Improving Blog Stats Pt 3: Revealing The Results

In early October, I decided to undertake an experiment to improve the total hits to my blog. Did it work? YES! Actually, it worked much better than I ever thought it would. I want to share what happened in the few weeks since I started my new blog regimen.

First, I posted: Just the Stats Ma’am: Improving Blog Stats on October 9th and I put out a list of activities I was currently doing, and asked my readers and blog visitors to comment on how to make improvements. I got a ton of great suggestions to choose from!

People suggested everything from re-tweeting blog links to Twitter, to writing more blog posts each week, to doing tag surfing on WordPress and commenting on blog posts I liked, to many other things. As I write this, there are 17 comments in that post, check them out for tips.

Next, I posted an update to my readers on how things were going: It’s Official: My Best Month Ever for Blog Hits to let everyone know that by October 22nd, I had just passed my prior number for most hits, which was 329 hits to my blog.

So, here we are, one day before the end of this month:

I don’t know if you can see it clearly, but since I started my blog back in March, this is clearly the best month ever with a current total of 549 blog hits for the month. In October, I’ve thusfar averaged 19 hits a day, handily beating all previous months I’ve been blogging.

So what is the secret to this success? What have I done differently?

There is primarily only one thing I’ve done this month that is a big change from previous months: I’ve posted many more times this month than any prior month. I’ve tried to maintain a (difficult) posting schedule of five times a week and that has seemed to make a HUGE difference.

Other things I’ve done this month to help ‘nudge’ my stats along include trying to post humor more frequently, and spending more time reading other people’s blogs and “Liking” posts I liked, and commenting on posts I enjoyed.

If I were even more saavy about this, I’d install some fancy stats package to look at my numbers in more granular detail and try to figure out what time of the day is best for me to post, what day of the week, blah blah blah.

I don’t think I’ll do that, but I do enjoy posting with greater frequency because I realized (only after having done it) that it creates a much more active conversation with the blog audience (that’d be you, dear readers.) You post comments more, you Like my stuff more, and I can chat with you more on the blog. Thanks again for all your support too.

The number one tip I’d recommend for anyone who wants more visitors to their blog is post more frequently and give the reader ideas and humor they’ll enjoy. I wish you the best of luck on your blog adventure too!

Why Short Stories Make Great Novels

You may have read my subject line and been perplexed. You may have said: “Huh? What do you mean by that?” But please, hear me out.

Over the years, there have been novels that were composed of short stories. Elizabeth Strout wrote Olive Kittredge, for instance and won the Pulitzer.

James Michner composed Tales of the South Pacific and not only did he win the Pulitzer for it, it also got made into a famous Broadway play and later a movie, South Pacific.

And while I wouldn’t call Interpreter of Maladies a novel, it was a collection of stories that only intersected somewhat, Jhumpa Lahiri also won the Pulitzer for them.

I was reading FRIGG magazine this morning, the issue just came out today btw, and there was a five story entry by Vallie Lynn Watson. I enjoyed the works because they fit together, they made some sense of a woman’s life and did it all while staying in the bounds of the short story form (and mostly flash fiction at that.)

And while I wouldn’t call this particular collection of shorts a novel, I absolutely ADORE Paul Theroux’s Twenty-Two Stories entry (again, flash fiction length) in The Pen/O. Henry Prize Stories from 2009. I’m most enamoured of Fritz is Back, the very first story in that collection.

I’ve been thinking about this subject for such a long while, I wanted to put down some of my thoughts here. I think the short story form is so flexible, and today’s readers have shorter attention spans, the short story based novel could be a great marriage.

The short story form gives the writer a chance to turn a subject this way and that, and to show pieces of things, which makes the reader do a bit more of the work in their minds stitching everything together. I think about how Olive Kittredge is not the main character in all of the Strout stories, but we see glimpses of her, which arouses our curiosity more. I liked the idea behind that book.

