A Painting a Day in Support of the NEA: Repin's Portrait of Mussorgsky

My protest of Trump's proposal to cut funding to the NEA and other arts organizations continues. Every day I will post a great work of art as a reminder of what could easily be lost in the shuffle of more "useful" government spending.

Here is the great Russian painter Ilya Repin's famous portrait of the equally famous Russian composer, Modest Mussorgsky (1881). Painted only a few days before Mussorgsky's death, it is an amazing psychological portrait of a tortured, tragically flawed, yet oddly dignified artist. Mussorgsky was a member of "The Mighty Five," a group of Russian nationalist composers who more or less put Russian music on the map (also included Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, Balakirev, and Cui). Sadly, Mussorgsky was riddled with self-doubt and drank himself into oblivion, almost stifling his outsized talent and revolutionary sensibilities. Repin recognized a uniquely Russian character in Mussorgsky, as we see from the hollow stare and his bedraggled appearance. Yet even so, he strikes a defiant pose, as if aware that he has a powerful message that he will never be able to share with the world. He is a portrait of neglect and ridicule, yet he seems conscious of his worth, even when he most denies it. A bottle might be in one of his hands, just out of view, but eternity is in his grasp--though sadly, it might take his death to reach it. Today, Mussorgsky's opera Boris Godunov is in the standard repertoire, as is his haunting evocation of Halloween, A Night on Bald Mountain, and Ravel's orchestration of his beautiful piano suite, Pictures at an Exhibition. This painting, too, is a kind of orchestration of the man himself, who only existed in an unfinished piano sketch--showing us the face he presented to society, and the one that slumbered beneath--visible only in his music. 

A Work of Art a Day in Support of the NEA: Dore's Illustrations of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Recently, Trump proposed cutting funds to the NEA, PBS, and tons of arts organizations, as if they're just so much fluff that's crowding the budget. The loss of support for the arts will impoverish our culture drastically, not just by encouraging new artists, but by removing agencies, such as PBS, who provide many children and students with their first contact to the rich heritage of the arts in our civilization. Millions of works can be silenced by such an act, and people can grow up with no idea that Beethoven wrote symphonies, or Monet painted cathedrals, or Shakespeare wrote plays. Education isn't a push-button process--you need great material to work with, and that in turn inspires great teachers. By cavalierly cutting these programs, our country might as well say "to hell with culture," and "to hell with our souls." 

In light of this, I've been posting a great painting every day on Facebook (and now here) as a protest to what we stand to lose in the face of such indifference. Please share these works yourself or share others you like, because the only thing that destroys art is not knowing of its existence. 

In 1876, the great artist Gustave Dore made a series of engravings to illustrate Coleridge's masterpiece, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798). While on some level a work of literature needs no illustrations other than the ones we provide in our mind, illustrations are a great way to collaborate with a work and redefine it for a new generation. Dore added a human element somewhat missing in the original, and looked back on it from the perspective of later horror and supernatural literature like Frankenstein and Poe's short stories. His stark, black and white engravings make the poem seem much more frightening than the original, but also anchor us right into the poem itself, since each image is beautifully tied to a specific moment in the text. These engravings remind us that all forms of art echo one another and can enrich the readers' experience, which is why art never dies, but grows stronger over the years and centuries. When I read Dore, I appreciate Coleridge even more, and Dore encourages me to find my own interpretations and extrapolations of Coleridge's vision.

The Art of Reading Indie

Can anyone be beautiful if someone doesn’t say to them, “I think you’re beautiful”? Can anyone be intelligent if the results of a test don’t confirm “you’re a genius”? And more pertinent to our discussion, can any book be good if not validated by a 4 or 5 star review? Can a book without reviews at all be good in any sense of the word? Doesn’t someone need to tell us it is? Otherwise, isn’t beauty, intelligence, and artistic worth a relative term, utterly meaningless without a verifiable source?

To me, the question of indie writers and books comes down to this simple question. When you browse the shelves of a bookstore or library, you implicitly know that these books have been curated for you by the experts. Not only publishers, but booksellers, sales charts, award committees, and librarians have each had their say, and personally picked through the debris of literature to offer these chosen gems: these are good and worth your time, they seem to say. So even if you take a book and decide it’s not for you, the reason isn’t that the book itself is bad, or comes from an inferior pen; it simply wasn’t your cup of tea, or what you were in the mood for. You don’t take it personally (or most of us don’t). 

