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=> ..."estival".....ESTIVAL??????

Posted by beezelbub (Guest) - Sunday, October 23 2005, 19:35:39 (CEST)
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...this word pops up in the first paragraph of Rosie's book. I thought for sure they forgot the "F" at the front...turns out it's a word all its own...means having to do with summer...or summery things. I'll bet you didn't know that...I'll bet Rosie didn't know that till she ransacked her Roget's Thesaurus. In fact, that's exactly what the book reads like...like she checked a dictionary first...found the meaning to a word, then looked in her Thesaurus for all synonyms and antonyms...and, voila! A writer is born!

this is "write-by-numbers"...it isn't WRITING...it doesn't come from the heart but from a publisher of reference material...with some sad tales woven in and around.

I'm no more a trained sculptor than Rosie is a trained author. I left the art department at the University of California at Berkeley after one sculpture session the first day of school...I was accepted next at the University of Washington in Seattle, in their Fine Arts department on the basis of two sculptures I made without any kind of "training" at all...I hopped a freight trian up there from San Jose but after a meeting and tour of their facilities I decided not to attend...instead, a few years later...I went to New York and lied my way into a job at a foundry...and every day after work and every night and on weekends, for four years, I took the train to the Metropolitan Museum and copied, copied, copied...also bought books and copied, copied, copied.

There is nothing original in copying...but that's the way the techniques were taught to beginners in the old days...if you wanted to "learn" to sculpt...you studied with a master and you COPIED the best works you could find..and for me, the best and farthest back was Assyrian sculpture. THEY were my "masters". If you have something worthwhile to say you need a VOCABULARY..otherwise you grunt your way through life saying, "dude"..."hey man"..."you know"..."like"..."whatever". You talk like a grair...which means you haven't anything to say and don't NEED words because you have no ideas to express.

As a sculptor...one who considers Assyrian sculptors of 3000 years ago his mentors, you have an AWFUL lot of catching up and learning to do. If Picasso had been my mentor I could've start OUT putting eyeballs anywhere I wanted to...but that is a PERSONAL style,,,,unique and proper to Picasso...it is NOT and never could be the style of an entire EPOCH...unless people were merely copying and stopping there. Where do you go AFTER you've scrambled the human face...back to Greece???

I felt I needed to have fast hands...fluidity...my fingers had to dance over the clay...almost unguided...but you can't start out that way...you haven't put in the time and the PRACTISE...just as you can't play the Rach three without lots of finger exercises...but you can copy Ringo Starr easily enough...but where do you go from THERE?

There is a stumbling awkwardness to Rosie's style...the images seem contrived...the words dragged in by their heels and dumped there, without regard to their feelings or how they got there...they're just "there"...you see? When you read "estival", that alone is supposed to conjure up it's meaning...only since no one else ever heard of it...we all have to go look it up...which is fine...if her intention is to expand our vocabulary while she expands her own...but that isn't the ART of writing. Neither of us was formally taught anything...but the prep work we each assigned OURSELVES tells the story and shows in the final result.

I also did my own thing...but with a lot of practise BEFORE I dumped my Ashurbanipal on an unsuspecting public. Had Roise known and planned all along to submit her manuscript to Oxford University Press...or even Penguin Books...or Random House...she would have been looking over her own shoulder...she would have made SURE...a sure as she could, that this was not only the best damn work she could do at the time...but "good enough". same goes for Aprim.

By the same token, had I intended only to display my monument at conventions where Assyrians gather in desperation to see if they are alive for another year...I would have made the piece with an entirely different ethic and purpose.

I KNEW this sculpture was going to a tough city to break into...a city, like Chicago, that had no IDEA I was doing such a thing...San Francisco and especially Chicago are like the toughest publishing houses in he country...if you're sculpting for them...you know damn well you had better be on top of your game...and there's no way you're gonna do some last minute "reference" work...or patch something together your FAMILY think is really good..."basmaganookh"

Take Emil. Is there ANY doubt that the man can WRITE? He has a fluidity and ease with the language that only comes from writing a LOT! But that's just the technique...but on top of that...you can see ideas and FORMS of expression...a point of view...a VOICE that is unique to him...I always know I'm in the company of a master craftsman..and that's important for all the reliance on cheap "brilliance" that is supposed to come out of nowhere...but I also know I can expect gems...real sparkling insights or phrasing that will stop me in my tracks...one looks forward with eagerness to what he will come up with...whereas with Rosie's book I was dreading the next agonized line.

I'm sorry...really I am...but we have got to stop this...we are making a laughing stock of ourselves..and more than that, WE are condeming ourselves to irrelevance...WE are making ourselves keep away from the glitter and the bright lights and the crowds...where the action is.

We have the lowest standard of excellence in the world...in history. We do that...or are encouraged to do it, so that an Aprim or Jassim or Jatou can maintain an easy grip on the "top"...but it is the top of an ASH HEAP! If a true desire to excel were ever to enter Assyria...and there should be NO doubt that we can match anyone in the world....these people would be gone in a heartbeat...they would find themselves exactly where they belong and would never DARE be heard from again...not unless they got off their righteous and self-serving arses and EARNED something for a change. And THAT'S why people are frantic to have me be gone...me and anyone else who threatens to raise the standard,,,it isn't for love of "Assyria' that they do it...it is to keep THEIR place at the top of the mess they are willing to make of us.

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