Virtual Memories Show 348:
Steven Heller
“It’s a learning moment of how powerful symbols are and how powerful graphic design is.”
The Nazi swastika is a symbol of evil, but what about the pre-Nazi version of that symbol? With the publication of The Swastika and Symbols of Hate: Extremist Iconography Today
(And check out my 2018 conversation with Steven!)
“There are all these ambiguities, but at a certain point you have to put your foot down and say, ‘This is how I see it.'”
“Doing the daily blog, you get into a regular groove, and when you stop, you wonder how you can get back into the groove.”
“When I lecture these days, sometimes I feel like the students know more than I do.”
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About our Guest
Steven Heller, former art director of the New York Times Book Review, is the cochair of the School of Visual Arts MFA Design / Designer as Author + Entrepreneur Program. He is the author, coauthor, and editor of more than 190 books on design, social satire, and visual culture, including Iron Fists: Branding the 20th Century Totalitarian State
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Mr. Heller’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 Microphones
(Fantagraphics Underground), and what he learned in the process of culling the selection of his work for the show. We get into the roots of his groundbreaking civil rights cartoons (and how he got away with making weed jokes in the Saturday Evening Post in 1965), his pioneering comics reportage, how his spontaneity and energy secretly come from laziness, the challenge of drawing people on NYC subways, his intense focus on the business side of cartooning (and how it might be tied into his late start as a cartoonist), and how he tied vacations and even his honeymoon into work assignments. 
, considered “the most comprehensive, authoritative book on the subject.”
.
(Harper Voyager), and the redemptive possibilities of dystopian fiction. We get into his SF pedigree, living in Austin and its influence on his ecological themes, the multivalence of Texas, his attempt at subverting the post-9/11 technothriller toward emancipatory ends, his background in business law and politics (and the role of power in both those milieux), his affinity for 
. His short fiction has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including MIT Technology Review’s “Twelve Tomorrows,” The Baffler, and 
. He lives in Austin, Texas. 
(Other Press) and how he explained it to passport control on his visit to the US. We talk about how his fiction-writing career both integrates and rejects his past lives in advertising and psychology, explore the Robin Hood model of the creative writing school, and get into the background PTSD of daily life in Israel. Then comics scholar 
that accompanies it (here’s a 
, which was included in The Independent‘s list of Books of the Year in Translation; 
; 
, a finalist for the prestigious Independent Foreign Fiction Prize; and 
(2004), and co-author, with Peter Stanbury, of 
(2005), 
(2006) and 
(2008). He is also the editor of 
(2008) and 
(2011).
, published by Tate Publishing (2013) and Yale University Press (2014), and 
(2014) with John Harris Dunning, published by The British Library. This accompanied the exhibition of the same name which Gravett and Dunning co-curated at The British Library, the largest exhibition of British comics ever held in the UK, which attracted some 60,000 visitors, almost half of them first-time visitors.
(Saga Press). We talk about the sense of his various endings, writing a talking animal book that’s actually about an old man dying, the challenges of reaching a broader audience and why he returned to fantastika, his retirement from teaching at Yale and his thoughts on how students have changed, his Catholic upbringing and how it informed his writing, the pressure of new rules and norms on writers, the radical challenge of sympathy, and more. But first, I call 
(Bloomsbury). We get into what Americans really need to know about China, how the country has changed in the 20+ years that he’s been working and living there (on and off), and why Pittsburgh is the Beijing of the US. 
and 
, Meyer teaches nonfiction writing at the University of Pittsburgh. His new book is 
, in 2009. Since 1993 he has taught creative writing at Yale University. In 1992 he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 2006 he was awarded the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement. He finds it more gratifying that almost all his work is still in print.
