Austin Kleon – Page 597

DONALD BARTHELME’S DREAM

Thursday, January 19, 2006

click to make it bigger adapted from Brian Kitely’s 3 a.m. epiphany

I don’t care much for opera. And I don’t know much about Richard Wagner, either. But I do know that back in 1849, Wagner was thinking a lot about opera and about art, and how to convey the human experience.

The Ancient Greeks got it all right with tragedy, he thought. A thousand years ago, all the art forms were fused together. Now, we’ve screwed it all up, and music, art, and theater are separated from each other! But Opera…Opera has the potential to fuse them all back together again…

So Dick started scribbling in his notebook, and came up with the essay, “The Art-work of the Future.” In it, he came up with a word, and the word was “gesamtkunstwerk.” (Like most German language, it sounds to me like a sneeze.) The word means something like “Total Artwork” or, “a synthesis of the arts.” Wagner was certain that the future of the arts was the integration of all forms, into something like a Mega-Opera.

Some people think that what Wagner was on to is what we now call multimedia. It’s safe to say that the dude was a little ahead of his time.

Matthew Barney might’ve gotten along with Wagner. I saw his CREMASTER CYCLE exhibit at the Guggenheim museum back when I was a sophomore in college. What Barney had done was make up a bunch of worlds out of sketches and sculpture and film. Some people called it a “gesamtkunstwerk.”

I like Barney because I think the greatest thing that an artist can do is create his own world: a place or geography that resembles the interior of his imagination, and all you have to do is drop in through one of his books or films or photos to get to it.

Yesterday I bought a DVD burner. Today I made a DVD of some home movies I’ve shot over the past couple years. With a DVD, and also with the internet, it’s so easy to fuse all kinds of art: film, literature, comics, music. I thought that maybe my goal shouldn’t be to put out a book at all, where I could only put words or a few drawings, but to put out a DVD or a website. Then you could drop in and see everything.

ETGAR KERET

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Etgar Keret is an Israeli writer who lives in Tel Aviv. I stumbled onto his work while ordering graphic novels for the library: he writes funky short stories (comparisons to everyone from Ray Carver to Gogol to Kelly Link), but also dabbles in comics and screenwriting. Here’s a few words from an article about him:

In his homeland of only five million Hebrew readers, Keret’s four collections of stories have sold more than 200,000 copies in all….His books are the most stolen volumes from Israeli bookstores, and he’s the most widely read writer in prisons. “A lot is to do with their attention spans,” Keret says of his fans behind bars. “They like my stories because they’re short.” His pithy sentences and blunt prose rarely propel his cameo tales beyond a few pages—a feature of his writing Keret traces to his asthma. “When you are having an attack and say to somebody, ‘I love you very much,’ you could, instead of ‘very much,’ say, ‘Call an ambulance.’ You don’t have time to bullshit.”

I picked up his book THE BUS DRIVER WHO WANTED TO BE GOD. Keret writes a weekly column called “Citizen K” over at nextbook.org. The site also has a reading and interview with Ira Glass. A new film called Wristcutters is based on one of his novellas.

Seems like a cool dude.

MARTIN LUTHER KING

Monday, January 16, 2006

He said:

…nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time – – the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression. Civilization and violence are antithetical concepts….[N]onviolence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation. Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

He also said:

I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. I believe that even amid today’s motor bursts and whining bullets, there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow. I believe that wounded justice, lying prostrate on the blood-flowing streets of our nations, can be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the children of men. I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down men other-centered can build up. I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive good will proclaimed the rule of the land. “And the lion and the lamb shall lie down together and every man shall sit under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid.?? I still believe that We Shall overcome!

Hint: it’s not about black and white, it’s about the haves and have-nots. And along the same lines, a press release from PRKA written by George Saunders.

LAUGHING WITH KAFKA

Sunday, January 15, 2006

“For me, a signal frustration in trying to read Kafka with college students is that it is next to impossible to get them to see that Kafka is funny…Nor to appreciate the way funniness is bound up with the extraordinary power of his stories. Because, of course, great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communication -theorists sometimes call “exformation,” which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient. This is probably why the effect of both short stories and jokes often feels sudden and percussive, like the venting of a long-stuck valve. It’s not for nothing that Kafka spoke of literature as “a hatchet with which we chop at the frozen seas inside us.” Nor is it an accident that the technical achievement of great short stories is often called “compression” — for both the pressure and the release are already inside the reader. What Kafka seems able to do better than just about anyone else is to orchestrate the pressure’s increase in such a way that it becomes intolerable at the precise instant it is released.”