With blackjack! And hookers!
Originally posted on the Benrik website: http://www.benrik.co.uk/...
"Rumbling along in my 1962 Dodge D-100, the last good truck Dodge ever made, I tossed my empty out the window and popped the top from another can of Schlitz. Littering the public highway? Of course I litter the public highway. Every chance I get. After all, it's not the beer cans that are ugly; it's the highway that is ugly."--Edward Abbey
Nate is READING: (still) Allen Eckert, 'That Dark and Bloody River'
WATCHING: The Shawshank Redemption
LISTENING TO: Druidcast (www.druidry.org)
http://authorofghostdance.wordpress.com/
If I may, I'd like to take a moment to talk to you about pottery.
If one measures the greatness of a potter by three criteria--his artistic vision, his ability to turn that vision into reality, and his technical skill--, it follows that the greatest potter who ever lived (in my opinion) was George Edgar Ohr. Ohr was the embodiment of the "crazy artist": He maintained a big handlebar mustache, spoke old-fashionedly, was an incourigable hawker (the sign on his shop in Biloxi, Mississippi, read: "Greatest Art Potter Alive: YOU Prove The Contrary!!"), even christened himself "the mad potter of Biloxi." And he was brazenly indifferent to the scorn heaped upon him by the artistic establishment of his day; much like John Keats and his desire to become "one of the English Poets," Ohr kept on making the kind of pottery he enjoyed making, fully confident that in time the name George Ohr would become synonymous with great art. And Ohr was just as prophetic as Keats in that sense: Nowadays, a single Ohr piece can sell for tens of thousands of dollars.
If the real judgement of an artist lies not in the man but in his work, George Edgar Ohr passes that test, and he does so with flying colors. As far as technical skill is concerned, he was and still is without peer: Much of his pottery looks more like something a metallurgist or glass-blower would cook up and all of it is as thin as porcelain, but he made it with equipment no more sophisticated than what you'd find in a high school art class. What's more, he achieved these amazing and innovative effects with clay that he dug by hand out of a river whose name is a Biloxi Indian word meaning "Broken Pot."
As great as it is, though, much of George Ohr's pottery reeks of European styles; this is not surprising, as he was an heir to the Romantics in much the same way Hunter Thompson was an heir to the Modernists. Because pottery is a craft as much as it is an art, all of the basic shapes are common to all peoples who have some tradition of pot-making, being--like the pyramid, the canoe, and the bow and arrow--developed independently and sometimes simultaneously by disparate peoples all over the world. What, then, can we call a distinctly American form of pottery, sort of like Walt Whitman's free verse answering Emerson's call for an American poetry?
The answer is, of course, the face jug. A face jug is (as you might have expected) a jug, or a bowl, or a flowerpot, or any other kind of utilitarian pot shape with alot of surface area, that has been decorated so that one side of it looks like a face (or, in some cases, so that the entire piece looks like a complete head). The common belief is that the face jug originates with the Scots-Irish; between old Celtic concepts like Jack-o'-the-Green and turnip (and, after the start of the Columbian Exchange, pumpkin) lamps, this is a valid theory, but it is my belief that the face jug is actually of African origin. The first people in America to make face jugs were not the Irish or the Scots-Irish, but black slaves from Africa: Too poor to afford gravestones, they would make face jugs to mark where loved ones were buried. The Scots-Irish yeomen--who, though free, were usually in a similar financial situation--later adopted the practice, hence why face jugs are usually associated with them. Based on these facts, I conclude that the face jug is actually a throwback to a common theme in most of the shamanistic religions indigenous to Africa: The veneration of ancestors by keeping their skulls as sacred relics. Anyone who has ever set foot in the city of New Orleans can tell you that the Africans did not simply abandon their native religions when they were taken out of Africa.
Dum de dum dum dum . . .
