The Mythology of Inspiration

Whatever your vehicle, Ladies and Gentlemen, start your engines!

In another lifetime I was a teacher. Not a fabulous one, mind you, but one who took what I did seriously and did my best to give my students, if not the actual practice that would make them more productive and skillful and happy in their making of art, at least the idea of what might be possible for them and perhaps the instigation of the will to develop over the longer term. Like every other teacher in history, I knew that most of the burden of improvement fell on my students and had surprisingly little to do with what I could or couldn’t, would or wouldn’t, should or shouldn’t give them. And like every other teacher, I heard from my students every excuse in the book about why they would inevitably fail to accomplish any of this, how they were powerless against the forces that conspired to keep them from making the assigned efforts or finishing their work. Having used most of the excuses myself, I had plenty of fuel to argue my case after spending the intervening years (or minutes) rethinking it all as I moved from student status to teacher. And I knew too that I would have to keep re-learning it all as long as I lived, since every teacher is only a different breed of student and Life is the biggest, craziest, toughest and most creatively optimal classroom of all.

So I made up a little page of possible excuses and a smidgen of food-for-thought responses to them–perhaps mostly for my own enlightenment and prodding–that I shared from time to time with my students if they happened to be getting a little too enamored of creating excuses to spend their creativity on drawing, design, writing, painting, studying, researching, making mixed media installations, critiquing or any of the other topics I was attempting to encourage them to learn. Here are a few items from my little list, because I am well aware that I still need to remember them myself and keep trying to blow past them with determination and, I hope, a pinch of wit.

1          GREAT THINKERS THINK ONLY GREAT THOUGHTS

               (and I’m not a great thinker).

If this is true, explain why the Old Masters painted over or destroyed canvases, Einstein was virtually dismissed as a pea-brain by some in his school days and our early experts on astronomy believed the earth was flat.

2          GENIUS IS BORN, NOT MADE.

This may actually be so, but untended and un-exercised, genius has no value whatsoever, and many a great achiever has acknowledged beginning an illustrious career ignominiously and becoming expert through sheer will and work.

3          EXCELLENT IS GOOD, GOOD IS AVERAGE &

               AVERAGE IS TERRIBLE.

               (Corollary: Good is excellent, average is good, terrible is average!)

Creative and inventive people often have a penchant for self-disparagement and perfectionism that leads them (and often others) to devalue work of quality; it’s also a common temptation to simply fall back on the platitude of ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ and accept mediocrity because one is too fearful or lazy to be honestly critical and opinionated.  Accept it and get on with things.

4          IT DIDN’T TURN OUT THE WAY IT WAS SUPPOSED TO.

Oh, come on.  Almost nothing does.  Sometimes it just isn’t finished yet when it seems to have Not Turned Out.  And more often than not, the real result is an improvement on the original plan anyway.

5          IT CAN’T BE DONE.

It’s better to go down in flames of glory, for having tried, than to prove only that  you couldn’t (or just wouldn’t) do it.  And what if it does work?!  Don’t you just love those rare chances to say I Told You So, anyway?

6          ALL THE GOOD IDEAS ARE TAKEN.

            All of the good ones haven’t been invented yet, Silly.

7          I CAN’T THINK OF ANYTHING.

You don’t have to.  Steal ideas all over the place.  Just remember to cite sources, give references, and wherever possible, to thoroughly revise and synthesize things into your own particular combination or version of them.

8          WHY SLAVE TO HAVE IT ALL WHEN YOU CAN SETTLE FOR LESS.

            Perhaps because apathy is as dangerous to existence as the threat of annihilation.

9          IT COSTS TOO MUCH.

Some of the same people who whimper over buying a five-dollar sketch pad and two ninety-nine-cent pencils (two weeks’ supply, say) think nothing of adding four dollars’ worth of popcorn and soft drinks to their seven-dollar movie tickets: that’s Whiners’ Math.  But most art supplies can be hideously expensive, especially for those productive enough to use masses of them.  So it’s a necessary and healthy part of the solution-oriented artist’s life that analogs and alternatives be a constant study.  What can legitimately serve as a substitute for the too-expensive?  Often the product of such inventiveness proves more exciting than the work as first conceived.  Sometimes it’s important to make the commitment to spend the real money for the real thing, too: how serious are you?

