Arion Press Artist Talk: Marlon James and Vincent Valdez

Claire Gilman:
Welcome, everyone. I'm Claire Gilman. I'm the Chief Curator at the Drawing Center, and I'm so happy to be here tonight with you all. Just a few things to get out of the way, American Sign Language interpretation for this evening is provided by Alyssa Besher and Kat Dunhams from All Hands in Motion.

We are thrilled to be here tonight with artist Vincent Valdez and acclaimed novelist Marlon James for a wide-ranging conversation that centers on the forthcoming edition of Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five," which was recently released by Arion Press, one of the nation's leading publishers of fine press artist books. And this event tonight is part of a two-week-long collaboration between Arion Press and the Drawing Center in which we are featuring select publications in a special pop-up in our bookstore upstairs. So I encourage you to come back and visit over the course of those two weeks.

And available titles for purchase in our bookstore include "Porgy and Bess," with lithographs by Kara, "The Lulu Plays" with drawings by William Kentridge, Jim Thompson's "South of Heaven" with drawings by Raymond Pettibon, Machado de Assis's "The Alienist" with prints by Carroll Dunham and "Poetry of Sappho" with prints by Julie Mehretu in addition to "Slaughterhouse-Five."

Will we have the Slaughterhouse-Five available for sale? Okay, for pre-order because as I understand it, it's not 100% ready yet. So the "Slaughterhouse-Five" project began in 2023 when Valdez collaborated with Arion's team, the expert craftspeople, to create original pen and ink drawings to bring Vonnegut's darkly comic, anti-war classic to life. Taken as a whole, the drawings coalesce into what Valdez calls a "visual testimony of transformation, hope, love, and survival in 21st century America."

And what you are looking at down here are the, I don't know, the exact number, 23 drawings that Vincent created for the book. Tonight's conversation is moderated by Arion's Executive Director Rolph Blythe. Rolph Blythe has worked in the publishing industry for over 25 years. And prior to joining Arion in 2020, he worked as publisher of Counterpoint LLC, where he oversaw the Counterpoint Press and Soft Skull Press imprints publishing over 65 original titles a year.

He has worked at Basic Books and Graywolf Press in marketing capacities and at the Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency as a literary agent. Before I turn things over to Rolph, I also want to acknowledge that we have a very special guest here with us tonight, who is Jill Krementz sitting right over here in front of me, Kurt's widow. And we are so happy that she has come and joined us this evening. So thank you for being here, Jill. She's also a very old friend of mine who I haven't seen in many years. So lovely to see you here tonight. Okay, Rolph, I will turn things over to you.

Rolph Blythe:
Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, everyone, for coming to this celebration of Vonnegut's work. I'm Rolph Blythe, the executive director of Arion Press. And in addition to thanking Marlon and Vincent for being here, we have a lot of other people to thank for being here. So I wanted to just take a minute out of the top to recognize a number of people that have been really critical to this project.

One being Agnes Gund, who has sponsored series of Arion talks. The second being Meredith Moore, who made possible the King Artist Residency and that allowed Vincent to come to the press to work with us for a period of time directly on this book and for making this trip possible, for the staff and I and for traveling to be here. So thank you.

I'd like to thank the Arion staff, Ted Gioia, our program and development director, and Blake Riley, our lead printer and creative director. And I also wanted to acknowledge Natalie Frank for being here. She's the artist that worked with us on our last project, an Edgar Allan Poe project, which is also available to see upstairs.

So the goal here is I hope you all get a chance tonight to learn more about the work of these two phenomenal artists and to review the drawings that Vincent contributed. And for those of who are fans of Marlon's work, we hope you'll get the opportunity to learn more about his process and his connection to "Slaughterhouse-Five." But the intention of this talk was really to put the focus on Vonnegut and a bit on the addition that Vincent contributed to here with the press and as well as just sort of exploring why a fine press like Arion here decides to revisit a 54-year-old novel and find something new for a contemporary readership.

So just very quickly, those that aren't familiar with the Arion Press, we're a 50-year-old fine press. We're based in the Presidio in San Francisco. And we're the last fully integrated bookmaking facility in the country, meaning that we cast type in our own foundry, its monotype. We hand set, we hand print, and we hand bind every book. And the press's mission is really to combine classic literature with established and up and coming artists.

