Category: Art

Art

Reading and Lists

By now, I’m sure, many if not most people on FaceBook have encountered the so-called BBC list of books “everyone should read” but likely haven’t.  It’s an interesting meme, both for what is on it and for what is not, but also for the apparent idiocies it contains.  For example, Shakespeare’s Hamlet is listed and then, separately, The Complete Works of Shakespeare.  What, is Hamlet suddenly no longer part of the Complete Works?  Also, the first book of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series is listed and then—again separately—The Chronicles of Narnia.

Aside from the obvious lack of editing, this raises the number of books (or, in the case of Shakespeare, “books”) quite a bit above 100.  So the question is, did the BBC actually have anything to do with it?

Well, yes and no.  Here is a  good explanation of both where the list came from and how memes like this get going.  Note that there was a list which was then opened for voting from BBC viewers.  An amended list, comprised of an amalgam of lists, ended up making the rounds via the internet and primarily on FaceBook.  As these things go, this one at least has the virtue of getting people thinking about and talking about reading, which I count as a good thing.

But it does open the question about canons and reading lists and what counts as “worthwhile” reading.  Part of the BBC meme is the assertion that “most people” have only read six of the listed titles.  (My own score is slightly north of half—I haven’t read the Harry Potter novels, nor most of Shakespeare,  and several of the more recent novels listed are not even on my radar [Dan Brown?  Are they serious?] )  Going down the list caused me to look at my own shelves, wonder why I hadn’t read some of these books, and perhaps look to acquiring others.

As a list of noteworthy books it would be good for more people to have read, it has its flaws, but it’s not terrible.  It did, however, get me pondering what I would include on my own such list and why.  So I came up with a syllabus and posted it.  To my delight, it attracted a lot of comments and may eventually become its own meme.  (Is that one of the great ambitions of the modern age? To have one’s own meme?)

My list is composed of those works of fiction which, in my estimation, would act as a solid ground upon which to build an even greater reading life.  These books—to me—embody eras, styles, concerns, and show a history over time of the evolution of the novel, not to mention offer what are, in my opinion, some of the richest reading experiences possible without utterly exhausting or discouraging the less than wholly committed.  By that, I mean people who read but may not have read in the classics or who may not read for the highest aesthetic reasons or who have limited experience with what Harold Bloom calls Deep Reading.  For this reason, I did not include works like  James Joyce’s Ulysses, which I feel rests at the far end of a bell curve of difficulty.  There are other novels that fit this category which, if anyone goes through the rest of the list would still be there to offer an even greater experience.  I did not, for instance, include Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, which is arguably his best, certainly his most famous.  I did include his V. because I felt it to be essential to that period of American literature (along with William Gaddis’s   The Recognitions).  I likewise did not include  Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany for the same reasons.

My view in creating this list was to represent the best writing at its most entertaining.  The challenge of “deep reading” is a different kind of pleasure.  For my part, often in the past I’ve cracked a book I was simply not ready for.  I read Ulysses when I was 18.  I assure you, it was a ghost-like experience—there was the sense of passing through something, but what it was I could not grasp.  I reread it, in a group setting, a few years ago and discovered a rewarding experience.  There have been other novels with which I’ve had the same realization.  Some works you have to build up to.

My choices, of course, elicited curious responses and quibbles, as all such lists will—and should.

One of the statements by which I live concerns book burning, which I consider an odious practice, just shy of genocide.  A book—especially a novel—is not A Thing in the sense of other objects.  A book, once engaged, is a life relived through access.  Someone put an essential part of their being into the making of the book, it reflects that person’s ambitions, desires, fears, hopes, loves, passions.  To destroy it is to kill them again.  It is a kind of murder.  Reading, to me, is not an avoidance of people, like many of my peers as I grew up tried to tell me, but an engagement with a person not present but who has left something of him or herself for me to know.  Seen like that, close reading of so-called classics is an act of regeneration—indeed, resurrection.  Bringing the characters to life allows the author a chance to tell what was important to him or her at that time, to have a conversation of a special sort with someone impossible to know any other way.

