(Hat tip to Denise Doyen, in a comment at the Seven Impossible Things blog.)
Unfinished Business
From whiskey river:
A Way to Look at Things
We have not yet made shoes that fit like sand
Nor clothes that fit like water
Nor thoughts that fit like air.
There is much to be done —
Works of nature are abstract.
They do not lean on other things for meanings.
The sea-gull is not like the sea
Nor the sun like the moon.
The sun draws water from the sea.
The clouds are not like either one —
They do not keep one form forever.
That the mountainside looks like a face is accidental.
(Arthur Dove [source])
“I Can’t Market My Art!”
Oh, Yes You Can
In a recent blog post, loyal friend of RAMH Froog dredged up a name I hadn’t seen or heard for years: “cartoonist” Hugh MacLeod.*
I no longer have any idea where I first encountered MacLeod and his interesting work. At the time, though, he was struggling to forge some sort of business from his creative output while still suffocating in a day job. He’d started up an e-newsletter, and in each issue he included — free of charge — a sample of one of his special projects. That special project was the creation of drawings (“cartoons”? eeehhhh… maybe) which he’d doodled on the backs of business cards. Some of the drawings were quite dark in tone; some were laugh-out-loud funny; some just made me uncomfortable with how much they made me think.
Ultimately, I unsubscribed from the Gaping Void newsletter, as MacLeod called it. Not because it had ceased to be interesting, even valuable or important. No, simply because I was saving every single issue, with all the others, in a separate GapingVoid email folder. The computer I had at the time had begun to wheeze with overload and I started to throw things overboard: MP3s, images, software… Gaping Void.
And then I forgot all about it. Until yesterday, when I read Froog’s post, and shortly learned that MacLeod is making a living doing what he wants to do. Crazy, huh?
If you want, feel free (of course!) to explore what is now MacLeod’s Gaping Void blog. But by all means (as Froog suggested) do stop over at the Lateral Action site for a terrific brief interview with MacLeod, in part on the topic of getting your art — dare I say writing? — in front of people who will want it for themselves.
Excerpt:
“Artists cannot market” is complete crap. Warhol was GREAT at marketing. As was Picasso and countless other “Blue Chips”. Of course, they’d often take the “anti-marketing” stance as a form of marketing themselves. And their patrons lapped it up.
The way artists market themselves is by having a great story, by having a “Myth”. Telling anecdotal stories about Warhol, Pollack, Basquiat, Van Gogh is both (A) fun and (B) has a mythical dimension… if they didn’t, they wouldn’t have had movies made about them. The art feeds the myth. The myth feeds the art.
The worst thing an artist can do is see marketing as “The Other”, i.e. something outside of themselves. It’s not.
So: what’s your myth — your “great story” about your story?
_______________________
* The “cartoonist” is MacLeod’s preferred term, rather than “artist.”
Uncomfortable Numbers
From whiskey river:
A Word on Statistics
Out of every hundred people,
those who always know better:
fifty-two.Unsure of every step:
almost all the rest.Ready to help,
if it doesn’t take long:
forty-nine.Always good,
because they cannot be otherwise:
four — well, maybe five.Able to admire without envy:
eighteen.Led to error
by youth (which passes):
sixty, plus or minus.Those not to be messed with:
four-and-forty.Living in constant fear
of someone or something:
seventy-seven.Capable of happiness:
twenty-some-odd at most.Harmless alone,
turning savage in crowds:
more than half, for sure.Cruel
when forced by circumstances:
it’s better not to know,
not even approximately.Wise in hindsight:
not many more
than wise in foresight.Getting nothing out of life except things:
thirty
(though I would like to be wrong).Balled up in pain
and without a flashlight in the dark:
eighty-three, sooner or later.Those who are just:
quite a few, thirty-five.But if it takes effort to understand:
three.Worthy of empathy:
ninety-nine.Mortal:
one hundred out of one hundred —
a figure that has never varied yet.
(Wislawa Szymborska; translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak [source])
…and:
One Hundred and Eighty Degrees
Have you considered the possibility
that everything you believe is wrong,
not merely off a bit, but totally wrong,
nothing like things as they really are?If you’ve done this, you know how durably fragile
those phantoms we hold in our heads are,
those wisps of thought that people die and kill for,
betray lovers for, give up lifelong friendships for.If you’ve not done this, you probably don’t understand this poem,
or think it’s not even a poem, but a bit of opaque nonsense,
occupying too much of your day’s time,
so you probably should stop reading it here, now.But if you’ve arrived at this line,
maybe, just maybe, you’re open to that possibility,
the possibility of being absolutely completely wrong,
about everything that matters.How different the world seems then:
everyone who was your enemy is your friend,
everything you hated, you now love,
and everything you love slips through your fingers like sand.
