After a crazy year of traveling and shows, then a couple of months spent hiding from the New Model Army after the election, I’m back to a normal studio and class routine.
By “normal”, I mean about 6-8 days each month as studio monitor at the Art Students League of Denver. You can sign up for those by first joining, then taking a class. They are incredibly cheap, and a great way to meet a very welcoming group of artists. I also work a couple of days each month at a private studio. I enjoy being in the studio- it takes my mind off the outside world of censors, corrupt puritans and tinpot thugs. I do sell art, of course,so nominally, I’m a professional artist still, but even if I didn’t the creative discipline and time with my thoughts is very immersive and relaxing.
I do recommend it for these dark times. Creative activities are a great way to counter fascist trends in any time, for many reasons:
The current group of blowhard thugs abhors, like all aspiring authoritarians, people gathering in groups. Community fosters good conversation ( a blessing after two years of far right word salad ). It doesn’t need to be political, sometimes it’s best when it’s not. Want to piss off the MAGAts? go to your library and join a book club. Trumpies hate books and reading. They want you alone and isolated from common sense talk. I had joined a conversational Spanish group at DPL, but Covid killed it. I keep looking for it, but no luck.
Art gives a voice. Again, for proof, just look at the orange mob’s hatred of the relatively innocuous pop songs of Taylor Swift. They know that their message of female empowerment is contrary to the interests of authoritarian regimes. In my last post, I suggested the role of comics and zines in challenging fascism. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, printing presses, for example, can’t be easily bought and neutered.
Giving threatened minorities a haven. The message of Republican police agencies like ICE is: divide and conquer. Art says: unite and strengthen.
I also teach art classes. Classes build confidence and problem solving skills, They are literally about the exchange of ideas, another aspect of free societies that makes MAGA petrified in fear.
I’m updating my Classes and Workshops page on the top menu bar with Spring and Summer offerings. Again, there’s no agenda to art, despite what the fear mongers want you to believe. Anyone who is sick of the simplistic ravings on cable news can benefit. It feels good to exercise the creative muscles, and it keeps a free society strong.
What I’m reading: I spent a lot of time on my Besties list of my favorite comics of the year. I spent a lot of time finishing up the books themselves, some which arrived very late in the year. You can see those here:
But I’ve not been ignoring prose. I had long books I read all through ’24, some of which I finally finished in the Fall, after a very busy Summer. The Fall remained busy, and there were the Besties, so I began to read shorter stuff, which worked like a charm.
My Wars Are Laid Away in Books, Alfred Habegger, Random House, 2001: I love critical biographies, in which the art is examined in light of the life, and this is a good one. There isn’t much biographical detail to go on in Emily Dickinson’s life, so Habegger must mine letters and poems for clues to how a reclusive sheltered woman from a conservative, puritan backwater became one of American poetry’s greatest innovators. I’m trying to post more regularly, and this book is crying out for a separate discussion, so I’ll leave it at that.
Tristram Shandy, Lawrence Sterne, 1659: Sterne’s humor, and thus his writing style, is quite elliptical, and this, more than the enlightenment era language, made the book hard to read. So it took me a long time, but it was worth it, as it’s funny as hell, even if you have to Google a lot of the allusions. A working knowledge of the 100 Years’ War is handy, for instance.
It shocks me that I’ve never seen a full comparison of Sterne and Pynchon, the book cannot have been very far from TP’s typewriter. This could be said of Barth, Wallace, and Gaddis to an extent as well. I found this book to be just as fundamental to my favorite literature as Don Quijote, which it constantly extols.
The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, Finca Vigia Edition, Scribners, 1987: In returning to these stories after reading them in college, a big question that arises is, are they still relevant, or have they gotten outdated? I reread For Whom the Bell Tolls a couple of years back, and it was enjoyable enough, but had its embarrassing, somewhat overwritten, moments. Not here, though. There is the occasional creaky story, but most of these are at least highly readable, many remain compelling. Words and sentences teeter on a knife’s edge and the weight of unspoken tensions, the famous ‘iceberg’ writing of Hemingway lore, is propulsive and gripping. I was a bit shocked to realize that many of these stories are far shorter than they seem in memory. One of my all time favorites, The End of Something, logs in at 3 1/2 pages. So filled with detail and moment that it seems almost novelistic.
The book collects all previously published stories from books, adds in some magazine stories that were never collected, then some that were never published. Only a few seem even a little out of place, and many of the unfamiliar ones add a lot to the canon. Several set in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War, feel more authentic than For Whom, because they hew closer to a biographical feel, like The Sun Also Rises. In fact, I read them in groupings by locale- Spain, Cuba/Key West, Italy, saving the Michigan group, the Nick Adams stories, for last. In Big Two Hearted River, there is no subtext, no unstated back story (and very little ‘front’ story, really) other than a boy on his own, slowly growing up, and the stories, too, are similarly ontological, and remain lapidary.
McSweeney’s 51, 2017: I spend a lot of my time in used bookstores, and a used bookstore is valuable for its sense of surprise. The current buzz is of no import there. You won’t find a current bestseller or talk show sensation there, you’re on your own. I bring home comics, classics, ancient magazines and oddities. If I can’t find anything I have to have, I often pick up essay collections or fiction anthologies, because they are handy, as stated, for busier times, and can even be brought along on the bus.
Short stories in McSweeney’s seem to be built a strong sense of the absurd or surreal, which seems to harken more to Fitzgerald’s than Hemingway’s influence. Or more likely, Borges. Kelly Link, George Saunders, have appeared and many of the regulars in McSweeney’s typify a creepy or eccentric undertone that enters viscerally then goes straight up the spine. I keep several older McSweeney’s on the shelf for when I’m casting about for a quick read. They are reliable, and this is one of the best I’ve read in a while, reminding me of some of my favorites from their earliest issues.
Short stories are concise and memorable. They are often assumed to be in conversation with a writer’s longer works, but they are sometimes in conversation with each other. The Nick Adams of Big Two Hearted River seems to hop a freight right into the strange backwoods encounter with The Battler. A story here, The Summer Father, does in fact trade in the unspoken tension of Hemingway, as three sisters grow up and out of childhood while on a summer getaway with their divorced father. The middle daughter, the protagonist, could easily be the young recruit in Mermaids, a story about mythical- and jaded- sea creatures paradoxically stuck in a tourist attraction.
Of course all artworks talk to each other. The conversations they have with readers and other works start new ideas and lead to change, just as the conversations we have do. It doesn’t require a PAC, it just requires a library or bookstore. It scares the hell out of tinpot thugs.
#readinglist #resistance #readingisresistance
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