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The Art of Life: How and Why to Look at Sculpture by Traci L. Slatton & Sabin Howard

The Art of Life: How and Why to Look at Sculpture

by Traci L. Slatton & Sabin Howard

My husband Sabin Howard (www.sabinhoward.com) and I are writing a book about sculpture together. He is a working classical figurative sculptor–think Michelangelo–and I am NOT a PhD.

I want to write this book precisely because I am not a PhD. I want to write it for the purest reason: because I love sculpture and it enhances life and I want to share this passion, and its uplifting effect, with everyone. Sculpture is too beautiful, too innately healing, too richly resonant of what it actually means to be human, to be monopolized by a few people with advanced degrees.

I stand for the democratization of art. This is precisely why I have such a strong aversion to post-modern art, which, with its emphasis on ugliness and alienation, has begged to be rejected by the ordinary person and embraced by the few who either 1, make money off it, or 2, get a PhD out of it.

I am here to tell you: art is not dead. Neither is God, for that matter. There’s a burdgeoning movement that is rediscovering both. Beauty, too.

Why do I call this book ‘The art of life’? Simple: when you pause and breathe and take in a sculpture, it brings you back into alignment with your deepest core self. It renews your Self. It deepens your experience of this moment now, of the presence, and Presence, in this perfectly imperfect moment of space-time. And isn’t that the practice of the art of life? It is for me.

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Hoisted on My Own Petard

During one of my blogtalk radio interviews to promote IMMORTAL, I spoke about publishing houses and writers and the need for the two to find a common ground. Today that interviewer contacted me, asking if she could use some quotes she had culled from the interview. Sure, I said. It won’t be the first or last time my own words have come back to bite me in the tushie.

Here’s the thing: Publishing is in a sad state right now. One house is foundering like the Titanic. Another house fired a publisher and is being restructured into a larger conglomerate. Editors have been fired. The ones who remain are afraid to buy anything.

But is firing people and re-organizing really going to help the bottom line? I mean, is it really going to entice people to buy more books?

The problem, as I see it, is two-fold: 1, marketing people decide which books editors get to buy, not editors, and 2, writers all want to publish beautifully written literary novels that no one but their mother and best friend will buy.

Books are not widgets. Books are the Keepers of Soul. For thousands of years, people have been going to war over their Holy Books. They’re still wreaking death, destruction, dismemberment and other varieties of intolerance because of their Holy Books. Books have this extra dimension, this extra quality, that MUST be taken into account. Even by marketing people, who can be soul-less creatures.

BUT. Writers also need to take the market into account. We writers can be all too self-indulgent, because we are in love with words, with prose, with story in its most abstruse forms. But most people don’t want to buy a book just because it has pretty words and the story takes an intellectually shimmering shape.

There’s got to be a middle ground. I say: let editors have more say and marketing people LESS say. One reason for this: editors love books, while marketers love money. When marketers chose which books get published, we get the current state of book selling. That is, I go to the bookstore and 99% of what I see is crap. Most of it is all the same. Badly written serial-killer-suspense books, formula mysteries, predictable action-adventure or supernatural yarns, and celebu-drek. Then there are those select ‘literary’ tomes that someone has chosen to anoint, and those ‘literary’ novels are self-congratulatory, precious, self-indulgent, and just plain boring. They also have unlikeable characters. WHY WOULD ANYONE BUY ANY OF IT???

I read everything, really everything. I will even pick up a Harlequin romance. I consider this my market research. I just finished a book that epitomizes what is wrong with publishing today. It is Brad Meltzer’s BOOK OF LIES.

I apologize to Mr. Meltzer for the bad review, and I can only say that plenty of bloggers have trashed my novel IMMORTAL.

However: BOOK OF LIES was confusing, hard to follow, and clearly created to capitalize on the DA VINCI CODE-secret-Biblical-artifact-craze, or what’s left of it. It is more than obvious that some marketing person yelped with glee: “Hey, Cain and Abel, biblical secret, we got a flavor of the DA VINCI CODE and we can even pull in the Superman fans: yes!”

Unfortunately, it’s just not that interesting a story. No one cares much about how Cain killed Abel and if the weapon survived. Yes, we did care about Jesus being married and whether or not the Church suppressed that information for reasons of secular power. Now, that story has been told: MOVE ON.

Meltzer’s prose isn’t horrible. He seems to be trying with his characters and with the relationships between them. It just never all comes together to make me as a reader care about anyone or anything. And the sentimental glop (spoiler alert!) of “Tell your stories to your children” that is supposed to be the big finale, well, if the story were riveting, it would be a let-down. But since this novel is just so functional, utilitarian, and forgettable, it comes across as annoying and silly. Drivel.

But the appeal to a marketing director is so blatantly obvious, how could this novel NOT be published?

So novels will continue to be boring, silly, and the same, because marketers are infected with the notion, “If it sold once, we can beat the dead horse into a gelatinous pulp and sell it a million times.”

So general readers are bored and disaffected and they don’t spend their money on books. And writers aren’t motivated to do more than 1, appeal to marketers or 2, indulge our worst, most narcissistic love of an abstruse craft.

