As of a couple weeks ago, I am now covering arts and museums for Chicagoist.com, a blog about Chicago. If you point your browser to chicagoist.com/profile/laurambrowning, there’s an RSS feed at the bottom to help you stay on top of what I’m writing. Expect news about art exhibits and other worthy museum events as well as some in-depth looks at art around Chicago. And poke around the rest of the site, too!
Cross-posted at artcanthurtyou.com.
A pronoun is a substitute for a noun, like “she” or “it.” An antecedent is the word, phrase, or clause to which the pronoun refers. Easy, right?
It helps if your pronoun has something to refer back to. From this morning’s Redeye, the Tribune’s free daily crap newspaper:
So, David—about those Armani underwear ads.
Soccer superstar David Beckham said he had some explaining to do after agreeing to be photographed in his skivvies for a new, sex-drenched ad campaign for Emporio Armani. The black and white ads show Beckham reclining shirtless.
“When the photos came out out, she was the first one to call me and say, ‘What are you doing?’” he told Jay Leno this week on the “Tonight” show, according to The Associated Press. “I had to try and explain it to her and it didn’t go down that well.”
That was the whole article. All of it. And who do you suppose she is? The headline says, “Ssh! Don’t tell mom and dad! Even superstars have to consider their parents’ wrath.”
Still, if you glance down at the article, like I did this morning while waiting for the bus, “she” doesn’t refer to anything within the text. And I don’t know about Beckham’s mom, but my mom gets pretty pissed off if she’s referred to as simply “she” or “her.”
I was trying to describe the ennui that follows the completion of a good book to Advisor, who responded by loaning me Hélène Cixous’ Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. Behold:
Not everyone carries out the act of reading in the same way, but there is a manner of reading comparable to the act of writing—it’s an act that suppresses the world. We annihilate the world with a book. You take the book you have opened, either knowingly or unknowingly, but often with an intimation that this book may be an instrument of separation. As soon as you open the book as a door, you enter another world, you close the door on this world. Reading is escaping in broad daylight, it’s the rejection of the other; most of the time it’s a solitary act, exactly like writing. We don’t always think of this because we no longer read; we used to read when we were children and knew how violent reading could be. The book strikes a blow, but you, with your book, strike the outside world with an equal blow.
Yes. Exactly.
I’m still not done with Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, even though I’m probably less than two essays from the end. I keep thinking that if I put off finishing it, I’ll blog about it right when I’m done and it’s still fresh in my mind, but of course it’s no longer fresh anyways. So what the hell:
I just started Zadie Smith’s On Beauty this morning, and it is something that Slouching Towards Bethlehem isn’t, at least not as a whole—compelling. Didion’s first essay, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” was the exception. It grabbed me by the toes and pulled me in (which perhaps unfairly set my expectations for the tone in the following essays). “Some Dreamers” is a murder-mystery story with all the necessary ingredients: love affairs, betrayal, denial, drugs. Didion’s spareness is especially intriguing in this context, because she’s not as chatty or as judgmental as your best friend might be in telling you the same story, but nor is she writing cold hard journalism. California, she says, “is the last stop for all those who come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways. Here is where they are trying to find a new lifestyle…” After the sets the scene, she weaves, Memento-like, from the scene of murder backwards to the events leading up to it. It was the only essay I had to force myself to set aside when my Metra ride ended.
The rest of the essays are good—they’re well-written, and they’re a weird and fascinating window into the 1960s. Joan Baez, fuckin’ hippies, drug culture, it’s all there. Didion is sort of the antithesis to other, more contemporary writers I’ve read in the past few years, the kind of writers whose prose is so thick and lush that you have to gasp for air every other sentence. In that sense she’s refreshing. And while “compelling” isn’t a quality required of everything I pick up, and while Slouching Towards Bethlehem was still far from being a chore… well, maybe it’s just the kind of book I appreciate—for her swift insights and deliberate writing—more than I love.
(That took me longer than thirty seconds to write, but that’s still about the amount of time I devoted to thinking things through. Take it as you will.)