10        I’M NOT INSPIRED!

Genuine inspiration occurs ZERO times in the average artist’s life. WHAT!!! Heresy! But truly, if we’re talking spiritual/mystical magic, most must instead rely on a painstaking and passionate process of trial, error, adventure and eventual coalescence to allow artistic completion and quality to arise.  Don’t wait around to be inspired, in case it’s not in the cards: deadlines and opportunities wait for no one.  If you’re the incredibly lucky one inspiration smiles upon, have conspicuous spasms of joy, make feverish use of the favor while it lasts, and get ready to work hard on the next thing when you become a mere mortal again.  We’re lucky enough just to be able to be the real thing, Working Humans.  Don’t knock it.  There’s joy enough in that.

Stay tuned . . .

. . . for being tuned up and ready to roll is more important than knowing where the road will take you . . .

 

Three Hundred Sixty-Five and Counting

Please pardon my squeals of glee; I’m just a bit of a pig, my dears.

Yay me!

I know, I know, I say such things all the time, egotist and drama queen that I am. If you were really sick of my self-aggrandizement I assume you’d have had the good sense to stop coming here by now. Thank goodness I surround myself with people who, though otherwise entirely admirable in their many stellar qualities, are just loopy enough to spend time with me ungrudgingly and continue to share their own blogging abodes and the treasures therein with me in ceaseless generosity. But I am feeling a little extra pleased with myself these days for a couple of particular reasons. I’m just ridiculously slow to get it all underway appropriately.

I guess I’m a real slowpoke by nature.

I am told that a recent post of mine was, in the tally of my benign WordPress overlords, number 365 in overall production here at the kiwsparks factory. That is, in the looser sense, a year’s worth of posts for a daily blogger. However, honesty and my personal traces of OCD move me to say that while I did indeed ‘officially’ commit only so far as one year’s worth of daily blogging, I hadn’t yet fulfilled that commitment to the letter since the one-per-day agenda began in earnest on, if I remember correctly, the 6th of July last year. Sure, who doesn’t need something to do to celebrate her wedding anniversary in a more special way than that boring old romantic stuff? So I had a second milestone of the 365 variety yet to achieve in two weeks. I did double-post a couple of times along the way when the whim emerged, but that in no way made me feel I had met the standard I set in my original plan. On the other hand, WordPress would no doubt find it arguable that I’ve posted, technically, daily, because the WP time stamp does not agree 100% with whatever time zone I’ve been in at various points along the year, so it dates my posts differently than I would, and I am happy to consider my own time zone the decisive one, even if it means typing madly until I can press Publish at the stroke (the clock’s or mine) of midnight. I’m nothing if not a control freak.

All of this being said, the rewards of committing to this year of daily blogging have been considerable and entirely worthwhile. I have gotten back into a dedicated practice of writing and creating visual as well as verbal images that is its own reward, to be sure. I am reminded of the need to Make Things on a regular basis and find pleasure in that process as well as sometimes amusing my own little silly self with the outcomes as well. Most of all, I have reconnected with a social side of myself that is sometimes less easy to access, as a more naturally introverted and even shy person who expresses her bolder and outwardly more comfortable character better in print than either in person or (quelle horreur!) on the telephone. Yes, my nearest and dearest will tell you that I am chatty (or verbose) and rather unfiltered in nature when around them, but of course many of you probably know exactly what I mean when I say that it is specific to my feeling safe and in familiar surroundings that brings out that extroverted version of me.

The biggest payoff in this blogging process is, of course, the presence of that sort of a Safe Place for me to have social interaction with a much wider range of wise and talented and fabulous and fascinating people from all over the world than previously possible. I may have had my own self-centered reasons for starting to blog, but it is you, my dear visitors, commenters and especially my blog-sharing friends, who have made it continue to be worthwhile and in ever increasingly fine ways. I have again been gifted with several blogging awards, and though the late spring-early summer schedule around here militated against my taking much time to respond properly, it is yet another reminder that my web community is generous and supportive as well as simply a fun and kindly group of people. So I must say further thanks to Dr. Dan and Susie and my delightful correspondent at veggiewhatnow for sharing their generosity of fine blogs and passing along blogging awards as well, respectively: the One Lovely Blog Award, Versatile Blogger and a recognition I’d never even heard of before, making me a Food Stories Nominee for Excellence in Storytelling. Cool! All of them, all of their blogs, and all of the kindness showered upon me.

