The Artist in Place is a year-long exploration of place and its relationship to the work of the artist. Through field study of evocative locales, observation, reading, writing, reflection, and thoughtful discussion, we will build a direct understanding of the place where we live and examine its impact on the work we do. Please make use of this space to share thoughts, ask questions, exchange ideas, and post photos.
Monday, December 20, 2010
BOOKS FOR SPRING
There are two new books required for the Spring Semester in our class. You can buy them at University Books in Seattle or order them online (links are on the right).
BIRD BY BIRD: SOME INSTRUCTIONS ON WRITING AND LIFE by Anne Lamott
SKID ROAD: AN INFORMAL PORTRAIT OF SEATTLE by Murray Morgan
Friday, December 10, 2010
Thanks for a great semester!
FINAL CONFERENCES
Monday, December 13
4:30 - Allison Combs
4:45 - Amelia Fitch
5:00 - Amie Christensen
5:15 - Cassandra Richcreek
5:30 - Chelsea Snowden-Smith
5:45 - Claire Mitchell
Wednesday, December 15
4:30 - Colin Fraker
4:45 - Jeremy Evans
5:00 - Jessica Muljadi
5:15 - Josh Thorsen
5:30 - Kevin Lavitt
5:45 - Mackenzie Sage
Friday, December 17
1:30 - Meredith Myre
1:45 - Michael Eber
2:00 - Robert Lucy
2:15 - Taurean Johnson
2:30 - Will Story
2:45 - Xitlalic Hernandez
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Portfolios Due Friday
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
For Wednesday's class, please read "Sweet Home" by Lucy R. Lippard in your course reader and prepare for seminar. "Sweet Home" is from Lippard's excellent book, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society. Worth checking out.
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
In His Own Literary World, a Native Son Without Borders
By ERIC KONIGSBERG
SEATTLE — The author Sherman Alexie doesn’t believe there is such a thing as selling out. He has no qualms about his commercial breakthrough’s coming when he wrote a young-adult novel, “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” despite the fact that he had already published 18 volumes of fiction and poetry to considerably less fanfare.
And he characterized the high-six-figure advance he is being paid for a subsequent novel, a thriller that is still at least a year away, as lucrative enough that it constituted “a pornographic deal.” He was quick to note that he meant nothing bad by that.
“No, I like porn,” he said.
Still, even Mr. Alexie has to draw the line somewhere. He turned down offers to sell the movie rights to “Diary,” a book he calls an extremely faithful recounting of his experience growing up poor on the Spokane tribal reservation in eastern Washington State.
“My concern was that they would never have been able to find an Indian kid who could act well enough and who was a good enough basketball player to play me,” Mr. Alexie said in a recent interview, adding that basketball was even more important to him than “the Indianness of me.” As it did during his own youth, salvation for his misfit protagonist, Junior, comes when he quits the reservation and excels on an all-white high school team. “I’d rather see myself played by a Puerto Rican or an Italian with a tan than have them ruin the basketballness of me,” he explained.
Mr. Alexie, 43, has followed the blockbuster success of “Diary,” the 2007 National Book Award winner for young people’s fiction, with “War Dances,” a volume of short stories and poetry published this month by Grove Press.
“I’m not conflicted about the success of that book,” Mr. Alexie said of “Diary,” “but I guess the thing is, you end up feeling very schizophrenic about it. I think the new book was an attempt to re-establish my eccentric self: ‘I’m not supposed to sell as many copies as I just did, so let me write something that won’t.’ ”
More significantly to him, Mr. Alexie said, is that in “War Dances” he has given readers a few characters of indeterminate ethnicity for the first time. “It’s not that they’re not Indians — they might be, they might not be,” he explained. “Up until now, I’ve always written identifiably Indian stories. I felt so conflicted about having fled the rez as a kid that I created a whole literary career that left me there.”
The lesson of both the young-adult book and in a sense the new book, Mr. Alexie said, “is ‘Get off the rez. Be nomadic.’ ”
“We all know the Indians were colonized by the Europeans,” he continued, “but every colonized Indian has been colonized by the Indian reaction to colonization. You’d never know it from reading the rest of the Native writers, but Indians actually grew up with American pop culture.” Mr. Alexie said he had been criticized for depicting reservation life as full of misery — “which it is,” he added.
He likes to talk about his writing as a responsibility and admits that it can, at times, feel like a burden. He recalled that in 1992, when The New York Times Book Review assessed the state of American Indian literature and declared his debut, “The Business of Fancydancing,” “one of the major lyric voices of our times,” he promptly went into the bathroom and vomited.
Mr. Alexie lives in Seattle with his wife, Diane, and their two sons, who are 8 and 12, and works out of an apartment he uses as an office in a luxury condo building.
