Don't Sell Your Soul

I tried to ignore this story about a guy complaining about his father who is a "right wing a-hole." Depending upon the day and my mood, I can fit or be made to fit into this pigeonhole. And when I have participated in such conversations, it's generally been unpleasant.

But then I heard just enough of Andrew W. K.'s reply that I realized he was making a point closely related to one that I had made a while back. So, if he's agreeing with me, he must be right. Right? I had noted that when interacting with someone who is selling something, their humanity becomes eclipsed by their sales pitch. And if the product is the Republican/Democrat party, the sales pitch is political propaganda. Talk to a spokesman/activist and you can find yourself conversing with someone who is indistinguishable from a spambot.

"I'm sorry, Ms. Social Justice Warrior, you just failed my anti-Turing test."

What Andrew W. K. said that snagged my attention was this sentence: "Try to find a single instance where you referred to your dad as a human being, a person, or a man." Maybe the dad was so monomaniacal in his right-wing advocacy that it eclipsed his humanity. That's a real risk. OR maybe the "Son of a Right Winger" was so monomaniacal in his left-wing beliefs that it blinded him.

I have to acknowledge the humanity of humans who are anti-Turing test failures.

This turned my notion of an anti-Turing test inside out. Or it provided a hint at what an anti-Turing test should look for. Humans can recognize other humans. And should recognize other humans. Seriously bad things happen when people ignore/deny the humanity of the other. Prior to the Civil War Huck Finn might say, "Nobody got killed except some n-----s." Hutus deny the humanity of Tutsis. Turks deny the humanity of Armenians. Nazis deny the humanity of Jews. (Yes, I've Godwinned this note. Deal with it.)

If you can't/won't see the humanity of the other, your own humanity is jeopardized.

Perhaps this is what older generations meant by "selling one's soul." 

Democrats turned the funeral of Senator Paul Wellstone into a political pep-rally. They got spanked by the electorate because of its obvious ghoulishness. But the ghoulishness wasn't obvious to them because the humanity of everyone involved had been sacrificed on the altar of partisan interests. The same lack of perspective is on display when a "Pro-Lifer" murders an abortionist.

When you read classics, the ancients' axe-grinding occasions only a quizzical "what?" But we read classics because the ancients did more than just grind axes: they shared some truth about humanity they understood. Propaganda has a limited shelf-life after which it becomes--at best--a joke, then irrelevant.

One must retain one's soul in order to create art. Art manifests something transcendent and it flees pornography. This makes some think that Liberalism is killing art when it asserts that Art is always political. Political totalitarianism is a blight on our culture.

If you deny the assertion that Art must put the correct political message first, you'll be called an International Lord or Hate, a cismale gendernormative fascist, or something as bad. Of course, I'd rather be called that then sell my soul to The Cause--any cause.

Making Art

If you read the Make magazine blog, you'll see a lot of folks making stuff. Lots of technologists and craftsmen are putting together neat stuff and setting up maker spaces. For instance, there's the folks at GRMakers who have set up the maker space in my hometown Grand Rapids, MI. This is also the home of Art Prize.

And then there's Pablo Picasso. Of all the folks you'd call modern artists, I respect him the most. He was a prolific artist and he did a lot of it. I heard that he did a lot of doves. He said that he refused to draw their feet, because he'd had to draw so many of feet when he was younger. Why would he be forced to draw a lot of bird feet? Because that was the way he was taught.

Before Pablo Picasso produced abstract modern art, he had to master his artistic technique.

When I experience the various entries in Art Prize, I see several Taxonomy of Art Prize Entries. Each entry manifests a separate mastery of some technique. Whereas the Old Masters knew how to put paint on canvas, nowadays artists are also glueing seeds or wine corks to a substrate, or welding, riveting or bolting together bits of metal. Or any of a zillion other techniques.
sorts of work I've described in my

The ones that get me excited generally involve wires and electronic components. And most exciting include some logic switching electrons around.

And this puts a great stress upon the artist, because folks can conceive art works that exceed their inherent skill sets. Some art pieces require a fusion of artistic vision and technological craftsmanship.

