Artistic Generosity

B. B. King, singing his heart out

B. B. King has passed away, and so I’m listening to him on Pandora this morning. His emphatic passion combined with his precise control is one of the things that makes him great. He throws himself into his performance. I heard a bit about him on NPR as I was driving to work, and he said he treated each performance as an audition, and you can really tell.  He gives everything of himself.

I love B. B. King.

It matches something I’ve been thinking about a lot.  Being a public artist means you put yourself out there, heart and soul.  Ideally, an artist is an instrument of the people.  Each person who hears/views/reads his or her work should be moved, and to be moved, that artist has to give it his or her all. 

Not only that, but they have to be there, to show up.  You have to make yourself available all the time.  That’s why the most successful writers are always putting stuff out there, doing blogs and putting out new work as much as possible.

We know how we are as consumers of art ~ we’re insatiable.  We want new stuff from our favorite artists as soon as we finish the last one.  As it should be.  We want to re-experience that feeling we had when we read our favorite book or first viewed our favorite painting or the ideal time we listened to our favorite music rich with our listening history.

That’s a lesson I need to take to heart.  Not only do I need to throw heart and soul into what I do ~ I need to be putting it out there as much as possible. It’s a convenient excuse to say that I’m busy.  If I’m going to be an artist and a public intellectual, I need to put my money where my mouth is.

The amazing B. B. King.

Much to My Mom's Chagrin

The Wabash Band

I am not a musician, but music moves me.  I can be in a rotten mood, but if I put on headphones with a bit of jazz, it immediately calms me.  I like writing to music, and what it is depends on my mood. If I’m writing professional work stuff, I like something without words ~ classical or nature sounds or jazz ~ and if I’m writing fiction it tends to be something that has the feeling of what I’m writing, not necessarily acoustic. And I love all kinds of music ~ rock to rap, jazz to classical, country to opera.

Much to my mom’s chagrin. She is an excellent violin and viola player, and her family lived and breathed music.  My grandpa Joe Fisher had his own orchestra in Iowa, which my uncles played in, and he played with John Philip Souza in Chicago. My mom has been in orchestras throughout her life. Even for all those years out on the ranch, she was able to drive 45 miles to a nearby community college to play in the orchestra there. I have lovely memories of after the yearly concert going to the restaurant Hansels & Gretals in Powell, Wyoming, and eating huge plates of French fries. 

Mom tried her best to get me to like music.  Also art, and that stuck, but not music.  We were required to take band when I was a kid.  Mom wanted me to take the bass, and Dad the clarinet like Benny Goodman, and the clarinet won.  A good choice, really, as I’d have had to lug that bass on and off the bus and everywhere.  And my backpack was already stuffed to the gills with books! 

But even the neophyte like me appreciates music.  I am moved by music.  It takes me out of myself to another calmer place.  And in all the arts I love seeing someone who’s really good at it.  One of my favorite things in the world is to come across someone who throws their whole body and self into their art, and that’s why every once in a while I binge on America’s Got Talent and Britain’s Got Talent, though I don’t hardly watch TV otherwise (only because I’m too busy).

And so I wanted to share this with you.  I LOVE the artistry of these guys, and the effect of the grain bin is eerily amazing.  This is Wabash Band, Brandon McDuffee on vocals and Quinn Bible on guitar.  See how they throw their whole bodies into it, how you can feel the yearning and the mastery.  

'Amour'

Amour (via)

I’ve been wanting to watch the movie Amour since it came out, and I finally got the chance to this weekend.  I thought, that’s my kind of movie, and it was.

It’s the story of an elderly couple, Anne and Georges, who are retired music teachers.  In the first scene, Anne has a ministroke while Georges watches.  She stares off into space at the breakfast table and doesn’t respond when he touches her.  The rest of the movie is her slow decline and him trying to take care of her, as she doesn’t want to go back into the hospital.

The brilliance of this movie is the way it captures the everyday, the significant details.  They sit at a table eating and chatting, and everything they do and say is both so right for that moment, so exactly mundane and beautiful, but also ripe with larger significance. 

