Dr. Albert Ellis and how to be a sane writer...or anything

Dr. Albert Ellis

A friend asked me over the weekend to help her with an emotional reaction she was having to an event in her life because, she thought, I had some wisdom along those lines.

 

I don't actually, except what I learned from the late Dr. Albert Ellis, founder of Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy. For my money, practicing REBT is the quickest, most permanent path from blooming neurosis (which most writers and other artists seem to harbor in their personalities, I think) to virtually 100% workable sanity. Virtually, not totally, 100%. We must keep a bit of the neurotic, I also think, to find ways of expressing, creating...all those non-nailed-down sorts of things.

But I can say without any doubt at all that my discovery of Dr. Albert Ellis was a magical turning point in my life, without which I wonder how I would have avoided various sorts of mental, emotional and physical doom.

The beginning of sanity was crazy

In the late 1970s, my husband had an assignment to cover the Mid-Hudson Psychiatric Association's annual conference in Poughkeepsie, NY. I went along for the ride; at the time, I was freelancing and doing pretty well. Dr. Ellis was the featured speaker. He intended using a volunteer guinea pig to demonstrate his A-B-C method of disputing one's nutty thoughts and acting sanely—regardless of conditions or your past history or how crazy your parents were (another favorite subject of Dr. Ellis)--and thereby creating a happy and productive life.

Just to show you how NUTS most shrinks of the Freudian stripe can be, not one of the entire audience of several hundred New York shrinks volunteered.

Oh, dear. My husband needed his story. He worked for a Dow-Jones paper as a bureau chief, and he couldn't fail to produce the necessary full report for publication. So naturally, I volunteered.

Oh boy.....This involved my going up on stage, telling Dr. Ellis and the world at large one of my own nuttinesses. I said I hated waiting for people, and I was ALWAYS having to wait for my husband, daily news being what it is.

So Dr. Ellis asked me pertinent questions, many along the lines of, “Will the world end if he is 15 minutes late? Will you have a heart attack? Will long purple hairs grow out of your nose?” Sensible things. That is, things to show me how stupid it was for me to get my knickers in a twist over a bit of a wait. AND...Ellis being Ellis (which I would subsequently learn), in addition to teaching me how to dispute nutty beliefs, he told me other sensible stuff, such as, “Just take a book along and then you won't waste the time you're waiting.” Duh.

A-B-C simplified

The dispute mechanism is simple. A is having to wait for someone for an unspecified length of time, + B is awfulizing it, telling myself it is terrible, unfair, etc., and it equals C, getting upset and acting crazy. Obviously, the place to change the equation is at B. At B, one changes the nutty, annoyed chatter to, “Oh, well, I can just sit and relax then, or maybe call the person expecting me to say I'll be late, or meditate.” And then C never materializes. No upsetness ensues, no argument with a spouse, no downward spiral of life and the events therein.

It was magic.

I used it quite a lot. Good thing, because moving back to Manhattan from up the Hudson and BOTH of us freelancing was definitely a prescription for nuttiness.

 

Tune-ups are quick and relatively cheap

For the first two years back in Manhattan, we were so damn busy keeping the wolf from our 17th floor door, I didn't have TIME to be nutty. But then we began making money, being able to relax a bit, even take a vacation. And suddenly, I had time for nuttiness once again.

Fortunately, Dr. Ellis's Institute for RET, as it was then called, was also in Manhattan.

So I called him and made an appointment. It took about three appointments, and I was back on track, nuttiness banished for several years. I admit it helped a lot when he told me not to worry about becoming a bag lady (which possibility terrified me) if the freelance income ever got thin. Dr. Ellis pointed out that the bag ladies were usually drug addicts or schizophrenics. “Haven't you noticed they don't wear coats in winter and bundle up in summer?” he asked. Well, yes. AHA! As long as I didn't blow coke or do something to send my brain chemicals off the rails, he assured me, I would not become a bag lady. I'd simply get a job.

About five years later, both my husband and I were feeling a bit out of mental sorts, so we both saw Dr. Ellis. Again, a brief stint, maybe five visits, and we were back to un-nutty again.

 

The opposite of shrinkage

Dr. Ellis didn't “shrink” his patients; he expanded them into greater understanding of how to break their own nuttiness juggernauts—and almost everyone has some from time to time. He didn't care where the nuttiness came from (who cares how I got so obsessed with being on time and nutty about waiting? Really?) He only cared to teach people how to stop the nuttiness, shift attention to logical conclusions and behavior, and get on with it.

He was one of my very few heroes. I felt a horrific shift in the universe the day I learned that he had died. I had thought, nuttily, that he was immortal.

 

Eternal ideas

His ideas are. Maybe Freud did something to change people's attitude toward mental illness and those who suffered from it. But seventeen years on the couch? No. Just no. Not economically feasible, really, and not really good to keep dragging up old crap, I think. The fact is, and this is my finding only, if you persist at disputing your irrational beliefs via the A+B+C model, making the rational changes needed at B, you'll eventually discover where your irrational beliefs arose. If you care at that point.

I don't. I'm just happy I know how to make a happy life, despite my continual dipping into the slime of political commentary and such other examples of nuttiness. And I know how to do that primarily because I had the good fortune to be a guinea pig for the founder of Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy, and later to see him for tuneups. (It must be noted that Dr. Ellis was an early sex therapist, also. Naturally, I bought him a T-shirt in Key West once that said, “Sex Therapist. First Session Free.” He said he would wear it to some erudite convention, and I've no doubt that he did.)

Thanks, Albert Ellis. I was so privileged to know you.

To find out more about Dr. Ellis' work, and how you can benefit, click here.

For a quick intro to his A-B-C method, click here.

Tags:

sanity

artistic personality

dr. albert ellis

rational emotive behavioral therapy

manhattan

freelancing

Prim-Raf Theatre Murder Mystery Evening......

Maybe I should confess. When I was a small child, I discovered the arts in the following order:

• Ballet at age 3 (I must have seen it on TV, as that is the year we got our first one and I teased until they broke down and sent me for lessons!)
• Literature/Reading (shortly thereafter)
• Drawing as a serious pursuit at age 5 when my Kindergarten teacher tried to convince my parents that I should go to art school  (they declined, as I was already in ballet, and it was LONG before the over-scheduled child era)
• Theatre at age 9, when my grandmother took me to see West Side Story, the original original, on Broadway (yes, now you can calculate my age)
• Music at age 16, when my mother insisted I take piano lessons, which I loathed, as I had long since given up ballet, and she thought it would be useful to me as I was an avid theatre-goer by then, and acted in school plays.

