02 August 2010
Beth & Andy
Here's a little teaser from an engagement shoot with my dear friends Beth Gockley and Andrew Petro, who will be getting married this coming April!
06 June 2010
Notes on Creativity
a creative essay from the first issue of New Fraktur
One.
To create from nothing. The most difficult thing; the most dangerous. Simultaneous glorification and absolution of the self. This self that can create; this self that ceases to exist in the face of the thing created.
Show me an idea that I may touch it.
The ownership of the palm of the hand. Since speaking, man has said mine, mine, mine--the province of sweat and toil, of thought process and involvement, of claim-staking, of ownership, of owning, of one's own. the province of the one who dares seek it first.
What is the boundary of an idea? Where does it exist? Where doesn't it? When does it become one's own?: The moment it germinates.
O, seed; o, growth! O, fertile soil and the action of tilling. The intimately personal joy of the harvest.
Two.
The qualitative element over the quantitative.
Ars Poetica
like pulling teeth
like giving birth
like the pressure in the lungs from holding breath underwater.
like orgasm--a little death, the focus on one small center of the body, intensely personal, distorting, brief euphoria, only ever brief
like none of these things
a battle for the most accurate
the place in the world where the ideal of a thing lies; carving out layers and layers to get closer to the ideal, to the thing itself, the purest form
false journey towards revelation
said, unsaid, re-said
glimmer of hope of possibility of newness--maybe not a new idea, but a new perspective
unfamiliarizing to recreate
ground up; sideways; a lens convex, concave, flat, magnifying; different ways of seeing
not to lie
What is a road but an indirect method of achieving x?
Are there true straight lines in the world?
Places where there is truth in art:
the idea before articulated
color unsullied
not the language of emotion--emotion ephemeral, truth maintaining
accuracy, exactness, fact
the word representing the thing is not the thing itself but instead stands in for the thing but lies if it represents that the thing is other than it is
blessing in disguise
stagnation--stagnant--stagnation
a means of re-stimulation
means and ends, means or ends
ends
ends
ends
beginnings
Three.
The belief in inspiration:
Ascribes no power to your own mind. What is inspiration? Can you touch it? Is it atomic? A broken synapse? External? Like a cartoon bolt of lightning striking the "create" center of the brain? Onto the page/canvas/tape/&c. by osmosis from random particles in the air, fingers as a malleable catalyst?
The existence of a watch presupposes the existence of a watchmaker. He is not "inspired" to his craft, coming to its knowledge with the suddenness and force of a sneeze. He is patient, diligent; he fails, disassembles and begins again. He improves his dexterity wielding tiny screwdrivers, screws, to reach into the smallest spaces and connect them. He is patient; he creates many poor timepieces. He relies on habituation; he relies on skills acquired through repetition; his watches tell accurate time; he is patient.
The man who guards time and its measure relies on his mind, his knowledge, his memory. Why should we, as artists, require anything less of ourselves? Why undercut the powers of our own minds?
It is worrisome, to rely so heavily on oneself alone. It is fearsome; it is frightening; it is exciting. It is strength, or truth, unlooked for.
One.
To create from nothing. The most difficult thing; the most dangerous. Simultaneous glorification and absolution of the self. This self that can create; this self that ceases to exist in the face of the thing created.
Show me an idea that I may touch it.
The ownership of the palm of the hand. Since speaking, man has said mine, mine, mine--the province of sweat and toil, of thought process and involvement, of claim-staking, of ownership, of owning, of one's own. the province of the one who dares seek it first.
What is the boundary of an idea? Where does it exist? Where doesn't it? When does it become one's own?: The moment it germinates.
O, seed; o, growth! O, fertile soil and the action of tilling. The intimately personal joy of the harvest.
Two.
The qualitative element over the quantitative.
Ars Poetica
like pulling teeth
like giving birth
like the pressure in the lungs from holding breath underwater.
like orgasm--a little death, the focus on one small center of the body, intensely personal, distorting, brief euphoria, only ever brief
like none of these things
a battle for the most accurate
the place in the world where the ideal of a thing lies; carving out layers and layers to get closer to the ideal, to the thing itself, the purest form
false journey towards revelation
said, unsaid, re-said
glimmer of hope of possibility of newness--maybe not a new idea, but a new perspective
unfamiliarizing to recreate
ground up; sideways; a lens convex, concave, flat, magnifying; different ways of seeing
not to lie
What is a road but an indirect method of achieving x?
Are there true straight lines in the world?
Places where there is truth in art:
the idea before articulated
color unsullied
not the language of emotion--emotion ephemeral, truth maintaining
accuracy, exactness, fact
the word representing the thing is not the thing itself but instead stands in for the thing but lies if it represents that the thing is other than it is
blessing in disguise
stagnation--stagnant--stagnation
a means of re-stimulation
means and ends, means or ends
ends
ends
ends
beginnings
Three.
