This morning the librarian had arranged a little rendezvous between myself and a man here in Valier who writes with the help of the librarian. If you say these things are beyond what librarians do, you’d be right and wrong. Like everything else, librarians are on a spectrum from hopeless to brilliant. Kathy is towards the top end, not because of fancy degrees, but because she’s a community builder. She values people as much as books and she doesn’t limit books to those funny square-cornered things with pages. Computers don’t intimidate her and she has an eye for art.
Byron’s blog is at www.mythicalhunter.blogspot.com He’s a man who has done a lot of things and is now retired in Valier. I would like to see Valier attract more writers and artists to the low-cost houses (some not even upscale enough for today’s renters) and low key life. Anyway, he wanted to know about self-publishing so I threw into a sack a bunch of demonstration books, ranging from Bob Scriver’s high-production “The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains” to Adolf Hungry Wolf’s early homemade stapled books to Gwen Frostic’s books so homemade that she even made the paper and bound the books: they are art objects.
It turns out that Byron simply wants to put some of his blog material on paper, so he will probably just take a copy-ready manuscript to Kinko and get them to make him a few hundred copies to sell around the region. He’s a hunter/fisherman and likes to write small smile-generating “funny moments.” We have a number of bloggers and column writers (they combine the two) in the local papers who do just that. A few have progressed to bound books and speaking here and there. None of the locals that I know of have gone “audible” which I think has a lot of potential where people drive long distances and work with the radio running in the background. A lady ranger from Glacier Park came along and fell into the conversation as did Corky, a former student of mine with near-family connections to Bob and I who runs the motel. It was a lively time.
I value these friends and enjoy them and their books and lives. But I will not give them much time. I will not go out of my way to do much more for them than this sort of conversation: that is, no editing, rewriting, typing, etc. Other people in town are capable of that. These friends are not occupying the mental territory where I live now.
The question arises of why I write and what I expect to get out of it. I do not make money -- in fact, I go in the hole. I’m subsidized by Social Security and my own willingness to live on less. But this is always what I’ve done. I move back and forth among the poverty of art and the poverty of the ministry and the poverty of underemployment. It’s only money. I have a certain kind of education and a big pile of books, which the librarian augments with Interlibrary Loan. Maybe ten years are left for me to live, if I’m lucky, and I intend to use them. What I can do seems to respond to a need I hear.
This is a time of confusion, not just politically and emotionally, but in terms of what we should believe, what gives the world meaning. People -- whole nations -- are lying, cheating, murdering and stealing. Is it because God is dead? If God is dead, what hope is there? Everyone gets stuck on this humanoid in the sky. I have no idea whether my ideas are the Ultimate Truth because I have no idea what Ultimate Truth really is. It may be deader than God. But I’m following up a few clues.
Genre publishing has left paper and gone to ebooks because it works. The readers gobble print, want to forget everything else, and don’t have money and space for physical books. Some travel. I think it’s really GREAT that textbooks have gone to tablets -- an American tradition, isn’t it? The student slate tablet with chalk? LIke the one Anne Shirley broke over Gilbert’s head when he mocked her red hair? Ebooks have also blown open the door to mixed media: print with a sound track, print that interleaves with video, print that’s watching your eyes and turning the page at the right time. It’s all great. (And totally dependent on the level of technology we can sustain in a fat country. I don’t mean the latest Kindle, I mean electricity.)
I was surprised to read that one expanding category of paper print is “spiritual” writing. I’ve scoffed at it -- I suppose I thought of it as a place for genre God-haters and dizzy pseudo-Hindu sutra chasers. People who can’t be troubled to come in and sit down in either a church or a library. They’d rather smother in a charlatan’s ersatz sweat lodge under a plastic Walmart tarp.
But now I think that there are readers and writers out there who are more dignified and worthy, seeking something like the revelations we cherished in the Sixties. All those backpack books. “Be Here Now.” Some are taking a second look at those books (it’s easier now that obscenity has been pushed back), making serious explorations of what we know so far and where we might look next. Not all the print is in books: blogs, websites, private communications, think-tanks (Edge.com, TED, MIT lectures on tape). Not all the conversation is in English. (Uh, oh.) What we’re looking for is a simple, powerful, gripping idea we can use as a guide. I think we’re getting closer but we’re not there yet.
No one has helped me more in my own quest than Tim and the boys of Cinematheque. They constantly throw atrocity, agony, destruction, and death in my face -- hardballs. My catcher’s mitt is not enough: my hand stings. I nearly lose an eye. I’m knocked cold. But I stay in the game because it forces me to grow in skill and power. I am not writing to make people laugh (though that happens) or to make money. (Hahahahahaha.) It’s a ministry. I’m not necessarily the minister. God is dead -- there is no God and never was. So now what do we tell the “twelves”?
I agree with the conclusions of these handsome, wicked, feral guys: Art is God. Art is participation in the universe. (You think God is love? Prove it. Show me your life.) The most subversive action is becoming part of the action without any permission or filter. Just there, because the presence of opposition is a key to the universe that pitches at these guys fatal spitballs aimed at their temples, even as the boys dance in the face of death.
No comments:
Post a Comment