Are you embodying that meaning?

What are the materials of the artist? Can the artist create quality art out of just anything? Trash from the gutter? A finely embroidered robe displaying symbols sacred to a living religion? Another artist’s drawing? 

I tend to think anything is the answer. Good people will disagree. And my own principle quails somewhat before the pained reactions of those who see some particular art as attacking them. 

In Art & Fear David Bayles and Ted Orland express some ideas about what artists should do:

Artists are wrong in thinking they may “fill their canvasses and monitors with charged particles ‘appropriated’ from other places and times. It is as though you could incorporate the power of the Plains Indian medicine bundle into your work. Or convincingly complete the closing movements to Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. Today, indeed, you can find urban white artists — people who could not reliably tell a coyote from a german shepherd at a hundred feet — incorporating the figure of Coyote the Trickster into their work. A premise common to all such efforts is that power can be borrowed across space and time. It cannot. There’s a difference between meaning that is embodied and meaning that is referenced. As someone once said, no one should wear a Greek fisherman’s hat except a Greek fisherman.” [italics in original]

Bayles & Orland mix a lot of elements in this passage. I disagree with much of it — especially the last line — but I sympathize, too. 

Should the Catholic Church be able to order destroyed a replica of the Pope’s clothing that included lots of little swastikas in the stitching? Should a scantily clad cheerleader on the football field have her decorative feather headdress yanked from her head by an irate tribal elder? Should every listener shun an attempt to finish an unfinished musical piece by a dead composer? 

I don’t think the Schubert example belongs with the others. Anybody ought to feel free to complete Schubert’s unfinished work. If the resulting music is beautiful the only people offended will be the fierce Schubert partisans. ‘It’s a fraud! That’s not how Schubert would have done it.’ The original, however unfinished, may feel sacred to them, but is it?

I also don’t think the Greek fisherman’s cap belongs with the others. I wore a Greek fisherman’s cap for a while because I thought it looked neat. It was black, worn close to the head (so hid my hair and wasn’t easily blown off by a breeze), and had pretty stitching on the brim. The authors are my first hint that there’s something sacred about a Greek fisherman’s cap, a kind of cultural power that not only does not transfer but in some way offends. Curious to see what I’ve been missing about the Greek fisherman’s cap, I did a little internet searching. 

GreekBoston.com says, “Although we traditionally associate these hats with Greek seamen or fishermen, variations of this hat [are] also present in other cultures. They are also known as a mariner’s cap, skipper cap, fiddler cap, or Breton cap. … [M]ost [historians] seem to agree that [the cap] started to become popular [in Greece] in the 1800’s.” Anthony Quinn wore the cap in the Zorba the Greek movie, which made it popular outside Greek fisheries. “John Lennon … wore the hat while the Beatles were at the height of their fame.” 

The anonymous Greek Boston author concludes, “Although this hat has been traditionally associated with those involved with the nautical culture in Greece, such as sailors, fishermen, ship captains, etc, there are no rules concerning who can wear them and who can’t.”

I don’t know which is the more authoritative source, Art & Fear or Greek Boston, but I will add that the rather more generic wikipedia entry lumps the Greek fisherman’s cap in with a bunch of similarly-shaped caps and there’s no suggestion in the article that non-Greek-fisherman wearers are phonies or posers or in any way sacrilegious. Or that there is any “power [that is attempting to] be borrowed across space and time” by a kid under a Greek fisherman’s cap. It just looks cool! Marlon Brando wore a leather version in The Wild Ones. Tom of Finland tops off his leathermen in his gay cartoon porn with a similar cap. So it’s got a bit of a butch aura. But ultimately it’s just material in a particular shape. 

Bayles & Orland hit closest when they talk about the offensiveness of the appropriation of Native American symbols and regalia. The authors do not mention appropriation of Western religious symbols or objects, but that happens, too. As I said above, I sympathize with people who feel attacked when their sacred symbols are treated in ways that they feel are degrading. But can you make degrading art? Probably? Can you make bad art? Definitely. 

If an American Indian artist uses a symbol from her own culture in a nontraditional way, a way that offends traditionalists, is she being a bad girl? In this case I suppose the artist is not “borrow[ing] across space and time;” she’s using local and contemporary material(s) that have power for her (and for a living community). Of course, our Native artist may be a crappy artist or may be misusing the symbol because she was raised outside her natal culture so doesn’t know any better, and what results isn’t really what one would call art. (Maybe bad art.) Say she isn’t Indian at all — and she is using Indian sacred symbols because they look cool. Or she’s making fun of them. Replace “American Indian” with “White Catholic.” Is the artist more or less justified? What if she’s wearing a Greek fisherman’s cap?

