Just a quick note to encourage you to check out this compelling interview with Andrew Bienkowski, whose grueling childhood in Siberian exile inspired a very moving book.
(Full disclosure: Andrew’s story was co-authored by my amazingly talented friend Mary Akers.)
Listen to his story and then go buy it!
With T-20 (or thereabouts) until the almost-Dr. submits his dissertation to the powers that be, it’s nice to be reminded that outside of all the footnoted minutiae that characterizes the PhD process, art history really is a lot of fun.
(Rusty art buffs (and future-art-buff aspirants) can head on over to Flavorwire for a refresher course on the original Famous Paintings behind Hold Your Horses’ hilariously adorable tableaus.)
(Thanks to Mary Akers for making my day with this.)
The morning my husband’s dissertation prospectus was approved, I bought him a magnet imprinted with the saying: “The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.” It was facetious at the time; with his focus and momentum, I thought he’d be finished in two years, tops. (That was fours years ago, almost to the minute, and what a long strange trip it’s been.)
Now, with less than two weeks to go before his diss will be printed and fastened with those official-looking little brass prongs and handed over to the committee that will confer his Ph.D. (should I knock on wood here?), I’ve been caught up in an extended nostalgia-fest looking back over the thirty or forty thousand actual miles and ten or twenty thousand psychological ones we’ve travelled between that day and this one.
Which is why the question of the month over at Susan Henderson’s LitPark (”Tell me something you’ve completed that you’re proud of, or that shows what you’re made of”) is resonating with me like crazy, and why the beautiful cover of her soon-to-be-released debut novel, Up from the Blue, could almost make me cry.
Over the last several years, via Litpark’s monthly (and before that, weekly) updates, I’ve been a witness to Susan’s road to publication, and I’ve watched other friends–like the fabulous Mary Akers, with her gutsy, compulsively readable debut short story collection Women Up On Blocks–make the same epic journey from bright idea to bound volume. But now, having been up close and personal with the many travails of my soon-to-be-Dr., I have more respect than the ever for demi-heroic act of faith and fortitude that is completing a manuscript.
I think the biggest challenge for every scholar/poet/fiction writer/essayist/philosopher/etc. is the plague of self-doubt that besets every big project somewhere between conception and completion: Maybe this is totally stupid idea. Can I really pull this off? Nobody cares about (the history of Mylar/modern Lithuanian cinquains in translation/the culinary history of Yucatan barbacoa) except me. Am I wasting my time/money/youth/energy?
Plenty of creative types lose their taste for the long-deferred rewards and ever-accumulating risks (personal, professional, financial) inherent in dedicating oneself to a long-term undertaking that might never see the light of day, or worse, might, but as a total failure. Like looney old Noah and his desert-bound ark, or Kevin Costner’s batshit Field of Dreams, it takes a near-delusional degree of conviction to make it from one end of a grand idea to the other. I’m not going to attempt to parse the decision to abandon the arts for a more sensible pursuit; maybe it’s right for some, maybe it’s always a tragedy. But know, floundering creatives–all you darers and dreamers who haven’t yet traded your metaphors for gardening spades, but who are growing increasingly weary of spending your Friday nights toiling over that script that may never make it to the screen, or that novel that might never make it out of the drawer, or that bundle of poems that might never etc.–that your voice is singular, your aims are worthy, and your perspective is vital. Know it in your bones, and then tack these words from Walt Whitman (yes, youngsters, long before he was selling us jeans, he was igniting minds with his visceral poems) above your workspace, or stick them on your fridge, or embroider them on your pillow so that they seep into your susurrant brain while you get never-quite-enough sleep:
On and on the compact ranks,
With accessions ever waiting, with the places of the dead quickly
fill’d,
Through the battle, through defeat, moving yet and never stopping,
Pioneers! O pioneers!
Onward, idealists! The world needs you. If you build it, they will come.
Tags: Lao Tzu, epic journeys, dreamer’s manifesto
Go over to Big Other and enter the Write Your Best Fake Hosho McCreesh Poem Title Contest, and you might win one of four copies of For All These Wretched, Beautiful, & Insignificant Things So Uselessly & Carelessly Destroyed
G’luck.
Tags: Big Other, Hosho McCreesh, fun with titles
I know that right now, for many of us, every penny counts, but Haiti really needs our help–your help, my help, every bit of help they can get. Without aide from the international community, the immediate devastation wreaked by the earthquake that hit earlier this week will be dwarfed by the havoc caused by the nightmarish conditions facing those those who are still alive. Currently, there are no hospitals and far too few medical workers, there is no potable water, and the country’s roads, ports, and airport are either crippled or simply wiped out. Estimates place the cost of reconstruction in the “low billions,” or at least 15% of Haiti’s gross domestic product.
I might not be able to pay my phone bill this month, but since I still have clean water to drink and a working hospital down the road, I donated. The wonderful PANK magazine made it a little easier to part with the cost of a week’s worth of beans and rice by offering to split all proceeds from direct sales of PANK 4 and Aaron Burch’s new chapbook HOW TO TAKE YOURSELF APART, HOW TO MAKE YOURSELF ANEW between the International Committee of the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders from now until February 13th.
If you can find a way to muster a few bucks, give.
Remanants of the Biosphere is a stunning photodocument of Biosphere 2, the “largest sealed environment ever created.” The photos presented are one part abandoned lot, one part Silent Running, and totally captivating.
For a juxtapositional thrill, after you’ve finished perusing Noah Sheldon’s strangely Kubrickian images, take a gander at the Epcot-meets-Valhalla glory of the official Biosphere 2 web site.
Tags: Biosphere 2, Noah Sheldon, hyperbolicecogeophotorealistic
After spending the past few months eschewing the blog world in favor of the micro-punditry of Twitter, I am hereby announcing my return to (comparatively) long-form exposition. Or at least complete sentences.
More to come. Soon. Really.
My (somewhat zany) review of Mary Robison’s excellent One D.O.A., One on the Way is up (now!) at Identity Theory.
This is my first review for the venerable ID; keep an eye out for more in the future.
Tags: Identity Theory, Mary Robison, gigs
When I was a kid, I used to love the infomercial series Amazing Discoveries. My best friend and I even used to stage our own reenactments (I know I should be embarrassed, but I’m pretty sure our production values were awesome).
Somehow, capping off a long week of era-ending celebrity death with the untimely demise of the Mike Levey of the 21st century, Mr. Billy Mays, is just too much.
I guess some summers they really do drop like flies.
Tags: Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, Billy Mays, Dirty Three Eulogy
Artist M.S. Corley has been posting redesigned covers for iconic series like the Harry Potter books, Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, and Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events in the style of classic Penguin Books.
Fabulous.
Tags: M.S. Corley, design, sometimes the cover’s better than the book
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