“I’ll write whatever’s going well for a few months at a time and move around from poetry to stories to the novel to a movie script,” he said. “I’ll write 150 pages in three or four days, and maybe I’ll scrap it all because it’s terrible, or it’ll become four lines of a poem.”
The broad portfolio is another thing Mr. Alexie sees as part of his mission. “I can’t think of any younger Indian writers who are multi-genre like I am,” he said. “In fact, it seems like most of them are poets. And besides Louise Erdrich, I feel like the only one who’s not a college professor. Where are the Indian mystery writers and romance novelists?”
A lot of time and energy go into Mr. Alexie’s being more than just a writer, and into his efforts to define and expand the kind of writing career he is able to have.
“I’ve always plotted it out this way, being aware of who your audience is and trying to build one,” he said, referring to “Diary” in particular. “The most dedicated readers in the country are teenagers. I did a study of Y.A. novels when I was figuring mine out — I read hundreds of them.” Besides, he said, “if a 15-year-old doesn’t want to read me, what good am I?”
A few weeks ago Mr. Alexie attended a fund-raising lunch for the Seattle Children’s PlayGarden, an activity center tailored to special-needs children. (Mr. Alexie was born with hydrocephalus, which causes the brain to swell with excess fluid.) He was the featured speaker, charged to “do the ask,” as he put it, toward the end of the meal.
“In a real-world way, my gifts are very limited in terms of what I can do,” he said. He spends a lot of his time with charitable work and speaking on college campuses, so much that he now employs a full-time assistant. “Her job is basically to say no to people,” he said.
At the PlayGarden event he was alternately heart-wrenching and funny, with a joke about how being hydrocephalic caused him to walk unevenly, as if he were carrying the burden of his race on his shoulders. He talked poignantly about how he never learned to swim because the pressure hurt his head. Then he got a laugh when he described his older son’s declining to participate in a PlayGarden talent show.
“It was a strange thing to hear from my son,” he said, imitating his own response. “ ‘What, you don’t need the love and attention of total strangers to validate your existence?’ ”
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Friday is FRYE-day
Monday, November 15, 2010
Friday, November 12, 2010
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
"Breaking and Entering" by Sherman Alexie
http://castroller.com/podcasts/PriSelectedShorts/1495368-An%20Hour%20with%20Sherman%20Alexie
Also, visit Sherman Alexie's official website: http://www.fallsapart.com/
Monday, November 8, 2010
WAR DANCES by Sherman Alexie
Saturday, October 30, 2010
Friday Field Study: Northwest African American Museum
Please bring bus fare, $4 for museum admission, your journal, and a pen.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
All these poets in the breeze
"Love is short. Forgetting is long." These are the words written in my borrowed journal. I read them, repeat them, mull them obsessively as I step gingerly onto green blades in the soft autumn sun.
Cold stone. Not sweet like ice cream but unwarmed by the sun and salty from many hands sweeping many times over and over and over the smoothed, wrought surface.
"rad!" yelled roland, spooning banana compote into more bailey's-filled shooters. "RAAAAAAAD!"
Somehow this park leads me to idleness. Unable to see anywhere but inward I remember symbols I've seen in the books I've read.
I get up, walk around, find a place where I can take it all in. A 360º marvel of intimacy and distance.
The red-headed dreamer next to me giggles and reads from her small book. "Pleasure's a sun and sometimes sin's a pleasure." L. Byron wrote this.
I counter with something from the back catalog, something juicy from C. Bukowski. "Sexual intercourse is kicking death in the ass while singing." We both laugh. That's how I feel here. I mean not like I'm fucking a person literally in out in out but that wind feeling. That wind feeling like it gets in my skin. By touching me it takes my warmth and leaves me something more. Equal exchange. Alchemy in motion.
Now we sit together in the sun fervently reading frightened words. All the girls have mud on their jeans. The twins are back, dressed like little butterflies. They mumble in child speak- crazed communication. I don't understand. This cat next to me apologizes for bad poetry. But his squirrel eyeballs me and I dig it. There's a warhead in my pocket. An empty wrapper though, no hard candy to pass the time. I like when your words match your speech. Excpet when they rhyme. We gotta have consonance in the dissonance. We are all having one of those days.
Girl, take me with you down the rabbit hole. We can hear all these new sentences that have never been said before. We can fall in love with all these poets in the breeze.
Monday, October 18, 2010
Volunteer Park Observation 10/15/2010
My Swing Set
"It's cold here
The goose bumps on my arms
are a constant reminder of this
They tried to clip my wings...
Feet hitting the ground in a rythem
that is unmistakably running
I slip out of the house into the night air
My mind is swerling with thoughts
Flashes of memories pricking at my skin like nettles...
I push away the chains and keep on moving
blind with fear
My tree comes into sight towering above the others
It's branches sweep down as if to welcome me home
I keep my dreams here...
hiding in the nooks and crannies of the weathered bark
I climb into it's arms
I am set free from the doom
The pain becomes nothing but a faint glow
Here i am only one
And this is my world....
