Where DO I Get My Ideas?

.

I have to confess to having a streak of lowbrow in my appreciation of the visual arts.  I'm a big fan of the highbrow stuff, mind you.  But like most writers I have a weakness for narrative art.  Sometimes I'll get story ideas from it.  Other times, I'll even impose a narrative on artworks where it doesn't properly belong.  "A Midwinter's Tale" was based on a show of Marc Chagall's paintings, for instance, and  "The Blind Minotaur" was derived from Pablo Picasso's Vollard Suite.

Yesterday I went to the Brandywine River Museum to see a show assembling sketches and watercolors that Andrew Wyeth painted and drew in the process of putting together a painting called The Ides of March.  (It would be a violation of copyright for me to post an image of the painting here, but you can find it easily enough on the Web, if you're curious.)

One watercolor fascinated me:  an untitled sketch of a wood fire burned down to embers.  It's a bravura piece of work showing nothing but the wood, charred to carbon mostly, though one stick is half-unburnt and white as a bone.  Smoke pulls away from it at one end.  Here and there, the embers burn bright.  It's a magnificent piece of observation.  Which fact is pointed up by a nearby watercolor of a fire painted by the great illustrator Howard Pyle; an excellent work, but not as good as Wyeth's.

I kept coming back to that one piece.  It made me want to describe a fire with similar care.  Then it made me want to write a story that would be contained within that careful description.  By the time I left, I was sure there was something there.

The tentative title for the story is, "Embers Hissing and Popping, Sparks Flying Up."  I've got some thoughts about what it's about.  Someday I'll come up with a first line.  Someday later, I'll come up with a last line.  Then I'll start writing.  My best guess is that it should be done sometime within the next five years.

Nobody ever asks me where I get my ideas.  But if they did, this would be my answer.


And, oh yeah . . .

I should probably mention that I'd just read a fantasy story which I thought got Faerie absolutely and completely wrong and which made me want to write something that would do it right.  So there's a touch of competitiveness that goes into the mix as well.


Above:  Stones in the Brandywine River Museum's courtyard.

*

Bootleg Romanticism

.

I just now read Ayn Rand's 1965 essay, "Bootleg Romanticism," not in a sardonic frame of mind but because the woman did write some very successful romantic melodramas which people bought in huge numbers despite the fact that they were punctuated by long essays about values, politics, and responsibility.  One can disagree with her philosophy and still admire the craft of that.

The essay begins by claiming that "thrillers" (quotation marks hers) are a kind of bargain-basement, skeletal form of Romantic literature.  That though lacking the literary quality of, say, Dostoyevsky, they deal with Man as an active agent of his (at the time, the convention of the male pronoun was universal, so let's not bust her chops over that) own fate, and deal with the issue of good versus evil.

So far, fine.  She goes on to single out for praise Ian Fleming and Mickey Spillane.  Not the exemplars of moral thrillers I would have chosen, but okay, I'm still listening,  "Because they provide heroes," she writes.  This is an argument that used to be common in science fiction and, I have to say, sounded just a touch jejeune even back then.

The bulk of the essay is taken up with a vigorous attack against the sort of thing she is opposed to and the sort of people who promote it:

A seedy, emasculated, uneventilated 'elite' -- a basement 'elite' transported, by default, into vacant drawing rooms and barricaded behind dusty curtains against, light, air, grammar, and reality -- today's intellectuals cling to the stagnant illusion of their altruist-collectivist upbringing: the vision of a cloddish, humble, inarticulate people whose 'voice' (and masters) they were to be.

Fierce words. But are they justified?  Can they be proved?  Will she name names?  Halfway through the essay, the Enemy has yet to be identified.  So far, there have been two quotations.  One is a brief excerpt from a New York Times review of an unidentified movie.  The other is a two-sentence synopsis of a Gunther Grass novel that had appeared in Time magazine.  Nothing in her comments suggests she has seen the movie or read the book.

Now, at last, however, Rand gets down to source of her ire:  An essay in TV Guide, praising a television show called . . . The Avengers.  She is horrified to discover that it is meant to be a parody of James Bond.  She is disgusted to learn that the show is meant to be a self-parody.  (Italics hers.)  There is nothing to suggest she has ever seen an episode.

Nevertheless, at this point Rand is confident that she has discredited James Joyce and Franz Kafka, both of whom are name-checked in the final sentence, though not a prior word was devoted to either before this, and so the essay may end.

As I said, I don't agree with Rand's philosophy.  But I expected better of her than this.

Above:  The cover of the book where I found the essay.  Does anybody know the name of the artist?  He/she did the covers of all the intellectually challenging and, often, polymorphously perverse, books back in the day. 

*

Fiction Forecast 2013

.