On the whole I liked Art & Fear. David Bayles and Ted Orland are trying with this book to lessen the anxiety artists feel. You are not alone, they want you to know. Everybody goes through moments — or years — feeling inadequate, being jealous of others’ success, afraid they are a hasbeen or a nevershallbe. Don’t worry, they say, as they root in their medicine bags for a pick-me-up. Just do it. If it turns out you have to cross space and time to borrow a cup of blue tempera, they might disapprove, but that’s life. Don’t panic. 

source:

Art & Fear: observations on the peril (and rewards) of art making

by David Bayles and Ted Orland

1993. The Image Continuum, Santa Cruz CA

always right, sometimes wrong

Why do you always have to right, I remembered John saying.

It was a complaint, a charge, part of a fight.

He never understood that in my own mind I was never right.

The memory of her dead husband comes up when Joan Didion is on a small plane with her daughter. It’s essentially an ambulance, her daughter being flown to a new hospital. 

One of the paramedics had a digital camera and was taking pictures of what he kept referring to as the Grand Canyon. I said I believed it was Lake Mead, Hoover Dam. I pointed out Las Vegas. The paramedic continued taking pictures. He also continued referring to it as the Grand Canyon.

Clearly Didion is annoyed by the misidentification — and the paramedic’s seeming insistence on it.

All right it’s the Grand Canyon, I thought, shifting position on the bench over the oxygen canisters so that I could no longer see out the window.

If she could see out the window, Didion would continually be confronted by the truth, which she feels compelled to defend, so she chooses to look elsewhere. 

“You always have to be right.” Kent said that to me once. It took me aback in that it was a charge I could have leveled at him. By this time I had also learned that if he called me on something — and I said you do that too — it was just going to escalate the argument. So when Kent accused me of always having to be right I had to pause to consider. I want to be right. Nobody wants to be wrong. I doubt Joan Didion seriously thought she was never right. But even when we are pretty solid on something, when challenged, we do for a moment wonder. If I think one thing, and someone else says different, there’s an instability. 

“I don’t think of it as having to be right,” I said. “I think of it as making sure I understand, that I’m not confused.” 

I am glad we have these magical research devices at hand, our phone/computers, and can quickly find a definition of a word or double check which president came after Wilson. I have absolutely no interest in being the One who is right. I want everybody to be right. 

Were I in Joan Didion’s situation, likely I would have dropped the issue, too. Who cares if somebody you will never see again misidentifies the landscape? Sure, you could turn around to the people on the plane and go, “Paramedic and I are looking down and he sees the Grand Canyon and I see Lake Mead. What do you guys see?” 

I try not to accuse people of being wrong. I try to be diplomatic, seek common ground, appeal to a neutral authority. But I’m human. I say, no, that’s not right. I don’t believe that. Really? Come on!

source:

The Year of Magical Thinking

by Joan Didion

2005. Vintage / Penguin Random House, New York

“the perimesencephalic cistern is effaced”

After Joan Didion’s husband died suddenly, she gave permission for an autopsy.  What she quotes in her memoir is a paragraph of medical jargon, much of which I don’t know. It seems the man died of a massive stroke. As I read the autopsy, I appreciate the words without knowing their definitions. 

“There is moderate to marked midbrain compression and the perimesencephalic cistern is effaced.”

The last four words of that especially.

“A thin posterior falcine and left tentorial subdural hematomas are noted. A small parenchymal bleed, likely contusional, is noted in the right inferolateral frontal lobe. The cerebellar tonsils are at the level of the foramen magnum.”

I don’t know whether you want your cerebellar tonsils to be at the level of your foramen magnum, but if it were generally to be esteemed, it would probably not be noted in an autopsy. 

I don’t know how many of these words I am mispronouncing, but I enjoy rolling them around in my mouth and trying out different emphases. 

Years ago I wrote a series of poems using words for their sounds rather than their meanings. Since the English writing system is variably phonetic, I used existing words rather than inventing any. I wanted readers to know how to pronounce them. When finished I flipped open a dictionary at random looking for a word I did not know but liked the look of. I would use it as a title. You can’t group together words without their having meaning, as words are meaning objects and they gain more meanings depending on their company. Thus the poems I’d written by ear could be seen to have meaning, meaning imputed to them. After I used the unknown words I often learned their meanings so the titles would suggest more readings for the poems. 

source:

The Year of Magical Thinking

by Joan Didion

2005. Vintage / Penguin Random House, New York

without you a book is nothing

I marked these lines by David L. Ulin, thinking it sounded like he was talking about Autobiography of a Book:

‘We possess the books we read, animating the waiting stillness of their language … but they possess us also, filling us with thoughts and observations, asking us to make them part of ourselves.’ 

