amy kurzweil is us today courtesy of rachel young fields

and sean fields and bank, south amy kurzweil is a new yorker and the author flying couch, a graphic memoir. she was a 2021 berlin prize fellow with the american academy in berlin, a 2019 sharing fellow with the black mountain institute, and has received fellowships from macdowell, djerassi and and elsewhere. she's been nominated for a reuben and an ignites award techno philia, her four part series with the believer magazine. amy has taught widely for over a decade. please give a warm savannah welcome to amy kurzweil. i everyone. hi. it's great to be here. this is first time in savannah and i'm obsessed with your trees

and also you're very kind people. so thank you so much to everyone at the book festival who made this possible just there's so many of you helping out and i really i'm really happy to be here so i'm a graphic memoir and i'm a cartoonist and so what means is that i write and draw about myself and my family. and i always like to warm up with some single panel cartoons. single panel cartoons are, like a humorous story in one screen. so make sure you can see the screen. and with single panel cartoons, i invite you to laugh, but it's not required. you don't have to laugh. right? you can just nod like, oh, yes very smart, amy. yeah. so here we have executive mfa the poetry of powerpoint. this is a new yorker cartoon. this is my proof that i actually have a degree in powerpoint

presentations. so you can rest assured that i plan to entertain you. so. this is one woman show. i'm really we have more than one one woman show, but you never know with book events. you know, sometimes. so i put that one in there. like in case that happens and we make a joke about it. yeah. okay. books. so some book themed cartoons, 3 p.m. meet the author, 3:10 p.m. tweet negative reviews the author 3:25 p.m. meet the authors disappoint good parents 3:30 p.m. meet the author spouse who has raised the author's children on a single earner salary. total fiction. nothing true about that at all. another literary one you'll never believe who's here. so i'll let that. this is a moby--- cartoon cartoon and this is going to be us after.

the author cocktail party like looking the white whales in the room. yeah. the very stressed cat. a pillar. that's with apologies to eric carle. yeah. i wanted to throw a love themed cartoon in there. this one is. i never knew what love was until you came along and explain it to me. my partner, who's a character in my book, you'll get meet him very briefly. he's a philosopher and i've literally said this word for word to before. and then i just put it in a cartoon. okay. so am i. cartoons. we're getting to the good stuff here. self-driving car, self conscious. would i look better in red and self-actualized car going back to school. so that's actually the first cartoon i ever sold to the new

yorker. and yeah, our last cartoon here, it's a little dark. remember, humans. okay. let's let that go right. we're moving away from the robot apocalypse, and we're going to talk about memory and humanity and also a little bit about a.i. so that brings to my book artificial love story. so this book is a family memr. it's about three generations of creative people in my family. there's me my father, ray kurzweil, inventor and futurist and, then my grandfather, fred who is a pianist conductor who was born in 1912 in vienna, austria he fled the nazis in 1938, moved queens, which is where my father was born. and then he died in 70 before i was born. and this book asked the

question, how does technology help us preserve and communicate with past? what does it offer? and does it leave out? and to introduce the book before i say more about it, i'm going to let you watch this animated trailer that i made. that's the thing. have trailers now or you know, moving into the digital age. so and in this book trailer, you're going to hear my father talk about his father and about the project that artificial revolves around. so going to hear me and my father's voices and then in the background you're going to hear a recording of my grandfather from 1946 playing brahms. okay, here we go. the whole philosophy of life is that information is precious and vital and well, i am trying to bring my father back using artificial intelligence intelligence.

tell me your father's story. he was born jewish in vienna. in 1912. he was a musician and his piano playing was absolutely marvelous. so wealthy american luxury came to vienna because i was a music capital of the world actually, heard him and she was very, very impressed. so she gave him her card, said, if you ever need anything, just let me know. the very next year, in 1938, the nazis marched into vienna, took it over. so he actually wrote her and said, will you sponsor me to to the united states? and she agreed. so his music actually saved his life. when i was 16, he had his first heart attack and he became ill. and i very much hope he would live because it was clear that his condition was life threatening. but he died when i was 22, so if

