How can we read good prose when we're reading so much junk?

As my daughter and I stood in line at the grocery store yesterday, facing a display of magazines including Us, People, and The National Enquirer, she asked: "Why are people interested in reading about all these celebrities and made-up stuff?"

"Well," I said, unloading food from my cart onto the conveyer belt, "I think people like to read about celebrities for a couple of reasons. Making fun of how the celebrities look or what the celebrities wear makes people feel better about themselves."

"That's not very nice," E-girl said. "And it's dumb."

"Yeah, it's dumb," I replied, "but what's dumber is when people read about celebrities and think they really know something. That's what they know and share with people."

"I don't want to read about it," she said simply. I would have given her a big hug and kiss at that moment if the cashier wasn't ready and the grocery cart wasn't between us.

Would it be hypocritical at this point to confess that I read People magazine whenever I'm sitting in a doctor's waiting room? Reading it occasionally is like a trivia challenge, trying to guess why people are it in. I can recognize rock stars and most actors. But Snooki and all these "real" housewives? I don't know why they are important enough to merit my time, or a magazine cover. What have they done besides appear on TV?

Women's magazines used to publish short stories, but now they fill those pages with celebrity profiles. Sigh.

I looked at the rack of magazines and wondered at how much effort had gone into producing them—the writers, photographers, editors—and how, as far as I was concerned, it was all for naught, for no real value. Was there one paragraph with valuable information, one sentence of beautiful prose, in the entire rack of them?

Where are the writers who once might have written the short stories and essays for national publications? The lucky ones have retreated to literary magazines, the luckiest to The New Yorker and a few other journals that actually pay. The rest of us, to blogs.

The super-absorbent writer

 As evident in recent posts, I've become slightly obsessed with journals, mostly because I don't know what to do with my old journals. I don't want to pitch them, but I don't necessarily want to read through them on a regular basis, either.  If you look too much to the past, how can you live fully in the present?

Maybe if you call a journal a "writer's notebook" instead, it becomes a source of material rather than mere documentation of one's life. But isn't there a distinction between a notebook and a journal? A notebook would aim to provide a ready source of material, a journal would aim to document moments or feelings, no thought for material purpose.

I suppose a good, or at least thorough, writer would keep both—the notebook aimed toward public viewing, the journal held more private.

What brings up this observation is a long piece on David Sedaris in the Washington Post Style section a few days ago. In it, the reporter, Monica Hesse, mentions that Sedaris keeps a small, spiral-bound notebook in his shirt pocket, in which he records observations of everyday life, with the intention of spinning them into stories. Hesse observes:

If your life, however, is writing about your life, then how do you find time to live in ways worth writing about? Does being a famous self-parodist make it harder to be a good self-parodist?

I don't want to end up as a caricature in one of Sedaris's stories, so I don't relish the idea of ever speaking to him. Surely, though, there are people with the opposite desire, who want to be granted some kind of immortality through his textual alchemy. Wouldn't this affect how they interact with him?

Maybe that's true for any writer. An acquaintance once told me that she had a friend who attended a dinner party with Joyce Carol Oates. The friend related an interesting experience and a little while later, like clockwork, the story had been turned into a piece of fiction by Oates. It was no longer her story.

Best to keep your lips pursed around those super-absorbent writers if you don't want your stories taken. Perhaps, though, such super-absorbency is the mark of a great writer, and should be the aim for any journal writer or note taker, to take what you need and make with it what you can.

The nearly lost art of the autistic knitter

A couple of weeks ago, we went to the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore for the first time. The museum features "outsider" art—art made, primarily, by people without formal training but with an intense need to create something unique or beautiful or visionary.

There were many things I loved at the museum, especially: the mesmerizing, kaleidoscopic paintings of Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, a baker who made paintings on his kitchen table after-hours (one of his paintings is shown above); the memoir paintings of Russian prince Andrew Romanoff, made entirely on shrinky dinks; and tiny paintings and sculptures selected from Richard McMahon's ongoing mini museum project.

But the exhibit that gave me the most pause was a block of bizarre crocheted pieces in the middle of the floor—a headpiece that looked like it was made for an alien, a striped, rainbow-colored coat, and more neutral-colored hats, all done with incredibly precise needlework. The plaque next to them said they were done by Deborah Berger, an autistic woman who was a knitting prodigy. Berger lived in New Orleans and worked as an artist's model by day, then came home and knitted nonstop for hours. After Berger died, her family threw out all her pieces, but someone from a New Orleans arts council rescued some of them.

Unlike the other artists I've described in this post, I cannot find a picture or even a description of Berger on the Internet. As far as I know, the most visible trace of her existence is on that block of wood in a museum in Baltimore. AVAM doesn't allow photos indoors, so I cannot show you what they look like (which is why Von Bruenchenhein's painting is shown above).

When she sat alone in her apartment, knitting furiously, was this her intention? Is a museum the ultimate destination, the best possible place for her work? Yes, probably, but still there's something a little lonely about it. One wishes that one of her subdued hats would grace the head of a distant cousin or great niece, that her family had wished to keep some part of Aunt Deborah's weird and wonderful art for themselves.

After I wrote this post, AVAM sent a short biography of Berger and photos of her work. See addendum post for September 17, 2010. 