We operate by subscription. We have only 250 copies of each edition that we produce. And 40 of them are deluxes. 210 are limited editions. And many of the deluxes come with prints or additional artwork like those displayed here tonight.

And finally, we have a nonprofit arm that is responsible for furthering our mission largely around programming and education. And we offer the last paid apprenticeships in book binding and type casting in the country.

We've had wonderful success launching a series of talks out of the Presidio in San Francisco. We've hosted Alison Saar, William Kentridge, Vincent, Laurie Anderson, and others in conversation with writers such as Tobias Wolff and Joyce Carol Oates.

So please come and see us, is the punchline there that it's been a really wonderful two years of growth for us, and we're so excited to be here. So that brings us back to our panelists here. For those that aren't familiar with Vincent or Marlon's work, let me just tell you a bit about them before we get going here.

Marlon James won the 215 Man Booker Prize for Fiction for "A Brief History of Seven Killings," making him the first Jamaican author to take home the UK's most prestigious literary prize. In the work, James combines masterful storytelling with brilliant skill at characterization and an eye for detail to forge a bold novel of dazzling ambition and scope. He explores Jamaican history through multiple narrators and genres. The political thriller, the oral biography, the classic who done it, confront the untold history of Jamaica in the 1970s with excursions to the assassination attempt of reggae musician Bob Marley, as well as the country's own clandestine battles during the Cold War.

James cites influences as diverse as Greek tragedy. William Faulkner, the LA crime novelist, James Ellroy, Shakespeare, Batman, and the X-Men. His bestselling book, "Black Leopard, Red Wolf" is the first in The Dark Star Trilogy, a fantasy series set in African legend. "Black Leopard, Red Wolf" received the Ray Bradbury prize for science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction for the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, the 2020 Locus Award for Horror, was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award in fiction, and was named one of Washington Post's 10 top best books of 2019. The second book in the trilogy, "Moon Witch, Spider King" was an instant New York Times bestseller. The history third book will be titled "White Wing, Dark Star." Thank you for being here.

Vincent Valdez was born in 1977 in San Antonio, Texas. He's an artist who focuses on painting, drawing, and printmaking. His artwork often emphasizes themes of social justice, memory, and ignored or under-examined historical narratives. Valdez's interests in art emerged at an early age. At nine, he took up mural painting under the mentorship of Alex Rubio, another young San Antonio artist. Under Rubio's direction, Valdez worked on a series of murals. The first was located at the former site of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center in San Antonio. Later, Rubio and Valdez worked side by side to complete murals under the auspices of the community cultural arts program. He earned a full scholarship to study at the Rhode Island School of Design where he earned his BFA in 2000. His exhibitions, and collections include the Ford Foundation, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, MASS MoCA, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the National Portrait Gallery, and others. Valdez currently lives and works in Houston and Los Angeles. No? All right, so please welcome the panelists, if you would.

So I wanted to start just a little bit of where we essentially started upstairs when we were chatting a few minutes ago, and that is that both of you chose to be here tonight because of a mutual admiration for Vonnegut and, in particular, the book we're celebrating tonight, "Slaughterhouse-Five." So what remains to either one of you, I just ask, what remains so compelling about this book? What draws you to it as artists? And what's so relevant about it 54 years after publication? It's a stumper. I know.

Marlon James:
I think an antiwar novel is tricky because it's a kind of novel you hope leads to a future where we never have to write another novel like it. U2 has this album called "War" and all the songs are about I can't wait for the day we never have to sing this song.

And I think we still have war with us, and we still look at war as this sort of defining way in which we shape our politics. And we have just this week exploded again. The cynicism behind it and the bitterness behind it and the willingness to kill hundreds of thousands for whatever is something that I don't think we still thought we'd be raging about. So it's tricky. It's still relevant, but I'm not sure if it's a relevance... It's a bittersweet relevance. I don't know if Marvin Gaye would be happy to know that what's going on is still irrelevant.

It's still beautiful, but I don't think you would want to know it's still relevant because it means we haven't done a thing. And I think that it's still relevant because it's reminding us that we still have work to do, and we haven't done it.

Rolph Blythe:
Thank you.

Vincent Valdez:
For me, in a similar fashion, one of the things that compelled me the most about collaborating as a partner with a writer like Vonnegut on Slaughterhouse-Five, it's the most underlying undertone paradoxes about America that I think that maybe isn't really one of the first things that's mentioned most when it comes to responding about Slaughterhouse-Five, this sort of sensibilities about the hypocrisies of America in all of our angst and our injustice and our pump and circumstance and parades that fuels our nationalism and patriotism.