Tonight i will sleep here with the leaves and squirrels
and tomorrow will be a better day...."
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Just a normal field? or the site where a massive battle of whits and speed took placed that challenged a group of young kids to turn this "field" into a battlefield!!
The thing that actually interested me the most out of this koi pond was that there was baby koi too. Usually when i find a koi pond it just has the big ones. And i did find a present day nemo! it was obviously physically challenged
The people of Volunteer park.....
A perfect way to end the day... crowded together on a llama
Volunteer Park
Upon reaching volunteer park, a group of us decided not to go hunting for the places listed on our handout, but play a game of tag under the bright (and at this time, warm) sun.
Volunteer Park Water Tower
From far away the brick looks normal, but when you get closer the brick takes on a totally different feel on the eyes. It's so uneven, misshaped and in some areas looked as if it had been melted my a fire or around a century of hot summers. All over the surface of the building there are remains of decades old graffiti. Then you look at the entry ways and they look so out of place with the clean and strait and untouched looking white stone.
Saturday, October 16, 2010
The Volunteer Park
Pioneer Square
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Pioneer Square
Pioneer Square!
...which was in one of the essays we read recently. I was super excited that I was seeing things that were in a book until I remembered that this was a book made for this course and about Seattle, so it wasn't like I'd spotted the white whale from Moby Dick or anything. It still made me happy though.
All in all, I enjoyed Pioneer Square, although I'd like to go back sometime soon on a better day and in friendlier weather because I don't think I really got the whole experience.
Monday, October 11, 2010
Pioneer Square
"What totem pole?" Jeremy asks. "Oh." The pole is not negligible, but it lacks a sense of power, considering there are buses and bums and trees covering and surrounding it. We take a picture of the glass posters written in (what Google has informed me is) Lushootseed and we move on.
For the most part our journey is documented in pictures and jokes about tattoo parlors and rug shops. We run into several of our classmates and it is almost like a regular Friday field trip! However, since it has begun to rain severely, we decide it would be best to head back so, with a quick stop for food, we hurry home.
A lasting impression of Pioneer Square: kind of dirty? I'm sure I'll have to go back and explore more when I'm not so worried about catching pneumonia.
Pioneer Square
Inspiration: Incomplete Manifesto for Growth
Pioneer Square
Taking the bus to Pioneer square would have been a pleasant bust ride away, had the bus gone down to pioneer square that day. So instead of a leisurely bus ride, I had a very long stroll. Luckily 3rd avenue doesn't climb any rigerous hills or descend as if it were taking you to the earths core itself. And not taking the bus made me see the smaller detials i would have otherwise missed. The trees that encroached on modern society by standing their ground in the concrete jungle were adorned with metal grates over their soft dirt groundings. Some were simple slats of metal designed to let water in, while others were intricately designed with leaves and twigs within the metal to mimic a woodland floor that had existed many years ago.
Across from these trees are feats of man kind. Towering buildings were decorated with art of all different kinds. Some of a molten looking rock and others with murals that stretched higher than I could reach, given that I'm only 5'3" it may not seem like much, from down here that's pretty damn tall. As I reached the actual Pioneers square area I felt as though I had taken a step back in time. Buildings were fillagreed with wonderful architecture and sculpted to look intricate and amazing. You don't see to many buildings like this anymore. Though some of them have been restored or remodeled they still hold the charm and awe as their aged pictures held on the piece of paper guiding me on my journey.
Pioneer square has almost anything you can think of: pizza places, the underground tours, bakeries, pizzarias, rug shops, child care, centers to help the less fortunate, bubble tea stores, antique shops and even a kilt store?! As I passed through occidental avenue I saw a totem pole that seemed to have been dismantled from when I had seen it the previous year. It seems as though this place is always buzzing with life, always changing and growing to the needs of the people. Stages are put up and torn down, stores come and go, installed art is added and removed.
Yesler Way was an odd street to say the least. A large triangle building jutted out of the hill looking like the wales that breech not far away from the bay. The open parts of the structure reminding me of the whales mouth. What a peculiar part of town. Old looking buildings coverd this area as well, making me feel like should wear some of my grandmothers outfits to fit in with the buildings. The apparentess of the conflict during the street grid construction is apparent, navigating the streets and following cross walks is like follwoing a pirate map with a tiny 'X'. Good luck finding them!
Going into the shops wether it be a rug or candy shop gave you a real feel of community. Everyone was friendly and every store unique. Some had giant teddy bears or giant rugs, giant sculptures or a well known history. The owners definatly knew their craft and were eager to share information on how a rug was made, or what processes create delicious fudge. I didn't really understand why there were giant teddy bears, unless they are just to sit there for an embaressing photo of a friend :)