All McBride's books in one place! And more!!!

New books, old books, all about McBride (well, some things about McBride), blogs, videos. Come on down! Click here.

Thursday, July 25, 2013

A sprinking of fairy dust

 George Bernard Shaw's writing desk in his writing hut in the garden at his home, Shaw's Corner. 





This morning, I read an article in The Author, the publication of The Society of Authors, titled "Payments in the digital age."

My first reaction was, "What payments?" As an author, I did pretty well from 1975 until 1997 out of writing non-fiction books for major publishers such as Simon & Schuster. I didn't write blockbusters; I wrote travel and business books under a couple of pen names. The books reached a modest audience, and I'm still getting small royalties from some of them. (There were 14 books in all.)

And then, the internet began to erode the income of virtually all professional writers except big-book novelists. I think my last decent contract was in 2000, for The Complete Idiot's Guide to Natural Disasters. Thank goodness writing the thing was fun, because the advance was a few grand less than the same publisher had paid me in 1999 to write The Unofficial Guide to Surviving Y2K and Beyond. That book got one stunning review; it said it was the only balanced report on the subject, and so it was. Of course, that's because I was a journalist, not a fear-monger like those nuts Gary North and Edward Yourdon. As I read it, North is a bona fide right-wing whacko, a nut who managed to turn his religious zeal into a humongous mess for the rest of us and profit for himself into the bargain, and Yourdon is a bona fide computer dude who saw the main chance by setting the rest of us on edge for a couple of years by convincing us that cyberspace was going to wreck our world.

So, anyway, I had a contract, so I began the research. As it turned out, there never really was a Y2K problem. An independent IT consultant in Columbia, MD, told me (paraphrase) during my research: "Your car has chips in it, sure. But the car doesn't really care what the date is--except maybe the one in the clock--and were not designed to melt down at midnight in 2000."

So, I told the truth. No problem. And I was right. Which ultimately sold very, very few books. The publisher, thankfully, stood behind me when I presented 400 pages of my findings, as I had a track record for accuracy. Still, none of us made much money. North and Yourdon, however, were sitting pretty. And today Yourdon, at least, doesn't even acknowledge the useless brouhaha he started. His website doesn't mention his involvement--nay, his masterminding--of the Y2K debacle, and he's still being paid lots of money as an expert witness on IT matters, apparently.

Which just goes to show the importance of fairy dust.

What is fairy dust? It is the ineffable something writers sprinkle over the very same words that might be turned out by a computer in the next generation of cyberspace. Indeed, Pearson publishers have already gone to work-for-hire contracts rather than royalty deals as often as they can, apparently, so that the writer--the sprinkler of fairy dust--will not profit nearly to the same percentage as the publisher will. (Yes, that was always true, but it's a matter of balance.) Next, according to Steve Ellsworth, in the article cited above, the publishers will attempt to cut out the writer completely, even (or maybe especially) those like Ellsworth who write ESL books (English as a second language). Yes, a computer could probably do that. I use the computer now to translate French sites for me on occasion, in fact. I get the information I need, but it is hardly deathless prose.

Ellsworth believes that if computerization of ESL books happens--and there are already novel-writing software programs out there, for crying out loud, so ESL should be easy--the fairy dust will disappear. While there isn't much fairy dust in ESL, and the fairy dust used by North and Yourdon was suspect, I think the fairy dust is what convinced people there was a Y2K problem, but also kept me employed all those years, churning out journalism--accurate journalism--but with a very human(e) face. And it doubtless adds to the success of Ellsworth's books, since he writes accessible and even perhaps deathless prose in teaching English because he is not a machine.

I love the fairy dust. I love it when I read it; I love it when I write it. I do not want HAL to attempt fairy dust. It would sicken me. It might never get things so wrong as did North and Yourdon because of its computer accuracy and lack of fairy dust. But it wouldn't mean much either. Who could laugh or cry or even be amused or aggravated by the bits and bytes that some hunk of silica turned into words?

I can tell you one thing: I'm glad my body of work when I moved to the UK four years ago was sufficient for me to gain membership in The Society of Authors. It's a great organization, pursuing income and rights for writers and offering certain perks every fairy dust producer deserves: lodging at The New Cavendish Club and the Goodenough Club in central London at special rates, membership in The Poets' Society Cafe, and discounts at Specsavers, all the better to keep that fairy dust coming during advancing years. And more.

I've been concentrating on the painting recently, but perhaps Ellsworth's article will draw me back to writing, if only to add one more writer's hand in staving off the introduction of HAL WRITER. Perhaps it will make a difference,  one more writer  toiling with pen and ink...or, in my case, Microsoft Bloody Word.

