But this isn’t all about me.

Rather, it’s all about you. Artsy living and stuff.

Someone I admire who has gone before and blazed a trail of artsy living online is a lady name Marney Makridakis. Marney is teaching a course this Thursday – a free course – titled The Complete Idealist’s Guide to Growing a Creative Business: 37 Ways to Really Make an Artsy Living. The class is this Thursday, February 26, and you can sign up for free. Just click the link below:

If you don’t already have plans this Thursday, check it out. The time is on the other side of the link. Don’t forget to click it. And did I say the class is free?

In the spirit of full disclosure, this won’t be for everyone. I find some of the artwork a little disconcerting and even some of the poetry. It’s not academic by any stretch, but if you’re the crafty sort of person who is into scrapbooking and digital art then this might be your bag.

The right words to describe Artella may be flighty, spirited, and leaning toward the feminine-right brain. I don’t mean any of that as an insult; it’s just a hairy-legged observation.

The Shoppes of Artella feature hundreds, maybe more, of products for all types of people, everything from fine art to fashion and jewelry to home decor. There are also books and recordings, cards and stationery, childrens products, supplies for artisans, educational resources, e-courses, and other miscellany. Artella Land also takes submissions for poetry and runs contests (I took third place in one in 2005 while in Iraq) and publishes a magazine that is distributed alternatively in digital format and print. A very unique product. If you have craft products of your own you can even sell them on commission.

As I said, this is a bit different than what most of us with academic backgrounds would be interested in, but if you enjoy sharing your art and poetic gifts then this might just be right for you. That’s why I don’t mind recommending Artella Land.

As an evangelical Christian, I feel like I exist in two worlds. In the first world, the one in which I was born as flesh and blood, there is a commitment, in my country at least, to free speech principles – at least among a good cross-section of the population. But in the other world, the spiritual world where my brothers and sisters in Christ and I join in heavenly bond, there is a natural – and sometimes adamant – recoil against certain perversions like the glorification of incest, child rape, and other sexual no-nos. I understand both worlds quite well.

Free speech, however, rarely has anything to do with what happens in the real (flesh and blood) world. Just because two characters in a novel choose to have sexual relations doesn’t have any bearing on whether or not such a thing actually takes place in the real world. If one of the characters is a 40-year-old man and the other is a 16-year-old girl going on 25 (or the other way around), the reader (and even those offended non-readers who heard about it on the nightly news) must realize that this is a work of imagination, bearing little semblance to reality.

On the other hand, art is often a depiction of real life so perhaps the author is simply describing an event that he knows is a real event and that the two people represent what he knows is all-too real. Nevertheless, the issue is often focused on the morality of the incident – whether fictional or real.

Neil Gaiman’s Defense Of The Indefensible

I tip my hat to author Neil Gaiman for his recent stand for free speech and weaving into his credo the often ambiguous and multi-faceted gray areas dealing with this issue. He really got icky with it.

Many of my Christian friends do not understand the line, “If you accept — and I do — that freedom of speech is important, then you are going to have to defend the indefensible.” Yet, that is my own position as well.

In full, here’s a paragraph from Neil Gaiman’s brilliant defense of free speech:

The Law is a blunt instrument. It’s not a scalpel. It’s a club. If there is something you consider indefensible, and there is something you consider defensible, and the same laws can take them both out, you are going to find yourself defending the indefensible.

Many Christians do not understand this. They believe that to defend the indefensible is to oppose God and undermine his kingdom. They will say they believe in freedom then in the very next sentence say that so-and-so should not be allowed to … (adopt children, get married, drink on Sunday, or you can fill in the blank). I take issue with these sentiments because they are not pro-freedom and if you are going to utter them then you should be aware that you do not believe in freedom and just be honest about it.

I love the law. To me, the law represents an iron fist. It should not – though it often does – discriminate between acts of intentional criminality and well-meaning acts of good intention. If it breaks a law then it should be punishable under the law, though mitigating circumstances may mean limiting a punishment to the lower end of the prescribed discipline for the offense. Of course, this digression is meant to illustrate that the issue of the Law is one not to be taken lightly and this in no way touches on what should be considered lawful in terms of human action.

The Absolute Of Non-Absolutes

Freedom of speech is not an absolute. You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater and you can’t falsely accuse others of a crime (in most cases) knowing full well that your accusation is false. Nevertheless, with few exceptions, freedom of speech is about as close to being an absolute as we have in the U.S.

