“In matters like writing and painting, a man does what he has to do—if he has to write, why then, he writes; and if he doesn’t feel the urgent need of writing, there are dozens of professions in which it is easier to earn a comfortable living. Writing offers fairly large rewards to a few successful people, but the rewards come late, and most writers are failures.”

- Malcolm Cowley in response to a letter asking whether one should pursue an MFA.

—

In the comments section, novelist Helen DeWitt serves a searing retort:

“…if he has to write, why then, he writes…” This is roughly what my penultimate agent, Bill Clegg, had to say on the subject. This is not so much the romantic point of view as the addict’s point of view. Anyone familiar with the world of publishing will know that it’s bullshit. The writer who is literally an addict, the writer who can’t help himself, the writer who HAS to write, can never be anything but an amateur, because the industry requires the professional to put writing on hold not just for a day or two, or a week, but for years.

http://millionsmillions.tumblr.com/post/23237055607/in-matters-like-writing-and-painting-a-man-does

Some time ago, I transcribed many of the “final thoughts” offered by the talk show host Jerry Springer; thoughts about transsexuals, mothers who slept with their daughter’s boyfriends, criminals and freaks. Then I thought, “What if each time he was talking about artists?” - Sheila Heti 1. Some of us might wonder what make a person come on a show like this to divulge their problems to millions of people. It seems sick, or we say to ourselves, “I would never do that.” But even the people who do come on this show have to, in the end, square their choices with their morality and their God. It’s all about being honest and asking yourself what you really can do, and whether the price is worth it. Because whatever you might think the price is now, you won’t ever know the true cost, not until it’s way too late. 2. A good many people want to make a living in art — you see them all the time; they have fantasies of being a writer or a painter or a dancer. The truth is, very few of these people will actually make a living in art — the rest will end up back in the service sector, waiting on tables, some might even get into exotic dancing, others might take up posts at the university and start teaching. None of these lives are bad ones, but they’re not the ones these people had the hopes of living. Are we to condemn them forever? Or are we going to try and understand that the situation is oftentimes beyond their control? They simply do not have the talent, or the connections, to allow them to live the lives they want to live. If this was our own son and daughter, would we stop loving them simply because they had dreams of making it big on the stage, or in a career that few people actually respect? No way. 3. It’s hard enough being an artist without people looking down at you all the time. That’s what makes these people act out in ways we often find intolerable. But we must understand that it is the condemnation of the many that makes them take that path. If we tried to treat them like everybody else, things would turn out differently — they wouldn’t feel the need to act out. One only acts out when one needs attention and love that is sorely lacking in their lives. I hope things turn out well for our guests, but I’m not so sure they will. 4. We call them freaks, oddities — we might even point and stare. But to point and stare is not why I brought them on the show today. I wanted them to be able to express their point of view for a change, so we could all see where they’re coming from. You see, in a free society, a person is allowed to make all sorts of choices, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else or impinge on anyone else’s freedom. These artists are not impinging on anyone’s freedom, because we all have the choice — whether to go into that gallery or not, whether to pick up that book or not, whether to buy that painting and hang it in our house or not. We might not like what these people are trying to represent, we might even disagree with them about what our society’s ills are, but we all know that society does have problems, and that it is the artist’s job to use the outlet of art to express the problems he or she perceives. We may not like it, but there it is. We cannot have our sensibilities offended unless we walk into the place where they’re sure to be, and we can’t accuse someone of a crime if we’ve walked onto the crime scene ourselves. 5. A person has every right to do whatever they want with their life so long as it doesn’t harm anyone else. When you have to start questioning your behaviour is when it does begin to hurt the people you love and care about. Sure, there will always be gossiping, and there will always be people who are looking at what you do, and don’t like it. The place to look is inside yourself, to ask yourself truthfully what effect your work is having on your audience: are they free to leave if they’re unhappy, or are they stuck to you despite whatever unhappiness they may experience? Are you manipulating them, or being dishonest with them? Are you leading them on? Are they unaware of your hidden motives? If that is the case, you have to let your audience into the closet and show him or her all the scary skeletons hanging there. But if you really are doing your best to be honest, then who cares what the neighbours think? Just erect your fence a little higher and go on with your life.

