Wendy Ellertson at the Javits in NYC

[All images and artwork here are copyrighted to Wendy Ellertson.]

Yesterday, we enjoyed catching up in person with one of our favorite artists, Wendy Ellertson, who is showing this weekend in NYC (Javits Center) at The American Craft Show.

Wendy has brought many new creations to the show.  If you are in NYC today, Lobster & Canary recommends you head to the Javits and find Wendy's booth (# 233, on a corner!).

Each of her pieces comes with a story waiting for its new owner to continue.  Her creatures are shamanic, connecting us with cloud and stars above, and root and rock below.  When I look at  Wendy's people, I am reminded of the Prydain novels, of Earthsea, of Patricia McKillip's tales, of Moominvalley, of Brian Froud paintings and the puppets in Jim Henson's The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth.

Best of all are the textures: the rawhide and worked leather, the feathers and fur, the bits of glass and glimmer.  Wendy's beings live and breathe, they have been caught in mid-stride, on the tip of launching into flight.  They are the visions of a seer, made real.

For more on Wendy, click here for her website and here for her blog.  

The Indigo Pheasant blog tour continues

My blog tour to help launch The Indigo Pheasant continues.   You can read my guest posts here:

September 11:  Small Beer Press/ Not a Journal:  "A Raffle of Laughter on Solemn Occasions."  Click here.    

September 14:  Civilian Reader:  "The Fantastical 18th and 19th Centuries, or, Dragons Dancing at Almack's."  Click here

September 17:  Fantasy Book Critic:  "Go Ahead: Judge These Books By Their Covers."  Click here.

September 18:  Bibliophile Stalker:  "Seeking the Distant Hills Within."  Click here.

September 23:  Layers of Thought:  "A Picture-Show in the Night-Kitchen."  Click here.

[September 24:  That Artsy Reader Girl:  "A History of Wonder: Illustrating Yount."  Click here.   Written and illustrated by my wife and artistic collaborator, Deborah A. Mills].

September 27:  Dark Wolf's Fantasy Reviews:  "Illustrating Yount."  Click here.

September 28:  So Many Precious Books, So Little Time:  [A Give-Away Raffle for The Indigo Pheasant]   Click here.

October 3:  The World in the Satin Bag:  "The Palest of Copies: History, Culture, Empire and Fiction."  Click here.

October 3:  Bull Spec Blog:  "The Hardest Part."  Click here.

October 4:  Charlotte's Library:  "On Writing Historical Fantasy."  Click here

October 5:  The Cozy Reader:  "On Titles."  Click here..

Deborah & I have several more guest-posts to go.  Stay tuned.

The Indigo Pheasant

At Lobster & Canary, I almost never talk about my own work but I ask your indulgence at this tiding:  yesterday ChiZine Publications (CZP) published in paperback and in all major digital formats my second novel The Indigo Pheasant, the sequel to 2009's The Choir Boats.   (CZP brought out a limited-edition hard cover in July).  Both novels are available world-wide and through all major sales channels.  My wife, the artist Deborah Mills, did the woodcarving that forms the basis for the cover design, and she did all the interior illustrations.

You can take a look at free preview chapters of both novels at the CZP site:

The Choir Boats (vol. 1) - preview chapters

The Indigo Pheasant (vol. 2) - preview chapters.

I will be on hiatus for the next month here at Lobster & Canary...but you can actually read me more frequently than ever in September and October, as I will be guest-posting at the following blogs (publication dates, except for the two already posted, are approximate; I will provide links when posts are up):

September 11:  Small Beer Press/ Not a Journal.   Post:  "A Raffle of Laughter on Solemn Occasions"-- click here.

September 14:  Civilian Reader.  Post:  "The Fantastical 18th and 19th Centuries, or, Dragons Dancing at Almack's"-- click here.

September 17:  Fantasy Book Critic

September 18:  Bibliophile Stalker

September 23:  Layers of Thought

September 24:  That Artsy Reader Girl

September 27:  Dark Wolf's Fantasy Reviews

September 28:  So Many Precious Books, So Little Time

September 30:  Disquieting Visions

October 3:  The World in the Satin Bag

October 4:  Charlotte's Library

October 5:  The Cozy Reader

October 9:  Grasping for the Wind

October 11:  Jess Resides Here 

Un-Still Life: An Interview with Artist Paula Pertile

Helium Figs, by Paula Pertile (all illustrations used with the artist's permission)

The lobster and the canary are delighted to have artist Paula Pertile as our guest today.  Paula creates some serious whimsy with her colored pencils, the kinds of images that simultaneously amuse and unsettle, that keep you coming back for more.  Trained in architecture at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and in illustration at the Academy of Art in San Francisco, Paula has done a wide variety of commissions for publishers (she is a leading illustrator of children's books), media companies, major retailers, and greeting card companies.  You can read more about her background and her projects at www.paulapertile.com  

  

Plums Up

Recently Paula began a series she calls "Un-Still Lifes."  Fascinated, the lobster and the canary asked some questions about this captivating exploration of weightlessness and fancy.

