One of Twelve – Sunset, Sunday, 1 December 2013

William Van Doren, ONE OF TWELVE. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 13 x 19.

One Moment on the Trail, or A Roundabout Weird Way to Realize Something About Twitter

“The trail leads through the veil.” I was actually walking up a trail when I decided to see if the voices I sometimes hear – more about them some other time – had anything to say. That’s when I heard: “The trail leads through the veil.”

I experimented a moment, in case they might have meant “The trail leads through the vale” – which seemed possible, and which got me singing “Church in the Wildwood” – but soon I was satisfied the intended meaning was ‘veil’.

The trail I was on was a good-sized one, an old jeep trail, with so much forest around it, it was nearly a green tunnel. As soon as I heard this line, I felt the beautiful dense green woods ahead and on either side rotate, subtly disassemble, and shift, and my field of vision become capable of re-forming in new ways, as in a kaleidoscope. The world I normally know was still there but had become a blur. The trail became more symbolic than real, as if I were walking on a vector through a plane, almost like on a bridge in the sky or in space, rather than on a roadway through the trees. There was a moment of some kind of cognitive power, or possibility.

I couldn’t hold on to it. So I had to try to go back to it, as I’m doing by writing this, to see if I can manage a further step.

As soon as I wrote that, I remembered something from the moment. I’d been assuming that whatever there was to discover in that “re-formed” reality would be visual, but apparently it wasn’t going to be that easy. It did involve a visual clue – in the broken stained glass blur of colored pieces of woods and sky, I suddenly realized there was one odd, blank, completely white piece – one piece that didn’t belong with the others. The trail had to go through that piece.

As soon as I focused on the blank piece, it led into sound. Strangely enough, it was something like a podcast, or a radio program, but of a kind that I don’t think yet exists. A spoken-word Twitter feed.

Specifically, for me, it was much like one of those apps that lets you organize what you’re getting on Twitter. It was a sort of symposium or collective feed from four very different people. One was @MJonesStudio, or fellow artist and writer Michael Douglas Jones. Michael tweets often, in a rich vein of material closely related to my own work. Another was @samwisebruce, longtime editorial peer and colleague Sarah Bruce, who hardly ever tweets but who understands my work and has always been one of my ‘early adopters’. Third was @LaurenceShatkin, because even though Laurence tweets almost exclusively about his professional findings as a leading career consultant, he’s my friend and college roommate and I like to keep track of what he’s doing and vice-versa. Finally there was David Johansen, of the New York Dolls, who doesn’t seem to be on Twitter but who should be.

Needless to say, perhaps, but none of these people bears any responsibility for this crazy construct.

Here’s the thing: I couldn’t understand a word they were saying. That’s when I realized something critical about the people I follow (and who may follow me) on Twitter. It isn’t – necessarily — the specific things they say. It’s often just the sound of their voices – as befits a program named after bird songs. It’s a sympathetic, or inspiring, or challenging, or reassuring personal chorus. I realized what I was meant to take from them was encouragement, or courage. Perhaps this is completely circular, but going into that white, blank piece of mystery gave me courage to write this, first of all. Beyond that, I’ve taken encouragement to go further in my work than I may have done before.

An insight about Twitter doesn’t seem much like piercing a veil of metaphysical mystery.

Perhaps.

Sunset, Tuesday, 1 December 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

Today is my friend Sarah Bruce’s birthday. Not sure about her age, except it’s somewhere under 40. Anyway, usually – in fact, always – Sarah, who controls the weather on her birthday because she’s some form of witch, contrives to deprive me of any sort of skyscape on December 1st except for a clear cold blue sky and that’s it, no clouds, no other color, thanks very much.

I guess this year she relented. I want to thank her for the sky.

Sarah moved north from here to be closer to Salem, I guess. If this sort of thing interests you, you might check out her blog, I Nap, Therefore I Am a Witch.

Around a week ago I posted a little item about the cover of The New Yorker and its image of a pumpkin pie – and a ‘pumpkin cloud’ – by Wayne Thiebaud and I made a wild guess that the original painting might run you $75,000. Now, thanks to a link in the blog emdashes, I’ve seen some of the actual prices for which Thiebauds have sold recently. Did I say last week that $75,000 was probably way, way off, on the conservative side? Well, out of some 30 Thiebaud paintings at what seems to be a sort of meta–auction site, I did manage to find one that had gone dirt cheap for $62,000 – and all the rest, forget about it.

In fact, speaking of pumpkin, a Wayne Thiebaud of slices of the pie sold for $1,900,000.

If you’d like to get in on the pop art action, but didn’t start saving 30 years ago, you can buy a Mike Fitts now and thank me later.

Sunset, Saturday, 19 September 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

I think in raving yesterday about trivial aspects of the writing (and painting) process, I may have missed much of the reason why Sarah Bruce commended Stephen Fry’s post to me in the first place. But that’s what happens to arrogant, self-absorbed, preoccupied, creative people (guilty on three of four counts) – we often miss the point. 

