Billy Graham Preaching At Earls Court in 1966
Looks like I missed him by a year. I lived at Earls Court in 1965, when my parents were in London. But that's not why I clipped this, nor am I consumed with preachers or their lack. This is about a writing thing. In his blog, my husband has made a few references to my saying that a writer shouldn't lecture his readers.
Yeah. Okay, I said that but only because I couldn't remember what I really said, and still can't. What I meant was that a writer shouldn't lord it over her readers. She shouldn't set herself up as a better-than version of normal humanity. The way I think of this is leaving some white space: giving the reader room to inject himself, herself, themselves into what's being said. A reader needs to stroll around the text, try it on for size, see if it fits and if it doesn't, the reader should feel like he can stay a while, maybe see if the text is ill-fitting but still intriguing. That's what I meant, and I still can't figure out a simple way to say it.
Enough of that.
I've been thinking about the Great Depression. My extended family was in Oklahoma then, and had been since well before statehood. We did not become fruit-pickers in California, nor were we sharecroppers, with our fields and houses buried in a tomb of dust. Instead, we seem to have gone on much as we had. One of my grandfathers was a lawyer, who mostly represented Native Americans, and the other was a wildcatter. The wildcatter grandfather thought the depression had a real bright side, which was cheap labor, and built his house in Tulsa then. My mother suspected she was served horse for dinner several times, but otherwise didn't feel terribly deprived.
Illustration for Main Street, by Grant Wood
1 of 9 drawings 1935-1937
Yeah. Okay, I said that but only because I couldn't remember what I really said, and still can't. What I meant was that a writer shouldn't lord it over her readers. She shouldn't set herself up as a better-than version of normal humanity. The way I think of this is leaving some white space: giving the reader room to inject himself, herself, themselves into what's being said. A reader needs to stroll around the text, try it on for size, see if it fits and if it doesn't, the reader should feel like he can stay a while, maybe see if the text is ill-fitting but still intriguing. That's what I meant, and I still can't figure out a simple way to say it.
Enough of that.
I've been thinking about the Great Depression. My extended family was in Oklahoma then, and had been since well before statehood. We did not become fruit-pickers in California, nor were we sharecroppers, with our fields and houses buried in a tomb of dust. Instead, we seem to have gone on much as we had. One of my grandfathers was a lawyer, who mostly represented Native Americans, and the other was a wildcatter. The wildcatter grandfather thought the depression had a real bright side, which was cheap labor, and built his house in Tulsa then. My mother suspected she was served horse for dinner several times, but otherwise didn't feel terribly deprived.
Illustration for Main Street, by Grant Wood
1 of 9 drawings 1935-1937
Meanwhile, in 1932, Grant Wood established the artist's colony, Stone City, Iowa, while teaching at the University of Iowa. It's still there, Stone City is and, when I was in school, so were a lot of people who knew Wood and studied with him. One was my faculty advisor, Byron Burford. "If you took a class with Grant Wood, you just about went crazy," Burford used to say. "He made you learn painting the way he thought it was taught in the Renaissance, so you had to grind pigments and all that stuff. But actually, he didn't know much about the technical side of painting. He did a bunch of screwy things like shellacking over the surface and sticking his paintings in a hot oven to dry."
But Wood, like a lot of artists had quit looking to Europe as any kind of art center, and, instead, began to develop a type of aggressively regional art. And, how nicely this brings us full-circle, back to the preachy-stuff. There hasn't been any giant upsurge in the value of depression era art. It's always been seen in the same light as soviet propaganda painting. And it is propaganda since it's also about delivering a big, fat social message that urges the viewer to do something!...generally a something like converging on governments, with pitchforks and torches. Didactic, is what we call art like that.
In my experience, viewers and readers are equal to artists and writers. Both groups gotta make up their own minds.
(Anyway, you can't tell nobody nothin' no how.)
But Wood, like a lot of artists had quit looking to Europe as any kind of art center, and, instead, began to develop a type of aggressively regional art. And, how nicely this brings us full-circle, back to the preachy-stuff. There hasn't been any giant upsurge in the value of depression era art. It's always been seen in the same light as soviet propaganda painting. And it is propaganda since it's also about delivering a big, fat social message that urges the viewer to do something!...generally a something like converging on governments, with pitchforks and torches. Didactic, is what we call art like that.
In my experience, viewers and readers are equal to artists and writers. Both groups gotta make up their own minds.
(Anyway, you can't tell nobody nothin' no how.)
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