I shall certainly try to honor the spirit, and hopefully the letter, of these awards but I’d appreciate it if you cut me a little slack when it comes to sharing those Fun Facts about myself (as if I haven’t poured enough of ‘em on you to nearly drown y’all already). As usual, I’m so impressed and humbled by the astounding company I’m privileged to keep that I hope every one of you will click on my three admirable friends’ names above and take a leisurely visit at each of their sites to see just what wonders await you there. You will leave far less hungry and far smarter and happier, really, I assure you. Dr. Dan is a Canadian internist and foodie-supreme who posts all sorts of succulent, sweet and savory cookery to make you dream. The wise and funny blog susartandfood is the place where Susie beautifully publishes her own marvelous food, along with superb art, fantastic writing and a good dose of wit throughout. And veggiewhatnow is a land loaded with grand vegetarian ideas, terrific photos and illustrations and a whole lot of useful information that just doesn’t show up anywhere else in such a friendly format.

My sharing of bits of brilliance about myself, well, that’ll keep coming in all of the upcoming posts just as it has in every post so far.

And here are some fellow bloggers greatly deserving of my passing along these honors, along with all of my previous nominees (please search my site via the various awards’ names found in my sidebar if you’d like to see the many other deeply deserving folk I so enjoy sharing with you):

For the Versatile Blogger Award, I happily commend to you the following standout bloggers: Mandy, filling The Complete Cookbook not only with gorgeous food and the photos thereof but also all sorts of domestic derring-do and lovely forays into the history (familial and wider-reaching) of landscape, pets, garden and more; Marie, managing a grand kitchen, a busy family, a beautiful property and gardens, and a dog who thinks she’s queen of the active crew of local wildlife, blogs at My Little Corner of Rhode Island; Claire, the travel, garden, cookery and photography (and more) blogger of Promenade Plantings; the supposedly year-stricken K, writing year-struck‘s wide-ranging, scintillating, touching and bracingly intelligent while often still hilarious tales; and Bishop, savoring through his Backyard Farm the natural approach to gardening, cooking, travel and the appreciation of fine libations both home-brewed and otherwise.

For the One Lovely Blog Award, I’m pleased to present: David, painting heart-stoppingly beautiful portraits and teaching lessons to lucky painters over at davidreidart (which my computer appropriately translates for me as ‘daredevilry’); Lindy Lee, weaving poems of the heart and telling tales that transfix, on Poetic Licensee; Nitzus, magnificent and insightful photographer spreading the admiration of memorable and remarkable people, places and creatures far and wide through his self-named site; Cyndi, bookchick extraordinaire, wending her way through collected poems, stories and essays of her own, and stellar photography in the pages of cfbookchick; and Dennis, that inimitable Bard on the Hill, whose poetry spills out of the Texas hill country in rivers shared with poems he’s selected from many other fine poets.

And for the Excellence in Storytelling recognition I enthusiastically nominate: Celi, at that magically inviting sustainable homestead, thekitchensgarden; John, who writes hymns of Italianate glory from the Bartolini kitchens; Tanya, la reina of the Spanish mountains’ bounty at chicaandaluza; Barbara, who has far more than justasmidgen of exquisiteness to share at her blog; and cookingspree‘s mistress of fabulousness at table, in the kitchen, and whatever amazing places she goes, Antoinette. All of my best to you–and theirs, too! Cheers, my friends.

A small footnote: while I am deeply honored and pleased to have been so generously given these recognitions, I am going to refrain from further award acceptance lest I spend too much of my time polishing my medals and strutting around in my tutu and tiara and too little time, well, blogging. Much ground left to cover, I’m pretty sure, even if I don’t yet know what it is. Meanwhile, you good people should busy yourselves with exploring the wealth of illumination at all of these other blogs too–so much fun ahead for everyone.PS–while I’m cresting this wave of self-promotional adulation, I’ll just mention that today at Zazzle.com there is a one-day 50% off sale on all of their posters and wrapped canvases, and mine are all over the site and pretty dirt cheap to start with, so if you go over there and search for kiwsparks you’ll see all sorts of affordable art, much of which has been seen on this blog before, on sale. Just saying.

http://www.zazzle.com/zazzle7thbirthday

Foodie Tuesday: Potato Famished

I’m going to keep this supremely simple. I love potatoes. Among my ridiculously long list of edible loves, potatoes rank pretty high on the list. It’s clear that my Viking ancestry designed my particular corporeal form to be composed of 70% potato water, so I’m spending my years just fueling it up as best I can.

