Monthly Archives: August 2009

Partially Congealed Pundit: Statement of Purpose

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I wrote this in 1998, I think, when I was unsuccessfully applying to MFA programs. I actually used this as my Statement of Purpose. It was published in the Chicago Review a couple of years later.

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Statement of Purpose

(adapted from The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron with Mark Bryan; Media Marketing: How to Get Your Name and Story in Print and on the Air by Peter G. Miller; and from the graduate admissions and promotional materials of writing programs at Brown University, Stanford University, the State University of New York at Buffalo, the University of Houston, the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Michigan, and Washington University in St. Louis)

To write is to bring representation and the suggestion of scientific method to the marketing of enlightened self-promotion. It is to be intimately connected to a high-tech ecosystem which overflows organically into a newer, better Graduate Record Examination. That is why, as a writer, I am a talented person. I reparent the artist-child who yearns to be a recognized authority; I pay too much in order to wear weird self-empowering clothing; I think of the universe as a vast electrical sea and of myself quoted in a national magazine. When I — a peripatetic Jungian — go to your cultural mecca to explore the beautiful irreverent shorthand of a profound, profane corporate brochure, the snowflake pattern of my soul will emerge, and, spiritually unblocking, I will become a controversial activist for ethnic and gender collages.

My life has always included strong internal directives. Well-packaged ideas, I call them. Although not always filled with sex and violence, they combine the comfortable nondenominational noncourse educational experiences of Poet Laureate Robert Hass with the sensuous television consciousness of solvent self-affirmer Sharon Olds, and accompany these attempts at conceptual and discursive emotional incest with literary modeling by Kafka, Proust, Woolf, Joyce, Pound, and Stevens. I tell this story not to drop names, but for reasons of ego and commerce. I want to work seriously with a unique community of writers, scholars, and critics in a program which, while current, is not overly specific.

As a kid my dad thought my art was an “unruly multisubjective activity.” That made me feel I was a multidimensional management consultant in pursuit of lush plants, plump pillows, experimental nonlinear interactive space: in other words, of one wonderfully nurturing self-loving something. As I have grown deeper, I have continued to rediscover that my creativity requires a sense of flow and stability different from other’s humility. I believe that the rituals of power and authority which traverse your writing package will fully open to me this sense of abundance — will allow me to perfect my craft and to immerse myself luxuriously in a rewarding publishing and teaching career. In return, I am certain I can contribute to your collective intellectual process by helping your institution maintain its competitive synchronicity.

Bad mood this morning

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Squeaky Fromme out just when more death threats against Obama are being reported. (Fromme here, threats here, found them on Memeorandum separated by a WSJ editorial.)

It’s not that I think interests are engineering a plot that involves Squeaky Fromme. It’s more like fate is setting up one of its dumb jokes. I think, “Yeah, that’s the shitty way things would work out. Obama gets killed, and right then there’s a Manson conspirator going free from prison.” 

The Boring Man and the Sea

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My cranky review of Jason’s Low Moon is online at Comixology. Here’s a selection:

As this indicates, Jason’s stories, like his pictures, are resolutely stripped of filigree. There’s no text boxes, and often not a lot of words. Open to any page and you’re likely to find some blank-faced animal staring meaningfully at something or other. The narratives unfold with a bleak, unexplicated inevitability. In “Emily Says Hello,” a hit man reports to his female employer on a series of successful murders, in return for which he receives an escalating series of sexual favors. Then things end badly. In “Proto Film Noir,” guy and gal meet, fuck, and kill gal’s husband…repeatedly, because he keeps coming back form the dead to have breakfast. Then things end badly. In “You Are Here,” a woman is abducted by aliens; her husband spends the rest of his life building a spaceship while her son grows up, gets married, gets divorced, and eventually joins his dad seeking her in the vastness of space. Then things end badly. And also poignantly.

Good line

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The Self-Indulgent Show deplores the presence of Katie Couric on the evening news: “I think if your name is Katie, you should have to deliver the news from a swing set.”

Another one, on Canadian content: “Rick Mercer curling with Margaret Atwood is pretty awesome.”
I never heard of these guys before. They turned up when I searched the Daily Show on YouTube.

Gluey Tart: Archie’s Double Dip

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Before anyone becomes horribly disturbed, this is not a yaoi title. I just gave in to a fit of sentimental whatsit. I’ve been doing that, lately. I also bought People magazine’s tribute to Farrah Fawcett. I loved “Charlie’s Angels” when I was little. I collected pictures of Farrah, and I recognized every one of the ’70s pictures in the magazine. Reading this magazine was a very emotional experience. Cathartic. I’m feeling a little verklempt, just thinking about it.

So, when I was at the comics rack at Borders the other day, desperately pawing through it to try and find something suitable for my young son, I paused dramatically at the Archie titles. Because I loved Archie comics when I was little, too. Even more than Farrah. So, overwhelmed with nostalgia, I picked up Archie’s Double Dip, evidently a Very Special Issue (the 200th, according to the excitable little yellow burst on the cover). I was curious about this, and alarmed. Because apparently, Archie Comics Online and Its Affiliated Companies have decided Archie needs a Dynamic New Look. The classic Dan Decarlo look, degraded as it has become, is apparently just too distinctive. Archie is being mainstreamed.

Woe!

It’s just the cover and the first story. It isn’t a no-going-back kind of thing; I imagine they’ll dump it as a failed experiment if people hate it. Or they’ll usher everything into the Borg collective, if people love it. Hard as that is to contemplate. Because, good grief, look at this. Here’s the second page.

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The artist is Norm Breyfogle, and I’m thinking he should have maybe turned down this gig. I’m not intimately familiar with his work, but he’s done a lot of Batman, and let us just say he seems much more comfortable with the pointy ears and the swishy capes. That’s Betty’s dad in the middle panel, apparently having an epileptic seizure. It’s as if drawing the drama of dad stealing some cake is so ordinary we’re maybe overcompensating a little. I love this ad, too.

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Betty: “Is this really goodbye forever?”
Archie: “Holy shit, is that a centipede on the ceiling? It’s enormous!”

And, here.

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What the hell happened to Archie’s chin? And Betty looks like a sex doll with the head put on askew. Is this what the kids are into, these days?

I realize it’s a desperate attempt to sell more comics, by any means necessary, and not a dark plot to indoctrinate girls into the ugly that is mainstream comics art. At least, I assume that’s the case. I guess if it is a dark plot, that’s actually kind of cool, although I sort of hope it doesn’t work.