Up Till Now: William Shatner’s biography
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Up Till Now: William Shatner’s biography

Let me get it out of the way right away: I am a long time trekkie and I have loved Captain James T. Kirk from the first minute I saw him on STAR TREK, in 1969 when I was 6 years old.

That was a formative year for me. It was also the year I read my first “big book” and knew I wanted to write novels.
So I couldn’t resist buying Shatner’s autobiography when I saw it at Barnes & Noble, though I will, alas, resist his websites, which he plugs on every other page of this book.
Other than the used-car-salesman-like pressure to visit his websites and purchase assorted Shatnerbilia, UP TILL NOW is warm and charming. It’s the all-too-human story of a life intensely and purposefully lived. The voice is well done, careening between blustery self-congratulation, wry self-awareness, and honest revelation. William Shatner is a man who has loved and lost and suffered, and he talks about it with perspicacity and sadness. He’s also a man who has succeeded, and he recounts his achievements–and his near misses–with equal measures of braggadocio and irony. Well, maybe the braggadocio comes out ahead. He is an actor, after all; that species is not known for lacking narcissism. But this book has more substance than the usual vanity fare. The unifying theme is the intelligence with which he revisits his life Up Till Now.
I don’t hold the “Buy My Stuff” schtick against him because I am an artist married to an artist, and I never miss an opportunity to 1, tell someone how wonderful my novel is so they can run out and buy it, and 2, tell someone how wonderful my husband’s sculptures are, so they can run out and buy them, too. After all, I’m not just in the business of writing novels, I am in the business of selling them. My oldest daughter nearly dies of mortification every time, but here is one of my typical forays:
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Video Store Guy: Here’s your movies, enjoy them.
Me: Thanks. Hey, do you read?
Video Store Guy: Read? Uh…
Me: I mean, do you enjoy novels. I’m an author whose first novel came out a few months ago. Here’s a card for it: IMMORTAL. It’s a historical novel set in Renaissance Florence. The film rights just sold a few weeks ago.
Video Store Guy: Film rights? Really?
Me: Yes! It’s going to be a great movie. Check out the novel!
Outside the store.
My daughter: MOM! Could you BE any more embarassing??? Argh!!!!!
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So I don’t judge Shatner for his candor about wanting to make money.
And he namedrops in satisfying enough ways, and he has been a working actor for a very long time, so he includes a little bit of the social history of acting and the evolution of the medium of television and some perspective on the phenomenon of STAR TREK. I would have liked to see even more of that; whatever the largeness of his ego and the smallness of his hairline, William Shatner is a smart man, with shrewd observations.
I enjoyed his autobiography. It was entertaining and I would recommend it to anyone with interest.
And, FYI, Dear Reader: My husband Sabin Howard’s small sculptures, like the exquisite MAN or EROS, can be purchased for $5000 plus shipping. His heroic scale HERMES (a testament to Man’s power and intelligence) and APHRODITE (a paean to beauty, harmony and balance, the single best female figure in several hundred years) each cost $165,000. For those of you who might want to own a limited edition, museum quality bronze sculpture by an artist that the NY Times has compared to Rodin and Donatello. His works are grace beyond compare: check out www.sabinhoward.com and see for yourself.
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Bill Murray in TOOTSIE, and what a novelist wants

Bill Murray in TOOTSIE, and what a novelist wants

Jeff the playwright, played by Bill Murray: “I don’t want a full house at the Winter Garden. I want people who just came out of the worst rainstorm in history. These are people who are alive on the planet… until they dry off. I wish I had a theater that was only open when it rained.”

Yesterday the mail brought me the return of IMMORTAL from a reviewer. She had emailed me a month ago saying that up to 200 people a day visited her book review website, and could she please have an ARC, an Advanced Review Copy. I responded that there were none left, but I did have a finished copy. I sent it on to her.
And it reappeared yesterday, with a note: “Although Immortal is beautifully written, I regret that I was unable to read it. As a former career nanny and mother of four, I’m just too sensitive to read about child prostitution and murder.” Her note was kind and it was a gracious gesture of her to return the book.
Part of me was disappointed: I am seriously promoting IMMORTAL right now. I am a new novelist and I am not just in the business of writing novels, I am in the business of selling them. Every review on the internet–or in print–builds my platform for selling copies. And earning $$.
But another part of me was pleased: my story affected this woman so deeply that she wouldn’t even finish the book! She put it down rather than confront what I wrote! In her turning away, she demonstrated the power of my words, characters, plot.
I think many artists have this deeply non-commercial instinct, where we care more about the impact on the audience than on sales. Where we want people to show up and be 100% present to experience our creation. Even if that means they’re dripping wet from a ferocious rain, or if they send a book back, “Thanks, but no thanks.”
That said, if you’re reading this blog, kindly go out and buy a copy of IMMORTAL for yourself!
Who do I read?
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Who do I read?

