Autoportrait I

So  okay. I have not yet finished what I started. I didn't even get up a good head of steam. I did three posts in early January that were going to be part of a series and then I walked away for a while. The next book in line is the Tao Te Ching, and that's a simple book with a complicated story and I haven't had the gumption to get going with it; it feels too big too me.

What I've figured out is that given the number of distractor factors I've got going on right now (Tumblr, Pinterest, my artwork, chess, reading, and oh yeah, my job), the only way I'm going to get into a regular writing rhythm again is to attempt smaller bites, try my hand at things that look more like fun and less like work. That doesn't mean I'm not going to keep going with the bookshelf thing, I will. But in between I'm going to play a little bit.

One of the things I like about Tumblr is that the posts generally include links not only to the person who most recently put up the post but also to the people who posted originally. So when time permits you can do a bit of surfing to find other blogs. That's how I ran across a blog I really like maintained by Stephen Sparks called Invisible Stories. It's got some interesting layers. On Wednesday his post began like this:

[After reading Édouard Levé’s Autoportrait in January ‘12, I attempted—as an exercise in personality upkeep—to compose a series of declarative statements of my own. I succeeded for a few months before fragmenting into sentences surrounded by comforting white space. With the same intentions, but hopefully better resolve, I attempt another stab (in the dark) here.]

He then posted a short essayish sort of compilation of declarative sentences that I found interesting to read both for what they had to say and for the territory they suggested might be there to be explored. Cool idea, I said to myself. That might be fun, I said to myself. So here goes:

I'm now five years older than my father was when he passed away. I've lived in Honolulu for almost fifteen years now. I like living in a state with no majority population. I like the air, the potable tapwater, the sunshine, temperatures in the eighties all year round. But it irks me that in a small city with a perfect climate there is no infrastructure for bicycles. We're choking on traffic. And in an environment where we have access to wind and sun and wave energy every single day, we generate more than 90% of our electricity by burning petroleum. There was a time in my life when I was a political activist, but politics discourages me now. People will go to extraordinary lengths to deny the most obvious truths if they do not fit with their predispositions. Al Gore wrote a book about that. I suspect that he had hopes that the book would be a game changer. The game has not changed. Before I wound up with arthritis in my hips, I used to play, and coach, basketball. Before I wound up with nerve damage in my shoulder, I used to play guitar. Before I became an administrator, I used to teach. I've been a voracious reader all my life. I read less now. I find it harder to get lit up by books these days. My life seems to be devolving into a series of departures. All of which are, let us say, rehearsals. I begin every day with a routine of stretching that borrows bits and pieces from yoga and tai chi. It takes about ten to fifteen minutes. Then I shower, make breakfast and go off to work. I like going to work as the sun is rising, but in the winter months it's often still dark when I reach my office. My office is always cold. It's in a big building with central air which seems always to be set at the same temperature whether the days are long and sunny or short and rainy. During the winter it's cold. I've worn a blue fleece jacket in my office every day for five years. I take it off when I go outside. I don't like travelling much. I like being at home. I like having time to myself. For the last several months I've been spending time in the evenings making collages out of old books and photographs. (Before that it was drawings. Before that it was prints. Before that it was idiosyncratic oddball abstract paintings.) I sit and piece bits of paper and cardboard together and glue them down with acrylic medium. It's somehow very satisfying, this business of pasting bits of old things down to make something new. Often while I work I find myself thinking of my father, who spent time most evenings in his study, pasting pictures and newspaper columns into scrapbooks with hunting and fishing themes. Dad liked to think of himself as an outdoorsman. He was a meticulous man, and his scrapbooks were elegantly maintained. He's been dead for 55 years. The scrapbooks are gone. I don't know where.

(3) Pieces of the Frame

Well, I knew I had to have McPhee on the shelf. The question was which of his many books to include. I chose Pieces of the Frame because it was one of the early volumes of his that I read, because it's a collection of essays which he wrote in his capacity as staff writer for the New Yorker, and because there's a passage from "Reading the River" that I used for many years in my classes to illustrate how syntax can sometimes be artfully designed to reinforce or add a subliminal charge to whatever description is being attempted. I wrote about this passage in a Throughlines post way more than five years ago. But I'm going to have at it again. Here it is:

