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36 Stories versus 20 Stories

14 November 2021 by Rey Armenteros

Myths make exciting stories. But the Myth of Sisyphus is not one of these. Notwithstanding the useful message, Sisyphus is rather droll, and I guess that’s the point. It has a teaching value. Another myth that is just as boring is the idea that there are only a limited number of stories in the world, and that all the stories come from these few stories. Not just another tiresome idea that has become a cliche, it is menacing the way we think about stories and the value we place in stories. It feels fatalistic, as if the meanings we place on life have always been put on an assembly line. Going up the side of the mountain with this great, big story the size and shape of a boulder only so that it comes down as intended. Do we really believe stories have that type of predictability? If so, wouldn’t they have gone extinct thousands of years ago?

According to certain crowds, the “hero’s journey” by Joseph Campbell properly outlines every story since creation. If everyone believes that the hero’s journey is the only story worth any merit, then anything that falls outside of that model may get lambasted for not following form. This happens all the time when consumers of popular material (movies, TV shows, bestselling novels, and such) admit they can’t understand something and then relegate it as a work that is subpar. Or worse, they group all works that represent the real world as “slice-of-life.”

Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey brought out the notion that many older cultures followed the same model of telling a myth. His theories raise the idea that there are a number of steps the hero takes along his journey before finally making the right decision and saving his society.

I don’t doubt that there are a great many stories that follow this one model. Just look at Hollywood and how it can’t get past whatever sells, and if the ideas of Joseph Campbell are a hot item with the public at large, Hollywood will base every heroic movie they make on his model.

I ask such people that believe in the omnipresence of the Campbell model if they can fit Proust into that model. Where do you fit Chekhov? Does Hemingway so patly follow this formula for making stories?

I won’t deny it is an interesting idea. Back in the days when I was fascinated by such things, I learned from my first creative writing professor that such an idea even existed — that there were only a limited number of stories ever told in the world. In those ideas, it was fashionable to group conflict into one of three categories: man versus man, man versus nature, and man versus himself. There were others I discovered later like man versus society and man versus machine, but if you were of the disposition of simplifying everything into some core, then you would have to admit that the former sounds like a variation on man versus nature, and the latter of man versus man. And the one known as man versus fate might have been nothing more than a different way of looking at man versus himself. But this was about conflict, which was not the same as plot or “type of story.” 

In those creative writing class days, I learned that there was even a writer that had put a book together that catalogued every possible story ever created. He got it down to thirty-something stories.

My initial reaction was to reject this. To my youthful mind, it seemed just so uncreative to follow the same story over and over. But I was curious. I looked up this dusty book in our college library and actually found it! I looked through it, almost checked it out, but I knew I was not going to read it. It was too old, and the writing was thick with a style I couldn’t understand. I let it go.

Years later, I found myself thinking about such things again. I don’t remember what started me on this return to old ideas, but I looked up the thirty-something stories and found the man and his book. I didn’t have to read the book itself since someone had summarized the thirty-six different story plots of Georges Polti on a convenient website.

I don’t think an audience of today would sympathize with Polti’s catalogue of story archetypes. There was a focus on types of stories we just don’t see anymore, such as stories about “erroneous judgment” and “slayer of kin unrecognized.”  There were two different plots for self-sacrifice: “self-sacrifice for kin” and “self-sacrifice for an ideal,” and though the two are clearly different, you would think that a book looking for the fundamental components of a story would recognize that the two were the same general idea. There was “rivalry of kin” and “enmity of kin,” and Polti distinguished what made the two different. There was “crime pursued by vengeance” and “vengeance taken for kin upon kin,” and again I realize the the flavor of two such stories would be quite different from each other, but they seem to belong to the same type of story. There was “adultery” and “murderous adultery.”

Polti had taken many of his ideas from classical literature and some of the French literature of his day. To our ears, it sounds like ideas from another era. And even so, it is a product of its times. Polti was only cataloguing what made sense to him at the dawn of the 20th Century. If there is a great difference between enmity of kin and rivalry of kin, it is because the difference might have been more pronounced in his day.

A more recent writer came up with his story types. Ronald Tobias was writing books and producing documentaries, and he came up with his leaner list of possible stories. To me, his choices have the smell of Hollywood behind them. This is a more practical look with only twenty types. On the surface, it seems like he had a few redundant pairs. We get “metamorphosis” and “transformation,” but the first one is an actual magical metamorphosis whereas the second is when someone merely changes. We get “love” and “forbidden love,” and again, we know they are obviously different, but in the end, every love story has its challenges, and one possibility is when that love is forbidden. I suppose they are quite different because one of them demands a tragic ending.

