Moved On Up

We’re now at http://owie.targeteil.org. Come on along and join up.

That’s if you’re a writer or illustrator. If you’re a reader, join http://ore.targeteil.org.

Where Ideas Come from

I was spooning out the cat food when I started thinking about an HBO feature I'd seen on Mission Impossible 3. I'm going to skip the gimmicky spelling here. Tom Cruise and JJ Abrams had shared how the city of Shanghai had really opened its doors to them. This struck me as interesting, because some bureaucrat probably had to look over the script for the flick before approval could be given and the portrayal of Chinese military intelligence in the script was probably obviously less than flattering. You'd think they'd have run into problems on that count. Perhaps they did and were just keeping the fact under wraps.

In any case, my mind turned to the question of art and what it consists of. Readers of my previous post will remember that I spoke of communities and their aesthetics. What if a human filmmaker submitted a script to an alien bureaucrat and the bureaucrat judged the script on its artistic merits? And what if the alien world's aesthetic was worlds apart from ours?

Sounded like a good premise for a story. Sci-fi, of course. A one off? Hmmm. Maybe I could fit it into a series. How about TEAL (Teaching English as an Alien Language)? Hmmm. How would I fit in an English teacher? Aha! The English teacher is recruited as consultant and translator. He or she observes and participates in the process. Now we're talking!

All this happened before I'd finished spooning out the dog food. That's where ideas come from. From spontaneous associations, not from dog food.

Hmmm. What about dog food? Alien dog food. Alien dogs. Really intelligent alien dogs. Hmmm. Attitudes toward intelligence. Measures of intelligence. Roles of intelligence. Slavery. Cultural prejudice. Hmmm. An English teacher is hired to teach an alien dog English. The dog is as intelligent as any of us. The masters refuse to learn other languages. The dogs handle interracial relations. Hmmm.

Two ideas in one day. Not a record, but not bad.

Art, Meaning and Message

Just yesterday I read Henry James's "The Tree of Knowledge" in Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine's Short Story Masterpieces.

A devastating and exalting little piece.

In the story, a self-styled great and little-understood sculptor, Morgan Mallow, aka the Master, sends his son, Lancelot, aka Lance, to Paris to study painting. The son discovers that he himself has about as much talent as a can of paint and that his father has less talent than a chisel. "I'm a hopeless muff [loser, bungler, incompetent]…, [b]ut I'm not such a muff as the Master!" he exclaims to the Master's long-time friend and his own godfather, Peter Brench, through whose eyes, if not voice, the story is told.

This is just one angle of the story (there are also the friend's heroic success at keeping his contempt for the work of the "artist" a deep and abiding secret without claiming the least respect for it, the son's struggle to keep his new and enlightened opinion of his father's work to himself, the son's apparent unfitness for any calling, the friend's deep and abiding secret love for the artist's wife, and the wife's subjection of her chronic and acute awareness of her husband's failings as an artist to her all-consuming and all-subsuming love for him and the concomitant care of his ego), but it's the one I want to deal with.

I'll bet it's the greatest fear of anyone who thinks they have talent but is aware that they might not that they will turn out to be one of those who has none but is unaware of it. You follow so far?

It is unlikely that either Morgan or Lancelot had no talent at all. The one could probably sculpt recognizable likenesses of people and things, and the other could probably paint recognizable likenesses of people and things. That's better than I can manage without a supreme effort.

The problem lies not in the ability to sculpt or paint, but in the power attributed to the sculptures and paintings. The problem lies in discernment. The Master's sin is not so much a lack of talent as a lack of discernment. He is able to sculpt likenesses, but he is unable to discern their ineffectiveness as works of art, their lack of power. If he claimed only to sculpt likenesses in a certain disproportionate style and made no claim of creating art, he would be neither contemptible nor pitiable. He would be normal. Because he so obstinately, in the face of the public's informed rejection, claims to be creating art but is so decidedly not doing any such thing, he is contemptible–or at least laughable, most likely slightly and harmlessly mad (that is, mentally out of alignment with his culture). Because he so naively persists in the belief that his work is simply not understood and because this naiveté is so essential to his self-esteem, if not his sanity, he is pitiable. There is no hope for the man. He will either dig in against the awareness of his own insignificance on that front, or crumble like Jericho when the reality penetrates his illusion.

The beauty of the story lies in the friend's, the son's and the wife's self-sacrificing subterfuge. They will quietly or vociferously, as they choose, align themselves with the Master's folly and bear the buffetings of a more discerning and less compassionate society rather than shatter the man's self-image or his image of the world. They are voluntary hostages to his benevolent but unsparing pride.

What does this mean for the rest of us, particularly us writers?

Whenever we write a story and friends or family applaud it, we must ask ourselves what motivates the applause. Is it genuine, discerning appreciation of our work, or is it self-sacrificing subterfuge, an inability or an unwillingness to confront us with the failure of our attempt? Conversely, whenever we submit a story for publication and it is rejected, we must ask ourselves why it was rejected. Was it because we failed in our attempt to create something of value, was it because there was no more room at the inn, or was it because a work of art was simply not understood?