I think that there's these small doses and drops that I find trace throughout Slaughterhouse-Five. And this is the thing that really interested me the most because I think it echoes contemporary America today in the 21st century how so many of these themes that Marlon mentions are still so prevalent right in front of our faces, but yet as Americans, we still today find it much easier to look away.

Marlon James:
Yeah. But I also think there's also weirdly enough for... I mean, it's an antiwar novel and a message is important, but there's also the sheer joy of telling a story. And for me, I grew up in a very sort of British colonial, it's Georgia, let Georgia, let George all the time. This is why I haven't read Middlemarch, just other protest. But the idea that there's still so many ways to tell a story, and there's so many ways to enter a story, There are ways to leave a story. And some of the elements that Vonnegut uses are still elements that we sometimes shy away from or we think is a lower form of art.

And the sense I get from him also is that I don't think he ranked, maybe he did. But the idea that you could use all these sort of different genres, these sort of journeys throughout the novel and come up with something that holds together, I think, is still interesting, even just as an act of literary bravado and a way of being creative. So I don't I want to lose that there's also the sheer joy of seeing creativity on the page. Yeah.

Vincent Valdez:
They sprinkled on top with his own drawings, which is something that I really truly admired. It becomes a graphic novel in a sense with those amazing simplistic line contour illustrations, something that really pulls me in because I think about how his union, his marrying of the visual and the text as these subtle details, it really lead you in between almost these, again, hidden, invisible sort of subtle themes that are resonating throughout the book.

Rolph Blythe:
Sure. So then my next question really was more about how this book applies to your work, but knowing each of your work, you've already answered it really. But for those who might not be familiar, can you, Marlon, for example, talk a little bit about how you balance the joy of writing that story with the political sensibility that you described?

Marlon James:
Well, I think like George Clinton said, "Funk is its own reward," and I think in some ways, it is. The process and the creative process in a lot of ways is its own reward, especially when you're writing something that's urgent or dark or disturbing or just sad.

I think, certainly, for me, there is the art and the craft of writing that in some ways carries its own sort of joy or its own sense of discovery. I don't usually know where my books are going to end up when I start them, which is why they're so damn long. But that's part of it, because for me, a good writing day for me is me going, "Well, I never saw that coming." And that to me is a good writing day.

And I think that, yeah, the sense that with writing, there is always a sense of possibility. Somebody once told me that if you want to be a writer, one thing you should never do is grow up. And I agree. It's one of the reasons why I teach undergrads because they still have this sense of really wild open sense of possibility. And I think that, every now and then, like a novel like Slaughterhouse-Five, you come across that.

Vincent Valdez:
I very much so tend to tackle pretty critical challenging subjects based off of my own reflections and observations of the world beyond the studio doors. Regardless, I've always felt it very important throughout the span of a lifetime really making images that there has to be a way that I can inject this sort of almost like a sarcastic, twisted humor that really, for me, that's the life force behind the work.

I mean, I think that's why I very much respond to graphic novels, comic books. You cited those as well as strong, powerful references I can definitely relate. The absurdities that I find in the world outside of the studio really is the thing that keeps me moving in the studio, keeps me encouraged. It keeps that flame of slight optimism about the world and its future. As an artist who reflects about where we go from here, I think that this is the thing that when I look at even drawings like we have here on the walls, I can't help but imagine that the entire drama and spectacle about all of our lived experiences, whether it's past, present, you didn't have to serve in a war to understand what it is that you're looking at. But we are all connected by the tale of being human. And I think that this for me has always been the pursuit as a visual artist.

Rolph Blythe:
I guess that sort of takes me to, what I've always admired about your work is this, and I think that can be said of both of your work is this sort of alternation between brutality and playfulness. And this is a book that has that in spades, the Slaughterhouse-Five, and so is trying to depict both. The playful, the element that you're saying is sort of part of the joy of making the work with the brutality. Was it hard to rise to the occasion

Vincent Valdez:
Specifically for this project?

Rolph Blythe:
For this project.