Part of the reason I’m thinking about this is because everyone on the blogs is talking about NaNoWriMo incessantly, since the kickoff is next week. And while I’m not a novelist, I may eventually decide to take the plunge on the novel form, but if I do – I think it may have to be a collection of short stories. It certainly won’t be this year.

As a side note on NaNoWriMo, I give anyone who is undertaking the task this year – or any year for that matter – a LOT of credit. It’s daunting to me.

For me the idea of writing a short story that’s more than 10 pages gives me the cold sweats. Most of my work is flash fiction or just over/under that range. Part of me speculates that as I continue writing stories that my work will naturally get longer. I have no idea if that is true, but I have noticed that when I have a flash fiction piece that gets good rejection notes from editors and Ido my re-writes, it usually turns into a story that is beyond the 1000 word limitations of flash fiction.

If you are a short story writer, what length are your stories? I imagine, with no facts to back me up, that longer stories are probably much harder to publish. So for those that write the long-ish short stories of the 20+ page variety, do you find it is much harder to place them?

What else do you think about collections of short stories that form novels?

Three Annoying Kinds of Blog Posts

Hello Campers!

Today campers, we’re going to learn about three annoying types of blog posts.  This will count towards your “best blogger badge” which also requires you to learn how to tie seven kinds of knots, wrestle a black bear, and mix a variety of cocktails for the counselors.

Guiding Light

In keeping with not annoying your reader, you may want to open your blog post with humor. This gets the audience warmed up and creates a sense of anticipation, which hopefully, you will not disappoint.

1) The first kind of annoying blog post is what I’ll call:  The Whine. (Not the good kind.)

This kind of blog post starts out telling you the blogger is bored. The blogger doesn’t have anything good to write about. The blogger can’t find enough topics. They don’t have enough time to blog. The blogger wonders why no one visits their blog by writing it in the blog.

Campers, this is laziness, pure and simple. It’s bad enough that you, the reader, are taking the time to read their blog. What’s worse is, if the blogger had been more inventive, they could have created a marginally interesting post. Either that or they could stop blogging and go play in traffic which, under the right circumstances, could be entertaining.

2) The second garden variety of annoying blog post is: The Careless Blogger

Careless Blogger writes with impunity, mistakenly thinking that whatever is written in the blog doesn’t need to be spell checked or have facts straight. If Careless Blogger says that Italy is a province of Switzerland, then so be it. If Careless Blogger makes up fake stuff about their favorite movie star, hey, what the heck. If Careless Blogger says they invented popcorn, it must be so.

Now, this is NOT the same person as “oops I misspelled a word” blogger. That is totally different. “Oops Blogger” made a mistake, which is human and we the reader can forgive such an accident, especially when the quality of other posts doesn’t have such errors.

Careless Blogger needs (aside from an attitude adjustment) to be introduced to the Interweb. The Interweb, (aka the ‘net, the Matrix, Al Gore’s network) is a handy tool to ensure you don’t LOOK like an idiot in your posts even if you are actually an idiot. You can look anything up on the Interweb, from maps of Italy to the Wiki link on popcorn (with 27 references!) Try it, you’ll like it.

3) The third kind of annoying blog post is: Writer’s Block

This blogger is similar to the whiner, but focuses all their energy on writer’s block. They want to tell you they have writer’s block, you could suffer from writer’s block, and the vitamins you should take to get over writer’s block. All I can say about that is bleh. BO-ring. Zzzzzz….

If you’re going to write about writer’s block, you must do it only when entertaining your audience so they can have a good laugh at your torturous misfortune.

Let’s review what we learned today campers:

1. It’s important to know how to make a good cocktail

2. If you met Al Gore in the Matrix, you’d know how to look up the genetic origins of popcorn

3. Fran Lebowitz is a genius, and on her worst writing days, is still funnier than me

and finally,

4. If you’re gonna have a blog, make ’em laugh.

Kittens!

