Eleanor Arnason's Blog, page 73

Comments on the Previous Post

Josh Lukin has pointed out that lousy right-wing politics did not start with High Modernism. There were many 19th century writers who had bad politics. I'm sure he's right. My post skips from the Romantics to the early 20th century, missing a lot. One problem is, there is a lot of 19th century western literature I have not read.

When I think of the 19th century, I think of Dickens, the Brontes, Melville. Twain, Dickinson and Whitman. That is hardly everyone.

Terry Garey says there is good writing which is recording, rather than an attempt to change anything. True enough. I would be hard put to do a political analysis of the following:

so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.

or this one, also by William Carlos Williams:

This Is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Writing # 1

I finished Long Quiet Highway. A good book. Now I have started Writing Down the Bones. Like Julia Cameron, Natalie Goldberg sees writing as therapy or self-actualization or meditation practice, which I do not.

It can be. No question. But that isn't what it is for me. For me, the important part of writing is the work itself. I am an artist. I make art.

I started mulling over my idea of being an artist. First of all, you are not likely to be a Zen master, at least in the west. My ideas of art and the artist come from the Romantic tradition: the solitary genius, who gives all for art like van Gogh. The rebel, like Byron who died in the Greek revolution against the Ottoman Empire.

The mountains look on Marathon---
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dream'd that Greece might yet be free
For, standing on the Persians' grave,
I could not deem myself a slave.

Shelly writing, "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."

Shelley and Byron and Mary Shelley wrote in the shadow of the French Revolution. van Gogh is much later. His life is closer to the Bohemian and High Modernist ideas of art and the artist: the poet starving in a garret, Proust writing A la Recherche du Temps Perdu in a cork-lined room. There is a shift away from politics in the High Modern idea of art, which is why you can have major artists with lousy, right-wing politics. High Modernism is about art for the sake of art, pushing the limits of art, creating something genuinely new and individual. As archie the cockroach says:

expression is the need of my soul
i was once a vers libre bard
but i died and my soul went into the body of a cockroach
it has given me a new outlook upon life
i see things from the under side now
thank you for the apple peelings in the wastepaper basket
but your paste is getting so stale i cant eat it

archie is both a mocking of the idea of the solitary genius and a straight up, sympathetic portrayal of a starving artist, who is obsessed with his art.

boss i am disappointed in
some of your readers they
are always asking how does
archy work the shift so as to get a
new line or how does archy do
this or do that they
are always interested in technical
details when the main question is
whether the stuff is
literature or not

Writing # 2

I grew up around art museums and with stories of 20th century visual artists. I got both of the idea of the artist as a rebel, a revolutionary and the artist who gives all for art. A lot of the artists had messy personal lives. They were bad husbands (usually husbands) and parents. They drank too much. They stayed out late with other artists or other women. What mattered was the art.

In no way were they Zen masters.

I don't think you need to mess up your personal life to be an artist. Better to not drink, not cheat, not go crazy or die young.

None the less, I focus on the art, not on self-improvement.

I sold my first short story in 1972. It came out in New Worlds in 1973. That is 40 some years of working at writing. More than that, since I began writing in grade school. As far as I can tell, my writing has not made me a better, saner person. But I am a better writer than when I started.

I have no problem with people using art to explore their lives, understand themselves, become saner and happier. But what they doing is art therapy, not art (I say, being something of a snob).

My irritation with the idea of the "professional," working writer, making production, is also tied to what art is to me. I'm with Byron and archie.

I'm a lot more with the Romantic idea than with High Modernism. Art should explain the world and change the world. Artists should speak for those who have not yet found their voices. It should be for the world's sake, rather than purely for its own sake or for the artist's sake.

I'm not saying any of this is right and true. It's what I think.

Learning to Write

I also started rereading Natalie Goldberg's Long, Quiet Highway, which is about writing and Zen practice; and I got the Nook version of her how-to book about writing, Writing Down the Bones.

Why am I doing this? Maybe I will learn something.

Thoughts on Captain America

I saw Captain America last night. It has a nice retro look and feel. However, it's a sad movie. At the end, Steve Rogers has lost everything. I wonder -- having seen two Marvel movies now -- if superhero stories are simply too repetitive.

The colors were mostly grays and browns, with white in the snow scenes. At times the colors were so muted, I seemed to be watching a black and white movie. The only real color I remember is the Red Skull's blood red head and the sparkling red, white and blue of production numbers when Captain America is selling E bonds.