you could talk to your father again, what would you want to say to him. how are you doing? a lot's happened since you've been gone. and. yeah. thank you. so you may have caught the central project artificial, this chat bot that my father has built. so i'm going to tell you a little more about it, but going to start here in storage unit. so my father has been guarding this epic unit full of boxes and boxes of my grandfather's things since my grandfather fred died in 1970. and it's full of photographs and newspaper clippings and lectures and notes and letters and also

many official documents. and the project that father embarked on was to take all of my grandfather's original writings saved in this storage unit, and to marry it with an alga them that understands natural language in order to create a computer program that simulates conversation. my grandfather and so this is where artificial began with me in the storage unit, spending a lot of time with my grandfather's archives. so i want to talk about that experi ence before i talk more about the job. but you know, my father is somebody who thinks a lot about the and i'm somebody who thinks a lot about the past. and so i saw this project and also this book as really a story about the future of the past and i was also really curious about this compulsion one that we have in my family to save everything, this compulsion to, you know, take the past and bring it into the present so that it can have a future life.

last night, jeannette walls said artists are hoarders because they see the beauty and value in everything. and i really love that i'm to take that into my heart and like feel seen by that quote. but i think there's, you know, there's another reason in my family why save so much? there's sort of another i came to see through spending time in the storage unit that there's a another story for that kind of family, that hoarding. and, you know, my father said in that video that my grandfather's was saved by his music because he impressed this wealthy benefactor, this american woman who able to sponsor him. that's how fled the nazis. so it's just like the story of you artistic genius saved his life. that's the story i grew up hearing, which is a really moving story. but there's another piece of story which is that documentation saved his life. right?

like the piece of paper, the visa that allowed him to emigrate. and i learned, you know, as i was looking in the storage unit and also doing some research about jewish history, especially --, and that that time and place that in order to leave nazi occupied austria or germany, you had to have so much paperwork like paperwork was what saved your life because the nazi regime was just so obsessed with documentation and you know just like paper after, paper after paper. and so that's the thing that got you out. and that was a new realization for me. i found that really interesting and that gave like new resonance to this storage unit full and full of pieces of paper. so here's one example of a document that saved my grandfather's life. this is my grandfather's passport, which bought him entry into the u.s. and you can see

the real passport is on the bottom and. then my recreation of it is on the top and i'm showing you that because in artificial i was, you know, obsessed with recreating documents. that's kind of one of the themes that comes up in the book. and whenever i drew official document, i would recreate it in this really style. it's kind of laborious style, which i can talk more about if you're if you're about how i do that. and there are these style shifts in the book also that you might notice, as i'm showing you images from it. there's this like super realistic style and then there's this more cartoonish. and i was fascinated in particular by this document because of the way this various stamps on the document told the story. my grandfather's escape from vienna. so for example, this big red jay says to the authorities, this is a jewish person. they're leaving the country. and there's this i don't know if you can see, but there's this handler written ten, 1038, right

on the side of that j and learned that that's most likely the date my grandfather fred passed out of austria and i had to show this and discuss this document with a historian in order to get that and i was like i was just really interested in the particular details of the fact that that date was handwritten like that brought this whole scene to my mind, right? of a person like my grandfather's document, you know, a nazi taking my grandfather's document and writing the date. and so it's like i didn't have that scene in my mind. i have anything like that. i didn't have access to anything like that. and holding this document, it's like all of a sudden this this sort of this image of something my grandfather experienced, you know, some version of it, some sort of imagined memory came to me, came to my mind.

so this document and my interpretations of it, my research around it, talking to the historian, these kind of imagined memories, that is what formed the basis, my understanding of how my grandfather escaped europe and escaped the nazis. and it's actually the only thing had that gave me any insight into what that experience was like. and that was really interesting to me that i had so little information about that experience because my, my first book, flying couch, revolves around my, the side of my family, my maternal grandmother, her. this this book tells the story of her holocaust survival. and so i was just i had just come from project where i was spending a lot of time with like an actual oral history that my grandmother on my mother's had given with all this detail exactly what she experienced. and then to turn to my grandfather's side and see that