(Federico Moramarco)
What’s in a Song: Fever (1)
[This is another in an occasional series on popular songs with appeal across the generations. This post will be broken into two parts; Part 2 will appear in a few days is here.]
As a kid, I once read a “funny” comic-book episode in which aliens landed in mid-20th-century America and reported back to their home planet about all the strange things the natives did. The one which struck me the most was this: the lunatic creatures leave the comfort of their homes; climb into sheet-metal boxes each weighing several tons; move the metal boxes out amongst hundreds, thousands of others; and play a game whose object is to accelerate your metal box to screaming speed, aim it at all the others, and come as close as possible to all of them without actually hitting a single one — all without dying in the process.
Ha ha, I know: comic books. Can’t take ’em seriously. For in the real world, of course, the aliens are reporting back about the truly strange Earthling behavior: our fascination with sex.
We construct elaborate religious frameworks of abstention and lifelong celibacy, and equally elaborate ones of fetishism and promiscuity — and everything between. Both as societies and as individuals, we underwrite costly technological improvements to its experience. We try to cure ourselves of the obsession; we throw ourselves into it. We have ecstatic dreams about it and hair-raising nightmares. We write about it, and we write about everything but (in the process, creating a gigantic sex-shaped vacuum that’s awfully damned hard to ignore). We celebrate the level-headed old-timers who seem to do just fine without it… and cheer the friskier ones still nuts about it.
And oh boy, do we ever compose music about it — music explicit and implicit. (Some of this music doesn’t even have words.) We pay performers to entertain us with this music, to mime their having sex with us — even to mime the act with their voices, while their bodies barely move onstage.
Somewhere out there, a civilization of little green men and women is scratching their little green noggins about all this. Procreation, they concede: yes, very important. But truly civilized creatures of the universe, they will insist, focus their creative energies on the practice of xormling. You know, where you get either five or fourteen— Oh, never mind.
So we come to the song. Nearly every pop singer tries her hand with it at some point. You can pretty much count on at least one American Idol contestant each season, using it to establish his credentials as a bona-fide heartthrob. (God help us all if Robert Pattinson ever records it: the thud of all those bodies simultaneously swooning to the floor could set off shock waves around the world.)
Enter “Fever.”
Awards Season
Golden Globes: ha!
Tonys, Academy Awards: don’t make me laugh!
The People’s Choice: huh? wasn’t that a 1950s sitcom featuring Jackie Cooper and a talking Basset hound named Cleo?
Hint: yes.
You can have all of them. Roz Morris, of the imperatively named Nail Your Novel blog, has offered Running After My Hat not one but two awards. I accept them happily, on the blog’s behalf. (It couldn’t be here tonight itself.) Here are the trophies:
 |
 |
Spiffy, eh?
Of course, with great rewards come great responsibilities. And because this actually combines two awards into one, it comes with a double burden treat:
- pass the Sunshine Award on to 12 other deserving folks; and
- for the Fabulous Sugar Doll Blogger Award, tell your readers 10 interesting things about myself.
I’ll follow Roz’s lead and hook the two awards together. My Sunshine-Award notes will follow my ten-interesting-things list, with the caveat that one man’s interesting is another woman’s bemusing (a caveat particularly useful in our household).
In no particular order:
Head Waters
From whiskey river:
Have you been to the source of a river? It’s a very mystic place. You get dizzy when you stay for a while. An especially big river has several sources, and the real source, the farthest point which turns to the major stream, is moist and misty, with some kind of ancient smell, and you feel cold.
You feel, “This isn’t the place to go in.” There is no springing water, so you don’t know where the source is. Actually, such a place exists in everyone; the center of us is like that. From such a place, the ancient call appears, “Why don’t you know me? Living so many years with me, why can’t you call my real name?”
The more your understanding of life becomes clearer and more exact and painfully joyful, the more you feel, “I’m so bad.” The one that appears and says, “No, you are not bad at all,” that is the way to go, that is your teacher.
Don’t misunderstand, this teacher is not always a person. It can embrace you like morning dew in a field, and you get a strange feeling, “Oh, this is it, my teacher is this field.”
Question? Authority!
