Books I'm Reading: The Thirsty Muse

Tom Dardis, in The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer (Ticknor & Fields, 1989), looks at four American writers—Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and O'Neill—and their relationship with alcohol. He argues that, while these men believed drinking aided their creativity or was even essential to it, alcohol was more often responsible for their creative decline.

The book asks why so many American authors have been alcoholics. Dardis points out that of the eight Americans that have received the Nobel Prize in literature (at the time the book was written), five were alcoholics. The number of winners has swelled, however, and the list would in any case depend on how one defines "American." I had to look it up, but the group would now be: 1930 Sinclair Lewis, 1936 Eugene O'Neill, 1938 Pearl S. Buck, 1949 William Faulkner, 1954 Ernest Hemingway, 1962 John Steinbeck, 1976 Saul Bellow, 1978 Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1987 Joseph Brodsky, 1993 Toni Morrison, and 2016 Bob Dylan. As none of the last three appear to have been alcoholics, the argument has been somewhat dimmed by time, and Dardis never really answers the question of why there have been so many drunk American writers (including plenty that were not Nobel Prize winners). The book also seemed a little flawed in its assumptions about the nature of alcoholism the disease, which in places seemed a trifle out of date. Nevertheless, the book is nicely written, engaging, and fascinating for its details of the lives of four important writers, particularly details about the role that writing for Hollywood had in the lives of Faulkner and Fitzgerald (in both cases, the only way they could make money once publishers began rejecting their work). Worth the time.   

Books I'm Reading: How to Write About Contemporary Art

The lessons author Gilda Williams offers in her concise treatise on good art writing How to Write About Contemporary Art (Thames & Hudson, 2014) could apply to writing about most anything, not only contemporary art. She attributes the large amount of bad art writing we encounter to a general lack of appreciation for the skills good art writing requires, pointing out that much art writing is assigned to people unprepared to handle it, and often assigned to such people because those assigning the task assume anyone can write about art well.

She first poses an important question: Why write about art at all? She answers by pointing out that there are many different types of art writing—writing for different purposes and different audiences that require different approaches. The main divide she suggests is between writing that explains and writing that evaluates. In the former category she includes news articles, museum wall captions, web collection articles, press releases, and auction catalog entries. In the latter, she includes academic assignments, exhibition and book reviews, op-ed journalism, magazine articles, catalogue essays, and grant, exhibition, or book proposals, while acknowledging that much art writing today straddles the two realms. In all art writing she suggests the first, perhaps most important, rule is to "...attempt, sincerely, to render artwork more meaningful, more enjoyable, attaching 'something more and better' to art and life than without it" (the interior quote using the words of New Yorker senior critic Peter Schjeldahl).

More specifically, she suggests good art writing succeeds at three things: 1) telling the reader what the art is (what it looks like); 2) telling the reader what the art might mean; and 3) telling the reader why it might matter to the world at large. Much of the text deals with explaining how to achieve these three goals while substantiating positions with facts and avoiding jargon and vagueness—particularly the vagueness caused by explaining one abstract concept with another equally abstract one, the hallmark of much pretentious, incomprehensible art writing.

The ideas are clearly presented and illustrated with many examples. While much of what Williams writes will be familiar to seasoned writers, it never hurts to be reminded of what makes good writing good. I suspect this book will be useful to anyone who regularly engages in critical writing about any kind of creative pursuit.

Words I'm Writing: A Poem (April 1, 2014)

I generally don't like reading poetry. Too often it's cryptic. Too often it's self-indulgent--little more than an author's in-joke--deliberately obfuscatory, or simply obscure, but that doesn't keep me from once in a while perpetrating the same.

Pearl

A pearl

Is what an oyster conjures—

A sheath of smooth, bright nacre

Over sand that wounds

But what oyster

On what wave-lashed rock

Is ever asked to form a pearl

Not over jagged sand

But to fend against

What is keenly longed for—not once in a lifetime but twice—

To shut away the selfsame haunting grain? 

I began this more than five years ago. I came across it today by chance and changed a few words that finally made it seem finished. Virtually no one will understand it, but I imagine poems are somewhat easier to decipher than visual art, which I fairly regularly create while feeling no need to explain. So, here is a poem: Make of it what you will.