Tobias gives us “ascension” and “descension,” which he agrees are two sides of the same coin. I can see the argument for having the extra story type because it changes the character of the story if the character is ascending into a better a life or going in the other direction. But if we are really boiling it down to the core elements, I would have stuck to the logic of giving just the elements and conflating the two.

I was thinking how Tobias’s more contemporary take on the different stories would surely sound out-of-date at some point in the future. This led me to reflect on how times change and how people create new ways to look at things. It could be that story theorists in the future would find the way we look at story all wrong. And like certain stories in Polti’s book seem to have fallen out of fashion, new stories might rise, coming from who knows where? This goes well with the young man that I was, believing that the possibilities in stories were virtually endless.

After reading about this and spending long hours contemplating the different possibilities, it wasn’t long before I started formulating my own story types. I came up with 26 different ones and explained them in an article I self-published long ago, and now that I am looking at them after all this time has passed, I see that some of them are redundant to me today. In the article, I prefaced it by saying that there might be only two possible stories: someone goes on a trip or a stranger comes to town (as it was described to me in some random website). But I then added that you can break it down further into one story, which is the one where there is a problem that needs to be fixed.

When you bring it down to just one story type (about the main character presented with a problem that needs taking care of), I ask what is the difference of that and attempting to define the word, story? You can look up the definition of story and then agree that it describes every story that you can think of, but does that really encapsulate all the different types of stories? It is nothing but a terse explanation.

I don’t fault Polti or Tobias for constructing their theories of story types.I think they are both commendable projects, and such work makes you consider parallels between stories. It also raises the idea of structure and is a great tool for instruction. If we recognize repetitions in their story models, it is because there must be overlap between these distinctions. And the overlap can invade certain stories, provoking new stories. The story type of sacrifice or loss could be an essential component in a love story. A revenge story could also be a quest.

On the surface, categorizations like this, if made well, always sound correct. They are put together by words, and words signify things. But words are often used to sway and to convince and to manipulate, and that enigmatic quality in any jumbled line of thought is what most makes them fascinating, as the words help picture impressions when telling a tale of loss and redemption clouded with mysteries that we hope to unravel on a journey through any story. Words are used to argue a point, yes, but they are best made for the things that make less rational sense, such as a story, because when we ask how many stories there have ever been, we fail to see that there have been as many types of stories as there have been stories told.

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Dream Interrupted

31 October 2021 by Rey Armenteros

Immediately after closing my eyes, five men were in a line up growling and yelling at the unseen authorities, who were volubly commanding them to stay still for the camera. The second from the left was brandishing a middle finger in a large hand, vehemently continuing his noises. Next instant, that man’s scowl was gone; hoods popped over their heads. The middle finger had also been shrouded, and loud noises woke me up.

Were those noises in my room? I picture cars falling onto our yard from a height of dozens of feet. Three such bangs.

I meant to take a look outside.

I concluded it was in my head.

Where could they have taken the hooded men.

I was going back to sleep, but I was really not, because the thought of returning to the hooded men kept me from returning…

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Geisha Machinations

17 October 2021 by Rey Armenteros

“Come on, you got to help me with this thing,” Max repeated. I said not interested.

“I don’t have anybody else to do the art for me,” he insisted. I said tough.

“Why don’t you think about it?” he offered. “It might be good for you.” I said screw you.

Yeah, that’s right! Max had it coming. It was always a problem with him! I had done work for Max in the distant past, and I’d be stupid to do anything for him again. Good luck, and remember to close the door on your way out.

Yes, he was a friend, sure. But for matters of work like this, this was the only course I could take. I don’t do work-for-hire. I have learned my lesson. My decision wasn’t going to ruin him. He’d learn to live with it.

I allowed my imagination to go over the possibilities of his having to find the artwork for the geishas he wanted from some other source. He’d have to go pay somebody up front, first of all. He could probably only afford some second-rate artist, or most likely somebody straight out of art school. It made me chuckle.

And from there, I started coming up with a story behind these geishas he wanted that were now kind of ingratiating their way into my unconscious and making themselves conscious for me. If I were painting geishas, what would they look like? You know, geishas, for the purposes of art, did not have to be Japanese. You could almost be making a statement about that iconic figure, the geisha. Think about if you made images that came from all walks of life. And if you did not exercise the ideals usually associated with them, imagine the artistic merit behind such unexpected incongruities as a black geisha, for instance! What about a male geisha? What if I based geisha portraits on people I used to know, trying to bring up faces from my memory? That would be an interesting game.