For example, a pigeon gets into their beautiful apartment twice through an open window.  An everyday sort of thing.  But the symbol of the pigeon means so much more.  It’s hope, it’s life, it’s escape, it’s love.  The first time, Georges shoos it out the window.  The second time he catches it by throwing a towel over it and then sits in the chair petting it.

And in it’s very quiet and subtle way, the movie reminds me of Million Dollar Baby, the Clint Eastwood-Hillary Swank boxing movie.  There’s one scene in particular where Anne refuses to eat and drink and spits water out that’s like the Hillary Swank character in Million Dollar Baby, but also because they are both about the human spirit and about love, respect, and dignity.

What Amour does in the medium of film, I aspire to do in fiction: mold everyday lived experience to have such coherent resonance and emotional impact.

Jim Ruland and Pearl Jam

This:  http://www.granta.com/New-Writing/Teenage-Wastelands.  Jim Ruland's great piece in Granta about being a fan and about his wife being a fan.

And then I watched Pearl Jam's "Even Flow" video, and it gave me chills.  What it brought home was the sheer force of energy and emotion and will that erupts from the band and especially from Eddie Vedder.  As those lyrics from another great song go, "Every ounce of energy, he tries to give away." And he does.  He's a fountain raining down on the whole audience and changing them irrevocably.

That's what you're trying to do as an artist ~ every ounce of energy, you're trying to give away. You're trying to transport people.

It moved me.

The Amazing 'Avatar: The Last Airbender'

No, I'm not talking about the movie.  I'm talking about the fabulous series created by Michael DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko. Cue crazy screaming fan-girl!  Avatar: The Last Airbender, created for Nickelodeon, is single-handedly one of the best shows in recent history, animated or no.  You should watch it!

And I always love the behind-the-scenes look at things.  Avatar always was a bit of a mystery, as they didn't do much publicity for that, but I was thrilled ~ thrilled! ~ the other day to come across this video interview of the co-creators. I love to hear them talk about the creation of it and the craft of it.  I love how they went above and beyond, outside of the received notions of what good animated film should be.  I love that they based it on real-life martial arts imagery and ideas ~ the best art has a firm grounding in reality, as well as lots of imagination.

I just love it.  Here you are!

The Elements of Glamour

I love people who take a subject and riff on it, and so this video is fascinating.  Virginia Postrel talks about the elements of glamour.

Something like this: Glamour = idealization + sprezzatura + distance + mystery.

The point she makes that I love is what’s left out.  What I’m trying to write is somewhat the opposite of glamour ~ I try to capture the small moments in life and dramatize them effectively. These moments are often the unglamorous ones, the ones that more stylized writing leaves out.

I’m going to be thinking about this a long time.  How do I encorporate glamour to make a more satisfying piece of art yet stay true to lived experience?

Love the Images of Kay Nielsen

Thanks, Brainpickings, for showing me the art of Kay Nielsen!

The Techniques of Art



Oct. 1, 2012. An Afghan refugee girl stands next to her family's sheep
in a field next to a slum area on the outskirts of Islamabad (via Time Lightbox)


Since beginning the Project 365, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about art in the broader sense, art with a capital A, and how techniques from one medium translates to another.

Take this photo, for example.  It’s one of Time Lightbox’s best photos of the week for Sept 28 - Oct 5. What makes this photo so amazing?  Why is it any different from any girl standing in front of a herd of her family’s animals?

Well, first and foremost because she’s wearing red.  The eye loves red.  It is the most alluring and seductive of colors, and it screams, “Pay attention to me!”  But I don’t think it’s simply the red by itself.  It’s the contrast of the red against the natural colors of the background and also the contrast between the everyday job of tending goats with this beautiful red of her garment.  She is dressed to the nines, as if someone is wearing a beautiful evening gown to muck out the stables. 

It’s not only the red.  This is a beautiful and mysterious girl.  The way she looks at the photographer with this unreadable and cryptic expression.  She’s thoughtful and penetrating.  And her hands.  She holds them in thought, picking at her fingers. 

