JOLLY DAYS, an artist's journal

Creative work often strays so far from its source material that it sometimes is interesting to revisit the original inspiration.

This site notes the White Horse Tavern was the source of “Those Were the Days,” a beautiful, wistful song. The tavern was a meeting place for Allen Ginsberg, Jim Morrison, James Baldwin, both great “Dylans,” Bob and Dylan Thomas; Dylan Thomas’ given name was taken as honorific by Bob Zimmerman .

Creative work mixes “reality,” whatever that is, with the temperament (“Art is life filtered through a temperament.” —Zola) with the evanescent grasp of memory.

Wikipedia quotes Dylan Thomas,

I should say I wanted to write poetry in the beginning because I had fallen in love with words. The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes and before I could read them for myself I had come to love the words of them. The words alone. What the words stood for was of a very secondary importance. [...] I fell in love, that is the only expression I can think of, at once, and am still at the mercy of words, though sometimes now, knowing a little of their behavior very well, I think I can influence them slightly and have even learned to beat them now and then, which they appear to enjoy. I tumbled for words at once. And, when I began to read the nursery rhymes for myself, and, later, to read other verses and ballads, I knew that I had discovered the most important things, to me, that could be ever.

It’s funny how profound those early encounters with the medium are for artists. I remember how I loved cartoons in the newspaper when I was young. I also remember, like Dylan Thomas, my reaction was purely aesthetic. I would study the lines and forms in cartoons with an infatuation that had nothing to do with content. I knew something was different in my reaction from that of my friends, for whom it was just a good laugh — although I had no idea why I felt that way. The pure sensual beauty of the lines and the magic of the suggestive images enthralled.

Wiki also notes that a monument to Dylan Thomas has an inscription from his work:

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

“Though I sang in my chains like the sea.” Fantastic.

[via drawn]

Art is a support system for life, not the other way around.
—Stephen King

[spoilers alert]

Stieg Larsson’s books and the movies made from them are an extraordinarily popular phenomenon. We haven’t read the books, but have just seen the two “Girl Who/With…,” Millennium movies. I’m not sure if the real interest is Larsson’s work itself or in the, perhaps, self-replicating popularity — 27 million copies of his books sold — that does fascinate.

Sweden has a Nazi past folded into its halcyon reputation. In fact, it turns out there is currently a creepy skinhead presence in Sweden. So much for New Age beautiful people swathed in health care hardly harming a fly fantasies.

Larsson was a communist and avid feminist. The original title of the Dragon Tattoo was Men Who Hate Women. Oddly, Larsson’s money was not left to his long time lover, but to the Communist party.

Hitchens notes about the Gothic subject matter:

… child slavery and exploitation … are evoked with perhaps slightly too much relish by the crusading Blomkvist.

His best excuse for his own prurience is that these serial killers and torture fanciers are practicing a form of capitalism and that their racket is protected by a pornographic alliance with a form of Fascism, its lower ranks made up of hideous bikers and meth runners. This is not just sex or crime—it’s politics!

The movies are tightly plotted, satisfyingly convoluted, and simple fun in their characterizations. The damaged grrrl genius hacker and the sad journalist teeming up as the familiar unlikely duo to do in the bad guys.

The second movie gets as Goth as main character Lisbeth Salander herself, who crawls out of a grave at one point. As in most victim movies, the victim is a flailing karate windmill, defeating nearly all but a monster man with an affliction — he feels no pain.

Jonathan Franzen’s appearance on PBSs News Hour was the first extended interview I had seen with him. (I went back and listened to his pre and post-Oprah Fresh Air interviews.) And now he is on the cover of Time magazine. A novelist. His doubts about appearing on Oprah skyrocketed the sales of a former book. Ironic the way things work. Oprah-discord itself attracts audience more than presumed value.

I sympathized with Franzen’s frustrations with the current indifference to serious art. He felt, as I feel about painting in its own realm of imagery, that novels present a world that cannot be told or experienced any other way; in the instance of images, even expressed well in words. Norman Mailer had despaired years before this deprecating of the serious novel. Mailer felt that the novel would become, like poetry, something “very special.” Reading a novel becoming an hors d’œuvre in the media stream — high display behavior  — like going to to France to “get kulchah.”

Franzen on PBS had the same depressive, unshaven presence as David Foster Wallace had on Charlie Rose. In fact, Franzen it turns out, was a close friend of Wallace and feels deeply the loss of his dear friend. Unlike Mailer, or Updike, writers whom Wallace had gratuitously denigrated, neither Franzen nor Wallace are or were much of an interview. Their use of language does not surprise and delight as one might expect of a writer. Words are the craft material and joy in those words expresses a separation of the craftsman from the artist. But, making allowance, spoken language and writing are different — it doesn’t reflect on the value of either’s talents — although it does make one take wary note.