Some time ago, I transcribed many of the “final thoughts” offered by the talk show host Jerry Springer; thoughts about transsexuals, mothers who slept with their daughter’s boyfriends, criminals and freaks. Then I thought, “What if each time he was talking about artists?” - Sheila Heti

1. Some of us might wonder what make a person come on a show like this to divulge their problems to millions of people. It seems sick, or we say to ourselves, “I would never do that.” But even the people who do come on this show have to, in the end, square their choices with their morality and their God. It’s all about being honest and asking yourself what you really can do, and whether the price is worth it. Because whatever you might think the price is now, you won’t ever know the true cost, not until it’s way too late.

2. A good many people want to make a living in art — you see them all the time; they have fantasies of being a writer or a painter or a dancer. The truth is, very few of these people will actually make a living in art — the rest will end up back in the service sector, waiting on tables, some might even get into exotic dancing, others might take up posts at the university and start teaching. None of these lives are bad ones, but they’re not the ones these people had the hopes of living. Are we to condemn them forever? Or are we going to try and understand that the situation is oftentimes beyond their control? They simply do not have the talent, or the connections, to allow them to live the lives they want to live. If this was our own son and daughter, would we stop loving them simply because they had dreams of making it big on the stage, or in a career that few people actually respect? No way.

3. It’s hard enough being an artist without people looking down at you all the time. That’s what makes these people act out in ways we often find intolerable. But we must understand that it is the condemnation of the many that makes them take that path. If we tried to treat them like everybody else, things would turn out differently — they wouldn’t feel the need to act out. One only acts out when one needs attention and love that is sorely lacking in their lives. I hope things turn out well for our guests, but I’m not so sure they will.

4. We call them freaks, oddities — we might even point and stare. But to point and stare is not why I brought them on the show today. I wanted them to be able to express their point of view for a change, so we could all see where they’re coming from. You see, in a free society, a person is allowed to make all sorts of choices, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else or impinge on anyone else’s freedom. These artists are not impinging on anyone’s freedom, because we all have the choice — whether to go into that gallery or not, whether to pick up that book or not, whether to buy that painting and hang it in our house or not. We might not like what these people are trying to represent, we might even disagree with them about what our society’s ills are, but we all know that society does have problems, and that it is the artist’s job to use the outlet of art to express the problems he or she perceives. We may not like it, but there it is. We cannot have our sensibilities offended unless we walk into the place where they’re sure to be, and we can’t accuse someone of a crime if we’ve walked onto the crime scene ourselves.

5. A person has every right to do whatever they want with their life so long as it doesn’t harm anyone else. When you have to start questioning your behaviour is when it does begin to hurt the people you love and care about. Sure, there will always be gossiping, and there will always be people who are looking at what you do, and don’t like it. The place to look is inside yourself, to ask yourself truthfully what effect your work is having on your audience: are they free to leave if they’re unhappy, or are they stuck to you despite whatever unhappiness they may experience? Are you manipulating them, or being dishonest with them? Are you leading them on? Are they unaware of your hidden motives? If that is the case, you have to let your audience into the closet and show him or her all the scary skeletons hanging there. But if you really are doing your best to be honest, then who cares what the neighbours think? Just erect your fence a little higher and go on with your life.

