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.

"'We call them pigs, and rightly so,' says Don Cox, 'because they have the way of making the victim look like the criminal, and the criminal look like the victim."

Wrote Tom Wolfe in "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's" (1970):

"So every Panther must be ready to defend himself. That was handed down by our Minister of Defense, Huey P. Newton: Everybody who does not have the means to defend himself in his home, or if he does have the means and he does not defend himself—we expel that man... see... As our Minister of Defense, Huey P. Newton, says, ‘Any unarmed people are slaves, or are slaves in the real meaning of the word’ . . . We recognize that this country is the most oppressive country in the world, maybe in the history of the world. The pigs have the weapons and they are ready to use them on the people, and we recognize this as being very bad. They are ready to commit genocide against those who stand up against them, and we recognize this as being very bad...."

Today's NYT has his obituary:

Donald L. Cox, who was at the center of black radical politics as a member of the Black Panther Party high command and who earned a moment of celebrity in 1970 when he spoke at the Leonard Bernstein fund-raising party in Manhattan made notorious by the writer Tom Wolfe, died on Feb. 19 at his home in Camps-sur-l’Agly, France. He was 74.

What year was it?

My history blogging continues. Before clicking, see if you know the year.

"Boston Corset Maker Says Women Have Grown Stouter" — and the the 21-inch waist is a thing of the past.

The Chief Justice spoke of Lincoln's "Christ-like character," but the President said Lincoln was a "natural human being with the frailties mixed with the virtues of humanity" — as the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated today.

Mrs. A.N. George of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage is offended by the reference to "the tactics of the pole-cat when badly frightened" that appeared in a resolution by the New England Woman Suffrage Association.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyles visits New York and opines on Coney Island, suffragists, plumage laws, and skyscrapers.

Why hasn't the Women's Party put up a female candidate for President?

"Every man turned into a devil. We ran fighting and clawing and scratching and swearing for the ladder leading up to the deck. We found the hatches battened down. Great God, how the men did curse!" A terrible ship fire.

The NYT tries to explain the physics of "Young Professor Heisenberg," and Lady Grace Drummond-Hay talks to General Hermann Wilhelm Goering.

Tom Wolfe "suggested that intellectuals are attracted to socialism because it seems in 'good taste"" and it has the '''secret promise' ... that intellectuals will wind up with power."

The NYT wonders why it is that the 12 greatest women alive in the United States today are all childless.

"Orwell said, 'I never wrote a decent word that wasn't motivated by a deep political feeling.'"

"I totally disagree with Orwell, who I admire," says Tom Wolfe. "I have never written a decent word that was dominated by politics."

People always talk about me as this right-wing writer. And to them I say, "What's my agenda? What is political about I am Charlotte Simmons? What's political about A Man In Full, what's political about The Right Stuff or The Bonfire of the Vanities, or The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test?"

Oh, Tom, don't you realize — of course you do — that denying such things are political is itself right wing?

I found that via Instapundit, who's got a 2:23 AM post at the top of his page now, saying that he just got back home after 6 hours at the Children's E.R. and that blogging may be light this morning. I hope everything is okay with the Instafamily, but it must be, because not only did he say "Things turned out about as well as could be," but he also saw fit to think about and take the time to manage blog reader expectations.

UPDATE: Looks like he's okay.

"What we have here is worthy of a Tom Wolfe novel: the bonfire of the multicultural vanities."

Writes David Brooks:

The Clintons are hitting Obama with everything they’ve got. The Obama subordinates are twisting every critique into a racial outrage in an effort to make all criticism morally off-limits....

Ha ha. Exactly. Are you deeply troubled that such serious matters should be so rudely politicized, or are you laughing at the farce?

Meanwhile, the 2 campaigns have supposedly called a truce with respect to any dispute over Martin Luther King. Does that mean race won't be a point of contention anymore or are we just seeing Obama showing off his graciousness while reminding us of Mrs. Clinton's MLK gaffe once again?