L & C:  What was the initial inspiration for this series? 

Paula:  "I had some lovely figs I wanted to draw. I fiddled with them, trying to set up an interesting still life. I had taken several photos, but wasn't really inspired by any of them. Then, in a moment of sheer frustration, I just flipped one upside down and thought 'well, why not?'.  The rest of the composition fell into place after that.  I really didn't have a well thought out idea about making a series, or what to call them, or anything like that. It was just an impulse to do something different. 

I guess the first piece in the series is actually Pulling Up Roots, which I did a while ago. At the time, I just wanted to do something with floating food, but the actual idea of an 'un-still life' hadn't come to me yet.

Calling these 'un-still' came to me after the Helium Figs piece was finished, and that's also when I realized I had unwittingly started a new series."

Pulling Up Roots

L & C:  Why depart from your other style(s) of work? 

P: "Its refreshing to have a new idea that really feels like 'me'. I've done so many nice still lifes of food and other objects that are no different that what a lot of other artists do, and frankly, a little boring. These 'un-still lifes' come from a place in me that gets me excited. I am looking forward to incorporating some architectural elements into them, working larger (and smaller), and just 'going there', if you will."

Taffy Rain

L & C:  What is your technique?

P.: "These pieces have all been done with colored pencils on paper. Colored pencils are my favorite medium, so I plan to do more like this. I mix wax and oil based pencils, and work 'dry', without any solvents.  I would like to explore using graphite, and maybe watercolors at some point, which are both media that I use for other illustration work."

L & C: Is the audience different for the Un-Still Life pieces?  

P.: "These pieces are a continuation of my realistic colored pencil work, but with a twist. They are new, so the audience remains to be seen. I'm guessing it will be people who appreciate classical realistic art, but who also like something just a bit different. As an illustrator, I draw and paint all sorts of subjects (children's picture books, architecture, decorative art, etc.). I expect that the audience for those pictures is quite different than the people who will be attracted to these!"

L & C:  Is there anything else you'd like to share?

P.: "Well, there's a funny story about the Plums Up piece. I conceived that as all the plums rising upward. And all the while I was drawing it, in my mind, that's how I saw it. It never occurred to me that the plums could be falling down, because I was so fixed on them floating up!  When it was finished, I posted it online and asked for help with a title. People came up with things like Plummeting and other clever titles that referred to the plums falling down. Other people said they knew they were supposed to be floating upward, and one finally suggested Plums Up. So I thought it was interesting that the piece could be viewed in different ways!

Summer Pops

P: "Thank you so much for having me as a guest on your blog. It's very encouraging to have people respond positively to these new pieces, and I appreciate the support so much."

L & C:  Our pleasure!  And now you have made us hungry!

The Craft, The Workshop

In recognition of (American) Labor Day, which is celebrated this weekend, Lobster & Canary honors the work, the discipline, the craft that goes into the production of art.

One example: above are pictures from www.jasonwustudio.com, revealing a little bit of the care and artisanal detailing that Jason Wu and his team put into the making of his collections.

The form springs from the mind, the making (with needle or keyboard, paintbrush or mouse, chisel or mallet, pencil or horn, violin or dance-shoe) from the hands and the body, our feet.  From the sweat the sweet.

Beyond the Loggia, Outside the Garden

Antonello de Messina, Saint Jerome in his Study (1460-'75)

In our genres of speculative fiction--fantasy, science fiction, slipstream, the weird and fabulistic in all their many strokes of invention--we have devised advanced strategies for "world building."  Not to replace or displace the World, but to understand it better, to improve it in some small way by bringing back what we saw and what we learned Beyond the Fields We Know.

I wonder when the urge to travel outside the World first hits those of us who write speculative fiction (or "Fantastika," to use John Clute's term).  For me, the desire has simply always been with me, but I can  pinpoint the first times I thought about the desire, when I recognized its power and began to name it.  I was a boy, less than ten, poring over books full of pictures by European Renaissance painters, captivated by the gorgeousness of oil paint, the lushness of draping fabric and sheen of angel wings, rays of the sun, gilt scrollings, birds brilliantly plumaged, the glory and strangeness of the stories depicted.  But most of all I found myself curious about what might lie beyond the scenes portrayed, by glimpses the painters provided (in a seemingly off-hand or indifferent way) of a world outside the garden (but don't be fooled, the artists poured their souls into the vedute), views that coolly teased and drew me on.