This is the second in a series of letters, sent through the mail, between the writers Claudia Dey and Stacey Levine, who are in the process of reading each others’ work. Both are the authors of novels and plays. Claudia lives in Toronto; Stacey lives in Seattle. Click here to read the first letter, from Claudia to Stacey. Below is Stacey’s reply.  May 10, 2012 Hi Claudia, It was a lovely letter you sent. Our blind date-on-paper went well, despite its full-on public-ness.  We covered some bases. We have questions for one another.  I looked up Rasputin’s death. It seems probable he was not poisoned at all. The photos of him, and the appearance of his hands, too, are a mite frightening. I’ll have you know I gave my students a writing assignment to be sort of addressed to current residents of St. Helena, the island where Napoleon finished. Your friend must’ve loved yr lyric mashup. Can you write poetry easily? I rarely think of it, though I teach it some. (I keep hearing a strange, soft, honking from outside my door at pretty short intervals, maybe coming from the neighborhood in general. It’s like a voice, not a car horn. Maybe this honking will dictate the paragraphing of this letter.) I am really taken by your play Trout Stanley, and esp. love that Sugar hasn’t been out of the house in years. Which sounds quasi-ideal as a life style…she is remarkably alive.  There’s a nice balancing / contrast between the characters’ still, thoughtful moments and all their furious activity. As the play was being produced, your actors must’ve been very happy people. In addition, the numbers and dates work out so musically in the play. Do you plot such things beforehand with charts or schema?  What about for fiction—do you use an outline? Are Canadian writers happier than their American counterparts? With your description of your experience on the film set, I felt I was there. I hope I can see this film sometime. Speaking of film, I am excited that at the library a copy of a film by Terrence Davies is waiting for me: Distant Voices, Still Lives.  It’s old. It’s set in Liverpool and has almost no dialogue. But lots of scenes of people singing in pubs. You’re asking about my Seattle apartment: well, I do not run a tight ship.  So, yes, many impractical collections, for example, a rubber chicken and a hard yellow plastic bee with a wingspan of about 12 inches. Both atop the DVD player.  (The honking sounds a bit between a soft-voiced dog and a duck. I’m a little concerned that what- or whoever is making this noise is not ambulatory.) I liked your tympanic rupture story, and its dramatic, crisp end.  I can’t think of a better way for pain to come to a close: on film.   I also had an ear issue recently, which ended pretty soon after a friendly doctor told me to do so-called Eustachian tube exercises, the goal of this being, I suppose, to air out this little ear-throat passageway.  I told the doctor I had never heard of this kind of exercise before, and he made a note in my medical record that I said this.  !  The exercise is: Every hour, you swallow 10 times in a row (which is unbelievably difficult to do, as the doctor actively acknowledged).  This process helps the Eustachian tube, because, as the doctor explained, “every time you swallow, you milk that thing.”  How perfect is this? And you, Claudia, were thinking that I write fiction? I just write about my life. By the way, this doctor gets very happy sometimes about very small things.  I heard him tell a nurse that he was “delighted” that some patient had taken a Tylenol.   (The honking comes about every three minutes. But I’m wondering now if it doesn’t sound less like a creature and more like soft bricks abrading each other kind of high up somewhere. But who would be outside late at night scraping bricks together once in a while on a rooftop?) My answers to your questions:  Ida by Stein is one of my favorites. I love Rhys, but not sure that she’s inspired my own writing. And Davis, also, not so much. About my bicycle helmet stage—frankly, sometimes it’s much easier to wear it than to carry it—that’s what I think…but I guess that’s not the whole story. I basically have no explanation for it. (There’s nothing wrong with going outside late at night to seek the source of a gaseous honking noise. Which is probably what I’ll be doing in a few minutes. Now it once again sounds like something sentient. It better not be a kitten.) What did you drink after your eardrum burst? I would have had whiskey with something sweet. What are you up to this week? Stacey  

This is the second in a series of letters, sent through the mail, between the writers Claudia Dey and Stacey Levine, who are in the process of reading each others’ work. Both are the authors of novels and plays. Claudia lives in Toronto; Stacey lives in Seattle. Click here to read the first letter, from Claudia to Stacey. Below is Stacey’s reply. 

May 10, 2012

Hi Claudia,

It was a lovely letter you sent. Our blind date-on-paper went well, despite its full-on public-ness.  We covered some bases. We have questions for one another. 

I looked up Rasputin’s death. It seems probable he was not poisoned at all. The photos of him, and the appearance of his hands, too, are a mite frightening. I’ll have you know I gave my students a writing assignment to be sort of addressed to current residents of St. Helena, the island where Napoleon finished.