"Ready at last to grind into her with the Hound, drive it into her piety."

Norman Mailer wins the Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

The idea of the award is "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it." But I do think they confuse good writing about bad sex with bad writing. Mailer was writing about Adolf Hitler, so he must have meant the act to seem ugly. This conflation of bad sex and bad writing was really obvious in 2004 when they gave the award to Tom Wolfe a passage in "I Am Charlotte Simmons":

Wolfe's third novel is set in an imaginary elite Ivy League university and is seen through the eyes of his eponymous heroine - a shy, virginal country girl who is initially shocked by the decadence and excess she encounters. Wolfe spent four years roaming the campuses of America's top universities researching the novel and claimed in a Guardian interview that "I have tried to make the sex un-erotic. I will have failed if anyone gets the least bit excited. So much of modern sex is un-erotic, if erotic means flight of fancy or romantic build-up."

I've read that book, and Wolfe did exactly what he says he meant to do.

Nevertheless, bad sex or bad writing, the chosen passages are quite hilarious.

"American life was becoming so surreal, so stupefying, so maddening, that it had ceased to be a manageable subject for novelists..."

So thought Philip Roth in 1960 -- as reported in a 1997 NYT review of "American Pastoral." (TimesSelect link.)

He argued that real life, the life out of newspaper headlines, was outdoing the imagination of novelists, and that fiction writers were in fact abandoning the effort to grapple with ''the grander social and political phenomena of our times'' and were turning instead ''to the construction of wholly imaginary worlds, and to a celebration of the self.''

These remarks -- made even before John F. Kennedy's assassination and the social upheavals of the 60's magnified the surreal quotient of American life -- help illuminate what Tom Wolfe identified (with considerable self-serving hyperbole) in the late 80's as a retreat from realism. They also help explain the direction that Mr. Roth's own fiction has taken over the last three and a half decades, his long obsession with alter egos and mirror games and the transactions between life and art.

"This business of my having done the unthinkable and voted for George Bush..."

Tom Wolfe on George Bush:

Mr. Wolfe offers a personal incident as evidence of "what a fashion liberalism is." A reporter for the New York Times called him up to ask why George W. Bush was apparently a great fan of the "Charlotte Simmons" book. "I just assumed it was the dazzling quality of the writing," he says. In the course of the reporting, however, it came out that Mr. Wolfe had voted for the Bush ticket. "The reaction among the people I move among was really interesting. It was as if I had raised my hand and said, 'Oh, by the way, I forgot to tell you, I'm a child molester.'" For the sheer hilarity, he took to wearing an American flag pin, "and it was as if I was holding up a cross to werewolves."

George Bush's appeal, for Mr. Wolfe, was owing to his "great decisiveness and willingness to fight." But as to "this business of my having done the unthinkable and voted for George Bush, I would say, now look, I voted for George Bush but so did 62,040,609 other Americans. Now what does that make them? Of course, they want to say--'Fools like you!' . . . But then they catch themselves, 'Wait a minute, I can't go around saying that the majority of the American people are fools, idiots, bumblers, hicks.' So they just kind of dodge that question. And so many of them are so caught up in this kind of metropolitan intellectual atmosphere that they simply don't go across the Hudson River. They literally do not set foot in the United States. We live in New York in one of the two parenthesis states. They're usually called blue states--they're not blue states, the states on the coast. They're parenthesis states--the entire country lies in between."

That's just a couple paragraphs in an excellent piece on Tom Wolfe. Read the whole thing.

Wolfe on Thompson.