Much of Fry’s post was about how difficult writing usually is. Or, not so much writing itself, but getting it done, putting it all together, and especially when we’re talking about big projects like books. I hope I don’t overstep by quoting this much Fry:

... [M]y friend Douglas Adams ... [pointed] out that the reason I had never managed to finish a novel was that I had never properly understood how difficult, how ragingly and absurdly difficult, it is to do. “It is almost impossibly hard,” he told me. “It is supposed to be. But once you truly understand how difficult it is,” he added, ..., “it all becomes a lot easier.” ... “A writer,” said [Thomas] Mann, “is a person for whom writing is more difficult than for other people.” How liberating that definition is. If any of you ... have ever been put off writing it might well be because you found it so insanely hard and therefore, like me, gave up ..., regretfully assuming that you weren’t cut from the right cloth, that it must come more easily to true, natural-born writers. Perhaps you can start again now, in the knowledge that since the whole experience was so grindingly horrible you might be the real thing after all.

Of course, as one would hope and expect, Fry goes on to say that if you’re encouraged by this and therefore become able to complete your project, it doesn’t guarantee anything about either the quality or the success of the finished product.

I have only one book under my own name – I’m currently in the throes of deciding whether my revision of it is good enough to publish. Aside from that, whether as a ghostwriter or rewrite editor or hybrid designer-producer-writer-editor, I’ve helped others write somewhere in the neighborhood of 75 to 100 books. (I have no idea of the exact number, it could be 71 or 119, because I have little vested in most of the projects and, with a few exceptions, pretty much forget them when they’re done – I don’t even have a list of them anywhere.) I find writing and rewriting intrinsically ‘easy’ but that’s deceptive – this is difficult (?!) to convey, but it’s both a challenging process and one that comes naturally. I tend to discount everything that goes into it. So I can forget the truth of what Fry is saying. But by the time an entire book is about done, one knows just how hard it’s been – especially if money and time are running out! It’s usually excruciating by the end.

I gained a real awareness of the blood, sweat and tears involved in my book-writing jobs a few years ago when I called on an old colleague, Jack Scovil, of Scovil Galen Ghosh literary agency in New York, who was present at the inception of my first assignment in 1973, and asked for advice in negotiating a ghostwriting agreement. Concerning my near-fatal tendency to undercharge, Jack said:

“Don’t forget, it’s you who are going to be doing all the back-breaking work.”

‘Back-breaking’ ... exactly! And ... amen.

Sunset, Friday, 18 September 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

So my friend Sarah Bruce was very enthused today about Stephen Fry, writing to me about him and also talking about him on her blog, and of course one of the things she said was (not that she would ever put it like this), ‘OMG am I the last person on earth to discover Stephen Fry?!’ to which I say ‘HAHAHA Sarah! – uh – well, actually, no – I didn’t know a thing about him until I got your e-mail!’

Which is a little bit funny because I now find one of Fry’s literary heroes is the late P.G. Wodehouse, who was one of ‘my’ authors when I worked at Scott Meredith Literary Agency in the early 1970s. I even got to speak with ‘Plum’ – then around 92 years old – on the phone! – a rare sort of thing in a business where we editors who did much of the real work were kept hidden from celebrity clients.

(Norman Mailer presumably never knew I was the only person to read his somewhat inflated manuscript for Marilyn – I was sequestered in a quiet corner for a day to read at top speed and report back so Mr. Meredith could tell Mailer what he thought of the book. Scott told me he told Mailer I had read it but, literature, show business and Scott Meredith being what they were, this was almost certainly not true.)

Anyhow, I digress – my favorite hobby. The British TV series Jeeves and Wooster, in which Mr. Fry co-starred, was of course based on the P.G. Wodehouse Jeeves books and stories.

The Stephen Fry post Sarah particularly wanted me to read had to do with the writing process. Fry says:

Many writers are, like me, fascinated by process. From an early age I wanted to know whether authors worked by morning or night, whether they typed or wrote by hand and if so on what kind of paper, whether they had their backs to the window, drank wine, sat, stood or lay on their backs with their legs in the air.

This set me off on a bit of a rant. Probably much of it is just posturing about things Fry might really agree with, but here, slightly edited, is what I said to Sarah:

I’m in such a funk about what I write ... I can’t tell today where I am on some of the things Fry talks about. I know I don’t find ‘process’ interesting in the least. I pretty much don’t care how anyone writes, just what. Isn’t that interesting (the difference)? That doesn’t mean I won’t spend ungodly amounts of time considering whether to buy a pink notebook or a green one, or both, and if I buy both, which one to write on TODAY – etc., etc. But I’m all about enjoying the results. This is true in painting, too. Process schmocess, I’d be happier if there were none! (Not true, but it sounds really outrageous, doesn’t it?) I become fully engaged in the process of painting – as you’ve seen, I get paint out of my brush by painting stuff out on my shirt, on my hands, my face, I end up with six brushes in one hand and three in the other, I walk away, run back, sit, stand, lie down, kneel, I get completely lost in it but I don't think it’s the interesting part. It’s not what it’s about. This is very unfashionable to say but I like the destination a lot more than the journey, meaning: I really live for the creation. The thing that results from it all. If it’s true, or if it’s right, then I have the pleasure of enjoying it just as much as anyone else. It seems like something apart from myself, something really unexpected – like, wow, how did THAT get here? I still feel that way about some things I did 35 years ago. So for me the creation becomes a sort of permanent talisman, not just a keeper but a keepsake that keeps on keeping on – that nourishes, supports, encourages, inspires me to ... to what? ... to put up with the [expletive deleted] process!

