My intention this morning was to reflect on the problem of the split between the kind of person who can create excellent works of art, full of meaning for everyone, and the kind who can promote such work so that the world even knows it exists. Even in Montana (tongue in cheek) we all know that Charlie Russell just wanted to paint, but his wife “Mamie” knew how to sell, both through her belief in the work and because she was good at the game of selling. She knew how to tempt, flirt, and reward the buyer. Charlie did the steak -- Mame did the sizzle.
I was going to say a few words about Al Tooley, who is another Montana artist, working in a cool medium: “CGE,” which is computer-generated environment. I THINK. The letters also seems to stand for other things, such as the Center for Gender Equity in SF. It’s a bit of acronym alphabet soup, but shucks, a bit of ambiguity and accident is good for us all.
Getting back to Tooley, he is the founder of a whole town: McKinley, MT, which is a town he made up. It’s virtual, but not necessarily virtuous. He sets out the nature of this town on his website, http://mckinleymontana.com/ and invites us all to contribute virtual history and stories and even artifacts that describe the place. My stories turned out to be suitable for a smaller town, so I invented “Twenty Mile,” a little satellite suburb that gradually gets absorbed by McKinley. I need to think up a new story for the place. Lance Foster is the person who told me about it. He writes scary stories with a sort of gothic tone. I guess this town amounts to a sort of organic anthology that generates itself. Al is the editor, of course, and might reject a story if it doesn’t fit.
http://www.ajtooley.com/wordpress/ is Al’s main website where he posts experiments and demos in CGE. Or is it CGI? Computer Generated Images. He makes scenes of dinosaurs that are highly realistic and then again a herd of bison that regroup themselves unrealistically to form a map of Montana! A lot of this expertise is meant for computer games, but also shows up in ads. A lot of this stuff appears on websites. I love checking out Tooley's hyper-scenery, which is intensified and augmented real landscape, rather like what Charlie did with paint. I think many of the images we see are altered and saturated without us realizing it, so that ordinary life can seem sort of . . . drained.
The thing is, such work requires intense concentration over long stretches of time, so Tooley and his computer are symbiotic. His personality is suited to that. I could (and do) sit at the computer for a long time but my writing is a matter of making a line of thought flower (sometimes way too florid for a scholar) and his image-making is much more dependent on detail and layers. At one time I thought I’d love to try that, over-laying images in the way that Tim and his boys do, but now it’s the words I want.
So I was intrigued by the Review of the Day, which arrives automatically from Powells in Portland. This time it was from ”The Nation” and the book was “Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector” by Benjamin Moser. (Google Moser -- he replaced John Leonard as the New Books editor for Harpers and he is based in the Netherlands. He looks about twelve but he believes books will survive our tumbling business models.)
He really has the hots for Lispector, but it’s a little tough to understand why. She looked “like Marlene Dietrich” and the claim is that she writes like Virginia Wolff, but then they go on to say that she wrote about trying to lose consciousness, to be not so much transgressive as withdrawn. Of course, she got off to a bad start: the product of a WWII gang rape that gave her mother syphilis as well as herself and ended up in a bad near-end, going to sleep while smoking and waking too late to avoid crippling burns that ended her beauty. During the fifty years in between she was a sort of reclusive Mary Gaitskill person, writing beautifully about miserable subjects. This is a very extreme example of what I’m talking about: a creative person who would seem not only personally unsuited to self-promotion, but also not likely to produce marketable books.
Evidently she is written about as being “religious,” a mystic though variously described as Jewish, Christian or even atheist. A sort of self-afflicter in the way of saints. This reviewer of the biography is Rachel Aviv, described as a Rosalynn Carter Fellow in mental health journalism at the Carter Center. Who knew you could get a fellowship in “mental health journalism?” Googling HER is also rewarding. For instance, at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=180239 she writes about a “poem” or trope that many people claim to have written. (It’s about footprints in the sand.) She quotes Jung, who’s hot right now: “In ‘Cryptomnesia’ (1905), a paper about accidental plagiarism, Carl Jung argues that it’s impossible to know for certain which ideas are one’s own. ‘Our unconsciousness . . . swarms with strange intruders,’ he writes. He accuses Nietzsche of unwittingly copying another’s work, and urges all writers to sift through their memories and locate the origin of every idea before putting it to paper: ‘Ask each thought: Do I know you, or are you new?’”
One of the “values” of creativity is supposed to be total originality, which may be why writing about formerly forbidden topics is so attractive, since even if someone wrote about -- as Lispector does -- the exaltation of licking pus off a cockroach, since one could hardly go lower, it’s not likely to have been published. (Personally, I’m not very curious about that.) Solitude would allow one to write in this way. Then promoting and selling it would be someone else’s problem, if anyone even knew it existed.
Which is a question that doesn’t seem to be included in this book/review/review-of-review -- how in tarnation did anyone know she existed? I gather that in certain circles her abruptness and mystery was magnetic and drew people to pursue her. The contradiction between her appearance and her “content” somehow hypnotized people. Maybe it was the period, or maybe that’s just the way people are wired: to be curious about what is different. . . or what is forbidden.
Al Tooley is not forbidden or gothic, just evasive, but CGI is certainly a curious medium and dinos are not cuddly. Worth checking out Tooley’s websites.
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