Like Saint Jerome, I sat in my enclosed study, within the order of the World, surrounded by known things and the symbols of known things.  Yet enclosure is no necessary prison; follow Saint Jerome's gaze to the book, as it skips then towards the southwest corner of the picture, and focus on the window set into the wall, beyond which is a landscape.  Oh, there it is...the landscape into which I want to go, forsaking the Book of the World for the Alphabet of the Unknown. 

Antonello de Messina, detail from the painting above

It takes a while to find the way through the window, as the Renaissance painters knew.  First you zoom in too far back, then in too close, losing perspective, seeking to center the road while it evades your feet.

Carlo Crivelli, Annunciation with Saint Emidius (1486)

When you begin to triangulate, to place the way right in front of you, to enlarge the little side window into an open archway, you can find yourself drifting backwards.  After all, it is hard to leave the World, with its endless delights and wonders and stories stranger than water.

 Pinturicchio, The Annunciation (1501)

When at last you center the view and open the window, you begin to approach the outside, you begin to see others out there.  Are they... 

Rogier van der Weyden, St. Luke Draws The Madonna (c. 1440)

...pilgrims like you, or at least dilettantes on an afternoon's picnic excursion...or are they denizens of the Other World, come in close to ours, like dolphins in the surf?  Who built those houses, that bridge, the ship at anchor in the river?

Jan van Eyck, The Madonna of Chancellor Rolin (c. 1435)

Sooner or later you realize that the view itself has changed (perhaps the parti-colored wings of Gabriel have amazed you), something in the air is more lucid yet also more aslant-- look carefully at the scenes under each arch window in de Credi's Annunciation below (each is a slice of a different world, the angles and atmospheres not aligned, the perspectives askew).

Lorenzo de Credi, The Annunciation (c. 1480)

You summon the nerve to come closer, yet still you hover and hesitate on the border, a pear held upside down...

Bernaert van Orley, Madonna with Child (c. 1520)

...a final draft before setting out...(from the Lady who must be floating just outside our window, looking in at us, in our chambers far above the ground)...

Quentin Metsys, Marie-Madeleine (c. 1517)

...and then you are on your way...

Hans Memling, Saint John Altarpiece' detail (1474-'79)

...equipping yourself for the journey... 

Pietro Perugino, The Delivery of the Keys (1481-'82)

...a journey that takes you far away...

Benozzo Gozzoli, Procession of the Magi (1459-'61)

...far away, but not alone, and with knowledge of the path back.

Paul Bril, Imaginary Mountain Landscape (1598)

[As always, no copyright infringement is intended; all images have been located on the Web and are believed to be in the public domain; this is a non-commercial use].

For Star-Crossed Lovers Everywhere: The Thorn and the Blossom, by Theodora Goss

The Thorn and The Blossom by Theodora Goss (2012 by Quirk Books, with illustrations by Scott McKowen) is a delightful love story, a tale of missed chances and mutual misunderstandings, woven around a thousand-year-old curse by a jealous witch.  Brendan and Evelyn meet cute in a bookshop in Cornwall, but their first kiss ends with Evelyn fleeing from a vision she has of Brendan transforming into the Green Man.      A decade passes before they meet again, fate (?) throwing them together in the English Department of a small college in Virginia.  Their love reignites ("For the first time that she remembered, the world felt right, as it should be.") but then Evelyn learns of Brendan's secret...

Goss--a professor of literature at Boston University--re-imagines in an original way the tale of Sir Gawaine and the  Green Knight, evoking more generally Arthurian legend as glossed by Tennyson and John William Waterhouse (she refers explicitly to Waterhouse's famous 1888 painting The Lady of Shalott).  Goss conjures not only a modern-day love story but the spirit of 19th-century fascination with an idealized medieval world, the world envisioned by Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris.  Deeper still, Goss updates the dangers of passions that seem to cross decades and centuries, the chill hazards of romance on the thresholds of death--summoning here a sensibility found in the work of Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Charlotte Mew.  Best of all, Goss leaves some things unexplained, and ends on a note of musing rather than finality.