The writing of a story is a process of encoding the imagination, which is in many ways the distillation of who we are.  When someone picks it up and reads it and experiences the imagining encoded, that distillation opens up and suffuses the reader.

I could compose a few more lists like this one, each with books that would tell a story of lives and adventures, customs and tragedies, dreams and loves, and be just as valid.  The whole purpose of such lists, though, should be seen as presenting opportunities.  Read these and find friends, learn about strangers, let someone live again for the space of a few hundred pages.  They are gateway documents, in no way proscriptive.  Just because something isn’t on such a list doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be or couldn’t be on someone else’s list, and certainly doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be read and valued.  Doing this has me thinking about some of the books I still haven’t read.

Interestingly enough, I’m currently reading a novel I really ought to have read 40-plus years ago.  Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin.  It’s one of those “seminal” novels we hear about, a novel that encapsulated something for its time and did what it did better than most.  It’s set in a time long after the Earth has destroyed itself and concerns the life of a girl growing up aboard a starship.  She is 12 years old when the story opens, two years from the Trial—a period she must survive in order to become An Adult, a rite of passage—and told from her perspective as she approaches the trial.  (I’m enjoying it, which is a bit surprising, because it really is one of those novels one should read at the “proper” time of life–great for teenager, not so much for a 56 year old.  Still.)  I came across a brief discussion in the book of old novels, which the main character reads and enjoys—and then observes that no one writes novels anymore, as if living on a starship has somehow fulfilled the need novels once filled.  This surprised me, especially coming from a writer who clearly knew what he was doing.  The need for story will never pass.  Even in places and times when storytelling has been suppressed and denigrated, it thrives.  Because it is not the novelty of the story that matters, though this is an important feature—it is the preservation of lives and imaginations.  Stories about certain Things may well pass from our interest, but story itself is as integral to being human as the need for other people.

Art

New Work

I’ve almost filled the portfolios on Zenfolio I initially put up.  Arbitrary numbers, yes, but I opted to include 32 images in each different gallery.  The only two I haven’t completed yet are the People Gallery and the Experimental Gallery.  The former, I’m getting to, the latter will take a bit more time.  In a way, almost everything I’ve been doing on Photoshop has been “experimental”, at least for me.

But I’m now beginning to cull the images in the other Galleries.  Some of them are simply not good enough to be there, so as I do better I will make substitutions.  Here is one of the new images, though, this one in the Experimental Gallery.

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At some point, when I’m satisfied, I may convert the Zenfolio site to a fully interactive store.  Even without that, all these photographs can be purchased.  Click on the image desired, copy and paste the url into an email to me with all the relevant info, and I’ll get back to you.

Meanwhile, enjoy.

Art

On Reading As Travel

I have close to 6000 books in my house.

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Now, this is not a lot compared to some I know.  Harlan Ellison has over a quarter million.  Of course, he has the space for it (barely).  But for an average library, 6000 is more than respectable, and many of those are collectible (which is not why I acquired them originally, it just turned out that way).

I’ve read maybe half of them.

I’ve known for a long time that I will likely never read all the books I own. Given that, owning them seems pointless.  The trouble is, I also never know which ones I will read (or when), so divesting myself of them defeats the purpose of having them—keeping them nearby on the off chance that I’ll pick one up.

(I have a hard time using the library.  The peculiarity of my habits doesn’t fit me to read books “on schedule” or on a timetable, so borrowing them knowing I’ll have to take them back in three weeks means that two days before they’re due I might start reading them.  I’ve bought books that have sat on my shelves for years before I finally picked them up.  This frustrates Donna for a number of reasons.  But for me, also, owning a book is my symbol of personal wealth.)

I don’t lose sleep over what I’ll never read anymore.  Some time in the last four or five years I stopped fretting.  I signed onto one of those online reading pages—Goodreads—and began adding in all the books I’ve ever read and the fact is, I don’t remember at least 500 of them that I should, no doubt many more that just fell through the cracks, possibly by virtue of not being worth remembering.  My current total is over 2600, but I know that’s short, and if I add in all the partials, the magazines, individual articles, etc, then my lifetime total to date is probably over 4000, maybe 4500.

