Author: eastbaywriter

An Excerpt from Art Objects

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I just finished Art Objects (read ‘objects’ as a verb), which I gave you a quick taste of recently.  First, let me admit – again – that I am so enamored of Jeanette Winterson’s writing that I can’t express the impact is has on me.  I believe everyone should have an author whose work they love so much – or multiple authors – the more, the better, really.  So, while Winterson is considered controversial and there are many out there that do not give her words the prominent place in their soul that I do, I cannot help myself from sharing a bit more from this book.

Art Objects is a collection of essays about art, all kinds of art, and people’s relationship with art.  I come from a place where art, except literature, has always seemed out of reach to me.  It was something I associated with wealthy people – snobby people, even.  The worst course I took in college was History of Modern Art.  My other half is an art and theater lover, and I have softened my position some due to her influence – but, I still struggle with unreasonable feelings of self-consciousness in a museum or at the theater – somewhere in the back of my mind, I still feel I don’t belong in that crowd.

Art Objects addresses many aspects of art, and has given me pause to rethink my attitude.  This book alone is not enough to wipe away years of weird discomfort about certain kinds of art, but it did make me think about my own writing as art, among other things.  That said, here is one of a dozen or so passages I earmarked in the book:

Against daily insignificance art recalls to us possible sublimity. It cannot do this if it is merely a reflection of actual life. Our real lives are elsewhere. Art finds them.

Should people be treated as fictions? The question is an ethical one only if we assume that fiction is a copy of actual life. If we do, then art always is autobiography or biography and the skill of the artist is making it into a pretty toy or perhaps an educational instrument. Art should not drag unwilling actors into its animation. … Instead of art aspiring towards lifelikeness what if life aspires towards art, toward a creative controlled focus of freedom, outside the tyranny of matter? What if the joke about life imitating art were a better joke than we think?

Are real people fictions? We mostly understand ourselves through an endless series of stories told to ourselves by ourselves and others. The so-called facts of our individual worlds are highly coloured and arbitrary, facts that fit whatever fiction we have chosen to believe in. It is necessary to have a story, an alibi that gets us through the day, but what happens when thes tory becomes a scripture? When we can no longer recognise anything outside of our own reality? We have to be careful not to live in a state of constant self-censorship, where whatever conflicts with our world-view is dismissed or diluted until it ceases to be a bother. Struggling against the limitations we place upon our minds is our own imaginative capacity, a recognition of an inner life often at odds with the external figurings we spend so much energy supporting. When we let ourselves respond to poetry, to music, to pictures, we are clearing a space where new stories can root, in effect we are clearing a space for new stories about ourselves.

Follow the links

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Callie Leuck really grabbed me with the opening paragraph of her very well written rant about discrimination.  Check it out.  You’ll enjoy it.  Thanks for speaking up, Callie!

I’m not normally a “life lessons” kind of person, but maybe it’s because I just haven’t read the right lists.  This post by Julie Farrar is really great.  Julie’s sense of humor and her writing style are a bit understated – this combines for a read that will make you smile more than once.  In fact, while you’re at it, read this awesome graduation speech she wrote for parents.

You’ll also get some laughs from the transcripts of hilarious conversations Heather Davis has with her kids.  She posts a Conversation of the Week, and this is a link to the entire category.  Her other posts are funny, too, but I particularly love the Conversation of the Week.

I only recently started reading Nathan Bransford’s blog, but I love it that he has tons to say about tons of stuff.  This post about the future of publishing is very straightforward, and I really enjoyed his take on what the future will hold for all the major parties in the ecosystem – publishers, agents, authors, bookstores, and readers.

And, speaking of publishing, Graham recently wrote a wonderful counter to another Huffington Post contributor’s opinion that blogging, or  “uncontrolled publishing”, and the Internet in general are leading us on a “path of literary extinction.”  While I imagine most of us will identify more with Graham’s position, Saadon’s writing is interesting regardless of what you think of his opinion.  It’s well-written, with the exception of a sentence or two that make their point, but do so using nonsensical language – a bit ironic for someone who purports only to respect intellectual writing.  Both pieces are thought-provoking, though.  Check them out.

