A Golden Age of Print

Andrew Losowsky, senior books editor at the Huffington Post, recently observed that print culture--far from dying as a result of the digital revolution--is expanding, improving and engaging:

"I'm a believer that we're entering a golden age of print.  When something loses its monopoly, it allows it to express what makes it special"  (quoted in Print, 67.5, Oct. 2013, p. 46).

I could not agree more.  I am in a (physical) bookstore at least once a week, and browse their online equivalents every day--and am deliciously overwhelmed by the choices, the inventive qualities, the lure and the blandishments of covers and fonts, the million voices whispering, illustrations leaping, every genre and new ones hybridized every week, deep and beautiful writing on worthy themes, cracking good yarns to liven up a subway ride, higher up and further in on entirely novel continents...

...and the old is refreshed and kept in print, and much that was lost is reclaimed inexpensively online...

Alexander Is Lowered Into The Sea: The Archaeology of Story

[Image & Artwork Copyright Held By The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC; Image Used Here For Purposes of Commentary Only, i.e., Within Fair Use; Museum Link Is Here]

The picture above spoke to me from across the room yesterday at the Metropolitan Museum, a small item amidst the panoply at the newly opened exhibition Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500-1800 .  See the exhibit if you can--it is the sort of bravura display that only the Met and a few others (the V & A, for instance) around the world can do, expertly melding history, anthropology, connoisseurship and aesthetics, and over-brimming the viewer's eye with one exquisite piece after another.   Enmesh your gaze in the glories of palempores on acres of bed-linens, of rinceaux patterns on bonnets and evening gowns, of pheasants and lions cavorting among the original paisley-fronds, of chintz before the word took on its present-day meaning.

The picture above the Met placed as a visual footnote or supplemental (having to do with the contrast between the Mughal headgear and the hats on the Portuguese sailors) yet I found myself more deeply drawn in the more I studied it.  "Alexander Is Lowered Into The Sea," it is titled, being a folio from a Khamsa (a quintet) by Amir Khusrau Dihlavi, with the painting itself attributed to Mukunda.  The Met tells us that, "while underwater, [Alexander] will receive a visit from an angel who will foretell his death."

I did not recall any such story attached to Alexander the Great when I stumbled through Diodorus Siculus and Plutarch (even in translation!) my freshman year of college.  How curious, this legendry revolving around a primitive but apparently functional diving bell.  Alexander--it turns out (but why was I surprised, since Aristotle was his tutor?)--had an interest in such things, if only to thwart any submarine defenses of the maritime cities he besieged.  Click here and here for more.

Alexander invaded Persia in 334 BCE, and India in 327.  Amir Khusrau  (1253-1325 CE) wrote the poem illustrated above some 1,600 years after Alexander's death, one flower in the great garden of verse planted and pruned during the Delhi Sultanate.  (For more on Amir Khusrau, one of the most influential and creative minds in medieval Eurasia, reputed to have invented--among other things--the sitar and the tabla, click here).  

Mukunda, or some other master-artist of Akbar the Great's court, painted the scene another three centuries after Khusrau wrote the poem.  One can imagine Akbar, with his syncretistic worldview and cosmopolitan sense of majesty, enjoying both poem and picture very much.

Four centuries after Akbar's time, we are admiring the painting and reading the story yet again-- and perhaps recollecting how much is shared across millennia and across seemingly disparate cultures.  Alexander founded cities as well as destroyed them, cities still important today.  While echoes of his battles at Gaugamela and on the banks of the Hydaspes live on in scenes such as those written by Tolkien for his men of the West confronting the elephants ridden by the Haradrim ("the men of the south"), we might also bring forth other bits of Alexandrine lore, those more tied to cross-cultural understanding and the pacific quest for revelation.

Memorials to the First Voyage

Barbara Remington's Covers for the 1965 Ballantine Paperback Edition of LOTR (photo of copies from the 21st printing, 1968; from the Mike is Bored blog, click here for more.  Lobster & Canary does not hold copyright in the images or original artwork in this post; their presentation here falls under fair use, is for purposes of commentary).

We visited the Experience Music Project Museum in Seattle last weekend, a compendium of great favorites, uniting Jimi Hendrix and Harry Potter under one roof.   A loving, Bowie-esque hodgepodge of drum kits and Daleks, light sabers and Stratocasters, complete with Captain Kirk's chair from the deck of the Enterprise and Neo's long black coat from The Matrix, the EMP was thronged with pilgrims. 

The first exhibit is an homage to modern fantasy and mythmaking.   And on the hall as you enter are two original paintings:  Barbara Remington's LOTR poster, and the map of Middle Earth by Pauline Baynes.