The belief in inspiration:
Ascribes no power to your own mind. What is inspiration? Can you touch it? Is it atomic? A broken synapse? External? Like a cartoon bolt of lightning striking the "create" center of the brain? Onto the page/canvas/tape/&c. by osmosis from random particles in the air, fingers as a malleable catalyst?
The existence of a watch presupposes the existence of a watchmaker. He is not "inspired" to his craft, coming to its knowledge with the suddenness and force of a sneeze. He is patient, diligent; he fails, disassembles and begins again. He improves his dexterity wielding tiny screwdrivers, screws, to reach into the smallest spaces and connect them. He is patient; he creates many poor timepieces. He relies on habituation; he relies on skills acquired through repetition; his watches tell accurate time; he is patient.
The man who guards time and its measure relies on his mind, his knowledge, his memory. Why should we, as artists, require anything less of ourselves? Why undercut the powers of our own minds?
It is worrisome, to rely so heavily on oneself alone. It is fearsome; it is frightening; it is exciting. It is strength, or truth, unlooked for.
17 December 2009
The Serenity of Dawn
Perhaps it's the coolness of the air. December frigidity gets a reprieve from its reputation: the cold is still biting, but not spiteful. It's a cold that portends warmth later. A cold that sharpens the edges of everything it touches. Not as a saw but as a nearer approach to the reality of the thing. The promise of clarity.
Or perhaps it's the clouds. Much-traveled territory made strange by the pre-dawn dark. It isn't until the road bends south that I notice a strip of clear sky beneath the thick cloud bank. The sky lightening; the clouds a deep, rich pink. Sunrise on Mars.
The day beginning in the sky. In the certainty of motion honed by custom into skill. My fingers touching on the far side of the steering wheel.
Or perhaps it's the clouds. Much-traveled territory made strange by the pre-dawn dark. It isn't until the road bends south that I notice a strip of clear sky beneath the thick cloud bank. The sky lightening; the clouds a deep, rich pink. Sunrise on Mars.
The day beginning in the sky. In the certainty of motion honed by custom into skill. My fingers touching on the far side of the steering wheel.
23 October 2009
Howl for Carl Solomon
As a student of literature, one typically finds oneself edged towards The Classics, the literary canon, all the works that themselves form the literary tradition. This is partially because that's how the curriculum "has always been done" and partially because The Classics are so for a reason and greatness has a way of making itself felt at whatever epoch.
As a student of the art of writing, however, it's quite the opposite; we as writers are encouraged to steep ourselves in the contemporary; to be of-the-moment in our subject matter, our style and diction, and our understanding. In my current quest to read all the books in my little library that I bought and never touched, I recently encountered a poet whose writing managed to elude me within both of these paradigms--the theory and the practice. Unquestionably, I would place Allen Ginsberg within an essential canon of modern literature, with Howl probably on my list of Top Ten Poems that Shaped Modern Poetic Thought. (Forthcoming. Obviously.) How I managed to eke out a university education without ever reading it mystifies me; nevertheless.
Much of the subject matter of Howl was widely contested as obscene when it was published; there's truth in this, but in spite of the obscenity, there is much that is beautiful, startling and painful. The pieces that struck me most poignantly are what I choose to share here.
From the introduction by William Carlos Williams:
"It is a howl of defeat. Not defeat at all for he has gone through defeat as if it were an ordinary experience, a trivial experience. Everyone in this life is defeated but a man, if he be a man, is not defeated."
"...the spirit of love survives to ennoble our lives if we have the wit and the courage and the faith--and the art! to persist. It is the belief in the art of poetry that has gone hand in hand with this man into his Golgotha..."
"We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness. Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels."
From Howl for Carl Solomon, by Allen Ginsberg:
"I saw the best minds of my generation desroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked..."
"...incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between..."
"...whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes..."
"...who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task..."
"...who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons..."
"...who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade..."
"...who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second..."
"...returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East / Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon..."
"...to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head..."
"...and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio / with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years."
"I'm with you in Rockland / where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse"
"I'm with you in Rockland / in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night"
From the Footnote to Howl:
"The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy!"
"Holy the solitudes of skyscrapers and pavements!"
"Holy time in eternity holy eternity in time holy the clocks in space holy the fourth dimension..."
"Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!"
As a student of the art of writing, however, it's quite the opposite; we as writers are encouraged to steep ourselves in the contemporary; to be of-the-moment in our subject matter, our style and diction, and our understanding. In my current quest to read all the books in my little library that I bought and never touched, I recently encountered a poet whose writing managed to elude me within both of these paradigms--the theory and the practice. Unquestionably, I would place Allen Ginsberg within an essential canon of modern literature, with Howl probably on my list of Top Ten Poems that Shaped Modern Poetic Thought. (Forthcoming. Obviously.) How I managed to eke out a university education without ever reading it mystifies me; nevertheless.
