The Poetics of Prose: John Gardner's "Ingenious Genre Crossing" in Four Modern American Writers.

In a 1957 interview published in the Paris Review, writer Frank O’Connor was asked why the short story was his preferred form.  “Because it’s the nearest thing I know to lyric poetry” he answered.  “I wrote lyric poetry for a long time, then discovered that God had not intended me to be a lyric poet, and the nearest thing to that is the short story. A novel actually requires far more logic and far more knowledge of circumstances, whereas a short story can have the sort of detachment from circumstances that lyric poetry has”.

Later in this interview he talks about his hesitance to make plot notes about a story before writing it: “I’ll write it down in my four lines; that is the secret of the theme. If you make the subject of a story twelve or fourteen lines, that’s a treatment. You’ve already committed yourself to the sort of character, the sort of surroundings, and the moment you’ve committed yourself, the story is already written. It has ceased to be fluid, you can’t design it any longer, you can’t model it. So I always confine myself to my four lines. If it won’t go into four, that means you haven’t reduced it to its ultimate simplicity, reduced it to the fable”.

On the surface, it seems that O’Connor is relating the short story with the concise form of the poem and its condensing of an idea.  His last statement in particular, the reducing of an idea to its “ultimate simplicity”, points to this directly; however, there are many other connections between poetry and prose besides this notion of reduction.

John Gardner in The Art of Fiction says that, “Novelty comes chiefly from ingenious genre-crossing or elevation of familiar materials,” and it is this which is “behind most of the great literary art in the English tradition” (20).  This notion, along with O’Connor’s statement about the short story being the closest thing to lyric poetry, compelled me to look for contemporary examples in American literature that blur the lines between poetry and prose.  In some ways, probably any piece of writing carries some poetic device in its passages, but it’s not only the use of a literary or rhetorical device that this essay is considering, but instead the blurring of genre itself within the text while maintaining a clear definition of genre over the whole text.

I’ve chosen four authors to examine, with the first, Ernest Hemingway, being grounded solidly in the American canon.  The other three—Denis Johnson, Chloe Caldwell, and Rodney Jones—are living authors whose work is more recent: Johnson’s published in 1992, Jones’s in 2011, and Caldwell’s earlier this year in 2012.  Also, Johnson and Jones are highly regarded writers in their own time, both of them Guggenheim Fellows and finalists for Pulitzer Prizes, with Johnson winning a National Book Award and a Whiting Award, and Jones winning the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.  Caldwell is at the beginning of her career, having just published her first book with an independent press.  However, even with these differences, each of these represents writing as groundbreaking in its own time through the use of “ingenious genre-crossing”.

The opening line of Paul Verlaine’s “Art Poétique” says, “You must have music first of all.”  So in looking for prose works that bend toward poetry, I started with what I think of as one of the most musical passages written in English: the opening paragraph of Ernest Hemingway’s short story “In Another Country.”  Of course, the title of “most musical” is highly subjective, chosen in much the same way that the two people pictured in one’s high school yearbook were chosen for the same title.  For me, the bias comes from my mentor in graduate school, the novelist Kent Haruf, who had all of his fiction students memorize this opening paragraph:

In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more.  It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early.  Then the electric lights came on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows.  There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the tails of the foxes and the wind blew their tails.  The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers.  It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains (267).

The music in this section of prose comes from its stepping over into the realm of poetry.  First, there is the repetition of words “fall” and “cold” in the opening and closing sentences which create a sort of frame around the details that make up the center of the paragraph.  There is also the use of anadiplosis in the next-to-last sentence with the word “wind”.  One might also note the repeated use of the pronoun “it” in these framing sentences, though the meaning of that word changes from war to indefinite usages.

These repetitions certainly add a poetic quality to this passage, but it’s actually the use of polysyndeton—the use of conjunctions in close succession—that gives this prose its music, namely because this literary device is immediately recognized as being integral in the prose of the King James Version of the Bible.   The KJV is often cited as a literary influence to authors, but the importance here is not on the influence of this text on the author’s prose so much as it is on the reader’s ear.  Since its publication in 1611, the KJV was the single most read text throughout the English speaking world, and for much of that period of time, it wasn’t read but heard.  The masses heard the scripture read each week in urban cathedrals and in country churches, particularly before the rise of newer translations of the Bible became commonplace and public education created a literate populace.  Regardless of race or gender or class, of region or denomination, this became the music of the English tongue. 

In the opening paragraph of “In Another Country” the conjunction “and” is used once in the first two sentences, then twice in the next sentence, four times in the penultimate sentence, and one last time in the final sentence; it’s as if this repetition mirrors the narrative arc of a story from rising conflict to climax to denouement.   Each successive addition of “and” raises the prose to new poetic heights.  Combine this with the stark, concrete language of Hemingway’s prose, which is another hallmark of the KJV (as well as modern poetry) and the poetic qualities of this passage seem clear.

But this is only an opening paragraph.  By itself, one could imagine it broken into lines to create a narrative poem; but it is the beginning of a story, and after this point, the prose becomes fairly utilitarian.  Still striking and full of detail, but certainly less poetic in quality.

In order to look for an example of short fiction that contains poetic quality in more than just the opening paragraph, it makes sense to look at a writer who started his career as a poet and then switched to fiction.

When Denis Johnson’s story collection Jesus’ Son came out in 1992, it seemed to redefine the American short story one more time before the close of the 20^th Century in the same way Hemingway had at its beginning and Raymond Carver had in its middle years.  Yes, part of the quality of Johnson’s stories in this collection is the spare prose style associated with Hemingway and Carver, but throughout there is an addition that is solely Johnson’s: moments of lyrical flourish that stand in contrast to that stark detail, giving these stories the feel, at times, of long narrative poems.  Some might suggest that this lyricism is reflective of the drug addled mind of the narrator, which may be partially true; at the very least, it allows Johnson to get away with these fantastic leaps which under normal circumstances a reader might question the validity of the narrative voice, but in Jesus’ Son, if a reader is taken aback by the shifts in prose style, they can at least say, “Well, he is high out of his mind.”