Barring allergies or outright dislike, it’s hard not to admire the potato regardless of one’s lineage. It’s one of the most inspiringly versatile foodstuffs on this little old planet. There’s hardly anything that a potato can’t gussy up nicely. Let me just commune with the spirit of the potato here for a moment:

Boiled, roasted, fried, baked, steamed. Even raw. Yes, on rare occasions Mom gave them to us sliced like cold little potato bruschetti, buttered and salted and munched out of hand. Odd, but not unpleasant. Still, I’m a little more of an old stick in the mud and like them best cooked up one way or another. Grated, mashed, bashed, diced. Sliced and made into insanely tasty (and of course buttery as can be) Hasselback potatoes. Cooked and smashed, with lots of gloriously rich cream. French fried, skin on, in beef fat. Scalloped with a passel of cheese. Okay, you caught me. I’m stuck as always on my beloved theme of delicious FATS. Yeah, I yelled. Ahem. Now, back to our regularly scheduled swooning over potatoes. Tenderly toothsome cubes in vegetable soup or clam chowder or some dreamy slow-cooked stew. Crisply golden-browned hash browns tenderly steaming at heart. Silky smooth in a luscious cool Vichyssoise.

And of course, sometimes nothing else can possible compare to a fine and dandy baked potato. Say, served with tonight’s very simply cooked steak and very simply plain romaine and tomato salad. Just halve the russet potatoes, coat well with coconut oil, place cut side down in a baking pan and then stab them thoroughly in the back with a fork or knife to prevent in-oven explosion (or zombie resurrection, if that’s your concern), salt them well with coarse good salt, and bake until they’re tender inside and crispy outside (circa 20-30 minutes, depending on the oven and the size of your potatoes) at 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Some things can’t really be improved, now, can they.

Most Fun ‘Disease’ Award: the Bluebonnet Plague

Spring in Texas is a highly variable thing. Like most regions where I’ve lived or visited, north Texas can rightly claim (any day, any part of the year) that if you don’t like the weather, all you have to do is wait five minutes. Ma Nature is that sort of fickle filly. She treats us mighty differently from moment to moment, season to season, and from year to year, too. So while last year, the drought and excessive heat both started early enough that we saw virtually nothing of the vaunted swaths of Lupinus texensis, the state flower, the Texas Bluebonnet, this year’s mildness and largesse of rains has kissed the sullen banks of the highways, the pastures and prairies, and not a few lawns, with a brilliant return, as if our nature-mistress apologized with flowers for running off and abandoning us to sere and lonely brownness all of last season.The extravaganza began with a wild froth of yellow sprayed over nearly everything–it’s a wildflower form of mustard known by many names and perhaps most commonly here as bastard cabbage, that nomenclature derived from the rosette at its base that resembles a false cabbage, but Texans probably embracing the less kindly interpretation of its first name because it has spread so widely as to be an invasive and predatory plant whose tough rosettes block out the bluebonnets‘ rise. While I would hate to see it usurp the blue beauty of the state flower, the wild mustard‘s foam floating over the rolling grasslands is a very pretty herald of the return of spring’s wildflowers.

Following the arrival of the mustard, in quick succession, the verges are airbrushed, in turn, with the purples of several vetch-and-clover-like wildflowers I don’t yet know after moving to this region, then the red hues of Texas Paintbrush (Castilleja indivisa), then the sea of bluebonnets, punctuated by handfuls of the pale pink-and-white tissue of Lady Bird Johnson‘s favorites, the Showy Evening Primroses (Oenothera speciosa).When you’re just moseying along, running errands and minding your own business and an explosion of living color appears before your very eyes, it’s not something you just ignore. If you’re me, you ask your husbandly chauffeur to be so kind as to pull over in the empty lot across the street from the biggest mass nearby so you can hop out and ogle, and take a few pictures. See, there’s this little bit of tension in the romance with wildflowers. As easy on the eye as nearly all of them are, they are, ahem, wild. People don’t really like wild very well, a lot of the time: everybody wishes in his or her secret heart to control the world–at least, to believe they can do so. Wildflowers grow and bloom when and where they are wiling and able to do it, and in many cases they’re not all that cooperative when we try to grow them on purpose. Never mind when the weather patterns of the moment aren’t as particularly conducive to their happiness, health and vigor as they could be. When the blossoming wild does decide to make a grand entrance, however, it can create these impressive and celebratory masses of glory right across the most inhospitable-seeming acres of dirt and weediness. Because, after all, wildflowers are weeds; weeds, wildflowers. As witness the aggressive behavior of the deceptively dainty-looking bastard cabbages, sweeping right over the top of the other spring blooms like a vegetable horde of Huns or Visigoths and laying siege until the smaller, weaker plants succumb and yield their ground.Like humans and animals and plants of all kinds, every living thing in fact that populates the earth, wildflowers are essentially invaders and will happily fill in any available space when they’re good and ready to do so. A plague upon the earth! Thankfully, unlike most species, wildflowers, whether annual or perennial, tend to repay their carbon debt rather quickly, subsiding into glorious compost almost as quickly as they arrived on the loam of last year’s dead. So I say, three cheers for the Texas Bluebonnet, which survives drought and depredation, bad seasons and bad gardeners, and gives us a massive dose of grand color virtually for free, then turns around politely and sacrifices its glories for the good of next year’s, or next decade’s, wild display.