This is why some of the neat stuff you see on the Make magazine blog are art projects. You'll also see in maker spaces an easy marriage of the technologists' expertise and the artists' vision.

In fact, one of the leading entries is a dragon from a Detroit maker space. Gon KiRin is awesome.

I figure that maker spaces are going to become a key contributor to culture. If you can hook up with one, or with the maker movement in general, by all means do so.

Waiting For Amazon

(This is step #11 of my How To Publish An Ebook thang.)

One of the annoyances of publishing with Kindle Direct Publishing is that you must wait for about 12 hours from when you tell it to publish your work until the time it becomes available.

While you're waiting you can redeem the time by reviewing your plans for promotion and advertising. I'm by no means an expert in these areas. In fact, I really think my efforts in this regard have been substandard. So, listen to someone else about promotion and advertising.

In fact, I'm considering hiring out promotion and advertising next time I self-publish something.

So, let's talk about hiring work out. Nobody can do everything at an expert level. That's a real-life corollary of a couple of my earlier blog posts about writing about superlatives, and writing here and here.

Take a survey of yourself. Can you write? Can you copy-edit? Can you do art? Can you write advertising copy? Can you do video production? Can you write press releases and follow up on them?

(I hope you can write. Otherwise it makes little sense to self-publish ebooks.)

For each of those things you either can't do, or feel incompetent doing, or have others tell you you're incompetent at--you should consider hiring that work out.

I've talked about how I got an artist for my work here. But I also hired out video production, copy editing, and web-page design. I think that next time, I'm going to do some more crude cartoons and story-boards.

Consider this image. It's crude and ugly. However, it served its purpose admirably: to help figure out composition and colors.  I wish that when I was defining Finding Time's trailer that I had put together crude story-boards. Likewise, my web page FindingTime.Poling.Info would have come together faster had I created some crude drawings.

Next time, I'll draw up a lot of simple sketches on a white-board, photograph them, and send them to my friends doing the art, design, and video.

I think I could have more quickly and more surely communicated my vision for the following trailer had I created storyboards like this.

 

(You can find the bullet-point outline of How To Publish An Ebook here.)

More About Mr. Perfect

I've blogged about avoiding superlatives, and beaten up that nice Mr. Mike Smith about his superlative protagonist.

Just now I found something that underscores what I'm talking about. Here's a link to an article about things overachievers do. It gets depressing at the end when it says they don't write books. Sigh.

The point I derived from this article is that if you're really, really good at X, then you'll be less good at A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, Y, and Z. If that was tedious to read, it was tedious to write. And now imagine that instead of just reading each letter, you were getting a Ph. D. in it? Sounds unrealistic? It should.

If your dashing knight is the best swordsman in the world, then s/he's got no time after swords practice for mastering the violin, or piloting a star fighter, or figuring out how to romance members of the appropriate sex?

If you see any of my ebooks, you'll see the art of Joanne Renaud. We've become friends because I am not an artist. She is. I've hired her to do art for my books. She's good. Yet she reminded me of something that weirded me out some years ago. Did I say I'm not an artist? Keep that in mind.

My sister was cleaning out some of the papers from my dad's house. And some of my teenaged papers were mixed up in them. She sorted them out, and returned them. I saw some landscapes and a picture of a superhero with a jet pack and ray gun.

"Who drew these?" I asked.

"You did," she replied.

I could not imagine any time at which I had been interested in doing something like that. I could not remember making those pictures. They were completely unfamiliar to me. I'm not an artist.

This bothered me a bit and I racked my brain about how these drawings had come to be. Over the course of a couple days I remembered having some time on my hands immediately after graduating from High School and before I started working in my full-time job. In the summer of 1973 I wasn't an artist. I wasn't anything. Just a kid who'd finished school with pretty good grades and a diploma from Kent City High School (The worst high school in Kent County, Michigan back then. I was told.)

In the decades afterwards, I've applied myself to studying Mathematics, Computer Science and Software Engineering. Then I applied myself to writing and storytelling so that my artistic expression is seen in my writing. Not the graphic or visual arts.

