Illustrator Arthur Jones on The Post-It Note Reading Series
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When Arthur Jones moved to Chicago after graduating from The Rhode Island School Of Design, he worked at a marketing firm and drew on the side—one sketch every day on a Post-It Note, which he uploaded to his website GorillaSuit.com. After befriending Starlee Kine, a writer and producer on This American Life, Jones collaborated on a reading show that paired his single-cell Post-It Note drawings with short stories from a variety of writers. The show then became a regular event in New York City, where Jones now lives. Fortunately for us, Jones and Kine will bring the Post-It Note Reading Series to Chicago on Monday, April 20 at The Hideout. Before heading back to Chicago, Decider caught up with Jones to talk about his previous jobs and why lit geeks supposedly love cartoonists so much.
Decider: How did you go from scribbling on Post-It Notes to writing stories?
Arthur Jones: Well, it really did happen as a result of that happy accident of the Post-It Note show. I’ve always enjoyed writing, but it was always like, I’d spend an hour working on a snappy email or something like that. But [I] never really thought it’s something that I could think about pursuing seriously. When I started doing it, I would draw little storyboards as a crutch to help me write, and then they went hand-in-hand. They were integral to each other. I wrote a short story for an anthology recently, and I felt a little lost without having the Post-It Notes to help me along. I actually kind of enjoy it—often more than the drawing part. The challenge of it, I guess, is writing something that’s not embarrassing, especially when I’m onstage with people that are real writers.
D: You said that you were working on an anthology. Who’s compiling it?
AJ: My friend Jason Bitner did this book called Cassette From My Ex. It had 80 different writers talking about mix tapes that were given to them by people that are now their exes. And so, I wrote a little work of non-fiction about a mix tape that a girl had given me many years ago. [Bitner's] an ex-Chicago person, too. I used to work on this magazine called Dirty Found with him. That book should be coming out next year on St. Martin’s press sometime.
D: Did you ever find anything too dirty to be included in Dirty Found?
AJ: There were a number of things that were too mentally scarring to put into Dirty Found. We used to tour around with a PowerPoint presentation, and we would end the PowerPoint show with this one particular image that was found in Chicago near The Aragon Ballroom called “Peep Hole.” It’s the worst photograph ever taken. It could end all of photography. It’s terrible. Anything that has piss or shit—we do not put in the magazine because it’s too scarring. When we would show those sort of photographs, it definitely becomes that thing of a social dare where you’ve got your hands over your eyes, and you’ve got two fingers apart, and you’re briefly looking at it for about as long as you can stand. And that's what we hope Dirty Found did. Not necessarily that it would function as pornography, but it would have some sort of broader audience that dealt more with the human experience. And that's why if you look at it, there's actually more notes and reading in Dirty Found than there are pictures.
Decider: Where do you buy your Post-It notes for the show?
Arthur Jones: Staples, and I buy them in bulk. I’m trying to think of the last time I actually bought…. It’s been a couple years. I bought a fall-out shelter’s worth of Post-It notes because if you just go to any corner store or Walgreens, it’s actually very hard to find just pads of plain yellow Post-Its—they have the day-glo colors; they have the mix-and-match; they have the purple and the blue all in the one stack. But if you just want to get, like, five pack of just plain yellow, non-neon notes, it’s actually kind of a pain in the ass.
D: It seems as though literary circles are often the first ones to support up-and-coming cartoonists—like Chris Ware in Newcity. How do you think this relationship arose?
AJ: The way it seems to me, comics and cartoonists have [been] stuck in the cultural ghetto for a while. For years and years, comic books were fighting for some place of credibility in the larger culture. And also, there’s been a real rise in great writing in the comic book world. Certainly, I’d say Chris [Ware] and Dan Clowes, and some of those people, are all responsible for that. They’re making books that are of merit in the same way that great novels or nonfiction books are. And I think for the literary side, it seems cool to have that stuff. [Laughs.]
The reason why this is called the “Reading Series” is because it is a reading series, but we try to avoid some of the pitfalls. I don’t normally go to readings. And so, the Post-It show is kind of a reading show for people that don’t necessarily like readings. We sort of avoid the poetry side of it—we keep things moving pretty quickly. The illustrations are really to fight off ADD that happens when people lose track of what’s going on or they’re straining to hear. We try to avoid some of the preciousness of it.
