pantagruel

poetry & politics

We don't have enough poetry in our lives. But thanks to Sarah Palin and William Shatner, that's changing:


You're welcome.

poetry, politics, WFS, beatnik

going wodwo

Tonight at Studio 2nd Street, the 'Change' show opens. I thought the painting I'm doing was going to just about kill me, but it didn't. (There were a few ugly, ugly moments, though.) About two months ago, when I found out about the show's theme being change, the first thing I thought of was Neil Gaiman's poem, 'Going Wodwo:'

GOING WODWO

Shedding my shirt, my book, my coat, my life
Leaving them, empty husks and fallen leaves
Going in search of food and for a spring
Of sweet water.

I'll find a tree as wide as ten fat men
Clear water rilling over its gray roots
Berries I'll find, and crabapples and nuts,
And call it home.

I'll tell the wind my name, and no one else.
True madness takes or leaves us in the wood
halfway through all our lives. My skin will be
my face now.

I must be nuts. Sense left with shoes and house,
my guts are cramped. I'll stumble through the green
back to my roots, and leaves and thorns and buds,
and shiver.

I'll leave the way of words to walk the wood
I'll be the forest's man, and greet the sun,
And feel the silence blossom on my tongue
like language.

--Neil Gaiman

I love this poem on many levels; it's one of my favorites. Ever. So I emailed Neil and asked if he'd let me adapt his poem and make it a painting. And a couple of hours later, he said yes, of course, be his guest.

That was, as it turns out, the easy part. Deciding how to do it and what part of the poem to focus on had me in a state. Because, you know, no pressure or anything, when you're only doing something with Neil Fucking Gaiman's work. When I ran into Dave McKean at Comic-Con, I told him I'd gotten myself into this. He laughed knowingly and said, 'And now you're terrified?' I nodded. He smiled and told me it'd be fine.

After I'd decided what to do, and worked out the thumbnails, getting a model was a minor goat rodeo. Finally, my best friend stepped up to the plate, and I took a couple of reference shots Monday afternoon, and got started. About 30 hours over the space of this week later, I finished.

The color's all off, because it's wet and I'm not good at taking shots of my paintings. It's much more like a Caravaggio in tone.

This one has the most accurate color of the shots.

A closeup of the stylized forest background.

In about an hour and a half, I'll be taking this down to the studio, to hang for tonight's show. I'm nervous about whether or not Neil will like it; how it'll go over at the show, and if it will ever dry. If you're in the San Diego area, or just feel like driving to Encinitas, come down to the studio and see it, and me.

Wish me luck.

Technorati Tags: art, deadlines, neil gaiman, painting, poetry, studio

getting on my soapbox

Elsewhere, I got on my soapbox about talent and art, and I think it's worth saying again. So I will:

I'm going to get on my soapbox for a bit here:

It's funny -- when I was getting my writing degree, I was told my first million words would be awful. And they were. When I went back to an art studio, I was told my first 10,000 drawings would suck. And they did. (This is why Fod invented fire.)

There's this myth that good art is made without having to work at the craft, and that talent is all you need. But after having gone through an MFA program and years at an atelier, I can confidently tell you that 'talent,' while real, gets you nowhere on its own. You have to be willing to suck; to put your work out there in the real world for feedback; to sit down and learn your craft; and chutzpah sure doesn't hurt.

When I first went back to art school, I despaired utterly of ever catching up to the other students, who had not taken any time off to go get writing degrees or careers. My drawings were… well, best not spoken of; theirs were beautifully rendered and lifelike; they were all much more talented. I was ready to give up, when my teacher brought in his old sketchbooks, so I could see that he also once made the same mistakes I was making. That was a priceless gift, because it gave me hope and the courage to get through the thousands of bad drawings. It didn't stop me from being terrified every time I work on something close to my heart, but it showed me that talent isn't the crucial thing; determination is.

Hell, I'm making myself work on this painting in spite of being so nervous about how it'll go over that I have to go retch before I can pick up the brushes. Any talent I might have is absolutely no help at all; not eating is a lot more useful, honestly.

So go submit your work; make a mess with the acrylics; and don't be afraid to suck.

Alright, I think I'm done with the soapbox now.

Technorati Tags: advice

swoon

You know, any day you get an email from your favorite author, it's an awesome day.

It's an even more awesome day when the email gives you his blessing to paint one of his poems, because he likes your art.

And if he signs it, 'love'?

Then you swoon.

I'll be on the fainting couch if you need me.

Technorati Tags: art, books, poetry

another wordle

Wordle has proved to be an inordinate amount of fun to play with. I've been putting some of my poetry into it, and seeing what comes out.

Here's one from fall 1993. I never realized just how… well, dark and intense my poems are.

Technorati Tags: poetry

thanks, neil gaiman

Or: superstitions, stars, and stories.

Once upon a time, I was a writer.