The late afternoon light coming full onto the scene gives it a glow that it wouldn’t otherwise have.  This is one of my favorite kinds of light ~ first thing in the morning or late in the afternoon.  It imbues everything with honey gold undertones.  What is it about this light that appeals to me especially?  I’m not sure.  The equal balance of light and dark, how it brings out undertones and makes colors richer.

The pastoral setting, too, brings something special to picture.  They’re goats, for heaven’s sake.  Not cows - expected and normal in America.  No, goats.  This lends it a bit of exoticism. And these are not puny ordinary goats ~ these are huge and rich in color and vibrance.

But this pastoral setting is marred by what seem to be plastic garbage bags, which means this has to be near a dump, where the winds have blown the bags away and they’ve become caught in the grass.  So the rural pastoral nature is contrasted so strongly to decay and garbage, and there’s this beautiful girl, this Cinderella.

Composition plays a part as well.  The eye loves thirds.  Yet this photo is set up in such away that it doesn’t portray the ideal proportions.  No.  Instead, it makes you uncomfortable.  By choosing to place the girl almost in the center, it puts you off balance.  Right in the center would be boring, but the human wants things proportional, so just off center gives it a bit of tension, just as edge anxiety ~ the figure right next to the edge ~ would make people nervous.  That’s horizontally.  Vertically, it is nicely proportioned into thirds, which somewhat counteracts the horizontal tension.

Then there is the depth of field.  We get such a sense of distance here. The tight focus on the girl to the fuzzy mountains in the background gives us room to breath.

All this makes me think about how these techniques translate into writing.  The red color.  We want something astonishing.  I say astonishing, not shocking, because (as the recent FB meme pointed out) shocking is boring.  Shocking means you haven’t given it enough thought or development. Astonishing means you’ve put so much of yourself and your art into it, it transports the reader. 

All the other elements also translate into fiction writing.  Contrast.  You have to set things up and then have a payoff in writing.  If you don’t, the reader will not believe you.  This is where contrast comes in.  You have use like elements and contrasting elements judiciously.  In literary fiction especially, you have to do the unexpected and contrast it with the everyday.

Composition.  Writing is a linear meeting you have to encounter through time, through a line of words.  In that way, it is a performance piece.  Therefore, it has to have a beginning, middle, and end (thirds again) or some structure that gives the reader an aesthetic pleasure.

You have to have a sense of depth.  There has to be setting and backstory and depth of character, even if they don’t immediately show up on the page.  The writer has to know.

I better stop.  I could do this all day.  It’s so fascinating.  All the different creative acts feed into each other.

Ah, Yes ~ Summertime

Today, the incomparable Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. A little bit of quiet paradise in the midst of your busy day.

The Kickass Guitar Picker Jalan Crossland

Today, for your viewing pleasure, Jalan Crossland, guitar and banjo virtuoso.

Art Saves Lives

Alice Herz-Sommer and son Raphael

The great violinist Roman Totenberg has died, as has the great storyteller and artist Maurice Sendak. An immeasurable loss to their legions of fans and to the world.

Why is it that for some people art is everything, and for other people, nothing?  Or this form of art ~ be it music or painting or writing or whatever ~ doesn’t move me but I can’t live without that form of art?  And why are some people “tone-deaf” when it comes to art, and they think people who do are crazy?

What is it that gives art its power?  Does it begin in the basic human drive to connect, to create, to feel transcendence and beauty, to be elevated by the spiritual?  Is it intellectual or emotional or both?

I suspect it’s very complicated and includes all of the above.

Art literally has the power to save lives.  Don’t believe me?  Here is a video about Alice Herz-Sommer (interviewed by Tony Robbins), who is 108.  She is a fabulous Czech pianist who survived the Nazi concentration camp at Theresienstadt.  The reason why the Nazis kept her around was because of her playing, which saved her life.  And she kept her six-year-old son Raphael alive with her. Her art saved her life and that of her son ~ that and her fabulous optimism ~ and I suspect it continues to save her life, in that she still plays every day and it gives her a reason to live. Alice has said just that: "Music saved my life and music saves me still."

