A Career of Work or Art?

This picture is of Rudy and Gabe. Check out more photos at Pamela Follett photography.

In a recent discussion with JB came up the topic if we had only spent more time at our art than at our business life would we be further along with our art?

What struck me mostly about the conversation was that we were both fairly serious about the topic, for each of us individually from the vantage of our own experience and perspective. We did not so much argue to convince each other as to compare notes. It is a question that I have to admit, has plagued me for many decades.

At a time in my life when I wanted nothing more than to write I made a deliberate choice NOT to go to college in order to study literature or creative writing. The sentiment then was, and continues to be, that a writer gains most from engagement with life and that the learning to write part comes of the persistence of desire to write.

I have always felt that what I really need to know in life is out and about to be shared by people that we meet, encounter, eat with, live and work with, if only we remember to pay attention. Which brings up that for me writing, art is mainly about paying attention, to be as fully conscious in life as we are able.

Too many years back a Snap-On tool salesman that we were building a fireplace for told me that when we need to know something we will figure out a way to know it. To me this is education by enlightenment, to seek the light of understanding and clarity. I want to know, therefore I will know.

Then another friend of mine, Jeff, who had gone on to college on to an MFA and eventually gained a position to teach art at a college, in a manner to recycle what they had learned, along their path told me that if I had gone to college I would be, as they said, 10 years further along in my writing. That was interesting, it caused me to stumble along for a while trying to parse it out. Ten years ahead of what?

They pointed at a particular Yale Younger Poet that was popular that year. “See, like her.” I followed Sylvia’s career that flamed down to Nicaragua or wherever the theme drove her passion then within like three years she vanished. I have never heard nor seen of her since. Ten years ahead of total obscurity? I am already quite comfortable in obscurity and see no reason for the expense of special training.

“Everyone puts their history into their work.” Erik Spiekermann, type designer quoted from the movie Helvetica.

This quote brings in a fold to my logic and I trust that you will make the leap to follow me. JB and I also share in that in our lives we do business, each to our own and at times we do business together, and for the most part what a majority of our network of friends and associates see us as is ‘in business’ and not necessarily first as artists and second as carpenters or stonemasons. Granted there are a few friends that know us only as artists and that we do ‘other stuff’ but for the most part people know us for our business.

When we are at a party, a social gathering, we do not say, “I am a painter.” Or “I am a poet.” In my case I fumble out, “I fix old buildings.” For the most part I cannot explain what I do in one or two sentences and I tend to give up quickly. Follow me and you will see what I do. If you cannot see it then I cannot particularly help you to see it.

The other night a charming young lady told me that I come across as lame, as if I had just fallen off a truck.

Regardless, there are folks who will come to a party and when you first up ask them what do they DO… they will tell you that they are a singer, or an actress, or a sculptor, whatever and when you hang with them long enough you find out what they do is laundry, or carpentry to ‘fill in’ until the big break, or their family owns a chain of cardboard box factories in Minnesota. I have always found this phenomena in part a ‘wanna be’ and I am delighted most when the person who introduces themselves as an auto mechanic when one day you discover, best if by accident, that they are making these fantastic off-the-wall sculptures out of dead bumpers in the alley behind the station. At heart I am an iconoclast.

So it comes to this, that though I share and admire the desire to be further along in our art, I do not quite understand what it means to be further along in life, short of acceleration along the route toward eventual termination and that it is the totality of our life experience that when we sit down to write, or paint or make a little movie, informs our craft, leastways if we are awake, paying attention, and conscious of our being alive.

So I cannot at heart separate out the hours, days, and months of busting stone with a sledge hammer as being some ‘other’ diversionary route to getting to here, where I am as I write this. I was very happy busting stone and it was in the moment of each strike of the sledge that I was conscious. As with some folks that like to freshen up their golf swing, I enjoy the occasion to go out and refresh my stone busting, if only for the reminiscence of ‘in the day’.

Shyness aside even the question as to what mask, poet or stonemason or foolish clown, that we will wear becomes folded into the work.