Vincent Valdez:
Oh, not at all. I couldn't have jumped on it faster. I mean, when Arion first approached me and asked me to present two suggested titles as far as projects to pursue with him, I immediately responded, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and Franz Kafka's The Trial, to me entirely both equally powerful in very different ways, but more importantly for me, these tales, it couldn't be more relevant to where we are today.

Marlon James:
You cannot be expecting an answer.

Rolph Blythe:
No, no. That's a really hard one for you to answer admittedly. So another parallel, so there's the beauty and the brutality and the playfulness. The other sort of thing that I saw you both subverting in your work is this notion of time, how to condense it or how to play with it in a certain way.

And particularly, I think I confess that A Brief History of Seven Killings is really one of my favorite works. And that's a book where you're talking about, well, you're depicting a day, a single day-

Marlon James:
Right.

Rolph Blythe:
... across the span of a long period of time.

Marlon James:
Yeah.

Rolph Blythe:
So you're necessarily leaving things out. How do you come to terms with a book like that if... Well, I'll let you.

Marlon James:
Yeah. Well, before it rains me in there, it would've been a 50,000-page book. Some of my favorite novels or some of my favorite scenes in novels take place in extra short period of time. The novel I was reading and rereading the most when I wrote Brief History was actually Mrs. Dalloway. And nobody believes that because all these... I said, "Yeah, Virginia Woolf, man. She gangster."

Yeah. Again, the whole idea of playing with time that the longest section of the book actually takes that is not even a day. The longest section of the book is seven minutes. It's just Andy Gibbs song plays twice Shadow Dancing, if you [inaudible 00:23:41]. And each character is sort of caught in a certain thing, one guy wakes up, and there's a hitman sitting on the edge of his bed. But, yeah, the idea that a paragraph can talk about 100 years, and 100 pages can talk about a minute, and that it's the idea that the thing I like about while writing in that way is time compresses and expands and stretches, and it goes back on itself.

One of the characters is beyond time because a ghost. And even though the novel novel is mostly about 1976, his story starts in his '60s. And the reason why I use him was because when I was growing up, a lot of Jamaicans, including my mom, talk about him and talk about when he died, a certain Jamaica died with him, and that he was supposed to be an alcoholic who fell off the balcony, or a sleepwalker who fell off the balcony.

And everybody in Jamaica go, "No, that was was bushed." And the idea of also time stopping that for a lot of people, Jamaica ended that night, and what is it we survey afterwards because time, of course, moves on. The other thing I'd say about the book is Brief History doesn't end. It just stops, again because time can also be abrupt and also you can be out of it. And even with all the books that I write, I'm very concerned about how we stretch it, condense it, and sometimes just run out.

Rolph Blythe:
In terms of your work, Vincent, what it made me think of as someone who makes images, that your job's to stop time in some way. And what I kept thinking about was your series, The Beginning is Near, right? And there's two parts. And the first is an image of the clan, which is this historic image that's been etched into our brains over the years. And then the part two, I believe, is the funeral procession for Muhammad Ali. And so, as an artist, in stopping time that way, how do you decide what to leave in and what to leave out?

Vincent Valdez:
For a painter, time is everything. There's never enough of it. It's always racing against you, but just the act of being isolated and solitary in the studio alone with these images, the transitioning of time is something that's always been compelling and absolutely elemental to the work in some way.

So as a painter, I tend to work not only on a very large scale, but I almost always work in sequential series. I've always considered myself or maybe related more to writers, novelists and musicians than I do painters. I work in chapters, and I've always considered this work, especially after the past two decades as an ongoing novel that'll eventually one day possibly get somewhere close to being completed, whatever that means. But I think that this fascination about time and how you inject it and how it relates into a still frozen image really began for me as a young kid. I mean, I must've been about five years old.

And at that time in the 1980s, the very first generation of VCRs, they were like this three-feet across, weighed 100 pounds. I bring a sheet of tracing paper or Mylar, and I would tape it up to the television screen in my mom's living room. And then I would ask her to push the button that would stop the moving image. And so, you'd see Christopher Reeve running a Superman, and I would trace it. And then I'd take it down, paste another one up. And that's really how I learned anatomy and composition, and expression, and emotion in terms of facial features.

But instilled in me, I think, at that moment in time was the essence about what it meant to capture something that was passed while doing it in the present. And so, the pursuit in a piece like the series, The Beginning is Near, An American Trilogy, that actually literally takes place beginning in 2015 and which is still an ongoing project for me today, that idea that I could become the enabler... I was now in place of the VCR. I can blur the past from the present. I can blur the lines between what is reality versus what is myth.

