Building Stories: Cartoonist Chris Ware Explores the Architecture of Being Human

What the inner life of a brownstone reveals about empathy, gender, and the human condition.

Building Stories (public library) is a remarkable storytelling artifact by cartoonist Chris Ware, more than a decade in the making — a giant box containing fourteen individual print ephemera (books, booklets, comic strips, magazines, and even a gold-rimmed hardcover and a board game), each telling the interlocking tales of different residents of the same three-story Chicago brownstone, from the couple caught in a loveless relationship on the second floor, to the elderly spinster grappling with her own aging, to the bee trapped in the basement. Somewhere between Paula Scher’s vintage children’s book The Brownstone, the Cold-War-era experimental Polish short film Blok, and artist Yasmine Chatila’s Stolen Moments series, the project — which I hesitate to call a “book,” since it’s a lavish deal more — is at once voyeuristic and deeply intimate, exploring the boundless complexities of inner worlds, relationships, and the hopeful hopelessness of being human.

Image via The Telegraph

Ware writes:

Who hasn’t tried when passing by a building, or a home, at night to peer past half-closed shades and blinds, hoping to catch a glimpse into the private lies of its inhabitants. Anything… the briefest blossom of a movement… maybe a head, bobbing up… a bit of hair… a mysterious shadow… or a flash of flesh… seems somehow more revealing than any generous greeting or calculated cordiality. … Even the disappointing diffusion of a sheer curtain can suggest the most colorful bouquet of unspeakable secrets.

The stories and stories-within-stories are all told through the perspective of one character, the female amputee on the third floor, deliberately left unnamed. In fact, part of what makes Ware’s feat so remarkable is that he manages to explore the intricacies of gender, and of women’s everyday psychoemotional turmoils, with a remarkable blend of rawness and sensitivity, without any of the cumbersome self-righteousness and forced political correctness typical of writing that is about gender.

On a recent episode of Design Matters, the inimitable Debbie Millman (♥ ♥) talks to Ware about being influenced by Charles Schulz and Art Spiegelman, about his ethos and sensibility, and about the fascinating, layered narratives and characters in Building Stories. Here are a few favorite excerpts from the interview:

On giving shape to the human experience:

When I was in school, some of my teachers told me, ‘Oh, you can’t write about this or that, you can’t write about women, because then you’re colonizing them with your eyes’… And that seems ridiculous to me — I mean, that’s what writing is about. It’s about trying to understand other people.

On the relationship between storytelling and empathy:

On the characters in Building Stories, the role of sadness, and what writing is really about:

On the building itself as a character:

On destiny, sexuality, the essence of literature, and the tragedy of our unlived lives — including one of the most beautiful phrases ever uttered, “veering towards happiness”:

When people’s paths cross, is there some higher plan to it all? Do all of these frozen moments just represent accidents, or genuine missed opportunities?

Do yourself a favor and listen to Design Matters in its entirety (or, better yet, subscribe in iTunes), then do yourself a second favor and grab your very own copy of Building Stories. You’ll never look at a city block, or a dimly lit window, or a bee the same way again.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson on Scientific Literacy, Education, and the Poetry of the Cosmos

“Science is a way of equipping yourself with the tools to interpret what happens in front of you.”

“People,” lamented Richard Feynman in 1964, “I mean the average person, the great majority of people, the enormous majority of people — are woefully, pitifully, absolutely ignorant of the science of the world that they live in.” In the half-century since, we’ve sequenced the human genome, put a man on the moon and rovers on Mars, confirmed the existence of the Higgs “God particle” boson, and achieved innumerable scientific miracles, small and large, that enhance our daily lives in fundamental ways. And yet, bad science spreads, good science journalism is fighting an uphill battle against media reductionism and distortion, and the general public remains as just as woefully and pitifully distrustful of or, worse yet, unconcerned with science as in the Feynman days.