Your friend must’ve loved yr lyric mashup. Can you write poetry easily? I rarely think of it, though I teach it some.

(I keep hearing a strange, soft, honking from outside my door at pretty short intervals, maybe coming from the neighborhood in general. It’s like a voice, not a car horn. Maybe this honking will dictate the paragraphing of this letter.)

I am really taken by your play Trout Stanley, and esp. love that Sugar hasn’t been out of the house in years. Which sounds quasi-ideal as a life style…she is remarkably alive.  There’s a nice balancing / contrast between the characters’ still, thoughtful moments and all their furious activity. As the play was being produced, your actors must’ve been very happy people.

In addition, the numbers and dates work out so musically in the play. Do you plot such things beforehand with charts or schema?  What about for fiction—do you use an outline?

Are Canadian writers happier than their American counterparts?

With your description of your experience on the film set, I felt I was there. I hope I can see this film sometime. Speaking of film, I am excited that at the library a copy of a film by Terrence Davies is waiting for me: Distant Voices, Still Lives.  It’s old. It’s set in Liverpool and has almost no dialogue. But lots of scenes of people singing in pubs.

You’re asking about my Seattle apartment: well, I do not run a tight ship.  So, yes, many impractical collections, for example, a rubber chicken and a hard yellow plastic bee with a wingspan of about 12 inches. Both atop the DVD player. 

(The honking sounds a bit between a soft-voiced dog and a duck. I’m a little concerned that what- or whoever is making this noise is not ambulatory.)

I liked your tympanic rupture story, and its dramatic, crisp end.  I can’t think of a better way for pain to come to a close: on film.  

I also had an ear issue recently, which ended pretty soon after a friendly doctor told me to do so-called Eustachian tube exercises, the goal of this being, I suppose, to air out this little ear-throat passageway. 

I told the doctor I had never heard of this kind of exercise before, and he made a note in my medical record that I said this.  !  The exercise is: Every hour, you swallow 10 times in a row (which is unbelievably difficult to do, as the doctor actively acknowledged).  This process helps the Eustachian tube, because, as the doctor explained, “every time you swallow, you milk that thing.” 

How perfect is this? And you, Claudia, were thinking that I write fiction? I just write about my life.

By the way, this doctor gets very happy sometimes about very small things.  I heard him tell a nurse that he was “delighted” that some patient had taken a Tylenol.  

(The honking comes about every three minutes. But I’m wondering now if it doesn’t sound less like a creature and more like soft bricks abrading each other kind of high up somewhere. But who would be outside late at night scraping bricks together once in a while on a rooftop?)

My answers to your questions:  Ida by Stein is one of my favorites. I love Rhys, but not sure that she’s inspired my own writing. And Davis, also, not so much. About my bicycle helmet stage—frankly, sometimes it’s much easier to wear it than to carry it—that’s what I think…but I guess that’s not the whole story. I basically have no explanation for it.

(There’s nothing wrong with going outside late at night to seek the source of a gaseous honking noise. Which is probably what I’ll be doing in a few minutes. Now it once again sounds like something sentient. It better not be a kitten.)

What did you drink after your eardrum burst? I would have had whiskey with something sweet.

What are you up to this week?

Stacey

 

Interview with Eddie Martinez

Part I.

The paintings of Eddie Martinez contain a grunting, primal urge for mark making. With a slew of tools and techniques, he piles up canvases with chunky shapes and smears that appear simultaneously accidental and blithely confident. The layers of his work go deep, and a nice, long look at a Martinez image reveals an idiosyncratic history of art: cave paintings, still lifes, animation, art brut, children’s drawings, and graffiti are all stacked and spread into an undeniable slab of satisfaction. A process interview with Martinez appears in our June issue. The below interview was conducted after Martinez’s recent trip to Jamaica. - Ross Simonini 

THE BELIEVER: When you’re drawing on the beach in Jamaica, what do you use? 

EDDIE MARTINEZ: Markers mostly, colored pencils, crayons. 

BLVR: Do you show these drawings much? 

