The Book of Leviathan

"He’s an American who’s lived in England most of his life. His weekly strips in The Independent [newspaper] gave a view of the world through the eyes of a newborn, an absolutely unacculturated creature. Every page is a great revelation. The world is full of terrible prejudices. There are racial prejudices and there are media prejudices, and they should both be overcome. You have to see the broader picture. The medium of autographic writing is a neutral thing. You can do something really boring with it, or something really interesting. The potential is there in any medium. There are forms in popular culture that were made just to make money. Most novels are terrible – the bulk of books are commercial, Harlequin Romance-quality. But that doesn’t mean you reject literature, does it? A lot of comics are hackwork but I wouldn’t blame the whole media. You have to have both visual literacy and prose literacy. It has to do with education and the way schools are set up. Maybe you weren’t educated to understand pictures. A lot of people have lopsided backgrounds. Editors of magazines specialise in text and hire art directors who are visually literate to oversee the rest. What we need are schools that bridge these academic divides. In popular culture there aren’t divisions between disciplines. In popular arts – theatre, movies, comics – that’s the norm. Academic divisions are based on a misunderstanding of how human beings work. Specialisation says that if you can draw, you don’t have to write. If you’re musical, you’re not expected to be literary. We train people to focus on one thing and not do anything else. In Asian culture – before the introduction of movable type when they started imitating the West – how you wrote your poem was as important as the words you chose. It’s the tradition of Asian calligraphy. To me that makes perfect sense, but it got fractured in the West. In one of the obituaries of Steve Jobs , the first or second sentence explained that the design revolution he started was inspired by his study of calligraphy. The inventors of the personal computers created single-font software with little bitmap letters – they decided words didn’t need materiality. Jobs thought we shouldn’t throw out the whole expressive tradition of typography, and that’s why we all have our choice today. There was a terrible rupture in Western culture between text and picture. It’s time that we correct it."