When modern canoemen go down a river in a wild-water race, covering distance against a clock, the amplitude of what they do is not so immediately apparent as it is when, at a time of leisure, they stop to enjoy a rapid. They can, for example, go zipping down a braided white torrent and suddenly stop dead in the middle of it, turn around, and hover, like a trout in a stream. Facing the current, they will nose down behind a ledge and let the full force of the river pour upon their bows while they sit there contemplating. They will come schussing through a rip, crash through an eddy wall, rest a moment, poised and quiet, then peel off through the far line of the eddy and drop so fast that soon only their heads are visible from the place where they paused to rest. Darting into an eddy on one side of the river, they will sit steady, facing in the direction from which they came, then slice the canoe decisively into the main current, paddling hard upstream. The result of this maneuver, called a ferry, is that they go skidding sidewise directly across the river, despite its velocity, without moving six inches downstream. To them, the white water is not a chaos of flow and spray but a legible language, and they know how to read it.

 What interests me about this passage is the way the language moves, and, more to the point, the way that the movement of the language mirrors the movement of the "modern canoemen." Two sentences illustrate this particularly well.

Example One:

They can, for example, go zipping down a braided white torrent and suddenly stop dead in the middle of it, turn around, and hover, like a trout in a stream.

What I admire here is the work done by the commas. The two commas at the start of the sentence set up a tentative, stop-and-go rhythm that is released in the middle part of the sentence, which not coincidently is about canoemen zipping down the river. When they stop, the commas return, three of them this time, to again create a rhythm in the syntax which mirrors that of the men in the water. I also note with satisfaction the placement of the simile at the end of the sentence, where the canoemen are compared, aptly, to fish.

Example Two:

They will come schussing through a rip, crash through an eddy wall, rest a moment, poised and quiet, then peel off through the far line of the eddy and drop so fast that soon only their heads are visible from the place where they paused to rest.

The same dynamic is at work here, but with the commas clustered at the start of the sentence, four of them this time, before the sentence plunges headlong with no interruptions to its end. Again, the movement of the language mirrors aurally the movement of the men in their canoes being described visually.

It's about at this point that my students will object, asking something like "Do you really think the author thought about this (their hypothesis being that no one would), or did it happen by accident. At which point I admit that I have no real way of knowing, but that there is ample evidence that careful writers respectful of their craft, like McPhee, do in fact think about such things. Raymond Carver, for example, has this to say in his essay "A Storyteller's Shoptalk":

Evan Connell said once that he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting commas back in the same places. I like that way of working on something. I respect that kind of care for what is being done. That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they can best say what they are meant to say.

Perhaps McPhee did consciously deploy his commas in this way with these effects in mind. Or perhaps he was just working intuitively to find the right way to capture this very complex reality in words. Either way, it works, and there's there for those who have eyes to see. To steal his own metaphor and turn it back on him, I'd argue that in the same way that the canoemen are learning to read the river through long experience of paying careful attention over time, careful readers need to learn to navigate the waters of prose by reading alertly and attentively over time

McPhee is the kind of writer who rewards that kind of close attention, which is one of the reasons why he's on my list.

Addendum Jan 7, 2013: Just got an email with the table of contents for the January 14 issue of the New Yorker, which features an interesting essay by McPhee on design structures in writing. (You'll need to be a subscriber to read the article, or pick it up on the newsstand or at the library.)

(2) Adultery and Other Choices

I've written about Andre Dubus twice before (here and here). Adultery and Other Choices is the second book on My Ideal Bookshelf for several reasons. First because Dubus is a writer of surpassing gifts whose stories have given me great satisfaction over the years. (In his back-of-the-book blurb for Dancing After Hours, Elmore Leonard says of Dubus, "More than any writer I can think of, he makes me aware of the simple pleasures of reading a story. You'll recognize Andre's people; you might very well be one of them." That's certainly how I feel.) Second because there's a personal connection. Dubus is one of a handful of writers I've actually met and talked to. I saw him read on a number of occasions, and hung around after a reading in 1985 long enough to talk with him for about five or ten minutes. Third because I wanted to include a book of stories in recognition of the genre, and if I had to pick one book, it was going to be something by Dubus. In the same way that including Allegiances was a gesture at the the whole genre of poetry and its importance in my life, Adultery and Other Choices is a stand-in not only for the eleven other books by Dubus, but for all of the other collections of short stories which didn't make it onto My Ideal Bookshelf but are to this day sitting right next to the twelve volumes by Dubus on the actual bookshelf in my living room,  books by masters of the form like Charles Baxter, Michael Byers, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, Anton Chekhov, James Joyce, Jhumpa Lahiri, Daniyal Mueenuddin, Alice Munro, John Murray, Grace Paley, and Colm Tóibín.