I for one do not believe that immoral art causes people to commit acts of immorality, cruelty, or go on disorderly binges of one kind or another. Human beings are depraved creatures. All it takes for many of us to slither through a gutter of moral bilge is to wake up and breathe. Even the good among us are not entirely good. We do not need the Marquis de Sade to teach us imaginative ways to pleasure ourselves. The same imaginations that create art of that nature are capable of living lives much worse.

Free speech is that thing that allows moral people to stand up and shout that a certain act or piece of literature is immoral. Without that, we could very well live in a society that is so permissive on one hand that it quells the good from shedding light on the bad. That would not be free speech and I would not want to live in such a society.

If free speech is to continue there must be a commitment to it from all quarters. We must be, as Neil Gaiman says, willing to defend the indefensible. But we must also be willing to speak out against the inconceivable. This thing we call free speech is a double-edge sword. It cuts going in and it cuts coming out. But when you need it to defend yourself you’ll be darned glad you have it.

The Pennsylvania state Capitol building is an incredible work of art. Built in 1906 after the original building burned to the ground a few years earlier, it cost $13 million to build and furnish. In 1906, that was a huge chunk of change. Figure that amount in today’s dollars and you will likely have to scour the face of the Earth to find enough zeros and you’ll likely run out of ground to cover. Our tour guide said it is “priceless”. I suppose that’s a good word for it.

My only regret is that we chose to visit the Capitol on a day when the sun wasn’t shining. Both the Senate and House chambers are decorated with stained glass windows that would have absolutely shone brilliantly the 24-karat gold that decorates the walls inside. The paintings and murals on the walls also tell a unique story of the history of Pennsylvania and the principles that founder William Penn took great pride in. I really enjoyed the trip, as did the wife, and our three grandchildren, which act more like children since they live with us full time. The Pennsylvania Capitol is a true work of art to behold.

Today I’m posting from The Emporium in York, Pa. The reason I’m in York today is because it’s YorkFest, the annual arts festival the city sponsors every year. I and a few other poets in this area are performing a one-act play at 2 p.m. I had to come in this morning at 10 a.m. for a dress rehearsal. That meant I would be here all day and since I had work related to my Internet and freelance writing businesses that I’d have to find a hot spot to log on and work through. I found it at The Emporium.

I’ve written about The Emporium before. The bookstore, an independent, is sponsoring a writing contest and I promoted that contest in a blog post. Jim Lewin, the owner, told me that he was getting quite a response from that post. Some other bloggers, evidently, have picked up on the post and promoted it as well. Thank you to everyone who has followed up and spread the word. That helps build my relationship with local merchants that I like.

Jim also sponsored Horrible Saturday, in which I participated and rendered a dramatic reading of “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe. Peruse his website and you’ll see he frequently has specials and promotions that he runs like that. I’d like some of you to enter his contest and have a good time. Well, here’s till the next post ….

At any rate, I’ll try to post over the next four days, but I may end up missing a day or so.

I found myself in the unusual position of defending a piece written by a young college-bound woman who was new to the group. It’s not unusual that I was defending a young woman, but that I was defending her Cubist aesthetic. As you know, I’m not preferential to the avant-garde schools, and particularly Cubism, but I’m a firm believer in critiquing a poem toward a poet’s intent and not toward my own preferences.

The regulars of the group are a rather diverse crowd. We met in Michael Hoover’s home. Mike is the current poet laureate of Hanover, Pa. He is a poet’s poet, a sort of John Donne among a cast and crew of rather colorful characters. My friend Gary is the Beat poet, protege of Jack Kerouac. Anna is an older woman, a traditionalist who is rather rigid in her poetics. Janet is another older woman who is quiet most of the time, but who writes strictly in form and meter, almost always. Tonight she presented a sonnet, complete with the obligatory and obvious end rhymes. Katie is much more contemporary and Millennial-thinking in her approach than the others, tipping toward the postmodern without falling into it. Then there is me and I’m all over the poetic map. Some of the other regulars weren’t there.

At any rate, the young college-bound lady is a former student of Mike’s. Her poem was firmly entrenched in the avant garde. Her poem consisted of several hyphenated adjectives, a handful of colons followed by short bouts of terse pith, imagery that would make Ezra Pound stand up and sing “Holy Moses”, uncanny indentations, and an all-around creative visual and thought-provoking piece. It was quite imaginative and I was blessed to have read the poem. At her age, to have pulled that kind of poem off without the use of the most overused word in any language – the confabulated “I” – was incredible. I think it may have been the best, and certainly was the most creative, poem of the evening.

