TITLE: "If I say no, are you going to quit?" AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: February 26, 2023 8:57 AM DESC: ----- BODY: Poet Marvin Bell, in his contribution to the collection Writers on Writing:
The future belongs to the helpless. I am often presented that irresistible question asked by the beginning poet: "Do you think I am any good?" I have learned to reply with a question: "If I say no, are you going to quit?" Because life offers any of us many excuses to quit. If you are going to quit now, you are almost certainly going to quit later. But I have concluded that writers are people who you cannot stop from writing. They are helpless to stop it.
Reading that passage brought to mind Ted Gioia's recent essay on musicians who can't seem to retire. Even after accomplishing much, these artists seem never want to stop doing their thing. Just before starting Writers on Writing, I finished Kurt Vonnegut's Sucker's Portfolio, a slim 2013 volume of six stories and one essay not previously published. The book ends with an eighth piece: a short story unfinished at the time of Vonnegut's death. The story ends mid-sentence and, according to the book's editor, at the top of an unfinished typewritten page. In his mid-80s, Vonnegut was creating stories t the end. I wouldn't mind if, when it's my time to go, folks find my laptop open to some fun little programming project I was working on for myself. Programming and writing are not everything there is to my life, but they bring me a measure of joy and satisfaction. ~~~~~ This week was a wonderful confluence of reading the Bell, Gioia, and Vonnegut pieces around the same time. So many connections... not least of which is that Bell and Vonnegut both taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. There's also an odd connection between Vonnegut and the Gioia essay. Gioia used a quip attributed to the Roman epigrammist Martial:
Fortune gives too much to many, but enough to none.
That reminded me of a story Vonnegut told occasionally in his public talks. He and fellow author Joseph Heller were at a party hosted by a billionaire. Vonnegut asked Heller, "How does it make you feel to know that guy made more money yesterday than Catch-22 has made in all the years since it was published?" Heller answered, "I have something he'll never have: the knowledge that I have enough." There's one final connection here, involving me. Marvin Bell was the keynote speaker at Camouflage: Art, Science & Popular Culture an international conference organized by graphic design prof Roy Behrens at my university and held in April 2006. Participants really did come from all around the world, mostly artists or designers of some sort. Bell read a new poem of his and then spoke of:
the ways in which poetry is like camouflage, how it uses a common vocabulary but requires a second look in order to see what is there.
I gave a talk at the conference called NUMB3RS Meets The DaVinci Code: Information Masquerading as Art. (That title was more timely in 2006 than 2023...) I presented steganography as a computational form of camouflage: not quite traditional concealment, not quite dazzle, but a form of dispersion uniquely available in the digital world. I recall that audience reaction to the talk was better than I feared when I proposed it to Roy. The computer science topic meshed nicely with the rest of the conference lineup, and the artists and writers who saw the talk seemed to appreciate the analogy. Anyway, lots of connections this week. -----