Power Outtage

Toward the end of a well-argued blog-cum-essay, Ben Huff touched on a point with relevance to the photographer and the photographed, the taker and, if you will, the taken. It is, as Ben cogently argues, about power.

This same chemistry often takes place on the stage and on the page; effective writers recognize it, wannabe writers had better recognize it. Shooting for quick recognition before moving along, I am tempted to hold forth one of my favorite of all characters from one of my favorite of all authors, Ms. Wife of Bath, from The Canterbury Tales. Reminding me of Zoe Strauss with her ebullient humanism, Ms. Wife stands out in a time when women were happy enough to be seen, but were not heard with too much enthusiasm. One moment particularly comes to mind, when Jankin, her latest in a series of husbands, is reading the then equivalent of a girlie magazine and Ms. Wife tears the page out of the booklet and tells him to get with the program, which happens to be her.

Shakesperean examples of scenes with shifting power bases abound, not the least among them involving Hamlet, his mother, and the ghost of his father/her husband, all together in her bed chamber. Hamlet, about to kill King Claudius, is another. "Now might I do it..." except that Claudius is saying his prayers. Come to think of it, Macbeth is about to pull a Tony Soprano on King Malcolm, but loses his resolve when he sees a servant carrying a dinner tray to Malcolm's suite, causing Macbeth to think Last Supper kinds of thoughts. "Trumpet-tongued angels will sing his praises." And a lovely tidal arrangement of power, starting with Macbeth telling Lady Macbeth that he can't go through with it. She is disgusted with his spinelessness--power shifts to her. But look what happens when Macbeth screws up his courage and goes through with the murder of Malcolm. Returning to their apartment, his clothing spattered with Malcolm's blood, his hands a gory smear, Lady Macbeth greets him with an effusive: "My husband!" Power back to Micky B.

Moving into modern drama and storytelling, say, just for the hell of it, Joe Orton's noirish Entertaining Mr. Sloan, or the splendid Jim Harrison novel, A Return to Earth, we see men and women on the stage and on the page, in varying degrees of vulnerability, in varying circumstances where they have given up power, usurped power from others, or had power wrested from them. Whether we take their image furtively or with their full consent, we are engaged in a dance of power with our subjects, with our characters, with our viewers, with our readers.

Ben Huff, in addition to producing moving, memorable images, has taken one of his recent shots, Red Door Open, which I greatly admire, and opened a door for me which I must enter, getting my own take on the matter of power. I believe the way to interest an audience in a character is to show that character in some vulnerability, being in the debt of a person, place, deadline, or attitude. Possibly also some disability. The story is about that person trying to get some power, either back in possession or, in the case of the buildugsroman, to get power for the first time and to use it for growth and understanding. This is where story begins. Where I believe I fit into the equation--thanks, Ben--is to give that character, that her or him, power. Over me.

Food for comfort and thought

Some splendid responses to comfort food:

Digby Wolfe suggests the list include blancmange which, he says, " is always welcome to a Limey. It's like boiled cabbage and warm beer."

Steve Beisner at three w's period Inkbyte dot com, a NOLA man at stomach, reminds us of the on-going need for jambalaya and for beignet, which may or may not be dunked in chicory coffee.

Liz Kuball votes for cheesecake but would not say no to key lime pie.

Lori Witzel wishes to add : migas
home-made (real) mac-and-cheese
Central Texas BBQ

and it would be churlish of me not to add corn bread.

On the other hand, wrobertangell@gmail.com a photographer, could well add rudeness when he took on Zoe Strauss for "capatalizing (sic) on peoples (sic)weakness." He also accused Zoe of being exploitative. Why does w robert need to consider a diet of crow? First off, it is cool not to like some one's work; this is one of the underlying conventions of blog posting in the first place. But w robert goes ad hominem from the get go instead of asking questions, making critical points, trying to perhaps find something in the artist's work he might not have caught. Second, when one looks at w robert's images, one sees in short order how he is reaching for many of the same results as Zoe and coming across with an acceptance rating of a piece with the current incumbent President of the U.S. I've followed Zoe for some months now, her words and her images. She needs no one, least of all me, to defend her work. But I can and do admire it, from the heart, not the snark. Start manging, w robert. Cold comfort

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Rejection Slip

1. You were not my first choice.

2. I was not your first choice.

3. I'm content to have finished this work.

4. I am not content to leave it here.

5. What is the sound of one rejection slip?

6. Is it true that I will favor you until you are taken?

7. Will I stop dreaming of you once you are taken?

8. Am I ahead of my time?

9. Is my time ahead of me?

10. Do you begrudge your brothers and sisters who were taken?

11. Have I ever lied to you?

12. Have you ever lied to me?

13. How does this all relate to Zoe Strauss' reaction at not being given a Guggenheim in 2007?

The Plot Goes on the Atkins Diet

It is a truth universally acknowledged that for all but a few holdouts living in remote farming communities or fishing villages, life has grown quite complex and continues to proliferate in ways that vex, frustrate, and disorient us.