Goss is already one of the fantasy genre's leading voices, both as a storyteller (she won the World Fantasy Award in 2008; her collection In the Forest of Forgetting from Prime Books in 2006 is a casket of gems) and a scholar (her 2008 study for Aqueduct Press, Voices from Fairyland, should be a standard on syllabi for Victorian poetry).  What she has done now is refresh the genre, expanding its interests into territory explored by A.S. Byatt in Possession and--still further afield--by Nicholas Sparks, Jodi Picoult, Anne Tyler.  Alice Hoffman has shown that there is a large audience for such explorations, as have movies featuring love stories with a paranormal or Borgesian twist such as 1998's Sliding Doors with Gwyneth Paltrow and John Hannah and the 2006 Sandra Bullock/Keanu Reeves vehicle The Lake House.  I hope Goss will continue mapping out her own lanes and fields in this province--and why not a film version in the bargain?.

No review of The Thorn and the Blossom can be complete without mention of its charmingly ingenious construction: the story is told separately from the point of view of each main character; the book is bound accordion-style, so that the reader can start with either "Brendan's Story" or "Evelyn's Story," then flip the volume upside down and backwards to conclude with whichever version of the tale is as yet unread.  Quirk Books has done a masterful job of physical production, from the slipcover to the McKowen illustrations, from the golden ivy and floral scrolling that runs the borders of each page to the embellished lettering on the covers--all worthy of Morris's Kelmscott Press.  The book even smells delicious, which unites the reader near perfectly with the heroine Evelyn:  "Yes, there it was. The intoxicating smell of old books.  It was one of the reasons she'd wanted to study literature rather than attend law school."

FTC-required book reviewer note:  I purchased my copy of The Thorn and the Blossom (for that matter, I bought my own copies of In the Forest of Forgetting and Voices from Fairyland as well); the review above is unsolicited.  

Sam Smith: Tigers, Harpies, Centaurs And A Packet of Crisps

Sam Smith (1908-1983) created characters of startling personality, based on enduring types (e.g., the Harpy, the Bareback Rider, the Steamboat Captain), showed us small worlds that opened endlessly inwards.

I love most the mood of his settings, which are snapshots of the phantasmagorical made into the reality of everyday: but of course one sees centaurs being ferried across the river on a Tuesday! and parti-colored tigers on parade down main street!

Like all true artists, Smith generates in his audience the urge to create as well--in my case, to create stories based on the whimsical people he sculpted and the eccentric toys he made.  I have for years built narratives around his mock-solemn, gently skewed, brightly lacquered creatures.  His sculptures are vignettes captured mid-stride...but where are they going, and why?

Deborah & I had the great good fortune to see Smith's work at his last major exhibition, at the Serpentine Gallery in London in the winter of 1980-'81.  His vision has never left us since.  

For more on Smith, click here.

"Anything, seen without prejudice, is enormous": Mervyn Peake, caricature, and the baroque roots of modern fantasy literature

Mervyn Peake wrote:  "For drawing should be an attempt to hold back from the brink of oblivion some fleeting line or rhythm, some mood, some shape or structure suddenly perceived, imaginary or visual.  Something about a head that calls out to be recorded: something about the folds of a long cloth: the crawling wave; the child; the tear; the brood of shadows.  That movement of the arm that hinted fear: that gesture that spelt amazement: the dream; the alleyway; clown; broker; stone or lizard.  The quicksands closing on a centaur's head tokens no more of magic than the penny loaf. ... Anything, seen without prejudice, is enormous" (from his 1946 booklet, The Craft of the Lead Pencil; above are his sketches of Steerpike and the Countess Gertrude, below of Flay with little Titus, Fuchsia, and Flay alone, illustrations to Peake's novels of Gormenghast ).

While Tolkien from his seat at Oxford was at the same mid-century moment creating (or updating) a Mythos For England, based on "that Northern thing," Peake-- ensconced on Sark in the Channel Islands just off the French coast--was plumbing the Universal in the melancholy comedies and grotesqueries of Gormenghast.  Peake is that decidedly un-English thing: a practitioner of the baroque, a Mannerist, an open sluice for rococo passion.  Where Middle-Earth is thick and delineated by maps (both for the characters and for the reader), Gormenghast is endless and unknown to those who reside there and to the reader...and outside Gormenghast the territory becomes utterly unmarked, inchoate, as Titus learns in his exile.  Middle-Earth is earnest, realistic, precise, multitudinous, full of exteriors described...Gormenghast is exaggerated, surrealistic, romantic, suggestive, full of interiors portrayed.