EM: I’m gonna. These ones have been getting kind of destroyed from paint that I’ve been working with. I feel like they’re really showing the direct link between the drawings and the paintings. You can see the physical paint on them, and it’s important to me to show them like that. People might not like it, but that’s not always a problem. 

BLVR: Do you have names for the forms that reappear in your drawings? 

EM: Yeah. 

BLVR: But you don’t want to say what they are? 

EM: Sometimes… [chuckle] I don’t really like to use them. 

BLVR: There are still lifes and then these portraits, and then even the abstraction - they all feel connected to art history.

EM: Oh, yeah. There’s portraiture and landscape and still life. 

BLVR: All the work stems back to these basic forms. 

EM: I think that comes from the way that I have been continually reading and looking, without having any formal art history training. The things that I originally picked up on were all these certain things that made painting painting - still lifes and portraiture and landscape. In a way, I think the abstractions are landscapes too.

BLVR: What are you learning these days? 

EM: I look at everything all the time. I’m constantly looking at art. I went to the de Kooning show the other day. I have this really strong connection and admiration for the Ab Ex painters, the New York school guys, Pollack and Gorky, de Kooning and Guston and all that stuff. That to me is the source, that’s the truth. Just the way that their lifestyles, and the way that they did it. They were all manual labor guys, doing murals and painting houses and stuff like that, that just sort of feels like how my life has been, and I can understand, I just understand those paintings. 

BLVR: You’ve done a lot of house painting?

EM: Yeah, yeah. A lot of house painting, all that kind of stuff.  

BLVR I remember reading about how de Kooning’s understanding of painting came from house painting. 

EM: Yeah, and then also those guys’ monetary restrictions. They were so broke that they would just have to go to the hardware store and buy enamel paint, and house painting brushes, and paint on wood and cardboard, whatever they could find. Growing up working with my dad, I really had no interest in doing the actual work, so I was always like drawing on the wood, doing stuff like that. It just has a real hands-on approach. 

BLVR: And you’ve never been to art school?

EM: No I did, I just dropped out of a couple schools in Boston. 

BLVR: A couple of schools?  

EM: I couldn’t do it. 

BLVR: The discipline? 

EM: Couldn’t do any of it. At all. It was just not for me. And I really wanted it to be at the time because I thought, ‘Oh, okay, I’m going to school, I’m going to art school. I have to do it.’ But I couldn’t. I felt like a real failure. But now I don’t. But at the time it felt like, ‘Okay, if you’re going to try to be an artist, you have to at least go to school.’  And I felt really below everyone. 

BLVR: How long have you been showing art?

EM: Well, I’ve been in group shows and stuff since early 2000s, but not with anything that connects to what I’m making now. I started making good-size paintings and showing them in 2005. 

BLVR: Is that the date that you feel you became the kind of artist you are now? 

EM: Yeah 2005, 2006, I started really developing. 

BLVR: How old were you? 

EM: Twenty-eight, twenty-seven. Started feeling like I was actually able to make some things. 

BLVR: Before that you were making paintings, but you felt they were… 

EM: It was always based in drawing, and it was using paint. I feel like I’m drawing with paint, but then it was really like paint-markers, and not really using a brush.  It also had to do with scale. I was in my bedroom with a big piece of wood. I mean, it would take fifty-thousand paint markers to do this. I didn’t feel like I was making paintings, but now I feel like I’m painting.

Erica Mendritzki is finishing her MFA at the University of Guelph, Ontario. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship. Her work has been exhibited in Canada, Germany and the UK. I spoke to her over gchat about her thesis project, a suite of four paintings titled “On Posing,” which I learned about when she presented them recently at a weekend of artist’s talks hosted by the Blackwood Gallery at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. – Sheila Heti

THE BELIEVER: First of all, what are we seeing here?

ERICA MENDRITZKI: These are four paintings that started with the idea of making a picture of a photographer’s backdrop—the kind you might find in a yearbook photo, or in a family portrait taken at Sears.

BLVR: How did the idea come to you?

EM: I honestly don’t know—as an idea, it suddenly appeared, I think while I was eating lunch at school! I remember asking my friend if she thought it sounded like it was a good idea, and she said, “yes? I don’t know?” which was basically good enough for me.

