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Ah, I finished Chapter 22 - finally. Frigging hard chapter to write. Now, I get to peck away at chapter 23. Yay. Book is now 179 pages and 65,670 words. Nifty.
Two more interesting selections from Milan Kundera's New Yorker essay on What is A Novelist, published in the Oct 9, 2006 vol of the New Yorker.
1. Fame
"A man becomes famous when the number of people who know him is markedly greater than the number he knows. The recognition enjoyed by a great surgeon is not fame: he is admired not by a public but by his patients, by his colleagues. He lives in equilibrium. Fame is a disequilibrium. There are professions that drag it along behind them necessarily, unavoidably: politicians, supermodels, athelets, artists.
Artists' fame is the most monsterous of all, for it implies the idea of immortality. And that is a diabolical snare, because the grotesquely megalomaniac ambition to survive one's death is inseparably bound to the artist's probity. Every novel created with real passion aspires quite naturally to a lasting asethetic value, meaning to a value capable of surviving its author. To write without having that ambition is cynicism: a mediocre plumber may be useful to people, but a mediocre novelist who consciously produces books that are ephemeral, commonplace, conventional - thus not useful, thus burdensome, thus noxious - is contemptible. This is the novelist's curse: his honesty is bound to the vile stake of his megalomania."
What an interesting view. Not sure I agree or disagree. Oh I agree about Fame - it is a disequilibrium and it does haunt those professions that tend to entertain or present, without necessarily connecting on an one to one level - the professions that engender a type of fanatical worship from admirers who they can never meet, who see or experience the work without the necessity of the physical presence of the creator of the work. In a way, anyone who has written fanfic, television essays and achieved some sense of popularity via that creation - has experienced "fame". Even if it's just for fifteen minutes. And it can be a heady experience, even addictive, having complete strangers come up to you and state how they love your work and feel they know you through that work - when you know nothing about them - have never met them and find it odd they can know you.
Was discussing this with two acquaintances I'd met last night after a concert. We'd wondered if celebrity worship was purely an American thing - first off, discovered, no, it's not (although from being online - I'd more or less figured that out for myself) - a Chinese woman said in some ways it's even worse in China. People are more hyper about celebrities there. Taking the whole thing to the extreme. The other woman I was with proceeded to tell a story about catering a party for Kathie Lee Gifford - a C list celebrity, who used to host a TV talk show and is married to a former athelet. She said that her boss, the chief caterer, acted as if she was Kathie Lee's best friend, that she knew the kids, and had visited the home on numerous occassions - when in reality she'd only been there once or twice and only as a caterer. Because the woman watched Kathie Lee on TV and had read about her - she assumed she knew her, they were "friends".
A while back, George Clooney was quoted as stating that "Fame" is the cancer of "Success". He'd stated it after having one too many cameras thrust in his face and one too many negative stories posted in the National Enquirer - the thorn in the side of many celebrities. Last night, I wondered, not for the first time, what is it about our society or human nature in general that we treat fame the way we do?
You see it with political icons - such as Princess Diana - who had lines of mourners, angry mourners, outside Buckingham Palace after her untimely death. None of these people had actually met Diana. She did not know their names. She had not met them. She did not know they existed. Yet, they considered her a close friend and mourned her as one.
And you see it with smaller, less well known celebrities such as James Marsters - whose only claim to fame is appearing on two cult tv shows. People act as if the man knows them. They give him gifts much as they might a boyfriend or a close friend. They take photographs with him. They want to kiss and hug him. They send him letters of support. They host charities in his name. And when they meet him in person - they act as if they are reuniting with a close friend.
While talking to the two people last night - I said I was not comfortable talking to celebrities. And in the few situations I've been in with them, often shrank back to a corner, unable to come up with a way of conversing, just watching people.
One of the women responded, the gal from China, "but what would you say to them? How would you even start such a conversation? I've seen your films? I love your work?"