i was missing, that piece, that that's like sort of where i was at the beginning of artificial. so i'll tell you just a little bit about saying ouch for that context. so this book was published in 2016. i started working on it when i was in college because my mother gave me this transcription of an interview that my grandmother mother had done with the holocaust. historian and basically in that story, my grandmother tells you know, in a lot of detail, with a lot of emotion. she tells the story of escaping the warsaw ghetto as a teenager and surviving the war on her own, losing her family, and then disguising herself as a catholic and escaping, escaping the ghetto and then spending time in these farms in the polish countryside, she was the only person in her family who survived. and in flying i became obsessed with lack of documentation about

specifically about my grandmother's members. you know, she had a whole family. she talked about them, but we had no photographs of them. we had no official documentation of. them every scrap, their existence was completely lost. and i started to realize that like the proof i had of these people's experience of living was in my grandmother. there was nothing outside of my grandmother that could point to the existence of these people. it was it was in her. it was in her voice. it was in her body. it was in her memory. and consequently, it was also in me and in my mother and in our bodies. and that's part of why drawing became so important to me, because drawing is connected to the body and drawing is therefore connected to to emotion and to feeling. but it's also connected to this place that, like, you can't prove. right. but it's like the proof of this whole family legacy is like in

my body. and this is the only proof i have for it. so these these last couple of images you've seen her from flying couch. this is my attempt to draw my grandmother's memories. this one is my grandmother escaping the the wall around the warsaw ghetto. she snuck out through some bricks in the wall. and, you know, i had this realization, like, well, i'm not able to represent my grandmother's story with this sort of capital, a accuracy, because i didn't have any proof of sort of what she experience. no photographs, etc. i felt i was able to draw her story with this capital t truth, right? because of the way inherited her, her memories, her experiences and my sort of firsthand knowledge in my body, of what she'd what she'd gone through. and so with my grandfather fred back, back to thinking about artificial, i had the exact

opposite problem that i had with my grandmother on my mother's side, my lily with fred. i had storage unit full of documentation, but unlike my grandmother and i should mention my grandmother on my mom's side is still. she's 97. so, you know, unlike my grandmother who i had her as a resource and she also lived through this age where were, you know, well, she lived through an age of video recordings and voice recordings and also through an age where people were really interested in documenting stories about the holocaust. so, you know, her story is in my book fine couch, but it's also online in this online archive. and, you know, people can go and listen to, unlike all of that, fred never wrote anything about what he experienced in europe with anti-semitism. he never wrote about what it was like to leave. there was a sort of like a a crucial time when he was there in vienna where stuff was happening and. he just he never talked about it. he never wrote it down.

and this is all relevant. what fred did or didn't write down is really important to this i project that my father was working on because fred's recorded language became form the corpus of text that built this chat bot that writes in his voice. so here i'm showing you two examples of my grandfather's writing from the storage unit. so these are like the actual documents that went into building this chat bot and i'm showing you this because there's a big range of what kinds of writing we have preserved of my grandfather. some of his writing was scrawled really quickly on like pieces of paper that were ripped, you know, and tucked away and like, you know, there's a whole plot point in the book about me not being able to read his handwriting, which is a really interesting and then some of his writing was typed up on a you know, official letterhead. this is from queensborough

community college, which is where my grandfather got finally got tenure a year before he died. so there was like more public writing and then there was also more private writing. and you know, all of that was sort what we were working with with this corpus of text and the way the chat bot worked is that unlike chalkbeat, which you may have played around with, which generates new language, like it's just constantly generating new language, unlike this chat bot was what's called a selective chat bot. so when you asked it a question, it reach into its archive and you an answer that came from writing. so it wasn't generating new answers, right? it was like you'd ask it a question and it understood, it, you know, we can put that in quotes, but it understood your question and then it go into the archive and serve you and answer. so like if you'd ask, you know, who's your favorite composer,

you'd be offered a passage about, you know, brahms or about beethoven. and then you could sort of like read what fred had to say about those composers. so ultimately my father and i knew that the more examples of my grandfather's writing we had the more dynamic this chop bar would be. so the role that i played in all of this was to collect and digitize my grandfather, his writing. so in some cases that was challenging, like that manic handwriting scrawl that you saw and but that challenge of sort spending time with this language that was sort of like somewhere in between language and image, which again is really interesting for me as a cartoonist right like the sort of struggle to decode what was left behind and then translate it into a digital space was really instructive for me because it reminded me something