Polyvision

Today we have Napoleon Bonaparte, Joan of Arc, and of course my friend Sarah Bruce. Then there’s the film director Abel Gance – and even the sunset. I just hope I can do this without injuring myself.

After I heard that today was the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, I found out that it’s also the date of an important victory, the Battle of Patay, by the army of Joan of Arc. (They say that the force under Joan’s immediate command wasn’t a major factor in the victory, but what I say is, if someone got burned at the stake at age 19, let’s be liberal with the plaudits.) 

This sent me through a zig-zag series of ideas not worth mentioning here, but I wound up at Abel Gance’s 1927 silent epic Napoléon, a film I saw circa 1980 after it had been restored by Kevin Brownlow and sent by Francis Ford Coppola on a tour of concert halls, with a full live orchestra accompanying the show. There’s a scene where Napoleon spins the globe and in the earth he sees a vision of Josephine.

What, I wondered, if Napoleon had been able to team up with someone like Joan of Arc? (I know this is a little silly, but bear with me.) His tactical prowess could have benefited from her visions (plural).

Yes, that’s a lot like those hyped-up conversations where kids might imagine Albert Pujols batting against Satchel Paige, or a battle of the bands featuring a long-gone group and a new one, etc., etc. But then it brought me back to Gance again, and his ‘Polyvision’ technique, revolutionary at the time, basically a split screen – sometimes divided into three sections.

At times, as I recall (having seen it again perhaps six or so years ago, on tape), the polyvision effect involves a central image and then one other complementary image, doubled at the sides, i.e., flipped on one of the sides. Thus in what I think was the ultimate scene, Napoleon’s army is marching in a long shot at the center of the screen, with the imperial eagle flying above, and at each side is the same close shot of a marching column of troops, marching out from the center toward the left, and then from the center toward the right. It sounds rudimentary, but with the timing of the scene as a culmination, the tricolor tinting of the three panels – blue, white, red – the sheer mass of the army, and the eloquent flying of Napoleon’s symbolic eagle, it’s powerful.

A more sophisticated use of multiple images – I think the effect is at times double exposure – occurs earlier when a storm of debate is raging in the Convention and Napoleon, at the same time, is making his way back from exile at Elba, sailing over a stormy sea. I had understood at one time that Gance swung the camera on a rope to convey the turbulence of the Convention, and the scene plays the two storms against each other, and doubles them, overlaid. 

Having come back to this scene, in a sense, by way of Joan of Arc, made me wish I could see all kinds of other simultaneous contrasts and overlays – further possibilities of this sort of layering. 

Which brings us back to ‘crossing’ energy, from the post of June 15th.

[A] casual conversation ... about our orientation to the poles eventually made me realize there might be a connection between the ‘energy’ of the sunset ... and my longtime fascination with things that run basically at a right angle to whatever I’m doing. This may sound a little weird, but – for example – I can’t drive up Route 15 between Gainesville, Virginia, and Point of Rocks, Maryland, without feeling at least a little, and sometimes profoundly, distracted by the beautiful creeks and streams that run underneath the road. Partly I just want to go down those streams; the feeling of going forward in fact and going at a right angle in mind produces a sort of friction – almost literally a spark – a ‘crossing’ energy. I know I’ll return to this idea at some point later (and I hope I won’t forget to bring in “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce). And what I realized was that this orientation to the sunrise and sunset is somehow also a crossing energy – across the axis of the poles – perhaps playing something for us like a bow drawn over a string.

To this I got a response from Sarah, titled ‘interesting misreading’:

When I read “bow drawn over a string,” I pictured a bow and arrow (despite your clear meaning of a stringed instrument). I liked it enough to read it again and saw my error; liked it both ways.

I like it too. First, to get a so-called misreading is itself ‘crossing energy’ – one idea diverging from another. And for me it produced its own spark.

I realize I could have been clearer in the first place by saying “playing something for us like the sound of a bow drawn over a string.” But an arrow drawn across a bow, and bowstring – that’s a great image, because the energy – the speeding arrow – created by that particular perpendicular setup is so familiar and powerful.

So the sunset’s somehow a vector crossing over our deeply felt magnetic north orientation. On any one day, depending on the day and the person, it can seem like Time shot a flaming arrow – excuse the expression – across our bow.