But I think there’s more to it than this.  To me, Johnson captures in these stories what every poet tries to capture, whether they are writing from a personal point of view, as an observer, or as a persona: the poet is trying to bring together the subtle nuances and connections in the web of details that surround our everyday lives in a way that reveals some truth, no matter how small, about the human condition. Poets see the same things everyone else sees, but somehow they express them using words in a way that is both familiar and shocking.  Johnson’s stories in this collection have the same effect.

Likewise, these lyrical moments are, in a way, like the volta of a sonnet: they mark a turn in the story.  Of course, there isn’t the strict formal quality of a sonnet in these stories, but there is that contrast, that shift from the stark simple prose that is a trademark of 20^th century short fiction to something that can only be described as poetic in nature, which, like the volta, is a point of dramatic change.

There are many brief examples of this throughout Johnson’s collection.  One of the most memorable comes in the opening story “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” where we find our narrator recalling the incident that the title of the story describes.  He comes to after the accident and next to him on the seat is a baby still alive, which he picks up and carries around the scene trying to figure out what happened.  He sees a man hanging out of a wrecked car who is

snoring loudly and rudely.  His blood bubbled out of his mouth with every breath.  He wouldn’t be taking many more.  I knew that, but he didn’t, and therefore I looked down into the great pity of a person’s life on this earth.  I don’t mean that we all end up dead, that’s not the great pity.  I mean that he couldn’t tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn’t tell him what was real (10).

This small turn, this move from basic functional prose to something unexpected—particularly from this narrative voice, marked by the formal usage of “therefore”—is like the volta in that it nearly brings the story to a full stop and creates a point of change.

This happens in a more significant way at the end of the story when the narrator is speaking to a doctor in the emergency room and then abruptly shifts to telling about being in detox years later.  There is no transition, no set up in the plot, and no return to the previous narrative.  Just a full stop and a dramatic turn.  A volta.

You see other examples of this in the collection.  One of the most notable is in the story “Work”.  Our narrator and his friend, Wayne, have spent the day salvaging copper wire from Wayne’s abandoned house near the river that was ruined by flood.  Afterward, the narrator feels good about having worked and earned money, and they go to The Vine to drink the rest of the night.  While there, Wayne nearly gets into a fight with a “huge, murderous man.” (64).  In the middle of this climactic tension, the narrator again steps outside the narrative to tell of another incident, but this time with more intention by announcing it to the reader: “And then came one of those moments” (64).  He goes on to describe a time when he was with the woman who would be his first wife, but before they were married, and there was a hailstorm.
 

Our naked bodies started glowing, and the air turned such a strange color I thought my life must be leaving me, and with every young fiber and cell I wanted to hold onto it for another breath.  A clattering sound was tearing up my head as I staggered upright and opened the door on a vision I will never see again: Where are my women now, with their sweet wet words and ways, and the miraculous balls of hail popping in a green translucence in the yards?  We put on our clothes, she and I, and walked out into a town flooded ankle-deep with white, buoyant stones.  Birth should have been like that (64-65).

He follows that description with “That moment in the bar, after the fight was narrowly averted, was like the green silence after the hailstorm.”  This connecting of a moment in time with another completely separate, seemingly unrelated event, is the work of poetry.  Breaking the narrative arc in order to give room for this type of lyricism goes against every convention in modern fiction.  And yet, this takes us back to Gardner’s statement about the “elevation of familiar materials.” These stories aren’t just another minimalist collection of short fiction.

After all, only a poetic sensibility could move, as Johnson does in the story “Emergency”, from a line as clear and straight-forward as “Around 3:30 a.m. a guy with a knife in his eye came in, led by Georgie” (71) to a Blakean description of a drive-in movie playing in the middle of a snowstorm, which is mistaken by our narrator for a military graveyard “filled with rows and rows of austere, identical markers over soldiers’ graves.  I’d never before come across this cemetery. On the farther side of the field, just beyond the curtains of snow, the sky was torn away and the angels were descending out of a brilliant blue summer, their huge faces streaked with light and full of pity” (81).

These examples from Hemingway and Johnson clearly support the notion of poetic quality in short fiction, but what about other creative prose?  Non-fiction writing is often very utilitarian in its function and usage.  There are real events that must be conveyed to the reader, and while there are certainly examples of lovely description in non-fiction, often such flights into lyricism when writing about one’s personal experience can seem maudlin.  However, in Chloe Caldwell’s collection of essays Legs Get Led Astray, she uses formal repetition in a way that seems both unique and familiar.  There are certainly conventional narrative essays here, but there are nine essays that are more like the long poems of Whitman or Ginsberg, namely through their use of anaphora.

The majority of those essays begin each paragraph with the same phrase, which often comes from the title.  A great example of this is “My Mother Wanted to Be Betty Boop”.  In it, the successive paragraphs all begin the same, some becoming longer and more developed, others short and percussive, like punctuation.

“My mother wanted to be a dancer…My mother wanted me to be an artist so she bought me cray-pas and canvasses and put a purple beret on my head…My mother wanted to be Betty Boop…My mother wanted her daughter to be sexually free, since she was not” (48).

 This short biography of Caldwell’s mother is accomplished in four pages using this poetic litany of details, and it captures so much in a short space because of the poetic form rather than what might have been written as a chronological story of the author’s mother.  This is not just another diary entry from a young woman thinking on her mother and her gender. Instead, it is a powerful and fresh piece of writing because of its unique use of form.  The same could be said of many of the best essays in this collection.