Mother’s Day Traffic Spike

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My most-read post in the past week has been Quotes from my crazy Great-Grandmother, driven by many searches for “great grandmother quotes,” and “great grandma quotes.”  I imagine the web surfers that stumbled on my small collection of my great grandma’s quotes got something other than what they were really looking for.  Oh well, maybe they got a little laugh.

I am woefully behind in posting here and reading other blogs because I’ve been focusing my energy on finishing a few essays, getting some critiques at http://www.mywriterscircle.com, interviewing for another new job, starting a professional blog, and writing a bunch of business articles for it.  It seems my brain can only handle a couple of kinds of writing at the same time.  I have the rest of this week, and possibly next, to wrap up some of my projects before I dive into my new job as a management consultant.

Yesterday, I began reading Art Objects, a collection of critical essays by Jeannette Winterson about art.  The writing is dense, the kind you need to really focus on, re-reading paragraphs as you go, turning over in your mind the ideas on the pages.  I’ll leave you with this bit from the first essay, also titled Art Objects.

Every day, in countless ways, you and I convince ourselves about ourselves.  True art, when it happens to us, challenges the ‘I’ that we are.  A love-parallel would be just; falling in love challenges the reality to which we lay claim, part of the pleasure of love and part of its terror, is the world turned upside down.  We want and we don’t want, the cutting edge, the upset, the new views.  Mostly we work hard at taming our emotional enviornment just as we work hard at taming our aesthetic environment.  We already have tamed our physical environment.  And are we happy with all this tameness?  Are you?

Tom Robbins

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I have been reading Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates, by Tom Robbins.  I bought the book in the indie bookstore in the Milwaukee airport – it’s an odd location for what I’d call a traditional old bookstore.  It’s not a chain, not the typical ‘newstand’ style of airport store that sells overpriced candy, a zillion magazines, and bags of mixed nuts along with t-shirts for the local sports team, but an independently owned store that has a locked up section of rare first-editions and autographed old books, with no discernible Best Seller section.

When I was much younger, I devoured Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Still Life with Woodpecker, Skinny Legs and All and Jitterbug Perfume.  I couldn’t get enough of the wild irreverence and oddly (but interestingly) placed philosophical meanderings in his writing.  Those same qualities are present in Fierce Invalids, and the book is a supreme example of Robbins’ acrobatic ability with words.  It opens as follows.

“The naked parrot looked like a human fetus spliced onto a kosher chicken. It was so old it had lost every single one of its feathers, even its pinfeathers, and its bumpy, jaundiced skin was latticed by a network of rubbery blue veins.  “Pathological,” muttered Switters, meaning not simply the parrot but the whole scene, including the shrunken old woman in whose footsteps the bird doggedly followed as she moved about the darkened villa. The parrot’s scabrous claws made a dry, scraping noise as they fought for purchase on the terra-cotta floor tiles, and when, periodically, the creature lost its footing and skidded an inch or two, it issued a squawk so quavery and feeble that it sounded as if it were being petted by the Boston Strangler. Each time it squawked, the crone clucked, whether in sympathy or disapproval one could not tell, for she never turned to her devoted little companion but wandered aimlessly from one piece of ancient wooden furniture to another in her amorphous black dress.”

and a few pages later:

” … [Switters] was remembering an actress he used to know, who, in order to entice a tiny trained terrier to follow her around during a movie scene, had had to have scraps of raw calf’s liver stapled to the soles of her high-heeled shoes. Thinking of that terrier magnetized by meat-baited slippers reminded him then of the old bald parrot that had waddled after its mistress … many months before … That’s the way the mind works: the human brain is genetically disposed toward organization, yet if not tightly controlled, will link one imagerial fragment to another on the flimsiest of pretense and in the most freewheeling manner, as it if takes a kind of organic pleasure in creative association, without regard for logic or chronological sequence. Now, it appears that this prose account has unintentionally begun in partial mimicry of the mind. Four scenes have occurred at four different locations and four separate times, some set apart by months or years. And while they do maintain chronological order and a connective element (Switters), and while the motif is a far cry from the kind of stream-of-consciousness technique that makes Finnegans Wake simultaneously the most realistic and the most unreadable book ever written (unreadable precisely because it is so realistic), still, alas, the preceding is probably not the way in which an effective narrative ought properly to unfold – not even in these days when the world is showing signs of awakening from its linear trance, its dangerously restrictive sense of itself as a historical vehicle chugging down a one-way street toward some preordained apocalyptic goal. Henceforth, this account shall gather itself at an acceptable starting point (every beginning in narration is somewhat arbitrary and the one that follows is no exception), from which it shall then move forward in a so-called timely fashion, shunning the wantonly tangential influence of the natural mind and stopping only occasionally to smell the adjectives or kick some ass.”