Thor, on the other hand, was set in a shining, science-fictional Asgard and New Mexico with sunlight pouring down.

Captain America is about a decent guy learning to be a hero. Thor is about a hero learning to be a decent guy.

Thor is about loss also. At the end, Bifrost has been broken, and Asgard is isolated from the rest of the universe. Thor has lost the woman he had learned to love. It didn't feel as sad to me. Thor is in Asgard, which is his home. Captain America has lost his home, the US in the 1940s.

Learning to Write

I ran across a reference to Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. It sounded interesting, so I got a Nook copy. It's a book on breaking through creative blocks. I guess that's as good a way of describing it as any: part 12-step program, part self-psychoanalysis and part the practice of writing. It makes me uneasy, because Cameron talks about God a lot. However, I've been playing with the book, trying some of the exercises.

One exercise is to write three pages every morning, without planning or revising. Just get words on paper. I have found this very hard. Mostly I write, "I have nothing to say." Of course, I don't have a writer's block, and if I am writing, I want to be writing my current story. Though I could write more. I figure the exercise is to get one in the habit of writing. Maybe I need that.

The next exercise I like: make an artist's date with oneself, a block of time to go out alone to do something that feeds the creative impulse. So I went walking along the river last week. I'm thinking of going to museums, attending concerts. None of these require company.

Another exercise is pick five careers you'd like for yourself. I picked paleontolgist, bird watcher, traveler, poet and social thinker. I do three of the five, to one extent or another. I could do the fourth -- traveling. Nothing holds me back. The fifth -- paleontologist -- is a dream. I don't really want to be somewhere in the desert with blazing heat and no bathrooms, digging up fossils. And I don't want to be sitting in a museum somewhere, using a dental pick and a toothbrush to free bones from their matrices. I like reading and thinking about paleontology.

I guess another dream career would be union organizing. But I've tried organizing. I'm terrible at it.

Maybe it would be easier to write.

APOD with NASA Commentary

An example of solar-powered flight, NASA's Helios aircraft flew almost one hundred years after the Wright brothers' historic flight on December 17, 1903. Pictured here at 3,000 meters in in skies northwest of Kauai, Hawaii, USA in August 2001, the remotely piloted Helios is traveling at about 40 kilometers per hour. Essentially an ultralight flying wing with 14 electric motors, the aircraft was built by AeroVironment Inc. Covered with solar cells, Helios' impressive 247 foot wide wing exceeded the wing span and even overall length of a Boeing 747 jet airliner. Climbing during daylight hours, the prototype aircraft ultimately reached an altitude just short of 30,000 meters, breaking records for non-rocket powered flight. Helios was intended as a technology demonstrator, but in the extremely thin air 30,000 meters above Earth's surface, the flight of Helios also approached conditions for winged flight in the atmosphere of Mars.

APOD with NASA Commentary

Magnificent island universe NGC 2403 stands within the boundaries of the long-necked constellation Camelopardalis. Some 10 million light-years distant and about 50,000 light-years across, the spiral galaxy also seems to have more than its fair share of giant star forming HII regions, marked by the telltale reddish glow of atomic hydrogen gas. In fact, NGC 2403 closely resembles another galaxy with an abundance of star forming regions that lies within our own local galaxy group, M33 the Triangulum Galaxy. Of course, supernova explosions follow close on the heels of the formation of massive, short-lived stars and in 2004 one of the brightest supernovae discovered in recent times was found in NGC 2403. Easy to confuse with a foreground star in our own Milky Way Galaxy, the powerful supernova is seen here as the spiky, bright "star" at the left edge of the field. This stunning cosmic portrait is a composite of space and ground-based image data from the Hubble Legacy Archive and the 8.2 meter Subaru Telescope at the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

Pterosaurs

The day has improved. I found a new web site, pterosaurs.net, and a book on pterosaurs coming out from Princeton University Press in the fall. I will order the book as soon as I can. In the meantime, I will read the essays on the web site.

Art

Eclipse of the Sun, painted in 1926 in the Weimar Republic by Georg Grosz. The image comes via The Activist blog. Notice the dollar sign in the sun behind the headless man at the head of the table.

I have been looking at Georg Grosz art my entire life. But I think you have to be as angry as I am now, looking at the situation in America, to fully appreciate Grosz.