HOO-boy! I don't know what I was getting at, writing that. Just a little informative essay. I've gotten lots of ideas for them lately. If nothing else, it's a good way to add a bit of meat to these journal sketches. Maybe I'll start posting some of my poetry on here, too. I've been throwing a couple of poems up on Facebook now and then, and feedback has been pretty positive. Tomorrow (or whenever I write another blog entry) I'm going to write a sketch about iambic pentameter, or maybe narrative poetry. Or something. I dunno. What this is, after all, isn't really a blog after all but a writer's sketchbook.
So . . . what now? Since I'm done with the play (Little Shop of Horrors; I was the narrator and the radio interviewer) and I haven't found a job yet, I've decided to pick back up on doing Book tasks. Today's was Downsizing Day; I was supposed to "fire" one of my friends. Well, they're all too important to be let go right now. Not exactly life-changing, but I guess it's good to ease back into something you've been out of for a while.
Still reading 'That Dark and Bloody River.' It's darn slow going, since I'm trying to actually learn from it and not just enjoy the stories. I'm underlining names and dates and I plan on going back and writing an outline for each chapter. Slow going.
That mountain man story that prompted me to get 'That Dark and Bloody River' is going well, too. I'm up to about 3500 words right now, and I haven't even told Ol' Scratch's origin story yet (and yes, I mean the same Ol' Scratch from 'Ghost Dance'; another reminder to READ GHOST DANCE! READ IT! If you like folklore, mythology, fantasy, adventure, horror, teen romance, Wendigos, or any combination of those, I garuntee you'll love it or your money back)!
Speaking of 'Ghost Dance', you may have noticed that there's still no new update. Well, I'm still busy. But I think I've cured myself of my chronic half-assing, and I have NOT! given up on 'Ghost Dance'. It's still very dear to me, and I will finish this final draft and post it in due time. Expect to see more than half of it posted before I'm done with school.
School . . . My grades still aren't what they should be. But, you see, about a year ago I had a testicular cancer scare. It turned out to be nothing (thank God! And thank Him again that Hot Emma was there for me through the whole thing), but it did put my priorities in order somewhat; I find it very, very difficult to make a big deal about high school in a world where your balls can rot off for no good reason. What do I want out of life? Let's look at Arthur Rimbaud for a second. When he died he was riddled with cancer, plagued by all kinds of illnesses, half starved to death, and nutty as a squirrel pantry. That's what I want: To live deliberately, to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to feel life in every breath so much that when the Auld Tyrant comes to collect his due there won't be anything left of me for him to take back to the Other World, not even my sanity. What is death, anyway? A temporary setback at worst. The ancient Celts didn't believe in an After-Life in the Western sense; they believed that when you died you spent a few years in a gloomy, foggy Erebus of a place that was more or less a storage tank for souls, and then you got a fresh new body and got to keep right on keepin' on. It was this complete lack of a fear of death that kept the Romans out of Wales and Cornwall, that gave us fearless naked warriors like Wolf the Quarrelsome.
So about the title of the entry. Those of you who've been following my simi-coherent rantings and ravings will know that I seriously do not like my English teacher. Well, every year she publishes a rag of the best poetry turned out by her creative writing class (which, by the grace of God, I did not get in; I'm in honors art instead; honestly, what's a woman who has never written a decent story or poem in her life doing teaching a writing class?). I don't want anything to do with it, but I've been thinkin' that maybe I could publish my own poetry zine. It'd cost next to nothing to self-publish, which is good because poetry zines usually don't sell very well. I've even taken up pencil doodling again (a hobby I gave up when I started passing slow time in class by making up stories), so that maybe it'll have something in it besides just text. I got this book, 'Stolen Sharpie Revolution,' years and years ago--a charming little booklet put out by Microcosm Publishing, which publishes lots of useful books--all about how to write and publish zines, and I was never sure why I got it since I never had any interest in writing a zine 'till now. I guess it's just the Wyrd.
And tomorrow I plan on doing a little science expirament: I'll try pit-firing some unfired flower pots in a tin garbage can. They did it at school last year and good things came of it. If it works, I may never want for cash again. Wish me luck!
Nate out.