English-language fantasy fiction has since, as is well-known, overwhelmingly followed the Tolkienian mode, harking back to Beowulf, to the sagas, the eddas, the lists of dwarves fleeing through Mirkwood.  Modern fantasy does not favor its other parents, including the ones celebrated by Peake.  He is a caricaturist in the finest, fullest sense of that word, distorting the external to reveal an essential truth (it is arguably harder to produce a good caricature than it is to render a good realistic portrait).  Caricature does not sit well in our modern field of fantasy; to extend the analogy, the market right now demands grand historical and quasi-religious paintings.  Few modern fantasists can be considered caricaturists (my short list includes Jeff VanderMeer, Sylvia Townsend Warner, D.M. Cornish, Angela Carter, Theodora Goss, Jesse Bullington, and perhaps needless to say, Italo Calvino), and fewer of those have enjoyed the kind of commercial success accruing to writers of  the grand epic.

I am no Peake scholar but I have to believe that Peake, a professional artist, had immersed himself in the great Italian and Spanish traditions of caricature, beginning with his studies at the Croydon School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools, and then as a teacher at the Westminster School of Art and at the Central School of Art in Bloomsbury.  I have neither time nor space today at Lobster & Canary to do more than toss forth below some examples of the sorts of latinate visions I imagine Peake knew well.  I encourage us as we review our genre's recent history to acknowledge not only the Northern elves but also the hippogriffs and pantagruels of the South, not only the stern reality of dragons and rings but the traditions that give us the labyrinth of the lady Gertrude's mind, the depths of Flay's devotion, the anguish of the seventy-seventh Earl of  Groan.

       [Ubaldo Gandolfi, a study of heads, c. 1760-?]

[Goya, They Are Hot, 1799]

[Parmigianino, Figures in a Ferry Boat, c. 1535]

[Parmigianino, The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine, c. 1527]

[Canaletto, Study of a Man, c. 1750-?]

[Pier Leone Ghezzi, Study of a Lawyer? c. 1725?]

Heidi Julavits On Genre Fiction; Joan Acocella and Maria Tatar On Fairy Tales

Heidi Julavits, the novelist and co-founding editor of The Believer, reviewing in this week's New York Times Book Review Glen Duncan's Talulla Rising marvelously describes the relationship between that which is "literary" and that which is "genre" in current fiction:


"If literature is lacinato kale, genre is gelato. Despite regular critical attempts to reconstruct this outdated food pyramid, the base holds strong. Fortunately, thanks to a surge in literary molecular gastronomy, readers can enjoy an ever wider array of broccoli rabe (or brussels sprout, or Swiss chard) ice cream. When cooked by mad word scientists like Glen Duncan — whose new horror novel, “Talulla Rising,” is a sequel to “The Last Werewolf” — this harmonic hybrid delivers sweet (plot), salty (character), sour (emotional pathos), bitter (psychological probity) and umami (stylistic and linguistic panache)."


She goes on to say that  the plot can best be described as a gleeful mash-up of Raymond Chandler's entire work, the vampire novels of Anne Rice and Foucault's Pendulum, with Proust looking on.   For the full review, click here.


Meanwhile, in last week's New Yorker, Joan Acocella superbly overviews the evergreen impact of fairy tales on modern fiction ("Once Upon A Time; The Lure of the Fairy Tale," July 23rd issue-- click here for the entire essay).   One example from among her many smart assertions:


"In truth, most of the Grimms’ tales cannot be made wholly respectable. The rewritings that seem most persuasive are sometimes more unsettling than the Grimm versions—for example, Angela Carter’s “The Company of Wolves,” inspired by “Little Red Riding Hood.” This story stresses the eroticism of the girl’s encounter with the wolf."

Acocella also deftly traces the recent history of fairy tale studies in the English-speaking world, noting that Maria Tatar has emerged as the preeminent scholar in the field.   The New Yorker already has Tatar in the fold as well-- see, for instance, her March 16th, 2012 New Yorker blog post "Cinderfellas: The Long-Lost Fairy Tales" about the discovery of five hundred (!) previously unknown (!!) fairy tales in an archive in Regensburg, Germany.  Click here for that.

Hy-Breasail in Manhattan

In May, the New York Times published an article entitled "On the Vaunted City Subway Map, Mistakes and Phantom Blocks" which revealed that the iconic NYC subway map contains wayward streets and hidden realms:


"On the West Side of Manhattan, beginning near Lincoln Center and extending toward the campus of Columbia University, Broadway is seemingly misplaced. It is west of Amsterdam Avenue at West 66th Street when it should be east. It drifts toward West End Avenue near 72nd Street, where it should intersect with Amsterdam. It overtakes West End Avenue north of the avenue’s actual endpoint near West 107th Street, creating several blocks of fictitious Upper West Side real estate.   [...]

On the current map, West End Avenue has inexplicably been extended to around West 116th Street, forging roughly nine blocks of phantom terrain.