I can blur what is based off of observation versus imagination. And so I think that again, with an artist like Kurt Vonnegut, that idea is very obvious in his way of writing. And so, it's something that really helped me to feel like this was a full-on collaborative experience as if he was in the studio in my head while I was working on this project.

Talking about one last thing about time, when Arion Press first asked me to do this project and I selected Slaughterhouse-Five, they asked, "Well, how long will this take you?" And I said, "Oh, 10 drawings and two to three months tops. No problem." Here we are 23 drawings later after seven months of working on these things every day. And so that damn time is just always chasing you.

Rolph Blythe:
Well, again, I've heard you tell this story before, but maybe many in the audience haven't, the thing that brought you to the book in terms of your uncle's connection to it.

Vincent Valdez:
Sure. Can I pick this up? Can I touch it? Early on in the very first stages of our initial conversations between Arion and I, I revealed to them that one of the reasons that I selected this title was because of my own personal context and connection to not only the character, Billy Pilgrim, but based off of Kurt Vonnegut's own experience.

And so, coincidentally, my great uncle, Ernest, my grandfather's brother, Ernest Valdez, was in the very same battle as Billy Pilgrim. He found himself in a freezing forest during the Battle of the Bulge and the art dance forest in Belgium. Coincidentally, like Vonnegut and Pilgrim, he was also captured by the Germans and was a POW for about a year until he was liberated and then returned home to San Antonio, Texas.

And so, I brought in and presented to the team, at the press, the original envelope containing the very last letter that was written by Uncle Ernest in this forest, and sent it out to his younger brother, my grandfather, who was on a ship embarking for Europe. He was telling him how to survive as a soldier.

And so, when you look at this cover, this palette, this sort of khaki army beige palette with the tints of red, we closely examined the envelope and the letter and its contents. And I thought that this project was going to provide me with a perfect tremendous opportunity to not only honor Kurt Vonnegut and his work, but to also honor the life story of my own family, a Mexican-American perspective, a new lens, a fresh new perspective and lens to tell this story. For me, that was everything as the artist because I think that this is what should occur, is this opportunity to reinvent not only myself, but these existing tales that are being told and shared with all of us throughout time.

Rolph Blythe:
Well, let me go back to the book again. The other thing I also wanted you to maybe speak to just very quickly is that since you use the tracing paper analogy, the overlays that happened in the book.

Vincent Valdez:
Sure. Throughout the book, we've inserted a few of these Mylar, the semi-transparent frosty paper that almost works as cover slips over certain pages. And when I began drawing at around the age of three or four, my father, who had just gotten back from the Vietnam War in 1972, went to schooling to become an aircraft engineer.

And so, I remember him sitting in his room with these eight-foot scrolls of Mylar and would sit there with a lead pencil doing all of his mathematical equations and wiring systems for the electronics in combat and commercial aircraft. And so, I would steal these rolls from his closet, and I would steal his lead pencils, and I would start making my own drawings. And so my mother, I'd start from the left, go down to the right, eight feet later, she'd roll it up, would date these things, hand me a second one, and I'd start all over again.

So these epic unfolding scenes that just began to reveal these stories, my mother was an amazing archivist, and so I have all of these ancient drawing scrolls. And so, it's really an amazing thing for me to see that as a small detail and homage to my own story.

Rolph Blythe:
Well, I definitely want to leave enough time for you both to ask any questions of one another that you have. But maybe since we're all sort of confessing the first time we read this book and under what conditions, I'll just sort of mention that my first experience reading it was as a high schooler, and it was offered to me in a history class rather than an English context. And years later, I realized, "Oh, well that was really forward-thinking of that teacher. How cool."

But the one thing that's always stuck with me that he said was that the first chapter of Slaughterhouse, which is really less of a chapter, but more of a preamble where there's a fair amount of autobiographical information that we can only assume comes from Vonnegut, that the book teaches you how to read it, I guess, is what his punchline was.

And I don't know if this was unique to that particular history professor or what, but it struck me in both your work, like Marlon, you mentioned the character that's deceased that opens the book and gives people a view into... It's not quite like Vonnegut does it, of course, but gives people a view of what's to come and how you both as artists get into a work like that and sort of set the stage.

