Illuminated Manuscripts, the next generation

This article about Jonathan Sarfran Foer's new book got me thinking. Normally I'm not really a fan of the writer, but I found the ideas he raised here interesting. His new book is essentially an art object. An already published novel that he has cut up to make a sort of a literary Mad Libs/Lift-the-flap novel. As a novel, I'm not willing to give it my time, but to me it holds far more credibility as  as an artist's book. This feels both snobby and elitist of me, and a bit close minded too. But I'm old school. A book is a book. And I'm not interested in it being diluted with anything. All I want is words, and all on one page, in regular sentences. I can't get through Breakfast of Champions because of the rudimentary line drawing of an asshole. Not only is this perspective close minded of me, but it also reveals my own myopic vision of the future. A vision that I'm trying hard to improve with this blog.  "Foer counters that only in writing do such incursions from other art forms draw much attention." And he's right, if text can appear in visual art, why do images somehow devalue literature? Maybe because to us old school types, images don't seem to add anything, they instead feel like a crutch. Your words should be able to create the visual you want to add. And yet here I am, incorporating images, using them to further my ideas, to help me reach beyond my own limited range as an artist. I began this blog with the dim understanding that, as Foer points out, "It’s not enough. . . for authors to tell stories in the same old ways, even as publishing transforms." Maybe I'm the worst kind writer, standing on the sinking ship, lightening striking the rocks ahead, saying, "the weather's fine, this is just a shower."  All while I'm frantically strapping on my life vest. 


When I spent a month at the Vermont Studio Center (a shamefully long time ago), one of the great lessons that stayed with me was that writers often think too literally about their craft. That as a group we get stuck thinking that being productive and committing to our creative process has to mean sitting in front of our computer for hours everyday (frog you, Stephen King). The painters and sculptors I met in Vermont showed me that your process can be anything that fuels your desire to make work. One painter said, "today my process will be sitting in the river all afternoon." Maybe some of being walled off in our writer's world has to do with the way people experience our art. Reading is a private experience. It does not have the benefit of being able to be enjoyed immediately, en masse, like visual art. (Don't even talk to me about going to readings, that can only give you a suggestion of what someone's work is truly like) We are a bunch of antisocial nerds, writing for a bunch of antisocial nerds and we don't want anyone questioning our perfect, bitter isolation. So we have built a wall around our genre, hanging a hand scrawled sign, "No visual artists allowed, keep out, this means you."  I may not be ready to take down that sign when it comes to my fiction. But at least here, in this completely topsy turvy world of the interwebs, I am able to chisel out a brick in that ridiculous fortification. 


That said, here are some artists' books to help inspire the inevitable crossover. Like Euraka and Warehouse 13. 

lastly, an image from Max Ernst's graphic novel

laugh it up fuzz ball

There are lots of funny people, movies, bits, jokes, gags, comics and even routines in this world, but it takes a certain kind of stupidity to make me laugh out loud. Some of that is because I live with a ridiculously funny, smart man with impulse control problems, who continually says and does outrageous things. Things that will one day inspire the wrath of god, I'm sure. Because of him I have become desensitized me to most shocking, inappropriate or intelligent humor. Or maybe it is because my father subsists on bad puns. Or because my friends, (Mr. Mannis, Mr. Fogg) with their humor or just their general carriage, have made me squirt all manner of beverages out of my nose.

Sometimes I feel like I've lost my sense of humor completely. Someone will show me a video, or tell me a joke, to which the general reaction is total hilarity, but my reaction is usually just a smile or nod and "yeah, that's funny."No actual laughter. My man (who will now be known as PBT, until I come up with something better, plus it makes him sound like a sandwich, and I think he will like that), PBT thinks that makes me the ultimate straight man (I've encouraged him to write a humor book entitled, Married to a Straight Man). I'm afraid this lack of laughter makes me boring.

I am left to find my chuckles where I can. There isn't enough room in the post for the amount of Bill Murray I want to include, so I'll just give you my favorite quote, "you can't leave, all the plants are gonna die."

 Here is what works for me (at varying levels of quality):
(the first two and a half minutes)




Or this, which didn't have a stupid embedding code.

Or this, which also didn't have an embedding code. Is it me?

so you want to take a vacation from your problems...

There is a saying in my house, a phrase we use when someone is trying to escape their lives, their reality, through avoidance. Usually commercial grade, illicit avoidance. Any practicing or relapsing addicted can be described as "taking a vacation from his/her problems." I think it is safe to say that I am an expert in such vacationers. I could even call them travelers, riding the snake or dragon or any other reptile, men and women who walk a dark road, one that often doubles back on itself, full of menacing pot holes and lined with houses of ill repute. Whether a traveler is collecting poppies or dusting snow caps or wearing vibrating beads, he or she is actually not traveling at all but sitting at the bottom of a forgotten, dry well wondering when someone will send down the bucket. 

I have been in such a well, and I too thought I was on a vacation. I was still riding the wave of my emo nineties cred (yeah, I know, I'm old). I was out six nights a week. Searching searching searching. I went back stage at shows, and skipped the line at clubs, and had all manner of doormen call me "sweetie." Being young and being cute and being able to hold my liquor was the trifecta. At least that was how it felt at the time.  I'll dub this time period in my life as "college." I did go to class, but I did not live in a dorm, or have the typical experience which that word usually reflects.

(this is me back then, obviously about to tell the photographer to frog off)

While I was in "college" I met hundreds of people and made no friends (Miss j the exception that proved the rule). For someone who valued her life, I spent far too much time lingering in 24 hour fast food spots, throwing up into their parking lot bushes. Glamorous, I know. I went to magical places like the city impound lot at 3 am, the rooftop of the Johnson Paint Company (though I can't remember how I got there) and the Micky D's on the McGrath O'Brien highway. Maybe I wasn't technically an addict, or maybe I was. I often embarrassed myself, told lies, put myself and others in danger, did things I couldn't remember and generally made poor decisions. 

Amazingly, one day it stopped being fun. One day I woke up at the bottom of a well and thought, this is not as nice as I thought it would be. When I was 18 and first started traveling, I realized that drugs (including alcohol) just made doing nothing fun, and I promised myself that I wouldn't let them take over my life. I saw too many friends go down that road. Some scratched and kicked their way into rehab, some turned blue on the hardwood floor of my apartment and had to be kept awake and breathing for hours, some disappeared in the middle of the night, some went to jail, some were burned up, some buried alive under all their wasted potential. Many years later I remembered that realization. It took a whole year to find a way out of that well. But when I did, I was all done. I turned it off. One day I just didn't want to drink any more. One day I just didn't want to be miserable any more. I think that is what leads all addicts to recovery, not the hope of happiness, but the rejection of misery. Maybe I'm not really an addict or maybe I'm just one of the lucky ones in recovery. I still have a drink or occasionally two (after two I am a mess). And if I have two I often want a third, and I feel that old twinge, the old rubber neck of the addict in me looking for the next party, not wanting the night to end, searching for some like-mined soul to join me in my dank little well. But I never do have that third drink. 

this isn't a poem, it's just a thing I wrote... with line breaks

Sometimes I want to walk by the river, hold stones,

watch the water rise with distant rains,

and drink from foreign hands.

I want you across from me, my hand on your ankle.

I want to find a place when we aren’t always saying goodbye,

a place between yours and mine.

A chair in the sun,

a slim view,

where wind is welcome.

Long pages, long hours.