Tom Wolfe writes a tribute to Hunter S. Thompson, who shared his first-hand research for "The Hell's Angels, a Strange and Terrible Sage" with Wolfe, giving him what he needed to write "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test." People like to say Hunter S. Thompson invented something new, Wolfe writes:

Yet he was also part of a century-old tradition in American letters, the tradition of Mark Twain, Artemus Ward and Petroleum V. Nasby, comic writers who mined the human comedy of a new chapter in the history of the West, namely, the American story, and wrote in a form that was part journalism and part personal memoir admixed with powers of wild invention, and wilder rhetoric inspired by the bizarre exuberance of a young civilization.

Bush's books.

President Bush loved the book "I Am Charlotte Simmons" and is recommending it to all his friends. He tells reporters about the nonfiction books he reads and doesn't mention the fiction, but, according to the linked Elisabeth Bumiller article, he loves Tom Wolfe and has read all his books. And Wolfe voted for Bush. Why do I always imagine that any given fiction writer votes Democratic? (I meant that as a serious question, but somehow I'm expecting jokes in the email.)



Of course, Wolfe has some terrific nonfiction books. Myself, I prefer nonfiction and have only read Wolfe's nonfiction. I'm especially fond of "From Bauhaus to Our House" and "The Painted Word."



UPDATE: A reader sends this link to a Guardian interview with Wolfe, from just before Election day, explaining his support of Bush. A snippet:

So what is it about his liberal neighbours and fellow diners in his adoptive New York that Wolfe cannot abide? "I cannot stand the lock-step among everyone in my particular world. They all do the same thing, without variation. It gets so boring. There is something in me that particularly wants it registered that I am not one of them....



"I do think," he admits, apparently speaking for himself, his country and his president, "that if you are not having a fight with somebody, then you are not sure whether you are alive when you wake up in the morning."

From my place here in Madison, I really know how he feels!



ANOTHER UPDATE: This is Drudge's sensationalist teaser for the Bumiller article: "Bush recommending Tom Wolfe's racy new beer- and sex-soaked novel, 'I am Charlotte Simmons' to friends..."

The view from Madison.

It's another damp, cool summer day here in Madison. My lewd front-yard mushrooms have re-sprouted. My overgrown hedge is now clipped, but swarming with mosquitoes. It's a good day to hole up inside and make the big push to get my Conlaw exams graded. Monday is the deadline, finally close enough to call up the mental powers that my brain keeps firmly in reserve, try as I might to tap into them earlier. Monday is also the first day of the 5-week summer session I will be teaching to a group--I don't know how large--of students who feel motivated for one reason or another to tackle the course in 2-hour sessions beginning at 8 am, four days a week. How strange it is to cover 5% of the material each day, to wrap one's mind around Marbury not in a week but a day. But we will do it! Instead of just bumbling into the summer day around 10 am, class will already be over, and a sense of accomplishment will cast a golden glow over the rest of the day. (See? I'm an optimist).



So, time for me to engage with some bluebooks. May I recommend the other Madison bloggers over there in the sidebar? Gordon (Venturpreneur) is currently blogging from Germany, and Tonya's blogging from Italy. Nina is now in Madison, as is Jeremy, and both of them have changed the look and the content of their blogs recently. Nina is tapping the rich material of her childhood, growing up in Poland in the 1950s (here, for example), and Jeremy is taking on Ralph Nader ("He may have a monomaniacal narcissistic mental world, but it's not a monomaniacal narcissistic fantasy world")(and scroll up if "Arkanoid" is a topic of interest to you).



UPDATE: John takes issue with Jeremy's assessment of Nader's contact with reality. Let's assume Nader means to lie, as Jeremy contends, when he says "I think I'm going to take more votes away from Republicans than from Democrats." John pointed out that it's such a ridiculous thing to say that even a liar would only say it if he was out of touch with reality.



I've heard two writers recently make the same observation about the difference between writing fiction and writing nonfiction: fiction has to be plausible (and is therefore harder to write). (The writers, heard on C-Span, were Tom Clancy and Tom Wolfe.) The same goes for lying: it has to be plausible. Deliberate liars who are in touch with reality will say believable things. Otherwise, why bother to lie?