Dance, the ephemeral art

Athough I normally avoid reality shows (because I'm not interested in dieters, dysfunctional families, or desperate "celebrities"), E-girl and I have been making our way through taped episodes of the current season of "So You Think You Can Dance" (SYTYCD).

Why? Because E-girl loves to dance. Even in utero, I realize now, she was trying to tap. She says she wants to be a professional dancer when she's older, for a few years, before she becomes a botanist and mom. She realizes there's an end to it already.

Is there any art more ephemeral than dance? Not just the performance, over in a few minutes. But the dancer's body itself—fleetingly supple and strong, particularly for ballet (and, probably, for break-dancing and hip-hop). Picasso was still producing art into his nineties, John Updike was writing and lecturing in his seventies. Old dancers can be teachers or choreographers, but if they still dance it's probably in solitude, without the audience they once hungered for.

Ironically, dance—the art form of motion—is the most static of art forms. It stays in place and can't be easily transported or transformed into another, more mobile medium. A painting can decorate a t-shirt or become a poster; a song can be heard while jogging or driving; words can become text which can become books or magazines or newspapers. Dance doesn't become anything else—it just is.

So the young people on SYTYCD may already be at their peak as dancers, or nearing it, which makes the dancing more precious and beautiful. You wish they didn't have to be judged and voted upon and eliminated, but could just be celebrated for their skill and enthusiasm.

I don't like the results show, the evening after the individual performances, where the dancers are lined up and told which ones got the lowest number of phone-in votes from the public. The bottom three are each given a minute to dance for their survival. I watch this part of the show with a finger on fast forward because it's too painful to watch, yet I still can't not watch it either. It's like a little death each week. And then the next week, the competition begins again and the cut performer is forgotten. The dance goes on.

(The illustration is a sepia-tinted snapshot of the "Hallelujah" dance from the first competition evening of this season's SYTYSD.)

Why it sucks to be a (visual) artist

"The Wilkersons’ costliest board was the 1972 painting Water Dreaming at Kalipinypa, a dazzling patchwork of stippled, dotted and crosshatched shapes, bought in 2000 for some $220,000—more than twice the price it had been auctioned for only three years earlier. The painting was done by Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula, an original member of the Papunya cooperative and one of its most celebrated. Sadly, the artist himself had long been overlooked; in 1997, an Australian journalist found Warangkula, by then old and homeless, sleeping along with other Aboriginal people in a dry riverbed near Alice Springs. Though he reportedly received less than $150 for his best-known painting, the publicity surrounding the 1997 sale revived his career somewhat..."

From: Contemporary Aboriginal Art, Smithsonian Magazine, January 2010.

To overkill a mockingbird: fiction creates a new geography

This year is the 50th anniversary of the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, which is getting a lot of press. Invariably, in the articles I've read so far, the authors lament the commercial enterprises in Monroeville, Ala., (Harper Lee's hometown) that have sprung up as a result of the book. These include: the Mockingbird Grill, Radley's Fountain Grille, the Mockingbird Museum, and all the Mockingbird trickets, t-shirts, hats and tote bags that are sold there at local gift shops.

I was going to join the tsk-tsking of this exploitation and then it struck me—it's actually kind of cool that what began as two-dimensional type (and fiction at that!) has now reshaped a physical environment. Admittedly, it's not what Lee might have wanted, but one still has to give a shout-out to the power of the word on the page. How many authors' works are celebrated this vividly and on such a constant basis? Those businesses sprung up because fans of the book continue to make pilgrimages there and obviously they want to buy a memento of their time there and relive moments from the book.

But my elation with fiction creating a new geography was only momentary. Lee still lives in Monroeville. When she steps out, she is confronted with what really is a bastardization of her ideas, a tacky echo of the decades-ago outrage and intent that went into her book. She is stuck in Mockingbird-ville, physically and intellectually. The success of Mockingbird also probably stymied her future writing, according to Harper Lee's Novel Achievement, an article in the June 2010 Smithsonian magazine.

Compare Monroeville to Asheville, NC (at least the Asheville I knew 28 years ago...)—the setting for Thomas Wolfe's early novels. The boarding house that Wolfe had grown up in and which he had featured in Look Homeward, Angel was still there. You could pay to walk through and see place settings, linens and furniture from his era (perhaps some actually original); there was a Thomas Wolfe playhouse nearby. That was it, as far as I remember. No gift shop selling plastic angels, no t-shirts with Wolfe's visage or quotations from his books. I sometimes drove over to the boarding house after-hours and sat on the porch, undisturbed. [I think the boarding house burned down a few years ago—I'm not sure if it was rebuilt...]

What's the difference? Look Homeward, Angel has never been as perpetually popular as To Kill a Mockingbird—as far as I know, it's not on any high school required reading lists as Mockingbird still is (perhaps it's never been a high school English assignment because of its length, or its lack of message). But the bigger difference, I think, is that Asheville had more going for it; it already had the Blue Ridge Parkway nearby and the Biltmore Estate, and lots of rich people retiring there. It didn't need Wolfe nearly as much as Monroeville obviously needed Lee.

I'm glad to see physical spaces that celebrate writers and writing, but it's probably better for the writers if the celebrations begin after they've left the town or the living—otherwise the celebration can become a trap.

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I was going to make a list of other destinations for literary pilgrimages, but of course someone else has already done it. I found a nice list, with additional recommendations from readers, on the Mental Floss blog: Book Your Trip Now: 12 Literary Pilgrimages.