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current book: I suppose now I’ll have to blog something about On Beauty, since I’ve already mentioned that I’m enjoying it…
current music: It’s my own damn fault that The Shins’ “Phantom Limb” is running a loop in my head. Better that, however, than the campfire song “Lloyd George Knew My Father,” which wormed its way into my ear whilst fact checking a bit on David Lloyd George earlier today. It is more annoying and even more pointless than “The Song that Never Ends.” If you don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, consider yourself a lucky, lucky person.
current socks: Tomorrow looks like it will be sandal weather!
The first part of Barbara Kingsolver’s essay High Tide in Tucson is perfect. It’s the kind of essay you can read over and over again and discover some new truth each time. Somehow the story of Buster the crab, an accidental stowaway from a seaside vacation, becomes Kingsolver’s story, and our story. The gentle anthropomorphization of Buster is funny, and his disorientation is relatable:
The largest, knottiest whelk had begun to move around. First it extended one long red talon of a leg, tap-tap-tapping like a blind man’s cane. Then came half a dozen more red legs, plus a pair of eyes on stalks, and a purple claw that snapped open and shut in a way that could not mean We Come in Friendship.
Who could blame this creature? It had fallen asleep to the sound of the Caribbean tide and awakened on a coffee table in Tucson, Arizona, where the nearest standing water source of any real account was the municipal sewage-treatment plant.
Poor Buster! But who hasn’t awakened one morning hopelessly confused, whether because of traveling or moving or too much alcohol? But Buster makes do in his new home, where he is spoiled with a variety of shells and moldy cottage cheese. But Buster becomes manic-depressive when it’s high tide on his home shores—apparently, at least, because Kingsolver can’t come up with any other explanation, and it’s certainly an appealing one. Because who doesn’t try to hang on to the Caribbean tide they’ve just left?
* * *
The rest of Kingsolver’s essays are hit-or-miss. She’s a lovely writer with a gift for description, but sometimes her metaphors are forced or overwrought. She also has a tendency to wear her politics on her sleeve, sometimes with what I perceived as a smug superiority, and although I don’t necessarily disagree with her, this habit starts to grate while reading essay after essay. But what an interesting life she’s had, one that has surely contributed to her politics—from a small town in Kentucky to Africa to the Canary Islands to Tucson and probably lots of other places in between. She’s been a concert pianist and biologist and a member of the all-author Rock Bottom Remainders band (alongside Dave Barry and Stephen King). Her essays draw from these landscapes and the life lessons they imparted, sometimes beautifully, sometimes so thick with adjectives that you’re left choking. But read the title essay—that’s where the really good stuff is.
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current book: Nearly done with The Land of Laughs (thanks, Ryan!). It reminds me a bit of Paul Auster’s Book of Illusions in that both are very compelling reads, each about a man who is obsessed with an artist. In the case of The Land of Laughs, the artist is an author of fantastical kids’ books as well as some fantastic and horrifying realities…
current music: Rocked out to my totally gay running mix during yesterday’s run. I needed that Kylie Minogue during that last half-mile, I’m telling you.
current socks: Tomorrow I will be sporting my St. Patrick’s Day socks, those which only get worn once a year. If you haven’t seen them, you are really missing out: a garish scene laid out in bright green and metallic gold thread involving leprechauns, rainbows, and pots of gold. Really, how often is it that socks come with their own narrative?
Disbelief. It doesn’t seem possible to even move beyond that. My friend and former colleague Leon passed away the day after Valentine’s Day, and I don’t think I’ll ever really believe it. I am grateful to have visited him while he was in the hospital, even though I think I’ll always be haunted by the memory of him lying there, intubated and hooked up to God knows how many other machines, unable to do any more than open his eyes or furrow his brow.