So naturally, I became a journalist when I grew up, writing both arts and business, and spending a miserable year as editor of a large American agriculture magazine--odd enough since I was raised in New York City and on Long Island, where the only agriculture was to be seen in parks and consisted mainly of grass and ornamental trees.

From where to eternity???

I went to art school as an adult, and now do as much painting as writing. But old loves never really leave one, so I've gotten back into theatre, in a way. I accepted the task of doing promotion for Prim-Raf Theatre, Callington, Cornwall, UK. It's a job I did for a couple of years in the 1990s for a world-famous theatre in the US, Barter Theatre, which produced Gregory Peck, Larry Linville (Maj. Frank Burns on MASH), Frances Farmer (Titanic), Ernest Borgnine, Patricia Neal and more. At Barter, it was both a labour of love and of money in the bank; at  Prim-Raf, since it's a community theatre, is a labour of love.

Worthy love object

Prim-Raf is worth loving. Among the stars who have graced its stage are Edward Woodward and Michele Dotrice. It owns its building, highly unusual for a community theatre in any country. It has a store of costumes most professional theatres would drool over (and it hires them out to groups for productions and to individuals in need of fancy dress). And it gets high marks from the critics for its annual pantomime. The most recent one was an adaptation of The Emperor's New Clothes--as it happens, a favourite fairy tale of mine when I was little, along with The Twelve Dancing Princesses with whom I naturally identified. Prim-Raf's version of Clothes saw a King who wanted to become a top model in the modern world, so all the songs were current. But that didn't mean the production lacked exploding cakes and all that sort of thing, and the ultimate baddies and the charming goodies, and of course a perfect ending.

Currently in rehearsal for presentation May 2 and 3, 2014 is Blood Money, an interactivie murder mystery evening written by Prim-Raf member Paula Beswetherick. It's Cornish all the way to the ground, with the action taking place in a pasty factory, and the audience being treated to pasties and a pint as they unravel who dunnit. At the end of the evening, one audience member, drawn from those who correctly provide the killer's identity, will be rewarded for his or her efforts with a prize.

No mystery about it

If you live in Cornwall or West Devon, pass it on. It will be a fun evening, as the interactive mystery evenings always are. It isn't Shakespeare (too high-falutin') nor Eugene O'Neill (too problematical)....but it is Paula Beswetherick, who has a deft feel for comedy and is a dab hand at food, having been a professional chef for no less that Madame Tussaud's some years ago. (So, of course, food WOULD have to be a part of her art.....)

Take a peek at the poster above. Click it and enlarge it and pick up your tickets in Callington, or on the door (if available). Frankly, for ten quid per person, it's a heck of a deal if I do say so myself.

***

Below, bonus video from a couple of years back.....

Monuments Men

Part of the Ghent Altarpiece by Jan van Eyck (Wiki Commons)

I saw The Monuments Men this morning. Clooney was Clooney, Matt Damon was Matt Damon, and John Goodman was John Goodman, and Bill Murray was sort of Bill Murray, all acting like soldier not-wannabes to rescue stolen artwork from the Nazis.  There was one French actor, Jean Dujardin, one of only five French actors ever to win an Academy Award for his role in The Artist (I guess I'll have to see it!), but one who could give Clooney himself a run for his money as aging heart-throb. 

Despite the box-office gold casting, it was a good film. Not a great one. Good. But it did highlight the perfidy of Nazi officers and the overweening hubris of their miserable excuse for a Fuhrer, Der Fuhrer. Little Dolph, failed artist, failed everything.

WWII Redux

I've been reading a lot of WWII books lately, some fiction, some factual. There was one otherwise forgettable book a while back about young British women working at Cadbury's during WWII. I noticed later that the book was sponsored by Cadbury; I guess they needed some good PR to overcome the rather diminished character of their chocolate after the takeover by American food conglomerate Kraft, Inc. (It could be worse; they could have sold out to Nestle, reputedly the world's largest food company by revenue, headquartered in Switzerland...which, in my current mind frame...seems too damn close to Deutschland. Plus one wonders how many Nazi-thieved artworks live today in Swiss vaults. But I digress....)

I also read a book about Bletchley Park. What amazing feats those young and untried cipher-breakers did. Probably their work did shorten WWII by two years, simply by breaking the Nazi codes and never letting Dolph's Boys know their codes had been broken. This did, unfortunately, mean some Nazi targets were sacrificed so the commanders would not know their plans were known; shortly, the British command figured out they could keep the Nazis off-kilter by simply beefing up reconnaissance in the area the code breakers had revealed to be the next targets; then the Nazis thought the obvious recon and not code-breaking was responsible for their defeat.

I suspect that, despite the finding of five million--yes, FIVE MILLION--artworks stolen by the Nazis, there are an equal number left to find, or to prove definitively were destroyed by the Nazi horde. Spite, it would seem, was part and parcel of the Nazi mindset, not surrendering like gentlemen but pillaging like brutes.

WWII goes on and on and on....

Some of the remainder were found not too long ago in Austria, although the man whose house they were in claims they were not stolen, either from museums or Jewish collectors. Believe what you wish, but his father was an art dealer to Little Dolphie...and there is no honour among thieves.

There are many great collections on the continent with questionable provenance. The Thyssen-Bornemisza collection, supposedly amassed by a family with Dutch and Hungarian ancestry, some connections in England and apparently great connections with the Nazi-tainted American Bush family (yes, THAT Bush family) is, I think, open to discussion. It is claimed much of the collection was purchased from embarrassed American millionaires after the 1929 stock market crash. Sure. Maybe. Who knows? Who will ever know? But taking at face value the provenance of any artwork in any private collection--in the aftermath of WWII's Nazi depredations on the artworks of the world--is simply being gullible. Provenance is not exact. Expert opinion is even less exact.

Film recreates life

What the real Monuments Men--about 350 of them, both men and women, and from half a dozen concerned nations--did to restore art stolen by the Nazis to their rightful owners is astounding. If they had done no more than recover the Ghent Altarpiece, 17 Renaissance panels of incredible beauty and value, they'd have done a good day's work.

The Monuments Men deals with the theft and recovery of that altarpiece in a very dramatic way (I won't spoil it). But it is true that Little Dolphie ordered it seized; eventually, it was stored in the Altaussee salt mines to protect it from Allied bombing (Dolphie still expected to win, apparently, even as his 1000-year reich was being stillborn in a hail of bombings and routing of his soldiers). When the altarpiece was restored and returned to Belgium in a ceremony with the Belgian royal family, the French were not invited; the Vichy government had allowed the Nazis to take the painting in the first place.

