In Joan Didion's "The Year Of Magical Thinking" she recounts an incident in which she and her late husband (also a writer) are in a restaurant and she asks if he has a pen on him and he scolds her for not having one -- obligatory for all writers to have pen and paper at hand to jot down the chance, ephemeral observations that become the nuts and bolts of writing. My immediate reaction was "Fuck you, asshole 'artist' -- this is real life, something you don't know a goddamn thing about, stick your fucking pen where the sun don't shine, shithead." That would still be my reaction, but perhaps tempered with one or two less expletives. "Art" is problematic from my anarchistic-communist perspective. As Ritchie says, "Note and photo taking can be distancing," it pulls you out of the experience of life into the experience of commentator. In one of Fellini's films -- "La Dolce Vita" or "8 1/2" or some other, I can't remember, there's a scene where a scandal brings out the paparazzi -- it's so incredibly disgusting, how they swarmed like flies around a carcass -- a great scene but causing eternal revulsion towards a career in photography for moi who was in the beginning stages of a free lance photojournalist career back then -- ah, but photographers need be made of bolder stuff -- like the stuff of TV reporters who ask: "How did it make you feel watching your child burn to death?
The whole idea of Art has always made me a little bit uneasy -- its a frivolous affair, no matter how "spiritual" you are, in the end, you can't eat music or a painting or a dance or a photograph or a sculpture or a poem or a story or a design or a movie or a stage performance -- as Jeffers said they all have "charm for children but lack nobility." I agree. I think only love has nobility, but that's my sickness. Things arty make the mundane bearable and mostly there's the mundane. As a communist, I hate that the wealthy get the good stuff and I have to settle for velvet Elvises, but that's life in the big city. Although I reject essentialism, I think the essence of art is not in the work itself, but in the soul of the creator and the appreciator, let the rich fucks buy it all up -- they're making possible my wonder and awe and love. I hope they're faring as well.
Mike Geary Memphis----- Original Message ----- From: "David Ritchie" <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Thursday, January 10, 2008 7:23 PM Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Cusco and the Grunebug Party
Listening to Susan Sonntag's son on the radio today, I realized that the reason he chose not to take notes on his mother's death was the same that caused me to neither keep a journal nor to take photos on our trip--the desire to be as present in the experience as possible. Note and photo taking can be distancing, drawing attention to what the experience would be like if or when shaped. The only art I allowed myself on the trip was painting, because it causes one to stop and to look slowly. So I have no notes from which to work up an account and only photos that others took--or that I took with others' cameras-- for I wasn't fanatical in my belief.Landing in Cusco was a weird business. We'd left Portland at three or four a.m., had lunch in Houston beside a huge group of very white people--you know the Scandinavian, skinny, upright, Lutheran type?-- who were ruled by a loud blonde gauleiter of a woman ("I'd like the salad, but can you take the bacon out and put the dressing on the side and if there are nuts in it...take them out too?")...I could have told her where the nuts were...and who leaned over, "excuse me, could you move your bag please, I need to go to the little girls room...why you have the same tags we do!" to reveal that we'd be on the same boat in about a week, for about a week...and after lunch flown to Lima where we were escorted across the street from the main terminal and into a hotel for four hours' sleep, before lining up in a classically South American line--proles here, people with connections there--and then been ushered to the front of the line when it was apparent that we'd otherwise miss our flight. It was in this waiting area that we met neighbors from Portland, who were on their way to Quito. Cusco--the navel of the Inca Empire--more properly called Cosco, lies in a plateau which is reached by the simple move of flying a plane between peaks and then threading your way onto the runway. Piece of cake.You know how the tunnel that leads from the plane is the first indicator of outside climate, humid and warm in Hawaii, cool and rain spattered at Heathrow? In Cusco there was little sense of temperature because your body was busy with, "where's all the oxygen gone?"And then we were met by someone holding up a sign that said something like, "Grunebug Party." Which was our first encounter with the guide who repeated everything three times. Repeated everything three...and with Portland's contribution to the Southern Hemisphere, the Sprinter van. Everywhere we went in Peru and Ecuador there were Sprinter vans, which have Mercedes diesel engines and which are made by Freightliner people right here in Portland, Oregon.Time for dinner. More later, if anyone wishes. David Ritchie, Portland, Oregon ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
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