I was asked to write the obituary for him—I was so touched and so honored and so terrified. I wrote an obituary for the newspaper and also a tribute that will be read at his memorial service next week. So for the past few days, I’ve just been shouldering through, focusing on the obituaries but not the event that necessitated them, and today, after receiving a few pictures of Leon, was the first time I mouthed the words, “he’s gone.” My perspective is different now that I no longer work at the museum with him, so I don’t have to deal with the pangs of emptiness that are borne of the expectation of seeing Leon at his desk or walking down the halls. I’ve never dealt with death particularly well, and I’m usually that person at funerals, the one who is choking with tears. (See: my paternal grandmother’s funeral. I was 12, and one of my aunts had to coax me out of the restroom at the funeral home, because I was doubled over on a chair, blotchy-faced and inconsolable. I have learned only a little grace and maturity since then, I’m afraid). Maybe being three hours away and at a different job will allow me to perpetually ignore it, or maybe it will string my disbelief out even longer. I don’t know. I suspect that everything will hit me at the memorial service next week, which is, I suppose, why we have them. I’ll be there, box of Kleenex in hand.
I ventured to the Newberry Library one Saturday in early December, a numbingly cold morning that begged more for my down comforter than a jaunt downtown. While looking at the library’s website a few weeks earlier, I had seen a program called “Writing Chicago Childhoods” that featured authors Elaine Soloway, Billy Lombardo, and Frank Joseph. All three authors would read from their books and then participate in a panel discussion “of how the authors brought to life the vanished worlds of their childhoods.” And so I shed my down comforter and left my warm apartment: it was an interesting topic, I’d read Billy Lombardo’s book The Logic of a Rose this past summer, and maybe I’d pick up something about writing memoirs.
Elaine Soloway read first, from her self-published book The Division Street Princess. Soloway is a tiny but imposing 68-year-old Jewish woman with short, silver hair and dark cat-eye glasses. At least I thought she was imposing—how else do you describe a four-foot-ten-inch-woman who looks down at you?—but that impression melted as soon as she started reading a dark chapter from her life and her book. Soloway grew up in Chicago—on Division Street, natch—during the 1940s. This chapter, which tells of an unwilling loss of innocence, is framed with the real story of the kidnapping and murder of Suzanne Degnan, which Soloway said consumed everybody’s thoughts at the time. Soloway, who was about Degnan’s age at then, saw pictures of this other innocent little girl on the newspapers her parents tried to shield her from. Her innocence takes a double blow, one at the hands of Degnan’s murder, one at the hands of a sleazy neighbor. Even her father, her protector, the one who calls her “Princess,” can’t restore it. Soloway promised this was the darkest chapter; even if it’s not, I hope to read the rest of her book someday soon.
Billy Lombardo, whose book I read last summer, wore his microphone so he could stand in front of the podium. Lombardo is a high school teacher, so maybe podiums are just too restricting for his tastes or habits, but I thought this was a nice touch. Especially since I’d already met his protagonist, one Petey Bellapani—Petey Goodbread, the neighborhood baker calls him—this brought Petey a little closer, made him a little more familiar. One thing I hadn’t expected (only because I hadn’t given it any thought) was Lombardo’s thick Chicago accent. Chicago accents are a bit of a giggle-inducer for me. They sound so Bronxy: “hey, how you doon?” But I recovered from my initial startle, settled into Lombardo’s accent, and reacquainted myself with Petey in the story “The Pilgrim Virgin.” Lombardo has a particular talent for capturing youthfulness inside adult reflection, which resonates even more in his own voice. You can, and should, listen to a radio interview of him on his website; it’s a little long, but it’s great fun to hear Petey’s distinct voice, his distinct Chicago accent.
Frank Joseph read last, and was for me the least exciting. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt; because he read from a novel, he had to read the excerpts a bit piecemeal, stopping to fill in the plot holes before moving to the next. Perhaps his is the kind of novel that just works better quietly, as a whole. Joseph also writes about Chicago in the 1940s, a city apparently defined along even more stringent racial lines than today. His book is about two boys, one Jewish, one black, who meet during a fistfight behind Comiskey Park. The black boy gets taken to the hospital, and the Jewish boy tracks him down later, feeling badly about what happened. They form something like a friendship, teaching each other about street smarts and kosher hot dogs.
