But Is It Art?

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I mentioned yesterday that I'd been to Grounds for Sculpture in New Jersey.  Not all of their work is outdoors.  There are small indoor pieces too.

Above is a snapshot I took of something I saw in an exhibition hall.  The question I'd like to pose for you is:  Is it art or not?  And if not, why not?

Answer below.




And if I'm allowed to grouse . . .

Did everybody notice that Shirley Jackson made it into the Library of America,  the closest thing this country has to an official literary canon?  And how about that review in the New York Times Sunday Book Review?

It really ticked me off.

Essentially, the review is a pathology.  It says:  Here's what was wrong with Shirley Jackson, and how it defines everything she wrote.  It ends with a brief discussion of Merrycat, the protagonist of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, who in the concluding judgment:

. . . manages to turn her crumbling family home, where she lives with her sister and her dotty uncle, into a pure expression of her own childish and profoundly unstable personality, a playhouse of disturbed dreams. It’s a place for her to hide, deep in herself, safe from the sinister encroaching of the outside world. In a way, Merricat’s crazy house is where writers go when they write, that quiet spot where nothing is ever as peaceful as it seems. It’s where Shirley Jackson went, anyway, and where she stayed, the scary place that felt like home to her.

Now, I understand that in today's celebrity culture, all artists are judged by gossip.  But this particular riff is even more pernicious than that.  It's a late survival of a sexist explanation of why there are women artists of genius when clearly there shouldn't be.

Here's how it goes:  Genius, whether literary or artistic, is a primal force, extremely powerful and even destructive in nature.  It takes great strength to contain it within a human being.  Men have this strength but women, being the weaker sex physically, morally, and intellectually, do not.  Sometimes one will suffer the misfortune of having genius and it will inevitably warp her into something ugly and unhappy and inhuman.

This is not my theory, remember.  I think it's self-evident horse hockey.

But it's something that was endemic to Academia for a long, long time.  It's the reason why women were discouraged from going into the arts.  To protect the poor little dears.

There was a story I heard several times when in college that upon hearing of Sylvia Plath's suicide, Anne Sexton had in a rage accused Plath of stealing her death.  It was always told approvingly, and never by women.

Yeah, okay, being human we're going to gossip about Jackson, the same way we do about Dylan Thomas or H. P. Lovecraft.  But it's wrong to define the art -- which is the best thing about any of us -- as a subset of the gossip.  Shirley Jackson wrote brilliant and enduring works and the appearance of her Library of America volume should be the occasion for a joyous celebration of them.  With cake and multicolored balloons.

We can always be catty after the party's over.


Above:  It is and isn't art.  The tubs were put out to solicit contributions from the public of found objects that the Grounds for Sculpture's current artist-in-residence can use to create a new piece.  Looks a lot like art already, dunnit?

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Grounds for Sculpture

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Friday, Marianne and I made a flying visit to take a brief look at Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, New Jersey.  That's just outside of Trenton,   You can find their website here.

G for S is basically an enormous sculpture park featuring work by "well-known and emerging artists."  That means no Brancusi, Bourgeois, Calder, Nevelson, Picasso, Giacometti, or Oldenburg.  But lots and lots of serious art, some of it challenging and all of it in astonishingly beautiful surroundings.  I'm convinced that landscapers must go there to look at the settings and ignore the art.

And of course there is a special pleasure in discovering artists you were not aware of previously.  This October there'll be an exhibition of Deborah Butterfield's cast-bronze driftwood horses.  They're astonishing.


And I'm just saying . . .

I was glancing at an oldish book of criticism the other day and abruptly jotted down the following critical joi d'esprit.

Enjoy!

The Shortest (Despite Its Title) Essay You Will Read This Year or Indeed Decade and Possibly Even Century Dealing With the Critic John Clute's Collection of Reviews Scores Which Actually Manages Almost Despite Itself to Say Something Meaningful About the Book as a Whole

The other day, I decided to look at Scores structurally -- how it begins and how it ends.  The book has an introduction, followed by a decade's reviews, followed by an afterword.  The introduction begins "Here is another book."  The text proper begins "Here is a short story about academia."  The reviews end "It is, after all, a story best understood as sf, a story about the best  case in the world."  The afterword ends "We are all going to die if we do not say something good."

So for Clute it all begins and ends with and as story.  But we keep in mind that he believes  -- and in the book frequently states -- that science fiction is effectively over, then it is obvious that, to Clute, what begins with a symbolic birth ("It's a fiction!") necessarily ends in a bitterly regretted death.

Above:  Carmelita by Austin Wright.  Apparently it lights up at night.

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Two Out of Three of Us Have Left the Planet!

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My friend Alexei Bezouglyi has sent me copies of the photos of me with Belka and Strelka, the first mammals to orbit the Earth and return safely.  On their deaths they were stuffed and placed on display in Moscow, just so someday an American science fiction writer could get his picture taken with them.

