Good news and good art!

This has been a nasty week, but it’s ending on a better, happier note.  It started off with an all-nighter when I had to stay up finishing a sculpture (I’ll post photos of it soon).  Two nights later, I came close to an all-nighter studying.  Then I had a test.  It was rough and busy, and that’s why I haven’t been posting very much.

But good news came in my email this morning.  Cellar Door, the campus literary magazine, is interested in publishing one of my pieces.  I have to revamp the ending of the story, and I have to revamp it really, really soon, but I’m quite honored, especially considering that as far as campus literary magazines go, Cellar Door is among the best. 

This ought to be a fun weekend, too.  I’m headed with a friend to go to a blues festival. 

And… I’ve discovered a cool artist while doing art history work.  His name is Vladimir Kush, and while the snotty elitists might view his work and visual metaphors as a little cheesy at times, I really like it.  It’s wonderful and whimsical surrealism.  Hover over for titles. 

All images from VladimirKush.com. 

Ice is nice.

This is a picture I took a long time ago in an ice storm.  The streetlights gave every tree’s branches a beautiful halo look.  I’m so ready for ice storm season.  Well, maybe not ice storm season, but at least fall.  It felt like fall for a while.  But this renewed heat wave is making me downright sluggish. 

Never have I ever…

I thought I’d post some of what I’ve been doing in my fiction course.  This was written for a classmate’s assignment.  She had us write down “Never have I ever _____” on a piece of paper.  Then we passed the paper to our right and got someone else’s paper.  Their “never have I ever” became the prompt for our assignment.  The one I got was “Never have I ever done a cartwheel.”  And this is part of what I wrote.  It’s fictional (obviously, since it’s for my fiction course): 

Never have I ever done a cartwheel.  Every now and then, when I was younger, I would throw myself into an awkward, exuberant loop, with my thin arms and legs stuck out like the bent spindles of a broken bicycle wheel.  But never a full cartwheel.  I could never trust myself enough to reverse gravity and the horizon and everything, even for that split second. 
 
Once, I almost made it.  In the third grade, Emily and Madalyn and I would fearlessly fling ourselves through the monkey bars and jungle gym and race each other down the soccer field, catching grasshoppers in rinsed-out baby food jars that Madalyn’s mother sent with her for the class to do craft projects with. 
 
One day, we were at the end of the field when Madalyn said she had news.  “I get to do the bar in gymnastics now.”
 
“Cool,” said Emily, who sat in the lip of the giant cement culvert that we weren’t supposed to crawl in, but did anyway.
 
“My teacher said I have the pertest cartwheel she’s ever seen,” Madalyn bragged.
 
“What’s that mean?” I asked.
 
“Dunno.”
 
“Oh.”    
 
Madalyn rolled over in the grass and yawned.  “Must be good.  Hardly anybody gets to do a cartwheel on the bar.”  I picked at a Matchbox car that a younger boy had left half-buried in the red clay.  Madalyn lifted her head and looked at us.  “Can you do a cartwheel?” she asked. 
 
“Uh, yeah,” said Emily, rolling her eyes as if that had been a stupid question.  To prove it, she lowered herself from the culvert, pulled her hair into a ponytail, and executed a neat, perfectly circular cartwheel.  “I can do a somersault too.”  She jumped up and flipped, landed a little messily, and as an afterthought, stuck her hands in the air like an Olympic gymnast in a leotard might do.  Madalyn and I clapped, and then Madalyn looked at me. 
 
“Uh…”  I got up.  I had to do a cartwheel.  Right then and there.  No guts, no glory.  I adjusted my headband, and then adjusted my sleeves, and then checked to make sure my shoelaces were tied, until I knew I could keep them in suspense no longer.  I dried my sweating palms on my leggings.  And then I launched myself.  For a moment, I stood on one hand, feeling like Atlas with the world balanced on the heel of my hand, the stalactite buildings lowering their spines around me, the birds flying upside down through the sky.  I’d entered a new dimension, where air was ground and my head felt thick and heavy with the blood rushing to it.  And then the world rolled off of my palm and came crashing down on me.  I lay on the ground facedown for a moment, until I heard Madalyn and Emily asking me if I was alright, and I felt the sharp pain in my right big toe. 
 
My mother was not pleased.  She had to take me to the emergency room and had to pay $300 for the visit.  How could she understand?  She’d never seen that strange world that I’d glimpsed for two seconds. 

 —

Oh, and an update:  the blogroll is back, but the header is not.  And I can’t upload it, because I no longer have the original file for whatever reason.  So until I’m able to hunt it up, bear with me and the ugly maroon header. 

Another update:  The header is back, at least temporarily.  According to another fabulous WordPress user, the glitch was systemwide. 

Technical difficulty.

