Mash-up
Tuesday, September 15, 2009 at 09:08AM 
I've been busy preparing for a couple of classes that I am teaching - one has already started and one starts tonight. Of course with the beauty of the internet, and having profs that blog, one does wonder which students will be checking him out - either for nuggets of wisdom (!) or to find out who this guy thinks he is (!!!).
Being a fiction writer, amongst other things, I like the opportunity of crossing the boundaries, or maybe a better word is mash-up: the visual arts with the written arts. I was thinking about this while listening to yet another radio interview with the publisher of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I was telling my wife about this publishing phenom (best-seller, translated into 17 languages etc.) and told her that the material was copyright free. Well, it went something like this:
Wife - Why didn't you think of something like that?
Me - D'oh!
Wife - I mean you're a writer. You could have done that.
Me - D'oh!!!
And the rest was pretty much the same.
But before I digress into my ideas for Robinson Crusoe in District 9, I'll talk about my mash-up. The graphic designer extraordinaire Chip Kidd turns out to also be a fabulous writer. Okay, maybe fabulous is a bit much, but pretty damn good. His novel The Cheese Monkeys is one of the best art school novels I have ever come across. What, you haven't heard of that genre? Okay, it's small. But Kidd's book is smart and very funny. I like reading it to my graphic design students, though to be honest, I am not sure if they get what the book is talking about. An arrogant and self-obsessed prof, Winter Sorbeck, puts a class of design students through a mental hell. Boot camp for designers. I see you readers rolling your eyes. Hey, wait. Art School was hell, life in the trenches, deadlines, exacto knife cuts, late night slurpie runs and buckets of coffee that no longer has any effect.
If you don't get any of this. Read Cheese Monkeys. Then come take my class. I am no Winter Sorbeck - but I do get passionate. And there are no zombies in my class (usually).
Better get working on that Crusoe story.
Reader Comments (2)
Robinson Crusoe and his zombie Friday. I'll buy that book.
Zombies are the new black.