I gazed long and longingly at the two, transported instantly to a young reader making his first voyages on the bark of Tolkien's story.  Recursive memorials to immersion and the gaining of identity through the loss of time and self.  Places of memory about places we imagine and then inhabit.  Recollection of my own paperbacks with their Remington covers (a slightly later printing of the 1965 edition, the 22nd or 23rd perhaps, from 1969, worn to just the same crinkled state as those pictured above, ultimately read right off the book itself, bound with a rubber band, all now lost).  Memories of the sunlight in the front-room on Concord Place where I first read these, and of the smell of the back-stairs (a slightly ominous corridor, like the entrance to The Old Forest), the solitude of my bedroom where a small lamp provided enough light to read by, late late into the night, but not quite enough to dispel the whispers of the Nazgul from the encompassing dark.  

"Memory installs remembrance within the sacred," to quote Pierre Nora.  "Memory takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images and objects."

P.S.  This summer I read Songs of the Dying Earth: Stories in Honor of Jack Vance, a marvelous 2009 anthology edited by George R.R. Martin & Gardner Dozois.  Vance, like Tolkien (and Le Guin and Peake), looms very large in the minds and memories of many modern fantasy authors; I found Vance only a little later than I discovered Tolkien and Le Guin, and can see and feel where I was when I first followed Cugel the Clever on his adventures and first shuddered at the appearance of Chun the Unavoidable.  Besides the great affection for Vance evident in their pastiches, nearly every author in the collection -- and the line-up is a "who's who" of the current field-- recalls in intimate detail when they first encountered Vance's writing, right down to the specifics of the editions.  For instance, Mike Resnick writes: "One of the very first science fiction books I bought as a kid was Jack Vance's The Dying Earth, in its original paperback edition published by Hillman."  Phyllis Eisenstein remembers paying "75 cents for that Lancer paperback with the odd leathery cover.  Only many years later did I learn that this was its first printing since the scarce 1950 Hillman edition."  Lucius Shepard:  "I first encountered Jack Vance's work in junior high, when I read a paperback edition of The Dying Earth sheathed in one or another textbook (I hated mathematics, so most often I read it during math class)."  Glen Cook speaks of forking over the "outrageous sum" of 75 cents for the Lancer edition at the independent bookstore next to a tavern he frequented.  Tanith Lee still has the English Mayflower edition her mother bought her decades ago, "though by now the pages are brown and many are loose inside the cover."  Dan Simmons stumbled into The Dying Earth and other Vancean worlds in stacks of his brother's Ace Doubles and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, when he was 12, in his uncle's third-floor apartment on North Kildare Avenue just off Madison Street in Chicago, "with me sprawled on the daybed...under the open windows with the heat and street noises coming in...reading Jack Vance."   Howard Waldrop:  "I remember sitting in a green and white lawn chair under a magnolia tree...in the summer of 1962, reading...The Dying Earth."   Martin was ten or eleven years old when he "grabbed one of those Ace Doubles with the colorful red-and-blue spines off the spinner rack in the candy store at First Street and Kelly Parkway in Bayonne, New Jersey."  Elizabeth Hand movingly describes "the single most intense reading experience of my life," a rainy Saturday alone in a rented beachfront cottage in Maine the summer before she started high school, devouring doughnuts she had bought with her father and a cover-less copy of  The Dying Earth found in the bottom of a box her mother had brought home from a library book sale.  As  Hand says, speaking I think for most of us:  "It was my madeleine."

"What Would It Be Like To Actually Don Their Slippers?": The Fairy Tale Worlds of Caroline Golden

That's No Rabbit (2007; mixed media collage)

[All artwork and images copyrighted to the artist, Caroline Golden, and used here solely for purposes of commentary, i.e., non-commercially].

Caroline Golden is a consummate bricoleur, building worlds of loving intricacy, oblique, enigmatic yet inviting.   Few artists-- Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Le Corbusier, Matisse--work so confidently across so many media, and few-- Paolo Ventura, Cornell, Laurie Simmons-- make the miniature so real.  Golden is expert at combining just the right objects in just the right arrays, to untrammel the exquisite and lodge the viewer in dreamstead.  Come in, she beckons, and we find ourselves unwilling to leave, snuggled into the details of linen-fold, polished porcelain, eclectic veneered surfaces.

Her workshop is itself a place of magpie magic, heaped with oddities and incompletes, cut-outs of eyeballs, hands and teeth piled here and there, a bottomless reserve of unlikely inspiration.  Some of her finds will wait for years for their final juxtapositions-- Golden is a patient weaver.

As I have written elsewhere, but repeat now with amplified application to Golden's work:  Here Bachelard's "poetics of space" meets Tolkien's "elvish craft of Enchantment, the sub-creation of a Secondary World."  Calvino's sixth principle, Visibility, merges with Benjamin's "panoramas, dioramas, cosmoramas...phantasmagorical and fantasmaparastatic experiences, picturesque journeys in a room."