I don’t know if it is my propensity to make up stories that had me coming up with reasons why an artist like me would even paint geishas in the first place.

Up until then, I have had nothing but bad experiences with work-for-hire, including every instance with Max. But I was turning and turning what could happen if I did help him. It was just conjecture.

Within a week, I was calling him, telling him I was seriously thinking about doing it. He just wanted these geishas, I know. He wanted geishas for this card game version he was trying to license from a smaller game publisher. The publisher sold a popular card game, but they rented licenses to people that wanted to make different versions of their card game and sell them on their own. Max wanted a geisha version of their game, and he had been in contact with their top guy about it. The top guy wanted to see images. Since Max was not paying me up front, I was going to take liberties with it. I knew he wouldn’t mind.

But I had already made up my story around it. I told him he had to do me an important favor. “Sure,” he said, “anything.” (What else would he say! He was giddy as a schoolboy.) My stipulation in our work-for-hire agreement was that he could not tell people that he was hiring me but that he was giving me a commission. He asked what the hell the difference was? To his ear, it was the same thing. Okay, true. Yes, of course. One was a fancier version of the other. But the way I have always felt about it, commercial artists were hired, fine artists took commissions. He was waiting for more.

Okay. And I went into this elaborate story about how (supposedly) he had seen my own paintings on geishas and how he was so taken in by them, that he wanted to use these paintings that were already finished for the card game he was trying to license from the publisher. If anyone asks how he saw them because we live in other sides of the country, he could say that I had wanted his opinion on these geishas and had sent him images of them. You fell in love, I insisted, and needed them in your little card game.

He didn’t understand why I needed this technical difference.

I needed this, I said, because I didn’t want some schmuck coming along after looking at my work and thinking they could hire me for some work or other. These are not illustrations, I finally came out and said. This was art. You were hiring fine art and using it as illustrations.

“Okay, okay. Whatever.” Max wasn’t convinced it would work my way, but if that was all I wanted…

When we hung up, I started going over the details of my story. If Max did not hire me, and I had done these geishas as my fine art work, as I had made it up in my story, why in the world would I be painting geishas? To make geishas out of everybody? Ok, sure, but geishas were that exotic symbol for Japanese culture. It had been romanticized to death. What would a serious artist be doing with geishas in the first place? I would have to need a pretty good story for this one.

My story had to be airtight because I didn’t want people seeing through my art, as if pinpointing some cheesy whim I had for these geishas. The geishas were just my way of making portraits of anybody. I wanted to have freedom with the faces. I didn’t think I was painting anybody ugly, although my tastes and the tastes of the common person are not in any way related. Essentially, all of this back and forth led me to the original concept of making geishas out of anybody and materializing them from people from my past.

I know my concept was thin. I still didn’t have a very good reason as to why I was painting these geishas, but at least I was going about it a little differently, and this was always better than perpetuating the stereotypes. I went to work on them.

When I showed him the first batch, he said that they were more like art than the type of illustrations you find on playing cards. He started skirting the issue, but basically he wanted more sexy but without getting sexual. When we hung up, I detected that he was being nice. What he really wanted to say was that he couldn’t use them, and I could infer logically from that observation that he was probably now having misgivings about asking me to do this.

If he didn’t want to pay me in the end because the job was not done to certain standards, that was his problem. It was not going to ruin our friendship. Plus, I could sell geishas to anybody, as actual paintings, as real art — I had no doubt about it.

Do you see the problem? It’s right in front of me as I am writing this down, but it wasn’t clear to me when I was in the middle of it, coming up with these plans in my head about what was supposed to be real life circumstances.

I did another batch, and I was getting closer. I sent them to him. He kept saying they were too good for a card game. This is art, he kept saying, not the graphic type of work he needed. I was aware of what he was talking about. Mere illustrations were going to knock it out of the park. High art was going to do nothing but scratch heads. I still believed I could get both: recognition as an artist with an idiosyncratic outlook on geishas and a good commission from the selling of these cards.

I guess I was too much of an artist for my own good!. We joked about this, but before hanging up, my laughter had already dried up. I had no idea where I was going to take this scheme for making geishas. Really, I was out of ideas. After spending too much time thinking about it, I called Max right back and asked him if he had examples of what he had in mind, to send me some goddamn pictures already!