Pedestrians on Broadway in this area can stumble upon an Ivy League university or gaze through the windows of Tom’s Restaurant, of “Seinfeld” fame. They can find a copy of “Pride and Prejudice” for $2 at a stand on West 112th Street, and, four blocks south, a taco for 50 cents more. They can even sip mojitos at Havana Central at the West End, near West 114th Street.

But they will never find West End Avenue between Broadway and Riverside Drive."

(For the full article, click here).

I am delighted but not surprised.  Abandoned stations lurk throughout the subway system, realities no longer shown on the map ("The Map"); you can catch shadowed glimpses of them as your train speeds by: Worth Street on the IRT downtown, 18th Street on the east side, 91st Street on the west side, and many others.  On the other hand, the Second Avenue Subway has lived fitfully and half-wrought, a cartographic ghost of endless promises, for going on a century, and now we ponder maps that portray planned stretches of the 7 Line and of the Long Island Railroad.  

Entire new precincts have sprung from the mud and shells of our rivers:  Battery Park City, the East River Park.  Our real estate brokers conjure forth neighborhoods that exist only on paper until pioneers make them real: where exactly is "NoLiTa" or "FiDi" or "Manhattan Valley"?  Equally vague and peripatetic are the boundaries of Chelsea and of Gramercy Park, of Turtle Bay and the Meatpacking District (not to speak of Williamsburg's ongoing annexation of Bushwick in Brooklyn).   On the other hand, very discrete entities such as Grove Court in the West Village, Henderson Place on the Upper East Side and Sniffen Court in Murray Hill exist like Rivendell, i.e., tucked away in plain sight, refuges from the wider world, and not always marked on maps.

The best writers of what is currently called "Urban Fantasy" are exquisitely attuned to such vagaries, to the bizarre, hidden and surreal elements of city life, to the fecundity of the city itself, the city as a seemingly independent actor outside of full human control.   China Mieville specializes in dissecting the hoarsely breathing, patchwork body of the modern metropolis,  most masterfully in The City and The City.  His short story (autobiographical essay?) "Reports of Certain Events in London" details the clandestine movements of feral streets, stealthy intruders that disrupt the maps and go their own way, sometimes playing tourist in other cities altogether.

Catherynne Valente, in her city of Palimpsest (and surely all major cities are palimpsests), describes a train with an impish mind of its own:  "It became apparent to enthusiasts of locomotive travel that there was at least one unscheduled train on the tracks of Palimpsest.  It did not stop at any of the stations, for one thing.  [...] ...the 3:17 northbound Decretal had had a somewhat unhappy affair with the 12:22 eastbound Foolscap.  The mysterious train was their child, and like any child whose parents no longer love each other, it runs wild and does what it likes and there is little at all to be done about it."  And here every NYC commuter nods, thinking of the J train that seems to fall asleep somewhere in Brooklyn because its only constancy is its caprice, and recalling also the quirky G,  while not forgetting the dainty 1-2-3's who apparently dislike water so intensely that the smallest rainfall causes them distress and delay, and the way in which buses travel their routes in packs, creating long caesuras for the anxious or resigned rider-in-waiting.

Theodore Sturgeon in the oft-reprinted "Shottle Bop" captures another reality well known to all big-city dwellers: the cool, curious little shop that you stumble on and then can never find again.  "I'd never seen the place before, and I lived just down the block and around the corner.  ...between Twentieth and Twenty-First Streets on Tenth Avenue in New York City.  You can find it if you go there looking for it. "  Or-- as the narrator discovers--maybe you won't find it.  It happens all the time, this losing your landmark stores, the boutiques and bodegas that orient and anchor you as you navigate the city.  

Delia Sherman knows all about the magic of the city, having mapped out a "New York Between" in her Changeling novels.   Terri Windling and Ellen Kushner know this too, having pioneered and then continued to refine the genre with the shared world of "Bordertown".   Neil Gaiman's "London Below" in Neverwhere,  Ekaterina Sedia's alternate city in The Secret History of Moscow, Marie Brennan's Onyx Court in her Elizabethan historical fantasies, Jeff VanderMeer's City of Saints and Madmen (in which he takes the game to the next brink, which is creating alternate spaces within cities that are themselves fictional),  M. John Harrison's Pastel City with its uncertain addresses and deliberate vagueness... the list is long and worthy, with grafts from Gormenghast (a castle that is a city that is a world, animated by its own desires beyond the petty ambitions of its inhabitants), from the tales of flaneurs in Paris and coffee-drinkers in Vienna, from the calqued realities of Dickens and Mann and Balzac, of Whitman and Kokoschka.

