EMILE NORMAN: LIFE AND EXAMPLE

(Emile Norman and Brooks Clement)

I watched the PBS documentary tonight Emile Norman: By His Own Design, and it sparked a wave of thought in me about art, long-term lesbian and gay relationships, and the limits imposed on artists by class and gender.

Emile Norman is now 90 but still actively working and living in the stunning, hand-built home atop a hill outside Big Sur that he created with his lover/partner Brooks Clement in the 1950s. Brooks has been dead since 1973, but they had 30 years together. During the 1950s and 1960s, they were openly gay, and their home was a refuge, a magnet for all kinds of creative people.

(Emile Norman waves from tower atop his Big Sur home)


Emile is an innovative sculptor/muralist who relies on nature for most of his symbolism and themes. He dropped out of art school after one day and pursued his own path during an era when abstract expressionism was all the rage. When Norman and Clement moved to Big Sur in 1946, Brooks told Emile "You go into the studio and I'll show the world what you're doing." It was a deal that made Emile successful and happy. The two men were inseparable, excellent companions and at the heart of a wide circle of friends. When Emile became too old to safely live alone, a pair of young gay men (Jeff Mallory and C. Kevin Smith) moved in as caretakers and forged family.

The documentary was produced by Jill Eikenberry and Michael Tucker, neighbors and friends of Emile. You may remember them as the husband-and-wife lawyers who immortalized the imaginary "butterfly kiss" on the TV series L.A. Law. It's a good film, interspersed with home movies from Brooks and Emile plus letters written about them by another neighbor, a young married woman and mother who visited constantly. The two men found freedom to be themselves in an era when few did, and the story of a sculptor who has been able to live by his art for 84 years is rare.

Equally striking to me, however, was the contrast between their good luck and the stories of other equally gifted and innovative artists who struggle with isolation and poverty. In particular, I wonder if two gay men of color would have found the welcoming attitude Emile and Brooks did. I doubt the Masonic organization whose mural represents Emile's largest work would have given him a commission if he had been non-white. Or a woman.

(History of San Francisco mural at Union Bank of California, by Emile Norman)

Lesbian artists of any ability are much less likely to be treated kindly by rural neighbors (even in a liberal place like Big Sur) or the arts community. They must contend with continuous sexism, veiled and incidental as well as outright violence and predation. If one of a pair of women is attractive by conventional standards, the men who enter their circle are likely to hope for a sexual conquest -- all dykes really want, after all, is the right cock, either from a manly man or, these days, from another queer. Or so the myth persists.

And with denial of access to circles of influence comes poverty. No chance to live atop hillsides, commune with nature, avoid wage-earning, and travel for inspiration.

(Solarium in home of Emile Norman and Brooks Clement)

Paula Gunn Allen died last month, far too early, with inadequate support at the end of her life. She had managed, while contending with her cancer, to buy a mobile home for herself (all she could afford) but it and most of her belongings were destroyed in a fire not long before she died. A lesbian of color poet, novelist, historian -- once the short-list for Pulitzer -- one of the greatest minds of our generation, but her death brought no public memorials that I've seen outside a few feminist blogs. And not even the Generation X blogs. It's as if she never existed.

I'm deeply glad Emile Norman is getting deserved recognition. I'm even more happy for the apparent happiness of his life. Still, it's not the face of minority art and artists. Not nearly enough.

(Polar Bear by Emile Norman)

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SOME NOTES ON BLOGGING

("Corfu Lights and Shadows" by John Singer Sargent, 1909, Transparent and opaque watercolor over graphite pencil on paper; a large, high-quality framed print of this has hung at the foot of my bed for 17 years, the first thing I see in the morning and the last thing at night)

At the rest of sounding like Thomas and his Friends, who are psychologically stunted around the issue of Usefulness (and avoiding public humiliation): My definition of art includes what Sharon Bridgforth refers to as "raising the energy". When I create, I seek to not only reflect my perception of reality in such a way that you have a chance at sharing the experience, but I also feel obligated to walk in beauty, to avoid anger or despair as destinations, and to weave into the fabric of my creation a belief that the viewer/reader has just as much expertise about the world as I do.

How well I achieve these goals depends on my skill level that particular day, of course. Holly Near once said that nonmonogamy was a post-patriarchal idea that we were trying to implement in a patriarchal environment. I think this goes for almost any of our best ideals: We have goals, and then we have reality. The tension between the two, the gap, can be extremely productive and even joyous if self-hatred is under control.

I bring this creative ethic to my poetry, my fiction, my essays, and my blog equally. I'm new to blogging, and have tried to learn the craft from reading others' efforts. Some conventions I follow, some I don't. For instance, I don't have a "Blogroll", I have a list of what blogs I'm actually reading regularly. I don't link to something unless I have derived good from it. No trading favors for me. I'm not in this to curry power and influence: I already have that in my life.

I also strive for graphics to accompany my text which offer an added dimension, not just illustrate my words. This means I spend a lot of time sweeping the web for interesting visuals, and my saved images files are enormous. I do my best to credit the creator of the graphic -- this isn't always possible, there's a great deal of anonymous stuff out there, but I search for origin when I have any kind of a clue.