i'm really interested as a memoirist, which is that the human hand plays a significant role in constructing history and something hope. my book communicates in a really visceral way. like if there's anything i have to contribute to the conversation about a.i., it's that a.i. is also built by human. and i like history and like love and many human endeavors is an act of human construction. and sometimes we think of ai as this like monster force outside of us. and i don't mean to downplay the fearsome of ai, and we can definitely talk about that, but this project did help me think about ai more as an art form. something that we ultimately build and something that we create from our own human legacies and that therefore it's something we can direct towards human goals.

so i started book because i was interested at an ai and i was interested family history, but ultimately it was the more personal question that propelled me through it. and one of the things i started to wonder is, can i really get to know my grandfather through his artifacts? and could i even say that i came to love grandfather even though i've never met? and what role was technology going to play in that love story and that question ended up being relevant to other love stories in my life? so there are a lot of other love stories, the book and lots characters in the book. so like you'll meet partner, you meet my mother briefly, you meet my grandmother on my, my father's mother, you meet my aunt and i really wanted this book to contain a complete network of relationships because like what is a person, not the

complex network of people that they love. and yeah, this is a it is a complex book i don't know if you've seen it. it's also like physically heavy. there's, there's a lot in the book. it's quite dense. but i also wanted the density of the book to sort of be its own message because if there's anything that this project, this like audacious of my father's to sort of resurrect the person, right? like if there's and i'm putting that in quotes, right? resurrect a person but if there's anything that the project sort of being a part of that project taught me, it's the or taught me to appreciate it's the infinite complexity of an individual person. like we are really not fully knowable because we are so as individuals infinitely complex. but that doesn't mean that can't try to know each other. and for me it was like this process, trying to know that a

manifestation of love. okay, so before i open it up to questions i'm going to read a section, the book and this is we're just yeah, we're just jumping right in with chapter one. this should introduce you to the themes, you know, and sort of show you give you an example of how i'm kind of like swirling all of these ideas together. and another thing i like this section is that there's a lot old machines and they're like lots of computers and computer programs. so you might recognize some of them. that was a really fun aspect of the book was drawing old machines and drawing old websites and like seeing sort of how much has changed the way we interact with technology and. the other thing i'll say is that you'll also notice that the book jumps around a lot in time and space. and i just want to invite you to sort of let that wash over you

and like don't need to read all the fine print right? you can get the book and study it just kind of it's kind of go with the non-linear journey and and yeah, enjoy. so we are reading chapter one pattern recognition nothing is stranger to man than his own image. my father has championed many robot artists. the kurzweil synthesizer works with its human host to mimic the sounds of full orchestra and. here we have stevie wonder playing the kurzweil synthesizer piano. the kurzweil poet writes verse this is a poetry algorithm from from the eighties. and you can read this at these poems. if you get the book, they're they're fun.

there's aaron, the cybernetic artist. is anyone ever heard of aaron? just curious, you know. okay, this is one of the first i artists, one of the earliest exames of geneted art here is my recreation, an aaron aaron drawing drawing. and then then there's me. this. is what robot. she's a robot. you're a robot robot.

robot. look, she's charging her batteries a robot. the robot comes from karl tropics. 1920 play rossum's robots about a group of artificial people made factory style from synthetic flesh. they serve human overlords until the script. i'm a robot i'm the robot going to cry. those girls were so mean what human tech had i left show show from a young age i'd learned that my compulsions revealed something about my nature. that i'd better keep to myself. some activities seemed more than others.

i wanted soul. i didn't want to be a robot. being a robot meant i was predict. uncool. click, click. so now i'm going to talk to one of the first computer chop ups, who's who's talked to eliza in here? anyone? yes. okay. eliza is a mock brazilian psychotherapist type to talk about your problems. eliza please tl me what you are feeling. tell me what you're -- face. why are you interested whether or not i'm feeling -- face. because you're a stupid robot. charge your batteries. robot that what makes you think

it's the case that i am a stupid robot and that i should charge my batteries robot. my father taught me that someday robots would made of memory. this unit stores the pieces of my grandfather'memory, the data for my father's next invention. i'm here to help my father find his father's writing. he'll feed those words to an algorithm that will write in my grandfather's voice. i've never met my but i know his mythology well. his name was fritz in america. they called fred. he was short and dark, quiet, a brilliant and pianist. he was born in vienna, a --. and then came the war.