Right away, he sent me some empty-headed online images of women in white skin and bouffants wearing dresses that vaguely looked like bathrobes converted into negligees. This was the subtle sexuality he was shooting for? “Not too much T&A,” he had told me, “or the geeks would feel uncomfortable playing this card game.”

I found it appropriately ironic that the hypothetical geeks he was talking about probably needed more sexuality in their lives, but as long as it were not in their board games.

Okay, that meant the nipple could not press against the garment, but the breasts themselves had to be ample enough to hold their own in a men’s magazine. I was starting to admit that there were now too many balls to juggle. For an enterprise into fine art that was trying to be sincere, my artistic intentions were cheating their way toward the truth. I knew my story about making these geishas as an artistic endeavor was starting to fall apart. My art was more idiosyncratic than I even knew. I was having mixed feelings about this, happy that I was different but wondering what that was going to cost me in the end of all this subterfuge with the world at large — but really, with myself!

I went back to the drawing board and cooked up seven more geishas. It took me quite a bit of meandering, but three weeks later, I was sending him one after the other, geishas simmering in the juices of saturated colors with breasts that could push through the shapeless vestments of a fantasy kimono.

He liked these, even after remarking once again that they were like art in a gallery, too beautiful to look at (which read like volumes about their actual value in this venture). He contacted me a few days later telling me that he showed a couple of people, and somebody was asking about my work. He didn’t know what to tell him, so he was asking me about that story I had been fishing up about this being art that Max had seen in my studio, or something — he couldn’t remember. He thought I should just come out with it — the truth. And if I did, you never know; maybe they’ll buy something from me.

I had to sit and think about this one more time. Because I had also forgotten the intricate plot that went with this. I took every element of my story and gave it a structure like something from a psychological novel, and then I laid it out for Max in the simplest terms, hoping that simplicity was going to get me out of the quagmire. When I got back to him, I gave him my condensed story in under five minutes. I asked him if he got all that, and Max said, “Oh I’m taking notes.” Ah, humor. I had him recite it. In the end, he told me he’d try, and he said it with a little tune at the end of it that meant, “Let’s see?”

We stopped talking for a while. Max didn’t need anything from me anymore now that he had submitted my most recent geishas to that game publisher, and I had nothing more to say.

Months after that, it occurred to me that I had never heard of what the publishing company thought about Max’s cards and my art. I wanted to ask him when the checks were going to start coming in already. I got Max on the line. He didn’t give me a straight answer. He said he too was still waiting. I told him to give them a nudge, that we were growing old already! A couple of weeks later, we were talking about it, and I asked him if he got ahold of them. He said they weren’t returning his messages. I asked him how long it took him to design that little geisha version of their game for those game publishing ingrates? Because, as I laid it out, his hiring me had cost me well over a hundred hours of work.

I started to get the idea that we were never going to hear from that publisher. All this time, I thought I was going to see actual money at the end of this, at least from the asshole publishers, but doubt was written all over this little endeavor of ours. I had forgotten half the story behind my geishas and am now trying to sell these strange little gems online without any backstory worth a sawbuck.

And waiting for the orders to come in, now that I had forgotten about the concept and being a genuine artist and laying all that to rest already. In the meantime, I was coming up with an elaborate rebuttal for the next time Max asked me for anything. I was baking this story with lots of vinegar, because when I gave him a taste of it, it was going to make him cry. I can already hear his reaction, like a whistle sharp enough to break glass.

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Choices (first published in BlazeVOX)

10 October 2021 by Rey Armenteros

 

DIRECTIONS: Read this to powerful music.

In all that time, I would have this thought.
You use words. Others have thoughts too.
But it never fails. It happens.
Disappointment. Something to overcome.
And the only way that can be done is with a tool.
A hammer. And you understand something larger.
Open chamber. Bits of skull with matted hair.
The housings of thought. But not your thoughts.
And once you give in to this curiosity, stop.
Regret sets in. And something larger…

(OR: Read this to whatever you like.)

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26 September 2021 by Rey Armenteros

A bull horn goes off in the distance. It is actually a train. It was not something processed through your senses but something absorbed into your understanding. Reflecting on that train sound in this quiet, gray morning, I look at the birds landing on my back lawn, and it is not just another thing taken through your eyes. It is completed in your odd mind, and it is made to create feelings in a most particular way.

There are new wrinkles forming from pink folds of anger searing into my forehead. I look at these in the mirror, forget about them, and get ready for work.

When I was walking past the college E7 Technology Building, I pondered the wooden and metal structures now rotting along one side of the building. They have been standing there for years. Were they tech projects, you know, like popsicle stick bridges gone gigantic, or parts of the building they changed their mind about, or maquettes that no longer have a use?