The Rabbit House (2011; mixed media construction)

For more of Golden's fairy tale worlds, her "architectural follies in miniature," her "Invisibles" and "Atlanteans," visit her newly relaunched website.   And now for a conversation with the artist:

Watch Cat (1999; paper collage)

Question 1.  Caroline, your "Many Faces of Alice" gives us a new look, a new take, on the well known heroine.  Why Alice, as opposed to, say, Dorothy, or Lucy in the Narnia adventures (or Lara Croft, Tomb Raider, for that matter)? 

Golden:  Alice is a very old friend.  I first met her in Alice's Adventure Underground when I was a child.

The "Underground" Alice found herself within- a dark, nightmarish and, at times ridiculous layer not far from the surface of what we would term as normal.  Logic and meaning had no place there but she defiantly refused to accept the upside down world for what is truly was. Throughout her journey she never seemed to doubt she would survive her trip down the rabbit hole. I admire Alice’s bravery and perseverance, while she maintains an appreciation for the absurd.  I suppose I consider much of my life as a journey back and forth down a rabbit hole, so Alice will always remain my heroine. 

And The King Replied (1999; collage)

Question 2:  Your approach is enormously painstaking, with long periods necessary for the preparation and construction of your worlds.  Talk to us about your process, walk us through the arc from inspiration to completion.  (Which begs the question: is a work ever really complete?)  

Golden:   In the early 1960's while my father was working for IBM, he brought home a paper model of one of their new computers. This model was printed in hushed tones of green and taupe and the precision of the folds and die-cuts had me mesmerized.  My father was less than thrilled when I used the model as Barbie furniture -but that's another story! Another early memory was at a carnival in Ohio where I watched a man cut into a piece of paper with a tiny pair of scissors to magically release a multi-winged bird. His hand holding the scissors remained stationery while the paper he was cutting danced between the blades - literally "painting" with tiny scissors.   To this day I employ this method of cutting.  I have always been intrigued by the trans-formative qualities of paper.

After college I worked in several ad agencies as a studio artist. Before computers, one had to actually draw out the area to print on a sheet of illustration board and then paste down camera ready text and imagery. The nuanced perception of visuals and text along with the precision of being a paste-up/mechanical artist was the springboard to how I work now - as a collage artist. 

I tend to work in a series. I have a large work area of multiple tables where at times I may have fifteen collages being worked on at once. My work area will eventually become like an archaeological dig as pages are torn, images cut some used, many discarded until I am happy with the end result.  I have some 1500 magazine and old books that are part my palette as well as my own photography and painting along with  tree limbs, mirrors, class, dollhouse furniture, wooden toys, cigar boxes and assortments of objects that are creating quite a storage issue!

The images that I have cut and don't use are stored away in tiny flat file drawers. These drawers contain images I have cut spanning the last fifteen years. For example, I have a drawer of eyes that must contain nearly 500 cut eyeballs or elements that would read as such. I can usually remember where images are filed and where I cut them from, which sometimes stuns me! 

Question 3:  You are so very multi-media and cross-disciplinary.  I was struck by the library of books you have in your studio (not every workshop I am in has so many books!), especially since they include many literary texts, not "just" art books as references...Umberto Eco's book on "Ugliness" is there, a slew of others...

Golden:  I have done quite a bit of reading about Lewis Carroll as well as many commentaries about his Alice books.  More recently I have delved into the history and significance of fairy tales. 

As I began to delve more into fairy tales and Alice - reinterpreting these tales that were such a part of my childhood - I became quite interested in the emotional life of the characters themselves. What would it be like to actually don their slippers? As I mentioned above, my training was in commercial art - where my creativity had very specific goals to sell a product or an ideal - to manipulate.  When I first started collage it was precisely this imagery I chose to cut up, in fact some of the very ads I worked on!  This revolution of sorts heralded a retraining of my eye and outlook. 

Question 4:  "Many Faces of Alice" is both an elaborate physical assemblage and its representation via your new web site.   How do the two reinforce and/or nuance one another?  

Golden:  My website is a selection of "portfolios" from the various series I have created.  Certainly a website to show case one's work is a far cry from a plastic sleeve containing 20 tiny slides!  It is always a challenge to capture art work in a photograph, especially if the piece is multi-dimensional or comprised of many layers, so it still does not take the place of seeing the work in person. It was also very important for me to create an engaging website to explore rather than just an inventory of my work. It was truly a collaborative effort with my website designer - as by default I was a member of the design team. I am very pleased with the results.

In my never ending quest to bring the viewer into my work I ventured into the world of stop animation.  I created a box based on the Rabbit House and, when Alice finds herself trapped within it, titled it Alice's Folly. I have always been intrigued by pop-up paper sculpture and wanted to employ this technique in this piece. The box took over a year to finish and I sure wish I had paid more attention in geometry class! It was completed just in time to be featured on my site upon its launch. 

Question 5:  I love how you bring the viewer right down inside the dramas you have created, putting us on the stage with Alice (as well as fairy tale characters) as it were.  When we spoke earlier, you talked about how you often find smudges of fingers and most likely noses on the glass that contains your two-dimensional works, suggesting to you that viewers are keen to enter (literally) the worlds that you depict.    Why do you think so many of us are drawn so powerfully to the worlds you create?