Living With the Truth -- summer reading, novel

In a mode of mythic comedy Jonathan Payne, a second-hand bookseller with a small shop at the seaside town of Rigby (we presume an imaginary Scotland seaside with Atlantic waters dashed against brisk stony cliffs and not along the flatness of Route 20 in Idaho, though Idaho would make an interesting second) is visited by Truth who undertakes to reveal his (Truth for each of us being manifested in the gender we see in ourselves) personality and quirks of taste insofar as what Truth considers that truth needs to be as it is revealed for Jonathan Payne.

There can be too much, or too little of truth in all our lives, and the author, my friend Jim Murdoch with great care, deliberation and crafted talent brings this range of truth for Jonathan Payne out into the open and on to the stage of our imaginations. This is brought about through fairly excellent characterization in such a manner that as the narrative progresses we increasingly share in the well-rounded portrayal of Jonathan Payne – he becomes infectious as he grasps our reading sympathy, with chuckles here and there -- and we are also caught up by the somewhat quirky and nearly trickster personality of Truth. Who would not enjoy Truth without a dash of the sardonic?

“Narrative allegory is distinguished from mythology as reality from symbol; it is, in short, the proper intermedium between person and personification. Where it is too strongly individualized, it ceases to be allegory; this is often felt in the Pilgrim's Progress, where the characters are real persons with nicknames.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge on the Art of Edmund Spenser

I quote that above from Coleridge on Spenser as the personification of Truth brings into range our consciousness of allegory, or sign and symbol as a character that is Truth is like a sign… in that an author could build a premise on the characterization of Stop Sign… a sort of neoPlatonic kind of post-modernism -- but more importantly that I like reading Edmund Spenser and Coleridge and at the risk of inflating Mr. Murdoch’s sense of his place (Scotland and not Idaho) it is against the backdrop of this literary context within which I read his novel.

I am not exactly sure, I figure when I look into it, if Living with the Truth is allegory or a parable or exactly what?

It is fun and it does cause one to pause and think. Mr. Payne, the protagonist, seems to have a peculiar fixation on the observation of women’s breasts. The truth revealed to me is that I cannot wander around nowadays looking about in the summer weather of Manhattan without reflecting on this character attribute. This offsets my general observation that the majority of people in the world, myself included, look really unfit for magazine covers.

It seems that though Truth may be present, and often bringing about disconcerting revelations to Jonathan about Jonathan, particularly in respect of his sexual proclivities, that truth is not necessarily overbearing and/or inclined to reveal more than a person can bear to handle.

In no manner does Living with the Truth go quite so far as the German author Charlotte Roche, “a headlong dash through every crevice and byproduct, physical and psychological, of its narrator’s body and mind” (courtesy of Nicholas Kulish in the NY Times 06/06/08). Truth in a very kindly manner spares us such physical intimacy.

Truth though often thought of as cold and dispassionate can be sweetly considerate and when not harassing the protagonist with revelations of previously unrevealed reality at times serves as a remarkable foil to reveal the authors sense of ironic humor, “And then she made the fatal mistake of looking him in the face. Oh, dear. It was an erotic work, whose author had greater aspirations for it than it rightly deserved. He was now working on a chicken farm days while the sequel lay in various stages of production on jotters around his lodgings.”

Considering that Jim Murdoch, a frequently erudite blogger on scenes literary (much about Beckett) does not, as far as I know, work on a chicken farm. So even with Truth present there is a hint of modest Dissimulation lurking in the outer hallway.

The comment on it being an erotic work that the spinster peruser of the bookshelves in the second-hand bookshop in her encounter with the eyes of Truth reminds me of an x-brother-in-law, a Brit who suddenly aspired one day to become a novelist, after having had a dab as a painter, and seemed to delight in talking out his most poignant scenes of bodice ripping ecstasy having to do something with the integration of coloured purses. Then he as suddenly moved away with another woman than any I am related with. This personal note regarding a known character all lends credence, in my estimation, to Mr. Murdoch’s ability to paint a fictional character with veracity.

