Studio 620 Blog #1

Greetings all, first blog here, better late than never! I'm using this blog for a couple of classes this semester, so I'll try and somehow indicate which posts are for this one. Feel free to read the others if you are so inclined, but I can't imagine why you'd want to. I doubt there will be much substance there. What now? A brief introduction perhaps? I'm James Fleeting. or at least some digital representation of him. Maybe I'm not James Fleeting, maybe I hacked his computer and stole his identity purely for the joy of doing his homework. Perhaps I'm a young Chinese boy sitting in a sweatshop, being paid 25 cents an hour to blog! Without any hope of confirmation, you'll just have to take my word. In this blog I intend to be longwinded, grammatically incorrect, and generally babble. That's what a blog means to me - the freedom to write and speak as I never would in a paper. It's kind of why I dislike blogging - uncensored unmitigated raw communication is sloppy, unclean. Like a stripper's g-string or a fat man's sweat stained shirt, it just feels inherently unclean, even if washed. I will, however, withhold my revulsion and do my best to blog my little Chinese heart out.


So, Blog Numero Uno. Letters to a Young Artist by Anna Deavere Smith was not a book that I enjoyed. My issues with it are so numerous they're almost hard to list, with so many complaints clamoring for attention I don't know which to address first. In no particular order;

I do not feel Anna Deavere Smith establishes her credentials sufficiently. I do not feel an actress is automatically an authority on "The Arts," and while they may know much about their art and some about the many arts (Such as writing) that are connected to it, I do not believe this is sufficient to establish them as worth listening to alone.

I do not enjoy the epistolary style the book is written in. I don't actually enjoy the epistolary style in general, but I feel that this book is a particularly poor example of the epistolary form. The letters are not believable, and as only one side of the correspondence is ever given, Anna Deavere Smith feels compelled to state in her responses the questions she's answering. If you're going to use the epistolary style, have some faith in your audience. We can figure out what you mean without you having to state it every single letter.

I find almost none of the content of this book believable. Stories feel too "Rounded," with details working out just-so, making them all obvious constructs. The letters do not in any fashion resemble realistic correspondence, and I don't feel BZ is a genuine character at all.

The advice given in the book is, almosst universally, so jaw-droppingly obvious that it is shocking to me this book was ever published. Actually, it isn't shocking, I just wish it was. When I se this woman's beautiful face on the front cover, I can only assume the people that tell her publisher was looking at her face and not her manuscript. Have confidence in yourself. Get in good with the people in charge. Don't procrastinate. The list of clichéd platitudes goes on and on.

So did I enjoy anything? There were a few humerous anecdotes, and a couple of enjoyable letters or interesting ideas. However, you find more content of worth on your average internet forum that you do in the pages of Letters to a Young Artist. If I had a meter for rating, rest assured this book would score low.

So there's my first blog, Letters to a Young Artist. I'd also like to talk about my first impressions of the Studio @ 620. I'm not really inclined to like this sort of establishment, as the deliberately pretentious atmosphere is something I usually try to avoid. However, the coffee/tea setup was good, and it seems the catering they get in there is pretty nice. As a (presumably affordable) downtown venue the Studio is very nice, and somewhere I might host an event. I just can't escape the feel that I'm in a poetry house, and my opinions on poetry houses (or contemporary poetry) are complex, and perhaps the material for another blog. They've got me on Parking Lot duty, an exciting task that consists of waiting for someone to park then walking up to them and telling them they can't park there. Next time I'll bring a chair with me. My next blog will be about the Studio, and my first adventure in Poetry-Parking-Policing, which is our weekly alliteration. I had something of a crazy (And in the end costly) adventure, which only yielded two hours of volunteer time, despite the frustration involved. It's going to be a looooooong 60 hours folks.