  

Golden:  I think most people are as captivated by the magic of miniature as I am. I believe the allure is based on being drawn into a place impossible to set foot in - leading one to want to explore the space all the more. My collages are multi-dimensional and I often create an opening to look within where I've used multi-layered imagery to further draw one in.   Over the last several years my architectural pieces have leapt off the 2-D plane and are 3-D; instead of in a frame, I place them under bell jars. Leaving the interior space absent of any character I leave the viewer to step in and take a look around. They may see a castle tower empty after the damsel as been rescued or Sleeping Beauty’s chamber long after she awakened and her bed stripped of its mattress. They could find themselves in grandmother's house, a claustrophobic depiction where Red Riding Hood met her demise. These collaged constructions are mostly made of paper, disguised to mimic wood shingles, linoleum flooring, plaster walls and wood molding.  With the aid of mirrors I have created additional spaces within, toying with the viewer’s perception of the space actually available for them to explore.

  

Question 6:  With your new website launched, what is next for "Many Faces of Alice"?

Golden:  I am currently working on a concept for a book based on Alice’s Adventures Underground and am further exploring The Rabbit Hole for inspiration.  The most important aspect of exploring any narrative is realizing "The End" may just be the midpoint of the story and the freedom and possibility remains mine to discover. 

Lobster & Canary:   Thank you Caroline.  Readers:  hie yourselves to the Golden website!

Nighthawks on 23rd Street

Three weeks ago the Whitney installed in "the prow" of the Flatiron a life-size cut-out replica of Hopper's Nighthawks-- an icon within an icon, like a devotional painting housed within an altar.

I work less than a block away, so have been over to see the diners bathed in light over that long counter, under the sign for the 5-cent cigars.

For decades, aficionados have searched for what they believe is THE single model for Hopper's diner, typically looking not far away in the Village.   No luck yet but the Whitney and the Flatiron have, at least, given us the illusion of the search's end.

A place more real than reality, the epitome of that reality captured on canvas, springing to life on our very streets.

I think I will have a slice of pie with my coffee, thank you.

Museum in the city, city as museum

Head of a Queen Mother (Iyoba), Edo Peoples, Kingdom of Benin

(Within Territory of Nigeria Today), c. 1750-1800

At the Metropolitan Museum, NYC (for more, click here)

[As always, copyrright of the image and artwork depicted held by the artist or museum and/or their legal representatives; no infringement intended, image presented here solely for purposes of commentary, i.e., non-commercial.]

The lobster and the canary visited the Metropolitan Museum yesterday afternoon, with no particular goal or agenda except to wander, listen and learn.  We sought counsel with iyobas, and delivered our respects to the beete masks of the Kwele peoples (whose territory falls within the borders of Gabon).   We contemplated the marble sarcophagus of one Arria, who died in the middle of the third century C.E., presumably in Rome itself, given the grandeur of the carvings.   We watched as pale-rust-red runners contended with one another across the flanks of gleaming black vases, abdominal muscles so finely etched we could almost see the sweat flowing along their contours.  We shuddered at a reproduction of Ayne Bru's early 16th-century painting of Saint Cucuphas's martyrdom, marveling at the juxtaposition of all the blood surging from his scored throat and the dog sleeping peacefully at his feet.  We craned our necks to follow the arc of lodge-pole carvings from Vanuatu, monstrously strong figures holding one another on their wooden shoulders.

The world expands within forever, each aperture opening infinitely on halls and chambers ever inside, but all connected, an arcade-work of humanity.

Outside the Metropolitan Museum is the metropolitan museum.

On the Great Lawn in Central Park, sunbathers in bikinis and strollers wearing hijab, both on cell phones and eating ice cream.  Or waffles from the Belgian "dinges" truck.   Tourists from the American Midwest (accents as odd to our ears as those of the French or Chinese tourists in line with them) queuing for Italian sausage from one of the grills parked at the Fifth Avenue entrance, near the enterprising young men selling their own hip-hop CDs, and the violinist in the underpass.  Every kind of footwear and headgear (nice fedora!), every kind of ball game.  

A bestiary on the cornices of the Upper East buildings, here there be dragons indeed.   A veiny-winged griffin guards one particularly grand edifice.  We still miss Botero's rolly-polly "El Gato" sculpture at 79th & Park (where did he go, the cat we mean? where all cats go, to roam the secret by-ways of the moon!).  On 80th near Lex, every townhouse has a painted door, a quiet red, a demure blue, little understatements in our brash city.

On the Lower East Side, bachata and the laughter of children echo from a courtyard.  At the farmacia, notices in Chinese and Russian to get a flu shot before the season starts.  On the sidewalks families promenade in their sabbath best.

Reflected in a window are the lobster & the canary.  Not mere observers.  We hope somebody is blogging about us as we blog now-- two more members of the urban gallery.