Marlon James:
Well, certainly for that book, I at some point, didn't know what I was doing. So I remember at one point, I just said, "I'll just keep it in until my editor takes it out." Also, even though it is a novel, it's based on a real event. And many of the characters are actual people.

And I changed all the names, and I forgot one. It was the worst one I could forget. He's dead now, so it doesn't matter. It was Frank Carlucci who was like the CIA Hinge boss, the guy who sued Miramax or threatened to sue Miramax because his name was in Lumumba. And there's one line I talk about, "Oh, they're Frank's boys," and I completely forgot to change it, but he's dead. So screw him.

Rolph Blythe:
There's no legal read on that.

Marlon James:
Huh?

Rolph Blythe:
There was no legal read on that one.

Marlon James:
Yeah. But I guess I would say that one of the most overrated qualities in art is restraint because, to me, a lot of what people call a restraint, I call a failure of nerve, not as I'm always preaching. Yes, I can and I'm always preaching excess. Who am I kidding?

Talk about books teach you how to read, that book had to teach me how to write it because the way the book was failing before was me re-using a process I had done before to write it, and it just wasn't happening. And I remember not talking to writers, talking to visual artists about it. And my friend Rachel, printmaker, and I said, :I don't know whose story this is." And she was like, "Why do you think it's one-person's story?"

And that's really how the 20 characters showed up in the book. Again, I think a work of art teaches you how to make it. And the worst thing you can do is impose yourself on it because you're just imposing what old news. You're posing what you know already. And I'm not saying you can't use. Yeah, I'm kind of saying it that if you're only using what you know already to make art to me, you didn't create it. You curated it, which is fine.

I wouldn't call names, but, yeah. I think, for that. And I'm just wondering that's why I come back to books like Slaughterhouse-Five and so on that books that Gabriel García Márquez talks about Kafka, how Kafka gave him permission to write. And when he first read Kafka, he was just appalled. It's like, "This is not how books are supposed to be written." You don't tell stories this way. And then, you realize it without even realizing it, that the book was showing a different way of telling a story.

And I think one of the reasons why Vonnegut is one authors you're always hearing creative writing classes is because his prose shows you different new ways to look at prose, to look at writing, to question it. But also I think one of the things that people who sometimes fail at satire or do, or people who misinterpret satire or do is they think it takes cynicism to write satire, and it doesn't. You have to care, and you have to believe, and you have to have a certain passion behind it. You can tell them when somebody's cynical because they don't make great art.

It's cool art, but it's not very good because to get to real satire, to get to real humor, you actually have to believe, and you have to be serious, and you have to actually care. And I think that that was the thing I always got. But it really came home to me when I think I was at a reading where Veronica was talking about Man Without a Country, and that's where it's, "Oh, he actually is a true believer in what books and what words can do." And I think it's something that people sometimes miss when they see just the dazzling word play and the wit and the satire that no, there is actually a bleeding heart here.

Rolph Blythe:
Well, I mean, Vincent, working on this book, did you have to adapt your process? I think of your work as sort of constantly adapting. I don't know the process that you take to make it, but I definitely get a sense that each project is a complete and new evolution or something along those lines.

Vincent Valdez:
I love making my life difficult, just what I do best, hundreds if not thousands of drawings throughout the past, throughout my lifetime. And so, one would assume that this would really be a fairly easy project, but I had to hit the reset button several times where I just couldn't seem to grasp what it was that it was so foggy like a mirage. I mean, I felt it, but I couldn't see it. And I went through several rounds of preliminary drawings that were supposed to be finalized. And then I'd tear them out or trash them.

And then at a certain moment after, I'd say, about the first two months of working, I finally just made the choice to just jump in the backseat and let whatever it was lead the way and drive me to where it needed to go. It was risky because like you mentioned, I didn't know which way it was going to end up, but it wasn't until that moment that finally it just felt right there it is. Then, it was crystal clear.

And so, if you notice throughout the sequence of 23 images, the tint of the paper changes. The formats change the way that even in terms of some of the technique, there's quite a quick evolution and a sort of play between negative space and positive space. And I really wanted to find a way to keep you the viewer so entrenched and maybe with a thin patina of confusion, you didn't really understand what you were looking at quite at first. You don't know if it's past or present. All of these questions had to be constantly reminded to the viewer.