I am again amazed at his ability with words, and how easily he breaks the rules of fiction, as seen above when he abandons the story line abruptly and speaks directly – author to reader.

More Blog Spam

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I have a few lengthier entries to share this time, but I think you’ll see the brilliance and decide they are worth a read…

For a start, everyone is welcome to internet marketing. That is beautiful. The young is welcome additionally as the old. The tiny is welcome still as the great. The weak is welcome still as the strong. Everybody is welcome. This makes internet selling a lovely home to remain and enjoy yourself to the fullest. It welcomes an Yank; it welcomes an European. It welcomes an Asian the same manner it welcomes an Australian. It’s indeed a home for all. It’s thus lovely that it will not examine you age or perhaps strive to authenticate, validate, or verify how previous you are. It’s therefore beautiful that it will not think about your temperament; it will not check your family background, community, nation, continent, race, tribe, creed, and tongue before permitting you to hitch the train.

It is likewise a good idea to specify who you desire the proceeds of your life policy to go to when you perish.
And that breaks my heart. Yours too, huh?

And, an interesting group of spam comments that have scrambled the letters in just one word.  Check them out. You could make a game out of unscrambling these.

Being new to social kowterning, I haven’t had time to figure out the protocols so thanks for the tips.

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Very impressive your art. Like to know what kind of paper, snickhetses and sizes. And are those his nibs to which your refer? grin!

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Both books are great, total classics for twriers.

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before you spend your money free advice, i would ccntaot a funeral home and have the ashes moved. you are not exhuming anybody (only a body can be exhumed not an urn)and it is relatively simple to get this done.let your aunt and uncle try to contest the children’s wishes and have them find out how much a standing they really have. none.but in case you need to litigate this any private practitioner can represent you in this matter.i hope this helps you.

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You’re not stalking, you are ipkeeng tabs. Stalking is peering into windows and following the person a few feet behind. Keeping tabs is ipkeeng up with the person online (Note to Graham:  I guess I’m not stalking you after all!)

If I gave out blog spam awards, I think this one would win for its obvious, though warped, reference to many things I have actually written about.

Hi, Janell! I’ve just been romping around in your blog and it’s a feast so many delicious topics. This post about Jeannette Winterson opens some doors for me; I’m intrigued by her approach to alone-ness, how she describes it as springing from having felt invaded in the past. So often we’re made to feel there’s something wrong with us at our core if we truly prefer to be alone most of the time. It’s a relief to know this is normal for some people (if using the word normal ever makes any sense!) Some people consider being alone punishment. Some consider it a reward. And that’s o.k.And I love the way you combine socializing with learning, while discovering ways to enrich your poetry (weaving in what you learn from a show on the Jewish use of trees) now that’s intelligent multi-tasking!I also really enjoyed your earlier post about memoir writing, and was struck by the similarities to writing fiction when you wrote of how vital it is to know what to leave out. This is a lot more difficult than it might seem, to the uninitiated; it’s a mighty effort of discipline and clear sight.This blog is an oasis for anyone caught up in the writer’s life. Thank you, Janell!

 

Diversity and Random Encounters

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Those of you that read this blog regularly know what a fan I am of randomness – random people, random facts, random language, random encounters.  Friday night, I was out with some friends at my local dive bar, and went outside to have a smoke.  While I stood in front of a row parked cars, I was approached by a 20-something kid, who apologetically asked,

“Would it be OK if I purchased a cigarette from you?”

“Sure, no problem.  You don’t need to pay me,” I said.  “You can just have one.”

“Oh, but I just hate it when people walk up to me and ask for one,” he replied.

“It’s really no problem,” I assured him.  “Here you go.”

“Thanks,” he said in a soft voice, then turned and walked back in the direction he’d come from.

He got about 20 feet away, then stopped, paused, turned around, and came back.

