JCO and the Painter Moose

I was fascinated, in the New York Times Book Review piece on Joyce Carol Oates's new memoir, A Widow's Story, to read of the famously productive author's sense of separation between her writing-self and person-self. In A Widow's Story (according to the Times piece–I haven't read it yet) readers learn of Oates's "dual self, that has let loose torrential, dark art while leading the quietest of lives." The writer-self Oates calls JCO, and considers "not a person, not even a personality but a process that has resulted in a sequence of texts."

What a weird and compelling phrase, especially when used by a creative person in reference to herself: a process that has resulted in a series of texts. This strikes me as an extreme version of the phenomenon that many writers experience, myself included: where you feel like the part of you that writes leads a separate, parallel existence to the part of you that does the dishes, shops for pants, watches Top Chef–the part of you that lives your life.

(Boy, that last sentence makes my life sound pretty slow, doesn't it?)

For me the separation between writer-Ben and Ben-Ben has grown much sharper since I started a family: once I close my laptop at 5:00, and the kids are home from daycare and dinner needs cooking and the laundry is waiting, I pretty much deactivate whatever part of the cortex has spent the day sorting through plots and wrestling with snippets of dialog. Sometimes this is frustrating–just as it's sometimes frustrating to say goodbye to my home life and go back to whatever weird world I'm working on–but on balance I feel this is the healthiest set-up, for both Bens.

The whole issue makes me think fondly of Arthur Paintstain, a moose cartoon character created by my friend "Mississippi" Marc Deckter. Besides being a moose, Arthur is a professional painter; but he doesn't paint all night with a beret, a bottle of wine, and a lit cigarette, like our romantic vision of the artist. He shows up every morning at nine on the dot, in a suit, takes paints and brush from a handsome briefcase, and paints furiously until five. Then he clocks out and goes home.

And so, my beau idéal of the working artist turns out to be either a cartoon moose[image error], or Joyce Carol Oates. Take your pick.

(If you're interested in Arthur Paintstain, you should visit "Mississippi" Marc's website, but be aware that nobody calls him "Mississippi" Marc except for me.)