When I started at Wossamatta U., I majored in creative writing, a degree in reading all sorts of writing, talking about writing, and learning how to do all sorts of writing myself. This is deceptively harder than it seems. After years of reading the canon of Western literature; arguing at length over signifiers and the signified; writing reams of erotic poetry to get dates, and enough term papers to fell a decent-sized forest; swearing to my advisor that really, I would never need to write a villanelle outside the confines of ENG 506; being the featured reader at local poetry readings -- after all that, I was given a very nice piece of paper with assorted colored decals stuck to it. The piece of paper vouched that I could be trusted to write competently enough to avoid my alma mater pretending it'd never heard of me, the way one might pretend to not know a drunken friend who's pissing on a car at the moment. The awards I’d won and the paper I’d presented at a national conference attested that on a good day, I could set my small corner of the academic world to smoldering, if not actually on fire.

After that, I worked as an editor, then as a designer, and also: Cajoler of the Server, Fetcher of Caffeine, and Maker of Pretty Trash. For the first few years I was working, I went to grad school, mainly because it was not only free, but I’d been accepted to the MFA program in under eight minutes, a record time in the 140-year history of the university.

All this is to say that I once was quite good at writing, before I started on the slippery path to becoming an art director.

But in the time before I was a writer, I was an artist.

Technorati Tags: art, art direction, artist, inspiration, neil gaiman, painting, studio

offer what you have

some days, it feels like most of what i get paid for is simply keeping my temper in check. but today's advice column on how to live a creative life by cary tennis, cheered me up a bit.

"How do we reconcile creativity with the practical requirements of living?

To be blunt: Maybe we do and maybe we don't. But we start by being honest. We start with a self-correcting catechism of ego deflation: The world doesn't owe us a living. Instead, we owe the world. We have been entrusted with something.

This is not easy. We are beset with problems. We are grandiose and irritable. In certain ways, we are the worst of people. We do not make especially good members of the community. We do not put out fires or save babies from pneumonia. We spend our days messing with paint or digitizing sounds. We are often egotistical and secretive, inauthentic and emotionally starved. We are not particularly good friends because we think mainly of ourselves. We do not necessarily make great parents or teachers.

Technorati Tags: inspiration, painting, work

lineation, semiotics, minions, and panaché

i spent an inordinate amount of time over the last two days writing up a very longwinded answer to someone's question about a poetic device, lineation -- which, as it turns out, isn't so much a poetic device at all, as it is an exercise in semiotics. semiotics is a subject that most of us exist in blissful ignorance about, yet delve into multiple times in the course of our daily routines.

i. the magician

1-the magician:

I juggled electricity, once.
from that instance, theories resolved
into impish calculations.

I unveiled nature's secrets idly
as strippers danced: another kind of phenomena.
occam's razor was my favorite tool,
shaped by long aquaintance with my hand and mind.
I cracked safes to amuse myself.

I placed o-rings in ice water to explain death.
beating charlatans at their own game was
my pastime. no illusions ever obscured my vision:
I was the only human to first watch the atomic bomb
convulse and engulf the clouds
with the naked eye.

fools, deans, and laureates alike fell to my hatred of suits.
a nobel prize didn't lend gravitas;
my practical jokes continued.

"But I don’t have to know an answer.
I don’t feel frightened
by not knowing
things,
by being
lost
in the mysterious universe
without having any purpose,
which is the way it really is,
as far as I can tell, possibly.
It doesn't frighten me..."

is what I told my apprentices, once.

QED: antiparticles simply move backward in time.
once I learned this trick, life became simple.

my last words, scrawled on a blackboard
in transitory chalk:
What I can not create I can not understand.

who am i?

ugly mug

so, i'm in the ugly mug on glassell, across the street from my old office, waiting my turn to read at the poetry open mike. i haven't done a poetry reading since grad school, which means, before i was married -- easily 7 years ago.

blah.

it's almost a mercy that the open mike readings are limited to one poem each, with 4 minutes tops. that way, i only have to feel like i'm going to die from anxiety for one poem. :P

very apropos, this from yezida's post today:

We let writers write and dancers dance because that way, writing and dancing is something "special" that we are not required to do ourselves.

But we are all required.

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. - Martha Graham

God Herself is the building blocks of all creation and the movement of all destruction. We are pieces of these processes, and reflections of vast workings. If we can come to know ourselves and then to connect out, we will better serve the processes of All. We will come to help all beings.

Find your beauty, your violence, your art. Become yourself.

the ugly mug, oddly enough, is the first place i hung out when i moved back down here after i graduated. i traded the owner graphic design skills for a haircut. i introduced my mom, my brother, coworkers, and later, my ex, to the owner -- but stopped coming around after my ex and i split up, because i didn't want to get caught in the Great Division of Friends that happens post-divorce. the owner saw my ex more, and thus, i figured he was in ex's camp. so i never came by, even though i worked, literally, right across the street from this place.

not surprisingly, i got quite a chastening for never coming by. but now i've been scolded, bought an iced coffee, and am pushing myself to take a couple of hours away from work, and do something i haven't done in forever. even though i feel like i am going to die if i get up on the stage and start reading something i wrote.

oh, i hate this kind of horse.

[edit] i got stuck going first on the open mike, which was first on the evening's schedule. yeouch. but i bravely stuck it out. people seemed to like it. i got applause. i think i'll go back next week.