BLVR: What did you ask her? “Should I make pictures of backdrops?”

EM: Yes. I think I said, “What if I made a painting of a backdrop, like in a yearbook photo?” I was attracted to the idea that it would look like an abstract painting, but that it would sort of secretly be depicting something. At first there was just one of them.

BLVR: How did there come to be four?

EM: I made the first one, but I wasn’t totally happy with how it turned out, so then I made another one, and I liked how the two of them interacted. But they were different sizes, and both were too small, so I decided to make four more that were a little larger. Four seemed like the right number—it’s so stable. Two becomes about doubling; three is hierarchical; but four is just enough to suggest “many” or “multiple.”

BLVR: And the blue… do backdrops tend to be blue?

EM: They come in lots of colours, but blue is probably the most common… or at least it was when I was getting school pictures taken! I think that this particular kind of backdrop is starting to become nostalgic. From what I can tell, studio photographers now tend to favour solid black or white in the background, rather than the mottled effect of the hand-painted blue that I’m referencing. But that kind of backdrop isn’t totally obsolete yet—I still see it turning up occasionally when some of my friends post professional family portraits on Facebook.

BLVR: Do you get a feeling of familiarity or possessiveness or kinship when you see those photos posted?

EM: Yes… almost like the feeling I would have if I used to work as a school photographer. It’s part nostalgia, part professional interest; I pay a lot of attention to exactly how mottled the backdrop is, whether there is any creasing, whether there is a halo effect, exactly what the shade the blue is. Most backdrops are kind of beautiful and kind of dreadful. I think my paintings are beautiful, but I was prepared to go through with them even if they didn’t end up being beautiful. The beauty is almost an accident.

BLVR: Did you model your paintings on specific backdrops that you gathered for research?

EM: I did a little Googling, but the model is really my own mental picture of a backdrop, based on school photos. I didn’t have a specific source on hand as I was painting them—I worked towards a mental picture, I guess.

BLVR: Did you reach it?

EM: Yes, I think so. They do look like backdrops, to me, and I’ve taken photos of friends in front of them, just for fun, and they’re pretty effective as backdrops! They can totally pass as the real thing. But how an image exists in the mind and in the world is never quite the same. The physical presence of the paintings makes its own kinds of assertions, and influences space in a way that you can’t quite predict in advance.

BLVR: What would be the ideal reaction to these paintings?

EM: I think it would be for someone to enter a space and look at the work and think of them first as abstract paintings, but then have someone else walk in front of them and have a kind of “aha!” moment where they see the paintings turn into backdrops. I’m interested in the questions, ‘Are they abstract paintings, posing as pictures of a backdrop? Are they pictures of backdrops, posing as the real thing? Or are they actual backdrops, posing as abstract paintings?’

BLVR: Those were the questions that excited me, too! You mentioned the “muse” in your talk last weekend. Do you believe in the idea of the “muse”?

EM: I guess I do, in a very loose sense. I think of it as operating in the realm of aesthetics in a way that’s somewhat parallel to how your conscience functions in relation to ethical decisions—it’s part of you, but it is also informed by culture, by your upbringing, and I think in practice it feels almost like an external judge to whom you can privately turn and say, “What if I do this? Or this? Which is better? What is the right thing?” Then it also sometimes spontaneously grants you ideas, like the idea of painting a backdrop that appeared to come out of nowhere. You can also look towards it for the sense of tone when you’re creating something—is the tone right, does it need to be harsher, smoother, crasser, whatever. I used to be suspicious of making work that was too grand or minimal or pure—the first backdrop that I made had these weird patches on it that I put in to try to subvert the simplicity of the image. But the paintings seemed to desire that simplicity, that minimalism. Now that I’ve broken my taboo against minimal elegance, I’m finding that I kind of don’t know what to do in the studio. I think that every time you re-invent yourself as an artist, even in a minor way, it’s both liberating but also strangely paralyzing, because you have to re-learn how to be this new kind of artist.