Have you ever seen images of kittens online and thought, that’s just adorable!  How cute! Oh, my mom/sister/best friend/wedding designer/salon stylist would LOVE that!

Maybe you saw an image like this and emailed it to twenty of your best friends:

Isn't this kitten just adorable?

 

Or maybe it was an image of a kitten and a puppy sleeping together, like this:

 

Sleeping together

 

But really, you should ask yourself, have you been spending ENOUGH time looking for kittens on the internet?

Have you checked You Tube? Or the funny kitten site? You’re a member of that one, right?

Personally, I don’t think you’ve been spending nearly enough time online checking out kittens. You could be spending MUCH more. I think you should spend three hours a day looking for these adorable kitten images if you are reeeally dedicated.  Anything less isn’t showing a proper level of commitment.

And just because I keep inserting the kitten images I could find within two minutes into this blog post:

Looking Up

 

doesn’t mean you couldn’t have done a better job if you are willing to make the commitment.

 

And frankly, let’s face it, you’re the type of person who could easily set aside three hours a day to this task, don’t you think? I mean, your goldfish died a week ago, your dog ran away last year, and now all you have left are these electronic images of kittens to brighten your day. It’s sad, I agree, but I’m not here to judge you.

 

Hmmm. On second thought, don’t bother with the kittens. I don’t think they will help you. You might be beyond that now. But, you do need help.

 

I’m your friend, and as your friend, I’m telling you, you need to stop spending so much time on the internet looking at pictures of kittens. You need to wean yourself off this activity. (You see what I did just there?)

 

I recommend a decreasing amount of time looking at kitten pictures each day. Start out with your normal amount, unless you typically exceed three hours, then just start with the three hours. After that, each day decrease the amount by a half an hour.

 

Within a week you’ll be spending a LOT less time on that and much more time eating salty snacks and watching bad television. Isn’t that so much better?

 

Salty snacks are delicious, and they don’t take any time to find. You just go right to the grocery store and look for the giant salty snack isle supported by the same conglomerates that brought you sugary cereal and frozen pizza rolls. In fifteen minutes you can get your recommended weekly dietary intake of chips, pretzels, or if you are in a country other than the good ol’ United States CRISPS. Of course, it’s not really the salty snack intake that’s the problem so much as deciding how bad your bad television should be.

 

I mean, should it be The Housewives of Argentinian dictators bad? Or maybe you prefer to watch people that Hoard electronic pictures of kittens and decaying meat in their refrigerator, I don’t know? You could consider watching The Best Chef who makes Desserts in fifteen minutes out of squid while being screamed at, now that’s entertainment! If you’re not into any of that, you can watch the fishing soap opera channel, or the people that spin a big wheel and try to guess whether or not the host has a toupee. The possibilities are truly endless.

 

I’m sorry, I got off topic, didn’t I?  This post was supposed to be about how people can be so easily distracted by mundane ca-ca everyday and blithely spend all their time doing it.

 

So, if you’re spending your day distracted by ca-ca, stop it. Stop it immediately.

 

Go out and buy a book.  Or two even. No, no… you could do that, but it’s only a temporary fix.

 

The best use of your time would be spent reading my blog. Yeah, that’s it. Subscribe today why dontcha?

 

Be forewarned though, future kitten pictures will be severely rationed, but on the up side, the dress code is casual.

And Now for Something Completely Different

Yes, the title of my blog post has been stolen directly from Monty Python, but I like it and it suits what you are about to read because today, my dear readers, I’m going to completely break with my normal subjects. In fact…

Normally, I write about:

• Writing
• Short Stories
• Submitting Short Stories to Literary Journals
• Publishing Short Stories
• Thoughts on the plight of the short story, and short story writers…….

But today I’m going to write about:

• Music

That’s right, you heard me (in your head, with a voice that sounds nothing like mine unless you know me personally…)

I could try to make this about writing again and tell you that I don’t listen to music when I write, which is true, but it’s off topic for this post since this post is about Music.

Ahem.