Another truth universally acknowledged is that there are precious few defining moments; life seems to unravel like a Bayeux Tapestry, the edges crammed with events, and no serious pattern. To be a bit crude about it, life rolls forth as though it were an endless supply of paper toweling.

Thus comes story, neat, predictable, with such decadent luxuries as beginnings,middles, endings. Story is life reduced to determinism; story is the triggering effect where there is some sense of logic or at least some visible momentum. Story is what we were looking for in Viet Nam; story is what the neocons invented to send us scurrying into Iraq. Story, alas, is part formula, part archetype; it helps us through the uncertainties and surprises and sudden turns of real life. Story leads us to expect resolution. The amusing and simultaneously terrifying thing about this is that there are just enough congruent elements in life and story to allow us to think that just this one more time, maybe life will work out to be a story.

And so, to paraphrase Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, we beat on, oars against the current, borne ceaselessly back into story, which is to say a hope for an ending that is convincing and shows us what to do. The convincing part is fine--we don't mind being convinced that the story is over--but when stories begin telling us what to do in some specificity, we begin recalling all the Sunday schools we bailed out on, all the too-pat endings we scoffed at.

Depending on where we are on the spectrum of rootedness within a culture and time, we chose our art in direct ratio to our feelings about time--our time--and place--our place--in the universe. We are walking happy endings or we are as firm and resolute in our aloneness as the character Anna, portrayed by Alida Valli in the Graham Green screenplay, The Third Man.

Green, by no means an optimist, wanted that story to end happily with Anna ultimately opting to find a new life with the character Holly Martens, a writer of Westerns. Yes, I suppose I have spoiled some of the story, but there are, I argue, enough other surprises, including the famed cuckoo clock speech from Orson Welles, to make up for my disclosure.

One of Rembrandt's final self-portraits was a warts-and-all close-up, stark, stately even, surely something to aspire to, but not a happy ending, certainly not the happy ending type that sentimentalizes old age.

A letter to the editor in today's New York Times complained bitterly because an educator was forced to cut part of her school outreach plan and said, in a public forum, "It sucks that I have to do that." The complainer wanted the educator to use nice language to express her disappointment. (Latin, perhaps?) Entitles as she is to object, the letter writer illustrates her point that a show of emotion, even an emotion wrapped up in disappointment, should be dignified. I can imagine how the splendid Philadelphia photographer, Zoe Strauss would respond to that. Or to put it another way, dignity is all well and good when all is well and good. There are those who simply have to fuck dignity to appropriately portray their sense of disappointment or outrage.

Happy endings, any endings at all, are products of a mentality that needs to tidy up the museum in which the artists perform or display their work. Beckett didn't seem to care much for tidied up stages or for neatness or for happy endings. Shakespeare, in his serious plays, didn't have a group marriage scene, in fact, if you look at Hamlet.

We carry with us in addition to our biological DNA our artistic, dramatic DNA; it forms the sounds we hear, the visions we see, the emotions we feel, its clock might just as well be rated in MHz the way our computers' clock is because it is our time, our sense of it coming and going. We work for some considerable time to find our voice, our vision, our articulated sense of the way things are. From time to time, we encounter men and women who have a skewed picture of their vision and how best to render it. They are, in effect, trying to say fuck dignity, while clinging to the parental cloak of good taste. Hearing one's artistic and dramatic DNA takes us beyond all thoughts of taste and into a world that is real, a world that is of its time and the times to come for some time to come.

I have for some many years now had readers react to my work; as a teacher I have heard untold hundreds of responses to the work of others, as an editor I have had to call some one's attention to places where the work doesn't work. I know the signs. When the first comment is, What lovely, beautiful writing, I know we are at some kind of beheading, some Marie Antoinette is about to be rendered in two distinct pieces, the beautiful head rolling around, detached from the misstated body.