Caldwell’s essay, “Underground,” is even more poem-like in that its repeated openings are tighter, more concise, and follow a formal pattern leading to the ending.  In this essay, Caldwell opens each paragraph with a statement about which train the narrator is on at the time of the event she is about to relate.  The first page’s paragraphs start with “On the G train”:

 On the G train in the mornings there is a woman crack-head who flicks her lighter at me and mutters about murdering me while I sit, trying to look composed and unphased and unafraid, wearing black and white, writing in my journal on my way to waitress the brunch shift./On the G train I take candy from a stranger. I can smell marijuana on him, and I know I should say no, but has these sesame peanut butter things that look too good to pass up, and he offers them to me with such integrity that I take one…./On the G train I am on Adderall writing in my journal and I remember that somewhere I read that writing in public makes people uncomfortable and I get sort of paranoid that I am making people uncomfortable because this is New York City and you don’t want to mess around (131).

The second page is in reference to events that took place on the L train: “On the L train we meet a girl who is sick and mumbling to herself and tiny and we walk her to her apartment in Bushwick and later we tell people that we met a heroin angel./On the L train you eat grapefruit and yogurt which are the opposite of train foods and it’s really gross and people stare” (132); and the third page is about the A train: “On the A train I see a boy with Nike sneakers and back-pack and I wish he would save me from myself./On the A train there is a Mariachi band and they play “Here Comes the Sun”. On the A train I read the back of a pregnancy test and eat Smart food popcorn” (133).

 The last page mentions the 1 train and the R train, then the penultimate paragraph begins with “On all the trains”, and the final paragraph brings everything together by including a sentence for each of the trains from the previous pages: “On the L train I stand alone. On the G train I eat grapefruit.  On the A train I try not to fall asleep but I learn to rest my eyes the way the rest of the adults do and I clutch my purse tightly while I do it. On the 1 train I look at different girls’ hands and think of your hands” (134).

This attention to form, along with the repeated use of anaphora, makes these essays seem an entirely new way of approaching non-fiction.  They are frank yet musical, accessible yet poetic, narrative yet within a form.  At the same time, they are recognizable in their construction, for one need only look at the poem “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg with its continued use of anaphora and its frank description of modern American life to see the poetic precedent for Caldwell’s style:

“who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steamheat and opium,/who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,/who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery….

Or go back even further to Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”:

“Where sun-down shadows lengthen over the limitless and lonesome prairie,/Where herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square miles far and near,/Where the humming-bird shimmers, where the neck of the long-lived swan is curving and winding….

All of these things taken together in Legs Get Led Astray—the music, the form, the concise clarity—seem a perfect example of Gardner’s “ingenious genre-crossing or elevation of familiar materials.”

It’s clear from these three examples that Frank O’Connor’s statement on the close relation of short fiction (and by extension short non-fiction) to poetry remains true even when put to a more precise analysis past the condensing of a single idea in a short literary form.  But does the door swing the other way?  Does poetry borrow from prose?

Certainly one might think of prose poetry as an obvious link, which is simply a poem printed in block form without line breaks.  In fact many narrative poets write their poems out as prose first before thinking about line and stanza.  But the connections between poetry and prose can be more than that.

In nearly all of his nine collections, the poet Rodney Jones features long sectioned poems which work on many levels more like essays, though there is no mistake that they are indeed poetry.  They are lyric and broken into lines and stanzas, the language is precise and condensed, but they are also made up of several numbered sections that aren’t simple continuations of the previous section.  These aren’t just long poems, but instead introduce new themes and events with each section that are woven together as the poem progresses in the way a creative essay might work.

In an interview that appeared in Third Coast in 2012, Jones speaks to this, saying, “Often my sectioned poems begin in journals, and when I'm writing in journals, I concentrate very hard, but when I feel a corner or a wall, I put down an asterisk and jump…. At other times, I need to find another angle. I sense disequilibrium and intuitively seek a balance: often a relief, or shift of perspective. In all cases, I want the separate sections to be in conversation with each other in a way that the individual sections do not address.”

In Jones’s most recent collection, Imaginary Logic, the sectioned poem “The Previous Tenants” stands as an exquisite piece of writing that intertwines the literary forms of poetry, narrative, and essay to create a work that transcends each distinct genre.

The poem itself is comprised of 10 sections and begins by thinking on the man and woman who had built the house where the poet and his wife currently live: “The couple who built our house had great plans/for this lot where they would live out their days” (47).  Jones describes them as they appeared to their neighbors, buts this view shifts after the woman’s memorial service where her son eulogizes that “she was a fine counselor, but a terrible mother./She was not there for us when we failed./She only loved our successes” (47).  This moment turns the theme of the poem to the second section where the poet seeks to understand this couple, the previous tenants of the house where he now lives: “Until then we had had foolishly thought them happy:/he an accomplished man, a graduate of Penn;/and she a woman of privilege and beauty,/tall and regal with an aquiline nose and blue eyes” (47).

The third section focuses on the house itself and what Jones saw in it when he was thinking of buying it: “The big room upstairs, open and high-ceilinged,/a luxury after the cedar frame and plain brown door,/as though the modest exterior held a larger interior” (48). Descriptions of the rooms and the yard and the gardens continue through this section until at the end a neighbor asks for clippings of columbine that had been planted along the driveway.  The seasons pass, marked by the various flowers that bloom and fade, but the columbine never appear.

This leads to the fourth section that addresses the dementia of the previous male owner: “He forgot the names of the irises, but the ego did not diminish./He forgot the trowel under the azalea, but the ego did not diminish./He forgot the azalea. Others and then himself he forgot” (49).  Section five opens with the line “How do you know you are old?” (50) and continues on this through section six.  Section seven relates how the previous tenants’ presence is still in the house, in flowers planted and unfinished projects and left behind household items in the basement.  “From things that work and things that no longer work” (53).  Section 8 is the poet reflecting on his own mortality and tying that back to the son’s eulogy in section 1.  Nine and ten bring all of these themes together, then leave the reader considering the question of what we leave behind, how we are known, after our deaths with the last line stating “The wood with its resins still speaks of the tree.”