Aren't we all looking for Platform 9-&-3/4 at King's Cross?  For Number 221B on Baker Street?  For Avenue Q, and Coronation Street, and Albert Square, and Sun Hill?

Pardon me, in fact, as I stroll out now into Manhattan's Lower East Side, to stand wondering at the corner of Ridge Street and Grand Street...at least, to stand by an official street sign proclaiming the existence of such an intersection in the broadest of daylight, while the ocular evidence yields no such place, only the one street (Grand), with an apartment building of Babylonian proportion and across the way a nondescript but bustling Roman Catholic Church where this alleged piece of Ridge should lie.

I should write Mr. Mieville to inquire if any sightings of a block or two of a "Ridge Street" have been reported in his London neighborhood.

A Mannerism Of The Mind: John Hale About El Greco; A Pinch of Blake

Adoration of the Shepherds (El Greco, 1614, originally in Toledo, now at the Prado).

Of this painting, the eminent historian John Hale-- a worthy successor to Burckhardt and Huizinga-- wrote: "It is a dazzling technical virtuosity. But this is a Mannerism of the mind, not of ingenious rule-breaking or a search for novelty, a style without a dominating source and which could have no progeny" (page 326 of The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance, one of my touchstones for understanding that place at that time; published in 1993, the book won awards from the Royal Society of Literature and Time-Life).

For grand pronouncements such as this, I love Hale's work. I love the firm assurance that brooks no retort, the god's-eye view, the sense of doors properly opened and closed, indeed of door-frames finely measured, angled and planed...and yet, and yet...the very finality of the assertion starts to bend and elongate (like an El Greco figure!) under closer inspection, does it not?

What--I ask myself--is a "Mannerism of the mind," as opposed to, say, a Mannerism of the heart or a Mannerism of the body? Or, alternatively, whose mind: that of the painter, that of the viewer (the intended original audience at the monastery in Toledo, or today's in the museum in Madrid), that of the critic (the critic at the time, the critic re-discovering El Greco in the 19th century, the critic writing today)?

What, I murmur: no ingenious rule-breaking, no search for novelty? But what had driven El Greco from Venetian Crete to Rome, and thence to Toledo if not his deep desire to break free of first Byzantine and then Italianate artistic rules? Others, some known to El Greco, shared his iconoclastic desires: Pontormo (I think), surely Parmigianino and Tintoretto. And the doom-laden, definitive claim that there not only were no progeny, but that there could not be any--?...even allowing the simple declarative, one ought to note that the offspring of aesthetic invention sometimes skip (many) generations: El Greco's role as progenitor was acknowledged by (among others)Cezanne and Picasso, presumably also by Dali and the other Surrealists.

My point though is not to flyspeck the powerful and enduring work of an expert such as Hale, but to force myself as a reader to slow down and scrutinize the struts and props beneath the carapace of authority, to question my own understanding, to query even the most persuasive of statements-- especially when I need only bend my vision to the image or text being critiqued. To quote Blake (another mannerist ill-understood in his own time): "As the eye is formed, such are its powers."

A Happy 4th of July (Short Video by Matthew Mehlan)

A short video shot in Brooklyn last year by Matthew Mehlan that celebrates the spirit of the U.S.A.

Cross-hatchings from our commonplace book: Sharon Olds; Little Dragon

We traverse the streets and lanes of our commonplace books, strolling like Benjamin through the arcades, wandering like Woolf through notes and quotes made by our younger selves, intrigued and sometimes amazed at who and what we meet juxtaposed at the odd corner and skewed intersections.

For instance, we read and re-read the opening lines of the first poem, "Unknown," in The Unswept Room, by Sharon Olds (2002): "On the last morning of the summer, a little/ family comes over the dune, across/ the pond, and lays out their cloth, and their nutmeat/ basket, the sweets and freshes cached in its/ worried-forehead lattice-shell."

Olds-- who in this collection once again powerfully demonstrates why she is one of our leading poets of the intimate and the elegiac-- follows the opening lines with an entire story of loss and yearning. I urge you to read all of "Unknown."

In the meantime, I see the "little family" coming over the dune, repeatedly in the theater of my mind, and I wonder about their history. I create stories of my own, little filigrees that spiral off the original text, drifting like down, down the by-ways and into the suburbs of the locus communis. I imagine the family's conversation over their nutmeats and sweets. The child-- a little girl-- traces the lattice-shell; she will always remember the feel of it, the whorl of its glaze over the anxious ripple, combined with the bark of a dog playing in the waves and the distant "halloo'ing" of the dog's master. The mother looks out over the surf, her hand shielding her eyes from the glare of the sun. The father spears a stranded jellyfish with a salad fork. Behind them on the crest of the dune, playing a flute very softly (just audible under the call of gulls and the suss'ing of the waves), is the figure of death, his long scythe laid lovingly on the hot sand.

