to improve one’s memory: The “book review comic”
Last week I tuned in virtually to a workshop with illustrator Elizabeth Haidle through the Sequential Artists Workshop (SAW) Friday Night Comics series (replay in the link), wherein she taught a method for making “book review comics” to illustrate a favourite book, either from our recent reading history or from childhood. In the workshop, Haidle confessed to having a panicky thought each time she finishes a book: “can I recall a single thing?”
This is not a new feeling for most of us: we’re all forgetting how to pay attention in the focused way that book reading requires. I have an anxious habit of signing out an impossible amount of books from the library, shortly before impulse buying yet more books online. I tell myself that the next book, article, or podcast has the key I’ve been looking for, without knowing what I’m even after. Despite being surrounded by voluminous book piles, I often end up barely reading at all, and retaining little of what I do read. I’m checking my phone, or thinking about what else I “should” do, or wondering if I’ve chosen the wrong book. I’m racing through a text because I have to get to the next one.
A possible antidote: if you want to remember what you read, maybe try drawing a comic about it. Drawing is its own mode of thinking. To draw is to devote slow time to something, to pay attention, to fully see, and to remember. It’s hard to recall what I did or read yesterday, but when I look at old sketches or paintings from a few years ago, I have an embodied memory of where I was, down to the music I was listening to in the background.
Cartoonist and educator Lynda Barry has another “instant book review” exercise in her wonderful book Making Comics:
This year I’m curious to pursue work in the field of editorial illustration (artwork for magazines, articles, book covers, etc). As a start, I’d like to draw what I’ve read. Whether it helps me with illustration or not, it’ll be a way to slow down and pay closer attention to the ideas in my books. I want my reading life to feed my curiosity, instead of becoming another growing list to hurry through.
I haven’t yet tried the comic review exercise with a book, but taking the workshop did inspire me to make an illustration of a film I recently watched and loved (Aftersun):
A movie about memory (and so much more): Aftersun
I did not know I felt such profound nostalgia for being a kid in the 1990s until I watched Aftersun. Yes, it broke my heart with its deeply tender story and phenomenal acting. But on top of that, I thought the film perfectly reflected the consciousness of a curious, sensitive young girl at that time. We were just discovering video technology (six-year-old me felt so seen when young Sophie flipped the camcorder around to see herself, made a silly face, and then pretended to “interview” her father). We got embroidery floss hair wraps on summer vacations and wore batik print dresses on top of tie-dyed bathing suits. We obsessed over arcade games, lounged around in baggy pre-faded clothes, and pretended to be adults by learning to shoot pool. Aftersun brought back a rush of my buried memories from a more innocent time.
I’m interested in movies that use the medium of film, and the camera itself, to explore how lived experience actually feels. If you’re in a human body with a conscious mind, you might find yourself trying to read another person’s masked emotions, then tuning in and out of sounds around you, then getting caught in the tangle of your disjointed memories, before suddenly coming back to the present and focusing your eyes intently on the way water ripples on a surface. Aftersun captures this internal cognitive circus to brilliant effect. Anyone who was born in the period from the late 80s to mid 90s will find the film particularly nostalgic. Our curious young minds developed inextricably alongside digital technologies. How many of us from that generation struggle to know what is a real memory from our childhood, and what was recorded for us on home video or a family camera? Aftersun shows us that memory is unreliable and always incomplete. We can’t fully know others, even the ones we love the most.
I can’t remember the last time a film affected me so strongly. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it for weeks. It still feels hard to write about Aftersun beyond my pure emotional response; I know I’ll be contemplating it for a long time to come. The film’s subtle melancholy washes over you slowly, between moments of simple joy and tenderness. You are an active participant in the film and must draw your own associations, but in doing so, you’re given generous space to find yourself in the story no matter who you are.
A painting about memory:
Much of my own artwork stems from my interest in memory. The painting below began with a recent, lovely memory of watching a moose that spent the night bedded down next to my garden, but as I worked, it became something less literal. While painting, I kept thinking of the question: “where did winter go?” I know the figure is searching for something: perhaps the memory of a lost winter, a season that continues to disappear in the climate crisis.
Before I chose to pursue visual art in earnest, I studied cognitive science and history during my undergraduate degree; it’s clear to me now that memory is one of my most enduring fascinations. Collective, personal, buried, historical, written, neurological - I’m interested in it all. What are your favourite books, songs, movies, or artworks about memory?
Other things I enjoyed in the past month:
Late ‘60s California is very much a memory now, but there was in fact a time when, at twenty-four years old, Joni Mitchell could buy a bungalow in the Hollywood Hills for $36,000, and sit in front of a grand piano to write music and poetry all day. The Laurel Canyon docu-series (from EPIX) will make you want to live in this memory.
An artist I like, gushing about an artist I like, is something I like: Jeremy Fisher talks about Fiona Apple’s When the Pawn…on the 1002nd Album Podcast. Fiona’s stunning 2020 album Fetch the Bolt Cutters had a big part in my early pandemic experience, but I was not very familiar with her back catalogue. After hearing Jeremy Fisher’s take on When The Pawn…, I felt like I heard the album properly for the first time. It’s a 23-year-old album that would feel contemporary if it came out today. It’s an album that confirms Fiona not only as a master lyricist, but also as a curious experimenter with production, an inventor of strange melodies, and a lover of music across every genre.
My current reading preference: short, poetic personal essays and memoirs that are ostensibly about “nature” but actually about everything else. Amy Liptrot’s second book The Instant was a great follow-up to The Outrun. Those books then directed me to Nina Mingya Powles’ Small Bodies of Water, which I’m really enjoying so far.
This melancholy profile of SZA for New York Times Magazine.
Love this em