his life was saved once by an american benefactor. she'd heard him conduct a choral concert. in 1937 and the next year she sponsored his salvation. remember sing is a lonely art. i suspect. we save objects because they can shared if the memory. my father's father had a body. if had a hand, i could shake. i would find it here. but this is me screaming because i just discovered what appears to be a man in the storage unit. all of this happened so. oh, my god. it's george now.

i remember. okay, i'm taking you back to the nineties. there's my mom, and she is bringing me to my father's office. where i first met george. any guesses owhat george's. sort of. you met george? he's our receptionist. come on, i'll give you tour. my father found george in las vegas sitting in a hotel gift, an impulsive purchase but not surprising. my father is a collector with certain obsessions. all right, so now i'm texting my partner, jacob. hello. i'm stil shaking. he's made of wax.

george, my faer named him after a character from one of his books and i from the future. he actually looks a lot like fun fact freud almost was my great great grandfather has it hi grandson proposed to my mom. well, i. but yeah, i'll tryth one now. love you too too. some seem alive. they resonate.

i don't believe in ghosts. was it a radio job still to make somewhere. i got used to the music in time. i'll get used to many things more strange than a song in the dark. thank. so all of that all of that really happened. there was music started playing in the storage unit. the time that i visited it, there was this wax figurine of george like, can you imagine?

like the old in the storage unit when i'm going to, you know, meet my grandfather's artifacts. but the music that started playing the thing that i feel like i need to tell you is that it was not that music. but i did record the music that started playing on my phone because i was like, am i going crazy? so i recorded the music and then in the actual book i did notate the music of the actual song that played. it was a jazz song and that song that you that you just heard, you know, for the purpose of the presentation is, my grandfather playing chopin so. yeah. all right. so now we're going to take questions. yeah. anything you want to ask. and, uh. yeah. first, thanks for your creative, very thought provoking work. i know you're focused on the past, but could you offer your views about what we're likely to see in the future with artificial intelligence and in particular, the singularity? sure, yeah, yeah.

let me just call my dad real. well, you know? i mean, it's i thank you for that question. i appreciate it. i, i don't think as far into the future as my father does. that's you know, i think when you're like memoirist or when you're in when you're a writer, you're it's like my brain can only fit. so information into it. and i'm so interested in specific of what's happening right now. so like i can i can't talk about the super far future. like i can't talk about if robots are going to have consciousness, know i'm they're going to wake up but but i can talk about what think is coming like you know in the in the more short term and sort of what i think maybe we should we start to think about i do think that ai's already and is going to get even more proficient in so many different kinds creative tasks. right. so like we were worried about a.i., you know, taking jobs like

truck drivers and like, you know, checkout counter. like we're worried about a.i. sort of taking those kinds of jobs. and as it turns, a.i. is actually like getting, better at these jobs. don't involve a body. right? so like anything that involves a kind of like mechanical exchange is actually much more difficult. it turns out, than natural language processing. and so that's been surprising for some people and scary for people. this idea that like ais are going to be able to write they already can write pretty well, like not, you know, not perfectly, but like they're they're getting really proficient in those kinds skills. and i think that that is going to be really disruptive for industry is that used creative image and text and video in order to sell like anything that of in the marketplace that's kind of measurable right like how well did this perform anything that you can measure? i think that ai is going to get

a lot better than humans and that has really disruptive consequences for how we structure society. but the question that i'm interested in is like is a.i. going to replace human artists right, or i shouldn't i'm not so interested in that question. but that question is really relevant to me. and my answer to that is, i feel like technology has kind of already replaced human artists in a way, but that but but only and to the extent that like the sort of market forces have had a real effect on artists. so that's like i don't think that that's a new phenomenon. i think that already artists have been sort of pushed out by the sort of metric driven nature of our system. but that has not meant that people stop being artists. right. like it just means that maybe we're artists in different kinds ways and that we are increasingly having a difficult time making a living. and i think that's already started like. you see with social media, i