In this fantastic conversation with Stephen Colbert, Hayden Planetarium director Neil deGrasse Tyson — passionate crusader for space exploration, eloquent champion of the whimsy of the cosmos, modern-day Richard “Great Explainer” Feynman — brings his characteristic blend of sharp insight, quick wit, and unapologetic opinion to the issue of scientific literacy and how it relates to everything from education to government spending to morality.

Highlights below, though the entire hour-long conversation — including the most brilliant and hilarious James Cameron Titanic critique you’ll ever hear — is more than worth the time.

On the ethics of discovery vs. the broader morality of application:

We are collectively part of a society that is using or not using, to its benefit or its detriment, the discoveries of science. And at the end of the day, a discovery itself is not moral — it’s our application of it that has to pass that test.

On the misunderstanding of science:

[Science] is distrusted not because of what it can do, but because people don’t understand how it does what it can do — and that absence of understanding, or misunderstanding, of the power of science is what makes people afraid. … Just because you don’t understand it, doesn’t mean it’s bad for you — go figure out how it works! That’s why we need a scientifically literate electorate — so that when you go to the polls, you can make an informed judgment and you can draw your own conclusions rather than tune into a particular TV station to have your conclusions handed to you.

On the poetry of astrophysics:

Some of the greatest poetry is revealing in the reader the beauty of something that is so simple you had taken it for granted. That, I think, is the job of the poet. The simplicity of the universe, if it doesn’t drive you to poetry it drives you to bask in the majesty of the cosmos.

On what’s wrong with education:

Our academic system rewards people who know a lot of stuff and, generally, we call those people ‘smart.’ But at the end of the day, who do you want: The person who can figure stuff out that they’ve never seen before, or the person who can rabble off a bunch of facts?

A brilliant addition to history’s best definitions of science:

[Science] is a way of equipping yourself with the tools to interpret what happens in front of you.

On our broken yardsticks for assessing the value of scientific research:

Today, you hear people say, ‘Why are we spending money up there when we’ve got problems on Earth?’ And people don’t connect the time-delay between the frontier of scientific research and how it’s going to transform your life later down the line. All they want is a quarterly report that shows the part that comes out of it — that is so short-sighted that it’s the beginning of the end of your culture.

He goes on to point out that people grossly misperceive how much is actually being spent “up there,” assuming anywhere between 10 and 15% of taxpayer money, whereas the real number is a mere 6/10 of a penny on the tax dollar, or 0.6%. The solution:

The greatest need is to be able to have the foresight necessary to make investments on the frontier of science even if, at the time you make those investments, you cannot figure out how that might make you rich tomorrow.

Finally, when Colbert asks the grandest cosmic question of all — why there is something instead of nothing — Tyson answers with a brilliant haiku-esque retort that hints at the power of ignorance as a tool of science:

Words that make questions
May not be questions
At all

Tyson’s latest book, Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier (public library), is a must-read.

↬ Swiss-Miss

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Gertrude Stein on Understanding and Joy: Rare 1934 Radio Interview

“If you enjoy it, you understand it.”

Gertrude Stein — beloved writer, poet, and art collector, fierce public intellectual, little-known author of children’s books. From PennSound, the audio archives of my alma mater (previously), comes this rare interview with Stein, most likely conducted upon her arrival at the Algonquin Hotel in November of 1934. After the interviewer asks her to explain her “Van or Twenty Years After. A Second Portrait of Carl Van Vechten” (1923), she proceeds to chide him for trying to “understand” the verse with the same kind of brilliant indignation with which Flannery O’Connor once scolded an English teacher for letting interpretation rob reading of joy.

Look here. Being intelligible is not what it seems. You mean by understanding that you can talk about it in the way that you have a habit of talking, putting it in other words. But I mean by understanding enjoyment. If you enjoy it, you understand it. And lots of people have enjoyed it so lots of people have understood it. . . . But after all you must enjoy my writing, and if you enjoy it you understand it. If you do not enjoy it, why do you make a fuss about it? There is the real answer.

↬ Open Culture; Image: Portrait of Gertrude Stein by Pablo Picasso, 1906

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