(1) Sturdy for Common Things

The first book on My Ideal Bookshelf, barely visible in the shadow on the left of the Dubus book, is Allegiances by William Stafford. It holds pride of place not just on its own behalf, but on behalf of the hundreds of poets and thousands of poems which have enriched my life, and which I might never have encountered if I had not first discovered Stafford, who set me on my way.

During my senior year of high school and my first two years of college, I worked at a small store in Fairfield, Connecticut which sold books and greeting cards. I tended the cash register, answered questions, and did such dusting and mopping and stocking of new merchandise as needed to be done. Eventually the owner, for whom the bookstore seemed to be a hobby to be indulged when he happened to be in the mood for it, took to leaving me to run the store myself. One whole wall of the bookstore was stocked with paperback books, and in the hours when the store was empty—and there were many of them—I'd often peruse the stacks and try to find something interesting to read. One afternoon I pulled a book of poetry off the shelf. It was called The Rescued Year, by William Stafford.

I should say that at this point, as an 18-year-old, I had no real interest in poetry. I had been the victim of the same kind of narrowly academic instruction that most students to this day are made to suffer with regard to poetry, which was presented as a kind of intellectual exercise to be approached and solved as a puzzle. The poets I had been exposed to—Donne, Eliot, Shakespeare, Dickinson, and the like—were using a kind of language which was understood to be elevated and freighted with Significance. Our duty as readers (and it felt like a duty), was to tease out the "hidden meaning" via a process of formal analysis.

It was therefore something of a surprise to me, and a considerable relief, to begin reading the first lines in Stafford's book:

The Tulip Tree 

Many a winter night
the green of the tulip tree
lives again among the other trees,
returns through miles of rain
to that level of color
all day pattered, wind-wearied,
calmly asserted in our yard...

This was a new idea to me, that you could write like this, that you could use very simple language and convey the movements of thought in a reflective, explorational way, even to the extent of bending the syntax ("to that level of color/all day pattered") in a way that doesn't sound right but feels right. I read that book straight through—the first time I had ever done that with a book of poems—and went back to the shelf for Allegiances, which offered up the first poem I ever committed to memory of my own volition:

Tragic Song 

All still when summer is over
stand shocks in the field
nothing left to whisper,
not even good-bye, to the wind. 

After summer was over
we knew winter would come:
we knew silence would wait,
tall, patient, calm. 

And that cold this winter gray wolves
deep in the North would cry
how summer that whispered all of us
at last whispers away.

I don't know about you. But for me, it doesn't get a lot better than that. The language is clean and simple, the imagery coherent and closely interwoven but also surprising, the point being made both sobering and eloquent.


Reading Stafford put a taste in my mouth that I wanted more of. It began a lifetime of reading poetry and writing poetry and (later) teaching poetry as if it were what in fact it should properly be understood to be: the product of another human being's very personal attempt to speak what is true in words that ring true. For, as Stafford says in the last two stanzas of the title poem in "Allegiances":

...once we have tasted far streams, touched the gold,
found some quiet limit beyond the waterfall,
a season changes, and we come back, changed
but safe, quiet, grateful. 

Suppose an insane wind holds all the hills
while strange beliefs whine at the traveler's ears,
we ordinary beings can cling to the earth and love
where we are, sturdy for common things.

Twelve Thirty-One Twelve

So here it is, 8:30ish on the last day of 2012. Outside in the rainy Manoa night families are lighting off their firecrackers, generating noise and smoke that will gradually intensify until the culminating celebration at midnight. I had been promising myself to post something here before the end of the year, and since it is indeed the eleventh hour I'm going to honor that promise.

I hadn't really intended to let four and a half months go by without posting anything here, but the trend that I indicated in my last post in August has only continued. The time that I used to spend writing for this blog has now been largely pre-empted by the time that I spend curating my art blog on tumblr.

I kept Throughlines going for six years and wound up with 490 posts and 9 followers. I've been at it on tumblr for less than a year and as of today I've got more than 6000 posts and 100 followers. Granted, posting at Tumblr is mostly a matter of a couple of clicks to reblog what someone else has chosen, so the stats about the number of posts aren't really comparable. But there is certainly a social aspect to tumblr that is interesting. I've found my way to 80 other blogs which also post art of the kind that I find interesting. I've vastly broadened my sense of what's out there in terms of art, and clarified what my own tastes and standards are. (I've taken a particular interest in still life painting, and have archive several hundred examples on the blog. Also collage.) Along the way, I've gotten a ton of ideas to support my own explorations in art, which during the course of 2012 have included drawing, painting, printmaking, and collage. If there were one major change in my life in 2012, one thing that made my life different this year than last, I'd say it was falling down into that particular rabbit hole. It's been an education, for sure. And a ton of fun.

