Glen Hirshberg's Blog - Posts Tagged "writing"
Art is a Team Game
TRUE (Tuesday Round Up of Everything) post #3, 7/1/14
No matter what the stereotypes or even an individual artist's stated intentions, the act of making art for other people is a fundamentally optimistic one. It presupposes not only a faith (sometimes mistaken for narcissism--and sometimes accurately pegged as narcissism) that one has something worth articulating but also that other people want to hear it, can be reached, can be moved by whatever that thing is.
It's pretty much impossible to argue that art is a team game. But too many people forget that it is absolutely and unequivocally a cooperative one. You can go ahead and count awards and sales and compute rankings any way you like. In the end, though, if humanity as a whole gets better, and if people individually have richer, more satisfying, more stirred and engaged lives, then everyone wins. And if either of those things doesn't happen, everyone loses.
For that reason, more than any other at this point, I've been grateful that a lot of my best work seems to fall somewhere in the murkier corners of the big tent of horror. Because the horror community is full of people hellbent on making us a community. Peter Straub goes so far out of his way, so often, to support so many. Ramsey Campbell has been supportive way beyond what I would ever have asked of him. Lucius Shepard was like that. So is Liz Hand.
The latest person to fall--or, rise--into this category, for me, is Christopher Golden.
Nothing may come of anything we've been talking about, and that isn't the point of this post. The point is, because he likes my work, he has veered far off his own path to help me find mine. To see if our paths intersect. To make sure I know he hopes so.
Most of these TRUE posts are going to be about art, because art is so fun to chatter and argue about. A few are going to be about people. Because in cases like this, I can't think of anything truer.
No matter what the stereotypes or even an individual artist's stated intentions, the act of making art for other people is a fundamentally optimistic one. It presupposes not only a faith (sometimes mistaken for narcissism--and sometimes accurately pegged as narcissism) that one has something worth articulating but also that other people want to hear it, can be reached, can be moved by whatever that thing is.
It's pretty much impossible to argue that art is a team game. But too many people forget that it is absolutely and unequivocally a cooperative one. You can go ahead and count awards and sales and compute rankings any way you like. In the end, though, if humanity as a whole gets better, and if people individually have richer, more satisfying, more stirred and engaged lives, then everyone wins. And if either of those things doesn't happen, everyone loses.
For that reason, more than any other at this point, I've been grateful that a lot of my best work seems to fall somewhere in the murkier corners of the big tent of horror. Because the horror community is full of people hellbent on making us a community. Peter Straub goes so far out of his way, so often, to support so many. Ramsey Campbell has been supportive way beyond what I would ever have asked of him. Lucius Shepard was like that. So is Liz Hand.
The latest person to fall--or, rise--into this category, for me, is Christopher Golden.
Nothing may come of anything we've been talking about, and that isn't the point of this post. The point is, because he likes my work, he has veered far off his own path to help me find mine. To see if our paths intersect. To make sure I know he hopes so.
Most of these TRUE posts are going to be about art, because art is so fun to chatter and argue about. A few are going to be about people. Because in cases like this, I can't think of anything truer.
Richard Skelton
At this point, having draped it over so many hundreds of my mornings, I'm not sure I can say whether Richard Skelton's skeletal, aching, oceanic music inspires my writing or just accompanies it. What I can say is that the space it creates, the world it evokes--a whistle in the grass, gray light on green water, faces in dark spaces in trees ("How to Like It"-Stephen Dobyns)--is the world in which I go wordpicking. And whatever walks there, walks beside me.
My Struggle Needs "Attention of a Different Kind"
I take zero pleasure in negative book reviews, of anyone's work (which doesn't mean I don't think there should BE negative book reviews; but there's nothing to celebrate in them). But few pieces of harsh criticism have filled me with so much...no, not joy, but relief, as William Deresciewicz's skewering of Karl Ove Knausgaard 's MY STRUGGLE in THE NATION. The supposed REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST for our age (only purposely stripped of any attempt at insight or poetry or meaning)? The 3600-page second-by-second accounting of the mundanity of one man's life, rendered as flatly as possible--that's its goal, that's the only struggle--that really seems likely to win its author (if that's even the right word--I suspect he'd say it isn't) the Nobel Prize?
Here's Deresiewicz: "His book is like a box of snapshots--no, a steamer trunk; a shipping container. Their very profusion makes each of them null. What's needed is attention of a different kind. One painting, not a thousand pictures. The patience to create the beauty than in turn creates significance."