It's a good movie, worth watching if only to assure one's self that there were, in the Allied nations, men and women of good will and deep convictions regarding the need to same humanity's artworks from brutalization, theft and destruction by the Nazis, and were willing to put their lives on the line to do it.

I salute Clooney, writer, producer and actor in The Monuments Men, for bringing it to public attention.



 

The Yoga Cure: Alive and well in Artland

I couldn't do this one yesterday....but soon!  (Wiki Commons)

Yesterday, I did something I haven't done in about six years, and it made an enormous difference.

I took a yoga class.

I've never been a yoga nut; I really haven't been a nut for anything, not even my beloved horse. But I did enjoy yoga when I got the chance all my life. When I was young (that is to say, under 60), I didn't need to practice it often because I was strong, healthy and flexible and I never had a problem with a pose.

That was then, this is now.

I actually could not perform the one-legged poses; I had suspected my balance was off, but that tested it.

I actually fell over in one close-to-the-floor tripod pose.

The instructor fell out of a pose shortly thereafter. No, she didn't. Yes, she did. This is England, where people are polite, doubtless the source of the hostess drinking from the finger bowl when an ignorant guest does so that the guest won't feel embarrassed. Just so, the instructor fell out of a pose. I actually wanted to tell her, "Hey, you didn't have to do that. I'm a former Yank, I can deal." But I didn't. Why should I rain on her civility parade?

Enlightenment through very gentle movement

But I learned something. By the end of the class, I realized that my faintly perceived balance issues were actually more like total lack of muscle tone. And of course, after having ridden horses, hard, for 20 years before just hanging it up eight years ago and doing zilch for exercise, the descent in strength was long and hard.

Fortunately, I am healthy. Despite my evening cocktail, which I regard as natural anyway, I eat no crap. I breathe as little crap as I can, which is probably very little indeed in semi-rural Cornwall. I work (sometimes) at staying mentally and emotionally healthy...although I admit that the go-round with the IRS 2.5 years ago about pushed me off the rails. Still, even that had a good effect; I renounced my US citizenship to rid myself of those wankers once and for all, and I'd wanted not to be an American for a long, long time.

So back to yoga and art.

Yoga Nazis

Before I left Upper East Tennessee/Southwest Virginia for the last time, I had started going to a  yoga class at the Johnson City, TN, community center. It was very inexpensive, like about 3 bucks, but the instructor was magical. I loathed the Salute to the Sun, still do, but  the rest was wonderful and her closing meditation alone was worth the price of admission. I have missed it since 1997.

I tried a yoga class  in Westminster, MD, about 6 years ago, realizing lack of riding was wrecking my muscles. But I was doing a lot of gardening, and frankly, it was better than the class. Then I tried one in Frederick, MD, that almost killed me. It was, I learned yesterday, probably Bikram yoga, which is like eastern calisthenics in a very, very warm room. I did that only once. And gave thanks that I lived through it.

And then the years rolled by. When I lived in the flat in Tavistock, I walked everywhere. Now, from my house on a windy road with lots of traffic in suburban Cornwall? Not so much, proving I do value my life. Good excuse, though, to become a slug.

Good yoga transcends place and time

Yesterday, at Sadhana Yoga Studio in Tavistock, owner/instructor Kathryn Blackie got me back to reality and yoga. She is kind. She is competent. She is knowledgeable. She does a good closing meditation. I actually signed up for two months of classes, something I have never done, ever.

Some parts of me, despite not being able to stretch ANY pose to the max, were sore, but a good sore.
The pain that had crept back into my knees after I tinkered (wildly) with the paleo diet that had cured them last summer disappeared. Last night, I didn't get the excruciating pain in my hips that had been with me most nights for a couple of months now.

In short, a single, gentle yoga class, in which I failed to do any pose to the max, cured a lot of what ailed me.

It also cured my attitude. I'd been snapping at Simon for weeks, for nothing. I thought it was the various promotional problems with my artwork and my writing making me crabby. Apparently not. Apparently it was disorder in my system. I had no need to snap at the poor man yesterday. So I didn't, and he was so happy, back to the charming, funny Simon I met and married.

I had been fretting for weeks about things that are very probably seven years away. I stopped fretting.

Onward and upward

I wrote a diatribe just for fun. (I love exercising those rhetoric muscles.) I finished a small painting. I cooked a really swell Chinese dinner-twice-cooked pork, spicy eggplant and cold peanut noodles. I ate fruit for dessert, not chocolate. (Simon was less thrilled with that, as he seemed to feel compelled to eat canned peaches with me. Yes, canned peaches. A childhood fave that I happened to have on hand. Plus I believe what a friend from Goa once told me; it is not good to eat raw fruit after dinner.)

So what's this got to do with art? Everything. One cannot properly produce artistic works if one is hurting and listless and lethargic and thinks there might be something wrong...which doctors probably could not pin down, but would have a good time trying to do and probably wreck the rest of one's life in the process.  I admit, I was actually thinking of visiting a doctor. Me. Visiting a doctor. Without having been tossed off a horse and carted off against my will. That's how bad it had gotten.

I'm going to do a few poses later today. I'm going to do a few tomorrow. I'm going to do a few every day, and lots of them on Tuesday mornings from 10 am to 11.30 am.  Why not? The benefits are enormous. They include:

• Less pain, heading toward none.
• Regaining strength and balance.
• Meeting some nice people.
• Being less crabby.
• Being more peaceful.
• Getting more writing and art done.

OK. Yes, increased work appears on my list. But you knew that. I might be one of a small group of Type A introverts in the universe. But there it is. And I make no apologies for it.

Whitewash

 

Drawing from book 12 Years a Slave (Wikipedia)

I've been looking forward to seeing the film 12 Years a Slave. Directed by Steve McQueen, it it scheduled to open in the UK on January 28, 2014. I expect I'll have tickets booked at my local Vue as soon as  I possibly can. I read the book a couple of months ago, and loved it, if one can use such terminology regarding a subject so fraught with horrors, particularly for an ex-New Yorker who grew up in horror at the things that went on in the American South up to the Civil War, and after for that matter. The first time I drove south, below the Mason-Dixon line separating former slave from former free states, I was horrified that some motels had huge signs saying "Colored." At first, I thought they were talking about TVs, and then it dawned on me.