Yup. That’s what Book wants — for you to give it life. Without a reader a book is nothing.

source:

“Say Yes: while his books may not pay the bills David L. Ulin has built a life around writing”

by Lauren Markham

Alta Journal

issue 25 “The Writers Issue,” 2023

San Francisco, CA

1918 ... 2020 ...

Slightly more than one hundred years separate the 1918 influenza epidemic and our covid-19 troubles. A CDC page offers the guess that about 10% of people infected died from influenza — maybe 50 million worldwide. Covid-19 has killed fewer, though it is still taking lives (as is the flu). As of 2022 the World Health Organization blamed covid for 15 million deaths. 

In a memoir that also includes digging into the history of her own Berkeley neighborhood Barbara Gates talks to a woman who collects oral histories. These lines about the influenza epidemic struck me:

‘One woman we interviewed just around the corner from here talked about the 1918 influenza epidemic and how it killed everybody off. At the Niehaus house, over on Delaware, everybody in that great big house died of influenza. Every last one. ‘

We live with flu these days. We’re living with covid. There are vaccines. Some people get a shot as soon as it’s available. Some are sure the vaccines are worse than the disease. I’m of the former camp. The recommended measures against covid have done me pretty good. Colds and flus, a stuffed up head, a fever that wracked me with bad dreams — I used to get whatever came through. Since 2020 I have had only the mildest forms of these, a couple of days of runny nose that I could nevertheless breathe through, a soft cough, a tickle in the throat. If I ever caught covid itself it was the (possibly mythical) asymptomatic variety. 

Whether it was washing my hands more frequently, wearing a filter mask in crowded places, or the vaccines, I now know that I don’t have to take for granted suffering through the seasonal bugs. I like it! 

source:

Already Home: a topography of spirit and place

by Barbara Gates

2003. Shambala, Boston MA

take off the jacket — or no?

Academic libraries strip books of their dust jackets. I discovered this when I got a job at the Santa Rosa Junior College library. The naked books put me off. Public libraries don’t do that, not the ones I knew. I guessed it was a budget thing. It costs money to cover the dust jacket with clear mylar, both in materials and labor. When the mylar gets torn it has to be replaced. Cheaper just to get rid of the dust jacket right off the bat. The dust jacket has almost nothing to do with saving a book from dust — or any other kind of damage. 

In a book on the evolution and engineering of the book shelf Henry Petroski gives a different explanation: space. Yes, that dust jacket takes up space. It may look like just two thin sheets of paper but, he says, the amount of “space on [a full] bookshelf [taken up by book jackets was] once calculated to be 2.5 percent.” When you have a huge collection that’s not an insignificant number. For every million books there’s space for what Petroski calls “a small public library” if dust jackets are removed.

SRJC did not have a million books. So they either removed dust jackets because that’s what academic libraries do, it’s become part of academic culture, or maybe I was right the first time and it’s less expensive that way. 

“To remove the jacket separates interesting information, such as descriptive copy and photographs of authors,” Petroski says. The dust jacket also preserves the design aesthetic of the time. Books of the early 70s look different from books of the early 80s. They use different fonts, different colors, arrange the information differently, and so on. I think a dust jacket is valuable for those reasons. 

But I wasn’t surprised when I got to UC Berkeley and surveyed row upon row of naked books. For Cal maybe it’s space. I was grateful for the paperbacks. You can’t strip a paperback of its color, its author photo, its unique design. Paperbacks don’t do dust jackets. 

source: 

The Book on the Book Shelf

by Henry Petroski

1999. Alfred A. Knopf, New York

Field theory of poetry

I run a Poetry Circle at the library. People sit around a table, taking turns reading poetry to each other. Mostly they read their own poems, but I lay out in the middle of the table a few anthologies and will open one now and then and read at random. I like to discover a poem as I read it aloud. I’m good at cold reads. One night a few years ago three different people who tried out a cold read, each opening an anthology at random and reading what their eye fell upon, voiced a poem by Edward Field.