Here's me: EMPEROR!! CLOTHES! NOT WEARING...
Here's Deresiewicz: "His book is like a box of snapshots--no, a steamer trunk; a shipping container. Their very profusion makes each of them null. What's needed is attention of a different kind. One painting, not a thousand pictures. The patience to create the beauty than in turn creates significance."
Here's me: EMPEROR!! CLOTHES! NOT WEARING...
Recycle or Die
TRUE (Tuesday Round-up of Everything), Week of 6/17, Post 6:
Way back in the early days of the first wave of the new ambient, a little German label called Recycle or Die surfaced in Berlin, put out maybe 10 exquisite CDs of bubbling, winking, transportive electronica, and vanished. This was their first release, and it has recently found its way back into my writing mornings and my reading evenings. With a lot of new-electronica, I kinda think that the stuff people claim to love most is the stuff they heard first, because passionate subculture arguments notwithstanding, a lot of it's kinda interchangeable, even the stuff that doesn't wag its tail (or big bassy butt) too hard in its desire to be loved. And yeah, I heard ROD stuff pretty early. But it all stands up amazingly well. The ingredients are familiar: spiraling sequencers, textures that tumble and blink and burble, long, hazy nebulae that cohere into dense-packed, ice-cored spacedust. But even with ambient techno, it turns out, it's the programmer, not the program. Don't believe me? Let this one swirl around and seep into you all the way to the nine minute mark or so, when that piano wanders through, shoulders the whole, spectral thing on its back...and then launches...
Way back in the early days of the first wave of the new ambient, a little German label called Recycle or Die surfaced in Berlin, put out maybe 10 exquisite CDs of bubbling, winking, transportive electronica, and vanished. This was their first release, and it has recently found its way back into my writing mornings and my reading evenings. With a lot of new-electronica, I kinda think that the stuff people claim to love most is the stuff they heard first, because passionate subculture arguments notwithstanding, a lot of it's kinda interchangeable, even the stuff that doesn't wag its tail (or big bassy butt) too hard in its desire to be loved. And yeah, I heard ROD stuff pretty early. But it all stands up amazingly well. The ingredients are familiar: spiraling sequencers, textures that tumble and blink and burble, long, hazy nebulae that cohere into dense-packed, ice-cored spacedust. But even with ambient techno, it turns out, it's the programmer, not the program. Don't believe me? Let this one swirl around and seep into you all the way to the nine minute mark or so, when that piano wanders through, shoulders the whole, spectral thing on its back...and then launches...
Boursier-Mougenot Installation
Tuesday Round-up of Everything, Week of 6/17, Post 4:
Wandered into the downtown branch of the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art and stopped dead, in the lobby, for at least fifteen minutes, mesmerized and laughing at the sound and sight of Celeste Boursier-Mougenot's installation of three inflatable backyard swimming pools gently circulating porcelain bowls and saucers, tuned and filled just so, their chimes as they bump randomly together as rich and atmospheric in that place as the bells of Riverside Cathedral on a Westside Sunday morning. Only funnier. Summer officially started for me right there.
This link doesn't begin to give you the sense of it, or the scope. But at least you can get an idea.
Wandered into the downtown branch of the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art and stopped dead, in the lobby, for at least fifteen minutes, mesmerized and laughing at the sound and sight of Celeste Boursier-Mougenot's installation of three inflatable backyard swimming pools gently circulating porcelain bowls and saucers, tuned and filled just so, their chimes as they bump randomly together as rich and atmospheric in that place as the bells of Riverside Cathedral on a Westside Sunday morning. Only funnier. Summer officially started for me right there.
This link doesn't begin to give you the sense of it, or the scope. But at least you can get an idea.
Javier Marías
Tuesday Round-up of Everything, Week of 6/17, Post 3:
Javier Marías lives on the windy side of genius, for sure. I picture him not so much writing as leaning out of his stylized, lushly appointed garret, a cross between the Once ler and Plato, only he talks more than either.
But:
"I believe I've still never mistaken fiction for reality, though I have mixed them together more than once, as everyone does, not only novelists or writers but everyone who has recounted anything since the time we know began, and no one in that known time has done anything but tell and tell, or prepare and ponder a tale, or plot one."
Story of my life(story)?
Javier Marías lives on the windy side of genius, for sure. I picture him not so much writing as leaning out of his stylized, lushly appointed garret, a cross between the Once ler and Plato, only he talks more than either.