I worked, in 1968, in a restaurant in the Florida Keys. There, no blacks were served, but no one ever told me not to serve blacks. As far as I know, no black person ever arrived and asked to be served, the colour lines were so firmly drawn. But the racism was all around; when I went to get the courtesy card from the local Winn-Dixie supermarket, they asked for my race. I refused to write it in. They asked me why, since I am white. I told them THAT's why...because I am white, and I am insulted to be asked to prove I am not black, since it made no difference to me whether I were white or black, so why should it make any difference to them? They let me have the card. Whoop-de-do! I could now cash my paycheck at the supermarket. And I figured I had made a small point for humanity.

White and Black were different in America

Of course, it would have made a great deal of difference to my life had I been black in America. Some bad, some good. For instance, I couldn't get an internship at Time, Inc. magazines because I was not a member of a minority, and Affirmative Action had been instituted right before I got my bachelor's degree in 1970. Had I been black or Hispanic, I would have been a shoo in.  It was not the end of the world, though, and life went on.

Later, when I was in grad school in 1973, in Georgia (the deep south), I was told by a prospective employer that I would have to refuse to wait on black customers if he told me to. I refused that offer of employment. Within the year, a black woman was the maid of honour at my wedding. Was I saying anything to that racist restaurant owner by choosing her? Not as far as I know. Alberta Knox, former sometimes singer with the Hot Nuts, was simply my best friend.

All this is not to proclaim my status as an enlightened white former New Yorker; it is to let readers in the UK know how totally pervasive dealing with the race issue was, and still is, in the United States.

How to screw up advancement

That having been said, I am now of the opinion that two black men have done great harm to journalism and the arts in America, one because his grasp was longer than his reach and the other because he is, to put it mildly, an unreconstructed intellectual bumpkin whose ignorant posturings would be an embarrassment regardless of his race.

The first man is Jayson Blair, the man who submitted plausibly bogus stories to the editors at the New York Times; those editors did not recognize shoddy journalistic practice until it smacked them in the face. Blair set feature writing back a good few decades with his shenanigans. It would have been the same had he been white. But there is some reason to believe that the editors were doing their own version of Affirmative Action, and in their appalling ignorance, selected for bling and nor for brains, doing no one any favours.

The second man is Armond White, whose name I had never come across until today. It seems, though, that he pitched a hissy fit--which is to say was unbearably rude and condescending--when Steve McQueen won a New York Film Critic's Circle award for directing 12 Years a Slave. According to the Toronto Sun:

Armond White, the editor of New York arts publication CityArts, whose opinions are often at odds with those of other film critics, called out, 'You're an embarrassing doorman and garbage man. F**k you. Kiss my a**'.'

Another Canadian publication, Maclean's, noted that White thinks of himself as a "pedigreed film scholar." Odd, scholars rarely use such terminology as that above. They usually have larger and more creative vocabularies with which to express disdain or delight, and they usually refrain from the sort of ad hominem attack that would seem to be White's speciality.

I would consider White a boor at best, a mental midget at worst, as long as we are traversing the Ad Hominem Trail, opened by none other than White himself. And I'm fairly certain my mongrel dog's pedigree is better than White's scholarly pedigree, regardless of where he got his sheepskin. I should think he'd be an embarrassment to most universities.

Which issue is he protesting?

It would appear that White, who claims enlightenment beyond that of all others, finds it somehow unacceptable that a British man could direct a film about an American black issue. But it is not, of course, a black issue. Enslavement of one group of people by another is a human issue. Period. We were all affected by it, one way or another, and no one person has a mandate to claim the high ground. Not one. We all have traces of racism within us; we all have been affected by racism in some way. We all have the right to speak our minds about it, to make films about it, whether because we are intrigued by the art itself, or because we wish to expiate our own or our society's guilt.

By the way, the Steve McQueen in question is not the white action-film hero; he is the black British director.

So what is White saying, then? That McQueen was somehow being a waterboy to vicious white men? That he has no right to make an American film, being a British man? That the book was trash? What, exactly, is this black man--who preens himself like a bygone Bojangles and who retains the name White while many black men changed to African-derived names--what is this grandstanding peacock of loud plumage and absent substance doing, exactly?

Darned if I know. I think he's laughable, frankly. Which many of the readers of the Maclean's article noted as well. One wrote:

It's obvious what White is doing. It's equally obvious what a wank it is. Pure self-indulgence. If you like something you should be honest about it and give an unfiltered review, regardless of what the 'masses' OR the 'cognoscenti' think. Clearly he waits to see what the consensus is, and if something gets too many raves, he feels it's his duty to take it down a peg. Hey, what ever gets him off, it's his own business, but it has nothing to do with reality.

Indeed. White's substance- and literacy-challenged rantings do about as much for me as American artist Julian Schnabel's sticking pottery through canvasses and calling himself a genius did. Less, really. At least Schnabel was, for a time, entertaining. White? Not so much. Just a bully using his racial pulpit to get away with stuff that marks him not as a fighter for human equality and artistic standards but, to descend into his chosen gutter, an elitist wanker reverse cultural snob of, however, the very highest order.

Quel dommage....buche de noel without a sparkler!

Buche de Noel

One year in the 1980s, we went to Paris for Christmas. We had thought at first of going to Portugal, just for a few days, for something different. Our travel agent--remember travel agents? what magic they were!--knew us and said, "No, you will just be bored. Go to Paris. That's where you really want to go." He was right. The worst part was the flight out of Miami, as we lived in Fort Lauderdale at the time; ten long hours across the Atlantic at night. But the best parts, and there were so many, far outweighed the misery of the flight.

When we landed on Christmas Eve day, it was snowing lightly. Magic already! We got a mid-day meal of some sort at a really horrid cafe near our hotel, the Hotel de Varenne, modest but nice and in the 7th arrondissement, to my mind the most lovely section of Paris. Then I bought a hair dryer as hotels did not regularly offer them in those days. I had memorized the phrases needed while being bored in flight. Then we took a nap, finally giving in to the jet lag. When we awakened at about six pm, we went out to seek dinner.

We found, on the Champs Elysees in the nearby 8th arrondissement, a restaurant called La Maison de L'Alsace. It is a panelling-heavy old-world restaurant serving huge trays of fresh shellfish, Alsatian specialties, and lovely wines.

It is impossible to get a table in a good and reasonably priced restaurant on Christmas Eve in Paris. But, for reasons known only to the gods of cultural appreciation, the maitre d' found us a table for two in a raised section of the restaurant next to a table for four--packed in, really--at which he shortly seated a couple, their ten-ish daughter, and a grandmama.