Jones speaks of the need for this unique form in order convey everything he was trying to capture in this poem: ”The work of the poem was convincing the ghosts to stand still long enough to let me describe them. At times, the poem seemed like a conscious essay. At other times, it was an intimate, nearly hallucinatory encounter. I saw the previous tenants in the deer in the yard, and I saw the rips in the screen wire on the porch where the wife had sat as runs in her stockings. It was difficult to establish the sections in a meaningful sequence because…the house had become internalized, and the poem surrounded me. Perhaps this is why the closure is as much surrender as resolution.”

“The Previous Tenants” is an amazing work of art that could not have been what it is had it followed conventional form.  If he had written it as a narrative essay, something would have been lacking.  Jones speaks to this in Timothy Shea’s interview when he says, “Pure narrative is like crabgrass: because it is a mimesis of happenstance, it chokes out other possibilities.”  It’s this notion of mimesis that I think Gardner is getting at with his statement about blurring genre and elevating conventional forms.  It’s this notion that these four writers are trying to unlock in their work by stretching the conventions of their reflective genres and borrowing from other literary forms.

Jones sums it up nicely by saying, “I'm not into movements or schools. Those are for fish. American poetry is not a factory or an argument. I prefer poets who fail the standards of other poets of my previous affections. I look for aesthetic freshness, narrative brilliance, imagination, bold language, dramatic intensity. I don't care if a poem is tragic or comic or a mixture. Anything that doesn't embody individual character bores me”. 

I think this extends to all literature, not just poetry, and the works featured here seem to accomplish this by avoiding the trap of simply being called story, poem, or essay, but instead recreate those forms to become something that might only be called art.

Works Cited

Caldwell, Chloe. Legs Get Led Astray. Portland OR: Future Tense Books, 2012. Print.

Gardner, John. The Art of Fiction. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. Print.

Hemingway, Ernest. “In Another Country.” The Short Stories. New York: Scribner, 1995. Print.

Johnson, Denis. Jesus’ Son. New York: Harper Collins, 1993. Print.

Jones, Rodney. Imaginary Logic. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcort, 2011. Print.

Jones, Rodney. Interview with Timothy Shea. “Pure Narrative is Like Crabgrass: Rodney Jones on the Sectioned Poem.” Third Coast. 34. (2012). Web. Nov. 2012.

O’Connor, Frank. Interview with Anthony Whittier. “The Art of Fiction, No. 19.” The Paris Review. 17. (1957). Web. Nov. 2012.

Light and Shadow

When Thomas Kinkade, self-proclaimed "Painter of Light", died earlier this year, I had a strange, albeit brief, obsession with reading about him--the sort of obsession one might have in looking at plane crash photos or shamed television preachers. You couldn't live in the 90's and early 2000's without seeing his gaudy landscapes and cottage scenes advertised in magazines. I never paid them much attention, really. To me, they didn't look like paintings, but computer generated images saturated with unnatural color and light.

I first started thinking about the larger issues around Kinkade's work and its popularity when I heard a wonderful report by Louise Rafkin on NPR in 2001 about a housing development in Vallejo CA that was built to look like a Kinkade painting. People were immediately taken in by the cuteness and hominess, and Kinkade tells her that he wanted to create a place where you would want to make memories. He continues, saying he'd like to create something like Walt Disney did with "the happiest place on earth" only that people could live there (he quotes Disney a lot, which comes into this story later). But Rafkin finds this quaintness "fake and forced" and discusses her own childhood in the 1960's in a brand new beach community, a scene of Kinkade's often referenced "simpler times", and while of course there were good memories made there, there were also memories of divorce and addiction. She notes that Kinkade's paintings rarely feature people and posits that if human beings, with all of their failings and shortcomings, were there, it would muddy up the idyllic picture. What would this collection of perfect homes in a perfect neighborhood be like in a year or two after they had been the settings for the disappointments, and fights, and betrayals that accompany us wherever we live.

Gregory Wolfe discusses this somewhat in his Wall Street Journal article, "Art in a Fallen World," that was published just after Kinkade's death, particularly dealing with Kinkade's desire to paint a world without a fallen humanity. And it's not that art shouldn't portray and inspire ideals--Wolfe cites the ancient Greeks here--but, "that our nostalgia is for an ideal we can only find after accepting, and passing through, the brokenness of a fallen world. Any other approach, in art or in life, is a form of denial."

There is a similar difficulty in another mainstream art-form: comics. I'm thinking particularly of Superman and why, as much as we love him (he was basically what started our American love affair with superheroes) we really aren't buying it. He's an invincible boy scout. He's a handsome and capable Dudley Do-right. And even when they try to make him grittier, we don't buy that either. I think it has to do with Wolfe's notion of an ideal without a fall. That's why we love Batman. He exists and operates in the unbelievably fallen world of Gotham, and Bruce Wayne is not above it, but continually has to confront it in himself. (To DC's credit, in the last few issues of Batman Beyond Unlimited, which is set a few generations in the future, we find an aging and alone Superman, who has outlived his loved ones--Louis Lane, et al--living in a world where technology has given police similar powers to his, and now he questions his existence and importance in all of it. It will also be interesting to see how next year's Christopher Nolan produced "Man of Steel" turns out.)

The other issue with Kinkade is Kinkade. Susan Orlean wrote a wonderful piece on him for the New Yorker in 2001; she quotes him saying, "I have this certain ability to have in my mind an image that means something to real people.... My art is relevant because it's relevant to ten million people. That makes me the most relevant artist in this culture, not the least. Because I'm relevant to real people." He sat up and started to laugh. "I remember that quote, man! It was a great quote! It was 'The Louvre is full of dead pictures by dead artists.' And you know, that's the dead art we don't want anything to do with!" He laughed again and slapped his thighs. "We're the art of life, man! We're bringing the life back to art!....I'm thinking of starting this program of loaning a few of my paintings to some of these [art establishment] critics and let them live with them for a year or two and see what they think then. Because art really grows as you live with it. See, I have faith in the heart of the average person. People find hope and comfort in my paintings. I think showing people the ugliness of the world doesn't help it. I think pointing the way to light is deeply contagious and satisfying. I would want to argue that I'm not an antagonist to modernists. I just believe in picture-making for people. I'm a firebrand. I will sit down and debate the grand tradition with anyone. I am really the most controversial artist in the world."

