Lilith Saintcrow

Oh, crud. Tony Hillerman has passed away. He was always a class act, and he wrote marvelous books.

May he rest in peace.

…when I finish doing the revisions on Flesh Circus and can stop listening to calliope music. This stuff creeps me out when played between Carly Simon and ES Posthumus.

That is all. Expect no long blog posts from me until I’m finished with this. *headdesk*

And this is why. I don’t watch a lot of telly and have stopped watching Supernatural, but this is…this is…

Words fail me.

Just a short writing post today, since I’m busier than a one-legged urban fantasy heroine in a leather-clad asskicking contest. (There are pumpkins to buy, after all.)

There’s a new biography of Rimbaud out, which kind of got me thinking about what Julia Cameron calls (it may not be exact, but it’s as I recall) the myth of the destructive artist. This is the cultural narrative that says artists are self-destructive, alcoholic, drug-addicted, or otherwise emotionally toxic. This narrative shows up in the way we talk about creativity, biographies of creative people, and in the destruction some creatives seem to helplessly play out despite themselves.

It seems against some sort of law to be a happy, healthy, reasonably well-adjusted creative. I think a lot of this stems from the idea that creativity or making a living at creative pursuits is somehow a violation of the Protestant work ethic. The creative life supplies “luxuries”, this way of thinking goes, so it is evil and sinful and if you engage in it, you are evil and sinful too. The tension of this unconscious assumption is large enough to indeed drive you to drink.

The flip side to this is the idea that since you’re already damned as an artist, you might as well go whole hog. And a lot of artists/creatives do. There is also the implicit assumption that “all artists are like that”, which excuses a lot of unhealthy interpersonal behavior–malignant narcissism, manipulation, double-dealing–all helped along by the idea that there are finite resources out there and artists have to fight tooth and nail for the lion’s share of them, because otherwise they’ll “lose”.

If you want to be a productive creative over a long period of time–which is, to me, the point–I think you should take a look at this unspoken assumption and a very hard look at how it affects your own assumptions about the creative life.

Creativity is not a “luxury”. It is a human birthright and a human need. You have a right to be creative, and you have a right to be a healthy, happy creative.

You also have a responsibility to take care of yourself so you can be one. Being a creative doesn’t give you a “pass” when it comes to being a decent person. It’s hard to let go of the myth of the automatically self-destructive artist, and equally hard to let go of the “oh poor me, I’m an artist so I can be an asshole to people.” Both are stumbling-blocks that get in the way of doing your (perhaps self-chosen, but no less valid) job, which is producing art.

Being self-destructive doesn’t make you an artist or a genius. It just makes you self-destructive, and lowers your chances of a long productive creative life. Now, there are valid reasons why people are self-destructive–abuse, trauma, social pressure, you name it. Therapy might be a good answer for that, and I’m not a licensed therapist. Art can even help you work through some of those issues, and it’s a time-honored way to do so.

Blindly following the myth of the self-destructive artist not only cuts your chances of being a productive creative, it also cuts your chances of being a reasonably decent human being. It’s not that I think artists are under a higher constraint of decency[1] than everyone else–it’s just that, with the massive power art has to affect the world, its purveyors are necessarily concerned with doing it the best they can. The myth of the self-destructive artist gets in the way.

What do you think?

[1] And please note that I am not using the word “decent” in the way prudes do, to beat free expression over the head. I am using it in the sense of: reasonably ethical, reasonably well-adjusted, reasonably reasonable–you get the idea.

From The Guardian:

The only actual crime here is that Acorn managed to register some 1.3m low-income (read: Democratic-leaning) voters over the past two years. The rest is, pretty much, just made up.

But in the bloody and desperate trenches of the Republican war on democracy, that’s more than enough to kick in a last minute surge of lies that may – with the help of a compliant and lazy corporate US media – wreak enough havoc, scare enough voters, confuse enough people and plant enough seeds to call an Obama victory into doubt on November 4.

If you can’t win it, steal it. If you can’t steal it, claim the other guy stole it. If you can’t claim the other guy stole it (yet), say they’re about to and then kick up smoke that maybe someone will believe you. (Heckuva job, CNN.)

Here are the facts. Acorn verifies the legitimacy of every registration its canvassers collect. If they can’t authenticate the registration, or it’s incomplete or questionable in other ways, they flag that form as problematic (“fraudulent”, “incomplete”, et cetera). They then hand in all registration forms, even the problematic ones, to elections officials, as they are required to do by law. In almost every case where you’ve heard about fraud by Acorn, it’s because Acorn itself notified officials about the fraud that’s been perpetrated on them by rogue canvassers. Most officials who run to the media screaming “Acorn is committing fraud” know all of the above but don’t bother to share those facts with the media they’ve run to. None of this is about voter fraud. None of it. Where any fraud has occurred, it’s voter registration fraud and has resulted in exactly zero fraudulent votes.

You’ll hear that Donald Duck, Mary Poppins, Dick Tracy, Mickey Mouse and (new this year) the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys football team have all had fraudulent registrations submitted in their names. That’s true. And we know this, why? Because Acorn told officials about it when they followed the law and turned in those registrations, flagged as fraudulent.

Don’t effing talk about how the Republicans “might be right” about voter fraud. If you effing believe that after the last eight effing years, you should probably look into buying beachfront property in Arizona. Someone’s bound to have some for you.