"I confess I feel somewhat bewildered by what you have just told me..."

"... to be born, or at any rate, bred, in a handbag, whether it had handles or not..."



Via Terry Teachout.

2 passages read recently on what makes an artist.

I've been rereading Tom Wolfe's "The Painted Word" in Kindle the last couple days, and I ran across a great passage that shed light on something in that collection of essays I keep pushing, David Rakoff's "Half Empty."

First, Rakoff:

An artist is something you are, not something you do.

I first encountered this Seussian syllogism in a used-book store, where I spent an extra thirty minutes fake-browsing just so I might continue to eavesdrop on the cashier, who was expounding to his friend about Johnny Got His Gun, Dalton Trumbo’s classic antiwar novel. The cashier had a theory about the book’s protagonist, Johnny, wounded and blinded and amputated to such an extent that, while sentient, he was little more than an unresponsive trunk of meat with a rich inner life.
“So I asked myself: If this guy was Picasso, would he have been any less of an artist or less of a genius just because he couldn’t paint? And my thinking is no, he wouldn’t.” I lacked the bravery to challenge him more openly than a muttered “Oh, brother” from the stacks, choosing instead to ridicule and sell him out years later, here in print. But it’s the same reasoning: indolence as proof positive of prodigious gifts. You can arguably invent Cubism and be the very embodiment of Modernism if you get a kick out of that sort of thing. But you hardly need to, Armless Picasso. Artists are artists whether they produce or not. None of it requires much more than hanging out. 

And hanging out can be marvelous. But hanging out does not make one an artist. A secondhand wardrobe does not make one an artist. Neither do a hair-trigger temper, melancholic nature, propensity for tears, hating your parents, nor even HIV—I hate to say it—none of these make one an artist. They can help, but just as being gay does not make one witty (you can suck a mile of cock, as my friend Sarah Thyre puts it, it still won’t make you Oscar Wilde, believe me), the only thing that makes one an artist is making art. And that requires the precise opposite of hanging out; a deeply lonely and unglamorous task of tolerating oneself long enough to push something out.

Here's Wolfe:

The Conceptualists liked to propound the following question: Suppose the greatest artist in the history of the world, impoverished and unknown at the time, had been sitting at a table in the old Automat at Union Square, cadging some free water and hoping to cop a leftover crust of toasted corn muffin or a few abandoned translucent chartreuse waxed beans or some other item of that amazing range of Yellow Food the Automat went in for— and suddenly he got the inspiration for the greatest work of art in the history of the world. Possessing not even so much as a pencil or a burnt match, he dipped his forefinger into the glass of water and began recording this greatest of all inspirations, this high point in the history of man as a sentient being, on a paper napkin, with New York tap water as his paint. In a matter of seconds, of course, the water had diffused through the paper and the grand design vanished, whereupon the greatest artist in the history of the world slumped to the table and died of a broken heart, and the manager came over, and he thought that here was nothing more than a dead wino with a wet napkin. Now, the question is: Would that have been the greatest work of art in the history of the world or not? The Conceptualists would answer: Of course, it was. It’s not permanence and materials, all that Winsor & Newton paint and other crap, that are at the heart of art, but two things only: Genius and the process of creation! Later they decided that Genius might as well take a walk, too.

Oscar Wilde to be protected from kisses...

... on his tomb.

In "A Woman of No Importance," Oscar Wilde wrote about kissing:

MRS. ALLONBY. You think there is no woman in the world who would
object to being kissed?



LORD ILLINGWORTH. Very few.

MRS. ALLONBY. Miss Worsley would not let you kiss her.

LORD ILLINGWORTH. Are you sure?

MRS. ALLONBY. Quite.

LORD ILLINGWORTH. What do you think she'd do if I kissed her?

MRS. ALLONBY. Either marry you, or strike you across the face with
her glove. What would you do if she struck you across the face
with her glove?

LORD ILLINGWORTH. Fall in love with her, probably.

MRS. ALLONBY. Then it is lucky you are not going to kiss her!

LORD ILLINGWORTH. Is that a challenge?

...

LORD ILLINGWORTH. [Sitting down.] Last night was excessively
unfortunate. That silly Puritan girl making a scene merely because
I wanted to kiss her. What harm is there in a kiss?

MRS. ARBUTHNOT. [Turning round.] A kiss may ruin a human life,
George Harford. I know that. I know that too well.

David Axelrod, circa 1975.

(Via Ben Smith.)

IN THE COMMENTS: Palladian said:

"He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O Cruel, needless misunderstanding. O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast..."

ricpic said:

Oscar Wilde lives! Sans wit. Sans soul. Sans everything.

Love all that literariness, but Psychedelic George hits what I was searching for:

Separated at Birth from

Chuck Negron

3 Dog Night's lead singer.

(Idle Chuck Negron rumor.)

He also bears a resemblance to Mickey Rat of comix fame.

Lem said:

If you put a moustache on this man you will not be able to tell them apart.

Actually, he looks more like Rasputin than the Son of Sam....

David Crosby....