Who I am is informed by these activities. The culture of the geeks I ran with helped form my values and attitudes. When I ran into artists in my various writing groups, making purdy pitchers was something they did, not me. Thus my shock and denial that I had dabbled in producing something I was now interested in only as an observer and consumer. This is sort of the inverse of my blog post about reading like a writer.

I'm not anything special and where I aspire to be special, I relate less well to the book-buying public.

I once wrote a writing mantra about making your protagonist someone you'd want to get on the train with. And that means your protagonist has to be someone normal humans can relate to at some level. Stan Lee does this when he makes Peter Parker an awkward high school student. C. S. Forester does this when he lets that nice Mister Midshipman Horatio Hornblower get beat up for doing something right. 

Look again at what those overachievers do: they trim away parts of their life that are unrelated to their goals.

Overachievers are unbalanced characters.

An overachiever in X will be an underachiever in something else. To make your characters believable they must be in this sense realistic. Maybe your ninja is the best swordsman in all Japan, but he sucks at marketing and promotion.

Think about your characters' strengths, and now imagine a list of everything that remains. Regard those things as weaknesses. Sherlock Holmes was an embarrassment to his family when John Watson disclosed he was a flat-earther. Just ask Mycroft.

Camille Paglia Needs To Get Out More

When you live on an island, it is easy to think that the world ends at the shoreline--particularly when that island is named Manhattan.

A week and a half ago, Camille Paglia wrote an opinion piece in one of that island's local newspapers.

With a title like "How Capitalism Can Save Art" Ms. Paglia piques the interest

Ms. Paglia cites a decline in the visual arts, particularly painting since the 1970s. She goes on to state that the avant-garde is dead while citing execrable installations masquerading as art. If that is what art is, then art is dead. She further laments the fact that in recent years young people have become disconnected from the manual trades, and thus lack the technique to pull off artistic expressions.

This is contradicted by the "Maker Movement" something you can see on display if you pick up an issue of Make magazine or haunt any of the "hacker spaces" popping up across the country. I think her observation is correct--as far as it goes.

True, today's kids are not going to get summer jobs in shoe factories or learn about steel making from besooted parents--unless those parents are artisans making hand-made shoes or smelting metal in backyard forges.

As technology creates new forms of expression old forms don't necessarily die so much as become art forms--like the blacksmith I watched on Nova last night forging a Viking sword in his shop in Door county Wisconsin.

Blacksmithing is art? It's more art than taking snaps of a crucifix in a jar of urine.

There is a limited amount of creativity in the world and there are many more modes of creative expression than smearing paint (or feces) on canvas. Perhaps this generation's Pollock or Mondrian are happily building fire-breathing dragons to drive around Burning Man.

I've said elsewhere that rich people can be stupid, filling museums with overrated junk and in so doing they are disclosing a naked-emperor groupthink unmatched by anything except perhaps the Obama presidency.

I don't think my hometown's billionaire is stupid, because he started ArtPrize a few years ago. Art experts squealed like pigs that the prize would be awarded on the basis of popular vote instead of expert judgement. Indeed. By crowd-sourcing art evaluation as was done with ArtPrize entries, art experts can be disintermediated.

Dangling a quarter-million dollar prize in front of the public caused a lot of talented people to think about what sort of art they could produce. And--for better or worse--they manifested a diverse spectrum of creativity as I've describe elsewhere. But don't take my word for any of this, look at this year's winners for yourself. The 2nd and 3rd prize winners are illustrative of this diversity of creativity: in the former case, hundreds of little robotic birds danced and flew about the room in a dazzling show of technology, while in the latter case, the artist put paint on canvas in a way that would please the Dutch masters of old.

The two trends both falsify and confirm Ms. Paglia's thesis.

First, the maker movement gets creative people back in touch with the hands-on matter of making thing. And they're spreading their creativity across a broad spectrum of artistic expression as they design circuits and software to create new forms of beauty while mastering techniques unimaginable a generation ago. I believe Ms. Paglia is no farther than a subway ride from some of the preeminent hacker spaces in the country. Are these folks capitalists? Maybe in an Etsy.com sort of way.