(I am also fascinated by the psychology of the Nazis.  Here are people who are able to so totally dehumanize people as to exterminate them, yet they value art so highly?  Art is supposed to connect, yet in this instance maybe it helped dehumanize.  What's up with that?)

I am reminded of the movie Dead Poets Society ~ art saves lives, and the lack of it, or what it represents, can cause death.

People die for their passions and principals all the time.  You’ve got to think that they are saved by them as well.

You Can’t Write the ‘Great American Novel’ ~ Nor Should You Try To

Today, I’ll wrap up my ideas on Yareah Magazine’s lovely post.

Isabel del Rio said,

Define ‘art’ today is much more difficult than ‘photography’ but one thing is certain: art goes beyond the artist, it has a desire for transcendence and for expressing general feelings (an almost impossible task, strenuous, which has left many people on the road).

OMG.  Do I really want to take on the definition of great art? So many have eloquently said so much about the topic.  And have said it so much better than I would ever be able to.  But ~ you knew this was coming ~ let me offer a few cogitations.

The best art moves you in some way.  Emotionally.  Intellectually. Or both.

As such, it is highly individual and subjective.  Beauty ~ or greatness ~ is in the eye of the beholder.  (It's not totally artistic anarchy. Yes, there are standards, but ... )

You cannot create “canonical” art.  These things are established by societal consensus, or by a small group of tastemakers, and you the artist have little influence over it.  You can try to put yourself in the right place at the right time, try to connect with the right people, create lots of stuff and get very good, and by sheer force of your personality influence the tides. It works for a select few.  However, if you’re trying to imitate the established greats, you’re living in the past because it takes time, sometimes long after a person’s dead, to become canonical. “Time is a sort of a river.”

As Isabel says, by being particular, the best art becomes universal.  It is ironic that trying for the general will not make it universal, merely bad.  Only by trying for the very specific with the very best style and craft you can master do you approach universality.

You cannot judge your own work. Let me say that again:  You cannot judge your own work.  I don’t mean to say you can’t figure out what’s bad and what’s good and do better.  By that I mean, if you’re trying to make something “great” you’re off base.  Because great is judged by a whole bunch of other people.  You can offer an educated guess, but you cannot create societal consensus, especially about your own work. We have to let that go.

Which leads me to this last, and then I’ll stop pontificating on the subject.  The only great art, the best great art, you can create is that which is true to you.  It is our own worldviews, our personal truths, that which is so true you cannot approach it without your stomach balled in a fist, your heart pounding, your shoulders tight with shame, tears welling up within you. 

(Note to self: resist temptation to undermine your words with self-deprecation.  Oops.  There I went and did it.)

To Be Is the Task of the Artist

Over the weekend, the wonderful Yareah Magazine posted a collage of mine.  The theme of their next issue is love. Someone’s been tagging our downtown all over with the word “LOVER” and I’ve been collecting photos of them.  It’s all the same graffiti artist ~ you can tell by the lettering.  I’ve been meaning to make a collage of them, and this was the perfect opportunity.

It was so fun!  I took all the best images into Photoshop and messed around with them.  I decided which one should be the backdrop and then resized and enhanced them all.  I moved them around, trying to achieve a balance.  Once I did, though, they were just a bunch of square photos on the page ~ not very exciting ~ so I played some more with them.  I let some of the background come through some, I clipped some, I rotated some.  It was better then, but it still didn’t feel unified.  So I experimented with a whole bunch of filters.  I ended up with 21 final versions, four of which I really liked. Those are the ones Yareah posted.

And then the lovely Isabel del Rio, art editor, wrote a great piece talking about the nature of art and photography.  I thought I might elaborate on some of her thoughts over the next couple of days.

Isabel writes,

‘To be’, I think this is the task of an artist.

‘What drives us to be’, it is my definition of art.

I love this.  The artist must live, must live fully, in order to be an artist.  And because they must take this raw material as their media, they must observe closely and think long and hard about what they are observing.  Their whole lives become the raw stuff of their art.  This of course applies to all forms of art.