There are only two standards we can go on, the standard of what works for me as individual, and the standard of what I need to do to get it there. All else is phony dignity, and you know what Zoe would say about that.

Making a Scene

A few readers of these vagrant entries wondered aloud to me at a recent Friday morning coffee klatsch at Peet's. Their wonderment had to do with my commendations of the blogs of photographers, notably Liz Kuball, Ben Huff, the remarkable Aussie who calls himself pod; and the European combo who call themselves Mrs. Deane.

Thus were we launched into a heated and productive dialectic on craft, in which more questions are invariably raised and left unanswered than those answered. The result is that we are haunted by the persistent nagging of the unanswered questions.

All the photographers mentioned above have posted on their blog sites intriguing photos of buildings, many of these photos having no people, some having people on the periphery, as though an afterthought. Net result: These photos encourage me to seek the personality in the buildings. True enough, in some darkened recess of my personality, I relate all buildings to people, and thus pod's moving shot of the roof of what appears to be a factory or warehouse evokes the dust jacket art for any number of Dicken's novels; Ben Huff's quonset huts in the Alaskan snow evoke visions of the types who work inside them; Liz Kuball's buildings in the Salsipuedes--what a lovely name: get out if you can!--industrial tract evoke the gritty quality of work, work being done, work left undone, the intrinsic neatness of industrial workings, the intrinsic jumble that attends my own work. Mrs. Deane, currently on a technical investigation of color and color separation, produces shots in which color literally and figuratively colors the emotional impact.

Johann S. Bach once wrote a treatise in which he set down the emotion evoked in every key, advising, for instance that a mass be rendered in one key, a celebration in another, a lamentation in yet another, and so on down the emotional spectrum.

I maintain that every work has at least one resident emotion. It is the task of the shooter, the composer,the writer, the actor, to convey those emotions as cleanly as possible.

Yes, yes; I know. We have all seen those tests in which people are photographed in the emotional equivalent of mug shots, and we, the viewers, are asked to identify the emotion we think the individual is registering. Looking at the "results" we see how what we supposed a smirk was really a suspicious glance, and don't mention that full-on smile; that character was in actuality registering feelings of superiority.

Nevertheless.

What we learn is to come as close as we can to getting our own feelings in the range finder--the emotional range finder.

We writers need settings that by their inherent nature, and the words we use to fine-tune them, induce an atmosphere. That atmosphere becomes the crucible for the basic dramatic unit, the scene. Buildings have personality. Seascapes and landscapes have a resident genie. Motel rooms. Offices. These are the settings for our stories. We have to give them as much thought as Mrs. Deane gives gradiations of color, as pod emphasizes mood by use of shadowy darkness, as Ben Huff removes a coating of snow with a splash of bright sunlight, as Liz Kuball emphasizes the presence of personality of an unoccupied building by her inclusion of a shadow from a nearby telephone pole, the photographic equivalent of an eye liner emphasizing the roundness of a model's eyes.

Especially when I have been writing reviews of late, it seems a natural order to favor the words "gritty," "spiky," "notional," and "driven" in connection with characters. This in large measure is because I am all those plus, I might add, impatient, curious, and irreverent. No accident then that I think these are excellent traits for characters, both the characters of which I write and those of whom I most enjoy reading.

Put them into a setting with personality--an abandoned building, a stunningly fawning architecture such as the Fess Parker Doubletree Inn in Santa Barbara, a Zen-like loft in Tri-Beca--then turn them loose to have at one another. That is the beginning of a scene.

Apply the pressures of chance, misadventure, and the chaos theory. Heat until they combust. Heat until the unthinkable comes to pass.

John Coltrane. Wayne Shorter. Bill Evans. Carmen McRae. J. S. Bach. Daniel Woodrell. Nicole Krauss. Zoe Strauss. William Butler Yeats. Frank Ghery. Mark Twain. Alice Munro.

The unthinkable, come to pass.

And now, the most difficult but necessary condition: Go thou and do likewise.

Cuand' arrive, scrive. When you get there, write.


My book review for the week beginning 04/12;

Here There Be Wrytres!

Some of my best friends are writers, which is to say I have grown up with men and women to whom I was drawn because we shared this passion, a passion we attempted to simultaneously understand and master. Most of us have long since given up trying to understand it; we have come to the awareness that trying to understand a thing often takes time away from doing it and, indeed, trying to master it. Most of us have also discovered that trying to master the process has become of a piece with the advance in computer technology. We no sooner go on the hook for a new computer when we learn of a vastly superior computer to the one we have just purchased on deferred payment. We no sooner feel a sense of familiarity (if not superiority) with a technique when we read a story or novel in which another writer has made us painfully aware that, well, that we were not as far along as we thought.