And some I think that it probably is one of the more liberating projects, or at least sequence of drawings that I've created because I just gave myself complete liberty to just step back and let something just take over and guide. Normally, with these large scale works, especially that I tend to create in the studio, they're 20, 30 feet in scale. It's like being at the mast of a ship. You have all of these ropes and making sure that all the sails are constantly moving in certain directions because you have to keep that ship together and keep it floating.

But on the smaller scale works, I think that there's a real dimension where it just allows you to do things an entirely different manner, at least for me. And I was speaking with Olga earlier who helped to get these drawings here, and I shared with her that this is probably one of the few instances where I've shared these drawings and felt completely comfortable with how roughed up they are.

I mean, you can really see the struggle in them because it was a real struggle. I'm sitting in the studio in Los Angeles. I began them in San Francisco. I figured them out in Los Angeles, 98 degrees in the studio with no air conditioner. I'm sweating on them, and I'm angry and frustrated. I finished them in Houston. And here they are in New York City.

So this sequence of drawings really have a very, very fast premature lifespan of their own already. And they really do turn into something different. Once you spit them out into the world, they're no longer mine. They become something, some other entity. And walking in here and seeing them for the first time after a month or two, since they were on my drawing table, now, it's crystal. It's even clearer to me. That's what it was. Now I see it, but it takes a long time. As Marlon is mentioning, you just have to keep pushing and digging until it finally gets uncovered and revealed.

Rolph Blythe:
Well, maybe I do want to leave enough time for you guys to just chat about whatever you'd like to chat about. You've just met a whopping 180 minutes ago or something like that. But, yeah, if there is anything you wanted to ask the other please.

Vincent Valdez:
So I do have to ask you out of curiosity, have you ever attended drawing or painting?

Marlon James:
Well, I was an illustrator. I used to draw storyboards back in the nana life.

Audience:
Wow.

Marlon James:
Yeah. Usually, when I run into people from art, not from art school, I didn't go to art school, but people from high school, they're like, "Where are your paintings?" And I'm like, "They're still in my mind." I used to run a graphic design agency actually. And at some point, I'm like, "I'm done with this. I can't draw another ketchup. I'm going to go write books."

But yeah, actually, it's funny you say that because I'm actually now doing go two different live drawing classes in New York now just to get back into drawing for the sake of drawing because it got to the point where the only time I'd pick up a pencil was to make a book, which I totally support. And I think, in a lot of ways, I still look at the world as a painter, as an artist. I still saw the storyboard scenes in a way so I can figure out how to write them.

Vincent Valdez:
And does that experience of storyboarding apply to the way that you write or not so much?

Marlon James:
Yeah, because when you're storyboarding to something like a commercial, you have to edit it down to what you think is the most striking image. And then, what always happens to me is you realize you didn't need the other images in the first place. The thing about drawing to me, art reminds me, and I said this to my students, as sunset doesn't need your help. The last place you need to put a metaphor is a sunset. Just describe the damn sunset. And I get that again from drawing and from visual art and photography, because all this sort of deeper meaning comes from the whole actuality of the thing in front of you. And, yeah, it reminds me of that. But, yeah, I'm back to live drawing. I'm going to quit this writing business, and go back to drawing.

Vincent Valdez:
Are you drawing from the figure or what do you-

Marlon James:
Figure, yeah, mostly.

Vincent Valdez:
Wow, amazing.

Marlon James:
Yeah.

Vincent Valdez:
You're pretty good at it?

Marlon James:
I like to think so. I used to earn my money from it.

Vincent Valdez:
Yeah.

Marlon James:
God, I'm going to stay away from the nerd questions because you also had your choice what you want to visualize. You don't have to talk about all 23, but I'm curious about what in the book struck out at you that led to some of these images?

Vincent Valdez:
I really was most motivated by finding these in-between subtleties, these hidden details within the writings that I felt were probably most often overlooked, like in renditions of Slaughterhouse or essays written about the novel. So, for example, this image back here, it's not even a full sentence. I mean, it's just like a blurb about-

Marlon James:
Is that stippling?

Vincent Valdez:
It's my secret weapon, which is an old toothbrush.

Marlon James:
Yeah. That's what I learned in art school, not art school, art class.

Vincent Valdez:
And it's the biblical tale about Sodom's wife is warned by God not to turn back, otherwise she'll turn to a pillar of salt. So I tried to capture these moments that I think that many readers might never think twice about. I sprinkled in maybe as anchor pieces, the five more iconic, symbolic, the powerful metaphors of the entire book.