"Yes," I said, "that's just it, it is so awkward. You, as the admirer of their work, have the advantage. It's almost like meeting someone's husband or best friend - who that person has told you all about, spoken of repeatedly, yet in return they've told the husband or best friend nothing about you - you have the advantage. You know who they are, but they don't know you."
Imagine if you will someone coming into your life - telling you how they've loved everything you've done, being able to repeat what you've said verbatim, knowing your public humilations, and your failures - how do you feel when you meet them? What is your first response? For me, it is to back away. Somewhat shyly. Protesting. You do not know me. You know what I've chosen to present to the world, the lies I've told to protect myself. The truth's I chosen to relate. But not me! How dare you make that presumption.
Fame is I think a disequilibrium. It throws the artist off-balance. And once it happens, the artist feels a bit like they are under a microscope, as if every nuance every tick is being torn and pulled at it. Criticized. Until the criticism may worm its way into the artist's own skull dictating what they create - ensuring they maintain the level of applause they've grown accostumed to.
2. Art and the World or The Little Boy and His Grandmother.
Also with Fame, people - the fans, tend to at times become bullies. They become presumptious. They have power over the artist, because they are the artist's cheering section - the means to his/her immortality. If they are not pleased, they will go elsewhere. Lose interest. Find a new artist to patronize or adore. Forgetting the last one with the ease a child may discard or forget a toy that no longer thrills him or her. And they will often tell the artist what to do with his/her art - how to make it better - how to change it to meet with their satisfaction. Then, too, society might get involved - certain watch-dog groups, insisting that the artist or novelist or creator be socially responsible - that his or her message meet societial norms and further the message that society as a whole wishes to promote.
Kundera talks about this interference in another passage, entitled aptly, "The Little Boy and His Grandmother":
"I was nineteen when, in my hometown, a young academic gave a public lecture; it was during the first months of the Communist revolution, and, bowing to the spirit of the time, he talked about the social responsibility of art. After the conference, there was a discussion; what I remember is the poet, Josef Kainar ( a man of Blatny's generation, also long dead now), who, in response to the scholar's talk, told this anecdote:
A little boy takes his blind grandmother for a walk. They are strolling down a street, and from time to time the little boy says, 'Grandma, watch out - a root!' Thinking she is on a forest trail, the old woman keeps jumping. Passerby scold the little boy:'Son, you're treating your grandmother so badly!' And the boy says, ' She's my grandma! I'll treat her any way I want!' And Kainar finishes, 'That's me, that's how I am about my poetry.'"
I 'd state that's me, that's how I am about my creative writing, be it in my live journal or my novel. Tell me what or how to write at your own risk. It's mine. And I will do with it what I want. There are so few things in this life we can really say that about, I think. But the creation of art is to a degree one of them - it comes from us, once it is out there we have no control over how others perceive it, interact with it, inhale it, or enjoy it. But it remains ours in the creation.
Or as Kundera states: " Because what an author creates doesn't belong to his papa, his mama, his nation, or to mankind; it belongs to no one but himself; he can publish it when he wants and if he wants; he can change it, revise it, lengthen it, shorten it, throw it in the toilet and flush it down without the slightest obligation to explain himself to anybody at all."
I'm not sure this is true with all works of art. If it is collaborative - ownership becomes complicated. And if it is interactive? Even more so. Novels like poems can be more personal, more controlled. Yet, even then, once they are placed out there in the world, we lose control. We lose control over how we ourselves are perceived through them. Which is why it is courageous to share what we have created, to throw it out into the world, but not necessarily courageous to create it.
The simple act of sending the child we've created with words or the stroke of a paint-brush outside the boundaries of our home or imagination into another's is not, I think, unlike a parent sending a flesh and blood child off to school or to a friend's house to play. The same trepidation and fears, I suspect, accompany both acts on some level. Both require a trust not only in the child that we've created, but in the universe we've sent it out to. And the thing about trust is it is more often than not an unknown, an act of faith if you will. We have no way of knowing how our child will be greeted, we can only trust that it will survive and be greeted with good will. And if it is not, pray we have the strength to handle it.