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When Prose Poetry Ended

19 September 2021 by Rey Armenteros

I am writing about sin and redemption. There are things I have done which I can almost regret, and there are wishes I had lost that taste almost as good when I bring them back in some painful form. There is a path that describes an imperfect arc across the limits of my panorama, over horizon and past stacks of houses, and its curve is wild with change as it peaks at its middle before straightening up at the farthest end, where it touches something way beyond my vision. When the excitement of the trail’s zenith is behind us, what you were reaching for terminates this glorious arc.

The term prose poetry is unnecessary. It is an explanation the poems that fall under this heading do not need. In the hands of the enemy, it becomes a hopeless excuse that they prod when scrutinizing it. A poem is a poem, and every single poem that has used the word prose in its heading is a poem that needed no such distinction. Such terms are lines in the sand. At first, it was essential to bring up this prose aspect to the poetry under the growing excitement of a burgeoning form, but it soon became its own Achilles heel. You read numerous introductions wherein the writers defend the form with outrageous anecdotes of other poets lambasting prose poetry, and you can hardly believe it, but there it is.

Or there it was. It seems to be a chapter in the recent past, because you hardly hear of its practitioners anymore. All the books on prose poetry I have gotten my hands on are from twenty years ago or more, when the form was really spinning and making waves in the process.

It has gone the way of so many others. Unknowingly, I was practicing prose poetry of some sort when it was still around, just before its final years. And then it was somehow absorbed into the greater heading, and nobody talks about it anymore. Perhaps, it is so accepted now, that a poem could have anything, from traces of prose to complete pieces all in prose, and no one would raise a single complaint.

It is now a chapter, and that is the way it should be. Though I reluctantly call my poetic aspirations prose poetry, I deny it in public, on pure principle, and yet the guiding light I take from my forebears were the practitioners that camped at that fire.

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Collections of Poetry and What is Lost

12 September 2021 by Rey Armenteros

Different ways of doing things, and each way gives a certain presentation. That was why I craved the original books. For Auden, it was the four books I had read from a college library. Those were the ones I wanted. But when I looked them up, the prices were too high for the battered conditions the old books had. They were four earlier books, and I wanted to relive them. Things like The Shield of Achilles and Nones. And The Double Man. I forgot the fourth.  I looked around a little more. I settled on one of two other options. I could either get the Collected Poems of Auden or the Selected Poems of Auden. To the untrained ear, they sound the same. And just a couple of years before, both terms would have meant the same thing to me. I now knew that “collected” meant every available poem by Auden. That collection was being offered in several volumes. So my four books would be there, yes, but so would every book by Auden I was not yet ready for. I looked into the other option, which was just one volume of what one editor deemed Auden’s best work. “Selected” implied the best (even though it was reluctant to say it) — according to whomever’s standard. I knew this would fall way short of the mark, but I settled for it because it did represent parts of these four books, along with some other stuff.

Neither option works. I hope one day poetry publishers understand that. The individual volumes of poetry are discrete works that need to be made into their discrete volumes. Books fall out of print. Some books come back into print. But for poetry, this rarely happens. As soon as a poet is dead or along in years, they put together these massive volumes that collect everything.

For Strand, it was just one book, and I thought at the time it was the best option. Originally, I was interested in one poetry book of his that was all in prose. But his entire career came along with this new edition. When I started reading it, it occurred to me — the notion that the life’s work of a poet was all held in this one not very large book. Like a brick that gets one shot to get thrown through a window. That would make waves. Its mark.

I went through Strand’s whole career like that, in that one brick, and it made me wonder if I were doing it wrong. You needed to breathe between the books. It was actually the kind of book you left close-by, handy, so that you can read a little everyday. Next time, that’s how I’ll do it.

I gather the economics is not there to publish one poet’s entire career of books as originally published. It saves to put it all in one book. And that way, the lovers of this work would have all the work available, and what is more important, it would still be in print.

But a collection lumps everything together. It does not usually honor the original typesetting of the individual books, and this could force textual inconveniences. The worst part about a collection is that the books of poetry that once existed on its own without being in close proximity with other works are no longer separate units to be encountered in that way. They share a spine and a reading momentum. They have stopped roaming the world on adventures and are now a part of a home where the family dynamics do not always equate harmony.

And the pages have no care for the distribution of the poems. Everything is done for the sake of space because so much is squeezed into one book. If the original books started every poem at the top of the page, a collection will not follow that because it follows a different set of ethical grounds.