A most difficult revelation it seems for Jonathan is that Truth personifies another person than Jonathan himself who knows exactly what Jonathan knows of himself and assumes is known only by him… with a dash here and there into things known or to be known as True or False in the world at large, mainly these objectives being delicate mirrors with which to further portray Jonathan’s personal insularity and narcissism in the distancing of and his self-imposed removal from personal relationships.

Jonathan is essentially a character who does not want his innermost secrets or secretions known not only to himself, but particularly not by another human, leastways, as human as Truth can be seen to be. Suddenly here in his life is this stranger who knows more of what Jonathan keeps to himself as secret, either to himself or to the world, than Jonathan is accustomed to share.

Purchase directly from the publisher: Living With the Truth, Jim Murdoch, Fandango Virtual

Do we read what we wear?

“this war of ideas is no less bloody than the one being fought by our troops in the Middle East.” Norman Podhoretz

In our local 7-11 (chain convenience store) on Lung Island where sometimes I stop on a morning to buy coffee & buttered roll, there is a young woman clerk that made a disconcerting comment on my purchase of a NY Times some months ago. I immediately felt defensive and assumed she was being a bit snide about my reading habits. In some places in the US the thinking is that the NY Times is a liberal commie newspaper. I am always wary that I don't want to look more intelligent than a carpenter or plumber when I am out and about. I dress for the most part in an appropriate manner with a philosophical grounding in Thoreau -- that at least is why I continue to enjoy wearing work pants with paint on them and holes in inconvenient places. Carpenters and plumbers are not known to read the NY Times. In the exchange our skeptical clerk told me her boyfriend was rooting for Giuliani -- I said that I was waiting to see if he flunked out. I made some quip about a preference for McClain if it had to be. That was the day Giuliani did drop out. I find it difficult not to express on my face whenever his name is brought up that I believe Giuliani is a pompous ass.

Giuliani said in a New Yorker interview that he was reading Norman Podhoretz’s World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism. Well, wanting to better understand the phenomena known as Rudy Giuliani, and actually being fairly open to whatever arguments the ‘conservatives’ have to put out, I read the book. Best I can say for the book is that it is not very long and thus fairly easy to carry around. Despite that Podhoretz advocates that we ream Iran a new butthole before the end of the current administration, which was dangerous enough to think that this is the intellectual influence that Giuliani cites… the book is not even good beach reading. Podhoretz does not much more for me than illustrate that at this point in his career that he is a muddle-brained intellectual imbecile. He may have been before this just that I never bothered to check. If this is an example of the brain not on drugs he should go back a few decades and start over?

Beware what you read into this sentence?

His arguments did convince me, though, that we are still playing in World War II and that to say otherwise is something of a political fallacy… kind of like when the president proclaims Mission Accomplished. Or when a former president claimed that the Cold War was over. It is convenient for the expediency to have these markers and milestones, like the War on Drugs, or the War on Terror…. I mean, does this crap ever stop?

Regardless, when I stopped in recently at the 7-11 I had forgot that I was wearing a sweat that said something to the effect, "Too many books, not enough time." It was under my coat that was unzipped open, so one had to actually try to read it. She liked what it said, and expressed to me that she likes to read what people wear. In the mornings she is faced with a constant flow of men and women making a stop on their rush to work, "Next!" It is not a particularly opportune time to strike up a conversation. Here up to this point I was worried she might take offense at my libertarian attitudes and spike my coffee with strychnine -- lightly brushed off her fingernails, of course. So the last visit, and with my coffee buttered roll and NY Times, I apologized to her that I had not thought to wear anything to read.

The place where I live, and enjoy for the very fact of it, is one where if a person is seen in public with a book it is comparable in social effect to a vampire killer walking around with a bible, a cross and gun with silver bullet. For me I feel it is a perfect place for a writer to hide.

But I like the idea that a person with a minimum wage job would be so turned on to reading that they would be conscious to read what is on the front of my chest. For that alone I want to go out and find something kool to read.

