Have you written any fiction inspired by this painting? Or any other paintings? For a while now I’ve been meaning to write a story about Joan Miró. I was looking at his paintings and found myself impressed by how much stuff he managed to stick to his canvasses (besides paint). So I wanted to write a story in which I travel back in time and spend an afternoon with the guy, suggesting various things that can be stuck to a canvass. Whenever it won’t stay, I travel into the future and bring him more advanced adhesives.

As for surface vs. interior, Scott McCloud points out how a common (or not unusual) technique in making comics is to write one thing but draw another. The example he gives in “Understanding Comics” is a drawing of a bank robbery in process. The text caption reads something like: “After college, I pursued a career in finance.”

I’ve been wondering for a while now how a fiction writer can do something like this.

Which reminded me of a novel a friend once told me about, although I don’t know its title. He recited one line to me:

“Hello,” he lied.

Does anyone know what book that is? Or have ideas as to other ways that surface/interior can be fiddled with in prose?

“a really good story, or flash, or poem, plays with surface, the tactile, while shifting something beneath it, something in our consciousness–maybe a little out of grasp. it pushes us to figure out what we’re thinking, what we see, what we hear and feel.”

It feels specific enough to resonate w/o totally mystifying, but open enough not to constrict.

if i wasn’t so lazy i could probably posit that “surfaces vs. interiority” is what good fiction–or good writing for that matter–is all about. it certainly fascinates me.

a really good story, or flash, or poem, plays with surface, the tactile, while shifting something beneath it, something in our consciousness–maybe a little out of grasp. it pushes us to figure out what we’re thinking, what we see, what we hear and feel.

someone can argue with me here, and i’d honestly welcome it. i’d like to talk through these things: how does surface help or hinder communication? at what point does interiority become surface? what about transparency, or when interiority is “worn” as surface?

i thought about these things a lot when i was reading joyce’s a portrat of the artist as a young man. his writing blends the interior with the exterior in a way that, in my opinion, has never been equaled. think about stephen’s ruminations on hell during the church sermon, his visions of fire and brimstone and eternity coupled with the place of the church itself, the voice of the priest, the five senses.