I swore I’d never buy another collection of poetry works again. For Ashbery, I bought the one poetry book I had read about. I couldn’t find a decent copy of Three Poems, but even a battered copy would be better than a collection. I bought the battered copy. Read it and read it. My fingers had to handle it more gingerly than I normally hold books, because the pages were about to start slipping out of the binding. I needed to read the book more, but I didn’t enjoy the physical conditions. I decided to get the first volume of a two-volume set of his collected works. I was reluctant. But there was no other option. Taking a look at it when I obtained it, paging through it, I felt more disappointed than with the Strand collected works. It was generic-looking. The pages were almost onion skin. It was a thousand pages. Reading it, I found, was like reading the Bible. But I’ve been reading it. And reading it is the best part. I kept reading it, and the physical limitations of the book did not add to the experience, but they slipped into the background. The generic-looking tome was what I expected everyday at the same time of the day when I pulled it for more lines of his work.

I am not a fan of the format, but this is all I have. I’m thankful it is here. Reading it and reading it still. The collected format is running a through line across every work of his, and this is inevitable in any reading of such a book. The thin paper and sober demeanor of its covers are now subsumed into my experience. After buying this first volume, I swore I would not buy another collection. Well, when I’m ready, I’m going to need to buy the second volume. And that will be the last one.

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Making Paper out of Paint

05 September 2021 by Rey Armenteros

The “paper” is that middle strip with the figures

 

I wanted to get into a paper show. I hadn’t worked on paper in a few years. I called the exhibition space and asked how flexible their definition of paper was. They said, well, what kind of work do you do? I told them I draw and paint on paper I make at home, and then stick that onto a plastic panel. They said that satisfies the definition for works on paper.

I was actually stretching the truth. The “paper” I work on is actually acrylic skin. I make this paper with acrylic grounds and mediums, like modeling paste, gesso, and fluid medium. I apply layers of these substances on silicone sheets. When I’m done with a paint skin, I easily peel it off and adhere it to my painted panel. The work I was going to submit to this show titled, Works on Paper, had no real paper in it. And yet, I wasn’t worried. It wasn’t like they were going to inspect it and then disqualify me.

Ever since this show, I have been looking at my process as a paper-making process. It makes sense. The concept alone propels me into making the many layers of paint to properly make my paper.

It takes over a week to make a small batch of this synthetic paper. I don’t just make these things on silicone sheets; I make them on polyethylene kitchen cutting boards with various textures, and this makes my painting surfaces have the textures of woven papers and laid papers, giving my make-believe paper a world of variability.

The only problem with it is that it is too demanding. It is the same old work, with little variation, year after year. The process of placing spread after spread of paste or gesso is the type of work I don’t find pleasant. It requires no thought but it does require concentration. And this is a bad combination for you if you need some manner of mental interaction in which to sink your teeth into.

When I am painting, I am completely engaged, working with a concept and executing the steps to get me satisfactory results, making on the spot decisions and changing plans, making the whole drawing and painting process into an elaborate game. The comparison with making plastic paper is accurate. This is the one aspect of my art process that reminds me of the hopelessness brought to life in Albert Camus’ work.

In his novel, The Plague, Camus delivered the same inexorable doom chapter after chapter— you knew exactly where you were going three hundred pages later, and in making skins, you know where you are heading a week and a half later, after hours of work and concentration. Camus’s novel is striking, but I still wonder to this day to what degree I like this one work. It is thoroughly depressing, it puts your life into perspective, it puts on display the most extreme bodily function: that of survival against the inevitable. The characters have nothing to engage with because they are stuck in this city wherein the plague is getting worse, and they can do nothing about the quarantine or their condition. All they can do is wait.

In Japan, I met an old man — he wasn’t exactly an old man; he looked older than he was because of the infirmities that he had to suffer. He had complete white hair. His voice was feeble, and his demeanor whispered the burdens of a convalescing gentleman. But his face was still smooth. We were teaching at this worn out middle school, where the students were in control and the teachers were the last vestige of order and reason against the coming apocalypse.

I was a sort of teacher’s assistant whose only real use in the program was that I was the only one who could speak English in a native accent for the students to try to emulate. The convalescing gentleman was no longer a regular teacher, teaching only some of the time, only when his condition allowed it. He was very surprised by the state of the school.