And I don’t remember over a third of them.

I do not reread.  There are a handful of books I’ve read twice, maybe four or five more than that.

For a few years I did book reviews, which forced me to read books I would otherwise not have bothered with, and this provided some great pleasures.

But the fact is, for the dedicated reader, it is impossible to read everything worthwhile, never mind everything.  So you can either stew in anxiety for all that you will miss or immerse yourself in what you can.

On FaceBook one of those lists has been going around, one I’ve seen in various forms for years, the 100 books the BBC thinks everyone should read but of which most people have only read 6.  The list has some remarkable books on it–-Les Miserables, Of Mice and Men, Middlemarch, War & Peace, etc.—but also some “huh?” moments, not so much because the choice is bad but because there are better books by the same author.  So while I could tick off 42 on the list, I could make a separate list of my own with over 200 that should have been on that list that I did read.

I read—many people read—for two purposes (three if you wish to specify that “for fun” is its own category, but I think that is implicit in my reason number two).  The first is obvious, for information.  I have a sizable reference library, many of the books of which I would never recommend as “pleasurable” reading, a good number of which I never intended to read cover-to-cover when I bought them.  But a lot of people who are not, by definition, Readers read for information.  I’ve known many people who devour technical books and the like but would never think to pick up a novel or a book of essays or short stories.  They do not read for the second, and in my opinion more important, reason.

I read to be more.

It’s nebulous stated that way.  What do I mean More?  Those who have a lifetime of deep reading behind them understand.  Reading enlarges our internal landscape, widens the horizons, gives us a sense of scope we would otherwise not have, matched possibly by the seasoned world traveler, the sort who picks up enough local language to function, and lives in a country long enough to dive into the parts not on the official tour.  By deep reading, my sense of my own Self has grown, and I apprehend more of the gestalt that is the world.

But also, the act of reading physically increases the connections in the brain, increases the brain’s capacity, not in a specified way, but in such a way that the world is both less surprising and more amazing when we encounter new things.  There is an excellent book about this that I recommend—Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf.  In it, Dr. Wolf details the physiology of reading in a way that convinced me that my long-held belief  is correct that, of all the forms of “entertainment” that affect us, reading is fundamentally different.

So it ultimately doesn’t matter how many books we end up getting through before we die.  What matters is the attention, the exposure, the fact that we read, steadily and widely, and through that become more of ourselves than we would otherwise be.  In this sense, each good book is a country we visit.  Widely traveled is still widely traveled, even if we don’t get to all of them.

Perhaps instead of talking about the books we haven’t read, we should instead talk about the books we’ve been to.  Who we have become from having visited these places is not lessened by all those places we have not and perhaps never will go to.

Art

Coming Back

We’ve been on the east side of the Mississippi often the last few weeks.  Good friends over there, and last night we had Thanksgiving Feast at the house of some very good ones.  Smoked turkey (my favorite way to have it—frankly, I’ve always found turkey a problematic bird to east, much too dry to be really tasty, but a good carrier for other flavors, so it behooves one to stuff them creatively and add spices as necessary) Brussels sprouts, potatoes, stuffing, three kinds of desert four kinds of wine, coffee, and some excellent conversation, not to mention a large, cheerful hearth with a substantial fire…ah, it was almost a Norman Rockwell moment!

It rained and snowed most of yesterday, stopped right before we left to go over there, and had cleared up completely by the time we left, which was after midnight.  Where they live, few lights compete with the night sky, and the stars salted the dome.  We listened to Santana on the way back.  We did not overeat to the point of pain, but we were well satisfied.

This image was not shot last night, but a week ago returning from another party with some of the same folks.  Still, I thought it was worth posting—it should go with Thanksgiving.  Life should always have great beauty for us to appreciate at least once every day.  If we’re fortunate, that beauty comes mostly from the people we call friends and lovers.  But occasionally we have to notice that which serves as backdrop.  So…

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Coming home on Highway 55.