Two more interesting selections from Milan Kundera's New Yorker essay on What is A Novelist, published in the Oct 9, 2006 vol of the New Yorker.
1. Fame
"A man becomes famous when the number of people who know him is markedly greater than the number he knows. The recognition enjoyed by a great surgeon is not fame: he is admired not by a public but by his patients, by his colleagues. He lives in equilibrium. Fame is a disequilibrium. There are professions that drag it along behind them necessarily, unavoidably: politicians, supermodels, athelets, artists.
Artists' fame is the most monsterous of all, for it implies the idea of immortality. And that is a diabolical snare, because the grotesquely megalomaniac ambition to survive one's death is inseparably bound to the artist's probity. Every novel created with real passion aspires quite naturally to a lasting asethetic value, meaning to a value capable of surviving its author. To write without having that ambition is cynicism: a mediocre plumber may be useful to people, but a mediocre novelist who consciously produces books that are ephemeral, commonplace, conventional - thus not useful, thus burdensome, thus noxious - is contemptible. This is the novelist's curse: his honesty is bound to the vile stake of his megalomania."
What an interesting view. Not sure I agree or disagree. Oh I agree about Fame - it is a disequilibrium and it does haunt those professions that tend to entertain or present, without necessarily connecting on an one to one level - the professions that engender a type of fanatical worship from admirers who they can never meet, who see or experience the work without the necessity of the physical presence of the creator of the work. In a way, anyone who has written fanfic, television essays and achieved some sense of popularity via that creation - has experienced "fame". Even if it's just for fifteen minutes. And it can be a heady experience, even addictive, having complete strangers come up to you and state how they love your work and feel they know you through that work - when you know nothing about them - have never met them and find it odd they can know you.
Was discussing this with two acquaintances I'd met last night after a concert. We'd wondered if celebrity worship was purely an American thing - first off, discovered, no, it's not (although from being online - I'd more or less figured that out for myself) - a Chinese woman said in some ways it's even worse in China. People are more hyper about celebrities there. Taking the whole thing to the extreme. The other woman I was with proceeded to tell a story about catering a party for Kathie Lee Gifford - a C list celebrity, who used to host a TV talk show and is married to a former athelet. She said that her boss, the chief caterer, acted as if she was Kathie Lee's best friend, that she knew the kids, and had visited the home on numerous occassions - when in reality she'd only been there once or twice and only as a caterer. Because the woman watched Kathie Lee on TV and had read about her - she assumed she knew her, they were "friends".
A while back, George Clooney was quoted as stating that "Fame" is the cancer of "Success". He'd stated it after having one too many cameras thrust in his face and one too many negative stories posted in the National Enquirer - the thorn in the side of many celebrities. Last night, I wondered, not for the first time, what is it about our society or human nature in general that we treat fame the way we do?
You see it with political icons - such as Princess Diana - who had lines of mourners, angry mourners, outside Buckingham Palace after her untimely death. None of these people had actually met Diana. She did not know their names. She had not met them. She did not know they existed. Yet, they considered her a close friend and mourned her as one.
And you see it with smaller, less well known celebrities such as James Marsters - whose only claim to fame is appearing on two cult tv shows. People act as if the man knows them. They give him gifts much as they might a boyfriend or a close friend. They take photographs with him. They want to kiss and hug him. They send him letters of support. They host charities in his name. And when they meet him in person - they act as if they are reuniting with a close friend.
While talking to the two people last night - I said I was not comfortable talking to celebrities. And in the few situations I've been in with them, often shrank back to a corner, unable to come up with a way of conversing, just watching people.
One of the women responded, the gal from China, "but what would you say to them? How would you even start such a conversation? I've seen your films? I love your work?"
"Yes," I said, "that's just it, it is so awkward. You, as the admirer of their work, have the advantage. It's almost like meeting someone's husband or best friend - who that person has told you all about, spoken of repeatedly, yet in return they've told the husband or best friend nothing about you - you have the advantage. You know who they are, but they don't know you."