The author panel wasn’t much of one—mostly some half-hearted questions about how to find an agent/publisher/self-publisher etc. (Maybe I would have been more appreciative if I was actually in the market for one of the above, but isn’t that what the Internet/library/bookstore is for?) More interesting would have been the promised discussion of bringing vanished childhoods to the page. That’s why I’d gone to the panel in the first place, although listening to Soloway and Lombardo read aloud more than made up for it.
One theme did repeat itself during the Q&A: early rising. Both Lombardo and Soloway said that they wrote most every morning, and at such early godawful hours—3:30am, 4:30am. Hours earlier than I get up unless there is a flight involved, and even then it’s an uphill battle involving repeated pressings of the snooze button. Is this the kind of discipline required to become a published author? Because I’m almost positive that if I set my alarm for 3:30, it would still be going off when I awoke four hours later. I’m also almost positive that I cannot spit at 4am, let alone string words together or put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard. Perhaps I should stick with blogging for now.
* * *
current book: Moved on to the next story in The Crystal Frontier, which is far better than the one prior, which seemed like a poor middle-school experiment.
current music: Listened to a little over half of John’s Best of 2006 Mix. I had to take a break from all the hip-hop, so I’m giving the e.g.s. mix of 17 august 2005 a spin right now.
current socks: Dark blue with light purplish-blue polka dots. Very fuzzy. Mmmmm.
For those of you who are just here for the cute cat pictures, here’s some candy for you:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rn1Qna-Ni3o]
* * *
I am in the midst of paper-writing hell. As though I haven’t already suffered enough? In some ways it’s a lesser circle of hell than my thesis was, because I don’t feel the same kind of pressure, but these are critical papers, and, as Advisor made clear, critical thinking is not exactly my forte (yes, there is a pity pool in hell, and I reserve the right to splash in it as needed, at least for a little bit longer). I am trying to answer this question for my first paper:
In his discussion of “The Central Region,” P. Adams Sitney argues that–despite the autonomy the film grants the image–Snow’s film is, ultimately, a metaphor for consciousness. Making use of Ricoeur’s account of the fundamental aporia between cosmic time and phenomenological time (the time of consciousness), discuss the plausibility of Sitney’s claim. In what way(s) is the specificity of film implicated here?
Michael Snow’s “The Central Region” is 190 minutes–that’s over THREE HOURS, folks–of a pre-programmed camera sweeping over the bare landscape of Quebec’s La Region Centrale. The camera motions are choreographed with excruciating, baroque motions: it begins with the camera pointed straight at the ground, wherein it begins a slow spiral (and I mean SLOW–it takes a full 33 minutes) into the horizon. This is only one of about sixteen different “dances,” all of which are equally painful to watch. The film is accompanied only by a series of beeps that sounds a bit like a phone ringing in the distance, and which made me quite anxious. After about the first hour I stopped anticipating a narrative–really, any narrative would have sufficed–and just surrendered to the pain.
Second paper topic:
Compare Heidegger’s notion about the entanglement between art, artist and artwork with Adorno’s later essay about the art and the arts, which answers Heidegger.
I actually really enjoy Heidegger’s essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,” which describes that entanglement, but I’m much less confident about Adorno. And my ego’s pretty bruised and doesn’t really want to tackle any more essays about art. As sad as I’ve been about the end of grad school, that light at the end of the tunnel is looking better and better.
* * *
current book: see above
current music: I made a little mix that I kind of love. It starts with DJ Shadow’s “Building Steam With a Grain of Salt” and ends with Calexico’s cover of “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” and includes two gems by the recently-discovered (by me) Isabelle Antena. I normally never put the same artist twice on the same mix, but she’s worth it.
current socks: now that it’s officially flip-flop weather, I’m not sure what to fill this space with. any suggestions?