I love how this phrasing ~ “to be is the task of the artist” ~ references the long history of art and makes the artist part of a long tradition. What first comes to mind, of course, is Hamlet’s soliloquy. 

To be, or not to be--that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep--
No more--and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep--
To sleep--perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th' oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th' unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprise of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action. -- Soft you now,
The fair Ophelia! -- Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remembered.

Hamlet is eloquently wondering whether it’s better to die, to commit suicide, than to live.  This metaphor extends so easily to the creation of art.  Many if not most artists have anxiety approaching their artwork, and they are ambivalent about it for many reasons. It’s painful to access those parts of yourself that you need to in order to create the best art.  It’s damn hard work too.  And the world really doesn’t want you to and actively works against you doing your art; why not give in to the demands of the world?  It’s much easier to just give in.  But it is also the reason that artists live, they feel.  It is their main purpose in life.  Not only that, but when creating art, the world receeds, becomes this black and white shadow, while you feel that what you’re creating is more alive and you are more alive than you’ve ever been.  Ambivalence, in the true sense of the word, as in love and hate.

So Hamlet’s going back and forth is what the artist feels.  Do I live?  Do I create art and go through all that that entails?  Or do I die?  Do I sink back into the indistinguishable multitude?

To be.  Some argue that art is a representation and a derivation of life, and of course it is, but in another sense, it is the realization of our higher self, all that we hope and dream and strive for, the embodiment of our best and worst selves.  Indeed, it is what drives us to be ~ both in the sense that artists live to create their art but also it is a representation of those most human of drives and desires, high and low.

The Problem of Distribution

Fate in war depends on supply lines.  What’s the poem? 

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the message was lost.
For want of a message the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

It’s also true in other areas of life. For instance, getting books from publishers to readers and getting art from artists to admirers.  That is one of the essential problems creatives face.

That is why I was so thrilled to come across Society 6.  What an amazing site and such a great idea.  They’re a collective for artists, but more importantly they are a means of distribution.  All you have to do is join and upload your art and then set prices on prints (or take the base price) and whenever anyone orders a print or a t-shirt or an iphone case, they are the ones to produce and send it. They even help with pricing and all that.  Isn’t that amazing?  A million dollar idea, I think.

And the artwork on it is fantastic!  Below is just today’s front page but there are t-shirt designs, too, that are hilarious.  Check it out! (And all you artists out there, thank you for sharing your work!)

The lovely Pix mentioned Deviant Art also as a place that does art distribution.  Thanks!

Making You Feel, Part 3

While I was home sick this past week, I got caught up on some great documentaries via streaming Netflix.  (I love that now I have access to all these offbeat things.) One of the documentaries I watched was Life in a Day.  Here’s the wiki about it.

Life in a Day is a crowdsourced drama/documentary film comprising an arranged series of video clips selected from 80,000 clips submitted to the YouTube video sharing website, the clips showing respective occurrences from around the world on a single day, July 24, 2010.

The film is 94 minutes 57 seconds long and includes scenes selected from 4,500 hours of footage in 80,000 submissions from 192 nations. The completed film debuted at the Sundance Film Festival on January 27, 2011 and the premiere was streamed live on YouTube. On October 31, 2011, YouTube announced that Life in a Day would be available for viewing on its website free of charge, and on DVD.

The film was the creation of a partnership among YouTube, Ridley Scott Associates and LG electronics, announced on July 6, 2010. Users sent in videos supposed to be recorded on July 24, 2010, and then Ridley Scott produced the film and edited the videos into a film with director Kevin Macdonald and film editor Joe Walker, consisting of footage from some of the contributors. All chosen footage authors are credited as co-directors.

When I first saw its description, I thought, hmm.  Could be interesting.  Then I went on.  Came back.  If it isn’t, I thought, I can always skim it. Then I was riveted for the full hour and a half. 

What an amazing film!  It’s doing just what I want to do ~ taking small moments in people’s lives, the stuff of everyday life, and crafting it into something that feels of a part, a whole, Art with a capital A. 