Pretentious doesn't even come close. The only word that seems fitting is asshole. This was in 2001, when he was still on top of his world without the fall, but even when we try to create a perfect world, the cracks start to show in the paint. Kinkade's fall came just a few years later.

The LA Times ran "Dark Portrait of a 'Painter of Light'" in 2006, in which Kinkade says that his paintings bring "God's light" into people's lives and that "God guides his paintbrush and his life", but we see the reality: business fraud and lawsuits, as well as personal behavior which includes public drunkenness (he heckled Sigfried and Roy at one of their Vegas shows by yelling "Codpiece!" over and over, and he cursed a former employee's wife for trying to help him when he fell off of a barstool), groping a woman's breasts at a signing party, and several instances of public urination, including pissing on a statue of Winnie the Pooh outside the Disneyland Hotel and yelling, "There's one for you, Walt!" Kinkade himself called this, "Ritual territory marking."

When he died in April, Kinkade's humanity was laid bare. He and his wife of 28 years, Nanette--the woman who Kinkade had honored by hiding her initials and the date of their anniversary in his paintings (which was also a selling point for buyers seeking family values romanticism)--filed for legal separation in 2010. According to the LA Times, "Less than two months later, one of the artist's many companies sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, which resulted in the establishment of a payment plan to cover a legal settlement. Kinkade had lost a suit against former gallery owners, who said he had used his Christian faith to induce them to invest and then stuck them with unsellable goods. With interest and legal fees, he owed $2.8 million. Two weeks after the filing, Kinkade was arrested for driving under the influence."

That year he also met Amy Pinto and by early 2011, she and her daughter had moved into Kinkade's home. At his death, it was Pinto who told reporters that he had died of natural causes at his home with the woman he loved (it turns out he died of an overdose of alcohol and Valium). Now, Nanette and Amy Pinto are duking it out over the 60 million dollar estate left behind.

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This past week, PBS Digital Studios continued it's remixed series (even for those of us who hate auto-tune, the Mr. Rogers "Garden of Your Mind" was wonderful) with a Bob Ross remix "Happy Little Clouds". I loved Bob Ross when I was a kid. Loved watching how a landscape appeared almost magically from normal looking paintbrushes in a half-hour, and loved his quiet reassuring voice that told us, "There are no mistakes here, just happy accidents." As I got older, I knew that what he was doing wasn't critically acclaimed art, but I didn't care. It wasn't the art. It was the joy that he expressed and shared while he was painting. The art wasn't what was on the canvas but watching him at the canvas.

While writing about Kinkade, I wondered how Ross had been written about in the press, and found this 2001 article in the NY Times: "The Undying Magic of Bob Ross's Happy Little Trees". Even after his 1995 death to cancer, his shows remain popular worldwide, often played without being overdubbed in the language of the viewer ("His voice, and his homey aphorisms, are beyond translation.") Bob Ross never made claims that his art was worthy of critical recognition, but even some artists find something special about him. "David Lloyd Glover, a professional artist from Beverly Hills, Calif., was flipping channels three years ago when he came upon Ross and has been a fan ever since. "It reminds me of painting as a child," he said. "As you get older, the teachers say, `You have to paint like this,' between the lines or whatever, and once the rules are put in place it delineates who's the artist and who isn't. What Bob Ross does is bring us back in touch with our innate childhood creativity. He takes away the rules. He keeps saying, `Well, I could put a bush here, or a tree here, or a stream here — I don't know, it's your world.' "

There's also something about the fact that Ross did all of his PBS shows for free, making his money instead from his paint supplies and instructional videos and books. All the paintings that he painted on the shows were donated to PBS stations across the country.

***

I think what all of us are looking for in art is authenticity. That genuine passion that comes from our expression of the human condition in the world around us. There is a separation between art and craft. Someone can be a skilled painter or writer or musician, but passionless in their expression. Likewise, someone can lack technical perfection, but something about their unique vision of the world grabs hold of us. In some you get it all, mastery and authentic expression. In others, the lack of skill is so distracting one can only look away.

Likewise, there is the artist's relationship with their work. Compare Kinkade and Ross. Their paintings in many ways are similar, but their relationship with their work, and with the viewers of their work, is markedly different. Eudora Welty said that a novel is a shared experience between writer and reader. I'd say this extends to all forms of expression.

To create is to lay oneself bare. It's to reveal one's view of the world shaped by one's experiences. Even if it's done in subtleties or through fictions, even if the scene the artist is painting or writing or creating through sound has nothing to do with the specific details of that artist's life, honesty is required. Anything else is a trick of the light.

Day 12

When I was a kid there were still a lot of reruns on television that were in black and white, and of course there were old pictures in my parent's photo albums that were in black and white (in fact, one of my earliest baby pictures is black and white). So I knew quite early that old stuff didn't have color. At the same time, I was aware that some tv's weren't color, so that regardless of the film used, color or black and white, that set would only show it in monochrome. The reason I'm bringing this up is because, for whatever reason, I believed in my earliest years that the world itself had no color until the 60's.

Most of you reading this must be thinking, this guy was a real dolt as a kid. In my defense this thought was to my best recollection, around four years of age. I know it was before kindergarten. But I can remember wondering what it must have been like for my grandparents to live in a black and white world, a world whose sky and grass and houses were only varying shades of gray. And then one day, someone (I'm not sure who) came along and painted all of it, and I thought, what a wonderful time to experience: the day the world became color. When I told my mom this, she said very bluntly that it was just the film that had changed. The world has always been the same.