A question might be asked about the Master's work. Was it really the pathetic scraping that his intimates and the larger public saw it to be? To him it was not. To him it had power. To him it was art. It had meaning and that meaning was conveyed. From this perspective, the question of whether a work is art depends ultimately on who is looking at it. If somebody thinks it is art, it is art. That is, it is art for them. And that is acceptable.

If you want to write, write. If you and others like what you write, then it's good writing. If what you write powerfully conveys meaning for you and others, then it is art.

The difficulty lies in the composition and conceits of the community within which and for which you attempt to write. In the story, the Master's son only sees his father's folly when he views his father's work from the perspective of an education in art in Paris. In other words, he had been brought up at home to admire his father's work, but when trained in a different aesthetic, the dominant aesthetic, he came to despise his father's work. He suffered a paradigm shift, a dramatic and traumatic one, one his godfather would have spared him. Such shifts occur all the time. What happens to any country boy or girl who moves to the city, any city boy or girl who moves to the country, any boy or girl who goes off to university, anyone who lives abroad? Do not they all come back, or at least look back, with some degree of pity or contempt on the aesthetic and cosmology of their neighbours and kin, their old community? And do they not often resume the old aesthetic and the old cosmology when they return?

So it appears to be a question of community. But then, that is what folk art and world art are for. We are quite capable of discerning power in an alternate aesthetic and the works it generates. Given a basic understanding of the aesthetic, we can say something of the success or failure of a work rendered within that aesthetic. Indeed, we may even be able to recognize art without any other introduction to its inherent aesthetic than the common aesthetic of humanity. Cross-eyed, short-sighted aliens from a planet that only shows blues would probably be unanimous in their judgment that every piece of visual art created on earth looks pretty much like every other, the way all country songs sound nearly identical to the uninitiated and all heavy metal sounds like a car crash to the violently unrefined.

Is this to suggest, then, that there really is such an objective quality as art? I suppose it is. At least, there must be some such objective quality at a certain level. That is to say, there must be degrees of art. This notion is adhered to by Penn Warren and Erskine, who quip in their introduction that "if we had got together within our available number of pages what we considered the best thirty-five short stories there would be fewer authors." They elaborate.

William Faulkner, for example, would have more than one, and, among others, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, and Frank O'Connor. There are few such real masters of the short story…. But there are others who have produced one or two stories so memorable that they must find a place in a book like this, which aims to give some representation to the considerable variety of good stories that have been written in our time.

I admit that when I read Faulkner's "Barn Burning" I was, or at least thought I was, conscious of a certain lushness not common in stories of any kind, let alone short ones, a sort of density of detail not attributable to length of sentence, paragraph or passage. On the other hand, I wasn't much impressed by Hemingway's "Soldier's Home", perhaps because I found no redemption in it (typical of Hemingway), but also because the rhythm seemed clumsily off. I'll have to go into depth about that later.

As I wrote about the subjectivity of art, or of the perception of art, it occurred to me that the aesthetically misguided may be guilty of a baser crime: vagueness. Could the Master have minutely defined in what the power of his sculptures lay? Or did his perception that his work was art spring from his belief that he was an artist and that all that he produced must by the nature of its origin be art? Can we pinpoint in what the art of our work resides? Can our friends and family when they applaud us?

The Shaping Up of OWIe

Well, I was going to take a whack at setting up a temporary home for OWIe on wordpress.com, but it looks like somebody else nabbed the address (owie.wordpress.com) first. Hmmm. Couldn't have done much more than create a new blog, anyway, so I'll wait to try again.

This is how I see OWIe working for now. Sorry, no diagram yet.

Everybody has his or her own website, blog and forum system (as desired). Everybody links to the OWIe website, blog and forum system. Everything but text is stored in member systems, to avoid overburdening OWIe with memory-consuming content like graphics.

The OWIe blog uses Elgg. Elgg features an easily accessible View all posts page on which are displayed a large number of recent posts with links to individual accounts  within Elgg. Meanwhile, Elgg users can create any number of communities, and both communities and posts can be restricted to any of several categories of viewers. It's simultaneously more sociable and more private than I've found WordPress to be.

The OWIe website features categorized links to member sites. Member sites all feature links to the OWIe website. Member sites feature links to other member sites at the discretion of their owners.

OWIe supports forums, hopefully nested ones.

OWIe offers a collaborative tool such as wikimedia or PBwiki which members can use to work together on textual or graphic projects. Once again, though, only text is stored on the home server. Everything else is stored by the members.

OWIe also features a wikipedia-style encyclopedia called OWIepedia which can be used for self-promotion. Members and their fans can contribute articles on writers, illustrators and elements of their work, such as the nature of various species on a distant imaginary world or the tenets of a certain school of writing or illustration.

If anybody is versed in any of the software I've mentioned (or acceptable substitutes), I'd be glad to hear from them.

Art and Craft

So what is art, anyway? And what is craft?

For me, craft is something like skill, the ability to make real what is in your head to make. And like skill, it is subject to style.  Either you learn a certain way of doing it, or you have to do it a certain way to get attention or acceptance.

Art is the ability to give meaning to craft.

Craft changes with fashion and with the need to give meaning. Take Cubism. As I understand it, Picasso, trained like his father in realism, developed Cubism so he could paint with meaning, because realism had become decoration.