Field has long been a favorite of mine. His poems sound like someone talking to you. I read an interview with Edward Field recently and snipped out a bit of ars poetica. Field says poetry isn’t “about language,” even though he’s just said, “It can be anything.”

 

“I’ve always seen poetry as therapeutic. … [Writing poetry]* is absolutely a tool. It’s a tool for staying focused, for remembering your feelings. … They always say, ‘Poetry isn’t therapy.’ Bullshit. It can be anything; it’s so many things. For me it’s a way of life … One thing it is [is] prayer. … Somehow poets get the idea that poetry is about this and not about that. So poets don’t often let out their political feelings in their poems. I’ve always included it some, but lately more.”

“The thing is that poetry, as presented to us, is supposed to be airy-fairy, up-there, philosophical, religious, abstract. And now the cant idea is that it’s about language. That’s one of the pernicious ideas about poetry. The second is the stricture against sentimentality. That is so evil! Every feeling you have is, of course, sentimental. We are sentimental. … I don’t like … differentiating between good feelings and bad feelings. … Why should we sneer at our feelings? … You have to tell the truth. If you’re telling the truth, you’re not going to be false. … [W]hen our world is ruled by liars, we have to stand up for truth and speak the truth. Even if no one is listening. You still do it for yourself. … That’s what poetry is about.”

*interviewer’s brackets

source:

Our Deep Gossip: conversations with gay writers on poetry and desire

by Chistopher Hennessy

2013. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison WI

“This is a life different from anything I had imagined.”

Excerpts from “None, I think,” a poem by Lise Menn:

“This is a life different from anything I had imagined. 

You are not here, you will never be here again.

There is no point in waiting for you.

You are, of course, everywhere, 

In this house full of our lives together.

But all thoughts of you are recollections.

There is nothing more to anticipate.

Everything about you is back, back, in some past, dreamed or remembered.

I live in a strange, quiet place.”

These are fewer than half the lines of Lise Menn’s poem about life after her husband died. I recognize in them my own experience. I did not know how to imagine a life without my husband. I did not try. Despite the oncologist’s dire prognosis, Kent seemed to be doing okay. He was alive. I wanted to live with him while he was alive. Even now, I don’t know what I could have done to prepare for his death. 

When Kent was first diagnosed with cancer 14 years ago, he found an estate attorney to make him a living trust. In the early weeks of this year Kent asked a lawyer friend for current recommendations so that I would have someone to help me administer the trust. Because of the trust no court had to get involved. That was Kent looking out for me. 

Kent and I were together for 30 years. Kent was my only long term relationship. We met when I was 28. Back in my teens and twenties I was mostly alone. I didn’t have a series of boyfriends. I wanted one. I wanted a lover very much, and I felt terribly lonesome. I did make friends here and there, and I didn’t live a sexless life. But I didn’t get the intimacy I yearned for. Not until Kent. 

I’d been going to a board games night at the LGBT community center in Berkeley. The people there were nice enough, but I wasn’t spending time with them beyond the games. (I was surprised when I’d hear others laughing about going sailing together or some other outing.) When Kent showed up he was taken with me right away. Six years older, he was close to my age. He displayed a sharp wit and I liked looking at him. Kent had had boyfriends before me. I don’t know how long he was with any of them, but I got the feeling he was the marrying kind. Relationships break up. I think my longest was three months, but if you add up all the time he and I were actually together it was more like two weeks. 

Kent liked to tell a story about how we met. We were playing Trivia Pursuit. We may even have been on the same team, and this question came up: “In the 1980 election who was the dream team?” Kent was bowled over when I knew the answer. Some politicos thought it would be amazing to have presidential candidate Ronald Reagan choose ex-Pres Gerald Ford as his running mate. That would be a dream team! I was fourteen at the time, but I was paying enough attention to politics that I picked up this tidbit. It didn’t seem to me a president would want as his VP a former president. You want the vice president (and everybody else) to be clear on who’s in charge. Ronald Reagan had the same thought, I guess. 

30 years of memories is something, isn’t it? I feel lucky I had all that time with him. He is everywhere in this house full of our lives together. But Kent is not here. And I have to figure out a new life without him. You may hear me saying the same thing next month or a year from now. I really don’t know. I am the one in the present, the one who has to look to a future. I want a lover. I want company. It seems so strange that any person coming into my life will be wholly different, not Kent at all. 

source: 

The Widows’ Handbook: poetic reflections on grief and survival

edited by Jacqueline Lapidus and Lise Menn

2014. Kent State University Press, Kent OH