wrote a piece, if you're interested, it's published with the verge about how social media put certain pressure specifically on cartoonists to change their work in order to fit the algorithm right. that kind of stuff has already been happening and i think that like there's just going to continue to be a sort of replacement in the marketplace of artists and then what do we do about that? i think it's a it's a big problem. so one potential solution is to think about how we can human artists and, you know, create systems so that we support them outside of the marketplace i think that's one important feature of future that we need to consider is that going to happen? like, i don't know. i'm not a you know, i'm in politics, but like, are we going to to prioritize that, you know, in our sort of political systems of power? we'll see. but i think if we want if we decide we care about human art and i think we all do. that's why you're here, right? you're like, you want to see me because you care that i'm a human being. i think everyone in this room cares about that.

i think most people care about that, who care about arts. so if we care about that, we have to make it explicit and have to find some workaround around the marketplace in order to make sure that we support human artists. and so yeah, so like, i don't know if that's going to happen, but i that i hope it does and part of the you know part of my motivation writing this book is it's wanting to reintroduce the sort of like prioritization, human values and human art, you know, over other sort of metric driven ways of of setting priorities. yeah. oh, well, thank you. i, i haven't read your book yet. i just started it reminds me of, alison bechdel, who influenced by her. yes. or talked to her yet. yeah. thank you for that question. yes, i'm very flattered. so thank you so much. she's probably one of my biggest influences. so very astute of you to make that make that connection.

yeah. so, alison, i don't know her. i did email her and she responded and i was like, yes, you know and i sent her my book. hopefully she reads it. yeah. so for those of you who know alison beck does work, she's really well known for fun, which is a memoir about her father, her father's death and uncovering his sexuality, his closeted homosexuality as she's her own sexuality. and part of what i was influenced about in her book is the way it's structured as this kind of swirling like her plot goes over, over the same stuff. it doesn't progress linearly. it's kind of like traversing memory. and she goes over a lot of the same memories and she structures her book thematically. so each chapter is sort a different lens on kind of the same material. and that's how i wanted to structure this book. so i would say that's the aspect that was most influenced by

alison bechdel is the way that all of my chapters focus on a particular kind philosophical theme. so the one i wrote from was the theme was patterns and pattern recognition. the second chapter, the theme is immortality. the third chapter, the theme is knowledge and how we get to knowledge and. then i'm kind of going over different material with that lens in mind, which is not how most comics are structured. but i, i was really influenced by alice and victor. yeah. you mentioned creating chat, but, and making the choice to specifically make sure that it was selective and then it wouldn't generate new information. i'm curious if afterwards, if you've thought at all about generating another one with the same digitized information, then yeah, generates new information. so if not, why not? yeah, yeah. i mean, that's the question. the reason for it being selective was that generative didn't really exist yet. when we started this project. so i've been writing this book for seven years. when i first started it, nobody

knew what a chat was and i mean, not nobody, but like general audiences weren't familiar with what that was. now technology is, you know, totally outdated and like, you know, we could, you know, come up with something that had different features that available. and one of those different features is this ability to generate text. okay, so it's it's a really good question and i'm not sure i have an answer yet, but it is something i'm actively thinking about and that writing the book sort of helped me about do i there's value to a chat bot that informed by the patterns of my grandfather's speech in the past or i should say, writing in the past generates new language. i think evaluating sort of the state of the technology right. i don't know if i would want that, because i'm not sure what it would teach me. you know, like i'm primarily interested in this chat bot because of the way it helps me

interact with history and the way it helps me sort of get this sense of my grandfather was life by revisiting parts of his life, i started to think about this chat bot as kind of like a time travel device like i was back in time to see what he said about this to see and i was getting surprising answers like it's different than being in a storage unit where you're finding the thing yourself and you're kind of like having this experience with artifacts. it was like a role play, you know, the value of the value of kind of like theatrical experience of talking with my grandfather and i found all of that really valuable. but if i, if i was having a conversation with new language and i'm like, where is this coming from? i think for me would be distracting, not useful for my particular for what i want from this project. but i could see somebody maybe like a grieving person sort of going through the process, the stages of grief, right. wanting something that feels a little more present, you know,