Art

Charcoal, Stone, Water

Back to the visual.  I had forgotten that before Advance closed down and I lost access to a full lab, I’d made some 4 X 5 transparencies of my over-sized art pieces, works that simply won’t fit on my scanner.  So I found these the other day and have been turning them into digital files, so if perchance I sell the originals I now will have a record, at least, of some of my doodlings.

Here’s one I rather liked.  It’s a composite of a few images, sort of done along the lines of a steampunk aesthetic.

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I did this on a slightly textured piece of mount board with charcoal and pencil.  No title, but I often don’t title my images.  After the previous grim post, a bit of grimness of a different sort, and possibly more pleasant.  Enjoy.

Art

Artistic Purity and the Real World

The writing world is a-buzz of late with the story about James Frey’s “new” marketing idea to rope writers into a contractual arrangement that makes indentured servitude look like an intern program over a summer between semesters.  The fact that some writers have actually signed these contracts is both telling and sad.  John Scalzi, over on Whatever, made the (radical!) suggestion that MFA programs (because the lion’s share of these hapless dupes come directly from them) teach a semester in the business of writing for part of the egregious sums colleges and universities charge for degrees.  This is a sensible suggestion.  In my experience, talking to writers from high school on up, one usually finds the attitude that writing is a holy calling and the business end of it is either not recognized or disdained as somehow sullying of the noble act.

A rebuttal to Scalzi was published here by Elise Blackwell, director of the MFA program at the University of South Carolina, who claims that MFA programs are there to protect young writers, to give them breathing space so they can write without worrying about anything else.  That, in fact, MFA programs are about “literature” and not business.

My personal reaction to this is: bullshit.  If you’re that concerned to coddle delicate artistic sensibilities, put the business semester in their last year, presumably when they’ve got what chops they’re going to get.  I can appreciate and sympathize with the belief that concerns over money can be deadly to creativity.  While working on the book, outside concerns not directly related to the art can distract and sometimes destroy the flow.  Desperation can be hugely debilitating.

But sending someone out into the world of publishing unarmed almost guarantees years of exactly that kind of desperation.  The reason to be savvy about the business is so you can protect yourself over time, learn how to not be raped by people without MFAs but rather with MBAs whose job it is to get the work from you without paying you what it’s worth.  As they say, knowledge is power, and to defend a refusal to teach what is necessary at the place where such things naturally ought to be taught is questionable ethics at best, criminal neglect at worst.

A lot of this comes down to the old dichotomy between Art (capital A) and Commerce.  Frankly, I think it’s a false dichotomy.  It’s a nonsense wall erected between two fields that are inextricably linked in the real world.  You want your art to be widely distributed, recognized, appreciate by many and, more importantly, survive your death?  Then you had better sell a lot of it.  Plant your meme in the social consciousness like a stake in the heart of a vampire (which is a more pertinent metaphor than you might at first imagine) and work that network for all it’s worth.  Nothing is guaranteed, so becoming a bestselling author does not automatically bring immortality (whatever that means), but it does mean you can continue to do what you presumably love to do.

(Not even oblivion is guaranteed for not working the system.  The famous example—and, I think, a fatal one to bring up to young writers—is Moby Dick, which sold abominably by any standards and resulted in Herman Melville eventually giving up and working the rest of his life in a customs house, but the book somehow refused to die and is now heralded as a Great American Classic.  True, this can happen, but it didn’t get Melville anything he could use during his lifetime.)

I sympathize with writers who turn their noses up at the business.  I hate it myself.  I want to write stories, not worry over spreadsheets and marketing campaigns.  I am not good at that end of it and we all play to our strengths when allowed.  But I have paid for my negligence.  Like it or not, the writers who do consistently well are those who promote, who understand contracts, who know how to say No to a bad deal, who work hard to get their books the best exposure, which means dealing with the business.  Many of them, true, have signed with agents or lawyers who dine regularly on the livers of publishers and distributors and who walk into the fray as part of their 15%.  But that doesn’t mean the writer shouldn’t know some of what’s going on.