I had the Coquille St. Jacques. Sublime. What my husband ordered I cannot recall, but it probably had fish in it some way or other. We were enjoying the experience completely, not least because the service is perfect there and the French family, though we could not understand much of their conversation, was so engaging.

Finally, it was time to order dessert. I had never had, and had always wanted to have, a slice of buche de noel. Aha! There it was on the menu. Expensive, mon dieu! It was the equivalent of about ten bucks American at the time, VERY dear for the 1980s. What the heck? We were already spending three times what we had planned when the original cheap-date-Portugal-four-days trip had turned into ten in Paris. At Christmas. And New Year's.

My dessert arrived,  borne to me on a platter, adorned with a sparkler flinging points of sizzling light everywhere. I was charmed.

And so was the little girl at the next table. Her eyes went wide, her lips turned up into a wheedling smile, and we knew her Papa was about to spring for a ten buck dessert for his charming little girl.

I don't think I have ever, before or since, loved a dessert as I loved that piece of pure Paris in chocolate ganache on a silver platter.

A good day

Detail from Wedding at Cana by Duccio di Buoninsegna, painted in oil on wood between 1308-1311 (Wiki Commons)

Today has been a good day.

A friend and I have just about completed the book we've been working on; it probably ships to the printer tomorrow.

I tinkered ONE LAST TIME with a watercolour commission and actually packed it up and sent it to the buyer. Simon took some good photos of it.

The Chieftains' Timpan Reel is playing on YouTube. My belly is full of strong coffee and mini mince pies (2).

The dog is asleep at my feet, and the cat is curled up on our bed.

I submitted my bio for an art show in Exeter that goes up next Sunday.

What could be wrong?

Nothing.

No, wait. That can't be. I'm an artist and writer. Something MUST be wrong. If nothing is wrong, then something is wrong.

So this is what I want to know: How could I chide my mother for her constant search for some physical ailment until, at last, she found one and it killed her? I do the same thing but not with my health, just with THE REST OF MY FREAKING LIFE.

Uh oh. Did I just identify something important? Something other artistic types--overly sensitive, prone to looking for the fly in the ointment, prone to both perfectionising and awfulising--are prone to do?

Well then. If there's any truth in the phrase seek and ye shall find, it would pay to cease and desist with the quest for what's wrong. My poor, dear mother died a thousand times worrying about what she might die of until, at last, she had a terminal illness. Which, I must say, she faced as courageously as I've ever seen anyone face anything, seemingly completely at odds with her worry-wart proclivities. She is, actually my hero.

My poor mother was brave, having achieved the certainty she sought.

So what then for us worry-wart artist types? Do we wait to relax into a fulfilling life when there's no more life to have? Worrying, that. I'd rather be happy for a long time than brave for a short time.

I think, then, it's time for us artistic types to embrace wholeheartedly a new (well, quite old) mandate:

"A man hath no better thing under the sun than to eat, and to drink and to be merry: for that shall abide with him of his labour the days of his life, which God giveth him under the sun." (Ecclesiastes 8:15)

N.B. Ecclesiastes is the Old Testament, before all the good stuff got mixed up with the misreadings of the stuff in the New Testament who tried to make the Hippy from Nazareth into the Corporation Man.

A little revelry, then, bunkies: I think our art serves no one if it doesn't serve us well. And, as Woody Allen once said, "Man lives to eat and often there must be a beverage as well."

Make mine a martini!

Art, wires and Pizza Hut

A large peperoni pizza. Hey, just because I didn't like managing a Pizza Hut doesn't mean I loathe the best of all comfort foods. TO BE EATEN WITH HANDS ONLY. NO KNIFE AND FORK ALLOWED. THE NATIVE NEW YORKER HAS SPOKEN! (Wiki commons photo)

This is not amusing. BT has placed its internet boxes on busy corners. Last Friday morning, about 1 a.m., a drunk decided to decorate the bonnet of his car with the backside of the BT box.

Since that moment, we have been paying BT for nothing. For a while, Simon and I used the single wireless dongle we possess to connect, running the thing up and down the stairs as needed. OK, it was exercise. But I can think of better ways.

Finally, with a long siege in view, Simon strung wires from his main computer, down the staircase from the top floor of the house to the middle floor, where my studio/office is, and to my computer so we could both use the dongle at the same time. Of course, we both have to be careful of using too much bandwidth. But still, much better than a constant chorus of "Are you finished with it yet?"

Now then, to tidy up before I go on.

In the US, the ground floor is the first floor, the next one up is the second floor, the third is the third. Simple. In the UK, the ground floor is the ground floor, the next one up is the first floor, and the third floor is the second floor. Confusing. Because I've inhabited both worlds, I use whichever is appropriate to the audience. Problem: This blog has UK and US readers.

A right mess an' all

Anyway, the result of all this interfloor wire stringing is that the house looks like it was jerry-built. This does not please my design-oriented soul. At all. I will admit that my office/studio is not the neatest thing on earth, but the rest of my living space is pretty darn neat, always is, always was. Clutter upsets me. Bad design upsets me. Things out of place upset me. No, I am not all chilled properly out as an artist ought, I suppose, to be. But remember, please, that I was a journalist for 30 years, which meant I really had to know where things were--like my notebook, my car keys, my next meal--and that has sort of been the substrate of my life.

I expect I will, just for fun, send BT a bill for my lost time. Or maybe I should just thank the goddess of communication that the dumbshit who lost it on the curve didn't knacker the telephone service as well.

All this at the precise time I need to be online A LOT to promote my artwork. Sigh. Not that I like doing that social networking thing. But I suppose it beats some of the jobs I've had in the past, including:

Deli clerk. I took the job before college, left it when I sliced my thumb down to the bone on the rotary slicer while cleaning same. That wasn't the bad part, though. The bad part was that I always smelled like chubs, the name by which horrid, rancid-looking dried fish bought by old farts were called.

Waitress/short order cook at a diner near a New York State mental health hospital. OK. Yes, there were releasees who came in, but you could hardly tell them from the staff, frankly. I did it for about three days, but after cooking fried eggs while trying to serve customers including the ubiquitous cops who had come in for their daily freebies...enough already.

Typist in dean's office at the university I went to. Did I mention I never took typing and got through 14 papers a semester for four years with two-finger typing? Lots of wite-out. When I took the typing job, I needed money for an end-of-term trip to Montreal with friends. The dean's office needed envelopes typed and didn't care what they looked like. Finite gig. Thankfully.

