Surprising the Audience

[Above still from director Alex Cox’s Walker (1987), which sounds like one of the most
interesting films I’ve never seen. Click image for more info.]

My regular Friday post inspired by the mysteries of the past seven days’ entries at the whiskey river blog. This one’s a little more complex than most — one or two more selections, and a small cluster of strangely relevant associations from elsewhere around the Web.

First:

The Room

It is an old story, the way it happens
sometimes in winter, sometimes not.
The listener falls to sleep,
the doors to the closets of his unhappiness open

and into his room the misfortunes come —
death by daybreak, death by nightfall,
their wooden wings bruising the air,
their shadows the spilled milk the world cries over.

There is a need for surprise endings;
the green field where cows burn like newsprint,
where the farmer sits and stares,
where nothing, when it happens, is never terrible enough.

(by Mark Strand — and yes, I had to read that last line several times to feel sure I’d gotten it)

Second:

The world displays perfect neutrality on whether we achieve any outward manifestation of our inner desires. But not art. Art is exquisitely responsive. Nowhere is feedback so absolute as in the making of art. The work we make, even if unnoticed and undesired by the world, vibrates in perfect harmony to everything we put into it or withhold from it. In the outside world there may be no reaction to what we do. In our artwork, there’s nothing but reaction. The breathtakingly wonderful thing about this reaction is its truthfulness.

Look at your work and it tells you how it is when you hold back or when you embrace. When you’re lazy, your art is lazy. When you hold back it holds back. When you hesitate, it stands there staring, hands in its pockets.

(by David Bales and Ted Orland, Art and Fear)

Third:

Yeats wrote somewhere that one had to choose between the work (the art) or the life. I have spent my life defying that, trying to make the work of art and the work of life both true without excluding one or the other and without differentiation. I don’t know if you feel the price you paid to accomplish this too was worth it, but I would pay the price of exhaustion, illness, and addiction over and over if I could have my beautiful, sane, happy children, the sustaining love of my wife, and one poem that opened the heart of another being.

(Terrance Keenan, in a letter to Hayden Carruth)

Not from whiskey river:

Books Don’t Take You Anywhere

WASHINGTON, DC — A study released Monday by the U.S. Department of Education revealed that, contrary to the longtime claims of librarians and teachers, books do not take you anywhere.

“For years, countless educators have asserted that books give readers a chance to journey to exotic, far-off lands and meet strange, exciting new people,” Education Secretary Richard Riley told reporters. “We have found this is simply not the case.”

According to the study, those who read are not transported to any place beyond the area in which the reading occurs, and even these movements are always the result of voluntary decisions made by the reader and not in any way related to the actual reading process.

“People engaged in reading tend to be motionless,” Riley said. “Not moving tends to make it easier to read.”

(The Onion, December 16, 1997)

Finally, one of the songs with which Bob Dylan overturned the expectations of his acoustic-folk fans (Newport, RI, 1965). This is the classic version of the song, not as Dylan played it at Newport, and the music begins at about 15 seconds into the video.

The images in this montage (many of which appear multiple times) come from an exhibition of photographs, Raised by Wolves, by photographer Jim Goldberger; the subjects are all homeless teens in late 20th-century San Francisco and Hollywood. Interested in the book accompanying the exhibit? Check out Amazon (but don’t expect to buy it with your lunch money). Also, see some interesting details on the making of the video by clicking through to YouTube and checking the “more info” link at top right. Edit to add: Among other things, this introduced me to something called the “Ken Burns machine,” although I’d seen its products before.