From time to time I have had conversation with students in MFA programs or who have been through them.  To be fair, most of them really had no long term desire to be a writer.  It faded.  One of the benefits of something like Clarion is that in short order you can find out if this is really what you want to do.  Not always, but it helps.  No doubt most people who enter MFA programs are sincere in their love of their chosen art, but that doesn’t always translate into career ambitions once the actual slog begins.  Still, you would think certain basic ideas would be common coin in environments purporting to teach a life skill.  I have always been dismayed by what these folks have not been taught, not least being the business end of the writing life.

However, part of what I wanted to talk about here is this notion that somehow there is a vast chasm between true art and commercial fiction.  This is a post-Marxist critique of economics that has badly infected the academy.  In high school once I got into a heady argument with my art teacher (I only took one year of art) who extolled the brilliance of Van Gogh.  Now, I admit here I’m in a tiny minority in this, but frankly I’ve never seen that brilliance.  To me Van Gogh is on par with a…well, I find nothing to love in his work.  It strikes my eye as ugly.  Learning that his brother was unable to sell his canvasses during his lifetime leads me to believe that his contemporaries displayed more honest reactions than our hagiographic reappraisals of someone whose present fame did him no good while he was alive.  So, being the bigmouth I was (and still often am), I challenged that notion.  He asked who I considered a great artist.  “Norman Rockwell,” I said.  He sneered.  Of all the things he might have said that would have been educational on the topic of art itself, what he did say dismayed me then and angers me now.  “Rockwell is a capitalist.”

Huh?  What does that have to do with his ability?

I see now what he meant—that Rockwell’s concern with money led him to paint what the market wanted and not, possibly, what he wanted.  And by contrast that Van Gogh’s singular vision ignored what the market wanted so he produced only what his “singular vision” dictated.

I think Van Gogh would have loved to have had half the popular success Norman Rockwell enjoyed.

Either way, it’s a bullshit answer.  While we make the art in our heads, alone, in garret, hovel, basement, office, or studio, the other part, the thing that makes it whole, is its dissemination.  People have to see it, read it, hear it for it to complete itself.  The greatest artist in history may be a hermit on a mountain in central Asia, but no will ever know, nor will he/she because the Other Half doesn’t happen.

Like it or not, we all do art with the public in mind, because it is the public—that vast country of human interaction and creation that we come from and live in—that feeds us the ideas, the inspirations, the causes, consequences, and catastrophes against which or with which we react.  That reaction prompts the impulse and the work of interpretation begins and we shape our vision of the stuff that world out there gives us.  If we do it well and true, it speaks back to that world.  To condemn that world in terms of commercialism is to miss the whole connection, ignore the cycle.

It is also true that works wholly tailored to some momentary notion of What The Public Wants are almost always doomed to be ephemeral, often crass, betrayals of any higher value that might transcend trend and fad.

So you work at it.  That what you do.  Find the truth in the thing and tell it (but tell it slant…)

That in no way means you have to be ignorant of contracts.  On the contrary, if you want it Out There in the best way possible, you better know contracts very well.

So to the MFA programs that insist on putting up that wall between the real world and the artist’s tender psyche—-get over it.  You’re handicapping your students, sending them out to be victims of the James Freys of the world.  Believe me, they are not ignorant.

Art

Rubble

There are several things in politics that I could write about.  I did post a screed yesterday over on Dangerous Intersection, so I think I’ll do something a bit more personal and, um, artistic here.  Of course, metaphorically, the theme sort of carries.  Ruin, rubble, the crumbling of ancient temples.  The overturned and broken remnants of an Aztec pyramid perhaps?

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It was fun to play with some of the values in this image, make it more epic than it already was.  Of course, this is nowhere near Mexico.  It’s an old, abandoned mine down in Bon Terre.  A Kodachrome original, though, and I must admit I’m still getting some of the best transfers from those.