Given that there is only so much time in a day or a week, the fact that I'm putting more time into art has had an impact on both my reading and my writing. I've been reading less, and writing little. Less, of course, is a relative thing. I'm still literate. The list of books I read completely this year—there are at least as many I dipped into and for one reason or another did not complete—includes the following (the ones with asterisks are ones that have impacted or stuck with me especially strongly):

LeCarre, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Toibin, The Empty Family
Purpura, Rough Likeness
*Harbach, The Art of Fielding
*Stephenson, Reamde
Greenblatt, The Swerve
Lehrer, How We Decide and Imagine
*Mantel, Bringing Up the Bodies
*Hessler, Oracle Bones
*de la Pava, A Naked Singularity
Child, A Wanted Man
Ford, Canada
Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic
Rachman, The Imperfectionists
Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
Eagleman, Incognito
Majors, Love's Winning Plays
*Knausgaard, My Struggle
Heller, The Dog Stars
*Espedal, Against Art (twice)
*Chabon, Telegraph Avenue
Shank, Teaching Minds
Zhao, World Class Learners (Dr. Zhao spent three days at my school this fall.)
Ramo, The Age of the Unthinkable
*Erdrich, The Round House

Right now I'm in the middle of Kingsolver's Flight Behavior and Eng's Garden of Evening Mists, and have another six or eight books piled up waiting for me.

So that's this year. Casting a wider net, I could list the books of a lifetime rather than a year. Jason sent me a book for Christmas called My Ideal Bookshelf. It features more than 100 "leading cultural figures" listing the books that have had the greatest impact on them. Each entry includes a drawing of the books on a shelf. I was taken with the notion and decided to put together my own bookshelf, but in the interests of getting done with it in a reasonable amount of time I photographed my nominations instead of drawing the book spines myself.

These are all books which have had a major impact on my life in one way or another. The titles, moving from left to right:

William Stafford, Allegiances

Andre Dubus, Adultery & Other Choices

John McPhee, Pieces of the Frame

Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching

Wilhelm/James (trs.) The I Ching

Bernard MacLaverty, Cal

Robert Finch, Common Ground

Patrick O'Brian, Master and Commander

Richard Kluger, The Sheriff of Nottingham

Michael Lewis, Moneyball

Dorothy Dunnet, Niccolo Rising

W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

David Shields, Reality Hunger

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

John  McPhee, A Sense of Where You Are

David Bayles and Tex Orland, Art and Fear

Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell,

John Gardner, The Sunlight Dialogues

J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Willam Golding, The Lord of the Flies

Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Thoma Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time

There's a story associated with each of these books. In some cases, several stories. I'm going to try to pick them off one at a time as the new year gets rolling, maybe try to do a post here about each. In the meantime, just wanted to check in and say I'm still standing. Happy New Year, one and all.

Warp 'n Woof

Well, hello there. It's been a while. I've been traveling some, and I've been posting a ton, but not to this blog. I've fallen under the spell of another sort of blog experience, over at my other blog on Tumblr. It's not a new blog, but I've been using it in a new way. For a long time I was just using it as a place to stash links to videos that I liked or thought I might want to return to. But then that changed in a big way.

There were two bits of technology that brought the change on. One was that through my school I was given access to an iPad, which was nice, but it mostly sat on my desk under a pile of other stuff because there wasn't much I could do with it that was that different from what I could do more easily on my laptop. Then I found what turned out for me to be the killer iPad app, which turned out to be Flipboard. Flipboard allows you to aggregate pretty much everything that you do on the internet into one easy-to-use digital magazine format. So instead of going from site to site or program to program, I can access Facebook, Linked-In, Twitter, Google reader, Tumblr, Flickr, The New Yorker, the NY Times, basically anything that has a feed, all in one place. What's even better is that I can share back (to Facebook or Twitter or my own blog or even email) whatever I'm looking at simply by tapping one of the icons at the bottom of each page.