Looking back on this memory, though, I think my four year old mind was on to something. Now I wonder what it must have been like to live in a fully colored world, but all visual documentation of that world, both real and fictional, was black and white. I think it's why we now associate black and white film stock has having some artistic quality. Because it's not an exact representation of the world, but something more ethereal. I'm sure when they came out with color film, people found it sad in some sense, because it was a little too real. I feel, in some ways, the same about HD television. Why do I need to see the beads of sweat on that politician's upper lip? Why do I need to see the plastic surgery scars on that actress? But, because I'm a person who accepts that changing technology now moves faster than weather patterns, it's no big deal one way or the other. Most of what I watch now is not HD. In ten years (or five, or two), everything will be HD, not because I choose it, but because that will be the only choice.

In the end, it's all about how our ability to recreate and communicate our perceptions shapes our understanding of the world. It's why the ancient hunters who painted on the walls of Lascaux in France ritually shot arrows at the images before going out after the real thing. No one would do that now because it seems absurd, but people do use Google Earth to make sure they understand the exact location of Disneyland before driving there. Because we trust that it's as close to reality as we can get.

The rub comes in knowing if the technology shapes our understanding of reality or if we create technology to mirror what we already understand about reality. Did I think the world before the 1960's was black and white because the technology shaped that perception, or did I already begin to understand that a new, metaphorical, color had come into the world about the same time that it arrived on film.

I think the dilemma we're faced with now, is that technology moves faster than we can understand how it's affecting us. Look at something so mundane as movies: for the first third of my life, you could go to the theater and maybe if you were lucky, catch it in some revised version on television. Then came VHS rentals and purchases in the middle third of my life. Then suddenly, we've gone from VHS, to DVD, to Blu-Ray; from renting at a store, to renting from Netflix, to renting through I-tunes, to watching it online through streaming video, as well as being able to purchase it in any of those formats. Then there's the delivery: before you could watch it in a theater or at home on a tv. Now I can watch a movie anywhere on any number of devices, which will then be obsolete in five years or less. When I was a kid, I could only rely on people's descriptions and memories of films they had seen in the past. Now, when I tell my kids about something I watched when I was their age, they say, "Check YouTube, Dad. I want to see it."

In the same vein, as technologies become obsolete, we tend to ignore those past archives unless they're updated to a new media. I have a box of photos that were taken before 2003 that are never looked at. After 2003, we bought a digital camera and have taken literally thousands of pictures that we peruse at least several times a month. Does that make the events in our life prior to digital photography less improtant? Do the photographs taken on actual film and stored away in boxes seem more artistic or sacred?

I've seen students pass on research for papers, even if it's perfect for what they're writing about, because it's not available online in full-text. They just find something else that is available. And who's to blame them. When I was in college, I avoided microfiche like the plague and interlibrary loan was such a pain in the ass. Once, I helped my brother-in-law, Jon, write a paper using only the books we happened to have in the house. He got an A.

I'm not sure what point I'm trying to make with all this. I love technology. I think Ctesibius building water clocks in ancient Alexandria is just as amazing as being able to watch live footage from Mars on my cell phone because it's humankind taking another tiny step toward the understanding of truth. But it seems that by letting technology decide for us which things will be remembered and studied, we're walking a dangerous path toward a dark age of our own creation. We consider ourselves the most informed generation in the history of humankind, which is true, if that information shows up on the first two pages of a Google search. Any knowledge past that is reserved for elite specialists. And if it's only available on microfiche, it's forever lost, the same as the scrolls containing the wisdom of the ancient world when the library at Alexandria burned to the ground.

Flight

Homage to Dick Cavett:

I can't imagine that there's a huge fanbase for Dick Cavett, but if there is, I have realized I may be part of it. I have a link to his NY Times blog, "Talk Show", which from the first entry, I've followed with great interest and enjoyment. Others have too, with about 400-500 comments on each post as evidence. And unlike most sites that feature posted comments, these are a good read as well. With most things I read online, I've had to make myself not scroll down and ignore what people write because it's full of hateful, bigoted, polarized bullshit, but Cavett's post draws comments of nostalgia, regard, intelligent disagreement, and other such civilized responses.

Then there are the interviews from the various incarnations of his television show, which are wonderful, and I can't imagine anyone now, except maybe Letterman, who could sit with such varied guests and somehow allow such a seemingly true picture to come from it. Who else has hosted a very insightful, yet barely coherent Sly Stone and had Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal nearly come to blows on his nationally televised show. If you look at the clips of Cavett's interviews on You Tube, you see the best and brightest of his generation: not just politicians, not just pop stars, not just literary icons, but all of them.

Cavett isn't what I'd consider a movie star, though he's been in many. The first one I saw him in was Beetlejuice, playing an art agent for Delia Deets's strange and supernatural sculpture. He delivers a perfect deadpan line as he's leaving the dinner party after having been possessed by Harry Belefonte's Bananna Boat Song about how as Delia's agent he's consistently lost money on her so he can tell her frankly and honestly that if she wants to scare people she should do it with her art. It's great comedy and so subtle it's easily missed, very much the way Cavett himself is overlooked.

When I was a kid, I was fascinated by airplanes and flight. Early on it was only with military airplanes. I have a cousin, David, who I was close to growing up, whose dad had been an F-100 pilot in Vietnam and was shot down and killed when David was two years old. I think because of this, he threw himself into the subject of military aircraft. He taught me to notice the small differences between planes so that I could tell them apart and understand their purpose. I read books he gave me and we built plastic models together and so began my education on aviation. David was a very talented artist, and his models were very precise reproductions. I remember the pride he felt after completing a large model of an F-100 that had the same squadron markings on the tail as his father's. I remember him using a toothbrush to paint in the blackened cannon ports under the nose. I remember it being a solemn moment when he hung it from the ceiling of his basement room with fishing line. And I remember sensing his grief because it didn't bring him any closer to knowing his dad.