Lucky Pennies is currently experiencing some technical difficulties for no apparent reason.  Certain important things such as my header and my blogroll have mysteriously vanished, all without my having done anything.  So until I figure it out, sorry it’s so ugly and messed up. 

In the defense of “greeting card verse” and normal folks who like art

I’ve finally written a new poem that I actually like.  It’s been a while since I posted one.  Poems have been few and far between for me lately.  Writing poetry has become sort of painful.  When I was younger, I would write a poem about every other thing that happened in my life.  They flowed easily and unselfconsciously, and though most of them weren’t anything a literary journal would be jumping to publish, at least they made me happy. 

Now so little of the poetry I write pleases me.  And I don’t particularly enjoy writing it, either.

What’s the difference? 

For one thing, I’ve had a little bit of training.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not blaming my professors or any of the other people who’ve taught me in the past.  My poetry professor was the best professor I had last year, and the people I had class with were great.  But that little bit of training was enough to push me into no man’s land, that desolate place between so-called pedestrian verse and the stuffy kind of poetry that only MFAs enjoy.  I don’t write the kind of stuff that your average high-school-educated Joe would necessarily like, but I don’t write to appease the highfalutin folk either.  Really, I don’t know who I’m writing for anymore.  And that is a grave problem.  Ted Kooser, in The Poetry Home Repair Manual, says that you need what he calls an “Imaginary Reader,” someone who represents your audience.  Similiarly, Steven King calls that person the “Ideal Reader” in On Writing.   

Sadly, I don’t have either. 

And I can’t be one of those people who pretends that they only write to please themselves, because that’s not true.  I really can’t stand those kind of people.  There’s no joy in making something beautiful if you’re only going to keep it under wraps.  But lately, it comes so slow that by the time I’m finished with it, I’m so bloody sick of it that I can’t honestly tell you whether I like the poem or not, and for that reason, I don’t really feel like showing it to anyone.  This is not conducive to growth in my poetic pursuits. 

And frankly, I’m disgusted with the arts in general, especially visual art and poetry.  Both have become the stomping grounds of elitists, over-schooled intellectuals, and snobs.  If were to walk up to any given professor in the creative writing department here and tell them that my favorite poets were Robert Frost and Billy Collins (they aren’t, but that’s not the point), they would probably roll their eyes inwardly and stifle a snicker.  Or they might pass out from horror that I (a creative writing minor!) would like something so woefully common, so average, so quotidian!  So many trained writers automatically dismiss, at least in part, the writing that pleases the masses, without thinking that perhaps there is actually a reason that that particular writer does please the masses. 

Same thing with art.  Professional artists, as well as art critics, museum curators, and art professors, think there’s something wrong with you if you can’t talk about a piece in lofty terms.  What happened to, “Because it’s beautiful?”  Why does there always have to be a reason, a deep underlying current of meaning?  Sometimes the only reason for something is your appreciation for it, for a beautiful landscape, for a beautiful moment.  I’m not saying it’s not good to be able to talk about poetry and art in a sophisticated manner.  But it’s not good to poopoo those who can’t.  And some people can’t. 

Elitists, too, disdain everyday folks who write what they deem “greeting card verse” or sing-songy poetry.  Who in the hell gave them the right to tear these people apart?  A good deal of them aren’t ever going to publish or even seek to publish.  Not every person who makes a rhyme is going to turn into Yeats.  Not every person who writes poetry is the next Thomas Lux.  They know that!  I’m not saying it’s the kind of writing that I want to read, but if they want to write, more power to them.  You don’t have to read it if you don’t like it, and if you don’t like it, keep that fact to yourself.  Writing pleases them and gives them joy.  And it takes an enormous amount of courage to present anything you’ve made yourself, to share something that you feel has a little bit of your soul in it.  I can’t understand what educated poets are trying to achieve by making fun of blogs and websites where everyday folks post their poetry.  They can tell what kind of website they’re looking at in a few glances, and if it doesn’t match what they’re looking for, they should just move on.  Snide comments and jibes won’t get anyone anywhere. 

In other words, pooey on elitists!

On that note, here’s my poem:
The Snakeskin
 –

(This poem has been archived.)

All this over a s’more…?

I don’t usually read the Daily Tar Heel, Chapel Hill’s campus paper, but a friend called to my attention this article by John Musci, called “First letter from John to the Christians.”  His column rubbed me the wrong way, and my friend, who is herself an atheist, also thought he took things one step too far.  I think he took things several steps too far:

“First Letter from John to the Christians” by John Musci

Evening, early fall. A knock on my dorm room door. Quick and heavy. A stranger’s knock. Two strangers, in fact. One man and one woman, dressed in khaki and Polo. They are from Campus Crusade, and they invite me to join them for s’mores in the quad.