Imagine if you will someone coming into your life - telling you how they've loved everything you've done, being able to repeat what you've said verbatim, knowing your public humilations, and your failures - how do you feel when you meet them? What is your first response? For me, it is to back away. Somewhat shyly. Protesting. You do not know me. You know what I've chosen to present to the world, the lies I've told to protect myself. The truth's I chosen to relate. But not me! How dare you make that presumption.
Fame is I think a disequilibrium. It throws the artist off-balance. And once it happens, the artist feels a bit like they are under a microscope, as if every nuance every tick is being torn and pulled at it. Criticized. Until the criticism may worm its way into the artist's own skull dictating what they create - ensuring they maintain the level of applause they've grown accostumed to.
2. Art and the World or The Little Boy and His Grandmother.
Also with Fame, people - the fans, tend to at times become bullies. They become presumptious. They have power over the artist, because they are the artist's cheering section - the means to his/her immortality. If they are not pleased, they will go elsewhere. Lose interest. Find a new artist to patronize or adore. Forgetting the last one with the ease a child may discard or forget a toy that no longer thrills him or her. And they will often tell the artist what to do with his/her art - how to make it better - how to change it to meet with their satisfaction. Then, too, society might get involved - certain watch-dog groups, insisting that the artist or novelist or creator be socially responsible - that his or her message meet societial norms and further the message that society as a whole wishes to promote.
Kundera talks about this interference in another passage, entitled aptly, "The Little Boy and His Grandmother":
"I was nineteen when, in my hometown, a young academic gave a public lecture; it was during the first months of the Communist revolution, and, bowing to the spirit of the time, he talked about the social responsibility of art. After the conference, there was a discussion; what I remember is the poet, Josef Kainar ( a man of Blatny's generation, also long dead now), who, in response to the scholar's talk, told this anecdote:
A little boy takes his blind grandmother for a walk. They are strolling down a street, and from time to time the little boy says, 'Grandma, watch out - a root!' Thinking she is on a forest trail, the old woman keeps jumping. Passerby scold the little boy:'Son, you're treating your grandmother so badly!' And the boy says, ' She's my grandma! I'll treat her any way I want!' And Kainar finishes, 'That's me, that's how I am about my poetry.'"
I 'd state that's me, that's how I am about my creative writing, be it in my live journal or my novel. Tell me what or how to write at your own risk. It's mine. And I will do with it what I want. There are so few things in this life we can really say that about, I think. But the creation of art is to a degree one of them - it comes from us, once it is out there we have no control over how others perceive it, interact with it, inhale it, or enjoy it. But it remains ours in the creation.
Or as Kundera states: " Because what an author creates doesn't belong to his papa, his mama, his nation, or to mankind; it belongs to no one but himself; he can publish it when he wants and if he wants; he can change it, revise it, lengthen it, shorten it, throw it in the toilet and flush it down without the slightest obligation to explain himself to anybody at all."
I'm not sure this is true with all works of art. If it is collaborative - ownership becomes complicated. And if it is interactive? Even more so. Novels like poems can be more personal, more controlled. Yet, even then, once they are placed out there in the world, we lose control. We lose control over how we ourselves are perceived through them. Which is why it is courageous to share what we have created, to throw it out into the world, but not necessarily courageous to create it.
The simple act of sending the child we've created with words or the stroke of a paint-brush outside the boundaries of our home or imagination into another's is not, I think, unlike a parent sending a flesh and blood child off to school or to a friend's house to play. The same trepidation and fears, I suspect, accompany both acts on some level. Both require a trust not only in the child that we've created, but in the universe we've sent it out to. And the thing about trust is it is more often than not an unknown, an act of faith if you will. We have no way of knowing how our child will be greeted, we can only trust that it will survive and be greeted with good will. And if it is not, pray we have the strength to handle it.