These friendships with writers are complex and life sustaining. I am reminded of this in more ways that I can enumerate. Having just last night returned from Woodside, the lovely semi-rural fringe between Palo Alto and Redwood City, where I hosted my every-other-month Woodside Writing Workshop, I come, tired-but-buzzing-with-ideas from the readings, the commentary, the interests, and the energy of writers, many of whom I've known for upward of twenty years. Among the group are MDs, shrinks, corporate execs, professors. Andy Grose, an MD, exemplifies the vibe. I am not, Andy insists, a doctor; I am a writer.

I arrive home just in time to fire up my Acer and get in a blog entry before midnight, which is to say I rush home to work off some of the excitement of being a writer. This is not really bragging, I reason, if it is done to one's self and is not meant to make me feel superior to, say, the persons ahead of me as I stand in the check-out line at Vons grocery or the, pun intended, check-in line at Santa Barbara Bank & Trust, Upper Village Branch. It is a part of writerly muscle memory.

Just before yesterday's session begins, I am in the sumptuous kitchen of Flip and Jim Caldwell's home, pouring coffee and looking at Jim Caldwell's large painting of a scene at Venice, showing a cluster of buildings, emphasizing the play of light. At the very foreground, two motor boats, in motion, veer toward us. One boat is bathed in light as, indeed, the left side of the canvas is; the other boat, larger, slower than than the boat on the left, is shrouded with shadow.

There are people, artists among them, who could look at that picture, I observe, and immediately be able to tell from the play of the light what time it is. True enough, Jim Caldwell observes, but that would scarcely register because of the ways in which I have tweaked the viewer's visual priorities.

The creator as tweaker.

We all do it, and when we tweak at our best, we tweak not from thought but from muscle memory, from countless trial runs, practice, drafts, torn-up pages, impatient pushing at the delete key. Whoever we are, we tweak until we get as close to the image we have in mind onto a resident place, a screen, a hard drive, a CD, a canvas, a sheet of paper. I have only to watch Liz Kuball, downloading images from her Canon 5D to her laptop, then sizing them on PhotoShop so that they will fit the space allowed by the Blog matrix to have the notion burned into my emotional archive.

I edit many of my friends; many writers I met as an editor have become friends. Diane edits me. Liz edits me. I edit Digby. Digby ignores my edits, throws everything out, recircles the wagons, protecting against Indians I have not even thought about.

I have edited men and women I have never known in real time. In some ghoulish cases, I have edited some authors who were no longer alive to consult with.

Many of the writers I consider friends are not only dead, they have been dead for years before I was born.

Many writers I read and admire are known sons of bitches, Republicans, reprobates, homophobes, anti-Semites and what have you. I would not want to know them in person even if I could.

As I say: it is a complex relationship, being in love with a writer's visions and technique.

A few days ago, Liz Kuball sent me the now iconic Guggenheim blog by Zoe Strauss and directly I read it, I felt the magic click into place wherein I recognized the genie in the bottle I wrote of a few days ago. The irresistible urge was planted and I have since linked Zoe to a set of my intellectual and emotional archives that began with my having read an essay by Leslie Fiedler in which he wrote of Herman Melville writing about Nathaniel Hawthorne that there was a grand truth about him. "He says No! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes." I wrote to Sol Stein, no slouch of a writer, but also at the time publisher of Stein & Day Publishers. I introduced myself to Sol so that I could thank him for publishing Leslie Fiedler.

Sol and I became friends and yes, he even sent me something he'd written, asking me to comment and check it over for soft spots.

I told you it's complicated.

It gets even better. Last night, tired and spaced-out from a day of running a workshop for writers, then driving three hundred miles, then slipping in a blog entry, I check out Zoe, whom I have never met but now "know" because of her Guggenheim blog. Doing so is like deliberately choosing as a picnic site a place that has been recently struck by lightning. You can see the charred tree trunk, smell the ozone and burnt leaves. And there goes any chance of a restful night of sleep. I am thinking as I read Zoe Strauss's latest No!in thunder, "there is a grand truth about her."

She says she is pissed and overwhelmed and going incognito to sort out feelings and once again, for this viewer, this reader, she has captured lightning in a bottle.