Franzen is experiencing the dilemma of the serious artist in a celebrity culture; of serious work presented to an audience used to quantum information morsels; bits and bytes of shallow easy to digest distraction poured into passive ears. It is admirable Franzen is still fighting the good fight — and feels it worth it.

Here are Franzen’s ten rules for writing fiction:

1 The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.

2 Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.

3 Never use the word “then” as a conjunction – we have “and” for this purpose. Substituting “then” is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solution to the problem of too many “ands” on the page.

4 Write in the third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice ­offers itself irresistibly.

5 When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.

6 The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto biographical story than “The Meta­morphosis”.

7 You see more sitting still than chasing after.

8 It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

9 Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.

10 You have to love before you can be relentless.

The brilliant TV writer Matt Weiner noted in his commentary on one of the Mad Men DVDs that the Irving Berlin song, What’ll I Do, used at the end of one episode, was written about the death of Berlin’s wife.

It’s a beautiful and touching song, but the revelation deepened the resonance of the song enormously. As presented it is a song about the loss of a love to another, but if Weiner is correct, it is a transformative song, where the lyric,

What’ll I do with just a photograph
To tell my troubles to?

When I’m alone
With only dreams of you
That won’t come true
What’ll I do?

evokes more than melancholy longing.

Mad Men has turned out, after watching DVD after DVD from Netflix, to live up to its pop reputation. Rare. Weiner has a sense of human interaction and the space it needs to reverberate.

The caveat would be that it is an unnecessarily depressing show, losing focus as it, perhaps, becomes too fastidious about being “true to the times.” Mad Men not only focuses on a repressed time in America, where tradition meant social suppression (and might come to mean the same in our time, given the current political climate and its drive toward “traditional values”), but it makes no effort to go beyond that default.

The 1950s/60s is an easy target for an anything-goes first decade of 2000. People lived in the ’50s and were joyful, must have been filled with charm and laughter from time to time. But the only fun as presented by Mad Men (at least to near the end of Season 2) was desperate extra-marital sex and drinking out of depression — if you believe the show. The show would have had more depth and less the feeling of shooting fish in a barrel if it had extended its understanding to the value those times might have had for those embedded in that time-wrapped wave of American reality.

And are we really in 2010 in a position to look down on other periods? Today TV news had floods that were close to Biblical in the size of the area hit, if not power; the news portrayed shrieking emotionally unstable “candidates” and an extremely depressing story about the toxic effects of homophobia and bullying meme culture at a “good school.”

Christopher Hitchens’ sad rhyming with the malady that did in his father — esophageal cancer — was brought to the fore movingly, and in that strange manner of contemporary life, publicly, as Hitchens almost appeared to be making the rounds in this dire moment. He was on video at CNN, at the Atlantic, and discussed at length on Charlie Rose by Martin Amis.

Amis has a natural gravitas and, as usual, was beautiful in his use of language. Hitchens is lucky to have Amis as a friend. We have both our experience, which we define as our life, but also the spirit existence that our presence inhabits in the memory and thoughts of others. Amis’ mental universe provides generous accommodation to Hitchens. Amis made clear how dear a loss Hitchens’ passing would be for him.

Their friendship goes back. Hitchens regards Amis as the greater of the two — Hitchens is the self-described smaller fish. Hitchens is right. Amis is a novelist and artist and Hitchens is a commentator. A wonderful commentator, and fine writer, but still the field delimits the achievement. Hitchens is only 61, far too young for a prognosis he indicates is little likely to be longer than five years. Of course, it is always too young, always too soon.

Hitchens himself, it is gratifying to say, is still at his best in a short, beautifully written recent essay @Vanity Fair about his experience.

On the land of the sick,

Everybody smiles encouragingly and there appears to be absolutely no racism. A generally egalitarian spirit prevails, and those who run the place have obviously got where they are on merit and hard work. As against that, the humor is a touch feeble and repetitive, there seems to be almost no talk of sex, and the cuisine is the worst of any destination I have ever visited.

Hitchens had been a long time smoker and as many who work on their own, at home, driven by a heartless boss,

I suppose, I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.

On receiving chemo,

You feel swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water.

Hitchens can be alternately abrasive and oily, true to his upbringing, with a mother who wished he be part of the upper class “if there is to be one,” and a father who disliked the upper and working classes equally. Hitchens brings a respectability and artfulness to dispute and made the debate more meaningful. By nature he is not a rebel, as Amis would have it, but a provocateur. But Amis is correct in saying Hitchens is a brave man.

