“There's a boundary line: on one side are those who make books, on the other are those who read them, so I take care always to remain on my side of the line. Otherwise, the unsullied pleasure of reading ends, or at least is transformed into something else, which is not what I want. This boundary line is tentative, it tends to get erased: the world of those who deal with books professionally is more and more crowded and tends to become one with the world of readers. Of course, readers are also growing more numerous, but it would seem that those who use books to produce other books are increasing more than those who just like to read books and nothing else.”
Not gonna lie, sometimes my mind drifts off to a world where overnight I obliterate all trace of my online presence and pick up and move someplace I can slip into anonymity. Mexico perhaps, someplace I know no one and no one knows me, and where I don't even know the language. Set aside any semblance of professional pursuit from my creative endeavors and instead get a job waiting tables or tending to a bar or working at a bookshop, a day-to-day affair that requires no longview, all while speed-learning Spanish and spending my free time doing nothing but reading and sketching till the end of my days.
The excerpt at the very top is from Italo Calvino's IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELLER, which may just be the most post-modern book I've ever laid hands on. It's about an apparently misprinted book, whereby every other chapter seems to belong to a completely different book. In that regard, it can be quite challenging to get into, but in so doing it held up a mirror to me and reminded me of a thing I did in THE SOLAR GRID, in which I relegated the half of each chapter to what may seem like a completely new story, until much later you discover that it is all in fact one story. Which made me realize how challenging I must've made it for readers too.
Sticking with Calvino pays off though, because by around the 75-page mark, you're hooked, and the brilliance of Calvino's ploy begins to dawn on you like eureka.
#reads #journal
Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out:
the Books You've Been Planning To Read For Ages,
the Books You've Been Hunting For Years Without Success,
the Books Dealing With Something You're Working On At The Moment,
the Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case,
the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer,
the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves,
the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified.
How appropriate to come across these lines after having splurged on an order of 10 books (Ten?! What brand of demented gluttony is this?).
The excerpt is from Italo Calvino's IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELLER which I've had shelved for a while waiting to hear its call. Having just finished Dylan's contemplative CHRONICLES: VOLUME ONE (which may just be the best autobiography I ever read) and spent the afternoon lost in play and laughter with the little one—now sound asleep—I feel in the right frame of mind to drift away with Calvino.
#reads
“Daddy, are you an artist.”
Yes I am, Moony.
“That's so cool.”
Ha! I used to think so too, kiddo, once upon a time.
#Moony
Final TSG thumbs clock in at 36 pages and there ain't no other way about it. There are four pages worth that maybe aren't wholly relevant to the plot, but they provide good narrative flow, add much richness to the story, and induce it with “real-world info”, or non-fiction if you like, which I think is part and parcel of the function of any good work of fiction. Cutting those 4 pages would reduce my workload by maybe 12 days, a gain that is not at all worth all the richness that would be lost.
36 pages means I've got a rough estimate of about 108 days of work ahead of me before bringing THE SOLAR GRID to a close. Some pages I might be able to dash off quicker than I anticipate, others employ techniques I have yet to fully utilize for comix and as such are a bit more difficult to accurately assign production time, but 3 days per page seems to me like a reasonable enough average.
Will take the long weekend to get my ducks in order; meal prep, organize tools, and ready the workspace. It's the meal prepping though that'll take up the bulk of the next few days. I find that I work best when I don't have to think about food or anything else aside from the work at hand. Especially essential when you're in it for the long haul.
#tsg #work #comix
We're not always looking for ideas, sometimes ideas are looking for us. Sometimes they violently break through the windows of your mind when you least expect it and sweep through you with unstoppable gusto. Attempting to resist can be futile. No use trying to shutter them windows when the winds of inspiration are too strong.
The thought of revamping my logo wasn't something that ever crossed my mind. I've had the same one for over a dozen years and it seemed to serve me well, but last night for reasons completely unbeknownst to me a new mark made itself known in my mind's eye and I immediately scrawled it into my current vomitbook.
Aside from the obvious eye, the logo is also comprised of 3 letterforms (as was the previous one), G, J and the Arabic letter ج. The G being the first letter in Ganzeer of course, as the ج is in جنزير (Ganzeer in Arabic). The thing about the letter ج though is that it is only pronounced a hard G in Egypt and pronounced J in literally every other Arabic dialect. Which means جنزير will often be pronounced Janzeer when I'm in touch with other Arabic speakers, so the logo is able to represent all possible phonetics in one single symbol. It's as complex as it is simple.
The eye may be a cliche, but fact of the matter is everything I do—be it art, design, or writing—stems from one unshakable trait: observation. Keen, unwavering observation. Without which I doubt I'd ever have anything worthwhile to say. In any medium, really.
I've always been a fan of the kind of symbols you can't help but want to scrawl on your desk when you're a kid. The pentagram is an obvious one, the swastika before we know what it means or where it came from, the eye of Horus, Fido Dido's head, and so on. I think this new logo has something of that quality, more so than the previous one for sure.
I may tinker with proportions and style sometime down the line, but for now I'll try it on raw, see how well it fits.
#journal #work
Made it past the 20-page mark on latest TSG thumbs and still plenty of story to tell. It is evident that capping this chapter at 20 is impossible if I want to do it any justice, and do it justice I must. Will try to see if I can close it at 30.
Mind turned to mush, I find this stage of comix-making to be the most mentally-draining. It isn't the most labor-intensive, but it requires the most figuring out.
Sent off a lot of hi-res scans to the folks overseeing the Italy exhibition which includes much never-before seen process stuff. Pretty sure it wasn't what they expected, pretty sure they think I'm demented.
#journal #work #comix #tsg
I was asked to design this year's poster for my favorite annual event in all of Texas: Zine Fest Houston.
This year's theme is: Zine-topia/Dystopia, so y'know, right up my alley.
#work
It is my understanding that I have some work showing in London right now.
What: Hudood – Rethinking Boundaries
Where: SOAS Gallery
When: 11 July to 21 September, 2024
A catalog is available for download.
#work #exhibition
A fellow artist and dear friend from Lebanon who gifted me this beautiful little art-print a couple years back had part of their home destroyed in one of the recent Israeli airstrikes. Reconstruction will be costly. If anyone reading this might like to pitch in, shoot me a message at shout@ganzeer.com and I'll share my friend's paypal info privately. For understandable reasons, they'd rather not make it public.
#journal