It is structured as the day, so there is nighttime and a full moon at first.  Early risers getting on with their day, then everyone getting up, then breakfast, through lunch, then dinner, and so on.  But it’s not only grouped chronologically but also thematically.  So you get a part around breakfast that show the gathering and making of food.  You get a part around midmorning about having babies.  You have a part in the afternoon about love.  And at the end of the day, of course, you get a part about death.  It sounds much more chaotic than it feels ~ I felt like I trusted this movie and the movie makers, even though they take us to some dark places (the darkest of which is the slaughtering of a cow for food). 

Did I mention how much I love this film!?

It is not just little bits of people’s lives, though there is a lot of that.  It also chooses a couple of longer vignettes that are scattered throughout the film.  Also, it has people answer questions on camera.  What is in your pocket or handbag?  What do you fear?

There are many reasons it is so excellent.  They went to the trouble to view all the clips (through volunteers) and took the best of the best.  The editing and music is superb.  I read that some reviewers didn’t like it, and I was incensed on the filmmakers’ behalves!

But to making you feel.  This movie makes you feel. It’s funny and light and shows the brightness of the human heart, but it’s dark too.  It’s got all those things I talked about yesterday (details, composition and focus, juxtaposition of small and large, leading to the human condition).  The very best moments are those that juxtapose the everyday life with huge wrestling-with-angels kinds of issues.  A mother and father with their little boy, going through the day, all while the mother is just recovering from a mastectomy.  A father and little boy waking up and praying for their dead wife/mother. A man who just had his second heart transplant who talks about how thankful he is to his caretakers.  So human. So divine.

I urge you to see the movie when you get a chance.  You can stream it for free on Youtube. Or if you have Netflix.

PS Tomorrow, I’ll wrap up with a part 4 on making you feel.

The Difference Between Cliché and Art

Offered without commentary.

Cliché

 


Art

 

The great work of James Mollison is here and here.  And of course the great work of the Simpsons creators is here.

“The Hare’s Mask,” by Mark Slouka

I finished this year’s Best American Short Stories 2011 last night. It always gives me a moment of mourning ~ because I so look forward to it and I draw it out as long as I can. And this year especially because my taste must be similar to this year’s editor Geraldine Brooks. The stories she chose, to a one, were outstanding.

Some years, there is a story or two I can see the attraction of but the craft is not quite there. The reason they were included had more to do with the energy of the language or the unique vision of the author, merits unto themselves.

This year, not a one.

And, oh man, that last story, “The Hare’s Mask,” by Mark Slouka. Oh, wow. I was drawn in but marveling at its construction and the end moved me to tears. It’s the story of a young boy and his father, who was in Europe during the rise of the Nazis. The plot is, basically, the family harbors a man in their rabbit hutch for a few days, meanwhile the father as a boy has to go out every Friday and kill one the rabbits for the table. But he loves these rabbits and names them. Two in particular are his favorites. It is tough times, and then he must choose which of those two to kill. See, I’m getting tears just talking about it.

But what this story does so amazingly is the layers of metaphor and meaning. In the background is the Terrors, and we find out early that the boy/father is the only one who survives. You have the microcosm of this boy having to decide which of his beloveds to kill and then having to kill them, which so strongly resonates with the setting of the story. Even that small thing, the hare’s mask, which is the skin of the face of a hare that is used to tie flies, is a perfect metaphor for the masks we put on, the death of loved ones, the care the father takes with his children. And then you have the present day, which is the son knowing all this, sort of the omniscient narrator, but then his younger sister wants rabbits. It’s really hard for the father, and the son knows it, but the father lets her get rabbits anyway.

It gives me chills to think about the artistry of this piece. What I try to capture in my own fiction ~ with varying degrees of success ~ are those little moments of grace, lived reality, the small kindnesses and violences we do one another. And not just “capture” like a bug pinned to corkboard but elevate to art. How do you transport lived experience onto a higher plain? Make so just right, so moving, so perfect? Well, of course the short answer is that you can’t.