He would turn suddenly to watch two eighth-graders fighting in the main office, knocking over chairs and slamming into faculty desks, and he’d comment about how bad these students were getting. None of the regular teachers were breaking up the fight — no, a few were actually getting out of the way. That was what it was like in that school, where the teachers were afraid of the students. It took two tall, male teachers a full minute to decide to break up the fight because it was getting serious. They got up and did just that, and my colleague was appalled, and I would have been too if I hadn’t already known the school for what it was. It was that kind of school, the kind I was intimately familiar with growing up in the States, but not the type you would ever associate with Japan.

Student behavior and the teacher reactions to the students were predictable. There was nothing shocking about it once you understood the rules. After a while, we both accepted it.

We would talk about things. We both had ideas we absorbed from books. This recovering teacher was a reader like I was. He confessed that no other book had ever affected him as did The Stranger by Camus. He told me it made him think about things as a young man, and he was never able to reconcile the ideas Camus was presenting with the course of his life. Camus laid out a reality that he did not want to accept but that he could not ignore.

When I read that book a few years later, I thought of my Japanese colleague. It was a story with a simple premise. The notion that someone would gun a stranger down for no other reason than a fickle momentary response was too surreal to take seriously. The inevitability at every stage thereafter was as dependable as water eventually boiling under heat. No surprise ending.

It left me wanting more. I never read it again, but I would recall moments at the beach before the shooting and moments in the jail, and the plain tone that depicted these unlikely and yet unavoidable circumstances digging into a finality and a simplicity that was total.

The rolling of a stone. This is the making of fake paper in an art career. Two plus two equals four. If you say that enough times, you will find just how fascinating this equation actually is. But once your kids understand that there is a connection between this and two times two, and then two to the second power, their minds will begin to find patterns. Patterns can be interesting. They can lead to concepts. Patterns and concepts and many other observations and ideas creep up when I work on images, but they never do when I am making my plastic paper.

In Camus’s version of Sisyphus, Sisyphus rolls the stone up the side of the mountain only to have it roll back down to the bottom. He does this over and over, for eternity. The rolling of the stone exudes the meaninglessness of our actions. It makes me think about what it is I do, and I don’t like to think about that stone.

And this is where my hell is going to be located, with making paper for no good reason. I am going back to an episode of a TV program titled Night Gallery. It was Rod Serling’s short-lived resurgence of Twilight Zone ideas. A hippie ends up in hell, and he’s in a waiting room asking when he was going to be taken in already. The other people waiting alongside him are all manner of annoying people talking to him about every nonsense. Finally, he can’t take it anymore, and he goes to the receptionist window once more and demands to be taken into hell already, and they inform him that the waiting room is his own personal hell, since this was the sort of situation he had always hated when he was alive. Of course, he screams as the other waiting room people harass him, and I can feel his pain because my hell was the one of over and over rolling a meaningless stone, making a dozen sheets of blank, plastic paper, concentrating on this in order to get to the real endeavor, waiting for the day when…

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Possibilities

22 August 2021 by Rey Armenteros

I make poems as if I were following the rules of a game.

But the sounds of words play no part in it. I almost never consider the audial nature of language — not when making thoughtful decisions. Things like puns that make an appearance through the parallel surfaces of words share the most random connections. I feel they are the least likely to level reflections of any depth. The same goes with rhyming. A poetry handbook might, for instance, point at the way wall and fall rhyme in one stanza, intimating that they are placed in such positions in a poem in order to underscore their connection, because there is meaning to be had when you fall off a wall.

But then, that is an English phenomenon, which immediately implies that the verbal artists from another language might not connect those two ideas in the same way because they would not rhyme in the same way in their own language. So falling off a wall seems to have a peculiarly English significance.

No, my poems would have nothing to do with such incidental coincidences. Instead of following the beats of a language, they follow the rhythm of situations. Yes, this is like prose. But such poetry would not simply be formed by paragraphs. I play with the rules of sentences and come up with new things. I use the following tenets to make my plain sentences into poems:

  • A poem should be presented before you in its entirety; so, it should be no longer than a page, or at least no more than two facing pages.
  • If prose is composed of paragraphs and sentences, and poems of stanzas and lines, my poems would have one foot in each camp. It would be stanzas that are made up of sentences.
  • In such a basic structure as three stanzas, you could still make other configurations. You can have multiple paragraphs inside a stanza by having all paragraphs that follow the first one inside a stanza indented. In this way, you can have three parts to a one-page poem formed by stanzas that each hold more than one paragraph.
  • There are other possibilities. In this type of system, you could write a poem that is only constructed of one-sentence stanzas, underscoring the line by having it more visible.
  • Another one is that of writing one solid stanza as a poem. A slight deviation from this would be making the stanza have multiple indented paragraphs, which would adhere to straight-forward prose — and hence, look nothing like a poem.
  • Of course, you could make three or four or five stanzas without interior indentations and leave it at that.
  • Or each stanza could be made up of two sentences. Each sentence could be a separate paragraph. If the first paragraph is not indented, and the second one is, the prose poem made up of such “couplets” would naturally look like a poem (but only at first glance), even if it follows all the rules of mundane grammar.
  • Rhythm could be established by number of sentences per stanza, as well as by types of sentence structures, as well as by depicted situation, as well as by the occasional repetition.
  • If it is one poem per page or two facing pages, the pages in the poetry book might look monotonous. One way around this is having some of the poems have no title. Some could have a number or symbol to introduce it. Poems could also have bold subtitles above each stanza. Coupled poems could appear on the same page. Unrelated tiny poems could do the same thing. Some poems could start halfway down the page, which would diametrically mirror the shorter poems that finish halfway up the page.
  • In addition to these basic rules, I invite a few auxiliary possibilities. Sentences can be numbered, for instance. And in the interests of lists, two or three columns in one page comprised of two- or three-word sentences can be allowed now and again, when I’m in the mood.

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Artist Unknown and Iger

15 August 2021 by Rey Armenteros

It was either “artist unknown” or “Iger Shop,” which essentially means the same shit. Horror comics from the 1950s never gave credit to the creators, unless you spot a rare signature by the artist somewhere on the first page. But since those days, comic book archivists and historians have managed to identify creators for some of the work. It follows that we know much of the work of Bob Powell because of documents and witness accounts, but also because his drawing style was so evocative. His work got so popular, that copycats started drawing those muscular faces with the same panache that was such an imprint of Powell’s work. In a manner of thinking, some of these “fakes” were so good, who knows if all of Powell’s alleged work were his or not?

But Powell was an exception. The industry didn’t have many of these. The crap was churned out so that it met with the demand. Comic books were big money taken from little kids. Not everyone that worked them was a first-rate artist. We horror comic aficionados revere Bob Powell, Lee Elias, and Jack Cole today, but they were virtual nobodies in their day. They would hide the fact they worked in comic books. If asked, they would claim they were commercial artists.

Because of our new interest, publishers are collecting these old works in nicely-made books for us to enjoy. Which takes me back to this one book that had so many unknown artists, I was like, “What the hell!” At the start of every story, I would level my eyes to the bottom of the page to see who did it, and it would say “Artist unknown.” About half the stories were “artist unknown.” And many of the others said “Iger Shop.” And they practically meant the same thing — but not quite.

If it declared the artist as unknown, it meant they couldn’t even properly attribute it to anyone. But Iger Shop was a mismatch. It pointed to no style because the system behind Iger Shop took away any inkling of originality.

The Iger Shop was a business run like a sweat shop. It had comic book artists lined up in rows of drawing boards producing the content for comic book publishers, doing it assembly line fashion. If you were an artist working for Iger, you were hired to draw the one thing you were good at: just close up faces of beautiful women, or spooky backgrounds on countrysides, or fast cars, or figures fighting each other, or monsters. From the directions of an editor/scripter, they would get the right artist for the panel needed. Each page was a Frankenstein monster that came from pieces of different artists patched together to make this grotesque thing. Maybe the pages were laid out by one artist designated to lay out pages before it was given to each respective artist to fulfill his duty.

But if you were good at drawing a mangled head or a living corpse, you were used in the specific panels that needed them, even if you were good at other things. This hodgepodge of art chores was put together in the end with perhaps a single inker who gave it a varnish of consistency. It might not hold it all together, but it was all that a system like this could ever hope for.

Iger Shop, believe it or not, has retained a few fans. I have read about those Iger Shop fans holding up this horror comic or that story as paragons of craft and terror. I have read some of these stories, and I recoiled at first reaction. Because before I knew it was an Iger piece of patchwork, intuition was telling me there was something wrong with the art. After digesting these better stories, I started seeing an argument in the ones that the defenders of Iger held up to the light. Actually, I am going to agree with them. But they are the exceptions. The rule for this type of work is that it is not just the trash everybody believed it to be in those days, it was the type that lined the trash bin at the very bottom to collect the ooze that spilled from everything that was thrown in it. Iger was getting his revenues, and that was all that could have mattered to someone who supported such a system. It’s filler material, something to sell to comic book publishing companies that need pages with which to pad their flimsy magazines.

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