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Why do artists love art?

Dun horse, Lascaux, France. (Wiki Commons)


Because it isn't accounting, that's why. It's endlessly different, and thereby entertaining and demanding of the intellect's and the spirit's attentions.

A column of numbers remains the same no matter what interrupts one's work with it. A painting? No. It changes, and not just because the paint dries, either. It changes because each time you approach the canvas or paper or clay, you will approach it with a different attitude than you were experiencing last time you worked on it. You might more accurately say the artist has changed, but can one really separate the artist and the art?

Art isn't accounting because there is no one simple point to reach that says the work is finished. If you add a column of numbers, you will know you are done when you have checked your work and realize all numbers were correctly entered, correctly added, and that the final sum is correct.

You will know when the artwork you are creating is done when....when....when....

Now. Is it done now? Probably not. Probably, it is never really finished. You may stop work because the commission has to be delivered SOON, or because you think one more stroke of the brush will push it into the muddy waters of overpainting, or because you're bloody sick of the damn thing and wish you had never started it. So you finish it and stash it in the basement behind the broken bicycles and half-empty paint cans and your heirs find it and--since artists only get popular after death--they sell the awful thing and get rich as Croesus, while you were almost as poor as a church mouse.

Still, thank goodness art isn't accounting. It's much more important than that. (By the way, I do have friends who are accountants, and my mother was an accountant. But I think they'd agree with me...besides which, the accountants I know these days all dabble in an artform at least; one books musical acts, for example, because he's a folk music aficionado.)

Even in prehistory, art was of ultimate importance. The cavemen didn't paint numbers in that underground grotto in Lascaux; they painted horses and bulls. Of course, you might say numbers--Arabic numbers and even Roman numerals--had not been invented yet, so they didn't have a choice. Yes, and? Proving my point: Art is more important than numbers, and was invented first. Numbers can tell how much, but art can tell what. Knowing what is, in my opinion, a lot more important to human life than knowing how many. And it would seem that is very deeply ingrained in the human psyche.

Still, I wouldn't mind having a few more quid to count. But I'm not going to trade the life of the right side of my brain for the satisfaction of the left. I'm not going to become an accountant so I can toil at stuff I don't like in order to have more holidays in Cyprus, and the much-awaited trip to Cuba (still being awaited.)

But I did have the good sense to marry an engineer. 


Wednesday, July 17, 2013

The arts of boxing and life


Stag at Sharkey's, 1909 by American Ashcan School artist George Bellows*
When I was a little girl, I used to sit on the wide, flat arm of my grandfather's favorite chair and watch The Saturday Night Fights with him. My grandfather was a tiny fellow, a chemist/accountant with a more than respectably large nose, and a brain to match. I doubt he ever hit anything in his life, although I'm sure he'd have made every attempt to punch out Richard M. Nixon. My first political memory is of Gramps saying Vice President Nixon (Eisenhower was president then) was the most disgusting politician he'd ever seen, quite a statement since Gramps was born in 1886 and had seen lots of scoundrels in office before Dickie's first election to national office.

Gramps was always right. I adored him, even when he complained when my grandmother bought me "paper shoes"...sneakers in US terms, plimsolls UK. Or when he wouldn't eat chocolate cake because he claimed it was just burnt vanilla. Gramps was a work of art. He was a kindly curmudgeon, a down-to-earth genius, a former country boy who never wore anything but a starched white dress shirt in his adult life as far as I can tell.

He certainly didn't encourage me to be an artist. Indeed, he didn't encourage me to be anything, except successful and even that he didn't push. But he read six newspapers every day, devoured detective novels for relaxation, smoked one huge smelly cigar a week during baseball season while watching double-headers, and instructed me in the art of boxing.

Gramps couldn't tolerate the sluggers; he liked the boxers, the fighters who used tactics more than mere muscle, and who stood for something. This was all transmitted to me, wordlessly I imagine. And so, I ended up being a rare bird, a liberal woman who appreciates a good boxing match.

Yes, I know. Boxing is deadly; aside from giving Muhammad Ali a good life, it is also taking it by bits, through the Parkinson's disease repetitive slams to the skull have produced and which this rare, bona fide American hero endures with a great deal of grace. It is definitely a case of the good with the bad. Ali got himself out of the ghetto, as have so many others, by boxing. A shame they had to do it that way, but it was a pragmatic approach in mid-century America. Ali also stood for something, having dumped his precious Olympic medal into the Mississippi River in protest against the treatment of blacks in the US. I was a fan of Ali when I was in high school, when he was still called Cassius Clay. Even on eastern Long Island where I lived, being fond of a black athlete, even the  poetry-spouting, totally unique Cassius Clay,  constituted a prescription for ostracism by one's peers.

