impromptu gymnastics strengthens muscularity

flag waving / anon

A.A. Milne, Autobiography. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1939, pp. 52-53—

The only occasion on which I spoke in the Debating Society was at what was called an “Impromptu Debate.” The names of the members were put into one hat, the subjects for speech into another. In an agony of nervousness I waited for my name to be called. It came at last, “Milne Three.” Milne III tottered up and drew his fate; not that it mattered, for one subject was as fatal to him as another. He tottered back to his desk and opened the paper. The subject on which he had to speak was “Gymnastics.”

I stood there dumbly. I could think of nothing. The boy next to me, misapprehending the meaning of the word “impromptu,” whispered to me: “Gymnastics strengthens the muscles.” I swallowed and said, “Gymnasthicth thtrengthenth the muthelth.” Then I sat down. This is the shortest speech I have ever made, and possibly, for that reason, the best.

• See also this great story about the “shotgun seminars” at Princeton, as well as this video essay about the nature of humor.

Joseph Podlesnik's Phenomenal Photography

Photograph © Joseph Podlesnik 2019

An Arizona-based friend and artist Joseph Podlesnik recently sent me a visual metamorphosis, the stages in the development of chair design. I thought it was appropriate because Joe himself is a metamorphosis, albeit not one you should sit on.

This fall he is teaching an online course in photography for Cornell University, his graduate alma mater. When I first met him forty-plus years ago, he was an undergraduate in painting and drawing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and admired for his skillfulness at drawing from life. His drawings were astonishing because they were so “true” to immediate sight, and yet they appeared to have happened effortlessly.

Here is a favorite self-portrait I’ve posted before. He does look squiggly in real life—but not that much.

Some years later, he began to make short films about his family, that relied on those same virtues of looseness entwined with precision. In recent years, he has evolved into photography. But not just photography, but Joe Podlesnik photographs.

A recent one (for which he received a prize in a nationwide competition) is shown above. But I am also reminded that in 2016, two years before my retirement, my students designed a series of posters, called Almost Seeing, about the photographs he was making then.

For more, see his website here.

Letters to Guy Davenport | Roy R. Behrens

Blog post from Paris Review (2016)

We were recently delighted to learn that my twenty-plus years of  letters to American scholar, essayist and fiction writer Guy Davenport have been added to the archives of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. They are part of Davenport's papers, acquired in 2005. They will soon be supplemented by my own gift of 231 letters from Guy Davenport to me. A post on the Ransom Center's blog featured one of my letters (with, as I often did back then, an illustrated envelope). It was also featured in a post on the blog of the Paris Review.

Blog post Harry Ransom Center (2016)

Iowa Insect Series: Attention to Detail

Cicada © David Versluis and Roy R. Behrens

Above In the late 1980s, driving a U-Haul from the Deep South to Cincinnati, as we neared our destination, we began to hear a deafening buzz—and soon we ran into a boundless cloud of the seventeen-year locust, the cicada. They were everywhere—everywhere. What an indelible welcome.

Another batch of the seventeen-year cicada will soon arrive in Iowa (in another week or so, I think). Be not alarmed or overwhelmed. They're actually quite wonderful. Enjoy them while you can—they may soon go the way of the monarch, the hummingbird, the garter snake.

Long live corn and ethanol in the land of hulk and money.

And guns.

In the meantime, my good friend David Versluis has anticipated the emergence of the cicada by installing an exhibition of his and my collaborative digital montages (collages made on computer), called Insects of Iowa: Attention to Detail. See exhibit installation below.

•••

David Plowden, from "Conversation with David Plowden" in Christopher R. Rossi, ed., David Plowden's Iowa. Iowa City IA: Humanities Iowa, 2012—

When you get to Iowa, the land may be gentle and the land may be very subtle, but the sky isn't. You live out here under the weather and at your own risk, for god's sake. You may have all of the most up-to-date equipment, all the pesticides and chemicals you need—everything. But you have no control over the weather. And I think that's one of the most important things about living in this part of the world—that you could be wiped out by the weather, or you could be blessed by the weather, but you live by the weather.…

Joseph Podlesnik | Marksman Par Excellence

© Joseph Podlesnik, Self-Portrait

In the early 1980s, Joseph Podlesnik and I were both living in Milwaukee. He was a student, and I was a teacher. Out of kindness, he likes to say that I was his teacher, but I don't think I taught him much, if anything. For one thing, I was a graphic designer, a collagist who had more or less given up drawing a few years earlier. But I have always loved strong drawing, and Joe, even as an undergraduate, was an extraordinary drawing-based artist (I hesitate to say "draftsman" because that doesn't quite describe his work), admired by teachers and students alike. Now he himself is a teacher, and he teaches drawing in a way that is based on intensified seeing. I continue to be amazed by his drawings, as well as his knowledge of vision. Above, for example, is a magnificent self-portrait he did about 8 or 10 years ago, using only a ballpoint pen. What impresses me so much is that every mark is both dead-on accurate and alive. I am reminded of what Hungarian-born artist-designer Gyorgy Kepes wrote in The New Landscape in Art and Science (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1956)—

There are two basic morphological archetypes—expression of order, coherence, discipline, stability on the one hand; expression of chaos, movement, vitality, change on the other.