But you can try.

The Ending that Shakes the Foundation

Spoiler Alert: I’m talking about surprise endings in literary fiction here, so if you don’t want it spoiled, don’t read!

I love Best American Short Stories. I read it every year, along with PEN/O’Henry. I’m taking my time, savoring it. There are always a bunch of the stories I’ve already read in their original pub ~ but I always reread them ~ and then there’s the delicious new ones.

Last night, I read Rebecca Makkai’s “Peter Torelli, Falling Apart.” I began reading it, thinking, this is interesting, not riveting but interesting. It’s the story of two guys who have been friends since childhood who are also both gay. The narrator, Drew, though he doesn’t say it, is in love with the other one, Peter, a charismatic actor. They kissed just once when they were teenagers. But now Peter’s falling apart and his acting career is in crash and burn. Because Drew is his friend, he gets Peter a job at a fundraising function reading a story that Drew doesn’t much like but thinks it suits him. Predictably, Peter flubs it, but so much less predictable is the end. Rebecca does this astounding authorial feat that upends the story and shoots you way out and above and resets the whole thing. I won’t do it justice, but I’ll try. Peter storms out and Drew knows that he will never see him again, but Rebecca frames it using the language of the story that a few pages before Drew had dismissed basically as rubbish (the one that Peter began reading outloud). This electrifies the story, it turns it over, it makes it so sad and moving. I can’t really explain it well.

I get chills just thinking about it. I love it when authors do this. If they always did this, it would get old, certainly. (Like a lot of people say the epiphanic ending is over. But it’s not over ~ writers just have to be careful how they use it. It must be made new, like everything else.) But it is so amazing, when it happens. I can think of a number of old examples: “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and the movie Jacob’s Ladder, to name two. More recently, two novels that have blown my socks off are Michael Cunningham’s By Nightfall and Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending. Again, chills thinking about them. These are all executing a raven. The whole of By Nightfall is about the narrator’s attraction to his wife’s brother, but then in the end it’s about the wife, in such a sad and moving way. I reread and reread it to reposition the rest of the book. In The Sense of Ending, you are blown away by the realization that puts the narrator’s whole relationship with a past love in a new light. Amazing. And the amazing Julian does it again.

I think the risk of such an ending is that it comes off as fake or tacked on. I LOVED Louise Erdrich’s Shadow Tag, but I felt that the end was unearned and tacked on. She shouldn’t have chosen her husband over her children. But in another way it is totally earned and it’s rather my own biases coming in. That’s one of the risks of such an ending.

I’m just standing in awe of these writers’ art.

Executing a Raven

Well, it wasn’t really a raven. A crow actually. But raven sounds more poetic, don’t you think?

Yesterday afternoon as I was driving by a park on the way to pick up the kids, I saw the most amazing thing. It was a hot but nice afternoon, with a bit of a breeze blowing in from the west. This crow was trying to land on the top of a telephone pole. You could see him angling, his body crunched with the effort, his wings flapping wildly trying to control his flight. (I say he ~ it might’ve been she. What do I know?) The thing is, he wasn’t trying to drop down on it from above. The wind was in his face, so he flew past it from below, flapped hard until he rose to the height of the top of the pole, let the wind push him backwards, and then he folded his wings and dropped onto the flat circle.

It was absolutely amazing, I tell you! He had to do it twice. The first time he did a complete circle ~ came in below, rose, let the wind carry him, but too far, so he dropped again, flew forward, rose, and then dropped onto the landing pad. Amazing athletics, I tell you.

That got me to thinking about executing a raven in writing. Don’t you just love coming across something in what you’re reading that absolutely makes your jaw drop? A perfect turn of phrase or the subtle observation perfectly expressed or a word in just the right place, or a plot twist that gives you the chills, it’s so good.

There are authors who consistently execute the raven. That’s why we read them. Alice Munro and Julian Barnes and so many others. You just stand in awe of them. Their gymnastics are almost always a perfect 10. The crow, too, was obviously a fabulous flyer, because why would he attempt it if he was not. The skill involved is amazing, and this bird was almost flawless.