But I think the beginngs of my shift from duty filled patriot child of the cold war to a 21st century pacifist, began with looking outside aircraft as a military application and seeing flying as a near spiritual pursuit, which happened watching a documentary as a kid in the early 80's on the history of flight, narrated by Dick Cavett. It started with the legend of Icarus, then the balloons and gliders of the 18th and 19th centuries, the crazy designs of early motorized attempts, moving to Samuel Langley's Aerodrome which failed with much publicity only a week before the Wright Brother's quietly successful flight at Kitty Hawk. It was about the human desire to rise above the earthly plane. Not about raining down death from above. And all of it was explained by Cavett's calm and comforting voice.

The last scene was a man snow skiing down a mountain beneath a bright orange hang glider, while the soft notes of Pachelbel's Canon began to play. I'd never heard this piece of music before, and though it's become the cliche of sappy weddings and no one of any taste would admit to liking it, I can't hear it without thinking of this: the man with the hang glider slid quickly toward a precipice, and Cavett's voice spoke the last lines of narration (I can't remember them, but can remember my chest feeling full, tears on my cheeks) and the music rising as the earthbound man went over the snowy cliff, and instead of plummeting to certain death, continued upward into a alpine blue sky.

Forever after that, when I ponder humankind's yearning to leap into the heavens or hear the still lovely Canon in D, I think of Dick Cavett, as if it was his voice that led me to these revalations, like a father teaching his son that one's first views on something aren't necessarily the best. That instead of being excited by falling bombs and cannon fire and dogfights, it's all right to be a ten year old boy with tears in his eyes because he sees a small beauty in this world. That it's all right to be who I am, instead of what's expected.

Day 8

When I was a kid, I loved baseball. I started playing on an organized team in the first grade, and this wasn't t-ball or machine pitch or coach pitch, but real 9-player baseball. I played little league from the time I was 7 until I was 15, and played on the Junior High and High School teams as well. Two different years, I played on little league teams that went to the National Tournement. The first year we took fourth; the last we took second. It was kind of like the movie Hoosiers in the sense that in a small rural town there was nothing to do except play baseball.


Even when we weren't playing organized ball, we were constantly riding our bikes to someone's house to play with plastic balls and bats wrapped in black electrical tape. Each yard had different ground rules: over the hedge at Billy Gulledge's house was a homer; my house was open and included the neighbor's yard in the field of play. You could catch flies off of trees, powerlines, houses, or anything else as long as it was between the foul lines, which were marked by any number of landmarks like bare spots in the grass or the concrete of the back porch.


And then when I wasn't playing ball, I was thinking about it. I took a subscription to the Sporting News when I was probably 9 or 10 and memorized team stats. I'd record myself on a tape player announcing 9 innings of an imagined baseball game. I'd read old tattered novels from our school library with titles like 'Gutter Team', which essentially had the same plot as the movie 'Major League'. I had the fortune being ten years old when the movie 'The Natural' was released. I still get chills when Redford's character knocks the cover off the ball or busts the clock or shatters the lights in the fantastic firework ending. It's complete fantasy, and yet that's how you feel playing baseball.


But as I got older, I stopped following the game as closely, mainly because of time constraints. When I was a kid, I could take three hours out of my day and watch an entire baseball game, start to finish. If I have three hours free now, I'm not going to watch tv. I was able to hang on to the game a little longer with my first job out of grad school--a university press that ran a baseball writing series. We even published a later novel of Eliot Asinof, author of 'Eight Men Out'. Basically, all of the books were written by men who'd gone on to live their lives and yet still carried that boyish belief in the legend and mythology of baseball. Men like me.


Last month, I took my sons to see the Eugene Emeralds, our local San Diego Padres affiliate, and it seems to me that minor league baseball is where that legend is alive and well. It's hard to be sympathetic watching the pros. That isn't about baseball; it's about advertisement and marketing. Even the achievments of the last 15 years--like the homerun race between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa in 98 was more about selling baseball to a new generation of ticket buyers than it was about greatness. It's the reason both of those guys were juiced during those years: because there was something at stake other than a game.


I think of Dizzy and Daffy Dean, famed brothers of the St. Louis Cardinals Gashouse Gang, and the fact that during the offseason, they would often get a factory job to pay the bills in order to play ball again come spring. I think of Cool Papa Bell, legend of the Negro Leagues, who was said to have been so fast he had to jump his own hit up the middle while going to second. I think of Phil Niekro, old man knuckleballer of the 70's who lacked the least shred of glamor, and yet still won ballgames. Would anyone of these make it in the majors today? Maybe, if they had the right agent.


But in the minors, that magic is there, because it's about the hope of something more. There's something at stake. It's not about whether you get another million tacked onto your contract, not yet anyway; it's about whether you get to spend one more day playing ball. For me it was about getting to sit in the stands and keep score on the scorecard and explain to my boys about why you don't swing on a 3-0 count or why it's a good thing to fly out on a sacrifice or why you learn to switch hit. For me too, it was about having another good day at the ballpark, surrounded by other people who loved the game, not because it was in a newly built facility or that it cost as much as a stay in a four star hotel.


I always felt a tinge of guilt on my turning away from baseball. Most people in the place I'm from remain passionate about sports into their dying days. My mother-in-law, who is not athletic at all, follows sports--baseball, football, basketball, tennis, swimming--religiously, with a clear understanding of the finer aspects of each. My grandpa Roy was a staunch University of Kentucky basketball fan, ignoring the scores on the 10 oclock news so he could watch the tape- delayed games afterward with suspense. My grandpa Gill, who was blind, listened to St. Louis baseball on the radio, with Mike Shannon and Jack Buck announcing, and to this day I think there's no better way to experience baseball other than being at the game. But for some reason, I wasn't able to keep up my commitment. Maybe there's a connection with this and my ability to keep my religious faith as well.