So, about Music. I like it. I don’t listen to music as often as I should because I’m usually spending my free time… hey, wait a minute, I know where this is going! And you need to just stop right there and get back onto the topic. (Sorry.)

Alrighty then, Music.

I grew up listening to Rock-n-Roll, and I was raised on Pink Floyd, AC/DC, Jethro Tull, Steeley Dan (and Donald Fagan’s solo albums which I highly recommend), Peter Gabriel, Eric Clapton, The Doors, The Allman Brothers, The Doobies, Peter Frampton… I could go on, but this is to give you a flavor of the kind of music I listened to at the time.

If I keep going backwards, I’d also have to say I listened to a lot of Disco. And I liked it. That’s not as much of a stigma to admit today as it was in the 80’s and early 90’s. But when I listen to Tragedy by the Bee Gee’s, it’s still damn good and I’m going to keep listening to the Bee Gee’s until I get old (well, I may already be somewhat old so I’ll just say older and we’ll leave it at that, m’kay?)

I’m ALSO going to keep listening to Frankie Valley, and Seals n Crofts, James Taylor, Chicago, and John Denver (yes, I said JOHN DENVER), Little River Band, Wings, Queen, Michael Jackson and many, many other pop artists too numerous to count.

I have to create a special mention for Stevie Wonder in his own paragraph because Stevie Wonder is, you will undoubtedly agree, a GENIUS. The guy has written rock, motown, pop, ballads and everything in between and he has done it brilliantly. I love his entire catalogue and so should you because he is a national treasure.

Now, I’ve already confessed to loving Rock-n-Roll, Disco, some forms of Pop and Motown, but I haven’t really said anything about how much I love the Blues.

In fact, I love the Blues SO much, I may have to write another post about it in the future because I can’t even begin to do the Blues justice in a few sentences or paragraphs.

Let me say this for now, and we’ll come back to this topic again later.

I’ve made pilgrimages for the Blues. I drove to Memphis, TN from New Jersey a few years ago to eat ribs and to hang out on Beale Street at the music shop for hours buying blues CD’s and talking with the manager of the store to find out about artists I didn’t know. I bought SO many CD’s that day that he gave me a free t-shirt. (Trust me, it was a lot of CD’s.)

The Blues is uniquely American, of course, and has its roots in the South, specifically black culture, and some of the best Rock gets its riffs and deep sounds from the Blues.

BB King’s album, Live from San Quentin, is a great set to listen to if you’re not that familiar with the Blues but you want to get into it and have a good time.

I’m a huge fan of sooooo many artists, I cannot possibly do them justice here. Kenny Wayne Shepherd is a real stand out talent, in my opinion, from the last two decades of blues-rock fusion. Pick up the first four albums and just sit back and listen to all of them. It’s fantastic stuff. Then consider he was, like, 18 years old or so (maybe younger?) when the first album came out (I think Ledbetter Heights is the first?), and then pick yourself up off the floor and listen to it again.

So there you have it: music. I don’t normally talk about it, but I wanted to share some of the flavors of what I like and now that you know what I like, you can make suggestions from what you like and I can check it out too.

Who are you listening to these days?

Stephen King on the Short Story

On April 12, 2011, The Atlantic published “Stephen King on the Creative Process, the State of Fiction, and More.”  I found his comments on the state of the short story extremely interesting:

JP: More generally, are you still as pessimistic about the short story as you seemed to be in that New York Times essay that you wrote? 

SK: Ah well …

JP: Or was that like a cranky moment?