. . . and While I’m on the Subject . . .

Oh! I wasn’t? Well, maybe I wasn’t talking about it, but I was thinking about it, and in my household, that constitutes a continuing conversation rather than a festival of non-sequiturs. That’s the way we operate. First, someone says something that appears to be completely out of the ether, Left Field, or a secret portion of the anatomy generally best left out of conversation. The ensuing stretch of interminable seconds is usually occupied with the second person working out madly in his or her head what the remark meant, how on earth it had any relevance, if it is possible to decipher, and–oh! There it is! Suddenly, the very long and convoluted train of thought that led from a comment or conversation long since ended (or so one thought) reappears, not having stopped at the station or even derailed but instead having wound through uncharted territory and visited innumerable exotic towns along the way before returning to view.

Sometimes it's as though I'd taken some sort of strange potion and time shifted . . .

As my spouse and I have just returned from a theatre viewed the Metropolitan Opera‘s live-transmission broadcast of Giuseppe Verdi‘s ‘Ernani‘, I can say that we two are evidently not alone in this discombobulating sense of the very tenuous connectivity of perceived reality. I was quite delighted with seeing the broadcast, our whole reason for attending in the first place being the Met live-broadcast debut of the exquisite-voiced Angela Meade, who ‘graduated’ university with my husband in a sense, being a senior student and outstanding soprano soloist in the choir he conducted and took on his farewell Scandinavian tour as he left the university where he’d been teaching for 18 years. Besides her very lovely persona, we knew and admired the beauty of her voice then and she proved again today that it has only further ripened into full bloom. Frankly, she could open the poorly translated operating manual for a lawn mower and sing from it and it would be musically and artistically fulfilling and entirely worth the hearing.

While I’m being frank, I’d have to say in addition that I think the libretto of ‘Ernani’ could be surpassed in literary merit, coherence and comprehensibility by the aforementioned lawn mower manual. Opera is, admittedly, rarely sought out for its exemplary logic and natural progression or, probably, for much resemblance to the real world and its history and human actions therein. That’s not why we go to the opera. But among operas I’ve seen and heard, ‘Ernani’ is mighty high (and I use the word advisedly) on the short list of the most wildly improbable, disjointed and just plain wacky so-called plots. That train not only left the rails right out of the station, it went straight off a cliff.

Let Elvira sing Hey, nonny nonny, Ernani, you ninny!

Meanwhile, back in his studio, young Signore Verdi was either smitten enough with the romance of a love quadrangle to ignore the outrageously outlandish pastiche on a plot-line, or perhaps had merely imbibed an entire Jeroboam of Barolo by himself, because he took that absurd libretto and proceeded to set the whole thing to equally incongruous music. Three hours of it. Thankfully, whether the Barolo had any chance to or not, Verdi eventually matured into writing stuff that had some relationship to the text, however ludicrous the latter happened to be.

Opera is at least so honest as to call itself ‘work’, it’s just not entirely up-front about the post-compositional work remaining to be done by audience members who might find it quite the laborious process to decipher what’s going on, with whom, and how. Never mind when, where and why. But I mustn’t pick at nits too freely; after all, our nice little cozy home conversations might just as well constitute the storyline of some incipient opera themselves. I have no musical compositional skills, so I couldn’t compete with Verdi even at his most immature, but maybe if I gloss over my melodic shortcomings with a few additional high Cs and a royal assassination or two thrown in no one will even notice that I’ve wandered far and constantly from my original subject. I may have mentioned that I tend to do that. I forget. Oh, well. It happens. And while I’m on the subject . . .