something that could could have imagination in the way that it responds. i see a value and a use for that. i know that's controversial, but i think within certain parameters, that kind of that kind of use of technology could be meaningful and useful. but me like i'm not grieving grandfather, right. so i'm not needing the experience to be like quite so in the moment, yeah. any other questions don't be shy. yeah, you can come and perhaps you could just hear. oh yes i can. yeah i'm just interested specifically in the relationship between moms and. the new world. mm hmm. yeah. thank you for that question. so a question about the relationship between my memoirs and my work for the new yorker, i guess i will say i started after finished flying couch, the first graphic memoir i worked

on. i that book took eight years. it was really the book that taught me how to draw and taught me how to be a cartoonist. and i decided that i wanted to finish something in less than eight years. so. so i met liana, who is a cartoonist for the new yorker, who also writes memoir and she told me about, you know, the the fact that anybody could submit the new yorker. and actually, at that time could, like, go in person and show your work to the editor who at that was bob mankoff and you could actually sit down with him and would give you feedback on your work. and that was a really rare thing in publishing. you know to be able to have an editor even respond to you alone, sit down with you in person and. so when she told me about that, i was like how? i was very intimidated like, i don't know if i can do this. this is going to take over my life. it turns out it did take over life, but it was great. so, you know, i went well, first i spent a summer drawing a single pound and liana told me

something that i never forgot, which is she said, single panel cartoons are playing scales. it's like practice for your longer work, you know? and it's just sort of like constant practice of those muscles of like word and image and image, how to get a story happening really quickly, like how to make an impact, how to use space, how to get the reader to have a reaction in the things you're not giving them. so, you know there's, there's so many skills that i learned through single panel cartooning. and that's something about that concept of like it's like scales, like, okay, i can sit down, you know, and i can do a cartoon. like i can just have a complete thing that i finish in a day, let eight years, you know. so i did that for a summer and then i into the office and i sat down with bob mankoff and if you know him, you know he's quite a character. he likes to insult. but then he also he ultimately really cares about you and to, you know, he, like insults you just enough that you're like,

hey. and then he's like, come back, come back, you know? so i kept coming back and then eventually sold a cartoon. and so i would say the relationship is like i'm using the single panel cartoon space to work out a philosophical or an observation i have about human life. and i'm also exercising these these skills, you know, that i that i then implement in my longer work and yeah i went i got an mfa in fiction writing and did write, you know, write just wrote prose and i wrote short fiction and i had a fiction teacher telling me like, you have too many ideas. so yeah, so cartoons are where i can out all of my ideas. yeah. thank you. continuing the the comedic part, your life and your cartoons, i'm interested in whether your father or your grandfather also had comedic streak. do they do they see funny is it

that did that come down through the system as well? that's such a good question. well, my father has a specter jocular sense of dad humor, right so he repeats, repeats the same jokes over and over. there are many of those in the book. i think i got all of his his dad jokes in the book that was that was a goal of mine and he was interested the theme of repetition and also that as humans we have these scripts right that we repeat and humor is a big script i would say in my family like the same jokes know and they like i my father was like why do you you know, like why do you say the same jokes all the time and he's like, well, if it's a good joke, like i know it's going to work. so like, just keep reusing it. why not? that's like, yeah, something i learned from my father that, like, you don't always need to be reinventing your material. you can just let the same thing keep, keep, keep it moving.

and my grandfather, they're like, i would love be able to answer that question. i, i knew if he had a sense of humor yeah, i don't know that, i don't think that was as big a thread of his life because i think so much of his life was about music and one of the ironies of this project is that my grandfather was actually a somewhat shy person. so, you know, he didn't have all that much to say in a social situation. so yeah, but what what did he find funny? i don't know. i wish i knew. thank you. yeah. thank you so much much.

i adam lazarus is an author specializing in nonfiction books featuring iconic and compelling figures in american history, including chasing super bowl monday, best of