Discussed: Reading Rainbow, awards, Eddie Izzard, Mark McGrath, Austin, Creighton University, the former Kyrgyzstan, Chingiz Aitmatov, technology, the UK sound, Star Seeds, Santa Barbara, Shelley Jackson's Ineradicable Stain: Skin project, Kinsey, illuminated texts, Jeanne Moreau in Le Journal d'une Femme de Chambre, Auden, disgust and the color green, the light in Los Angeles, Robert Irwin, Chapel Hill

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I.

In 1987, Great Plains Network/Nebraska Education Television's Reading Rainbow, which would come to prominence in the early Eighties across the country on the Public Broadcasting System, had a big year. Aside from LeVar Burton's fourth straight Emmy for Outstanding Performer in a Children's Series, the show received two Silver Apples from the National Education Film and Video Festival just weeks after having bitten off the news that it had garnered the American Education Film and Video Festival's Red Ribbon Award for its "Mama Don't Allow" episode. But "Mama Don't Allow" just knocked down the door.

In September, "Hill of Fire" and "Feelings" each took home Ollie Awards, while the International Monitor Awards – the benchmark of children's television achievement (or, in other words, its Oscars to the Golden Globes that are its Ollies) – would soon see fit to bestow its highest honors on one episode: "Animal Cafe." At the time, no one could have known how influential "Animal Cafe" would become – the book itself hasn't held up all that well, while you can still feel the effects of the episode in everything from Dora the Explorer to the comedy of Eddie Izzard – but it was immediate enough to justify Best Achievement in Children's Programming and Best Camera.

Connecting the dots almost two decades later, the show's 1987 sweep is not as stunning as it might have been back then. There was one constant, as it turns out, the pin in a revolutionary literary grenade, and his name is Drew-Dean Sorak. As the 7-year-old son of two Creighton University professors, Sorak starred as a correspondent/reviewer in three of Reading Rainbow's four award-winning episodes that year. To this day, he remains the show's only repeat talent (aside from Burton, of course, and, perhaps unshockingly, Mark McGrath). And now he lives in Austin, for part of the year, at least.

"I didn't want to do it at the time," says Sorak, who now goes by D.D. "I was young. I mean, I am. Still young. I told my parents at the time, "I am too young.' But they were right, and I was not. You are never too young, just like you are never too old."

Sorak is from the former Kyrgyzstan, now the Kyrgyz Republic. He was born there, and his parents moved their young family to Nebraska in 1982. His accent, dew-soaked and halting, reluctant as morning, still bears the traces of his ancestry, a line that includes the great Kirghiz avant-gardist author and activist Chingiz Aitmatov. In fact, Aitmatov's iconic cheek bones, if you know them, sit high on the throne of Sorak's royal-looking mug, prevalent, steadfast, and severe, though they are only fourth cousins and have never met.

"I wish I had met him," Sorak says, feigning wistfulness with charming transparency in trying to please his interviewer over coffee at Star Seeds circa 4:30am. We have taken in 14 bands from the UK in just over 6 hours of SXSW invigorata. "I have dedicated a glyph to him."

When told that Aitmatov is still alive and living in Santa Barbara, Sorak starts.

"But we had heard ..."

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II.

You have heard of Sorak's glyphs, much as you have heard of his companion band, the Neato Mosquitoes.

Or maybe you have. Maybe you haven't. Maybe you're lucky enough to have seen them, read them. Or heard them. Or both. Sorak maybe prefers it that way.

"Were you a part of Shelley Jackson's Ineradicable Stain: Skin project?" he asks, his steel-blue eyes, bullets to the brain, as innocent as Jeanne Moreau's in Le Journal d'une Femme de Chambre, piercing. His particular reluctance to be pinned down like so many of Kinsey's wasps, his artistry writhing on the needle's head as he is studied and subjected as just a note in a notebook, filed, nomenclated, finally begins to bristle. Combined with his Eurasian roots, it is as enthralling as it is discomfiting. "You weren't, were you?"

I was not.

"I didn't think so," he relishes. "I was."

He rises, brushing against a plastic container that sends sugar packets skittering across the chipped formica table – "Auden," he says simply, pointing at them – and hitches up his left pantsleg. Tattooed vertically in the chicken-breast firmness between his shin and calf is the word "also" and a period.

"This is mine," he says. "It is Shelley's, but it is mine. But you are something like the hundredth person I have shown this to. Much like my fiction, much like Shelley's fiction, it is mine, but it is ours. You see, yes?"

I do see. Jackson's novella-on-people was perhaps the most important literary movement of 2004. Probably the most important artistic movement, in the end, and I am sitting, staring, at one of her "words." She solicited thousands of subjects to tattoo one word (and possibly, depending on the luck of the draw/timing of her mailed direction, punctuation) on their person, the completion of which would comprise just that much in her novella. After a signed waiver "releasing the author from any responsibility for health problems, body image disorders, job-loss, or relationship difficulties that may result from the tattooing process" and a submitted photograph for verification, Jackson's "words" would become part of a living work. Living fiction. "As words die the story will change; when the last word dies the story will also have died," Jackon's call for "embodiments" explained. "The author will make every effort to attend the funerals of her words."

In a word, "also" is likely the word for Sorak, but the period is more than perhaps too limiting. He demands something more like a serial comma, or an ellipsis. He takes Jackson's idea and explodes it, remaking fiction as an incredibly inclusive phenomenon that shuns the printed page – "the printed page is just a part of the process" – in favor of breathing, heaving vibrancy. Still, the innate underground nature of his exploits, as aforementioned, pleases him. In fact, he calls it a necessity.

"I look back now on my experience with Reading Rainbow as equally disgusting and a time of discovery," he says. "Disgusting because it diluted what I am – I am what I do, what I did then, which was to think critically about various texts, and now I create as I did then in a different way – and because it so rigidly defined what art is for people at a formative age. They have had to live with that the rest of their lives.

"But what I am doing now is wiping that away and rebuilding for people. And I discovered with Reading Rainbow how to do that most effectively to get the message out. Using media to understand art. And the art will challenge as well as entertain. Well, that is my hope.

"I know now that art – specifically literature – is for everyone," Sorak continues, working himself into a notably thrilling lather as he spears a chunk of honeydew with a pencil, a curious pale green flecked with graphite, and, with the way the light of Austin's own particular dawn bounces off the rough and tumbly color of the starving artists' work on Star Seeds' walls while hitting the dish in front of him, it feels for all the world as if he's subconsciously yearning to recall the work of Los Angeleno outsider Robert Irwin, "but it is not for everyone. What I am doing here, in Austin, and when I am not in Austin, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where my parents currently do their "teaching,' is navigate that disconnect."

To see Sorak's navigation in action, how history evolved into the glyph, see the schema accompanying this article.

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D.D. Sorak will be at the Escapist Bookstore on Sunday, April 3, 7pm. He will then participate in a fashion show at FactoryPeople the following evening, time TBA.