In consideration of how bloody the war of ideas is how about, “WWV Veteran, Read My Blog”

A Writer's Mark

The photo here is of mason’s marks that I recently found cut into the stone of a church in Kielce, Poland. I am not exactly sure of the year. Mason’s marks essentially identified the journeyman who had set the stone in order for their work to be quantified and paid. Compare this to Dickens, who did not have a computer or a typewriter being paid by the word and thus stretching out his word count by hand. Compare this to Richard Kostelanetz publishing a large X wherever large Xs will appear. In the case of the mason’s mark it was the cut of the stone set that required a chisel, along with physical effort to make their literary impression, as minimalist as it appears. This marking in stone is similar, but different, to marriage marks in timber framing.

I had a recent experience riding on the train and writing in my notebook a flash about the woman sitting next to me and made a point to write it out rather terribly lest she look and notice that I was writing about her. I later had trouble transcribing the text onto the computer. My eyesight and handwriting, particularly when I want to be illegible, and to be illegible to my neighbor I need to make sure that I am illegible to myself, seem to compete in their rate of deterioration.

I have multiple notebooks, and multiple pens... not fixated so much on any one of them but wanting to have them available to grab when needed. I follow a similar policy of at-hand to grab anywhere profusion of reading glasses scattered around the house. It is one thing to enjoy the physical process of writing by hand, another to be able to see it.

If I attend a meeting, or have a business phone call I tend to write notes during the entire communication process. I like to use different pads for different purposes and I identify them as objects associated with their use by their differences in shape, color, size, covers or weight. Currently for phone calls I like to use a small 5x8" pad with graph squares on it. I used to use letter size pads and it made a difference to me, to how I felt for as long as the pad would last, if I was using yellow, white or green. I have years of phone conversations writ down... I rarely if ever look at them after I have written them. I tend to remember what I have written down by hand, either long script or most often in a crude architectural block print. Choice of style does depend if I want to be able to later understand what I wrote. I have learned to have active conversations and write at the same time. These days I tend after a month or so to burn the notes. There is way too much paper behind me and it has become a life management problem to deal with not letting go of it. I push toward a paperless ideal and scan paper for filing on the computer. The effort to scan and file placing a practical value on what it is that I bother or get around to store. As I remarked recently, I store my older paperwork in the basement where it floods in spring and slowly the ink and the paper dissolves and floats away into the sump, into the earth beneath me.

My preference in pen is currently 0.5 mm needle tip ball liquid gel in black ink. I am extremely fussy about writing instruments though not fixated on having just one of one type, but multiples for multiple uses and intentions. A mechanical pencil, certainly for marking up construction drawings. And then all the fun color markers. And we need to keep in mind the special uses of red ink. I have never been one much for fountain pens. I have certainly played with them and quill pens dipped in the ink over the years. I would never, excepting for Jim Murdoch bringing it to my attention, consider to write a novel or a short story by long hand. I am used to not having the paper handy, not too easy to use a pad and pen while driving, and tend to compose in my head and then go direct to the computer. Then again, I can see that taking a text that I have put on the computer then writing it out in longhand may be a manner in which to by-pass blockages that occur where the brain goes dead.

I have been fascinated over the thinking as to if one should sign their name in black or blue ink. There seem to be arguments, some of them stridently held, as to either color being the most appropriate.

I am reading a book by Samuel Ray Delany, Jr., he has me caught, where in an essay on para-literary canon he remarks on the advent of typing that made possible more writers, combined with linotype that made access to publication more prevalent, and how the sudden surge of texts produced required that some literary genres be partitioned off into their own zones, such as sci-fi, romance, mystery, horror etc. and now we find ourselves in the midst of a blossoming of computer enabled text with internet distribution... it will be interesting for someone to see what compartmentalization occurs in an attempt to rationalize and manage a profusion of spontaneously generated text... many of them rather short and vapid.