I defended her because everyone else in the group seemed to want to change the strophe in the poem that I thought was the heart and soul. In the midst of all this imagery surrounding that verse, the poet committed the cardinal sin of “author intrusion”, only it wasn’t so much an author intrusion as it was an addition of “self” in a family portrait. The poem’s title, you see, was “Cubism Family Portrait.”

What Is Cubism?
Anyone who has seen a Cubist painting will have one of two reactions. They’ll either love it or hate. I hate them. Pablo Picasso, heralded a genius by many art lovers in the 20th century, was a crazed, maniacal canvas abuser. I don’t like his Cubist art and I much less like his Blue Period paintings. But a thing is what it is.

When a poet presents a poem that is titled “Cubism Family Portrait”, it is pretty obvious what she is attempting. As a critique group participant, it is my duty to help her achieve her goal in creating the poem that is true to her aesthetic and reaches the point of perfection according to the principles of that aesthetic and not to infuse her poetry with my own aesthetic preferences or attempt to turn her into a miniature me. But that, unfortunately, is the approach of many critique group participants.

The Cubists attempted to present their subjects as geometric lines and shapes rather than the way we would normally see them. Cubist paintings are like stick figures on steroids. They are, in a certain sense, simplistic, but then they are also quite complex in other senses. The idea is to turn reality into an abstraction and the Cubists did that quite well.

I thought the young lady’s poem captured that sense of abstraction that can be found in Cubist art quite well. There was no mention of “I” in the poem, which I thought was a marvelous absence, yet the poet, or narrator, was definitely present. The poem attempted to describe the family in a very imagistic sense, including the dog, and even included two thoughts, spelled out explicitly, of the narrator regarding two imaginary events based on the movement of a chair in the scene. I thought the scene was spelled out quite well. Others didn’t think so. I didn’t have a problem with their inability to visualize it so much as I did with their attempt to fix the problem.

The suggestions had more to do with changing the way the poem was presented rather than improving it in the direction that it was moving. Group members didn’t like that she numbered her thoughts; well, it was unconventional, sure, but I thought it worked for her poem. The “author intrusion” as it was called was a necessary component to the poem because how can you have a family portrait without the painter, who is also a part of the family? The painter has to draw herself in too, doesn’t she?

So what we had was a poem that was primarily based on images, but which took a short excursion in two ways:

1. The painter, who was also a member of the family, entered the poem with thoughts and feelings (well, she is human, isn’t she?)
2. And the form of the poem changed, including a numbered sequence of the intruding author’s thoughts along with double indentions and italics

I thought the author intrusion was appropriate, but I was in the minority.

That’s not to say I thought the poem was perfect. I had my issues with parts of it, but I thought the one verse that everyone seemed to fixate on and wanted to fix was the part that needed the least work. Michael was the only one who saw my point, though I could see that Katie also agreed with me in at least one sense. While Michael could see my point, he still insisted the verse needed to be fixed.

I never try to fix someone else’s aesthetic while in a critique group. I don’t think it’s appropriate. I may not like their approach to writing, but it’s not my place to say it there in that setting. The best influence I can be is to help them improve their poem in the direction that they want it to go. If the aesthetic they have chosen doesn’t work for their poem, I think they’ll discover that on their own in due time. If they don’t then it will just have to be a bad poem. I’m not there to put a clay roof on a steel building.

Silliman’s back (unlike AC/DC) in black and white.

Enjoy The Second Coming. It’s been Finnished.

And yet, another Amazon boycott.

The Jewish geniuses a la Andy Warhol.

Meet President Iambic Dimeter with a pyrrhic dangler.

Capitalist poetry. Solicitation anyone?

Time to prepare a submission. Later.

Jim Murdoch writes about poets and art.

I still have not seen The Dark Knight.

Reginald Shepherd has a very interesting take on MFA programs. He says two things in particular that are the reasons why I’ve never pursued that course for myself. No. 1, I’d have to put myself in debt to attend one (which I just hate to do) unless I went to a program in the state of Texas and took advantage of the state’s veteran’s education benefits program, but I haven’t found a program in Texas that I’d like to attend. I figure if it’s a program that I wouldn’t pay for out of my own pocket then why would I put myself through it on someone else’s dime? Secondly, I’m afraid that going through such a program might kill my love of literature. Not necessarily the MFA, but if I pursued an MFA then I’d likely want to keep going and I’m sure any doctorate program I pursued would sour my love of literature. I just know it would. So I stick to working full time and managing a family while continuing to write. It’s difficult, but I consider it a character-building exercise.

Happy Birthday, Diane Wakoski.