Who is this young girl in a kimono, and other things

I chanced upon two ' quotations' this week that seems interesting in the light of my project.

The first one - ' Who is this young girl in a kimono ?' was a reference to an assamese mekhla skirt worn by somebody with, err.. small eyes. ( It's a fantastic anecdote with all the elements that I'm trying to touch in my work, but I can't possibly narrate it here- I have a 'literary ' career to worry over!). I think I'm going to use this as a title to one of my stories.

The other quotation is from Yves Chaland,a comic book artist talking about style.Yves Chaland worked in the 1980s and created Freddy Lombard - a comic book in the 1950s style.Chaland died young though and one gets the sense that he would've done more important work if he didn't go so early. You get the feeling from his work ( and from his ideas on where his work was heading ) that he was only warming up. Well, here's what he wrote about style in a letter to a friend -

"I believe in treating the reader badly, in making sure he never forgets that the writer is in charge. I can make a tiny event that takes three minutes fill 43 pages, and I can tell a person's entire life story in one page if I want to. I want to really grab the reader's attention, I want him to know that if he skips one image , he could miss a bloody masacre with 583 casualties. That's also why there can be pages with no text and others with more text than the reader can stand to read. You have to do the opposite of what other people do and invent the rules of a new style, because style is the most important thing, and the author has to spend the most time on it."

Yves Chaland
September 18, 1985.

Also I've posted in another two page story 6 o'clock. It's the same style as At the Park ( my last posting)but different in many ways too ...( it perhaps doesn't strictly conform to the migrant's story theme.)

6 o'clock