But the thing is, even with his skill, this crow had to do it twice. Some maneuvers are so complex and dependent upon chance that you just have to keep trying to get it right, to land Plop! onto that little tiny wooden circle.

Here’s to you and me, today, attempting to execute a raven.

Friday Loveliness

So, I recently discovered Gel, which is very much like TED only weighted slightly toward the creative side. Fabulous stuff. They have smart, funny, intellectually authentic videos just like TED. Today I wanted to focus on one that blew me away.

I love it when you come across an brilliant mind and charismatic speaker whose ideas mesh so well with yours, especially when they are in a different field and able to say it in a new way. Yesterday, that fabulous dynamic person was Rob Kapilow, American composer, conductor, and music evangelist.

He starts by talking about Bird by Bird, that great book about writing by Anne Lamott. He extends its ideas to life. Your working hard getting nowhere in your writing, or in your life, and then something happens. He quotes Anne:

You find yourself back at your desk, staring blankly at the pages you filled yesterday. And there on page four is a paragraph with all sorts of life in it, smells and sounds and voices and colors and even a moment of dialogue that makes you say to yourself, very, very softly, “Hmmm.”

Then he says:

You’d had that sense that you’d come in contact with something important that resonated in some kind of fundamental way. I believe the ability to listen for the “Hmmm,” and more importantly the ability to act when something makes you go “Hmmm” is one of the most important abilities that you can possibly have.

This idea of his fits so well as an answer to “Where do you get your ideas?” (Which is kind of what Anne was talking about in the quote, but I’ll extend it a bit.) For me, I’m never at a loss for ideas. They come thick and fast, especially when I’m “in” my writing or tuned in to that frame of mind. For me, ideas come as Hmmm moments. Something will catch my attention, my emotion, my interest, and set my mind agoing. Before you know it, I’ve got a first sentence or the ideas spool themselves out into a character or a plot. An entry point and that “force that through the green fuse drives the flower,” that creative drive and impetus and life. It catches hold and spins me, and is like the kneel Catholics give before entering the pew, a ritual that puts me into a certain state. This way I work fits so well with what Rob is talking about here.

But he goes on, wonderfully, beautifully. He does this amazing thing: he explicates what the experts hear and what moves them (in music). He tells a story about a great teacher Nadia Boulanger, who taught all the greatest composers of the twentieth century, who opened his ears so that he really listened. “There is both an enormous and an infinitely small difference between good and great. The difference is hundreds of small but inspired choices,” he says, and it is so true. And then he made it his mission to show audiences how to hear just as he had that epiphany, which he does regularly on NPR and through teaching.

Oh, oh! In writing, exactly the same thing. It’s so funny because when I was teaching Freshman Comp, every once in a while I would get these perfect papers with these eloquent turns of expression and perfect grammar. You would think that I would’ve jumped for joy, wouldn’t you? But of course I didn’t because this was plagiarism, and someone had bought a paper to hand in. I can see why it happened, but how could a person actually believe that I ~ or any writer/teacher ~ could mistake a professionally written paper from that of a freshman in college? It’s because, to them, they cannot sense the difference, but an expert can tell in the first sentence. That’s what Rob is trying to teach audiences, to sense the difference between good and great, to be able to understand what the composer and the arranger and the musicians were trying to communicate in the intricate and complex language of music.

And that’s what makes the difference between good and great in writing: hundreds of small but inspired choices. First you have to be able to tell that difference ~ which is where reading voraciously and commenting on peers’ work and mimicking the greats comes in. Then you have to implement it in your own work. (This is why I don’t understand people who want it to remain a mystery and can’t explain how they do things. Aren’t our tools words, and if you can’t explain what you’re doing, how can you possibly hope to explain the delicate colors of contaminated water or that look your partner gives you when you’ve broken his heart for the final time?)

He goes on and says many other great things. You should immediately go and watch it all the way through. But in the meantime, I wanted to make your Friday lovely with this ~ if nothing else, go to 17:50 on the video and listen to him playing the piano.