Ooh! Pretty flower! Now, where was I?

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 6,300 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 5 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Foodie Tuesday: A Mystery Wrapped in an Enigma Wrapped in a Crispy Golden Tempura Batter

Why do I like to eat what I like to eat? It’s a puzzle, of course. Some of it must naturally arise from the peculiarities of my specific papillary configuration. (Hey, get your mind back up here! I’m talking tastebuds.) Some preferences were undoubtedly trained into me by the provender present in the happiest associations of my infancy and childhood. A few favorites have sprung from serendipitous tastings introduced by environment, friends, or random grocery store discoveries.

And there is that wide swath of my preferences defined by three simple characteristics: sweetness, fat and umami. An unbiased observer might perceive this as a recipe for dietary disaster, especially regarding the potential for shrinkage in the vascular regions and expansion in the pants-ular regions. I will not deny that age and indiscretion have been taking me at speed down the well-buttered slopes of gravity toward ever more elastic-oriented departments at the clothiers’. I am cursed, however, with sound dentition, few allergies, unusually slick arteries, and an exceedingly forgiving self-image, and therefore delude myself consistently into flagrant indulgence. Fie upon my natural good health! It makes me  ever the more porcine in my eating habits no matter how I flatter myself I’m too wise to fall so far.

Even the recommended remedy for stopping zombies would likely fail here, if you subscribe to the old school of filling their mouths with salt and sewing their lips shut, because of course salt enhances the umami perception and you’d just end up recharging my gastronomic ghastliness. Not, I would think, your aimed-for outcome of saving me from my food-stalking madness.

Then what shall I do? Mangia, mangia! What, did you really think there was any other solution? I crave delicious things. I would no more survive a deprivation diet than I would invite a known sadist over to give me a mani-pedi. If you happen to be looking for me, then, look no farther than the nearest grocery aisle, the kitchen with the loaded larder. I will be the one moving like a monstrous threshing machine through the comestibles, making Yummy Sounds with wild abandon.

Maybe I’ll throw together a little parcel of pork chops–they go down nicely with, say, a ragout of green beans and cremini mushrooms, some buttery, fat avocado, and a crisp sweet pear . . .

Lest you think I’m utterly indiscriminate and have landed in the only possible location where one of my ilk could survive–Texas being known for both its Everything-Oversized approach to life and ‘it tastes better when it’s deep fried’ attitude toward all things edible–there are some few things I won’t eat in any quantity. I’m only mostly indiscriminate.

Especially if there are foods handy that have any combination of the previously named temptations. Sweetness plus fat? Oh, yeah. Fat plus umami? Soitanly. Sweetness plus fat plus umami? Get thee out of my way, for I must needs attack these victuals instanter!

I will admit that spending long periods of time mulling over my food-lust is probably not precisely what one would term a cure or even a mitigation of the condition. After all of my worried ruminations on this topic, however, my friend Dennis Lange over at thebardonthehill assured me in haiku that:

Calories don’t count
On any Foodie Tuesday -
It’s only blogging.

I couldn’t've said it better myself. After all, my mouth is so full.

Fresh labne with olive oil, za’atar and lime juice on warm flatbread . . .

. . . a savory treat that goes down especially well with, say, some fresh squeezed blood orange juice . . .

Brightening Our Days with Scary Stories

The news and indeed sometimes our own everyday lives provide plenty of stories of sorrow and horror and True Crime, which is–oddly enough–precisely why I like a good fictional tale of dread, doom and destruction. It’s such a relief to remember how to detach from dark and grotesque and terrifying things and even to laugh at them. But I’m mighty squeamish, when it comes to the real thing or even a too-good simulation of it, so slasher movies just don’t do the trick for me. I do need the remove and control that reading or visibly stylized and artificial images provide.

Something is amiss in the conservatory . . .

It’s why when it does come to film I love the Alfred Hitchcock classics of suspense, or the genteel Gothicism of movies like Bunny Lake is Missing, Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, and Gaslight. I avidly read the yarns of Roald Dahl and Edgar Allan Poe and Saki and their ilk, and bask in a good Henry James or Robertson Davies ghost story. I thrive on the dark-tinged fantasy of Edmund Dulac and the witty weirdness of Edward-too-good-to-be-true-named-Gorey.