I'm fascinated with spaces lately. If there's space, there's time, unpredictability, possibility. Spaces between the art and artist. Spaces between art and observer. And now, spaces between the aura and the jolt. I came across this particular space, or the idea of it, in the poem "Seizure" by Philip Jenks. An excerpt:
the spaces between the aura
and the jolt are shorter
like some epileptic thunderstorm
waiting for the eye.
Analyzing poetry really isn't my strong suit, and I know I'm bringing all of my own incorrect meanings to this little stanza (it's about a seizure, after all, not art). Presumably Jenks is talking about the space and time between the aura of the seizure, that first premonition, and the moment it actually starts. But I'm still hooked. Hooked on the idea that there's a space between the perception and the synthesis, a space between knowing something's about to happen and it actually happening, a space between the shimmering web of an idea and being suddenly captured into its sticky strings, a space between the aura and the aha!, the aura and the jolt. Even though Jenks and I are talking about two different things, I'm intrigued that he calls it a space, not time. For both of us, it's a place. A place of unpredictability and possibility.
* * *
current book: Mrs. Dalloway. *sigh*
current music: The Sixths' Wasps Nest
current socks: brownish-red with cats and the words, "here kitty kitty"
One thing I've learned about writing this year is that much of it is a science. Grammar plays a huge part in elegance and eloquence, and part of being a good writer is being able to tap into that during the revision process. But, of course, much of it remains subjective.
I just received comments on one of my essays from An Established Writer (not Advisor or Preceptor). Writer read the essay about my experience of seeing a Georgia O'Keeffe calendar seven months after condition-reporting the original painting. The essay begins in Borders at Christmastime, where I saw the O'Keeffe calendar with Yellow Cactus on the cover. It moves to the Eiteljorg museum, where I condition-reported Yellow Cactus, and then to Taos, where the painting was born. I think it's probably my strongest essay, and I've worked and worked and worked to tighten the narrative structure. I want it to take the reader on the same kind of journey that the painting took me on. I want it to stare art right in the face, with lush, vivid, descriptions, and then take a step back and think about why my experiences were so powerful.
Writer suggested that that framework was awkward and unnecessary. He says:
The problem is that your great subject–the difference between studying an original painting and looking at a mere reproduction–is hung, so to speak, in an awkward frame: the Borders/Christmas thing. You can cut all of that stuff and lose almost nothing. I know it's there to warm up to your subject, and to provide some comedy, but the reader doesn't want to warm up, she wants to go straight to the chase. And Christmas is not funny. It's been done to death. Avoid the subject at all cost. Your framing of your real, original story with this device detracts from the fascinating process of "interrogating" the paintings with the loupe, about which I urge you to say even more in your next draft. Hone in on that and the unnecessary information about Borders and Christmas and Taos' "discovery" by the white man and Walter Benjamin will fade away entirely, or into a mere sentence or two, and your essay will come into perfect focus. It's almost there.
This is incredibly interesting advice, and I don't really know what to make of it. I like the idea of having a framework that, to use museum jargon, is a kind of way-finder for the reader. And I've been pretty attached to the idea of reflecting on my experiences, not just relating them (hence Walter Benjamin). But I also appreciate that those aren't the strongest moments of the essay.
I've been working on this essay for months and months now, and it's difficult for me to have a good idea of what a reader might want. So I'm paying close attention to Writer's advice, since he hasn't seen previous versions of this essay. And subjectivity reenters the scene: who's to say that framework is better than no framework? Advisor and Preceptor–both excellent writers–have encouraged a narrative framework that carries the writer through the story. I wish that this was as scientific as establishing elegance through fun grammatical tricks, and I wish that there was some gold standard I could hold my work up to compare to.
I thought that the worst of the frustration would be over now that I've turned my rough draft in. How wrong I was… but I'm going to play around with Writer's advice and see what I think of the essay when it's been stripped of its frame. Stay tuned.
* * *
current book: still Mrs. Dalloway, although I'm far, far, behind where I should be
current music: The Deathray Davies' The Kick and The Snare
current socks: "I Heart San Francisco" socks covered in hearts and trolleys and sunshines and palm trees and golden gate bridges