But:
"I believe I've still never mistaken fiction for reality, though I have mixed them together more than once, as everyone does, not only novelists or writers but everyone who has recounted anything since the time we know began, and no one in that known time has done anything but tell and tell, or prepare and ponder a tale, or plot one."
Story of my life(story)?
REM
TRUE (Tuesday Round-up of Everything), Week of 6/17, Post 1:
REM's "Unplugged: 1991-2001" is exactly good enough to remind me how good they once were, no better. Every song I thought I remembered, I still remember. There are a couple ("Find a River"!) that I forgot I remembered. And every song I'd truly forgotten--that is, virtually everything after drummer Bill Berry left except "Electrolite"--I still can't remember, even after hearing it again. Given that Mr. Berry always struck me as more solid than special, it's amazing how deep and wide the gap is between almost everything this band did with him and everything they did without him. Even unplugged, with Berry (in 1991) and his fill-ins (in 2001) tapping congas and cans.
REM's "Unplugged: 1991-2001" is exactly good enough to remind me how good they once were, no better. Every song I thought I remembered, I still remember. There are a couple ("Find a River"!) that I forgot I remembered. And every song I'd truly forgotten--that is, virtually everything after drummer Bill Berry left except "Electrolite"--I still can't remember, even after hearing it again. Given that Mr. Berry always struck me as more solid than special, it's amazing how deep and wide the gap is between almost everything this band did with him and everything they did without him. Even unplugged, with Berry (in 1991) and his fill-ins (in 2001) tapping congas and cans.
Dean Wareham at the Roxy
TRUE, week of 6/24. Post #5:
Caught Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips at the Roxy, and realized that while they do indeed radiate glamour, it’s not the kind I expected or that they have aspired to. Sure, Dean hardly looks like he’s trying as he leans into his surprisingly lyrical melodies or soars through a guitar solo, but his is the not-having-to-try of someone who never puts down a guitar, can’t stop humming, rather than smug insouciance. And they both smile a lot: at us, the music, each other. By the end, their brand of effortless seemed a product of hard practice—at interplay, at songwriting, at staying in love with staying in love. A lot less Serge Gainsbourg or even Lou Reed, in other words, than Bryan Ferry. And their cover of Joy Division’s “Ceremony” is so buoyant, by the end, that it restores the joy to the riff, sounds remarkably like the racket Ian Curtis might be kicking up, still, if he’d somehow put himself back together after love (or epilepsy, or depression, or whatever it finally was) tore him apart.
Caught Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips at the Roxy, and realized that while they do indeed radiate glamour, it’s not the kind I expected or that they have aspired to. Sure, Dean hardly looks like he’s trying as he leans into his surprisingly lyrical melodies or soars through a guitar solo, but his is the not-having-to-try of someone who never puts down a guitar, can’t stop humming, rather than smug insouciance. And they both smile a lot: at us, the music, each other. By the end, their brand of effortless seemed a product of hard practice—at interplay, at songwriting, at staying in love with staying in love. A lot less Serge Gainsbourg or even Lou Reed, in other words, than Bryan Ferry. And their cover of Joy Division’s “Ceremony” is so buoyant, by the end, that it restores the joy to the riff, sounds remarkably like the racket Ian Curtis might be kicking up, still, if he’d somehow put himself back together after love (or epilepsy, or depression, or whatever it finally was) tore him apart.
"A Game of Clue" by Steven Millhauser
TRUE, week of 6/24, Post #4:
At his dazzling best—as he is in so many of his short and longer stories—Steven Millhauser makes an entirely of-this-time, of-this-country mythology out of the most unlikely materials: the clockmakers and magicians and mad moonlight of fairy tales; a positively Updikean clarity and depth of insight into characters and their foibles, married to a decidedly not-Updikean charity and warmth; the sensualized fever-dreams of adolescents (and not only adolescents), rendered with their perversity but also their sense of wonder and radiance and possibility intact (as in “Clair de Lune,” when a teen who can’t sleep slips out into the suburban summer, works up the nerve to walk past the house of his crush, half-sleepwalks into her backyard…and discovers her playing whiffle ball with two girlfriends in the middle of the night); and a sense of high concept that has much more to do—again—with ghost stories or fairy tales than post-modern meta-gameplaying.
At his least successful—as he generally is, for me, in in his novels—the concepts win.