Oh, yes, I’ll happily digest the terrors of a good contemporary thriller novel or the occasional modern fright-night movie, but I’m a sucker for old-school drama, it seems. Even in music, I can find lots of vicarious thrills and scare tactics in a great modern film or TV score and there are some current composers that excel in this (Danny Elfman, are your ears burning?), but my heart never ceases to lean back toward the bejeweled darkness of Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain and Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre and, if I’m in the mood for cinematic music, perhaps one of Miklós Rózsa‘s classic romantic scores.

I am haunted enough by my own spooky imaginings . . .

It’s a fine thing to have the worlds of imagination in which to safely plumb and defeat all horrors and terrors. So I do like to indulge the urge myself with stories and poems and artworks of the brooding and twisted or the cheerily perverse and demented sort whenever I need reassurance–or just want to share the twinges a little.

• What better way to find comfort on a drearily dark day than to curl up with a bit of artistic darkness?
  

Be Not Afraid of Me,

Unless You have a Good Reason

I buried the various body parts

in secret locations around the state,

reserving the heart of him I hate

to pin on the board for a game of darts,

and when it was thoroughly pierced and minced

I put on my favorite dress and heels

and danced a couple Virginia reels

before I washed up the room and rinsed,

then took the mincemeat left of the rat,

put it in the kiln for a nice hot burn,

where it made a fine glaze for a lovely urn,

and filled it with daisies, and that was that.

You might think I’m a teeny bit callous, cold,

rejoicing in vicious destructive acts,

but perhaps you’d relent if you knew the facts

and the rat’s true story at last were told–

but worry you needlessly? I? A shame,

when it’s highly unlikely by any stretch

of imagination you’d be a wretch

of such magnitude and incur the same . . .

now let us sit down for a cup of tea,

our own snug little tête-à-tête;

don’t worry about what you have just et,

unless you have reason to fear from me . . .

So what's the score on horror? Do we close the book on beastliness? Oh, no, there's ALWAYS so much more . . .

Smile and be

What looks like a smile

From this distance might

Be the bared fangs

Of monstrous threat

Or then again might be

The hateful grin

Of rigid death

So much to read

Out of a single smile

But all I need to know

Is, do I keep on

Going toward it

Who Needs Persistence when You can have Lucky Breaks?

 

Who persists, endures; who endures can astound . . .

Me, that’s who.

I have already admitted to having had more than my fair share of lucky breaks in my lifetime. And I have no intention of turning in my life-lottery tickets, either; I’ll gladly keep collecting such loot any and every time it’s tossed my way.

But it’s random. It’s unreliable. And if I’ve used up my fun-karma and crazy mountains of bliss already, I’d like to think that my skill and hard work and cleverness and dedication will fill in any resulting gaps. (Well okay, would that my good luck would grant me a quick smack on the pate first with that glittery wand imparting the necessary will and skill to make this possible.)

Lacking any guarantees of some handy grant-wishing genie, indefatigability fairy or goodness-gnome just flitting into my neighborhood on a whim, what I get to thinking is that there are all kinds of motivation and inspiration out there if I just get my own effort the slightest bit underway. When I think of family and friends, and certainly of some of the great famous icons of fortitude and endurance, those who have risen above the general tide of humanity through sheer force of personality, the strength of their own determination, their patience in times of trial and intense belief in something special well worth their doing. To be unwavering in the pursuit of what is important takes passion and faith.

I’ll have to work on that still. I’m pretty sure it’ll only happen in very little increments and at a glacial pace. That’s how it works, I guess.

So here I am, starting a blog and plodding on, day by day, trying to keep my mind hopping just enough to move forward, ever forward . . . dainty little molecule by molecule. Here I go, planning the next minor move toward putting my more of my artwork out there in the world. Here it comes, the next foray into a new phase of constant art-making practice, stumbling along and hoping that my totems and talismans of dedication and determination will push me yet further toward–what? Being a better artist, that would be terrific. Being a better person, that would be outstanding. Being committed enough to work toward getting there any way I can: that’s the real goal, and I hope with all my heart I find the fortitude to go that route.

Teach me how to do this, my friends . . .

. . . and . . .

. . . in case anyone wondered . . .

How I blue all my worries away