I write this as if he were gone, but he is here, and if not “fighting a battle,” a phrase he points out is unique to cancer, he is hardy in spirit both in the videos and his writing — may Hitchens have many years before him to contribute and thrive.

I had always been disappointed that Helen Vendler, a wonderful writer about poetry, did not use a more conversational voice in her book about Shakespeare’s Sonnets, which is linked in the navigation column on this page.

Her writing over the years for the NYRB was always accessible, without the lingo of academia, which often obscures more than reveals. Her deep understanding of the mechanics, and she would probably argue, further appreciation therefore of the value of what she discusses, wasn’t for me a great read.

But she is a subtle thinker, an insightful critic, and no small issue, has her own value system which won’t be subsumed to fashion. So even the Shakespeare book had great interest.

In this NYT review of a book by a poet filled with enthusiasm for his subject, Walt Whitman, Vendler once again offers sharp and helpful remarks (the poet C.K. Williams is Vendler’s reference),

Although Williams calls him “compulsively gregarious,” Whitman could hardly have composed his monumental poems without spending a good deal of his time not being gregarious, but rather sitting, thinking, reading, writing, revising.

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Williams knows that the real meat and drink in Whitman’s work lies in the poet’s unprecedented assembling of rhythm, sound, language and images.

But in the end, for Williams, the didactic trumps the aesthetic: we are brought back to the poetry’s moral demand that we be “greater than we are.”

This, however, cannot be the purpose of poetry, which necessarily subsumes even the ethical under whatever it has set up as the aesthetic law governing a particular construction. Ethics — like landscape, or anecdote, or history, or psychology — is part of the raw material of some (but not all) poetry. Like other ingredients it plays a necessarily subordinate part.

Wonderfully said, Helen Vendler. What Vendler calls, “the aesthetic law governing a particular construction,” is what I would call the poet’s sense of the world and ability to express that overriding sense; to weave it into meaning that is felt.

I write this book to disembarrass my soul of certain notions that have hovered about in it too long for my comfort. I do not seek to persuade anybody. I am devoid of the pedagogic instinct and when I know a thing never feel in myself the desire to impart it to others. I do not much care if people agree with me. Of course I think I am right, otherwise I should not think as I do, and they are wrong, but it does not offend me that they should be wrong. Nor does it greatly disturb me to discover that my judgment is at variance with that of the majority. I have a certain confidence in my instinct.

I must write as though I were a person of importance; and indeed, I am—to myself. To myself I am the most important person in the world; though I do not forget that, not even taking into consideration so grand a conception as the Absolute, but from the standpoint of common sense, I am of no consequence whatever. It would have made small difference to the universe if I had never existed.

You can tell, not only from the way the ideas are expressed, but from the ideas themselves, that this was written by someone from another age. The perspective, modesty (but with substantial ego), and wisdom, suggest it was written at another time.

It was written by Somerset Maugham in “The Summing Up”. I read that book a long time ago but it really left an impression.

The modern memoir is another deal entirely…

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Christopher Hitchens has written a self-described memoir. The NYT has a brief review which scatters such phrases as, “[Hitchens] has a moving personal story and is a pasha of vice”. A pasha of vice.

The review says there is nothing much new in Hitchens’ memoir but it is hard not to like the guy. Damned by faint endorsement.

(In fact, the NYT is steadily drifting from the pop culture’s version of a “newspaper of record,” to yet another tabloid expression of contemporary junk culture.)

To see the full bloom of the latter you can read the Q&A, in which Hitchens bats the sludge back with some dignity,

Q.Your mother committed suicide, in a pact with a lover, in I973. Did she suffer from lifelong depression?


A. No. I think she was having a bad menopause, and she was losing her looks, which were pretty impressive.

Hitchens is a bracing, unpredictable thinker. People like Hitchens (and there are only a handful) should be given awards just for shaking things up — the hive mind being what it is: smug and intolerant. There is nothing less allowed than trying to work out an issue for oneself. Hitchens’ unfortunate affirmation of his “consistency” in the Q&A is less a bragging point than his efforts at his own brand of honesty, which will often result in honorable contradictions.

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The review is titled, “Do I Contradict Myself?” Perhaps unknowingly meant to be snide (no surprise at the NYT); perhaps knowingly, quoting,

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
—Whitman

Charlie Rose interviewed Ian McEwan recently. Listening to McEwan speak is such a civilized pleasure.

“Humor is such a delicate and changing thing,” McEwan said, in the flow of conversation — a brilliant throwaway — saying why he did not like comic novels. Comic novels try too hard.

McEwan expressed his admiration for the moving ending of Joyce’s “The Dead.”