Editor of insurance industry magazine. Oy vay. OK. I needed the money. Bush had been elected and the economy began to shut down the minute he opened the White House door, really. The publisher was a fat jackass who demanded I watch Jerry Springer with him in his office any day I hadn't managed an appointment out of the office. He fired me. Thank goodness. It meant I got unemployment payments for months and months, so I rebuilt my freelance business.

Assistant manager, Pizza Hut. No kidding. Really. I did that, as recently as nine years ago. There was another freelance slump, so it seemed tempting. Managers could earn 100 grand. And I love pizza. It was nasty, though. Every night, the till had to balance to the penny, which simply isn't possible in retail, and it was crazy-making to grill every server and hostess to see who might have tucked 17 cents in their pocket, or dropped it on the floor. I got a job as an editor of a dental magazine (not really better, money was worse and the people were slimeballs...but at least I wasn't chasing small change until midnight in the stench of rancid grease.)

Yup, going on line to promote my artwork looks pretty darn good.

Revisions

Well, I've done it. I understand the great masters sometimes did it. Very possibly my Aunt La Te Da, who generally painted blue swans with rhinestone eyes, did it. So, then, it's universal.

What?

Reworking an older painting.

The thing is, I really loved the portrait in the original painting. It was done, in fact, as a sample of a dog portrait for sales purposes. And it is of my own little dog, Brownie, aka Lady Bronwen Marbella McGee, at her favorite place, South Milton Sands beach.

As it happens, Delacroix repainted the background of his 1824 painting, Massacre de Scio, after seeing how Constable painted backgrounds. Fair enough.

Massacre de Scio, Delacroix,1824 (Wikipedia)

And, I have repainted the background of Brownie, because I have decided the painting was a perfect candidate to morph into a naif.

I have liked naifs since I first saw a great number of them in Paris eons ago. But with all the art training I've had, it seemed silly to me not to use the techniques and knowledge imparted to me by the modern masters who taught at The Art Students League of New York, where I studied, and which I also picked up by modeling for Silvermine Guild in Connecticut and The New School's art classes in NYC.

But I came to a conclusion recently: Unless one is doing angry paintings, perhaps all other paintings--except portraits--are too ephemeral in today's world to be meaningful. In a world where anyone can Photoshop any assortment of elements into something else and call it art. But naifs--primitives--are a bit different. They are more honestly the reaction of an artist to a place, person, event or even idea than most things, I think. And a reaction, to be valid, must simply BE, it need not be expressed in a particular manner.

That having been said, primitives are, indeed, very mannerist. They would have to be, as the artist is not only expressing his or her reaction, but is also expressing it in a way completely individual to that person, simply because that person has not been trained, taught to think of line in a particular way, or of colour in a particular way, or composition, or anything. 

Even trained artists will express as themselves. My nude drawings are nothing like the turgid, Renaissance-like work of my first tutor, Gustave Rehberger. (I had an abortive first attempt at studying at the Art Students League. I unwittingly signed up for Rehberger's class, and was so terrified of him that I dropped out in less than a month. Truly, his raw power distressed my soul and even years later, when I would happen to pass him while walking on 57th Street, I would quake inside myself and cross the street.)

Nor are they like the precise anatomical work of Robert Beverly Hale. Nor yet like the more commercial style of D'Alessio...or any of my other teachers.

They are like me.

BUT  they do depend on what I learned at the Art Students League and elsewhere.

The primitives I have painted require that I forget all that and simply go to the subject itself, choose colors along the lines of what pleases me or what I think might make the painting please viewers or both. And, as it happens, viewers who can't spend multiple thousands for artwork for their homes, it seems to me, are generally not interested in difficult works, or works that one needs to have read all of Germany's modern authors to understand, or that will only look well in a Philip Johnson-designed minimalist house.

They are interested in colourful work that makes them happy, reminds them of good times, nice places, swell food, cute doggies, happy children. 

I decided, first and foremost, that after 40 years working mainly as a journalist--and even now, penning rants about current political conditions in the US and the EU because although it's a dirty job, someone has to do it--I needed more HAPPY in my life.

I'm not going to disavow my education and cease doing work in other genres. But I think the way to get happy is by painting some primitives. With luck, others will like them, too.

Brownie's Excellent Beach Adventure, copyright Laura Harrison McBride 2013

Copyright Laura Harrison McBride 2013

Philistines abound; avoid their cheap advice at all costs

The Horse Fair by Rosa Bonheur (1852) (Wiki Commons) This picture is owned by the Metropolitan Museum of New York: I spent hours of my youth sitting entranced before it, and knowing the story of Rosa Bonheur who refused to do needlework to become a painter instead.

NOTE:  If you are having trouble reading this, please click here. Blogger seems to have issues today.

I'm fairly certain I'm a feminist. I don't, however, think I would call myself a feminist; I think I would call myself a progressive pragmatic humanist. Which means? That I believe in humanist ideals for all people, including women, but we are not there yet. Feminism implies too much of an Us v. Them mentality for my taste. And I believe that the entire world will benefit when the entire world is equally valued, equally paid and when the innate characteristics of all sorts of people are equally valued.

This morning, viewing a slide show that accompanied the story "23 things every woman should stop doing," on Huffington Post, I noticed they had recommended the book Get To Work...And Get A Life, Before It's Too Late by Linda R. Hirshman.

Included in Hirshman's "strategic plan for women" was the following advice: "don't study art."

I am appalled. What was this woman thinking? Or not thinking. Is it really better to become an accountant for the potential of big money when your heart says to be a painter? Will one, in fact, make big money if one's heart is not in it? And if one does make a relative fortune despite a lukewarm attitude toward the work itself, what happens after 40 years of that? Does one then curl up and die immediately of regret, having beaten one's muse into an early grave? Maybe trading passion for the pocketbook explains all the sour old bats one meets. 

Some of us go ahead and paint--forty years later--because we have a nest egg or a working spouse and don't need to scrimp and save through retirement. But some, having squandered their youth and strength rushing down paths they really dislike, are simply locked out, unable to raise either the blood pressure or financing to follow their passion, their dream. 

How sad. I can tell you first-hand that living a life for a paycheck--even a paycheck achieved by relatively satisfying work--is no substitute for expressing the life one wants, regardless of the size of the paycheck. Waiting 40 years to do what one loves is damaging, not only to one's soul, but to the world deprived of whatever in one's heart was yearning to be free.