“You know that laundromat down there?” he pointed towards the huge, generic Coin Laundry at the end of the strip mall.

“Yeah,” I said.  “I know it.”

“I work there every night,” he said.  “When you have to do your laundry, if you come at night, I’ll be there.”  He seemed excited to share his schedule with me.

“I was just there two days ago,” I replied.  “But I was there during the day.”

“Really?  Oh.  I only work at night.”  He went from puzzled that he didn’t recognize me to understanding why not.

“I had the worst time getting that damn money card machine to work!” I told him.

Seems the Coin Laundry doesn’t take coins any longer – you have to pump single dollar bills into a machine with a plastic money card in it, then you stick that money card into a slot on the washer or dryer you want to use.  When I first tried to use the machine, I couldn’t get it to spit out a new card.  A helpful woman intervened when she saw my idiocy, then tried to explain in Spanish that the machine wasn’t working if you chose the English language menu.  I couldn’t follow her, so she finally just took the money from my hand, punched some buttons to get to the Spanish menu, fed it a couple of my singles, and there my card was.

“Oh, you’re not the first,” my young laundromat friend laughed.  “I’ll help you out next time,” he said, seeming satisfied with this offer of help in exchange for the cigarette I’d given him.  With that, he was on his way back to work.

Later that evening, I went outside again.  A group of four people stood chattering together near the door.  I joined them so I wouldn’t be that one random person standing alone pretending to be oblivious to the little crowd a few feet away.  I recognized one of the four – he’s a guy my friends and I call Axl Rose because he has stringy, long, blond hair, wears rock band T-shirts, and always sings things like Def Leppard when it’s his turn at the karaoke mic.  The other three, one woman, two men, were unfamiliar faces.  I was introduced to each, though I couldn’t understand the names of the two men.  The group was in good spirits.  The woman struck me as the sort that was excited by the prospect of playing games, even the made up sort you drum up in the car on a long road trip.  Happy that the thought had come to her, she asked each of us where we were from.

“Wisconsin,” I said.

“Norway,” said Axl Rose.

“Japan,” said man #2.

“Tibet,” said man #3.

“I’m from good old Oakland,” said the woman who’d started us talking about our childhood homes.

The conversation went on for a couple of minutes as we all marveled at the diversity among us, and the distances everyone traveled at some point to end up at the same dive bar in a strip mall in a residential suburb of San Francisco.  In our moment of solidarity, linked together through drinking, smoking, and generally horrible singing at a bar with velvet wallpaper, I realized, in Bokononist terms, we were a granfalloon, and I sent a quick mental thanks to Kurt Vonnegut.

Pictionary Woes

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My other half and I had dinner at Grass-Phobia Girl’s new place this past weekend.  It was a great time – good food, good cocktails, and some fiercely competitive Pictionary.  We busted out the dry erase boards – no skimpy little notepads for us – split into two teams of 4, and were off to the races.  Well, the other team was off to the races.  My team languished near the starting spot for way too long.  We just couldn’t catch a break.  To give you an example of our Pictionary woes, I had to draw “Blink.”  No big deal, I thought.  I expected to have it sealed in seconds – but, my team thought otherwise.

I quickly drew an almond-shaped eye, added the iris and retina.  My team began to yell.

“Eye!”

“Eyes!”

“Eyeball!”

“Look!”

“See!”

“Stare!”

Next I added a lid, half-closed, and dashed some eyelashes onto it.  Then they hollered.

“Eyelash!”

“Lash!”

“Lashes!”

“Mascara!”

By then I was frantically switching back and forth between stabbing the dry erase board, literally in the eye, and slashing in blue marker in a down-then-back-up motion.  I thought for sure I had it when they began to scream

“Close your eye!”

“Close your eye!”

“Close your eye!”

But, time was called before they ever thought “Blink.”

More blog spam

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I’ve been sparing you the details of most of the blog spam that comes my way – in fact, in the first quarter of this year alone, Akismet has blocked ~850 spam comments for me – thank you, Akismet!).  That said, I am still astonished by some of the comments and can’t help but share them with you.  To another round!

“Most heavy duty trailer hitches are developed employing cutting edge computer aided models and fatigue stress testing to ensure optimal strength. Share new discoveries along with your child and maintain your child safe by purchasing the correct style for your lifestyle by following the Perfect Stroller Buyers Guideline.”