Through the heliopause

Voyager 1 sails on, over 11 billion miles from Earth, the farthest out any human-made object has ever been...scientists are debating whether the probe has officially left the Solar System or not (the boundaries of which are uncertain)...but regardless, Voyager 1 is heading into interstellar space and will never stop, unless it collides with something...

The lobster and canary try to map personal time onto space-time...remembering the launch of Voyager 1 in September of 1977 (such fanfare, all the talk about the data on the golden disc), thinking now of all that we have done while the spacecraft made its pilgrimage through the system and onwards....where were we when the dart passed Jupiter, then Saturn?...all those moons and rings...and what were we doing when Voyager 1 turned its camera aft (thank you Carl Sagan) to take the now-iconic picture of the Pale Blue Dot?

Voyager 1 is 125 "Astronomical Units" away (one AU is the average distance from the Earth to the Sun; one light-year is 63,241 AUs), traveling 3 1/2 AUs each year, i.e., something like 55,000 kilometers per hour...one AU is 149,597,871 kilometers...I calculate I have run about 120,000 kilometers in my life..once I could run 10 kilometers in just over 31 minutes...now I can do so in around 41 minutes...say, a dwindling average of 15 kilometers per hour...

Voyager 1's power source is winding down, and will quit around 2025...the lobster and canary certainly anticipate outliving Voyager 1 in that regard...but Voyager 1 will carry on, its initial thrust and inertia keeping it on a steady course through friction-free space...in 40,000 years it will be somewhere in the relative neighborhood of a star, Gliese 445 in the Camelopardalis constellation...and apparently the brave little spacecraft might even outlive Earth itself, billions of years hence...

And maybe, just maybe, sometime between 40,000 years and a billion years hence, out there somewhere another lobster and another canary on some other planet will look up at a miniature star, an incoming not-quite-asteroid, and send a probe of their own, which will intercept valiant Voyager 1... whatever will they make of us?

Click here and here for more.  And here.

The street history of painting

Robert Motherwell  

David Reed

[Images found on the Web; artists and/or his legal representatives hold the copyright; used here solely for purposes of commentary, i.e., non-commercial]

Great quote by artist David Reed in this week's Village Voice:  "It amazes me that in New York there's a history that painters know, a street history of painting, that is totally different from the history that the museums know and the history that is written about in books."    (Click here for entire article; click here for more on Reed).

An insight well worth contemplating and exploring...Reed's own essays on painting (I especially like his memoiristic piece on Rubens in Las Vegas) remind us how relatively few visual artists write much about their work or that of others, the occasional manifesto aside (and who issues manifestos these days?)...reminds me of Motherwell's body of written work, another exception to the rule...

Reminds me also why the interviews in magazines such as BOMB and Turps Banana are so important: conducted by and with visual artists, these conversations form the internal archive containing the alternative "street history" of painting.

Braking for beauty (slow down and see)

Turner, Chichester Canal (c. 1828; in the Tate)

Jennifer L. Roberts (Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard ) recommends that we "decelerate," deploy "strategic patience," and thereby better understand the world around us through close, unwavering scrutiny.  (Click here and here for more). 

The lobster and the canary could not agree more with Professor Roberts.  We've written at length about "the artisanal turn," the need to restore craft, the tactile, the tacit to our work and play (click here) -- the deep patience required to visualize, to shape, to enjoy, to be satisfied.  Decelerated education, Slow Food, DIY, hand-made this and organic that...they are all of a piece with the braking for beauty.  

Above all, to highlight Roberts's insight, we need to engage with what we see, and to do that we need to look, focus, look.  Fall upward into the painting, let the frame expand and disappear, travel with the collier on the canal, listen to the warblers in the bankside reeds, savor the sunlight reflected from cloud and rill...

Lisa Occhipinti: The Book Re-Envisioned and Restored

Lisa Occhipinti

[As always, all images and the objects they depict are copyrighted to the artist and/or his/her legal representatives.  Images are displayed here purely for purposes of commentary, i.e., no commercial use.]

The book is dead, long live the book!   I love Lisa Occhipinti's work:  she is hacking (both literally and figuratively) volumes, re-imagining the form and contents, helping us re-see one of our most treasured achievements.  

Portraits (her term) of our books, in their formal moments but also as candids, with all the dignity, humor and pathos of people...which, in essence, they are.  

For more about Lisa Occhipinti and her work, click here  and  here .  And also here.

Still too hot

The heat and humidity intensified this week in NYC...it is just too hot (canary feathers singed and drooping) and humid (even lobsters need to breathe) to do more than seek shelter under a tree and take a nap...synapses running syrupy, thoughts meandering into a hazy mist or baked slowly under the opaque sky...

Never too hot for art

Raqib Shaw, Adam (2008)

For more of his work, click here.    And here.