And so on and on...many small fictions spinning out from the main story...and eventually, in the pages of our commonplace, catching upon the prongs of another reference, in this case the first song, "Twice," of the eponymous first album (2007) by Little Dragon, the band from Gothenburg, Sweden (one of our favorite cities, but that is just happenstance) led by Yukimi Nagano, a song they made the soundtrack of a shadow puppet play called "Dreams from the Woods," directed by Johannes Nyholm.

 

For more on Olds, click here. For more on Little Dragon, click here.

We Have Met The Artist and She/He is Us

Ellen Dissanayake has been saying very wise things for decades about why we humans make art. As I stir my coffee this morning and contemplate Deep History and the Big Picture, I am happy to read her words: "Paleo-archaeologists and ethnographers tell us that from as early as a hundred thousand years ago (some say much earlier) until very recently, in many parts of the world, members of our species have spent enormous resources of time, metabolic energy, and costly materials (such as feathers and ivory from rare and powerful creatures or shells and minerals from far distances) to mount complex ceremonies in which the elaboration of bodies, surroundings, and paraphernalia is joined with vigorous and intricate dancing, dramatic performances, and complex songs, chants, and drumming. In other words, although they lacked money, they nevertheless invested their human capital in the arts. [...] To an evolutionist, devoting time, effort, and resources to apparently non-utilitarian pursuits should have made people less rather than more likely to survive. Yet the fact that they occur so extravagantly, universally, requires an opposite conclusion: the arts must have enabled their practitioners to better survive than humans who did not go to such extensive and expensive extremes. Their “value” had to be not only cultural but biological." Excerpted from an essay, "What Is The (Adaptive) Value of Art?," published August 16, 2011 on the NEA website. You can click here for the full text plus much more about Dissanayake and her work.

At the bar beyond the edge of the world

Fantastical motifs flourish everywhere in our contemporary field of vision: a steady return to the images we conjured around the first campfires, celebrating the most intimate and original of our minds' companions-- odd, whimsical, frightening, amusing (sometimes all at once)-- a constant counter-point to the Enlightenment's banishing of the hobs and the fairies-- a dancing, shimmering retort to the streamlined functionality and no-nonsense sleekness of industrial design and the various sects of modernism.


 

To take just one example from modern, urban life: Visiting the craft beer aisle or a wine merchant is now like a tour of Ali Baba's cave, with labels as lovingly created as the liquid within the bottles, labels awash with phantasmagoria, eccentric figures, legendary creatures, and the just plain bizarre.

 

Surely there is a line from the great book illustrators (Rackham, Dulac, Beardsley) and poster-artists (Mucha) of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, through the original funny papers and then comic books and the pulp covers, meandering around fantasy and science fiction book covers, traipsing through the font foundries and the hills of Dadaism and especially Surrealism, to the concept art and posters for a thousand strange and speculative movies (Terry Gilliam!), and music album covers of the '60s and '70s (think of Hipgnosis, of Roger Dean).

Thumbnail sketches of empires east of the moon and west of the sun, cameos of curious creatures, a slantwise glance at the Old Man of the Mountains and the Old Woman in the Shoe... all in aisle seven of your local Whole Foods or in the racks at your neighborhood wine boutique.

  For many more labels from beyond the fields we know, click: The Daily Meal, "25 Beers: Great Label Art Slideshow" (400 Pound Monkey! Hophenge!); The Oenologist, "The Art of the Wine Label"; Web Urbanist, "61 Exceptionally Creative Wine Label Designs"; The Pour Curator, "The Best Beer Label Art of 2011" And be sure to check out The Art and Design of Contemporary Wine Labels by Tanya Scholes. Click here for more information.

Sigils and Signs at the Observatory

Pam Grossman has curated yet another fabulous show, this one focused on the sigils and signs that illuminate our various paths to enlightenment (however one wishes to define the term). If you are in NYC these coming days, I urge you visit this show. [Full disclosure: my wife, Deborah Mills, and I have a collaborative piece in the show, and one of Deborah's solo works is also exhibited there, so this is hardly disinterested advice. But don't go just to see stuff by Lobster & Canary-- check out the many other fine and wondrous items, some difficult to describe, others easy to describe but hard to fathom...in all the right ways!] Alchemical symbols, kabbalistic designs and notations, and much more await you. Go! For more, click here.