Recently also I have been networking with two non-writer friends that know Wendell Berry with a vague idea on my part that I would like to eventually meet him. There are not too many writers that I actually want to go talk with in person, he is one of them. Usually I go and listen, sit in the corner and listen. There is an argument that writing is a separation from the human interface of dialog, of two humans taking the time to be in the same place on earth at the same time. In the case of Wendell Berry I would like to be able to say, “Hi.”

“I am not going to use a computer because I don't want to deny myself the pleasure of bodily involvement in my work. In using computers writers are flirting with a radical separation of mind and body, the elimination of the work of the body from the work of the mind. The text on the computer screen, and the computer printout too, has a sterile, untouched, factory made look... The body does not do work like that. The body characterizes everything it touches. What it makes it traces over with the marks of its pulses and breathings, its excitements, hesitations, flaws and mistakes... And to those of us who love and honor the life of the body in this world, these marks are precious things, necessities of life.”

Though I very much, with a stone masonry background, appreciate the tactile intelligence of hand to pen to paper I do believe that there is a transcendence of perspective that does not need to inhibit one as a writer from a quality and interest or depth of emotional context for text composed direct to computer.

What I do believe though is that if a writer is intent on slowing down, as seems to be a valid argument for not using a computer, then they should consider a habit to work their words in stone by hand, I mean, nowadays even stone masons fabricate with computer driven carving machines that tend to erase their involvement and identity as human individuals.

Panorama of Krakow, Poland from roof of Rubenstein Hotel, April 2008

Panorama of Krakow, Poland from roof of Rubenstein Hotel, April 2008
Originally uploaded by Follett Group
PODCAST Radio Free Preservation: Poland, April 2008

Flash in Human Scale

Flash fiction: extreme brevity?

I have a few close friends who have ADD. They are good readers, perceptive of their world, and fairly intelligent. They simply cannot pay attention to any specific focus for very long. What strikes me most about conversations with them is that though they literally cannot stay on any one topic, and their attention span seems to vary in duration for no discernible reason, my impression of their reality, if seen from my sloggy connected perspective, is a stroboscopic display of unrelated flashes of consciousness.

It is possible to have an extended conversation with them as long as one is willing and able to jump to a multiple number of unrelated topics then return to the background thread. Seems to me this provides a jump point for thoughts about a novel of aggregate flash. Many short segments, like postage stamps all intimate in their own contained frame of reference. Like with pudding stone, many pebbles conglomerate to make one stone.

Sometimes it is possible to capture the attention of flitters and they stay with the flow longer. Sometimes it is like you hit a wall where the conversation abruptly will not go any farther on that topic. This can be a sudden stop. The stop can be disconcerting, and often it looks as if the ADD participant is in actual pain if you do not jump with them swiftly. Quite often, for them in their reading experience an extended 'plot' is extraneous as they won't last that long to follow it. Or, the plot is well integrated to the writing and sustains the focus. How?

Though the disconnect between one topic of conversation and another seems just that, a disconnect, if one is inclined to try to see patterns in chaos then it comes to a constant wonder as to what relationships there are to the disparate topics. The refreshment is that in the conversation new constructions occur over and over. For the ADD afflicted individual their pleasure is to have someone that is willing to try to have a conversation with them on their terms. I also have friends who are functional schizophrenic. I like to talk with them too.

As what I bring up in conversation here applies to flash fiction, and the idea of flash as an end in itself, or as an extension to other modes of text, or as a direction of literature in general I think along the following lines:

For any individual, with ADD or not, as the volume of information increases that an individual is confronted with, as media pushes for the attention, there tends to be a survival mechanism that kicks in that even for the most fluent of any of us we begin to either reject information (we stop listening), or we push to absorb more information, and in many respects we take on behavior to process reception of information in a manner that is not ADD (rather than a neuro-biological issue it is one of defense against environment overload), but very much mimics ADD. This information afflicted individual, I presume, is the hard core audience for flash fiction.

I combine this with the number of people who complain to me that they do not want to get two page e-mails. Or that blog entries are best kept to extreme brevity. Flash is possibly connected with the restrictions of keeping an e-mail to a length that fits on one screen without need to scroll?

