epilogue
Q&A
HUFFINGTON
09.23.12
Thomas Pynchon. I think literature, because of Jerry’s references, was very important when we started Devo.
Your book, Beautiful Mutants, is mostly image-based. Have you considered
delving more deeply into writing? Yes. I write all the time. I do artwork that’s part of a diary, and I write short stories to go with
them pretty much every day. I was just counting things up because I’m doing a museum show in a couple of years — there’s
close to 300 books that have 100 drawings with stories that go
along with them. They’ve been an image bank, a source of lyrics
and just a reference point for all sorts of things. My intention
[for the exhibit] is to have one
room look like a library, where
the books would be laying out so
THE STORIES I WRITE
you could go through them.
When I was a kid, the book
ARE OFTEN LITERthat I liked the most was Aesop’s
AL TO EVENTS THAT
Fables. There was a version of it
HAVE HAPPENED
that my father read stories to us
OR OBSERVATIONS
kids out of. I liked the idea of the
THAT I’VE MADE, AND
short story format. The stories I
SOMETIMES THEY’RE
write are often literal to events
FANTASTICAL.
that have happened or observations that I’ve made, and sometimes they’re fantastical.
What do you read to your kids? When they were really young,
before they could read at all, I was reading Dr. Seuss. [Recently] I bought a book called How to Disappear and they
both seem to really like that one, they’ve gone through it a
couple of times. And Where the Wild Things Are, of course.
They like all the normal stuff, because they go to a school
where all the other kids are reading Harry Potter and Coraline and Emma. They write stories, they love writing stories, both of them. They make little books all the time. I
really like that about them.