Playing With Words

Langston Hughes reportedly wrote out drafts of poems on napkins or whatever spare material he had on hand, often composing right in the thick of things in a club or coffee house. When someone asked him why he didn’t invest in some more permanent writing material, he responded that writing on napkins wasn’t “for real,” and it allowed him to make mistakes and not take it so seriously. And he’s right: try writing a poem or the beginning of a story on a napkin sometime, or the back of a menu, or even on your own hand. There’s a sense of play in the activity, a sense that you’re not really writing, just giving it a shot. It’s probably the best cure for writer’s block known to man or woman: change the medium, and you change the writing. 

Racing To The Future: Charting Diversity in Science Fiction

What color is the future? Who inhabits it? What do we call the cultures or races of the 24^th century? There’s no easy answer to these questions, though science fiction has always attempted to answer them, even in times when such topics were largely taboo. Most comic book lovers are familiar with EC comics’ story “Judgment Day” (Weird Fantasy #18, 1953) which tackles the subject of 1950’s race head-on. In the story, a representative of Earth lands on the planet Cybrinia, “Planet of Mechanical Life.” The planet is inhabited by two species of robots: the orange robots and the blue robots. Tarlton, ambassador from “Earth Colonization,” is greeted by a contingent of orange robots, who take him on a tour of their city: he is shown their technology, their government, and finally, their means of production. The ambassador is puzzled that he doesn’t see blue robots anywhere in the facility, though is told that they work elsewhere. While impressed with the means of building and educating their new robots (after a brief apprenticeship, they get to choose their own vocation), he insists on seeing where the blue robots are constructed. Nervously, his robot guide answers, “Well…you’ll have to go over to Blue Town…on the South side of the city for that!” 

You Are What You Read

Image from Jeffers, The Incredible Book-Eating Boy

In the Renaissance, when books were quite scarce and each one a precious object, owning a library was a sign of either wealth or eccentricity. Cardinal Bessarion (1403-1472) assiduously tried to assemble, piece by piece, most of the forgotten learning of the Greek and ancient world before it was irretrievably lost. As he explained in a letter, 

“I tried, to the best of my ability, to collect books for their quality rather than their quantity, and to find single volumes of single works; and so I assembled almost all the works of the wise men of Greece, especially those which were rare and difficult to find…They must be preserved in a place that is both safe and accessible, for the general good of all readers” (Jardine, Worldly Goods).

For Bessarion, there was a difference between many books and good books: he was willing to exhaust his time and coffers to find “quality” rather than simply amass a library. Even a Cardinal knew they needed a richer, more varied diet than 15^th century Europe offered to the masses. If every dish represents a culture, then so, too, each book represents a whole history of ideas, preserved in careful thought and language. By reading the great works of the ancients, he hoped to bring about a true Renaissance of learning, as if books alone could resurrect the academies and agoras of the ancient philosophers.

Would You Rather Read or Play a Novel?

In an old episode of Star Trek: Voyager (“Future’s End, Part I,”: Season 3, 1996), the crew travels from the 24th century to late 20th century Earth, there to encounter the wonders of ‘modern’ civilization, including soap operas. As Neelix (the crew’s cook) tries to explain the intricacies of a specific episode, Ensign Harry Kim is puzzled, remarking “how strange to watch a story you don’t interact with.” He is of course referring to the Holodeck, where the crew literally becomes part of their favorite stories, be it Beowulf or a desperate defense of the Alamo. In the 24th century, stories are meant to be lived in and through—not as passive intellectual entertainment. In a sense, it is the ultimate merging of literature and video games, where classic stories can be re-lived and re-imagined, a basic story template upon which a ‘reader’ can play different roles that lead to unexpected outcomes. 

