Seth draws back the curtain on the “solitary pursuit” that is cartooning
In the September issue of The Walrus, Seth draws back the curtain on the “solitary pursuit” that is cartooning. In the process, he also manages to speak to how we experience our own daily routines, and what it’s like to be alone with ourselves. He was kind enough to respond by email to questions about memory, time, and, of course, cartooning. The second part to this Q&A will follow in a couple days.

Q: In your article “The Quiet Art of Cartooning,” you mention that when you’re drawing and inking your mind is often visiting the past in some manner, and that these reveries often find their way into your work. Do you think that all cartooning might somehow relate back to this sense of memory, or to the act of looking back? Is memory somehow connected with cartooning in a way that isn’t true of other art forms?

A: It is hard for me to generalize on other mediums but I do feel a unique connection between memory and cartooning.I started to formalize some thoughts about this when I was studying the life of Thoreau MacDonald (the son of Canadian painter J.E.H. MacDonald). Thoreau mentioned in an interview that he never drew his pen and ink drawings of the rural landscape while actually out in the field. Instead he would go for a walk and look about and then, when he came home later, he would sit down and draw the scenes from memory. Thoreau understood that he couldn’t capture the reality of the natural world in black and white ink drawings but he could replicate the memory of being there. This struck me. (more…)

I just had to take a quick break from re-writing the movie Red Dawn (it’s a rush job to shoot it before Patrick Swayze passes away and before everyone has jumped on the Cold War resurgence bandwagon) to talk about my Twitter heroes, the truckers.

Early adoption of GPS was mandatory for truckers given their destination-driven vocation. So they have taken to the location awareness services like Brightkite that we 3G iPhone users are just getting into. The iPhone can pinpoint your exact location and, using Brightkite you can check in at that location. (more…)

BEIJING—Last Saturday something incredible happened in the Bird’s Nest. Usain Bolt, the aptly named Jamaican extraterrestrial, demolished the world’s fastest runners with a swagger, cutting three hundredths of a second off his own world record. I was fortunate enough to be there, and I’ve never seen anything like it. The stadium was on fire.

Two days later, just before noon on Monday, something equally incredible happened at the Nest, only the reaction was polar opposite. In a matter of seconds, the energy and excitement of Bolt’s run was sucked out of the stadium—and the Olympics—into a black hole of national sorrow. As famed hurdler and virtual Chinese god Liu Xiang pulled out of the 110-metre hurdles, the crowd of some 80,000 gasped in disbelief, mouths ajar, as they tried to figure out just what the hell was going on. Many broke into tears, including journalists, and an unsuspecting country went into shock.

It’s difficult to put into context the gravity of Liu Xiang’s exit from the hurdles competition. One of the CBC tech guys said it was akin to Wayne Gretzky, in his prime, gingerly skating out for a Stanley Cup game seven warm up, and then failing to show up for the opening face off. Really, though, that’s not even close. Canadians love their hockey, but I doubt the Great One could bring reporters to tears. (more…)