So that was cool. Then when I was using the "Explore Tumblr" feature on my dashboard I came across the remarkable Beverley Shiller, who as far as I can tell seems to spend pretty much every waking hour trolling the internet for artwork that sets her on fire. I found that her taste in art was very much like my own, so I signed up to follow her blog, which meant that every day on my tumblr feed in Flipboard I was getting five or ten really good pictures which I could reblog to my own tumblr page just by tapping the reblog button.

Maybe that doesn't seem like a big deal for you. But it was a game changer for me. Because her blog led me to other blogs, and I could follow them as well—I'm up to about 20 now—and pretty soon I was getting really maybe thirty or forty examples of really cool artwork delivered to my iPad for my consideration every single day. From which, using Flipboard to reroute whatever I like to Tumblr, I have been able to more or less become the curator of my own private museum of modern art, with only the pictures that I like in it.

But wait, there's more. It took me a while to figure it out,  but it turns out that tumblr also gives you an archive view (button on the top right of the page) that aggregates thumbnails of all of your posts in one page you can just scroll through if you're looking for one particular work. Like this, only much much much longer, since I now have more than a thousand pictures in my archive.

And eventually I also figure out that you can also tag those posts any way you like and call them up that way. I've gotten dozens of pictures from artists I liked all along but didn't have any way to look at, and I've learned about dozens of others I never heard of before who, although they may never become household names, are doing wonderful work in nooks and crannies I would never have known about. My tastes in art are offbeat. I like a lot of stuff that most people would shake their head at, if they bothered to look at it at all. But I find it really encouraging to know that all across the world there are people who are producing work that speaks to me, and that I now have a way to get to it.

I've been hearing tech people like Will Richardson talking about how universal access to digital media in some sense turns all of us—adults and students alike—into curators, and about the implications of that for our notions about school and our teaching practices. I didn't get it at first. Now I think I do.

So that's how I spent my summer vacation. And, oh yeah, I was in China for two weeks. About which perhaps more some day.

Innerworlds

I've been working for several months on a series of black-and-white semi-abstract drawings. Each is about 8' x 10". This weekend I added two more to the ten I already had completed. When I got done with them I added them to iPhoto and happened to notice that there was an export function that allows me to put together a Quicktime video of the slide show with music. (The music is Ozzie Kotani playing "Moanalua," from his CD To Honor a Queen, on which he plays lovely slack-key versions of songs written by Queen Lili'uokalani.) Here's the video:

Working on these drawings has become a kind of meditation practice for me. I do not normally plan them out in advance, but work them out in the making, one move leading to another.   I'm not sure how they are going to turn out until they are done. But it's turned out to be a satisfying way to work. There are a couple of operational "rules" that I've imposed upon myself, one being the overall format and another being the  high-contrast black/white aspect, no half tones or shading or crosshatching. Each one winds up taking between five and ten hours to complete.

(Having posted this, I notice there's a glitch with the video: the first picture shows up only briefly and then there are ten seconds of black screen at the end. But you get the idea.)

Make Good Art

Here's writer Neil Gaiman's graduation address to the University of the Arts Class of 2012. (Thanks and a tip of the hat to Ronk.)

Two excerpts:

The urge, starting out, is to copy. And that's not a bad thing. Most of us only find our own voices after we've sounded like a lot of other people. But the one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.

The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you're walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That's the moment you may be starting to get it right.

The things I've done that worked the best were the things I was the least certain about, the stories where I was sure they would either work, or more likely be the kinds of embarrassing failures people would gather together and talk about until the end of time. They always had that in common: looking back at them, people explain why they were inevitable successes. While I was doing them, I had no idea.

I still don't. And where would be the fun in making something you knew was going to work?

and

We're in a transitional world right now, if you're in any kind of artistic field, because the nature of distribution is changing, the models by which creators got their work out into the world, and got to keep a roof over their heads and buy sandwiches while they did that, are all changing. I've talked to people at the top of the food chain in publishing, in bookselling, in all those areas, and nobody knows what the landscape will look like two years from now, let alone a decade away. The distribution channels that people had built over the last century or so are in flux for print, for visual artists, for musicians, for creative people of all kinds.

Which is, on the one hand, intimidating, and on the other, immensely liberating. The rules, the assumptions, the now-we're supposed to's of how you get your work seen, and what you do then, are breaking down. The gatekeepers are leaving their gates. You can be as creative as you need to be to get your work seen. YouTube and the web (and whatever comes after YouTube and the web) can give you more people watching than television ever did. The old rules are crumbling and nobody knows what the new rules are.

So make up your own rules.