Calling for a Denver Art Caucus

Ginsberg/Kerouac
southerncitymysteries.blogspot.com 

Call this a manifesto. Call this the initial organizing document for the Denver Art Caucus.

In the style of the Beats, Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, who are appropriate inspiration for this document since Denver played a part in making their reputations, I will ramble a bit and let the reader decide whether to read from sentence to sentence to the end.

But unlike my inspiration, I am sober when I write this, not cracked up on meth, nor speeding on marijuana or cocaine. I am developing this manifesto in my  own time, of my own mind, as an idea, a dreamed thought, a half-dreamed construct for the new art of the 21st century.

I issue my call to all Colorado artists. It is a utopian invitation built around a new model for conducting the business of art: production of high quality work in an age when money rules the barriers of entry and most artists are too poor to hurdle those barriers.

I have a friend, John Wren, who is somewhat of a business partner, somewhat of a visionary in his own right. John Wren has an obsession: the political caucus. He believes in them; he refuses not to believe in them, and he believes the caucus is a model for saving America by reintroducing town-hall democracy to the nation.

Not just in New England nor small-town Iowa, and not just for the 18th or 19th centuries, but for the 21st century and for all time.

On Tuesday, February 14, 2012, John Wren outlined his cause to a near dozen men at what John calls a Franklin Circle. Wren has made a life of trying to create these circles, groups of adults who discuss over a table what they have learned or taught themselves over the past two weeks.

On. Feb. 14, John outlined his passion for the political causus. I have heard bits and pieces of what John has had to say about caucuses in the past. But never have I heard Wren speak of the caucus as passionately, nor as comprehensively as on this day.

And yet not one of us among the dozen came away convinced that John will pull off a new revolution of neighbor-talking-to-neighbor in America to solve political issues. Several of us, however, left impressed with John's idea for a revolution in the way we talk to each other in America.

On Feb. 18, I had an epiphany.What if you were to adopt a caucus model for making art in Denver!
I am calling for that revolution to remake the way art is produced in Colorado.

Call it the Denver Art Caucus and instead of drawing neighbors together to make political discourse, create small groups of artists committed to supporting each other and producing good art work.

Not just good work, but great work! Art that would last; art that would shake a cynical world's core. Art that could establish reputations. Art that could actually make some money for the artists contributing to their separate caucuses, under the umbrella of a Colorado Art Caucus or a Denver Art Caucus.

Yes, this is hippie utopianism, much like the Occupy Wall Street movement. Yet it is meant to attract young people to groups of playwrights, filmmakers, poets, painters, sculptors, dancers, songwriters performance artists. Yes, this is a new art of collaboration, forged for the "flat" world described by New York Times writer Tom Friedman early in this century. But my idea translates Friedman's theories to an artistic arena.

Artists gather in cells of four, six or eight individuals who support each others' work as well as each others' lives by sharing living space, profits, workspace, emotions, beans and rice and housecleaning.

Cells would collaborate with other Colorado cells to show their work, produce a play, publish their writing, market their products, collect revenue and share profits. I think it would work.

This is my manifesto. I call for creation of a Denver Art Caucus, and I await your response.

"Freedom" to try to write literature

How do you review a two-year-old novel that took you a year to read and that no one else in the country at this time cares much about?

Last Christmas, my nephew Sean overbought my present having drawn me in the family lottery and knowing I was fast running out of money to support myself. He sent me the book I asked for, "Freedom" by Jonathan Franzen, (2010, Farrar, Straus and Giroux), an Oprah's Book Club selection, and called the best book of American fiction for that year by Esquire magazine.

Sean also sent me a new pair of jeans and a very nice sweater-like shirt/jacket, my appreciation for which has lasted much longer than my appreciation for Franzen's book.

And yet, finally having finished the novel, I wanted to review it here in my own time, hoping to acknowledge not only my sister's son's generosity but also the longterm pleasure one gets from reading even when the quality of the writing is less than you might have hoped.

Literature, after all, is created by writing that is memorably excellent, and Franzen's book is meant to be a literary novel, not just a best seller. 

I don't think the book was as bad as it was considered to be by B.R. Myers, who practically ridiculed it in a review in the October 2010 issue of The Atlantic magazine. But I also don't think Franzen's work was worthy of the three A+s, seven As, two A-s, and three Bs which the book earned by graders at the complete review, a website that aggregates reviews of recently published books and offers a grade for the book based on the content of the review. The Atlantic's review gained "Freedom" its lowest grade: D.

But as I read the book, I never got a sense of reading something "good-to-great" until the final chapter of Franzen's 562 pages. A good book will give you that sensation much earlier in the writing, and a classic work of literature gives it to you from the start.

And still I kept reading, from last New Year's Day until I finished about mid October. I do that not only because I admit to being a slow reader but also because I could sense Franzen's striving. There was some heft to his story, and he was making a novel out of what one reviewer called "everyday life" in America, content I have always believed contains the heroism of every great American literary classic.

Even when the writer's efforts fall short of that standard, the experience of reading the words can bring great pleasure. That is the essence of the best seller in America. It doesn't have to be a literary giant to sell. It just has to extend the pleasure of reading to those who keep turning its pages.

There are other weaknesses in Franzen's book.

For a novel about the preservation of a bird species and the natural environment, the writing is particularly devoid of natural imagery. Perhaps that's an intentional device to support the theme of the overcommercialization of American life, but images are the stuff of great literature, and to subtract them from your writing rather than revel in them seems a mistake.

Instead, Franzen tries to describe mental states: thoughts, reflections, philosophies and ideologies. But such description falls short of the imaginative scenery a reader constructs when ingesting a great piece of fiction, a real world made up only in one's imagination.

I missed that element of a great book as I read "Freedom" over a long period of time. Still, I enjoyed ten months of mild reading pleasure. 

Rita Dove's anthology, reported sans criticism

Much has been made in the literary press lately about Helen Vendler's criticism of Rita Dove's editing of the "Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry," and Dove's response to the inestimable Yeats scholar and critic.

The PBS Newshour's Jeff Brown on Friday broadcast an interview of Dove about the book, without even mentioning Vendler's criticism. The exclusion of controversy from Brown's initial coverage of Dove's anthology was refreshing.

Click here to watch and listen.

What is this? A work (art work?) in process

I've started this blog prematurely by changing the name of another working blog I had in my blogger account in hopes of building this space into a place for a statewide conversation about the arts as well as a marketplace for my own and others' work.

My goal is to have Colorado artists participate here by blogging about art offerings across the spectrum of the state's art community: dancers, painters, writers, poets, photographers, movie makers, musicians, sculptors, actors; anyone who wants to communicate with their audience, and get feedback from that audience.

I also hope this community of artists and art consumers will share their opinions about what art is being presented in the state, through reviews and commentary that I will edit and post as our conversation develops. I will also comment occasionally.

I also want to use the space to sell my own and others' art work. I will find a way to post my own poetry here for sale, replacing my own website where I do that, and invite other artists to post work for sale. I intend to file for non-profit status for the entire enterprise, but I will charge artists a 1% of sales fee for posting their work here to generate a sale.

This has been a dream of mine for several years now, developed since I was challenged to start my own business to support myself since leaving an editor's post at a statewide business magazine, ColoradoBiz. I'm a slow learner, and that is my only explanation for why it has taken me so long to develop and start up this model.

I'm not sure how it all will work out, but I know my intentions are good, and I hope you will keep checking into the progress of this new blogger experience.