West Texas, the USSR, and Reprehensible Reading

This is the kind of post I write when I have things floating around the pelagic zone of my head but no single topic to focus on. I seem to be emerging from one of the phases of isolation I pass through whenever I've been overstimulated or taxed by too much interaction. Ugh.

I have been keeping busy with my Texas stories, my next novel, and a painting for The Worm Ouroboros, however. That's the key to being productive. When you're tempted to look the gorgon in the eye, just keep working. The stuff you bring to light at the end of the tunnel will be about as strange as what you'd expect a blind painter to produce, but there just might be a certain aureole of beauty about it as well. You can't tell while you're still in the pit. You just have to keep going and hold on to all the shards until you're competent to judge them.

Still, I think anyone who produces in isolation is apt to go at least a little bit insane, and not necessarily in a good way. I'm a great admirer of William Blake, as readers of my blog know, chiefly for his early poetry and his lifetime output of paintings and prints. I have to admit that I find most of his "prophetic" books unreadable, as I think most people do. But he wrote what he felt he had to write, in utter isolation, in the face of decades of neglect and incomprehension, and he's my hero for that.

Nevertheless, when I consider how much he warmed up to even the smallest token of appreciation for his work (as, in the evening of his life, he became the center of a circle of young artists), I wonder how much his outrageous, elliptical style owed to the scorn and amused indifference his works tended to arouse. Perhaps, if he'd found himself placed in slightly more congenial surroundings, or his education or personality had been slightly other than what they were, then his life's work wouldn't have forced down such eccentric channels, and he would be a Universal Man like Goethe or somebody instead of a kind of "cult classic" of English letters. Then again, maybe he wouldn't have done anything memorable at all.

I went to that West Texas con a few weeks ago and gave a slideshow talk about the Ballantine series. Four people attended my talk. Ouch. This owed partly to personnel changes just prior to the con. But the room also cleared out before I got up, so I think it's more that the topic and speaker were too off-the-wall for common interest. That's too bad (for them), because I really put together a spanking good slideshow (festival of wrap-around covers and all) and gave a brilliant talk. (I'm better at speaking in public than you might suppose, despite my almost total inability to navigate small talk; after all, I make my living giving lectures on abstruse topics to persons of varied backgrounds.) Anyway, it was kind of a bummer. I don't take it personally, though I did write down who left the room before my talk. (Just kidding.) The episode just underscores how very isolated I am out here. Without the Internet, I could never survive as a writer-artist guy.

There was a bit of a silver lining to the whole experience, however. A local seller of vintage comic books saw my talk on the schedule and donated a stack of Ballantine paperbacks to hand out as visual aids. He even let me keep the leftovers for proselytization purposes. We chatted a bit, and he told me that he's collected (and sold) the entire series twice over. Now that's impressive. So, by going to the con, I discovered that there's at least one other person (and probably only one other person) between San Antonio and El Paso interested in what I'm interested in.

In other news, my intellectual life seems to be coming up against Soviet Russia for some reason. It began with my decision to begin reading John le Carré, most famous for The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. I've enjoyed what I've read immensely. It calls to mind both Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad, two of my favorite authors.

Then I acquired the first part of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago from the county library book shop for $0.25 and read it straight through. I'd read a couple of Solzhenitsyn's novels back in school, and had then perused the Archipelago, but without really delving into it. There's nothing I can say about it that won't sound trite, but it's a book that I think everyone should read at least once.

Last but not least in my encounters with the USSR, I recently attended a seminar by a now-nonagenarian friend of a friend of mine, a journalist who spent the bulk of his career (through the late 1970s, I think) as a war correspondent, covering such conflicts as Vietnam and visiting a total of 120 countries. Last fall when he was in town (our mutual friend brings him for a series of public talks every year at Veteran's Day), we all split a six pack of Spaten Optimator in a hotel lobby. His stories about intrigues and death on the Russian borders of Red China came immediately to mind when I read The Honourable Schoolboy, which centers on the community of foreign correspondents in 1970s Hong Kong.

But his entire life is almost unbelievably storied. He started out as a child actor, his parents being vaudeville performers in New York. He was a cast member in the original production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, which went on to win a Pulitzer. During World War II, his family performed for troops around the country through the recently founded USO. He enlisted once he was old enough and fought in the Battle of Okinawa. After the war he went to college.

As a journalist, he became an enemy of communism, and he counts among his greatest achievements his having been labeled a "very dangerous man" by the KGB. He was actually escorted out of Russia by the KGB, and subsequently refused reentry until after the fall of the USSR. (In later years he managed to get a glimpse of his old case file through a contact in Moscow.) He lost none of his energy with retirement, and used to appear on CNN's Crossfire among other things. He still travels to France, Russia, China, and elsewhere, giving talks at universities and meeting with State Department officials. Did I mention that he's 90? A gentleman of the old school, a hell of a speaker with a biting sense of humor, and a principled professional. Quite a person to have had a beer with.