I am reading About Writing, Samuel R. Delany, and at one point he states that the functionally literate population is more than 50 times the size it was in 1814. That is really not all that long ago particularly if one reflects on the exploding star that was reported in the news yesterday... the furthest away visible object to the human eye. I told my wife I would jump up and go look before I fade out. I digress. An exploding star is a flash, no? If we can see it unaided then that distance of measure must be within human scale.

Regardless, if we consider the number of humans who are able to read English (not even to venture into the multiplicity of wonderful languages available to us or to discern the American sect from UK variants) it seems clear that the psychological make-up of readers would become more and more diverse. In this it seems to me that regardless of means of publication or media of distribution that there will be a dedicated readership for flash fiction.

As to if anyone can sustain a living wage out of that as a writer, or not, is yet to be seen.

The Sex Talk - New York

In regard to the recent spate of sexual peccadilloes of Eliot Spitzer there was an article buried in the NY Times where parents were interviewed on how they were caught having to explain Spitzer to their children. So in another context came up the question as to how do you deliver the sex talk to your children, and/or how did we get the talk ourselves from a parental unit?

I was like ten when my stepfather took me aside in the kitchen and asked me if I ever felt funny down there.

I thought about it and said, yeah, when I slide down the wild grape vines in the woods.

See, wild grapevines can grow quite sturdy and we had a lot of them and pretended like Tarzan to climb on them then slide down. I imagine now as I am older that Tarzan probably had a woody most of the time from his vine interactions and that it was not always about Jane or fun with chimpanzees. Regardless, I had no clue what my stepfather was talking about.

So he went on to tell me about a carrot and a vase. The carrot goes in the vase. The carrot comes out of the vase. I have trouble eating carrots without remembering this talk. I suspect that is why at our house we tend to stick with baby carrots for snacks so that I don’t feel quite as challenged in that department, you know.

Then there was something about birds and bees. Bees stick their nose in flowers? Birds have their own rules of conduct? I had no clue what he was talking about.

By that time I had read segments of the Marquis de Sade that I found in the drawer next to his side of the bed. I did not understand that either. There was also the stuff that came in the mail in the brown envelopes. That was always curious. But it was not always enlightening as to biological functions.

He told my mother later when she asked how the talk went that I seemed to understand. I've got real good at acting like I know what the hell you are talking about when I don't know diddly. You all may have noticed?

I asked my younger brother (not exactly my parental unit) and he explained the whole thing. In anatomical detail.

So, w/ our recent governor's indiscretion my brother calls me up and asks me how many governors does it take to break up a prostitution ring?

That was the first zinger. Next he wants to know who in the world can afford $4,000 for sex? I imagine if money is no object. If you got it, blow it.

He says he could not get away with spending $400 without his wife figuring it out. I tell, him, make that $40 and I'm willing to advance a loan.

He lives in Texas... I tell him it is not fair Texan upstarts pick on NY governors. His quip, Texans export their morons.

I tell my brother if he ever wants to make it in politics he is going to have to figure out how to pay for sex, no, I mean, pay more for sex.

So then he wants to know was it like $1,200 per minute? His wife told him it was probably more like $2,000 per minute. She drives a hard bargain. As a family we are proud of our thriftiness and can-do-more-with-less attitude.

See, my conversation w/ my brother as to 'what is sex' continues into our post-sex later years.

I don't believe that repression of sexuality, or taboo of the subject, should be handled in such a rigid manner that when there is a revolt or a breaking out that the person feels compelled to go over the hill with it all.

Spitzer would be a whole lot better off as a human if he had been able to come home and say to his wife, "I'm going down to DC and get laid. Is that ok?" As it is -- though he may have had political power it seems he did not have any power over himself.

Willie has issues with himself too.

I do tend to wonder to what extent our cultural perceptions of individuality have to play in our perceptions of how these political folks are seen as individuals with problems, as opposed to units within a social network that is screwed up, as to if it is individual ambition or social structure that leads these folks to come to where they are in the political spectrum and to end up to do what they do sexually.

What did Spitzer's Daddy tell him?