Second, by bringing hundreds of visitors to the Grand Rapids downtown area, the ArtPrize organizers have brought a lot of business to restaurants, coffee shops, and bars. ArtPrize is capitalist. It is as capitalistic a happening as an Amway presentation. Art may be dead in Manhattan, but it's alive each autumn in Grand Rapids, MI.

So, Ms. Paglia, if you want to see art that is not dead, look in Brooklyn for a hacker space. And if that doesn't satisfy, drop by Grand Rapids next fall.

A Taxonomy of ArtPrize Entries

I've devised a crude taxonomy of #ArtPrize entries.

(If you don't know what ArtPrize is, come to Grand Rapids, MI and find out!)

1) The unkind title of the first category is Refrigerator Art. Some people took Garrison Keillor seriously when he said all the children are above average. And the unhappy truth is that some people have no business entering their work in ArtPrize. Though everyone is God's special unique snowflake, not everyone is able to produce something worthy of display. I'm not saying anybody should be excluded, but maybe loved ones could stage an intervention.

2) The second category is the Monumental. Some artists have genuine talent and they deploy this talent in the service of The Cause. In Soviet Russia, these would be larger than life depictions of the New Soviet Man, working in a factory or driving a tractor. In China, you'd see a five-story Mao leading the Long March. But in Grand Rapids, MI we've got a number of competing religions, like Sorting Recyclables, Empowering Disadvantaged Youths, and Restoring The Ten Commandments. Each of these partisan interests inspire larger-than-life submissions.

3) The Propaganda category combines the worse elements of the first two. It beats the Propaganda drum so furiously that it never gets around to executing any good-looking art. It's just there, declaring some message in the most heavy-handed way imaginable without the slightest breath of humanity or humor. It can be produced by a crowd of 6-year-old draftees or by some too-earnest "artist" toiling away in his garret. Is it Art? I dare not deny that, but you can't deny it's propaganda.

4) My favorite category is the Science Demonstration entry. The Good Lord put some really beautiful phenomena in the laws of Mathematics and Physics, and some boffin will find a way to render that tangibly in an ArtPrize entry. Bravo to you. You've got my vote, because I'm a boffin wannabe myself. Same goes for the engineer who lashes together software and hardware to make some pleasant interactive blinking lights and sound effects. These guys are like the Wizard of Oz, tweaking their balky devices to make them work while saying, "Pay not attention to the man behind the curtain." I salute the man behind the curtain.

5) Then there's the Crafty Art category. What can you make with an unlimited number of toothpicks, ten-penny nails, coins, legos, cigarette butts, win corks or push-pins? Anything! And they usually look wonderful. They're a gimmick and I love gimmicks.

So far, I've described categories of ArtPrize entries that have varying chances of winning. Now I'll describe the one category that is a Sure Fire Loser

6) The Sure Fire Loser category is different from all the other categories. Entries in this category reflect something appealing in nature or humanity. And they do so beautifully. But what makes them a Sure Fire Loser is that they could easily fit on a wall of my house. Nobody is going to vote for this over a 10-ton flying pig, or a 50-foot woman. I could never put a Public Service Announcement over my couch and entries in this category won't attract the partisans' votes. I don't want to dust a million toothpicks formed into the shape of Sonic the Hedgehog no matter how cool that would be. But that painting of a bucolic pasture or that stained glass rendering of dogs playing poker would be welcome additions to my home.

That's where I think #ArtPrize is the best. It takes guys like me who would never consider buying anything from an artist, and it puts the notion of Buying Art into the realm of the possible. The artist who executes a Sure Fire Loser will give his or her card to someone like me. I'll never be able to buy a Rembrandt, but Rembrandt is dead and there are starving artists who'll benefit if their universe of customers expands to include fellows of questionable artistic pedigree such as myself. These artists should be numbered among the winners of ArtPrize.