The dog days of summer came early this year in New York City, so the Lobster & Canary seek to cool our sweltering heads with the beauty of art.   The sun and the humidity smothering our analytical faculties, we surrender to the sheer primal love of design, color, the luscious line, the idea so weird it knocks your elbow off the table.

Pawel Bownik, "Reconstructed Flowers" (2013)

For more of his work, click here.

Natvar Bhavsar

For more of Bhavsar's work, click here.  

[As always, copyright in all images displayed here is held by the artist and/or his legal representative(s); images used here solely for purposes of commentary, not for commercial gain.]

Slantwise across the sky

Sarah Charlesworth, one of the pioneers in Conceptual Art, died two weeks ago.

The Lobster and the Canary are fascinated by her slantwise approach to the world, the way she excised elements to create a new set of objects, a sculptor of images carving away the surface to get to the core.  She helped teach us to see the shadow-lines as the most important vectors, to see the negative space as the essence of the volume, to read a new story into and behind the narrative distracting us with its bombast.

Arguably her most famous work is Arc of Total Eclipse, February 26, 1979, partially reproduced here.  She photographed the front page of c. 20 separate newspapers in the Pacific Northwest as each recorded the eclipse, and then she eliminated all but the mastheads and the photographs, resulting in an eccentric document of the sun's passage across the region and into Canada.   The newspapers did not all use the same photographs, so the event becomes even more singular.   There is no standard, straight-on, transparent story here.   We all see the same things-- even the greatest of natural phenomena--in our own ways.

Click here and here for more.  As always, the artist and/or her representatives hold copyright in the images displayed here (I believe the Whitney in NYC holds the original work).   All images downloaded from public web sites, for non-commercial use and for purposes of commentary only.

A picture is worth how many of whose words? (A small homage to Robert Rauschenberg)

I return often to Rauschenberg's collages and combines, seeing in them the felt but not-yet-written stories that attend my night-thoughts, especially the tales murmured in a locked room, around the corner of a street I have never visited, behind the rustling billboards on weathered walls.

We hear of "painterly prose," but less frequently of whatever its counterpart might be:  "writerly painting," I guess.   I do not mean art that follows or presents a narrative.  I mean art that has no explicit narrative, art that may nonetheless illustrate a story or mood the artist decided to hide from the viewer...or stories the artist expected the viewer to bring to the viewing without any context or hints, no clues or aide-memoires supplied by the artist.

Rauschenberg-- who famously insisted on the right of the creator to define the meaning to be found in whatever he or she created-- is one of the Great Tricksters.  He sets out meaning in glyphs that each of his acolytes will take a lifetime to understand, strewing meaning under the bedclothes, behind the calendar's date-boxes, over the skrim of an umbrella.   Small bones, splinters, teasingly laid down, snares of paint and gypsum chips, wire and a bottle cap found on Bleecker Street...

How did he know the deep grammar of the stories I want to tell, the stories I feel wound around my bones and lurking in my lymphatic system?

[As always, all images used for purposes of commentary, not for any commercial purpose; images found on the Web.]

In medias res...

Johann Zoffany, Tribuna of the Uffizi (1772-1778)

As we prepare for an ever more cybernetic future, we stumble over boundaries we made for ourselves millennia ago, boundaries between the Real and Unreal, the Quick and the Dead, Art and Nature.  Reality slips our moorings, while we contest its location, its course, and its ballast.

Domenico Remps, Cabinet of Curiosities (1690s)

Like starlings chuckling on the eaves, the ancient arguments continue about the relationship of things to the words we use to describe them.   (As Francis Ponge says in Mute Objects of Expression, we are constantly forced "to accept the challenge that objects offer to language").   Rooks nesting in our chimneys, tossing bits and leaves down the chute, rustle our debates over the power of language to describe, entrap, encircle, capture a reality that forever eludes.

Open-world video game environments, ever-widening sandboxes of virtual reality...meticulous CGI, visual descriptions of that-which-may-or-may-not-be.  Our modern-day wizards creating-- as Barthes puts it of their forebears-- "the effect of the real."  I have seen The Matrix and it is real.  I have inhabited an Avatar on Cameron's Pandora, and I was real.

The old experiment debouches into the ocean of digital magic.  We wield once more the Shield of Achilles, so famously described in the Iliad.   Yet recall Auden's warning about that shield:  "But there on the shining metal/ His hands had put instead/ An artificial wilderness/ And a sky like lead."

P.S.  Inspired partly by these concluding remarks (page 217) in Joanna Stalnaker's The Unfinished Enlightenment: Description in the Age of the Encyclopedia (Cornell University Press, 2010): "...we are at a critical juncture, when literature is no longer being treated as an autonomous category of discourse, and when other fields are borrowing the tools of textual analysis for their own purposes.  From the rhetoric of science to historical epistemology, there is a new awareness that the science and literature of description are inseparable from one another."   

