Unreal

I am not a huge fan of realism in art – I do appreciate artists such as Rembrandt, who had the ability to paint figures with faces that seemed lit from within. However, my heart seems to lie with Miro, Dali, Chagall, and Picasso – when I look at their work, I feel better, dunno why. I don’t talk about this to sound like a snooty broad; I grew up with two artists who felt it was necessary to completely misrepresent reality, so maybe I relate better to the bending of visual truth. Same goes for photography – I enjoy photos, and I especially like when someone has taken a photograph that has gone awry, and ended up with a little more than they were expecting. Fuzzy, double exposures, extra backlighting to make the subject look as if they descended from the heavens and plopped right down on the end of the Redondo Beach Pier at sunset – these are the photos that I look at more than once.

While impressionism might be fine for art, it’s not so desirable for writing. I feel as if I’ve reached a plateau, and that I’m repeating the same things over and over; I also feel like my writing is fuzzy, with double exposures, and bores me before I ever finish a paragraph (incidentally, editing before you’ve even completed a paragraph is not the best way to write – my superego gets in cahoots with my left brain, and the results are a big yawn). I’ve started to read “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” by David Foster Wallace. His writing flattens me, period; there are certain people in my life that I know that I will never equal in terms of creativity and brilliance, and Wallace is one of them.  I also started “Infinite Jest,” at the beach a couple of years ago, and discovered that it is no beach read – it is filled with (to me) obscure references, and I know that I will read it, but I have to practice lengthening my attention span so that I can fully appreciate it. And if that’s not enough I’m reading “You Shall Know Our Velocity” by Dave Eggers – I’ve been staying away from fiction, but this novel is so well-written that I don’t want it to end.

Funny how my life seems to have taken on an impressionistic feel these days; it helps me to put horns and three eyes on some people, and drop them through the hole that melted over the side of my desk, or paint others blue, and suspend them over me all day long, so that I wouldn’t be lonely. Definitely not realistic, but once in a while it gets me through.