Art: where the broken wings fly after all

Originally posted April 4, 2008. Thought I'd haul it up here again and update it a bit to remind me.

Every person has beauty and value. Some have other unsavory aspects which obscure the beauty and value, but it's there.

Some of us are eccentric, obviously old, ridiculously odd, too fat, too thin or perhaps misshapen or unpleasant or unreliable. Some folks, though beautiful, are misshapen in ways more difficult to see - disfigurement by the constant prejudgement of others, where every word was twisted, shaded, weighted and measured against some mythical standard of perfection. Or by constant criticism during childhood where every flaw was carved up like a roast repeatedly. Or by constant underserved praise and by life passages bought and paid for by blood money rather than earned. This unhappy learning is latter replayed on others.

Sometimes people find it really difficult to get past it all. Some are like moths that have emerged from the cocoon in a jar that was too small. (See my pencil drawing above) Their wings unfolded only midway and are forever bent. Yet even in this there can be value.

Like many other resources, the past can be transformed. Rather than repeat it, and live it out again and again, rather than turn the bitter criticism or the too clever manipulation on others or measuring them against an imagined perfection, or insulting them for dramatic effect (sounds familiar in the current political scene) -- the best use of the past is to render it down into art. (Not the so called Art of the Deal,  but art in the expansive sense - whether literary, musical, visual, theatrical etc.) In that way it is an offering, and something is given to world.

It doesn't even matter if the world accepts it. It is the making of it, and perhaps the offering of it, that heals in a way that golden toilet seats and hair implants never can.

- Mar  Walker

Books: The Adderall Diaries, Stephen Elliott in Bethel, CT

Friday the 13th, 2009.
   Stephen Elliott, author of The Adderall Diaries, is reserved, a compact man with interesting tattoos and a slightly tenorish voice - a man easy to picture as a masochist. He read his clean, brisk prose last night in puffy suburban Bethel CT (at Molten Java at 102  Greenwood), with a quiet voice as  even as the surface of his narrative.
questions:

   He read three sections in all, fairly conservative sections of the book, and took questions after each. The audience seemed very interested in the memory aspect of "memoir."  Elliott said his some of it was taken from writing done as journalling at the time the events were occurring, so the details were not drawn from distant memory nor imagined after the fact,  but were written down fresh from the experience itself. He said he'd done of lot of editing and that the writing in its present form was many steps away from the first writing.
   The audience also asked how difficult it was to do the the kind of extensive self-revelation that The Adderall Diaries contain. Elliott said that getting used to revealing your secrets was a gradual thing, and that he'd previously written several novels where he used material from his life. He compared the process  to a transvestite's coming out. First, Elliott said, the man puts on a dress when he's home alone. Then, after a while, he puts it on and wears it out for a quick trip to the store.  A few months latter, he's out dancing in it, and can hardly remember when just putting it on was a big deal.

odd fly buzzes in the ointment:

     Elliott's  reading was interrupted in the middle by the owner of the neighboring bookstore (at 104 Greenwood Ave). (The bookstore folks own the building where the coffeehouse and the bookstore are located.) She'd been sitting in the back, waiting for him to mention books for sale.
   She interrupted to announce officiously that there would be no book sales, as Molten Java's lease had a non-competition clause with the bookstore.  Of course Molten wasn't selling the books, the author was.  For her part, she had no copies of his book to sell in her store.  So it seems her only object was to thwart the income of one author selling directly to his public, and to piss off people who had formerly been her customers.
    After a final section of prose was read, the company left the coffeeshop and went to the pizza parlor across the street where we ordered pizza, and drinks, talked and many of us bought a book directly from the author. Art will out, landlords notwithstanding.

-- Mar Walker

Gertrude Stein: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

A Cubist Memoir

 A response to Gertrude Stein's book "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas"

Gertrude Stein is a cubist name dropper! After introducing herself to readers as one of only three true geniuses in her acquaintance, she, as Alice B. Toklas, drops the name Gertrude Stein one to fives times on nearly all of the 252 pages in the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. While it is autobiographical, it is most certainly not about Alice B. Toklas, who 'sits with the wives of geniuses.' Instead it is Stein's own extremely self-reflexive cubist memoir which comments on itself, calls attention to its own materials and production processes, is obsessed with surface, is cyclic rather than linear and offers simultaneous views over time of both its own structure and its autobiographical vignettes. A genus? Yes, indeed.

As Stein clearly states, she is interested in surface versus interior, the outside of things as differing from the inside.  "She always was, she always is, tormented by the problem of the external and the internal," she says of herself on page 119. So with a wink, she writes, with the name and voice of her companion, her own story, dotes on herself as her lover and companion would and tabulates her own talent's progress in the voice of her mate.

Besides surfaces of name, there is also the narrative's surface - what was done and what was said, told with "the refusal of the use of the subconscious," and without emotiveness.  In this way she allows readers to make intellectual conclusions about the emotional nature of the narrative rather than offering a directed vicarious experience of it, so that experience of her life in print is essentially intellectual and analytical rather than emotional. Of writing this way she says "...that listening to the rhythm of his (the dog's) water-drinking made her recognize the difference between sentences and paragraphs, that paragraphs are emotional and the sentences are not."  --- In order for this to be so, one must detach from immediately experienceable emotion in any one sentence, so that the emotion becomes apparent only after the whole of the paragraph is perceived in the mind.

Stein's narrative is not linear but cyclic and gives one the feeling of moving ahead and at the same time going back. Stein was a friend of Picasso and Juan Gris and notes Marcel Ducamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase: on page 113.  It was not surprising to see it mentioned, as it had already come to mind by the second or third time the dinner where the painters sat opposite their paintings was described. This odd familiarity caused a hasty look back to see if I'd lost my place and was rereading the same paragraphs. The same thing happened in other places: the incident where Maitisse gets fried eggs rather than an omelet, the description of William Cook driving a taxi and of Gertrude Stein driving a car for the American Fund for the French Wounded, and the many returns to Paris. Each mention seemed familiar, out just a little off from the last time, with sometimes more and sometimes less of the incident visible, like one of the iterations of the figure's limbs as it descends the stars and seems to move, in Ducamp's painting.

Stein hints at her fascination with lulling repetition and the glint of surface: "It was this summer that Gertrude Stein, delighting int he movement of the  tiny waves on the Antibes shore, wrote the Completed Portrait of Picasso."  In the end, the tide of surfaces recedes and leaves a bit of truth dry on the shore. Stein admits many had badgered her to write an autobiography. In turn she badgered Alice B. Toklas to write one instead.

"About six weeks ago Gertrude Stein said, it does not look to me as if you were ever going to write that autobiography. You know what I am going to do. I am going to write it for you. I am going to write it as simply as Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe. And she has and this is it." (pg. 252)

 Of course, like Defoe's work, it is about a stranded traveler and his companion. Yet it is about quite another thing than it purports to be and it glides along tongue in cheek, a surface cleverly concealing and revealing simultaneously.

--- Mad Mar Walker

Original date: Sept. 2003