SK: Well it wasn’t really a cranky moment. I mean, it’s a question of who reads them. And I’ve got a perspective of being a short-story reader going back to when I was 8 or 9 years old. At that time there were magazines all over the place. There were so many magazines publishing short fiction that nobody could keep up with it. They were just this open mouth going “Feed me! Feed me!” The pulps alone, the 15- and 20-cent pulps, published like 400 stories a month, and that’s not even counting the so-called “slicks” — Cosmopolitan, American Mercury. All those magazine published short fiction. And it started to dry up. And now you can number literally on two hands the number of magazines that are not little presses that publish short fiction. And I’ve always felt like I wanted to write for a wide audience. And I think that that’s an honorable thing to want to do and I also think it’s an honorable thing to say, “I’ve got something that will only appeal to a small slice of the audience”. And there are little magazines that publish in that sense — but a lot of the people who read those magazines are only reading them to see what they publish so that they can publish their own stories.

JP: Right.

So you know what they’re talking about, here is an excerpt from the September 30, 2007 New York Times essay by Stephen King

What’s not so good is that writers write for whatever audience is left. In too many cases, that audience happens to consist of other writers and would-be writers who are reading the various literary magazines (and The New Yorker, of course, the holy grail of the young fiction writer) not to be entertained but to get an idea of what sells there. And this kind of reading isn’t real reading, the kind where you just can’t wait to find out what happens next (think “Youth,” by Joseph Conrad, or “Big Blonde,” by Dorothy Parker). It’s more like copping-a-feel reading. There’s something yucky about it.

King wrote the New York Times essay because he was guest editor of Best American Short Stories that year. In fact, King broke with the usual process (of reading pre-screened selections submitted to him by the other editor) and went crazy reading hundreds, if not thousands, of short stories to ensure he was exhaustively surveying the landscape.

Also, King’s credentials as a short story writer are impeccable. He’s written hundreds of them, published them for money, he’s had fantastic movies made of his short stories (Stand by Me, for instance), he’s read thousands of short stories by others, so if you’re thinking ‘well, what does he know’ the answer is: a lot.

So when I went back and thought about what he said I found myself feeling guilty about going to many of the journals I’ve read because I wanted to understand what kinds of stories they publish. (I don’t know how I was going to figure it out without reading the stories they published, but perhaps that is besides King’s point.)

And while I do read some journals regularly because I enjoy them, more frequently I have an ulterior motive. As a writer, I don’t think this is inherently bad – but it is bad if that constitutes the majority (entirety?) of the audience for that journal.

Then there is the money thing to consider. Short story writers don’t make any. King is right again, there probably used to be a much larger paying market out there (before my time) and now there isn’t.

But I still want to get my stories published, and so I submit them without expecting any payment. Does that make me bad? I don’t think so – but it is bad if that constitutes the majority of short story writers, a large unpaid group of people producing their works of art for free and handing them out to the public for free.

I don’t have an answer to King’s comments except to say, yes Mr. King, you are right. I submit my stories without expectation of recompense, and I will keep doing it as long as I love the short story form and enjoy writing stories. I hope some of those stories will be worthy of being read years from now, not just this month when they happened to come out online. Whether or not there will be a collective internet memory for them remains to be seen.

Also, Mr. King, you’re (probably) right that the audience for short stories is other writers. I don’t know what to do about that either.

I’m glad Stephen King made the comments he did, because it should push the short story writing/reading/publishing collective conscience to get up off its intellectual high-minded arse and get a real, paying job.

Unfortunately, that probably means becoming a novelist.

It’s Official – My Best Month Ever for Blog Hits

Several days ago I wrote a post about how I might increase my blog hits and get more readers for my blog and I got a zillion responses to that post (you know who you are) which were very helpful. (Thank you.)

One of the top suggestions was posting to the blog more frequently. Although the idea of posting 4 or 5 times a week was daunting, painful, intimidating, terrifying…you get the idea…I decided to take on the challenge as an experiment. What the heck, I said to myself, it’s worth a try.

Now, it’s up to you out there in blog-land to determine whether or not you’ve enjoyed the posts as much as posts prior to the experimental phase which kicked in about 2 weeks ago, but hopefully my posting quality has not suffered. I’m still trying to bring you my most tortured thoughts, my publishing triumphs (few and far between as they may be) and the occasional humorous rant (have you read the one about the lucky underwear?)

