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But I digress
Cleaning out the mind's mailbox tonight.
Nobody asked me who Chinua Achebe was. Does this mean that you've all read his books? I sure haven't. It would be fitting, somehow, if the one time everyone gets one of my weird, obscure little jokes is the time I happen to be talking through my hat. All I know about Achebe is that he wrote a book called Things Fall Apart. Well, that and what my encyclopedia of literature told me when I looked him up.
And Nora, of course, is a character in the Ibsen play A Doll's House. Another Ibsen play is An Enemy of the People - except that ever since I saw a certain movie with Will Smith and Gene Hackman I've been getting the two titles mixed up.
Willard Espy writes that critic George Jean Nathan "wrote of an ill-done Doll's House that when Nora walked out on her household and slammed the door, the audience rose as one man and rose to congratulate the husband."
Eric tells me that when I said W.C. Fields' nose was red and puffy from habitual boozing, I was perpetuating
a common misconception: The nose of W.C. Fields (and others like it) is the result of untreated rosacea. Drinking too much is bad for your body in many ways, but not this one.
Mary Anne (by which I do not mean Mary Anne, but Mary Anne - don't worry, they know who they are) wrote me in some agitation today and said:
But the sisters' condition for losing their souls was that Calvino and his bride's happiness would end; what happened to that?
They wanted to see the happiness end. All happiness ends sometime. I picture the sisters coming back for a brief vacation from Hell, fifty years later, to watch Calvino on his deathbed.
Or you could take the pessimistic view, that knowing he'd been responsible for the Devil taking the two sisters so distressed Calvino that all of the joy was gone from his marriage after that.
You be the judge.
Incidentally, I got that story from Italo Calvino's retellings of Italian Folk Tales, so I changed the name of the main character in his honor. Don't worry, though, I'm not stealing Calvino's words; only the plot, which he stole to begin with. In fact, if Calvino were alive to see how messy my interpretation was, he'd probably demand I put the hero's original name back and take his off.
Aussie had something very important to say about my art vs. illustration rant:
You may have a bit of a point, but you've missed a whole 'nother point on the artists/illustrators thing. The distinction you've failed to note is that your list of artists are all Representationalists (at least all the ones I recognise). This is what makes the art snobs call them "illustrators". In a way, it's defensive - they won't call Rembrandt, Michelangelo or DaVinci "illustrators", you'll note, only modern representationalists. It's a valid thing for arts people to get defensive about, however, because the bleeding public is always willing to drag out the old cliche "My kindergartener draws better than that" and so on, and will never fail to be impressed by photo-realism. In short, there are a whole lotta folks willing to consider art only by how much it looks like the real thing, and the art snobs feel it their job to put those people firmly in their place. To some extent this has been overdone, and some abstract and conceptual art is overrated shit, but the art-ignorant art patrons who would rather fill the museums with Currier & Ives than Klee & Kandinsky, need art snobs to shame them into broadening their outlook.
John Held, one of the artists on my list, is far from representational ... but since he's the one I said I didn't care for, I can't pick nits. It's true that I distrust most non-representational art. (Kandinsky - isn't he the one that paints canvases with three big swipes of color and nothing else? Oh, no, wait, that's Rothko. Urgh.) Picasso has never done much for me - and he knew how to paint reality quite photographically; he just chose not to. The only kind of non-realist art that's ever really spoken to me is surrealism, where you're still pretty realistic in style, but painting things that can't possibly exist. I think one of the reasons surrealism is so popular with my generation is that they see that plain realism lacks imagination ... but they also don't see the point of, say, Mondrian grids and other abstracts. Surrealism is sort of a compromise.
I am vulnerable to Aussie's accusation. If preferring realistic art means that my tastes in art are lowbrow, then so be it. I can't stand Currier and Ives prints, though.
I have the following prints on my wall: Magritte's The Empire of Light, the two bored-looking Raphael angels that everyone loves (from the Sistine Madonna), Monet's painting of his wife in Japanese dress ... and a framed Georgia O'Keefe item which belongs to Nonelvis and looks sort of like a close-up of a black orchid's intimate parts. I also have four printouts of my own photos which I've altered with colored pencil, and five sketches from Marc.
Since Marc seldom does figurative art of any kind, and I like his abstract forms enough to put them on my wall, I expect to hear from him about this art stuff any second now.
I have two really good Irish folktales about beating the devil, but they both happen to involve lawyers, and I don't like to fire off lawyer jokes until I've had a chance to put up my bulletproof disclaimers.
I still haven't seen An Ideal Husband and it's driving me Wilde.
I have to remember to type up a brownie recipe for Mme S. before she comes back from her trip.
I spent several sleepless minutes last night wondering how to pronounce Aet's name. English isn't good with AEs. It could be ayt or iyt or eet, if the dipthong makes a long vowel, or eht if it makes a short one.
It occurs in Sethin, but to them it's not a dipthong, just another vowel; AE is the way it transliterates to our alphabet. It's always pronounced as a long a; A by itself is always short. The other false dipthong, IE, is pronounced like a long e; E by itself is short and usually unstressed. Now you know how to say Aedie.
Aet blames me for teaching her the phrase, "But I digress."
© Columbine
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There is less in this than meets the eye.
- Tallulah Bankhead
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