I decline their invitation and thank them for stopping by. They assure me they have plenty of s’mores, in case I change my mind. In fact, I do want a s’more. I haven’t eaten anything since that infernal omelet at the dining hall. But I don’t want new friends who, even before they met me, wished I was different.

I know where s’mores lead. S’mores lead to “What’s your major?” leads to “Are you in any clubs?” leads to “How is your personal relationship with Jesus Christ?”

I do not have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. I’m on holiday from Catholicism.

But the Christians who came to my door want me to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. They’re not offering me a s’more, they’re offering me The Savior, between two graham crackers, a ‘mallow and a hunk of Hershey’s. Because without Him, I am not a whole person; I am not bad - I will not accuse Christians of being judgmental - but I am incomplete.

People like me who are “taking a break from religion” or are just sick of waking up Monday morning with the same questions they had Saturday night are insulted and repulsed by the Christians who seek us out only to proselytize to us.

And we are very tired of being looked down upon by people who are no more satisfied with life than we are.

I struggle, they struggle. I’m lost, they’re lost. I’m uncertain, they’re even more uncertain; the Christians’ desperation to see their beliefs reflected in the world around them reeks of insecurity. The Christians who cannibalize each other in public over who is and is not saved are the most insecure of all.

What’s even more infuriating is the God they come peddling presumedly loves me, yet He doesn’t like who I am. When the Christians say “s’mores,” I hear a fractured version of the 18th-century sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”

“The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds this marshmallow, or some loathsome jet-puffed sweet on a crooked, brittle stick over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: His wrath towards you burns like the gas flames of this cheap portable grill.”

We, the agnostics, atheists and skeptics, are looking for someone whose faith is evident when faith is not the question. We will be open to religion when we meet someone whose everyday joy and ability to cope with pain exceed our own.

I met one such person last year. He laughed as if heaven were today. What was he on, I joked. He kept on smiling, and I kept searching his drawers for antidepressants. Nothing. I soon learned that he was Jewish and that he taught Hebrew songs to children every week. I completed a photo story on him for a photojournalism class and watched him practice his faith one frame at a time.

He didn’t change when he put his yarmulke on. He was just as warm, excited and caring as he was when we sat on the porch and talked about Billy Joel and Colorado.

All he ever said to me about religion was, “My faith inspires me. You can come to services if you want.” He didn’t offer me anything. Just a chance to come and see. And I know when the time is right, that chance will still be there. And if the time is never right, I know he’ll understand.

And that’s what makes me want to believe in something again.

—

That really ticked me off.  So I decided to write an editorial on it.  No word on whether or not they care to publish it, but it got a weight off my chest to submit it, even if I had to contain what could very well have turned into an extensive, sprawling rant to within 250 words.  So here’s what I wrote (I should have had a summary of his article in the first sentence, but oh well): 

“You got a problem with s’mores?” by Me

While Musci’s “First Letter” was clever, it is unfair to assume that all Christians who openly express their faith look down upon those who don’t share that faith.  It is not “desperation” or “insecurity” that drives Christians to share the greatest solace of their lives, but rather the earnest wish that others may also rest in this solace.

Ironically, though Musci speaks of judgment passed, he himself passes a scathing judgment: that Christians are looking to disparage you simply by asking you what you think about Jesus. 

And does it not “reek of insecurity” that Musci cannot accept a mere s’more without suspicion?  Yes, Christians can offer their faith in the way they lead their lives.  That is wonderful.  But some pair the offer of their faith with the offer of some other sort of fellowship.  Campus Crusade would not offer s’mores if s’mores did not draw the doubtful into their ministry.  Musci disdains Crusade without so much as a thought that Crusade may be helping some to “believe in something again,” just as Musci’s friend helps him. 

Musci’s sarcasm, while amusing, is dangerous in that it only deepens the schism between believers and non-believers.  Sarcasm begets sarcasm in those who might otherwise seek. 

—

And I could go on.  There were no Campus Crusaders lying in wait on the quad to fling flaming s’mores at unsuspecting atheists and agnostics until they admitted Jesus into their lives.  Campus Crusade wasn’t doing anything his Jewish buddy wasn’t doing.  They weren’t using s’mores as a manipulator or a marketing tool.  There was no fine print.  Campus Crusade, a Christian ministry, was offering food and conversation to those who wished to accept.  Anyone attending an event sponsered by a Christian group should be prepared to answer, in a mature and straightforward way, questions about his beliefs, just as a Christian attending a meeting of atheists should be prepared to answer questions about his beliefs.  Musci has got some growing up to do if he thinks he’s exempt.  And he’s got some growing up to do if he views an invitation to eat s’mores as a threat. 

Just eat the s’mores, fool!