That, in the end, is the case with “A Game of Clue”, which I read this week. Half the story is a pretty fine depiction of a gently troubled family playing the title game all night on a porch to celebrate a 15 year-old’s birthday. The other, less compelling half details the wanderings and emotional musings of Colonel Mustard, Professor Plum, and the other suspects wandering the dark hallways and billiard rooms of the gameboard. The connections between game pieces and people, in the end, are tenuous, the humor in the concept itself light and repetitive, the meanderings in the mansion clever but aimless.
But even here, there are glimpses of Millhauser's magic. Oh yes. As in this heartbreaking, gorgeous moment when Colonel Mustard slips into the ballroom to continue his brutish seduction of Miss Scarlet: “The Colonel is patient; he appears to be waiting confidently for a sign from her. She asks herself suddenly: have I given him a sign? His eyes hold abysmal promises: come, I will teach you the disillusionment of the body, come, I will teach you the death of roses, the emptiness of orgasms in sun-flooded, loveless rooms.”
At his dazzling best—as he is in so many of his short and longer stories—Steven Millhauser makes an entirely of-this-time, of-this-country mythology out of the most unlikely materials: the clockmakers and magicians and mad moonlight of fairy tales; a positively Updikean clarity and depth of insight into characters and their foibles, married to a decidedly not-Updikean charity and warmth; the sensualized fever-dreams of adolescents (and not only adolescents), rendered with their perversity but also their sense of wonder and radiance and possibility intact (as in “Clair de Lune,” when a teen who can’t sleep slips out into the suburban summer, works up the nerve to walk past the house of his crush, half-sleepwalks into her backyard…and discovers her playing whiffle ball with two girlfriends in the middle of the night); and a sense of high concept that has much more to do—again—with ghost stories or fairy tales than post-modern meta-gameplaying.
At his least successful—as he generally is, for me, in in his novels—the concepts win.
That, in the end, is the case with “A Game of Clue”, which I read this week. Half the story is a pretty fine depiction of a gently troubled family playing the title game all night on a porch to celebrate a 15 year-old’s birthday. The other, less compelling half details the wanderings and emotional musings of Colonel Mustard, Professor Plum, and the other suspects wandering the dark hallways and billiard rooms of the gameboard. The connections between game pieces and people, in the end, are tenuous, the humor in the concept itself light and repetitive, the meanderings in the mansion clever but aimless.
But even here, there are glimpses of Millhauser's magic. Oh yes. As in this heartbreaking, gorgeous moment when Colonel Mustard slips into the ballroom to continue his brutish seduction of Miss Scarlet: “The Colonel is patient; he appears to be waiting confidently for a sign from her. She asks herself suddenly: have I given him a sign? His eyes hold abysmal promises: come, I will teach you the disillusionment of the body, come, I will teach you the death of roses, the emptiness of orgasms in sun-flooded, loveless rooms.”
Night Moves (the new movie, not the old song)
T.R.U.E., week of 6/24, Post #3:
In his review of the new indie-thriller Night Moves, A.O. Scott enthuses about how director Kelly Reichardt’s movies avoid falling into any established genre. That is often NEW YORK TIMES critic-code (although A.O. often knows better) for movie-that-doesn’t-actually-bother-telling-its-story. That, unfortunately, is the case here.
Three characters we don't understand, care about, or believe plot to blow up a dam. They’re commune dwellers, supposedly passionate about ecological concerns, though Reichardt takes great pains to make sure no one actually acts passionate about anything. Scott also praises the way “there is never a lot of talking in a Kelly Reichardt movie.” And it’s true, Reichardt has clearly seized on the idea that good drama is often driven by characters who won't or can't say what they’re thinking.
But in this movie, anyway, I’m less than convinced that she has any idea what her characters ARE thinking. And I certainly don’t.
In his review of the new indie-thriller Night Moves, A.O. Scott enthuses about how director Kelly Reichardt’s movies avoid falling into any established genre. That is often NEW YORK TIMES critic-code (although A.O. often knows better) for movie-that-doesn’t-actually-bother-telling-its-story. That, unfortunately, is the case here.
Three characters we don't understand, care about, or believe plot to blow up a dam. They’re commune dwellers, supposedly passionate about ecological concerns, though Reichardt takes great pains to make sure no one actually acts passionate about anything. Scott also praises the way “there is never a lot of talking in a Kelly Reichardt movie.” And it’s true, Reichardt has clearly seized on the idea that good drama is often driven by characters who won't or can't say what they’re thinking.
But in this movie, anyway, I’m less than convinced that she has any idea what her characters ARE thinking. And I certainly don’t.