I think F. Scott Fizgerald articulated this in his essay "Ring", a send-off after Ring Lardner's death. Lardner was a literary figure who started in sports writing, and he was a close friend to both Scott and Zelda. Fitzgerald said, "It was never that he was completely sold on athletic virtuosity as the be-all and end-all of problems; the trouble was that he could find nothing finer. Imagine life conceived as a business of beautiful muscular organization--an arising, an effort, a good break, a sweat, a bath, a meal, a love, a sleep--imagine it achieved; then imagine trying to apply that standard to the horribly complicated mess of living, where nothing, even the greatest conceptions and workings and achievments, is else but messy, spotty, tortuous--and then one can imagine the confusion that Ring faced on coming out of the ball park." I understand that same confusion.


For me, when I watch sports now, that complicated mess of living is all too apparent. Steroids. Money. Media. Racism. Arrogance. Shallowness. That's what I see. So I go to Civic Stadium and pay six dollars to watch young guys in their early twenties play ball in the minors for the same money that I make at my job, watch them make great plays and bonehead errors in the same inning, all with a hope that somehow by buckling down and playing the game right, something better will come from it. That's the stuff that made baseball legendary. That's what made baseball life.

Day 3

When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was "Superweasel". It was published the year I was born, 1974, when the environmental movement was taking off. The story is about a kid, Alvin Fernald, who's given an assignment by his teacher to come up with an idea to help the environment. Other kids are collecting newspapers for recycling and cleaning up vacant lots, but Alvin decides to become an environmental super hero, Superweasel, who takes on the city's biggest polluters. He dams a small river that a large factory is dumping waste into so that it backs up into the factory and causes the plant to shut down. He also, with the help of his best friend and his little sister, throws dead fish killed by the chemicals into the swimming pool of the company's owner. On another night, he climbs the smokestack of a manufacturer across town and blocks it so that smoke pours below, sending workers fleeing for fresh air. This continues and at the end of the book, he hangs up his costume, fish have come back to the river, and he gets an A on his report as the teacher is the only one who figures out his identity.

I can remember wishing I could do something like this. The adventure and the secrecy and going against the machine of the rich and powerful, but all for something so clearly important. I have a feeling a lot of kids my age felt the same. Then they grew up, and there's still a huge animosity toward being responsible toward the environment, and it seems like an environmental super hero is in order. But when they act on these things, suddenly there's a new name for Superweasel: Eco-terrorist.

I was speaking with someone the other day and they were saying something about the 'New Green Movement'. I thought to myself, it's been around as long as I have. Superweasel, The Lorax by Dr. Suess, the crying Indian commercial (who actually was an Italian immigrant who adopted a Native American persona early in his acting career). It's marketing. The green movement didn't start in most people's minds until they were able to label it, wrap it up, and sell it. Before it was only something to teach little kids in funny stories that of course aren't real. It's cute to protect the trees and the rivers and the animals, until you're old enough to understand that there is money to be made in their destruction.

When I was in grad school, I worked on my Father-in-law's farm to make money through the summer, and once a neighbor gave me this advice: "If you ever find an endangered animal or plant on your farm, kill it right then and there, because if the EPA finds out, it'll ruin your life." The fact that a small town family farmer has this attitude is proof we've failed in the moral dilemma Jimmy Carter warned us of in his Malaise Speech. It reads as if it was given in Denver a few days ago. As if, thirty years later, this is new stuff to us. Will we take a moral and responsible stand on how we do business and operate government and take care of the environment, or will we simply become a nation of consumers filling up the void of our lives with stuff? I guess you have the answer now, Mr. Carter.

But even with the 'new awareness' of all things green, the marketing whizzes and the spin doctors have tapped into this and are profiting beautifully. Here in Oregon, the Toyota Prius has become a symbol of that green consumerism. Never mind the issue of battery disposal. Never mind that the carbon footprint used in making those new cars is larger than the energy saved while driving it. It's an outward show that you care and are willing to spend money for the cause. It shows that when faced with a dire situation, our answer is to buy more stuff. It's a way to ease our consciences. Seven years ago, after 9-11, our answer to Al-qaeda was to buy things. Travel. Buy new cars. Spend your money in a vigilant act of patriotism. If there was an alien invasion, the ad agencies would have us running to the stores in droves.

Even on my most optimistic days, it seems hopeless. It makes me long for childhood, when keeping the air and the water clean and the trees green seemed like something as obvious as breathing, something outside the reach of profit margins and marketing. A time when waste was something you were admonished for instead of rewarded. When the heroes were Jimmy Carter and Superweasel. It's a good thing I still have my copy of that book from when I was a kid, because even if I wanted to buy it new in a modern show of support for environmental literature, it's out of print.

Day 1

I guess it's fitting that I'm starting this on a Wednesday as I was born on a Wednesday. The children's rhyme says that Wednesday's child is full of woe. I'm sure there are lots of people out there born on hump day that claim this isn't true, that it's prejudice against mid-week births. But I read it and tend to say, yeah, it's not far off. Even on my happiest of days, and there are many, there's an underlying melancholy beneath it all. My youngest son, Connor, was born on a Wednesday. He seems happy, though he's a loner and prefers to play by himself in the backyard, imagining some other world, talking to himself in hushed tones. He also has a brutal temper that appears from nothing in a split second. It's like looking in a mirror.

I was thinking about another children's rhyme the other day when I saw four crows in the street in front of our house. The one about counting blackbirds to see what their meaning is: one for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a story that's never been told. Seven seems the most romantic, but you never see seven crows together. Mostly it's one. I had two Irish friends in grad school, Shane and Niamh, and one night at a party, standing under a covered porch in a downpour, they told me that in Ireland when you see a crow you always start looking for another one so that it becomes something other than sorrow. When we saw the crows in our street, my oldest son, Cormac, asked what four birds meant, so I went through the rhyme and said, four for a boy. He replied, "It's me. I'm the boy." I said, "Well, it could be Connor, or even me. I'm a boy." But he said calm and confident, "No dad. It's me." He was born on a Tuesday. Full of grace.