ANYWHO… the bottom line is: IT WORKED!

As of today I will surpass the best blog hit month I’ve ever recorded! Muahahahaha!

It’s not an insane number or anything, but previously 329 hits per month is the absolute best I had achieved in this seven month period, but October will surpass that today. I have no idea how many hits I’ll have by the end of the month, but it would be AMAZING if I wind up having my first-ever 400 blog hit month. Now, I don’t want jinx myself, but if I write at least something reasonably amusing for y’all, I may just get there.

I’ll let you all know.

Thank you for listening to me continue to rant about this…I know I’m obsessed.

The Joy and Hell of Writing

You know the moment when you are revising a story and you’ve got most of the story done, and you know it’s good – maybe even better than good – but you’ve got one section that isn’t working and you’ve read it over so many times it doesn’t make any sense?

That’s the joy and the hell of writing.

Or when you are staring at a story that was flowing up until one minute ago, but now upon re-reading is a total mess that you hate and if you could bring yourself to do it, you’d delete the entire file?

That’s the joy and hell of writing.

And there are stories that you’ve finished and when you read it (at the moment it was done) you were so satisfied with yourself. It was an unquestionable fact that you were the next Faulkner and this was a masterwork. Of course, two weeks later when you looked at it again, you realized ten percent of the words were spelled incorrectly, you used the same word five times in three paragraphs, and you accidentally called the main character Elena and her name is Ellen. You wonder if someone else has been using your computer and changing your story just to mess with you. At least, you hope that’s what happened.

Yep, the joy and the hell of writing.

But it’s also the most difficult story you can’t bring yourself to work on because it’s so hard. Somehow you find yourself finishing it and you’re relieved just to be done with the damn thing. Then a friend reads it and tells you they cried, or laughed, or that the characters or dialogue stayed with them for days.

There’s a joy that comes from living through the torture.

What do you do to get yourself to the other side when you hit the wall in your writing? How do you keep going?

 

Story Accepted for Publication!

Hi all,

I got some great news today, my short story “The Girl at the Chelsea Hotel” has been accepted for publication in Spilling Ink Review!

The story will be published in their December edition, Issue 7. When the link appears, I’ll publish it here and permanently on my Published Stories page.

Huzzah!

Carol

Being Funny Just Ain’t That Humorous

If you always wanted to know just how much sublime fun it was to be a writer of wit and humor, read the comments below from greats like Oscar Wilde, Woody Allen, Fran Lebowitz, Dorothy Parker, Erma Bombeck and Mark Twain – then think again. It was damn hard work then, and it’s damn hard work now.

If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you. – Oscar Wilde

People think it’s very hard to be funny but it’s an interesting thing. If you can do it, it’s not hard at all. It would be like if I said to somebody who can draw very well, My God, I could take a pencil and paper all day long and never be able to draw that horse. I can’t do it, and you’ve done it so perfectly. And the other person feels, This is nothing. I’ve been doing this since I was four years old. That’s how you feel about comedy—if you can do it, you know, it’s really nothing. It’s not that the end product is nothing, but the process is simple. Of course, there are just some people that are authentically funny, and some people that are not. It’s a freak of nature. – Woody Allen

FRAN LEBOWITZ

When I was very little, say five or six, I became aware of the fact that people wrote books. Before that, I thought that God wrote books. I thought a book was a manifestation of nature, like a tree. When my mother explained it, I kept after her: What are you saying? What do you mean? I couldn’t believe it. It was astonishing. It was like—here’s the man who makes all the trees. Then I wanted to be a writer, because, I suppose, it seemed the closest thing to being God.

I never wanted to be anything else. Well, if there had been a job of being a reader, I would have taken that, because I love to read and I don’t love to write. That would be blissful. Sometimes you meet people who really enjoy their work. Those are the people I am most envious of, no matter what their work is.

INTERVIEWER

You never enjoyed writing?