Much of the subject matter of Howl was widely contested as obscene when it was published; there's truth in this, but in spite of the obscenity, there is much that is beautiful, startling and painful. The pieces that struck me most poignantly are what I choose to share here.
From the introduction by William Carlos Williams:
"It is a howl of defeat. Not defeat at all for he has gone through defeat as if it were an ordinary experience, a trivial experience. Everyone in this life is defeated but a man, if he be a man, is not defeated."
"...the spirit of love survives to ennoble our lives if we have the wit and the courage and the faith--and the art! to persist. It is the belief in the art of poetry that has gone hand in hand with this man into his Golgotha..."
"We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness. Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels."
From Howl for Carl Solomon, by Allen Ginsberg:
"I saw the best minds of my generation desroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked..."
"...incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between..."
"...whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes..."
"...who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task..."
"...who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons..."
"...who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade..."
"...who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second..."
"...returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East / Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon..."
"...to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head..."
"...and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio / with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years."
"I'm with you in Rockland / where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse"
"I'm with you in Rockland / in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night"
From the Footnote to Howl:
"The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy!"
"Holy the solitudes of skyscrapers and pavements!"
"Holy time in eternity holy eternity in time holy the clocks in space holy the fourth dimension..."
"Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!"
11 October 2009
Ise gots t'flow again...
Oh, hello again, blogosphere!
(Katie spends several minutes contemplating the term "blogosphere" and its sister sufferers, other bastard children sprung from stops along the information super-highway: Twitterverse, to Google, Myspace picture, to Facebook, and *shudder* e-vite. Unprofitable digression.)
You guessed it: This is yet another late-night-and-Gertrude-Hawk-smidgen-(yeah, I said it)-fueled attempt to make the internet work for me. With the advent of my royal purple netbook in my life, I feel like I can take on anything, Monopoly City Streets notwithstanding. (Dude--that game is kicking my ass!) It means more time engaged in active work, less time spent adjusting the network of rubber bands holding the power cord in place. It means increased mobility, less dependence on others for help, a new perspective on my own capabilities; really, it means a new lease on my intellectual life.
Is it just me, or is this starting to sound like a Rascal scooter commercial? My favorite is the one where the child rides circles around his grandmother on his little red tricycle: "You're motorized and I'm still faster than you, Murder She Wrote!"
My advice to you upon entering my little consciousness-awareness project?
1. Check your expectations. Things not to expect from me: Politics, except as an off-handed joke, religion, potty humor, anything from the news or world events. Things you might possibly expect: Sports enthusiasm, poems, photographs, nostalgia, ranting stories from Lotion Land (Seriously, lady? Every coupon you've ever gotten from anyone anywhere ever has a start date in addition to an end date. Cross my heart.), Homestar Runner/The Office references, questions to which I really want answers, arts and crafts homework... The list is fairly limitless, in other words.
2. Shop early, shop often.
3. Don't ask me any questions to which you don't actually want to know my answers. The only ego I'm interested in protecting is my own; also Skippy's, but to a lesser extent.
4. Bring a friend. And a bottle of wine. It's a party.
And you're...*shudder*...e-vited.
(Katie spends several minutes contemplating the term "blogosphere" and its sister sufferers, other bastard children sprung from stops along the information super-highway: Twitterverse, to Google, Myspace picture, to Facebook, and *shudder* e-vite. Unprofitable digression.)
You guessed it: This is yet another late-night-and-Gertrude-Hawk-smidgen-(yeah, I said it)-fueled attempt to make the internet work for me. With the advent of my royal purple netbook in my life, I feel like I can take on anything, Monopoly City Streets notwithstanding. (Dude--that game is kicking my ass!) It means more time engaged in active work, less time spent adjusting the network of rubber bands holding the power cord in place. It means increased mobility, less dependence on others for help, a new perspective on my own capabilities; really, it means a new lease on my intellectual life.
Is it just me, or is this starting to sound like a Rascal scooter commercial? My favorite is the one where the child rides circles around his grandmother on his little red tricycle: "You're motorized and I'm still faster than you, Murder She Wrote!"
My advice to you upon entering my little consciousness-awareness project?
1. Check your expectations. Things not to expect from me: Politics, except as an off-handed joke, religion, potty humor, anything from the news or world events. Things you might possibly expect: Sports enthusiasm, poems, photographs, nostalgia, ranting stories from Lotion Land (Seriously, lady? Every coupon you've ever gotten from anyone anywhere ever has a start date in addition to an end date. Cross my heart.), Homestar Runner/The Office references, questions to which I really want answers, arts and crafts homework... The list is fairly limitless, in other words.
2. Shop early, shop often.
3. Don't ask me any questions to which you don't actually want to know my answers. The only ego I'm interested in protecting is my own; also Skippy's, but to a lesser extent.
4. Bring a friend. And a bottle of wine. It's a party.
And you're...*shudder*...e-vited.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)