It is common enough to see drawings that adhere too much to one of those polarities, while all but ignoring the other extreme. Joe Podlesnik (in his films as well as his drawings) achieves a masterful mixture of both.

Jackson Pollock's Iowa Roots

 © Les Coleman, Pollock's Palette (1972). Household paint on hardboard. Photo: Colin Sackett.

From Henry Adams, Tom and Jack: The Intertwined Lives of Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock. NY: Bloomsbury Press, 2009, pp. 22-23—

[Jackson] Pollock's mother, Stella McClure, the eldest child in her family, was born on May 20, 1875, in a log house near the little town of Mount Ayr, Iowa. Her parents were stern Presbyterians who believed that there was just one straight and narrow path to salvation. Life on the McClure farm was harsh and strictly regulated, and misfortunes, which came frequently, were accepted with a kind of stoic resignation. One of Stella's sisters died of convulsions in her arms; another died young of tuberculosis. Around 1890 the farm failed, and the family moved to Tingley, Iowa, where her father, John McClure, found work as a brick-mason and plasterer…

The background of Jackson Pollock's father was, if possible, even grimmer than that of his mother. Two years younger than his wife, Roy Pollock was born to the name of LeRoy McCoy on February 25, 1877, on a small farm in Ringgold County, Iowa. In 1879, when LeRoy was two, his mother and sister both died of tuberculosis. Despairing and destitute, John McCoy gave away his infant son to James and Lizzie Pollock, a poor farm couple in Tingley who were not his relatives.

John Page | American Artist

Artworks © John Page

For more than thirty years, printmaker and painter John Page (1923-) was on the faculty at the University of Northern Iowa. He retired in 1988, and he and his wife Mary Lou moved to a retirement community in Arizona. Above are two of my favorite works from the hundreds he produced over a long (and on-going) artistic career. As a graphic designer, I am inevitably drawn to images not so much for the story they tell—but because they tell it well. The top image is a monoprint of a reclining nude, completed by John in 1980. I find it breathtaking when an artwork teeters on the line between structural perfection and gestural spontaneity; surely, this print does just that. The lower image is one of twenty small colored etchings (called the River Series) that John made in the summer of 1966. They are based on on-site drawings of seemingly insignificant scenes along the Cedar River, in the vicinity of Cedar Falls, Iowa (where the university is located). Again, while I surely relate to the story that's told, I am even more deeply astonished by the rhythmic perfection ("the exact words in the right order") that makes it an even more beautiful poem. In recent years, still living in the Southwest, John has turned to small, abstract watercolors, and, at the moment (October thru December 2011), some of these are being shown at the Posada Java in Green Valley AZ.

Get To Work | Richard Hugo

 Fine advice from poet Richard Hugo in The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979)—

Lucky accidents seldom happen to writers who don't work. You will find that you may rewrite and rewrite a poem and it never seems quite right. Then a much better poem may come rather fast and you wonder why you bothered with all that work on the earlier poem. Actually, the hard work you do on one poem is put in on all poems. The hard work on the first poem is responsible for the sudden ease of the second. If you just sit around waiting for the easy ones, nothing will come. Get to work.

Jack Kerouac Meets Buffalo Bill

Edward Zane Carroll Judson, better known by his pseudonym Ned Buntline, was a 19th-century author of dime novels. It is he who is usually credited with establishing the legend of William F. Cody as Buffalo Bill. Buntline could write as many as six dime novels in a week. His writing method, as it turns out, seems to have anticipated that of Beat Generation novelist Jack Kerouac (a method called spontaneous prose, about which Truman Capote once said, "That's not writing, it's typing"), who is said to have typed his novel On the Road on one long role of paper, with no revisions. Here's how Buntline described his way of working, as quoted in Robert A. Carter, Buffalo Bill Cody: The Man Behind the Legend (Edison NJ: Castle Books, 2000), p. 139—

I take a bound book of blank paper, set my title at the head of it, and begin to write about the fictitious character who is to be the hero of it. I push ahead as fast as I can write, never blotting out anything I have once written, and never making a correction or modification. If you will examine the leaves of my manuscript you will see that the pages are clean with no erasures—no interlineations. If a book does not suit me when I have finished it, or at any stage of its progress, I simply throw it in the fire and begin again, without any reference to the discarded text.