What brought all these thoughts on was a Facebook exchange with a friend today that included lyrics from Paul Simon's "The Boxer." It led me to think about Angelo Dundee, Ali's "cut man" and trainer.

So I looked him up. Dundee died about a year ago, RIP. But the article mentioned that he had got his start as a cornerman/jack-of-all-trades at Stillman's Gym, a New York City boxing establishment.

I lived there. No, not in the gym. It was torn down in the 1960s and a high-rise apartment building erected on the site. I lived in that for about three years in the late 1970s. I confess that I didn't even know of the connection until a really slimy politician my former husband was working for (he eventually quit) told me about it, trying to aggravate me, I suspect. I'm sure the politician was shocked when I genuinely thanked him for the information.

My grandfather's name was Harry Stillman. No, no connection to the gym that I know of. But then, I didn't know much about my family until I began doing research on the Irish side to establish my descent and gain Irish citizenship (I was successful!), so I could more easily move to the UK with my current husband, a UK citizen.

It turns out Harry's descent was from English forebears who settled early in Rhode Island, fanning out later to western New York State. Every time I check ancestry.com, it turns out someone has added information to my family tree on my Irish father's side. I wonder if sometime the Stillmans who began Stillman's Gym will turn up on my mother's somewhat more difficult-to-research family tree, and if I'd even figure out that's who they were.


* Bellows also taught at my alma mater, The Art Students League of New York.
 

Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Who needs critics? I've got me.



It's a shame any of us has to grow up before going to art school. 

It has been a while since I mused aloud on the inherent problems of creating pictures. But today, after a sleepless night in which the idea for a semi-Persian miniature tromped all over the Fields of Morpheus with heavy feet and clanging bells, I find I cannot go on.

Don't be afraid. I don't mean that as in, "I can't go on, therefore I am taking arsenic."

I mean I can't go on with the painting. At least not now.

See. There it is. An egotistical unwillingness to tear up the paper--expensive though cold-pressed watercolour paper is--and start again, possibly at another image entirely.

Or, I could go back to it and reclaim it, as I did thousands of times--literally thousands--during my life as a journalist, but have not yet learned to do as an artist. Or not well, anyway. A couple of months ago, after working and working and working on a portrait of Boadicea (or Boudicca, if you prefer, but I'm very fond of the Latin) drawn from a modeling session a month or so before that, and Celtic lore, I gessoed the canvas.

My husband was horrified. He liked the portrait. He liked it when it had boobs, and after they got cloaked. He liked it when the face was too ruddy, and when it was too pale. I liked it none of those ways. I did quite like the hair, embellished with some gold paint woven through it as light-catching strands and also as part of a hair decoration, and I liked the background. It was so fen-like. I was really very pleased with that.

But the main part of the picture was a disaster.

What I'm working on today, the semi-Persian miniature, is not even close to deserving my disdain the way the Boadicea did. But I did notice that the sky was not quite the teal I had imagined, and, actually, the thing looks a bit "school-ish."

***

So of course, I took a nap. It is now two hours later, I'm awake (sort of), the dog and cat have been fed, and I am busy destroying my adrenal health with a cup of strong French roast coffee accompanied by pain au chocolat with chocolate cream cheese on it. I was quite peckish, always am after a nap, and drinkies and dinner are 1.5 hours off.

The picture, barely started, isn't as bad as I thought. After all, the only things done so far are the sketch and the three main color blocks. Since it's a sharp focus watercolour done wet on dry, I'm going carefully. I can adjust the sky later, which I couldn't do wet-on-wet.

But I really do need to stop being an adult about this, and assessing every little bit as I go.

Or maybe it's age. I don't have a 40-year career stretching ahead of me at this point, in all likelihood. Being a Type A, I naturally pressure myself to get to the professional level I desire RIGHT BLOODY NOW!  Ostensibly so I can enjoy its fruits for longer, of course, never mind that I am driving myself nuts on the way.

We are so crazy, humans are. And artists are possibly undeniably the nuttiest of us all. I'm proud to claim it, really. I certainly wouldn't want to be a well-balanced banker, for example, hated these days more even than dentists. Being an artist gives one a lot of latitude to be a child.

Now if I could only figure out how to do that....

PS I put up a Marley version of Paul Simon's song because it seems closer to the simple original than Simon's recent performance versions. More childlike. More about connecting the inner to the outer, the child to the adult...and very importantly, vice versa. Mind you, I still love Paul Simon, always have, but reggae and the name Marley...well, enough said. Hope you enjoyed it.