Tag Archives: Art

The Tom Waits Highway

October 6, 2010 by Michael | Comments Off

Every morning, I write for a couple of hours, working on various projects: stories, essays, a novel.  I don’ t have a particular good reason why I choose one over the other on any given day, but usually, I stick with one thing for a few weeks (or, with a novel, a few months) and then, for no clear reason, I turn to something different, re-reading with a bit of surprise,  like seeing an old friend in an unexpected place.

The wonder of what I’m working on, or why I’m working on it, doesn’t concern me a great deal.  The important thing to me is that I do it everyday.  On weekdays, I have less time, of course, because I need to head over to The Missouri Review offices and get to work.  Weekends provide me more time, but I don’t have different plans for Saturdays or Sundays.  I just write.  There are many, many pieces of advice on how to write, whole books, (thousands of books, actually) but for me it’s just a matter of writing everyda.  No big mystery.

This doesn’t work for everyone.  Other needs something to get them going, a way of contextualizing the work so that it makes sense.  A way to nurture creativity.

So, here’s this interesting video of Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love, discussing creativity and  Tom Waits (the title of this post does have some relevance), among other things.   At the beginning of this short talk, Elizabeth acknowledges something a bit scary: she’s probably already had the biggest success she’s going to ever have as a writer.  So, now what?

It’s definitely worth your time to watch and found out.

Michael Nye is the managing editor of The Missouri Review

In Praise of Our Covers

September 1, 2010 by Kris | Comments Off

We don’t usually say much about our covers, which needs to change because we’ve been using the work of some exciting contemporary artists. The cover of our current issue, Crash, is a photograph by Kerry Skarbakka. For the sake of the camera, he jumps off bridges, freefalls from skyscrapers, tumbles from stepladders, trips down stairs face first or simply slips in the tub. He has been compiling a portfolio of falling pictures since 2002. We had a difficult time selecting from this collection because all of the photographs had cover potential. You can visit his gallery at www.skarbakka.com

Our up-coming cover for the fall Shadow’s issue is by English filmmaker, photographer and conceptual artist Sam Taylor-Wood from her Bram Stoker’s Chair series. This summer I took in one of her video installations at Montreal’s Museum of Contemporary Art. It was a playful piece of Robert Downey Jr. lip-syncing badly to an Elton John ballad as he walks languidly through an empty mansion. Her first feature film Nowhere Boy about John Lennon’s childhood in Liverpool opens in October before the seventieth anniversary of his birth. It stars Aaron Johnson as Lennon and Kristin Scott Thomas as his buttoned-up Aunt Mimi. You can view Sam Taylor-Wood’s work at www.whitecube.com

Kris Somerville is the marketing director of The Missouri Review.

"An Illusion of Control"

July 26, 2010 by Michael | Comments Off

In yesterday’s New York Times, there’s an interesting essay under the “The Way We Live Now” section by Walter Kirn, a frequent Times contributor and author of many awesome books.  His article describes a modern phenomenon called “procedural voyeurism,” which he defines as the focus on the business of creating a spectacle rather than the spectacle itself.  He cites LeBron James’s “The Decision” and the tabloid back-and-forth between Conan O’Brien and Jay Leno.  Best part, cut and spliced:

“The process of delving ever deeper into questions of process is relentless, a kind of narcissistic spiral into a procedural heart of darkness … Procedural voyeurism grants us an illusion of control over realities that we secretly fear we have no power over.”

Writers might be nodding at this, especially when thinking about the Q&A section that is commonplace after a public reading.  Questions such as “Do you write by hand or on a computer?” or “Where do your ideas come from?”, to name just two, echo the ideas that Kirn has raised.  Hearing these questions from behind a podium, I nod politely and answer truthfully, but I’ve often wondered why anyone would care about how my work is created.  What difference does it make, I’d wonder, compared to the experience of the story?  I’ve always admired the way William Trevor is noticeably silent in the back of all those anthologies his stories appear in: why comment on how it all came about when the story is in your hot little hands?

But, on the other hand, as a sports fan, I enjoy seeing how a team is constructed, what decisions go into who is hired, signed, for what type of contract, all that stuff.  The construction of a baseball club or a basketball team is interesting to me.  Is it a “narcissistic spiral into a procedural heart of darkness?”  (Could I just quote a kinder part of Kirn’s essay and take it easy on myself?)  I’ve never felt believed that the simple narrative process about the BP oil spill or the backroom deals about the health care bill or any other complex sociopolitical event gives me an semblance of control over these disasters.  Nor have I, or any reasonable person I know, bought into the idea of some grand conspiracy by the president, corporate oligarchies, or left-wing (or right-wing) cabals.  Conspiracy theories strike me as a form of illiteracy: because modern events are so complex and absurd, we create some character, probably like this guy, at the center of the storm, conjuring havoc.

With events like the Gulf oil spill or the war in Afghaniston, I don’t believe discovering this procedual voyeurism is a bad thing at all: doesn’t how it all happened matter?  Isn’t the transparency of the decision-making process in our government important?

But when it comes to art – be it film, literature, sculpting, etc. – should the process matter at all?  Or is it simply a matter of the end product?  It’s not quite as simple as one might think from behind the podium: many artists, such as Percy Shelley, Pablo Picasso, and Edna St. Vincent Millay were, to put it mildly, difficult (and this could quickly be a very long list of “difficult” artists) to live with and, with an arsonist’s glee, set fire to the lives around them.  The How-Did-This-Happen asked of a writer isn’t just about the process, because the process isn’t a great big Hollywood studio (insert Dan Brown joke here), but, more often than not, just one person.  One person in front of the page, worrying and writing and working, getting ultimately at this question: Who am I and what do I have to say?  And, when dealt with honestly, that’s a haunting question with no easy answer.

No wonder we always ask it of other artists.  And ourselves.

Michael Nye is the managing editor of The Missouri Review.