The Unthinkable Mind students read comics during class. They also eat candy. They also wrote 40,000 words by hand this semester and did an uncountable number of drawings.
Song:
Source: The great http://soulmusicsongs.tumblr.com/
Dear Unthinkable Mind Students,
We are going to have a good week together! It’s going to feel like this song sounds. Have you been worried about your book? Projects like this often come together in a completely unexpected way but you may not know what I mean until it happens to you. A surprise presents itself and you follow it and as you work it keeps surprising you. And that is the thing that will help you finish. You’ll want to chase it down until you can run along side it.
This ‘surprising thing’ that seems to happen in an instant(— often right about the time we are sure it’s all actually horrible—) can only happen after spending the amount of time you all have spent learning and practicing this way of working, this Unthinkable Mind thing, whatever it might be. I am so happy to watch all of your books starting to bloom at once. Pictures from an expedition.
Love,
Professor Old Skull.
“Lesbian Cattle Dogs”
Comics by 2012 “What It Is” class alum, Lydia Conklin
Dear Unthinkable Mind Class,
There are a lot of ways of doing your final project for our class. Comics are one of them.
Professor Old Skull
After reading “The Fourth State of Matter” written by Joanne Beard about a shooting Iowa University campus, students in The Unthinkable Mind class were asked to imagine themselves somewhere at a specific point in the story and then describe what was going on around them.
This story lasts for just over a minute.
What happens to the ordinary moment is unspooling alongside an extraordinary event? The way the sky looks, the way the river smells, the crowded street we jaywalk; the weight of a certain door, the sound of footsteps in a certain hallway. What happens to all of these things once we know the whole story?
How are we able to imagine this? How are we able to put ourselves in another person’s story? Does this mean a story is also a place?
One day Professor Old Skull passed out index cards to The Unthinkable Mind Class and asked them to fold them in half and write a made-up title of a book on the top of each one. Then she passed out photocopies of pictures the class had drawn earlier in the quarter using an exercise from “Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice” by Ivan Brunetti
Professor Old Skull asked the class to cut the pictures apart up and paste one on each of index card as if it were the bookcover illustration. Then she gathered the cards, mixed them up and passed them out again and asked students to turn the ‘nano book’ over and write a genre type on the back without looking at the title.
Then she mixed them up again, passed them out one last time, and gave students less than two minutes to write the first line of the book based on title, genre, and cover illustration.
From The Unthinkable Mind Nano Book Project, University of Wisconsin-Madison, taught by Lynda Barry
One day Professor Old Skull asked her Unthinkable Mind Students to do the exercise found on page 37 in Ivan Brunetti’s book, “Cartooning, Practice and Philosophy” but instead of doing each drawing on a separate index card, they folded a sheet of 8.5 x 11 paper into 12 panels and drew the following scenarios:
A) The beginning of the world
B)The end of the world
C) A self-portrait, including your entire body
D)Something that happened at lunchtime (or breakfast if it is still morning)
E) An image from a dream you had recently
F)Something that happened in the middle of the world’s existence
G)What happened right after that?
H) Something that happened early this morning
J)Pick any of the above panels and draw something that happened immediately afterward
K)Draw a ‘riff’ on panel ‘J’
L) Finally, draw something that has absolutely nothing to do with anything else you have drawn in the other panels.
A few days later, Professor Old Skull asked them to cut the panels apart and mix them up. Then she gave them a poem written by Thomas Treherne in the mid 1600’s and asked them to cut the poem up into 12 parts, maintaining the original order of the poem. Then students were asked to glue a panel above each part of the poem, trying to find which pictures made the page have a kind of resonance that can happen when two things don’t match up literally, but have some sort of swing between them.
It’s a good way to get to know a poem, repeating it. Learning it sideways, as if it were a song.
This sequence features the work of Spinal Cord, Prefrontal Cortex and Brain Stem
One day Professor Old Skull asked her Unthinkable Mind Students to do the exercise found on page 37 in Ivan Brunetti’s book, “Cartooning, Practice and Philosophy” but instead of doing each drawing on a separate index card, they folded a sheet of 8.5 x 11 paper into 12 panels and drew the following scenarios:
A) The beginning of the world
B)The end of the world
C) A self-portrait, including your entire body
D)Something that happened at lunchtime (or breakfast if it is still morning)
E) An image from a dream you had recently
F)Something that happened in the middle of the world’s existence
G)What happened right after that?
H) Something that happened early this morning
J)Pick any of the above panels and draw something that happened immediately afterward
K)Draw a ‘riff’ on panel ‘J’
L) Finally, draw something that has absolutely nothing to do with anything else you have drawn in the other panels.
A few days later, Professor Old Skull asked them to cut the panels apart and mix them up. Then she gave them a poem written by Thomas Treherne in the mid 1600’s and asked them to cut the poem up into 12 parts, maintaining the original order of the poem. Then students were asked to glue a panel above each part of the poem, trying to find which pictures made the page have a kind of resonance that can happen when two things don’t match up literally, but have some sort of swing between them.
It’s a good way to get to know a poem, repeating it. Learning it sideways, as if it were a song.
This sequence features the work of Frontal Lobes, Corpus Callosum and Amygdala
Dearest Unthinkable Mind Students,
Does Feynman’s explanation of hot and cold transfer and jiggling atoms work as a metaphor to help us understand how images are transferred?