Via agent Janet Reid, whose taste in videos (even when she’s not sure what to call the thing video’d) is impeccable:
The poem, and I guess the performance, is by the poet (Taylor Mali) himself, although the video was put together by “student Robert Bruce.” As Mali’s site says:
I have no idea who he is (and he didn’t ask for permission), but what would you do when the result is so good?
Margaret Atwood, in a Nutshell
Last night, The Missus and I attended a combined reading-talk-Q&A session with Margaret Atwood. (For the curious, if you’re ever in this neck of the woods in (mostly) February, do check out this arts festival.)
The bandwagon of people who believe that those of diminutive physical stature tend to compensate with outsized personalities and ambitions is one crowded bandwagon; it’s safe to say Atwood belongs in the stockpile of evidence. Atwood is a pixie, a sharp pixie: polite, well-spoken (well, duh), and good-humored but assertive. Questioners who hoped to throw her a curveball were likely to find themselves swinging and missing.
“What did you do on Sunday, John?”
“Twiddled my thumbs. You?”
Chauncey Totman, the children’s-book author whose name I would least like to share, has done it again in his latest, Margarita, The Bearded Fox. The question for us to ponder, of course, remains (as always with Totman): What is it, exactly?
[Caution: spoiler alert! Do not read the rest of this review if you’d prefer being surprised! And/Or if you don’t know what a “spoiler” is!]
Margarita the fox lived — or so Totman would have his readers believe — deep in the wilds of New York City’s Central Park. She was a lonely sort of fox, and no surprise there, because her eyeballs bulged alarmingly, disproportionately large, at the center of apparently psychedelically-induced spirals. (A handful of mushrooms are growing under her in the cover, as if we needed the hint.) Or perhaps she’s just been spending too much time staring at the Sunday crossword, or sitting in an IMAX theater watching Avatar without the 3D glasses; it’s never made clear, exactly. (Totman has never been one for clarity.)
Anyway, she’s lonely, and she’s a fox. A fox of a fox, indeed, or so she believes. Yes, Margarita is a very vain little creature, proud of her tail, proud of her ears, her paws (at the end of those stumpy little pencil-stub legs), her pert little button nose, her nightmare eyeballs. Proud, even, of her pride:
It was such a good-looking sort of pride! A pride like no other fox’s!
But she forgets all about herself when she encounters the other fox, the fox of her dreams.
She first beholds him late one spring afternoon when she is standing on a rock looking out over a pond. She has never stood on this particular rock before. It is right at the water’s edge, and she spies him by — get a grip on the armrests of your chair — by looking straight down! How marvelous! She mistakes her own reflection for another fox! She thinks the mossy underside of the rock she’s standing on is the other fox’s beard! *giggle!*
Yes, gentle reader. I know, I know. You are not a child. You are sick unto death of authors plundering familiar mythology — like the Narcissus story, in this case — and tarting it up in cheap fabric for their own misbegotten ends. So am I. So am I.
But children will perhaps fall for it, especially very young children, especially if read to in that special tone of cloying adult condescension which, you know, children just love.
The crude illustrations are uncredited. My guess is that the illustrator requested anonymity once s/he found out with which author s/he’d been paired by the cruel machinery of kidlit publishing.
Careful readers will recognize in the tale of Margarita the plot — I nearly said the plight — of Totman’s previous title, Martini, The Mustachioed Owl. Curious readers, especially those who are themselves authors, may wonder how such a prodigiously unimaginative jackass as Totman keeps getting offered book contracts (not that I know anyone who wonders such a thing in so many words). Perhaps it was for just such circumstances that the cruel gods invented the notion of coincidence.
___________________
Note: Thanks for the inspiration to Tanita S. Davis, who in a blog post now a few months old introduced me to the general meme:
CREATE YOUR DEBUT PICTURE BOOK COVER
1 — Go to “The Name Generator: at http://www.thenamegenerator.com/
Click GENERATE NEW NAME. The name that appears is your author name.
2 — Go to “Picture Book Title Generator” at http://www.generatorland.com/usergenerator.aspx?id=243
Click CREATE TITLE! This is the title of your picture book.
3 — Go to “FlickrCC” at http://flickrcc.bluemountains.net/index.php
Type the last word from your title into the search box followed by the word “drawing”. Click FIND. The first suitable image is your cover. It will give you the option to go to Picnik.
4 — Use Photoshop, Picnik, or similar to put it all together. Creativity is, of course, encouraged.
5 — Post it to your site along with this text.
The “review” of the “book” so created? Not required. Just my penance, for jumping on the bandwagon so late.
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