But, yeah, I really was trying to construct a puzzle that didn't only speak about the horrors of war or World War II as an era. It had to be able to transport you throughout various mindsets and perceptions. One of the things that I tried to do was play between this shift that format between the traditional rectangular image versus the horizontal then versus the square, rectangle, and then the circles, the cylinders.

The spheres for me were like a metaphoric, unspoken reminder to you, the viewer, about learning to experience the world and see it through a different lens. Because I'm primarily a figurative painter and drawer, you don't see one revealed face throughout the entire seat, and that was a very challenging thing for me to do. Nobody has ever revealed entirely. They're in shadow. They're obstructed by other forms. I didn't want people to worry about who caress what Billy Pilgrim looks like. It's not important. It's not relevant. We are all these characters that we encounter in the book,

Marlon James:
Yeah. And if you had a face, then we only end up with one Billy Pilgrim instead of the thousands that exist.

Vincent Valdez:
Exactly.

Marlon James:
I said that [inaudible 00:51:33] Lord of the Rings, before the film, we had millions of Frodo, and now we only have one.

Vincent Valdez:
Forever.

Marlon James:
Yeah.

Vincent Valdez:
What are you working on now?

Marlon James:
I'm actually working on not the third, although I am kind of working on it, the third in the fantasy series. At some point, I just decided, I resisted the whole personal thing. I think I was very good to go through five novels without doing any autobiographical bullshit. This one isn't autobiographical either where it's the closest to something in the novel that traces gay life in Jamaica. It starts in the '80s and ends in around 2014, but it goes pretty far back. It goes back to 1940 because in the 1940s, given our wildly homophobic reputation, you'd never know it was that in the '40s.

Jamaica was sort of a gay riviera. Katharine Hepburn and her girlfriend had a house there. Yes. She was into ladies, in case nobody... Yeah. Edward Molyneux. Yeah. Usually, there was saying that by the time you got to Ian Fleming's house, they go, "Oh, finally a heterosexual house in Jamaica," which is so hilarious given a homophobic we are now. So, yeah. And it's about eight characters who... The only thing I say about it is they tried to put on a gay version of Pygmalion, and it goes very badly. But that's all I'm going to say about it.

Vincent Valdez:
Wow. Is this something that has been a more recent concept for you, or is it something that you've-

Marlon James:
Yeah. What I do think at any time and distance, I don't know if I'd written this novel if I was still living in Jamaica, not that I was afraid or anything. But I think in some ways it's very similar to Brief History in a sense that I still find myself trying to make sense of the '70s and the '80s. The '70s, I was pretty young. I mean, the earliest I got in the '70s was nine. The '80s because I said this, if you were a Gen X and you grew up in the '80s, it doesn't matter where in the world you grew up, you had the same '80s. We all had that same video recorder. We all think we saw a Terminator in the cinemas. None of us started in the damn cinema.

We all saw it on VHS. And we were all listening to Madonna. And then, we thought we were cool because we bought Sonic Youth, and we lived most of us in the suburbs, one house, two trees, one house, two trees, all the way to the end into vanishing point. And we spent much of our lives just being bored.

But it's interesting, going back to that time, what I found myself doing with this book is there are a lot of things in it that happened to me, but I throw it to characters who are not like me because I'm very curious and to see how they would react to something like that. And some of them make smarter choices than I did, and some make dumber choices. And it's been fun to write it.

Vincent Valdez:
Yeah. I'm just now beginning a massive project titled after Frank Sinatra's famous tune. It was a very good year, but my version is it was a very good year, 1987, '88 and '89, and I'm selecting these iconic moments that I watched unfold on the television screen with that VCR, but I really love that idea.

Marlon James:
You said iconic. And I thought the most iconic moment of '88 was Little Richard's speech at the Grammy's when he's... I don't think he's the best new artist and he says, "Best new artist is me." You should watch it on YouTube. It's one of the greatest moments in the entire '80s.

Vincent Valdez:
Yeah. Absolutely. It's really amazing.

Marlon James:
And he talks about how he's the architect of Rock 'N' Roll Nanny. I never gave me no damn Grammy. And he sobers up and goes, "The best new artist is still me." If you haven't seen the documentary, please watch it. You'll never laugh so hard, and you'll never cry so hard either.