Best to you from Professor Old Skull.
Physicist Richard Feynman thinks aloud about atoms and how they jiggle, and how we perceive that jiggling as ‘hot’ and ‘cold’. From the BBC TV series ‘Fun to Imagine’(1983). You can now watch higher quality versions of some of these episodes at www.bbc.co.uk/archive/feynman/
We love this video and we thank our wonderful Occipital Lobe for finding it for us.
Dear Unthinkable Mind Class,
Cerebral Cortex found this video for us and we are so grateful! It features The Unthinkable Mind’s Seoul brother, writer Young-Ha Kim. Below is part of the transcript.
Love to you and many gold stars to Cerebral Cortex for bringing this back to our ship.
Professor Old Skull
Young-Ha Kim: “Unfortunately the little artists within us are choked to death before we get to fight against the oppressors of art. They get locked in. That’s our tragedy.
So what happens when little artists get locked in, banished or even killed? Our artistic desire doesn’t go away. We want to express, to reveal ourselves… The artistic impulses inside of us are suppressed but not gone.
They can often reveal themselves negatively in the form of jealously. You know the song, “I Would Love to be on TV”? Why would we love it?
TV is full of people who do what we wished to do but never got to. They dance, they act, the more they do the more they are praised. So we start to envy them. We become dictators with a remote and start to criticize the people on TV. “He just can’t act.” “You call that singing?” “She can’t hit the notes.”
We easily say these sorts of things. We get jealous not because we are evil but because we have little artists pent up inside of us. That’s what I think. What should we do? Right now we need to start our own art. Right this minute. Turn off the TV. Log off the internet. Get up and start to do something….
… In my writing class I give students a special assignment. I have students like you in the class, many who don’t major in writing. Some major in art or music and think they can’t write so I give them a blank sheet of paper and a theme: Write about the most unfortunate experience in your childhood. There’s one condition. You must write like crazy. Like crazy! I walk around and encourage them. “Come on! Come on!” They have to write like crazy for an hour or two. They only get to think for the first five minutes.
The reason I make them write like crazy is because when you write slowly lots of thoughts cross your mind. The artistic devil creeps in. The devil will tell you hundreds of reasons why you can’t write. “People will laugh at you. This is not good writing. What kind of sentence is this? Look at your handwriting!” It will say a lot of things. You have to run so fast the devil can’t catch up.
The really good writing I’ve seen in my class was not from the assignments with a long deadline but from the 40 to 60 minutes they write without knowing what they are writing. And at this moment the nagging devil disappears.
So I can say this: It’s not the hundreds of reasons why one can’t be an artist, but rather the one reason one must be that makes us artists. Why we cannot be something is not important. Most artists become artists because of the one reason.
When we put the devil in our heart to sleep and start our own art enemies appear on the outside. Mostly they have the faces of our parents or our spouses. But they are devils. Devils. They come to earth briefly transformed to stop you from being artistic, from becoming artists. And they have a magic question: “What for?”
But art is not for anything. Art is the ultimate goal. It saves our souls and makes us live happily. So in response to such a pragmatic question, we need to be bold: “Well, just for the fun of it. Sorry to have fun without you.” that’s what you should say.
“I’ll just go ahead and do it anyway.”
MARDI GRAS INDIANS SINGING, DANCING AND CELEBRATING THE LIFE OF THE LATE BIG CHIEF LIONEL DELPIT
Dear Unthinkable Mind Class,
What is an image?
No one was ‘leading’ the song these people sang together one day at a funeral in New Orleans. There wasn’t a set way or time for this song to begin or end. There wasn’t a plan for how it would go beyond a maintaining a certain rhythm and repeating chorus that may or may not change.
An image is has no fixed content or meaning. It takes on the characteristics and context of the particular moment in which it is conjured. It moves and is made manifest without a plan, but follows some spontaneous ordering force. It is uninhibited by logic or convention and often times takes a shape that is surprising or offensive or hilarious or sad or terrible or moving or wrong-headed or brilliant or mysterious or impossible-to-explain-beautiful, and/or all of these things at once. And by the way, an image isn’t actually a ‘thing’.
Is it the 4th state of matter?
An image is something made alive by a certain state of mind and body engagement and seems to arrive whole, it has a personality and a certain disposition toward the world that can move intact from man to man. It’s in this video. Can you see it jump from singer to singer and hear the change ripple through the crowd? What’s moving? How does one singer let it go and the other take it up?
Try to catch the moment that it jumps. This is what our class is all about.
The image in this video was filmed being kept ‘alive’ for almost ten minutes. When the video begins the image is already in play and the video ends before the image does, so we don’t see how the image arrived or how it departed. It’s carried by voices, and an incredible tamborine player. What is the tamborine player doing? Is he the navigator or the sextant?
This is not home work. It’s just here for fun, just to add to your cache of Unthinkable Mind thinkin’s But don’t forget that presentiment is that long shadow on the etc etc
Professor Old Skull
Special thanks to onenawlins: for this video and many others about New Orleans Culture
On February 27, 2013, students in Lynda Barry’s “Unthinkable Mind” class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison were given a piece of paper and a flair pen and asked to draw a picture that they couldn’t see. Professor Old Skull was the only one who could see the picture, and she described it line by line, asking them to draw along with the description. What happened? The picture Professor Old Skull was describing appears at the end of the video.