Getting back to John le Carré and Solzhenitsyn, I've started to realize that it's not very good for me to read fantasy while I'm engaged in writing fantasy. Reading Lord Foul's Bane over the summer made me pretty cranky, but I would probably have gobbled it up if I were writing spy novels. That's how I've always been. I can't do my job well as a math professor if I don't paint at night, and my painting suffers if there's no math or logic going on. I think it's just that I'm very immature, and most productive when I feel like I'm getting away with something by working on a project that the little voice in my head says is the opposite of what I should be doing.

So I recently read Mickey Spillane's I, the Jury, another little item I picked up at the library bookstore. It was enjoyable enough, I suppose, but also quite moronic. It made me think of Raymond Chandler's soliloquy on lurid pulp stories and the apocalypse:

Their characters lived in a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction, and was learning how to use it with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine gun.

I've always loved Robert Altman's incoherent noir apocalypse, Kiss Me Deadly, which skewers the Mike Hammer character, but I'm big enough to appreciate both satire and subject. So there are two more Spillane rocker-shockers in the hopper.

Speaking of reprehensible reading, I may venture into Gor in the not-so-distant future. I've never read (or been tempted to read) a single Gor novel, though it's been hinted that I work coded references to the series into my stories. People tell me that they start out okay, but get sicker and sicker as you go on. However, under a humorous post on the subject over at Black Gate last month, a commenter linked an interview with John Norman so straight-facedly bizarre that I kind of want to read a few now. After all, as authors, we have quite a bit in common, being otherwise-obscure academics who write pseudonymous sword-and-planet stories set in the counter-earth. Actually, given some of the things I've written about, it's not terribly surprising that someone would assume I'm a fan.

But I'm not, of course, and don't suppose I ever will be. It's kind of strange, though, that those who would normally speak out against censorship are perfectly okay with keeping people from reading stuff they think is really bad. And maybe the Gor books are really bad! But everyone who tries to ban something thinks that what they're banning is bad. Otherwise they wouldn't ban it. If you say you're against banning as a general principle, you have to be against the banning of any book, even "bad" ones; otherwise you're just a viewpoint advocate with a penchant for moral posturing.

You can argue, as a commenter at the Black Gate article does, that John Norman's excommunication from the mainstream publishing world isn't an example of censorship but of free-market capitalism. To be honest, that's what sounds most likely to me. But people like Michael Moorcock did advocate "strategies which marginalize" John Norman's output, and his output has in fact been marginalized. In my opinion, the specific action Moorcock suggested (placing the books on the top shelves to keep them out of the hands of young adults) is perfectly reasonable. But some books celebrated during Banned Books Week have faced far less opposition. So what's the difference?

I don't have much of an opinion either way. It's just something I've thought about.

Well, I guess that's about it for now. I may start a series of short reviews of my favorite films noir. I've got about a zillion titles on DVD that I like to watch and rewatch. It'll be a good thing to keep me posting on my blog while I devote the other parts of my brain to my ongoing writing projects and other things.

Bosque-Larios I

My most recent artistic endeavor:



Bosque-Larios I, 7" x 5", watercolor on hot-pressed paper.

In 1675, the first expedition from Mexico into the part of Texas in which I live was organized at the request of the local Indians, a Gueiquesale group, who wished to convert and enter under the protection of the Spanish crown. The Bosque-Larios Expedition, named for its leaders, Fernando del Bosque and Fray Juan Larios, crossed the Rio Grande and traveled north toward the Edwards Plateau. A high mass – reputedly the first high mass in Texas – was celebrated on a portable altar not far from where I live, and attended by more than a thousand Indians.

There, according to the expedition's travel log, a curious story was related to the explorers by a Gueiquesale leader. The Cabesas, a group of Indians with whom the Gueiquesales had dealings, had some time previously come into the possession of two Spanish children, a boy and a girl. The boy they had shot full of arrows – he died praying over his crucifix – while the girl was made a servant of, until, long after, she too fell victim to her captors' arrows. Her dead body was left where it fell. Two years later, the Indians happened upon it again, and found it as fresh as though she had just died, with no sign of decay or molestation by wild beasts. They moved the body to a cave. The account ends by noting that the girl had long hair.

[Cf. The Native Americans of the Texas Edwards Plateau, 1582-1799, Maria F. Wade, University of Texas Press, pp. 39-40.]

Did this actually happen? Materialists might doubt the Indians' story, or posit natural causes. For what it's worth, there is a precedent of saints' bodies remaining incorrupt. The romantic in me would like to think of these two as nameless martyrs in the wilderness. Many a medieval cult was established on slimmer evidence. Being a circuit-riding professor who teaches night classes, it is my lot to drive long, lonely desert roads after dark, and the story often comes to mind, especially when I'm in the vicinity of where the mass took place. I imagine the girl's body still reposing undiscovered somewhere in the hills to the north, where limestone caves abound. Whether the episode is more likely to have happened around here or over in Coahuila is more than I can say.