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Awesome, the way the rhythms and resonant depth of the paragraph and story resolve, in the last line, and then spreads out, into more than itself: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

[ via John Gruber ]

This article about iPad / eBooks / physical books pointed out things anyone creating books / eBooks has thought about. How to present the content. I’m currently working on two books and so the idea of presentation floats in the day to day for me.

The author, Craig Mod, thinks that eBooks present in a “formless container” — a useful designation, and I agree; one reason I have so many posts on the index page of this weblog. Why not take advantage of the long form the web page can display? Enforced scrolling is sometimes disdained in web design, but a long page format seems a natural for the digital framework, far less intrusive than “paging”, which often leaves the reader suspecting ad views are the basis of the truncated content. The eBook form, at least as epub, is a web page really.

That said however, my take is slightly different than the author as to the value of the eBook “container”. Currently eBooks are a dumbing down of books as demanded by the limitations of technology. The nascent eBook form demands no aesthetic. Rather the technology has to get better. The formatting and presentation of books was honed over centuries. It contains the wisdom of those centuries in its form. Nifty eBook effects like page turning work because, like desktop folder icons, they are familiar. Sometimes familiar is good.

Did you see how engrossed uber-geek Steve Jobs was when he turned the page of an eBook in his iPad demo?

To his credit, Mod says each to his own. That some books work better as physical books. But some of his examples are dubious and vitiate his arugment; he admires some books that are art school high concept non-books — the tired postmodernist default, where idea and form are all, aspiring to drained coolness (what a reviewer at the NYR called “the dread hand of design”); or alternatively, he provides examples of handmade books, which are really craft objects and, in that same framework, old books, which are sentimental artifacts. Such stained warriors have an Antiques Road Show charm, but for the wrong reason, given his argument — i.e, their interest is not as books but as, once again, grunge craft objects.

One of the great unintended jokes of technology is that the more precise and golly-gee-it’s-real things get, the more grunged up, stained and flickering the most “advanced” digital creators get. Anal retentive precision forgets the soul of the image. The lack of content’s centrality in the high concept formalist approach to books is what drives people to the popular culture for content. Any content to which they can connect.

The idea that “new forms of storytelling” are intrinsically good seems a reach, both as content goal and format benefit. It’s not even clear if there is much new there. Such outlier experiments may inform more traditional storytelling, but we shouldn’t be fitting our inherent inclinations to the demands of technology. Vice versa. Good TV shows like Damages, and bad ones, like Lost, use time shifting to affect a new form of storytelling. But this tactic is an annoying artifact which does not serve the story or the viewer. The central argument: is a predisposition for the physcial book form inherent, honed by the generations into a wonderful “container” that speaks to human needs or simply a product of necessity?

My current feeling: Physical books are an expression of the genius of our species; the physical book as form, now established, is worthy of retention in the virtual world as well.

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Some
of
my
books.
(A few are available as eBooks.)

I haven’t read Susan Orlean’s books but I’ve liked many pieces by Walter Kirn. These writers discussed film adaptations of their books @bhtv. It went on too long, but it is an interesting subject: writers and pop culture.

Kirn pointed out to Orlean that because she admired “The English Patient” Elaine (Seinfeld) wouldn’t like her. You gotta love Kirn.

About having their work adapted by the movies:
Orlean despaired that being anointed by Hollywood is perceived by some as being a better writer. She is right. Kirn felt movie interest means that he “created a character”, and that is an affirmation he appreciates. Kirn thinks that if the movies have a character they “can find a story”. Kirn is wrong about the centrality of character. Movies are storytelling machines. The characters stay with you because of the acting. Story and directing is what makes a movie.

Kirn was quite effective in describing the shallowness of movies — their skeletal narrative capacity — and at the same time accomplished the hat trick of admiring the adaptation of his own books. He seemed sincere.

Orlean said she doesn’t look at all like Meryl Streep, who played her in a movie which was based on her book. But she said that people are so benumbed by the movie form that they overlay Orlean and Streep. Strange effect the movies have. Orlean does belong to the same gene pool as a Seinfeld character however: a woman who dated Kramer but drove Elaine crazy, describing this character as so enthusiastic she was like a “game show contestant.” This is the character who thought everything was “really, really great” — the actress does resemble Orlean, although Orlean is nothing like that ditzy character in manner.

Kirn said he wasn’t looking foreward to Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” — comments that reflect my own sentiments. Burton is limited — an illustrator attempting to inhabit a masterwork of imagination. Movies lately, in their imagery, have adopted a video game gothic kitsch; very well done as an expression of craft, but dreary as engrossing visual material.

Avatar is a huge industrial project, said Kirn. He feared movies would become like Avatar. They already have.