A Baby Boomer searches for life

My first love was theatre. But my father talked me out of studying it at university, or maybe it's more as if he was so frightened that I'd get ahead by lying down, as it were, that his disapproval of the whole idea influenced me. So I decided I would be a writer instead. It never occurred to me, not even at university, that I could work in theatre without being an actress which did, in fact, bore me to tears. I loathed learning lines, and if there was ever a show I was in during my youth in which I didn't do a bit of improv because I hadn't learned my lines, I don't know about it.

So, writing then. I went to journalism grad school. I became a journalist, a pretty good one. I made a good living for 35 years or so. But I was never, ever happy about it. Firstly,

I'm an introvert, and it took a bit of self-flagellation to get me to pick up the phone. Eventually, though, I got stuck in and had quite a bit of fun asking politicians questions they didn't like, even face to face. One of my favorite moments was asking one such question of the Secretary of State of the state of Tennessee; he saw a female journalist and expected fluff. HAH! The look on his face was almost worth the price of admission.

Maybe that's what kept me at it, the fact that I was having a good time making a decent living in what is still, I hasten to add, a man's world. It is the rare female journalist who gets the kudos. But I digress.

Following yet ANOTHER wrong path

Several years into that career, my need to express demanded to be let out of its cage. I started by going to the New York School of Interior Design. I like nice houses. I thought if I did that, it would be a REAL profession, with real money...etc. And a chance to...dare I believe it?...dabble in art. Of course, the fact that I aced the colour course without actually waking up and the instructor was a horrific witch and endured the chatter of dingbats throughout the period furniture lectures...well, it was a non-starter.

Finally, I gave in. I went to the Art Students League of New York for real lessons in real drawing and painting with real instructors, so real that they had to be working artists, well represented, even to teach there. 

And I never looked back.

I loved art school. I really did. So many interesting people, aside from the chance to actually learn how it's done. But I failed again to switch horses. I made a small attempt when I lived in Florida to start a gallery for my own work and a friend's, a former architect who had become a watercolourist in his retirement. But I depended on my freelance writing income to support it...and a major client went belly up. End of experiment.

Hard to get stuck in when one has been dulled for 40 years...

So...here it is...I am retired from journalism, though you'd never know it to see my byline all over the place, but now I write only what I want, not only what is paid for as I did before.

I'm having a hard time getting stuck into a career in art; my career should be over, after all. I should be doing nothing but what I want and traveling. I've paid the piper, paid my dues in several wrong professions. I'm getting, well, old if the truth be told. (Reference the line above about raising the blood pressure and the cash to finally paint, sculpt or whatever later in life.)

Still, I have begun doing what I want. I am painting, although the usual socially/culturally influenced negativity that afflicts most women puts the brakes on my forward movement more often than I would like. (Must work on that.)

But worse, I spent an entire life denying myself what I wanted to do: art. Theatre, art, or even writing poetry (something else that seems to have taken on its own life all of a sudden.) I was a journeyman journalist making a good income writing about stuff that seemed to be useful, and that sometimes I even enjoyed, for instance, the years when I was a theatre reviewer. But it didn't feed my soul. It fed my horse, and my horse fed my soul. But then, I view riding a horse over fences as kinetic art; indeed, that's exactly what I was doing, and doing well when I managed to win a ribbon.

All this chequered past makes it all the harder to begin now, knowing I cannot in this lifetime achieve the mastery of a Rembrandt, the temporal fame of a Basquiat or Hockney, the money of a Warhol.

I would like to meet Linda R. Hirshman and possibly punch her right in the nose. How dare she tell women not to pursue their passion! How dare she assume for others that having work that pays well is all a good life is about. I think money is the least a good life is about. I'd tell her to get a life before it's too late, but I doubt she'd hear me. Apparently, the demands of a dying culture are sufficient for her: work, save, put off anything that makes your soul sing. Get a life, you know, one of those cookie-cutter things one can find on TV.

It's bullshit, her statement. And it needs to be put in a paper bag and set afire on her front steps so she gets the full benefit of the stench of her soul-deadening plan for women. I've got a few choice words for the editors of HuffPo, as well.

 

Muse on the ropes. Again. Plus Sarin.

My Muse, pondering (Laura Harrison McBride, 2012)

A few weeks ago, I had a moribund muse, half killed by months of visitors and no opportunity to let her exercise either her verbal or visual powers, to express her needs for truth or beauty or both.

And then, freedom. An empty house. A house with cleaning needing to be done, laundry needing to be washed, food needing to be cooked, husband needing to be looked after, dog needing to be groomed and cat needing to be waited on hand and foot. (Cat lovers will know that the last part is the only essential one.)

Still, I made a start at feeding my muse with things she needs and enjoys.

And then came Syria.

Who cares? Well. Let it be known that I am not a political animal. When I wrote for newspapers and magazines, I steered clear of politics. I wrote features and reviews.

Did I mention Syria popped up?

The Rime of the Aging Painter

Segway again. Last weekend, on our way back from Wells, Simon and I stopped at Coleridge Cottage, and there the subject of the Romantic poets returned to my consciousness. It would be fair to note here that, although I double majored in English Lit. and Theatre at university, I was a casual student at best. Mostly. I didn't give a rat's ass about most subjects and saw no reason at all that the world would be better or worse off if I got a wonderful grade in the work as opposed to an acceptable one. I had already figured out that employers didn't really care as long as you had a sheepskin from someplace, and I didn't have any intention of going to grad school. The B.A. was fine; M.A.? Why? I didn't plan to teach. I planned to write. Not poetry; journalism. In aid of which I did, in fact, go to grad school. 

Anyway, for reasons only my spirit could enumerate, I was drawn to the Romantic poets, much as, I suppose, I've been drawn to the Impressionist painters. So, there it was, the Big Class in Romantic poetry. The final exam was being shown 50 snippets of poems by the major and minor Romantic poets--minor works we had not studied--and determining who wrote each and why. I lost only two points out of a hundred on that test. And for years, although I never cracked it again, I dragged around a huge academic volume of the Romantic poets. And now I can't find it. Somewhere between Maryland, USA and Cornwall, UK, it got dumped-lost-given away-something.

But I found, in talking to the docent at Coleridge Cottage, that I still recall an amazing amount of stuff about those poets, 45 years later. That the Romantic poets were all political animals, that Coleridge was an activist who was often regarded by the authorities as a danger to decent society. My memory banks were pleased, and transferred the resurrected knowledge to my conscious brain; it's OK, then, to be a poet and an activist.