The plants in the picture (agave, prickly pear, red yucca) are such as are found locally; the figure is inspired by depictions of St. Sebastian and St. Cecilia, whose tombs I visited several years ago. The upper part of the picture employs a lot of chrome green and Naples yellow, the lower more sap green and raw sienna, with plenty of cadmium red and burnt umber throughout. As usual, no black was used, but there is a bit of black in Payne's gray, which I frequently employ.

The execution was inspired by William Blake and his disciple Samuel Palmer. I recently read G. E. Bentley's biography of Blake, which is quite excellent, but found the author strangely dismissive of the "conservative," naïve Palmer, to whom we owe many important impressions of Blake's last days. Palmer's early visionary works are far ahead of his time and among the most glorious in British art. Before his youthful exuberance was curbed by his father-in-law, the painter John Linnell, he seemed obsessed with trying to portray nighted pastoral scenes under the glow of the crescent moon. I'm always trying to get something of the magic of these works into my own pictures.

I once spent time poring over a facsimile of Palmer's famous early sketchbook. Unfortunately, after the artist's death, his son burned the other sketchbooks from that period because of their "unmanly" qualities, which, given the historical context, I take as a reference to homosexual undertones. It is a shame. Indeed, it is a great crime against art. And a great sadness that such genius should have been sandwiched between two such uncongenial minds.

Sometimes, as I continue to paint and sell art, and to write stories and publish them here and there, I wonder what will have become of all of my faltering efforts in a hundred years?

Badlands and Baldanders

Another recent painting:

Badlands
5" x 7"
Oil on gesso on hardboard.

It's not the best scan. I was using a product called Ampersand Gessobord, which has a pebbly tooth. I always just scan my paintings, as I don't have a good set-up for photographing them. Usually I prefer using Claybord, which consists of a hardboard panel coated with a kaolin clay ground. It's very absorbent, which most people don't like, but I like how smooth it is, and don't mind building my paintings up in layers. It gives them a kind of luminous quality, and scans well. I wanted to finish this one pretty quickly, though, so I went with the gesso.

(Some time soon I want to try a painting on tin, as in the Mexican ex voto tradition. An artist friend of mine, who, unlike me, is from Mexico, has been doing a number of these, and knows how to prepare the metal properly. He showed me a couple retablo-style pieces by a friend of his who has a painting in the San Antonio Museum of Art. They looked almost medieval, and I thought them quite beautiful, though of course they have a strong dose of irony. I prefer to do things straight-faced, without self-reference.)

Anyway, the above picture is an homage to Georgia O'Keefe, of course, though her hill and mesa pictures always depict New Mexico. I went camping at Badlands National Park in South Dakota with my kids some time back, and the landscape just made my heart sing out. I'd never seen anything like it. Since then I've been itching to celebrate it in painting.

I have a little studio in the upstairs corner of my house. It gets north light, and I can look over the backyard from the window, and watch my children swinging, or the chickens chasing each other around. Lately I've been listening to audiobooks while painting. This has the amusing effect that each passage of the painting gets identified in my mind with some scene from the book. I was listening to The Lord of the Rings while painting Badlands. A couple watersheds of the main mountain, for instance, make me think of the Prancing Pony. Badlands and the foreground and statue of my Santa Maria sopra Minerva painting required all three volumes of LOTR plus Paradise Lost. I guess I paint pretty slowly.

Right now I'm working on one of Saint Michael the Archangel casting the devil from heaven – perhaps this is rather mercenary of me, as traditional religious pictures are the only things that seem to sell around here, close to the border with Mexico. Most appropriately, I've gone through The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator, but I'm not done with the image yet. I have a couple weeks to wait for my new audiobook credit, though, so Moby-Dick will have to fill in the gap.

I've kind of been working my way toward abstraction from two different directions, mathematical and artistical. My recent show featured both paintings and digital collages. Its title was Abstraction, and my artist's statement is as follows. (As is usual for such things, it's annoyingly assertive, universal, and elliptical.)

By abstraction the rational mind isolates an aspect of nature and examines it in itself. 

Mathematical abstraction. When we see five stones, or five sheep, or five men, we abstract the quantity five, which in itself exists nowhere, and thus begin to people an intellectual universe. This is a leap of insight. There are tribes of aborigines for whom there are no numerical concepts beyond one and many. 

Artistic abstraction. The artist sees with the corporeal eye (or the mind's eye, which views concoctions whose ingredients came through the corporeal eye) and, selecting some element out of the world of form and color, digests it and creates a new work by hand. 

These are separate and distinct. Beauty is truth, truth beauty. But the beauty of truth is not the truth of beauty. 

Art is neither illustration, nor expression, nor communication. It is creation of the visible.

One of these last assertions  – art is not illustration (though it can of course be illustration in specific instances) – puts me in mind of William Blake, who strenuously asserted the contrary. To him, art was neither more nor less than illustration. I am a great admirer of his work, both his poetry and his illustrations, but here, obviously, I've come to disagree with him. His view makes art subordinate to knowledge, beauty subordinate to truth, and is typical of the gnostic view of things. Etienne Gilson has a good discussion of this controversy in his Forms and Substances in the Arts.