"I'd had a feeling for some time that there was something worth writing about coffee. My attachment to it. My desire to draw my children into it."

Good God! Would someone please have a cup of coffee with Judith Warner?

She seems to have immunized herself from ridicule by tying her bland coffee musings to mourning over dead family members. This post about coffee and dead loved ones is about her previous post — a week ago, in what counts as blogging on the NYT site — which was about coffee and dead loved ones. There's musing about musing about coffee and death:

I wanted to capture a sense of lost worlds. I wanted to try to express what it felt like to have the time to be present. I wasn’t prepared for how much the piece would end up being for me about loss. About interruption and sadness and relationships ruptured by death or distance or estrangement or the indifferent cruelty of growing up and growing away.

One would have to have a heart of stone to blog about that without snarking.

How hail 4+" in diameter caused me to see 18 films.

So I was just hanging around at home, trying to get some reading done, and I see reports predicting hailstorms -- hail 4 1/2 inches in diameter -- baseball size! I have never seen anything close to baseball-sized hail. And I don't keep my car in a garage. So I pack up my things and drive to the mall where there's a covered garage and a café with WiFi.

That was over 5 hours ago.

At the café, I ran into a friend and had a long conversation, then drank coffee and got absorbed into the laptop for who knows how much reading and writing. Still, no storm. It was after 5, so I moved upstairs to the Bistro, drank some wine, ate a salad and continued to fool around with the computer. Still no storm, but the scary baseball-hail was still predicted. It was nearly 7, so I paid the check and went downstairs to the theater.

Surely, the length of a movie will give the hail time enough to come through. I bought a ticket for "Paris, je t'aime," which is 18 short films -- all set in Paris -- from 18 directors. I emerged from the theater 2 hours later, hoping to see piles of hail-baseballs outside, telling me it's okay to go home. But, no, nothing seems to have happened. So I'm sitting in the café again, writing this, wondering if I can leave. Has the hail passed us by?

So let me while away a few more minutes and say the film anthology was swell. The films were so short that I didn't get too impatient -- my usual problem. If anything seemed not so good, it would go away very soon. And all the films were pretty good. The only one I disliked was the vampire thing with Elijah Wood, and even that was bad in an absurd enough way to put up with. My favorite was "Tuileries," which starred Steve Buscemi and was directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. Just a little scene in the subway, with an American tourist who reads in his guidebook, after staring at a reproduction of the "Mona Lisa" that in Paris, you shouldn't make eye contact with people. Then he makes eye contact with a woman, etc. etc.

Various French and American stars show up for their short sequence. Juliette Binoche is very touching. She encounters Willem DaFoe, who's a dream-cowboy. Ben Gazzara has a turn with Gena Rowlands -- they're in a restaurant, and the waiter is Gérard Depardieu. Who is this Margo Martindale? She appears in a very affecting film, the last one, directed by Alexander Payne, who, in an earlier sequence, played Oscar Wilde, suddenly appearing next to his grave in Pere-Lachaise Cemetery.

Still, no baseball hail. The hell with it. (The hail with it.) I can't stay here forever. I'm taking my

ADDED: ... chances. (Somehow, I neglected to finish that sentence. Failed to write "chances." Fortunately, I made it home alive. Or that would have been freaky. For you.)

UPDATE: "Severe Storm a Non-event in Madison."

"Bad for You" books.

The NYT Book Review this week has a theme: "Bad for You." I don't think the individual books are anywhere near as interesting as collecting them together like this makes them seem.

For example, one book is about email -- don't you know you can get yourself in trouble via email? -- and even with Dave Barry writing the review, email is a dull topic. Don't tell me, let me guess. People hit the "send" button hastily, writing lacks the emotional cues of a face-to-face conversation, and blah blah blah.

NYT writer Gina Kolata has written a book about our fatness -- "Rethinking Thin" -- that is reviewed by Slate writer Emily Bazelon:

Kolata ends on a quixotic note, by wondering if perhaps Americans weigh more for the same reason that we’re taller on average than we were a century ago — because we’re in better health. Maybe the extra pounds even help contribute to this well-being.

What's "quixotic" about another repetition of the idea that fat people are actually healthy? I suspect this is the sort of thing you say in a book about fat to appeal to the people who would buy a book about fat. If we're getting fatter all the time for the same reason we're getting taller, why does that mean we're more healthy? It seems to mean we have steady access to food, and our bodies evolved to deal with scarcity, so we're really good at using food, loading up when we get the chance, and storing it away for a famine. When the famine never comes -- which is good -- it's bad.

Nirvana! Is Nirvana -- the band -- bad for you? Benjamin Kunkel reviews Everett True's "Nirvana":

[I]t is difficult to hold on, from year to year, to all the strength and pain of being young. It is also difficult to remain quite so completely confused. Yet there is honor in confusion — since figuring out how you feel usually means abandoning one of your truths. And the adolescent, like the artist transformed into a commodity, is right to be confused: right to want to be popular; right to be contemptuous of popularity; right to hate the faults in himself that make his popularity undeserved; and right also to hope that winning a deserved popularity might actually redeem, for a time, the entire category of the popular.