Camille Alexa: Interview

Camille Alexa is one of the most thoughtful and inventive writers I know.  (If you have not read Alexa, and you like the work of Aimee Bender, Karen Russell, Kij Johnson, Kelly Link...go order Alexa's Push of the Sky right now).   I love her self-description as someone who likes her humor dark and her horror funny.  I love the way she describes her Edwardian house as full of fossils, willow branches, broken shells and other very pretty dead things.  She is as smart, funny and warm in person as her fiction suggests she would be.  For more, click here.  

Lobster & Canary:  

You appear to be comfortable in many different styles and sub-genres; the works in your collection, Push of the Sky (Hadley Rille Books, 2009) range from cowboys-in-space to hunters-in-the-Stone-Age, and everything in between.  In your gleefully idiosyncratic approach, you remind me of "Golden Age" fantasists such as Bradbury, Pohl, Leiber, Laumer, Fletcher Pratt, perhaps with a touch of Vonnegut...are any of these influences on your writing?  And who else has inspired you?

Camille Alexa:

Growing up, I read everything -- and I mean everything -- I could get my hands on. My Norwegian grandmother came to live with us when I was 9 or 10, bringing her enormous SF&F paperback collection with her. I'd like to come off all highbrow and say I loved the Vonnegut and Leiber and Bradbury and Wyndham and Pohl best … but the truth is I consumed with equal delight John Norman's Gor series, Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover novels and McCaffrey's Dragonrider stuff and all the random vintage Harlequin romances sharing her shelves.

L & C:

No matter the material setting, even when you situate your plot and characters in deepest space or the farthest future, a fairy tale tone threads its way through the core of your stories.  Even your stylistic flourishes echo the fairy tale's refrains:  the villainous Boss of the droidtown is frequently referred to as "the oldest son of the youngest son of the richest man on Mars"; Earth's far-flung colonists return to the mother-planet, "long after water became more valuable than human blood," when, "long, long after that, there lived a girl"; one of your heroines, kicking the "Fridge-o-mat," to grab a can of "caffeine-rich Zamola" on the way to school, does so "on the day before the day before the end of the world."  Such lines beg to be read aloud!  Do you read fairy tales regularly, do you read them out loud?

CA:

Very perceptive! My father is a folklorist specializing in music and oral tradition, so I'm always thinking about language and the way words flow and repeat and echo. I love reading my work aloud for an audience, though sometimes I get too caught up and cry or laugh at a story in the middle. But yes, I revel in the sensuousness of the spoken word (too much sometimes?) and want an almost musical rhythm to come through even in print, even when it's ringing only inside a reader's skull. I think about urban myth and poetic edda and traditional folksongs, and how repeated phrases and epithets helped the narrative stay memorable and meaningful for both performer and audience. It's not often a conscious thing when I'm writing, but I'm very conscious of this stuff as a component of my storytelling. 

L & C: 

Many of your stories deal explicitly with technology's impact on human life and our ways of living, while comparing our craft with biology and the systems of the natural world.  I especially like this passage in "The Butterfly Assassins":  "What man had not at some point witnessed the mysteries of nature?  The wonders of man-made magicks and even his most complex mechanicals paled in comparison to the inscrutable workings of Earth and Sky and the beasts that dwelled between" (page. 20).  Tell us more, riff on this theme.

CA:

Okay, a riff, but on a personal note: As influenced as my writing is by my father's folkloric background, it's perhaps even more profoundly shaped by my mother's lifelong enthusiasm for natural history. When I was a kid my mom would bring home and repair human skulls from archaeological dig sites, or stop the car in the middle of an abandoned Texas highway to measure the length of a disgustingly enormous insect by the side of the road, or identify an animal by its scat left on a trail during a family camping trip, or noxious weeds by their Latin names. I'm so grateful to her for imbuing me with a sense of perpetual wonder over the natural world, flora and fauna, geology, climate. She was a keen and knowledgeable amateur scientist in the original sense of the term amateur: one who loves a pursuit or study or science outside the context of a profession (I've read that ancient Romans respected amateurs because dedication to a pursuit for love of the thing was more admirable than a mere moneymaking venture -- no clue whether this is true, not having been alive…). I remember an unnusual bird broke its neck flying into our living room window once, and she carefully wrapped the dead animal in cellophane and stuck it in our refrigerator for a while… uhm, maybe even quite a while… until she could get the specimen to the apppropriate expert for evaluation. My parents are just so cool! I can hardly stand it. 

L & C:

You are particularly good at what I would call "the tender meditation," i.e., internal monologues that your characters have about their relationship to others, to the world at large.  "Flying Solo" is a wonderful, moving example of this, yielding insights on what it means to be connected, and how fragile connections are in the midst of emptiness.   Your further thoughts on this theme?

CA:

That's the payoff for me: to be these characters, to live these characters and their situations the way they live them. I often don't even personally agree with my characters' insights or belief systems or goals… but they make sense to me. When I am them, they make sense. And as a writer, I can be a hundred different people in a hundred different stories. As a reader, I can be a thousand. I'm not sure if other writers experience things this way, but you know that feeling you get when you read a great book? That empathy for and anguish over and frustration with everything a character goes through? Writing is like reading, but to the tenth power. It's truly glorious, yo.