OK.  Who can tell me what heavy duty trailer hitches and baby strollers have in common?

“I to assuredly thrilled to trick payment across your totality trap dividing and look presumptuous to pot-pourri of more without tantamount times reading here. Thanks in days gone on again special seeking all the details.”

I’m perplexed.  “…thrilled to trick payment across your totality trap…”  I consider myself fairly good at untangling warped language, especially the sort that is created by those who do not hold English as their first language, but I’m just plain lost on this one.

“oh happy day, the end times are upon us”

I only hope that when my time comes, I can look upon the “end times” with such optimistic abandon.

Follow the links

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Who can resist reading about the history of the manwich?  I couldn’t, but was doubly rewarded when I saw a mention of my home-town and the odd misnomer we use there for the sloppy joe…

As always, I have to include a link to something I found quite funny.  I’m grateful for the people in the world that will share their neuroses so openly and with such self-deprecation.  They are among the best teachers because they remind us we’re all a little crazy and we should never take ourselves too seriously…

Graham’s post about opening lines gave me a little shot in the arm.  I’ve been reading like a fiend lately, and I like to go back and read first lines after I’ve put a book away for awhile.  Perhaps it’s time to do that again soon…

This post about kids fighting over and retrieving a boomerang is great.  It reminds me of the crazy things my father let me do as a kid – things that no other person with even a semblance of concern about safety would have sanctioned.  Things like climb to the roof of the barn using the grounding wire from the lightning rod as climbing rope, then sled down the other side, to fly off into banks of snow.

I enjoyed this pensive post about the state of waiting we often find our lives or our selves in.  It’s a gentle thought-provoker…

A care package, of sorts – part two

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For part one of this story, go here.

The thing about getting a package from Grandma was that I never had a clue what would turn up inside, but I knew it would be odd – something neither I nor any other person on the planet would buy.  Clothes were never her strong suit, but on the off chance she sent me something I might wear, I could count on a note safety-pinned to the garment if she hadn’t yet washed it.  And not just any note, mind you.  Sometimes she ran the sticky note through her typewriter instead of writing on it by hand.  When I called to  thank her for a crazy T-shirt that hung down below my knees (I think maybe it was meant to be a sleep shirt), that came with no note, she explained on the phone that she’d already washed it, but she assumed I knew that since she didn’t pin a type-written sticky note on the front.

As a small kid, 4 or 5 years old, I went with my mom to bars now and then.  I entertained myself by playing dice with the bartender.  Family legend has it I was pretty good.  A couple of years ago, my grandma sent me an antique dice cup, to commemorate my young passion for playing Liars’ Dice and her passion for antiques.  The hand-made cup is dark brown leather, slightly misshapen, a bit weak at the seam stitched up the side.  The leather, though smooth, is hard as tack, but a simple wavy pattern circles the center of the cup where the maker likely used a sewing machine to punch a bit of decoration into it.  An old yellowed newspaper clipping is curled up inside that tells the story of the demise of the bar from which the cup apparently came.  The clipping was from a 1981 newspaper – one of those ’50 Years Ago Today’ bits.  It reads:

50 YEARS AGO TODAY – FEB. 12, 1931

With the interests of the old people at the Reiss Home for the Aged and the future expansion of St. Nicholas Hospital in mind, Hospital Sisters of St. Francis have acquired the Acker property at the southeast corner of the intersection of N. Tenth Street and Superior Avenue.  The Acker site is 120 feet square. On it is a double two-story building occupied by the Joe Acker saloon and boarding house, and a barn (ausspannung). Part of the main building was formerly occupied by the Bruder Radio Company. … With the purchase of the Acker real estate, the Hospital Sisters now own all the land in the block in which the hospital is located except a small house and lot in the southwest corner.

I like that the paper tossed in just a single German word in that little article.  Weirdly, though, the translation seems to be ‘relaxation.’  It’s unclear whether one would seek relaxation in the boarding house or in the barn.

Check out the dice – I love that they are stamped like playing cards, not the boring old pips I expected to see when I tossed them out of the cup.  There’s no way to know if this cup actually came from the Joe Acker saloon, but Grandma is convinced, and old objects always seem cooler when they come with a story, so I’ll stick with it.