There, now, does that help? Should you listen to your Nirvana records again, or do they embarrass you? Would you read a bio of the band?

Camille Paglia reviews Jon Savage’s "Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture":

Savage amusingly juxtaposes the earnest social prototype of the “muscular Christian” with the capricious iconoclasm of Arthur Rimbaud and Oscar Wilde. Missing, however, is the Romantic lineage of these writers in Théophile Gautier and other aesthetes : not everything in literature should be interpreted as a direct response to current events or social conditions.

Amuse me with juxtapositions and then piss me off by failing to juxtapose something that my capriciously iconoclastic mind juxtaposed.

Here's a review of "The Joys of Drinking." Barbara Holland has written a book about the history of alcohol use, and she's putting a positive spin on it. The Constitution's framers drank a lot, people socialize in bars, etc.

[Holland] can’t abide our current era of moderation. Hip urbanites, she writes, “turned drinking in moderation into a high-class avocation.” Wine tours caught on and microbreweries arrived. The devotees “aren’t drinkers. They’re connoisseurs and critics, priests of ritual, sniffers and tasters, discerning scholars scowling thoughtfully into their glass. Fun has nothing to do with it. ... In the metropolitan haunts of the highly sophisticated, the cocktail is no longer an instrument of friendship but a competitive fashion statement, or one-upmanship.”

Is that moderation? You can have different kinds of attitudes and tastes and still drink a lot. And hasn't there always been a high class and a low class approach to drinking? I don't get it. This review, by Robert R. Harris, is just not critical enough, but it is studded with tasty nuggets of information, gving me the feeling the "Bad for You" themed Book Review is just here to entertain us, to play the "most-emailed" list game to win.

"If the sky above you/Grows dark and full of clouds..."

"And that old north wind begins to blow/Keep your head together/And call my name out loud...." So wrote Carole King, heard this morning on "Theme Time Radio With Bob Dylan." The theme was "Friends and Neighbors."

I must have listened to that Carole King album -- "Tapestry" -- a thousand times with my college friends. I seem to remember playing Hearts -- the card game -- and ignoring the moon landing.

Driving out Mineral Point Road as the radio show began, I loved the song he played by Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who, he said, must have influenced a lot of guys to play electric guitar. He was effusing about the way she looked, and told us we could look on YouTube and find a clip of her "that'll blow your mind." Okay, Bob, I found the clip:



I wanted to write down the name Sister Rosetta Tharpe, so I wouldn't forget it, and I considered trying to write and drive at the same time. I got out the Uniball and, for paper, opened to a blankish page of that Entertainment Weekly in my handbag, but then I thought better of it and just started hoping for a red light. But the red light wasn't long enough, so I pulled into a parking lot and took some notes. I wanted to remember to tell you these two quotes he recited:

"Go up close to your friend, but do not go over to him! We should also respect the enemy in our friend." Friedrich Nietzsche

"True friends stab you in the front." Oscar Wilde

And I wanted to remember to mention the T-Bone Burnett recording of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend." That was great, like it was crossed with the Velvet Underground's "Sweet Jane." Maybe you ought to find various old songs and try to sing them like "Sweet Jane."

Driving again, I noticed the clouds looked really strange, and I had to stop again for some photographs:





I turned onto Elderberry Road to get these shots, and it took me on a country drive I hadn't bumbled into before. It curved all around and by the time it ended, it was called Schewe Road.

Great show today, Bob. The best one yet. Next week, the theme is "Radio." The only song that it seems you absolutely must play is "You Turn Me On, I'm a Radio" ... "If you're driving into town/With a dark cloud above you/Dial in the number/Who's bound to love you."

Aubrey Beardsley, Andy Warhol, Janis Joplin. If you clicked on the Oscar Wilde link in the last post, you saw one of the fabulous Beardsley illustrations for Wilde's Salomé. Here's the whole set, at a lovely website. Here's the one I had a poster of on my bedroom wall when I was in high school. My other two posters from that era were of Andy Warhol (from the series of large black and white photo posters that were called, I believe, Personality Posters) and Big Brother and the Holding Company. That was a classic orange and blue psychedelic style silk screen that pre-dated any recognition of Janis Joplin. Boy, I wish I could find that thing somewhere amongst my belongings!

"Solomizing." Newsday.com tells us:

Four days after presiding over a slew of same sex marriages in his quaint Hudson Valley village, the mayor of New Paltz today was charged with 19 violations of New York's domestic relations law, injecting the debate over gay marriages in the state with increasing drama and urgency.

Jason West, 26-year-old Green Party mayor, was ordered to appear in court Wednesday to answer charges that he broke state law by solomizing about two dozen weddings without a marriage license, according to New Paltz police and West's lawyer.

Solomizing??? Is that some combination of solemnizing and sodomizing? With perhaps a dash of Salomé, presumably the Oscar Wilde version.

And, yeah, it's awfully harsh here to take the criminal route. On the other hand, litigating the issue when faced with a criminal charge (with a possible one year sentence) might make the gay marriage cause more sympathetic than it would look in a civil suit.