Giacchino's Rogue One: A Soundtrack Story

Many people were understandably upset (myself included) when we learned that John Williams would not score Rogue One, though he thankfully remains committed to Episode VIII, and we assume, IX. After all, there has never been a Star Wars installment without Williams, from the familiar fanfare to the trademark themes and leitmotifs. But Rogue One always set out to be something different, not part of the trilogy proper, but an addendum, showing us the behind-the-scenes work that led to the heroics of Luke, Han, and Leia. To add to our collective confusion, the composer tapped to provide this installment, Alexandre Desplat, was replaced at the last minute with the uber-busy film composer, Michael Giacchino, fresh off his magnificent score for Doctor Strange. If we believe the press, Giacchino had a mere four weeks to score the entire film—no laughing matter for an epic that spans over two hours of screen time. However, I wonder whether or not that was simply to lower expectations for the score and deflect criticism of a non-Williams work? Either way, what we hear in the film—and on disc or MP3—are simply the notes, no matter how they were composed. After all, Mozart wrote the famous overture to Don Giovanni in the hours before its first performance, and his even more famous Symphony No.36 in a week. So why not a film score in four? 

A Musical Mount Everest: 36 Hours and 104 Symphonies With Joseph Haydn

One of the most daunting tasks in classical music is navigating the symphonic output of Joseph Haydn, the so-called “father” of the symphony. For most composers, the symphony is the most august, serious, philosophical statement one can make in music. A symphony is like a four-act play, with each act/movement capturing something of the struggle of being human, or of contemplating the divine. Even a light-hearted symphony is written ‘big,’ for the gargantuan modern symphony orchestra (often over one hundred players strong) and made to sound like the entire universe is singing. For this reason, many composers wait until middle-age to tackle a symphony, if only because the greatest composers are in their rear-view mirror, seeming hoarding the best themes, structures, and innovations. 

FREE to Download this Friday-Saturday: The Count of the Living Death

This Friday-Saturday you can download my second novel for FREE, a comic gothic-fantasy novel following the exploits of a pampered count, an eccentric magician, a no-nonsense countess-to-be, a mysterious half-brother, and a menacing chest which hides unspeakable terrors under three magic locks. It's not quite as serious as it all sounds (or is it?), and it makes for a quick, enjoyable read, especially for those who enjoy books like The Hobbit, The Princess Bride, and the great comic-Gothic book that started it all, The Castle of Otranto.

Click on the link to download the book on your Kindle or Kindle app: https://www.amazon.com/Count-Living-Chronicles-Hildigrim-Blackbeard-ebook/dp/B00FQ6711Y/ref=pd_rhf_gw_s_t_1

Or, click "read more" below to sample the first three chapters...

The Revolutionary Rhino of Venice

In 1751, the Venetian painter, Pietro Longhi, created one of his most unusual works: a painting of fashionable spectators gawking at a rhinoceros. In an age before zoos (or at least humane ones), Europeans had little opportunity to see the wondrous diversity of biological life, relying instead of fanciful books by unreliable travelers. So you can imagine their delight to see a real Indian rhino in the flesh, part of a tour that was sweeping across Europe. The rhinoceros in question made quite a footnote in history: her name was Clara, captured as an infant by a Dutch captain in 1738. He took care of her for a time, but eventually sold her to someone with an entrepreneurial eye. Clara made the grand tour of Europe, spending several months in all the major capitals. By the time she made it to Venice, Clara was nearing the end of her life, though her final stop would be in England, where she died in 1758. 

You Are What You Read: How The Power of Myth Showed Me The “Penultimate Truth”

In my Critical Responses to Poetry course, we were discussing theories of identity in literature, and how literature not only expresses/records the world around us, but consciously shapes it by the very act of description. That is, people read these works and then imitate them, making a second-hand version of life into a performance of life itself. In Chapter 8 of his book, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, he writes,

“Literature has not only made identity a theme; it has played a significant role in the construction of the identity of readers...Literary works encourage identification with characters by showing things from their point of view. Poems and novels address us in ways that demand identification, and identification works to create identity; we become who we are by identifying with figures we read about” (113). 

The Debt of Authorship: And Who Has To Pay?

What does an author owe to his or her readers? A book, certainly. But beyond that, does the contract between writer and fan demand any further obligation? For example, what about a real name? We all know that many authors opt for a pen name, some as simple as J.K. Rowling, while others create a completely false identity to throw off the scent in case he/she has a respectable day job which might be threatened by purple prose and exotic sex scenes. And some authors, of course, switch genders in the fear that boys won’t read books by girls—or vice versa. At the same time, it’s become customary to feature a glossy head shot of the author on the back flap of the book, assuring us that the author has brains and looks. Who wants to read a book by a total fright, after all?