L & C:

If you could invite any other artists (of whatever medium, style, genre, period, etc.) to dinner, whom would you choose and why?

CA:

Hmm…Samuel Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain), because he must've been a riot (though possibly a frustrating dinner companion); Kij Johnson, because I just read her collection At the Mouth of the River of Bees and practically died from the beauty; and Jane Smiley, because her books blow me away on like a million different levels and I want to hear all about the research she must've done for The Greenlanders. (I guess I'm writer-centric.) Oh, and since this is my happy imaginary world, our dinner is vegetarian.

L & C:

What would you like to see more of and what less of in speculative fiction as the field currently is?

CA:

I like to think the field -- if you want to call speculative fiction a field of its own within the greater sphere of literature -- is as wide and deep as we're willing to make it, or as we're willing to let it be. What does bother me about the field is not at the written end of the equation but at the writer end; the spec fic scene just seems to have devolved into such an unhappy place. More joy, please! And I don't mean in the stories themselves; high body counts, bleak outlooks, and melancholy endings to tragic zombie love-affairs are all awesome. I mean in the writing and the sharing of the writing: less award-stumping, please.  Less desperation, less arcane insider criticism, less hierarchical scrutiny. More joy!  More joy!  More joy!

L & C:

What are you working on now?

CA:

Well, I recently saw the release of my first anthology as editor rather than writer, MASKED MOSAIC: Canadian Super Stories.  It's been thrilling! Co-editor Claude (Lalumiere) was incredible to work with, and we're both so happy with the stories, the authors, the process . . . it makes me giddy just thinking about it. Seriously, I get a smile on my face every time. Other than that, I spent a lot of time writing short fiction last year (it's all dribbling out here and there, places like Ellery Queen's and Alfred Hitchcock's mystery magazines, a boatload of small anthologies, the occasional obscure lit journal), so this year I'll be a grownup and focus on novels again. Watch this space!

Diego Salazar Gallery Group Show

Deborah A. Mills & Daniel A. Rabuzzi (a.k.a Imps Etc.),

"Changeling Blocks, numbers 4-6: Baba Yaga, Coraline & Friends"  (2013)

The  Diego Salazar Gallery (Long Island City, NYC  http://diegosalazargallery.com/ ) has a brilliant show running through June 15th, eclectic in style and media but unified in its dedication to exquisite execution and attention to beauty.   Lobster & Canary--in a departure from our norm--cannot claim to be an objective observer, since we have a collaborative piece in the show (the first three "changeling blocks," in our "not-quite-right toys" collection) and Deborah has two other pieces of her own also exhibited.  

All of the artists have studios in the building.  Painters, photographers, sculptors, collagists, glassworkers... styles ranging from the purely abstract to the most traditionally figurative...another common thread: a romanticist focus on reverie, a warm meditative spirit pervades the show...whether revealed in subtle arcs and swathes of muted color enclosing a darkness for introspection in the work of  Karen Mastriacovo, or in the gestural work of  Preston Trombly, with its delicate traceries over calm fields, in the surrealistic assemblages of  Caroline Golden (her work has a smile on its lips, even as it tries to keep a straight face!), or the esoterica and occult images of  Ragnar Lagerblad and of  Christian G. Brandner, in the super-saturated mysteries photographed by Steve McCurry or in the precise, intimate compositions of  Robert Badia, small checkered geometries overlaying forms of nostalgia.

Here is a small sampling from among many good things...noting also that the gallery space itself is a work of art (as always, the artists hold the copyright in their works; the images are shown here for purposes of commentary, not for commercial reasons):

Christian G. Brandner, "Painting # 00900" (2010)

http://christiangbrandner.blogspot.com/

Ann Leggett, "Manuel and Mortality" (1996)

http://www.annleggett.co/annleggett/Biography.html

Preston Trombly, "Imaginary Landscape with Red Ribbon" (2013)

http://www.prestontrombly.com/index.html 

Ligature

Joan Snyder, Carmina (1995; oil, acrylic, herbs, cloth on canvas)

Snyder, My Life (1996; oil, straw, velvet, silk, plastic grapes on linen)

Snyder, Antiquarum Lacrimae (2004; acrylic, dried flowers on linen)

All images copyrighted to the artist, Joan Snyder; used here exclusively for purposes of commentary; no commercial use intended.

Struggling always to close the gap between the Me and the World...navigating towards an ever-receding membrane, an endless arc placidly retreating before and behind me...while I try to impress upon the tangent some small token of my Me, of my being, or at least my sentiments...

...pinning a relic or a flower just picked, it matters only that a sliver, a strand, the tiniest wisp is affixed, connected...

...which would mean (if only the world would hold still for just that one quiet moment) that some of me would become and remain part of the world...for every one else, forever...