LEBOWITZ

I used to love to write. As a child I used to write all the time. I loved to write up until the second I got my first professional writing job. It turns out it’s not that I hate to write. I hate, simply, to work. I just hate to work, period. I am profoundly slothful. Practically inert. I have no energy. I never have. I just have no desire to be productive. Now that I realize I don’t hate to write, that I just hate to work, it makes writing easier.

INTERVIEWER

What, then, would you say is the source of most of your work?

DOROTHY PARKER

Need of money, dear.

INTERVIEWER

And besides that?

PARKER

It’s easier to write about those you hate—just as it’s easier to criticize a bad play or a bad book.

INTERVIEWER

You have an extensive reputation as a wit. Has this interfered, do you think, with your acceptance as a serious writer?

PARKER

I don’t want to be classed as a humorist. It makes me feel guilty. I’ve never read a good tough quotable female humorist, and I never was one myself. I couldn’t do it. A “smartcracker” they called me, and that makes me sick and unhappy. There’s a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.

UDQ: Tell me about your writing process.  How do you write?  Do you set aside a certain time of the day, and if so, why aren’t you writing now?

Erma Bombeck: I am.  You just interrupted me at a page and a half.  Discipline is what I do best.  I can’t imagine any writer saying to you, ‘I just write when I feel like it.’  That’s a luxury, and that’s stupid.  The same for writer’s block.  If you’re a professional writer, you write.  You don’t sit there and wait for sweet inspiration to tap you on the shoulder and say now’s the time.  We meet deadlines.  I write for newspapers, and newspapers don’t wait for anybody.  You write whether you feel like it, you write whether you’ve got an idea, you write whether it’s Pulitzer Prize material.  You just do it, that’s it.  Discipline is what we’re all about.  If you don’t have discipline, you’re not a writer.  This is a job for me.  I come in every morning at 8 a.m. and I don’t leave until 11:30 for lunch.  I take a nap, and then I’m back at the typewriter by 1:30 and I write until 5.  This happens five, six, seven days a week.  I don’t see how I can do any less.

Mark Twain:

“I tell you, life is a serious thing, and, try as a man may, he can’t make a joke of it. People forget that no man is all humor, just as they fail to remember that every man is a humorist. We hear that marvelous voice of Sembrich – a wonderful thing – a thing never to be forgotten – but nobody makes the mistake of thinking of Sembrich as merely a great, unmixed body of song. We know that she can think and feel and suffer like the rest of us. Why should we forget that the humorist has his solemn moments? Why should we expect nothing but humor of the humorist?

“My advice to the humorist who has been a slave to his reputation is never to be discouraged. I know it is painful to make an earnest statement of a heartfelt conviction and then observe the puzzled expression of the fatuous soul who is conscientiously searching his brain to see how he can possibly have failed to get the point of the joke. But say it again and maybe he’ll understand you. No man need be a humorist all his life. As the patent medicine man says, there is hope for all.”

The Artist’s Tuning Fork

Today was a gorgeous day in New York City, and I spent a few hours this afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art to see the William De Kooning exhibition. Now don’t get the wrong idea, I’m actually not a big fan of the artist, but I am very interested in Abstract Expressionism and I wanted the opportunity to re-think some of my ideas about this painter.

As per the MoMA website:

The exhibition, which will only be seen at MoMA, presents an unparalleled opportunity to study the artist’s development over nearly seven decades, beginning with his early academic works, made in Holland before he moved to the United States in 1926, and concluding with his final, sparely abstract paintings of the late 1980s. Bringing together nearly 200 works from public and private collections, the exhibition will occupy the Museum’s entire sixth-floor gallery space, totaling approximately 17,000 square feet.

Despite my internal resistance to the way De Kooning merges traditional body forms with abstraction in his most famous paintings like Woman I,

De Kooning's Woman I - part of the permanent MoMA collection

I really did like his later works in the last two decades of his life, none of which I’ve seen before. These works were much more graphic in nature, brightly colored, with lots of white background to provide space to the drawn forms and lines that marked these canvases.