Back to rabid political screelings on another day.

Art

Soulard Past

Was a time I wandered around with a camera around my neck and acted like the “cool photojournalist” type.  Another aspect of “career” I never acted on in any serious way.

Except the work.  I loved the work.  The images were all.  (I’d read about Alfred Eisenstadt walking away from his position at LIFE Magazine when a new batch of editors started cropping his photographs with scissors.  He told them it was in his contract that they run his work as he gave it to them, but they said “Pop, it’s just not done that way anymore, you gotta get with the times” and he said “No, I don’t” and quit.  Part of me thought I’d gotten the jump on that kind of scene by not even taking the job in the first place, but at the end of the day I was just a stupid kid who didn’t do the work to find out how to do the work.)  I was very serious about the work itself.  I’d stay up late in my darkroom, music playing, working in oversized trays.

I didn’t pay nearly as much attention to the color side as maybe I should.  I did a lot of it, but I never took the same time to learn how to print color as I did black & white.  Now I’m going through these old transparencies and thinking, hmm, not terrible.

Example, from Soulard’s Market.

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Antoine Soulard was a refugee from the French Revolution who settled in St. Louis and became the first “official” surveyor for the village and surrounding lands.  The section of the city now occupied by this open farmer’s market was once owned by him.  Later his widow “gifted” it to the city when they tried to make her fix the streets in her area.  She didn’t want to pay for that, so she turned it over the the town, who then had to do the repairs out of general revenue.  (Republican thinking even before the city was even part of the country!)

Soulard’s Market is on Broadway and part of the heritage of old St. Louis, even though it is still some distance beyond the borders of the original 1763 village.

I’ve worked this image over a bit to make it more, oh, photojournalistic.

Art

Transparencies of Days Past

Gradually, given enough time, I’ll both learn proficiency with the new digital medium and transfer my best images from nearly forty years of photography.  I’ve been doing this “in between” all the other things on my plate and it hasn’t had top priority, but once in a while I find some old negatives or, in this case, transparencies that make me wonder, for only a moment, why I’m doing anything else.  I finish working something like this over…

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…and I get a thrill such as I used to whenever I first made a new image that I thought was worth a damn.

What’s fun now is  that I barely remember taking some of these photographs, but I remember them.  This was an abandoned house behind the property of the people I once worked for.  Furthermore, I shot this with my view camera, a 4X5 Linhof.  I very much wanted to do fine photography and I was raised on the idea that the f64 Group—which had members like Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Wynn Bullock, and others—were the gold standard.  Most of them shot with large format view cameras.  When I finally acquired one and started working with the format, I fell in love.

Negative size relates directly to print quality, that much is obvious, and I could make some very large prints from 4X5 negatives.  But the color work!  This was shot on a long obsolete Ektachrome, E3.  Through most of the 60s on until, oh, the mid 80s or thereabouts, amateur transparency film was E4.  That designates the emulsion type and the processing type.  E3 had been the studio standard for decades and even up through the mid to late 70s large format transparency film was E3.  I could process this myself at home, but it was a magnificent pain.  It required re-exposure part way through the process.  But it possessed a color saturation and vividness e4, as far as I’m concerned, never had.

This particular one, though, had problems.  When I pulled it out of the sleeve it was clear that I had probably been the one to process it.  The image was washed out, heavy in the cyan range.  It may not have been properly stabilized, I don’t know.  But there was enough to it to make it worth scanning.

Once in Photoshop, I was able to revive the original color, much to my surprise, and the image is as sharp as one might wish.  I took it further by erasing a couple of superfluous details, ramping up the contrast a bit, then de-saturating it somewhat for a kind of “aged” look.  Little else was done.  The original exposure had captured everything I needed in good register.

The view camera kit weighed about thirty pounds and I lugged it all over for several years, trying to make “important” images.  A lot of it turned out to be magnificent garbage, but some…well, some came out not too badly.

You’ll find this one and a couple others now on the Zenfolio site.  Enjoy.