The Art Monk - The Blog of Sandro Sebastian

The second week of the Otis creative writing MFA experiment. Our second week book, "Blue Nights" by Joan Didion, gives the account of the author's life in dealing with the grief over the loss of her adopted daughter, Quintana.      Already, this book is not unlike the Karen Green book of the previous week, with its gloomy cloud over head at a deceased loved one, with anecdotes of seemingly unrelated events, but with the dramatic backbone of the story tying them together.      The experience was interesting, and well written. I had heard of Joan Didion before, but never read any of her work. Her command of language and sense of time and place, and all that technical stuff was "appropriately appropriate" in its "appropriate" little way, as I often times make fun of with many artists of any medium, but she does give an interesting charisma to it and world perspective that I found myself able to empathize with more than initially expected I would. ...

     So with my creative writing MFA stint at Otis college of art and Design fully under way, (yes they do have a creative writing department. Go figure...) I've enrolled in one of the discussion based classes with the traditional list of university professor selected works for the semester's reading. This is always a useful exercise, as it forces one to branch out into other forms of literature and readings that one may have been previously unaware of.      The first book on the list, "Bough Down" by Karen Green, was a title I'd never heard of before at all, nor the author.      Apparently, she was the wife of the acclaimed author David Foster Wallace, author of the famous book "Infinite Jest." Which I'd never read, but have heard of. He unfortunately committed suicide about a decade ago, and she discovered his body hung in their backyard.      So this book is told from her perspective, as she deals w...

     Poking about at my preferred little indie DVD rental store, I fell upon this title in the documentaries, or old timey TV movies in the, shall we say "very obscure" section of the store. And it's got the name Picasso on it, so what the heck, I blew the dust off of it and rented it.      Funny thing about the past, is that one's notion of it is constructed by images and stories that have lasted through the ages, and stayed fresh, not fallen out of fashion, or become hokey-looking. The most popular movies of the late '60s, that are still cool in a "retro" sort of way, that make it look still fresh, exciting, sexy and dashing are the more likely to come to my attention. The titles that the film industry still finds worth promoting, and still turn a profit when offered to a younger generation.      Then there are the more dated titles, that fall into obscurity, or perhaps had a brief turn as some passing fad in the days of...

  So, as I was perusing the library looking for books of art from indigenous cultures to look at, this title caught my eye. A relatively new one, about a pair of men back in the '60s and '70s with an interesting story between them.    Two men who decided to leave their western upbringings to go live in the wilderness of Borneo, (that's Indonesia) among a tribe of people known as the Penan people. A group of nomadic folks that no one knew about until the early 20th century.      The two men whose lives are chronicled in this book are Michael Palmieri, an American who worked as an art dealer, plundering from foreign cultures, and Bruno Manser, a Swiss man with a very hippie upbringing in the postwar economic boom of that part of Europe at the time, who actually lived as a shepherd in the alps, but decided to "go native" as it were and venture out to Borneo to live with the indigenous peoples. The accounts of the latter's journey there, which appear to be ga...

     So technically I didn't "read" this book, but I was looking for an audio book to listen to nightly, in that last half-hour or so before bed, when the day's work is done, and mental energy is spent, but you're still not drowsy enough to doze off, and got tired of surfing the internet, filling my head with rubbish, and don't feel like laying in bed having to hold a book steady over yourself, wanting to be able to just curl up and listen, so I tried this.       Jack London is one of those writers that I love for his choice of simple subject matter. He just seems to like talking about people and places that he finds interesting. There's not a whole lot of technicality to his plots, from "Call of the Wild" to "White Fang", or any of the numerous short stories you might read.      This one was about a high class, pish-posh intellectual man who is the victim of a shipwreck and is stranded at sea until a group of rough a...