Fringe Elements

A note as I head up to Edinburgh to make live drawings of the Fringe Festival

It’s an unusual time for me at the moment. To be more specific: I’ve been editing and re-editing a piece about my recent, somewhat-ill-fated cross-Western-Europe train journey, but I can’t seem to get the piece quite right. I’m not even sure I’ll publish it. It’s odd, because I’ve probably spent five separate sessions editing it, but it doesn’t seem to come closer to being finished, for reasons which escape me.

I am working on a video instead, which will tell a different side of my travels, a more light-hearted and silly one. Half of the video is my doing English wordplay on foreign signage (in Germany and Denmark).

Being absolutely inane is no small reason I’m alive, I believe.

I’ll probably post that video when done, but I do want to make this newsletter more of a paying-subscriber thing, for the reason that a) it takes dedication to keep running and b) it would feel better to be paid for my work. So, we’ll see!

I’m also editing a few other pieces, and wishing that I had some kind of assistant who could actually take care of the publishing-and-posting.

I write and edit and draw every day, but I sometimes — okay, often — just can’t be arsed to organize and publish things. Recently I spent a couple of hours organizing essays from the past five-ish years and made a small dent. Those are whole different regions of the brain, the creating side and the disseminating side. I suspect a lot of writers aren’t terribly interested in the latter, which feels more like grunt work.

I keep thinking of something a friend said a few years ago. I was talking about getting my paintings shown in some gallery, and she said: “Well, that’s the whole point of why you painters paint, isn’t it? To have people look at what you do?”

She said this as if it were self-evident.

And, actually, that isn’t why we make our work. It’s not the main reason, anyway. I’d wager most painters and most writers don’t care a whit if their work gets viewed. Is it a bonus and a gift if people engage with our work? Of course! It’s wonderful to connect with readers and viewers. But at base, we create because that’s our natural recurring impulse. It’s a dialogue (or, given how many facets we have, an overcrowded summit) that mostly happens to be interior.

That’s why people like Glennon Doyle — whom I adore — are lucky. Glennon happened to have a sister, Amanda Doyle, who would do the work of disseminating what Glennon wrote. Glennon’s main job, the first many years of her extremely successful career, was to simply write. As I’ve said before, I’d love to have an Amanda Doyle or a Vera Nabokov. (Vladimir Nabokov’s wife typed up and edited his pieces and handled all of his correspondence, as well as the household, so he could devote his time to creation).

I’d put an image or here to break this entry up, but I don’t have a strong enough internet connection to do so. How VERY 1998!

In other news, I am about to spent a week-ish making live drawings of performances at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (that’s THEIR syntax), better known as the “Edinburgh Fringe.”

I can’t wait to see shows in English, and to be able to make jokes to a barista again, to not have to translate everything, to understand the conversations of passers-by. I’m particularly excited to commune with My Folk, which is to say theatre and spoken-word and clowning enthusiasts.

I’ll be drawing events at Fringe Central, which is a a location for performers to visit between gigs and attend programming helping them develop shows and market their work.

I’ll also be running around Edinburgh drawing shows, mostly comedy.

The one and only other time I drew shows at the Fringe was in 2017, which feels like an actual lifetime ago. I drew Andy Zaltzman’s show, having fallen in love with him and his cohost John Oliver (yes, THAT one) from their days hosting the Bugle podcast, which often sent me into fits of laughter when riding the subway into Manhattan during graduate school. I drew Zaltzman again at the Underbelly comedy festival in London, and also when I made the poster for Radiotopia’s live tour.

Here’s part of that poster, featuring Roman Mars:

At Fringe in 2017, I also drew this fun 1930s-revival jazz band called “The Easy Rollers” at the BBC tent.

My last newsletter, I put my Seen and Overheard series after the paywall because I feel like it’s my best writing. If you want to contribute to future Seen and Overheards but you don’t want to subscribe just yet, my PayPal is through kyotosusan at gmail dot com. You can give what you like. You can buy me a cuppa in Edinburgh! Or help me pay for the enormously expensive lodging — expensive because many thousands of people are descending upon the city at the exact same time.

Seen and Overheard:

1 At a photography-gallery-slash-cafe in London not far from King’s Cross, there’s a couple, about 85 years old, sitting at a table. At first I think they’re new acquaintances because of her enthusiasm in telling him what to do, and the way she makes big declarative statements and he keeps agreeing with everything she says. But then I remember we are in England, where (as living here for a year taught me a while ago) this kind of couple is common enough: the woman making declarations, directing the man to do whatever, the man’s nodding along, agreeing with most everything she says, seeming to like having someone manage every aspect of his existence. Just an observation! Don’t kill the messenger!

2 At the terraced dining area at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art outside Copenhagen, there’s a Korean family of four. They’re impeccably dressed, and have perfect posture. There’s an older sister, about ten years old, and a younger brother, maybe eight.

What is remarkable about this family is that they converse amicably and with complete, good-natured attention. Everyone speaks in turn (except the little boy as much), telling stories — sometimes at length — and joking.

Everyone seems to be in complete and utter support of whomever is talking at the moment. Everyone listens avidly, attentively, with a slight, good-natured smile. Each one “performs” a little when they get the floor, but in an understated way, nothing outlandish or obnoxious.

All of them look completely comfortable, happy, relaxed and engaged, for the entire duration of lunch.

It’s downright freakish!!!

Don’t worry, right around the same time, there was another family of four at a nearby table: an Asian-American woman, a white American man, and their two boys. The mother was sitting at an angle turned away from her husband, clearly angry about something but getting through lunch with clipped tones.

Then an Irish family came through to take over the Korean family’s table. The two young boys were sullen, and shared with their dad a look of suffering — which perhaps they wear all the time, maybe it’s just their face. The father did not have patience for the mother, and seemed to be a little dour in general. I felt bad for the mother.

Okay, that’s all for now.

Be well, and see you next time.