I received an e-letter from a reader the other day which said in part:

Will there be another batch of Mongolian Wizard stories on Tor.com in 2013?  . . . The first three stories were exceptional and I eagerly await my next encounter with Sir Toby and Franz-Karl.

Well . . . I have reasonable hopes that there will be some more Mongolian stories at Tor.com in the not too distant future.  A fourth story, "The House of Dreams," has already been accepted.   I also have two more stories partially written which I plan to get back to just as soon as I finish the current novel.  And I have plans for stories beyond them simmering away as well. 

In unrelated news, I also have a new Darger & Surplus story, "Tawny Petticoats," coming out sometime this year and at the rate I'm going, I should have the next Darger & Surplus novel, tentatively titled Chasing the Phoenix, done in a few months.

Above and beyond that, I have several stories almost completed, which I look forward to having the time to finish when the novel is done.

So, ironically enough, when it looks to all the world as if I'm doing nothing at all, I'm being fiercely productive.  This is the writer's life.  There have been times when I had work coming out all over the place and wasn't producing worth a damn.

And as always . . .
  
I'm on the road again.  But I should be back in time to post a Friday blog.  Or  blog a Friday post.  Whatever the proper construction is.

Above:  Miss Helen Hope Mrrrlees wishes you to know that she is not in the least impressed by anything I have written or, indeed, done.  Ever.

*  

Art & Whimsy in Doylestown

.

I went to the Michener Museum in Doylestown, PA, the other day. The Michener is not one of the great art museums of the world, but it's one of the great second-string art museums of the world.  Founded with money from James Michener and his wife, it's more open to representational art, narrative art, and illustrative art than many a better-funded museum, and it has interesting shows.

On this visit, the big discovery was Jerry Uelsmann, a photographer with a strong streak of whimsy to his work.   The museum played up the fact that he doesn't use Photoshop, but relies on traditional methods of developing film, dodging and burning and using multiple exposures in the darkroom.  But let's be honest, most creative work is hard work.  What matters is the end-product.  Which in Uelsmann's case is extremely good.

Here's an example:

Just across the street, incidentally, is the Mercer Museum, which is . . .  well, it's . . . it's the foremost example of a Mercer Museum type of museum in the world.  

Here's Wikipedia's explanation of founder Henry Mercer:

Henry Mercer was a gentleman anthropologist. On a cruise up the Ruhr in early adulthood, Mercer was impressed by the eclipse of artisanal culture by industrial production, and resolved himself to preserving artifacts of preindustrial life. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Mercer collected pre-industrial hand tools and other implements of the past. He believed that the story of human progress and accomplishments was told by the tools and objects that people used and saw these time-honored crafts slowly disappearing from memory.

Mercer personally designed plans for a museum to house his collection, six stories tall and cast of poured-in-place concrete. Mercer's museum was completed in 1916. In addition to tools, it displays furnishings of early America, carriages, stove plates, a gallows, antique fire engines, a whaleboat, and the Lenape Stone. The Mercer Museum Library, which houses historical research materials, is located on its third floor.

There are more whimsical places in this world, but not many.  And, dazzling as it is, the museum serves a serious function and is a useful tool for researchers.   He built it himself, with the help of two laborers and a mule.

You can find the Michener's site here. You can find the Mercer site here -- be sure to look through the photo gallery.


Above:  The rooftop of the Mercer Museum stares through Fred Schmidt's Juggler, a sculpture on the grounds of the Michener.

*

Teaching Quadrotors to Juggle

.

Here's a bit of fun to ease your transition into the weekend.

Last year, some grad students at the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich taught quadrotors to juggle.  As witness above.  That's pretty cool. 

But wait!  There's more!  One Dario Brescianini then taught quadrotors to toss poles back and forth. As witness below.

My thanks to Bud Sparhawk for bringing this to my attention.

*

Dinosaurs for Sale

.

Look what I found on Etsy!  It appears that Walters & Kissinger, the dinosaur art studio, is cleaning house.  So, briefly, you can buy museum quality art by world famous dinosaur artists for entirely affordable prices.

How affordable?  Bob Walters' Psittacosaurus illo above is available for 150 dollars.  The scientific illustration of a Giganotosaurus skull, one of the earliest ever drawn, however, is not available at any price.  Because I nabbed it for a hundred bucks.

Full disclosure here.  Bob and Tess are friends of mine.  That said, these prices are a steal.  Do a little comparison shopping, if you doubt me.

You can find the Etsy page here.

Above:  Illustration copyright by Bob Walters and used with his express permission.

*

What Makes An Editor Happiest?

.

Shown above:  superstar editor David G. Hartwell answers the ages-old question: What makes an editor happiest?

The answer, of course, is Writers' Tears.

*