Truth will out

Well before last weekend, I had begun writing poetry that was rather well-received, I thought, on Glipho. I was actually quite pleased with that, if not quite as pleased as I would be for a similar reception to my paintings. I suspect my muse has wanted to write poetry for decades, but her journalist overseer prevented it.

Unfortunately, since the day it became clear that the United States meant to bomb another sovereign state because it is annoying America's rich folk and bankers, my muse has gone to ground. And the journalist has usurped her time.

I've renounced my US citizenship. I don't live in the US or Syria, and have no plans to go to either place, ever. So neither I nor my muse should really not give a rat's ass, especially since Labour made the UK do the right thing.

But I was planning to go to Cyprus in October. It has been three years since we last were there, so, during the upheavals of the summer, I decided a good dose of sun, sand and antiquities would restore my muse, and me, to health. Booked it...and these days, booking is the same as paying. No longer can one make any changes to flights, even for a fee. If we don't go, we just lose the entire fare. BUT...and it's a significant but...I have no intention of being a schnook and canceling. I simply won't show up for the flight as the cost to me will be the same, and I might thus prevent the greedy airline (in this case, one that begins with T) selling our seats for full stroke, twice. They MIGHT get takers at the gate...but probably not. It seems to me this ought to become a movement, in fact, among airline customers. If you can't go, don't show. Snappy, yes?

Common sense dictates...maybe

I doubt that I will go. I need to gin out a few more paintings to be juried so that I might join an artists' group that I hope will have me. 

I'm tired, though. Tired enough to run my mouth about all the crap the US is perpetrating on the world now. I'm feeling good about Labour turning off Cameron's plans for supporting Uncle Sod-All, but feeling bad about watching Obama follow the example of that most horrific of US presidents, George W. Bush. Up to and including lies, in this case, pressing the air strike issue with not one shred of proof that any Sarin attack happened, never mind that it was by Assad. As one commentator said, why would Assad do it? He was winning against the insurgents (American-backed, we understand), and gassing his own citizens certainly wouldn't help him win their hearts and minds.

But never mind. I have a muse to resurrect. Darned if I know how, though. I'm having a hard time concentrating on cleaning brushed, never mind using them.

And then there's this: If I am ever even tempted to paint on a canvas board again, might someone please strike me hard with their open palm? Nasty stuff, that. Did it for cheapness, as I meant only to sell copies of the original. Never again. My muse is worth canvas with a bit of life, after all, or how will she know when she's moving in the right direction?

How do you spell that?

Finally.

Finallyfinallyfinallyfinallyfinally.

When one is getting over an illness, one does first that which comes most naturally. When it is a malady of the soul caused by the logistics of life (that is, having houseguests all summer, which is not conducive to artsy thinking or doing), then one works one's way back by doing that for which the muscles of body or soul or both are most easily resurrected.

In my case, it was writing, and particularly, it was writing journalism, columns on the vicissitudes of modern life. I was a journalist for 40 years, after all, and only a part-time artist and equestrienne during that time.

So I dumped a tirade about the reprehensible current mayor of my birthplace (Michael Bloomberg of NYC) into cyberspace. Ah. Felt pretty good. (It would feel better to write a paean to the late Ed Koch, the best mayor of NYC there ever was...but the subject isn't "sexy." No one suffered, as New Yorkers are suffering now.)

Today, finally, a poem escaped me. It needed to. And it meant I had at least partly processed the upsetting events of last week, horrific environmental damage on a small scale by a truly reprehensible old geezer who lives next door and destroyed our common hedgerow.

And I worked a bit on two paintings.

I am turning a portrait of my dog into a primitive.

And, I have begun a painting of two dogs who frequent a pub in Gwithian and, as it happens, sit on bar stools covered with doggie-paw-print fabric. They are real dogs; I ate lunch with them one day in early spring.

Late discovery

I have suddenly discovered primitives. I do recall having seen a gallery devoted to Naifs in Paris 35 years ago. As I recall, the palette of most artists shown was either blue or green. And there were a lot of cats.

But I couldn't recall seeing many more naive paintings until I picked up a book including works by members of The Association of British Naive Artists during a visit to Penlee House, Penzance, last summer.

And then I recalled--doh!--a piece in my own collection. A small painting, about 6 inches by 9 inches, that I bought in Paris about 35 years ago, give or take. Possibly on the same visit in which I saw the gallery, possibly not. Back then, I went to Paris whenever the spirit moved me AND I had the wherewithal at the same time. It didn't happen all that often, not half often enough.

Anyway, I carried the little painting around unframed for a while, quite a while, while I ended a marriage and made a couple of long-distance moves. Plus, I had a horse to buy; I couldn't afford framing. But eventually, the little painting got framed. And since then, it has always hung in my kitchen. Not the ideal place for a painting, I suspect, but it is done in acrylics, so probably a bit less difficult to ruin than oils.

And I love it. Not for the subject matter. Not for the colour. Not for the style. Not for the artist whose name I haven't the foggiest idea of, although I recall he was a big guy, didn't speak much, and had hung his paintings on the fence around a church on Boulevard St. Germain. And I think I paid about 15 bucks for it, at whatever American money was exchanging for with francs back then.

What I love about it is this: Charcuterie is misspelled as Charcutrie.

Despite my almost obsessional demand that English should be written correctly, whether English English, American English or even pidgin English, all according to its own rules, the fact that charcuterie was misspelled said something to me.

It said that art was art and didn't really need to represent anything in a standard manner. Probably, the artist was simply a lousy speller. Why not? He was studying art, not French....if he was French. Maybe he wasn't. Maybe that's why he didn't speak much, because we tourists wouldn't want to buy art on the street in Paris created by an English guy, or a German or Italian or even an American in Paris, no matter how cheap the art or how charming the art or the artist. Maybe he was a foreigner and that's why he misspelled that common French word.

A feast of possibilities

So, there it hangs in my kitchen among the pots and pans reminding me as I create our meals that I can create other stuff, too. Stuff that doesn't depend on years and years of study, as my journalism and horse-showing lives did. I did study art, though, because that's the way I'm made, with a penchant to find out HOW things are done and to have the best instruction I can find. But I think, now, I might forget those studies, the magic of Robert Beverly Hale's anatomical drawing instruction et al, and do a little naif painting myself. It's happy, and lord knows happy would be good both in the big world and my little one at the moment.

But I don't think I'll have a green or blue palette; so far, both paintings seem to be a little red- and orange-heavy...but who knows? I still do love oils far more than acrylics. So, after a little waiting, and I can paint over it, change the palette if I feel like it, and maybe even misspell a common Englesh wurd.

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.

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.