As Marianne likes to say (quoting  the comic book Planetary):  "It's a strange world.  Let's keep it that way."


And if I can be serious for a moment . . .

The history of the space race, as written by Americans goes:  We got to the Moon first.  We won.

But the reason we declared that the first nation to the Moon would win was that the USSR had already put the first satellite in orbit, put the first man in space, and sent up the first vehicle to return photos from the dark side of the Moon.  We desperately needed something we could win.  If the Soviet Union had reached the Moon before us, there would probably be Americans on Mars today.

Not to belittle the American accomplishments in space, which are genuine and well-documented.  Just to give credit where it's due.

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Little Arrow and Squirrel

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Fifty years and eight days ago, two dogs became the first animals ever to orbit the Earth in a spacecraft and return alive.  The August 18, 1960 flight was a major step in the Soviet space program.

Belka (Squirrel) and Strelka (Little Arrow) were not the first dogs in space.  That honor went to Laika (Barker) who on November 3, 1957 went up on Sputnik 2, only a month after the first artificial satellite was placed in orbit.  But because no provision had been made to return Laika to Earth, he died in space.

There were also two dogs who died when their rocket exploded seconds after takeoff.

The Soviet space program was far in advance of the American program at that time, but it was by today's standards a primitive thing.  Yet eight months later it launched the first human being, Yuri Gagarin, into space.

Belka and Strelka were both small dogs, so chosen because their capsule was not large.  They were also strays, because it was thought they would be tougher and more adaptable than pampered domestic dogs.    Not only did they survive the flight but Strelka later had six puppies.  Nikita Kruschev gave one of them, Pushinka (Fluffy) to John F. Kennedy's daughter Caroline.

I would have posted all this a week ago, but it's taken me this long to admit that I'm not going to be able to find the photograph of me with one of the two canine heroes of the Soviet space program.  Somewhere, however, it exists.  After they died, they were stuffed and placed in the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics in Moscow.

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Creators Across America

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That admirable organization, the Copyright Alliance, has posted the latest installment in their Creators Across America series, an interview with . . . well . . . me.

There it is above.

I haven't looked at it yet but Marianne tells me I came across okay.  For which I am duly grateful to the video's creator, Patrick Ross.


Oh, and speaking of teeshirts . . .

. . . as we of course were not, there was an article in the Inquirer today about the guy who came up with the shirt pictured below.  He discovered he needed such a thing only after moving to the West Coast.

Which put me in mind of the time I opened a reading in Seattle by saying, "Your city is so beautiful.  If I'd come here as a teenager I would've stayed forever.  But I've lived in Philadelphia too long.  Now I could never feel comfortable in a city where if you cut across the street people will stop their cars just because you're in their fucking way!"

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Admit It . . .

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You've always wondered where all those royal dicks came from.

Now you know.


Above:  Snapshot taken in Edinburgh.  Feel free to pass it along.

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Tea With Jane Yolen

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Probably the single best perk about being a writer is getting to hang out with other writers.  When I was in Chengdu, the editors of Science Fiction World showed their foreign guests all the local sights and threw banquets with extraordinary entertainments (including a truly astonishing mask-dancer) . . .  and yet the highlight was the evening we spent in a tea house, talking with our Chinese counterparts.

While I was in Scotland, Marianne and I, along with our friends Gail and Rob, dropped by Jane Yolen's house for tea.  That's Jane up above, sitting before the enormously tall window in the Great Hall.  Her house, you see, was designed by Sir Robert Stodart Lorimer, the second most famous architect of the Arts and Crafts movement.  (The most famous was Charles Rennie Mackintosh.  "They treated him so badly here that he left," Jane said of him.  "Lorimer stayed in Scotland.  That's why he's not as well known.")

I'd have to write a full-length article to do justice to the house.  There's what Lorimer called the Minstrel Gallery overlooking the Great Hall, with hand-carved paneling under the railing, stained-glass windows in the kitchen, Medieval-inspired door latches, some extremely nice plastering, a marvelous tiled fireplace . . .  All of which comes together in a harmonious manner that makes simply being there a pleasure.

It's hard to picture a more appropriate house for a storyteller.

So Jane set out a generous selection of food and a pot of tea )several times replenished) and we talked.  We talked about architecture, and Scottish cheeses, and local restaurants, and life in New England, and the Festival Fringe, and Mary Queen of Scots, and children's literature, and fantasy literature, and publishing, and a hundred things more.  Including the fact -- I've mentioned this before -- that she's just finished her three hundredth book.

Three hundred books!  That's a hell of an accomplishment.  I was happy for Jane that she had such a lovely house.  But that fact made me even happier for her.

And of course the two facts are not entirely unrelated.

Above right:  A door handle.

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