Regardless, the De Kooning work I have the strongest resistance made me think about my favorite Frank O’Hara poem Why I am Not a Painter. It goes like this:

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

This led me to think about De Kooning’s “positive” and “negative” series including paintings like Zurich, which are all black and white and have words or letters embedded in the paintings. Or his piece called Attic, which De Kooning said had “everything in it.”

I’m not sure why, but all of this led me back around to thinking about the end of De Kooning’s life again, and the last two decades that he painted even though he was in ill health. I thought about how he was unable to paint for at least the last seven years of his life, as his health continued to decline in his late eighty’s and early nineties. It made me wonder if he felt trapped inside his body, with ideas still coming about how he wanted to paint, but his body would have been unable to comply with the demands of the work.

There’s a story in that idea somewhere. I feel that instinctively. And if you’re wondering where all this rambling is leading, I do have a point so bear with me just a bit more.

Yesterday I went to an open air art show where painters, sculptors, potters, and photographers gathered to show the best of what they had to offer. I met a sculptor there, named Brianna Martray of Denver, Colorado. She was displaying a piece called Lighthouse Keeping which really intrigued me. I sensed a feminine energy to her work, and this piece in particular strongly reminded me – not in form but in feeling – of a Dale Chihuly’s installation at the New York Botanical Garden which I saw in 2006.

             Image above courtesy of Brianna Martray

 

                   Chihuly installation of small glass works at the New York Botanical Garden

This weekend was, for me, an opportunity to become inundated – even over-stimulated if you like – with the ideas of other artists. All of these things keep me “in tune” as a writer, with other aspects of art that lead towards a highly diverse set of expressions.

In my short story, Lancaster, the main character comes into close contact with an artist and that experience changes him in some way; it makes him want to strive to be the self the artist has depicted of him, a self that he sees as “other” and yet some possible alternate self to his current way of living.

So, as you sit down to do some reading, whether it be a collection of short stories or a novel, you should also consider using the artist’s tuning fork and get out to see an exhibition of paintings, sculpture, installation art, arthouse films or anything else that intrigues you. While writers are notorious observers of other people, sitting next to them in restaurants, in trains, or elsewhere, we shouldn’t overlook the opportunity to tap directly into the veins of artistic expression and mainline directly from other masters of expression – words are optional.

There are so many possibilities to be inspired by other artists… who do you find yourself most in tune with, and why?

The Moral of the Story – An Amusing Interpretation

So often in today’s modern society, readers are seeking out entertainments with the highest moral aims in mind. One thinks of classic films like Citizen Kane or Home Alone along with serious books such as Of Mice and Men, or The Little Engine That Could.

And so, dear reader, I am here to offer up some titles you could put on your must-view or must-read lists, with a handy plot summary to use as your guide.

The Boys From Brazil, film – A man decides to conduct a scientific experiment and start his own soccer team with boys from Brazil, where they play some pretty mean soccer

The Godfather, film – a heartwarming family film about a pater familia who ensures the success of his sons for future generations

The Road, novel – a father and son go on a road trip together. The father teaches the son how to be a good camper.

Empire Falls, novel – how to book on running a diner in a small town

His Girl Friday, film – a murderer is on the loose but Cary Grant is more interested in stealing someone else’s fiance

Marathon Man, film – Dustin Hoffman as the jogger who gets his teeth cleaned by an older German gentleman

Middlesex, novel – living in Detroit isn’t all its cracked up to be, especially if you are Greek and have a big secret

Groundhog Day – film, freakish popular resurgence of Sonny and Cher permeates this film, although Bill Murray is spectacular as the charming, weatherman who plays the piano

The Royal Tennenbaums – film, Gene Hackman plays a man who tries to convince his family he has cancer by substituting tic tacs for real pain medication. They fall for it, then they don’t.

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory – film (the original) – a tale about why it could actually be good to drop acid and write children’s books