People ask me what other authors I like to read. Richard North Patterson and Sue Grafton, for starters: two of the classiest writers of prose in the English language today. Line for line, Grafton’s prose stacks up against anyone’s in the history of the English language, and she’s a virtuoso with character development and story. Patterson is bringing to life ideas that we as Americans need to face, and he does it with elegance and heart-palpitating suspense. In “The Race,” the question is, Can an honest man become president?–And for those of us who voted for Obama in the primaries, as I did, the answer is: I sure hope so.
Lately I’ve been reading Daniel Silva. Another elegant writer who can tell a story. His painting restorer/secret agent Gabriel Allon is three-dimensional, human, and mesmerizing. I read Silva’s book and think, I wish I’d written that.
I read for pleasure and knowledge, I read fast, and I read everything. There’s plenty out there that I can’t believe actually got published. There’s a lot that’s great, too. I’ve become wary of current books touted as ‘literary’ because that usually means they are precious, self-congratulatory and unreadable, with unlikable characters. But if I look back fifty years or more, that wasn’t the case. Dickens is full, rich and satisfying, and Jane Austen never gets stale. And there are occasional evenings when I kick back with a glass of red wine and the Complete Works of Shakespeare in my lap, and I read aloud from his plays. What could be more fun than that?
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The Internal Triangle, and the Failure of Psychotherapy

My neighbor upstairs, Lucy Holmes, has written an interesting book called “The Internal Triangle: New Theories of Female Development.” Lucy’s a smart lady and the book crackles with life and intelligence. It’s well-written and absorbing. She’s also set herself an ambitious goal: to use Freud’s drive theory to explain female development. The back cover explains that she’s the first woman to attempt this in over sixty years. I haven’t read a lot of Freud, but didn’t he theorize that women long to have penises, and that’s why women are all so messed up?

This despite the archetypal message of the blind prophet Tiresias, who spent seven years as a woman. He tells the gods unequivocally that a woman experiences greater sexual pleasure.

For me, the most arresting part of the book was the exquisite attention to transference and counter-transference as Holmes relates anecdotes about women patients from her many years as an analyst. Some of her patients idealized her, some hated her, many did both, some wanted to kill her, some wanted to have sex with her. In response, Holmes worries, is tormented and feels inadequate. She wants to help them. Does she?

It threw me back into my years as a hands-on healer, and my years in therapy. When you lay hands on people’s bodies with love and the intention to heal, miracles happen. So does powerful transference. And wicked strong countertransference. A practicing healer has to be on her edge, standing with her toes touching the line every second. I made some big mistakes in my practice when I wandered off that edge.

And because we are all human, mistakes, blunders, errors, and inadequacies happen. A decade of my personal psychotherapy imploded in heartache when I divorced my first husband. My therapist was also my husband’s therapist, and our marital therapist, and it was all too fuzzy and intertwined. And when the negotiations between my ex and me grew contentious, I wrote a letter to the therapist saying it wasn’t right for me that my therapist was counseling someone with whom I might go to court. It was something I had to do to stand up for myself. She didn’t write back but she must have agreed, because she terminated her work with him. Of course, he blamed me. A lot of hurt and pain here, for everyone.

Which brings me to qualms about conventional talk psychotherapy. Does it really work? Can it? Therapists are all too frail and prone to err, even with the best of intentions. And, of course, therapists make their living through people showing up regularly, once or twice or three times a week. They have an investment, acknowledged or not, in their patients’ ongoing mental unhealth. Too many patients feed their therapists’ investment, falling into what Caroline Myss so aptly calls ‘woundology,’ cherishing their suffering. They don’t move on. They start every conversation with, “My therapist says….” Don’t we all know people like that?

And my most serious criticism of psychotherapy is that, largely, it doesn’t turn people into better human beings. Here is a the beginning of an imaginary, all too likely, session:

Therapist: “So, you’re an ax murderer, you lure innocent people into the woods where you chop them into little pieces. How do you feel about that?”

Accountability is anathema to psychotherapy. What modern psychotherapy has contributed to the zeitgeist, the way it is largely practiced, is the demolition of judgment and accountability. What psychotherapy should do is teach people how to hold their feelings without acting on them, and without shattering. If human beings can feel a range of emotions from -10 to +10, and can perform actions on a decency scale from -10 to +10, (-10 is genocide, +10 is risking or giving your own life to save someone else’s), then psychotherapy should help people feel and contain their feelings on the full scale, but limit their actions to, say, -2 to +10. But that’s not what’s happened. People who feel below -2 and over +3 are put on medications. And censoring actions is considered bad form.

We’ve become a culture, thanks partly to modern psychotherapy, that confuses prejudice with judgment. The pendulum has swung that far as we try to dismantle millennia of discrimination on the basis of gender, race, religion, sexual orientation. Discrimination is a great evil that I hope to see largely dissolved in my lifetime–though I probably won’t.

And judgment is still imperative. There are reasons why so many of the great, ancient, spiritual texts say, “Thou shalt not.” We need to be able to say, “That action is not okay!” The higher octave of discrimination is discernment, the wisdom to separate the chaff from the grain. Despite the moral relativism of psychotherapy, there is still chaff, and it differs qualitatively from grain.