I do this for two compelling reasons. One is the example we set for one another in the 70s, the heyday of lesbian-feminism, to credit our sources. We saw this as a behavior men did not tend to do unless legally or academically required, especially white men: For them, it was all about claiming territory by sneaking it away from others, and building ego through ideas. Our cooperative model, however, led to essays and even fiction being peppered with footnotes at the bottoms of the page, acknowledging the influence/conversation/support of another woman for our comprehension or embellishment of a particular thought. I first noticed it in the pages of DYKE: A Quarterly, but it was common in Sinister Wisdom, Common Lives Lesbian Lives, Chrysalis, Quest, Feminary, etc. Even graphic artists did this, such as Alison Bechdel in her strip Dykes To Watch Out For with her "Tip o'the nibs" squeezed into the margin.

The second reason is that I am assiduously trying to comply with the Web Accessibility guidelines spelled out at Wikipedia. Labeling a graphic means that text recognition software used by a blind computer reader, for example, can hear the caption and description of that image rather than just hitting the alphabet soup of graphics code and skipping over it. The blog server I'm using (Blogger) tends to limit my ability to create large and click-to-enlarge graphics, another accessibility recommendation, but I'm working on that as well.

As I have stated before, I avoid the practice of using some goofy riff to label a link instead of a clear description. This is an obnoxious demand that the reader either click on the link to find out what it's actually about (not all of us have the time and energy to live at our keyboards in this fashion) or ignore what might be something we really want to see. We should have enough information to make a choice. Some big-name political blogs are really terrible about this, and I've gotten into the habit of never clicking on an unclearly-labeled link. If someone won't make the effort to synopsize content into a handful of words, then it must not matter to them very much if I actually go look at it.

Conversely, I was inspired today by Liza Cowan's essay at her blog See Saw about the value of links, the revolutionary impact it's having on our discourse and our ability to not only "follow our bliss" but locate kindred souls out there in Cyberia. Liza says "Links are often my favorite part of blogs. I’ve found some of my most valuable resources by following links, not only in the body of the text but also by following the URL’s embedded in names of reader comments."

I, too, check out the profiles of someone whose work has reached me in some strong way. Ironically, although I knew Liza as a sister leader in our movement for decades, it wasn't until I saw her name in the comments section of a blog (unfortunately, not a blog which allows profiles to come through) that I was motivated to Google her down and commence one of the most rewarding relationships of my life.

(May your friendship spread all over the world -- Shen qing hou yi ji wu zhou)

I think the nature of reality is complex. Usually, more complex than we can comprehend, but dumbing it down in response is a major mistake. The truth is never simple. And art, communication, reform, atonement, any means of growth should simultaneously embrace as much of the complexity as we can see while earnestly attempting to deliver it in a comprehensible form.

One of my mentors, Terry Galloway, a genius of a playwright, dramaturg and director, always stressed that if we have been given an audience, we are not to indulge ourselves at their expense. We have a responsibility to work our asses off, to not intentionally confuse or insult them, to share with trust and goodwill. She was quite fierce about leaving adolescent embarrassment behind, and I often hear her voice in my head when I'm trying to edit a piece.

And, going off on a related tangent, here's a request: When interviewing an artist, please stop asking them the meaning of what they do. The meaning is in the piece itself, and what you get from it. Artists seem to feel compelled to answer these damfool questions with a long string of arcane solipsism which differs from the interviews with football players after a game only in vocabulary. The reason why someone wins a game is because they played better. The reason why an artist did X is because they thought it looked/sounded good. If you want to dissect the artist's psychology, point out that the reason why their faces are mostly expressionless or their conversation tangential is because they lived with a control freak molester, go right ahead but don't ask the artist to participate in it.

So, do offer me feedback and feel free to talk about anything at all in your comments, as long as its not white supremacist, woman-hating, or otherwise oppressive, and you're not simply hyping your own self. (If you do, I'll delete it swiftly.) Aim high, forgive yourself, and as Garrison Keillor says, do good work.

I leave you with a department store product page for HEMA, in the Netherlands, that is a stunning example of how creative a web catalogue can be. Wait patiently for the page to load, then keep you hands off your mouse and watch the place go wild: HEMA.

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HAPPY ANNIVERSARY, LIZA!

(Self portrait by Liza Cowan, copyright hers 2007)

This night one year ago, I wrote my first e-mail to Liza Cowan.

I knew of her for at 30+ years, and her influence on my life had been intense. As one of the founding voices of Lesbian-feminism, her courage and clarity had helped bring me to similar attributes. And, I'd written her decades earlier, when she and Penny House were co-editing DYKE: A Quarterly. I was living in a Lesbian land collective that subscribed to DYKE, and we'd noticed their publishing name was Tomato Publications. We'd had discussions about why that name -- it certainly wasn't from the sexist term for women, because Liza was one of the language pioneers helped us unravel gender role conditioning.


Eventually, I sat down and wrote her (circa 1978), posing the question: "Why Tomato Publications?" She wrote me a postcard back that began "Why not?" A familiar humor, now. Then she explained they'd read a national study which said that men's favorite vegetable was cucumbers, while women's was tomatoes.

Somehow our physical paths never crossed in all that time, although they could have more than once. She remained an influence across a distance. I often wondered what she was doing now.

In June of 2006, I began writing what Liza has called the Great American Lesbian Novel. Since the main character was based on me, I gave her the same connection to Liza that I had, and you can't write a novel about politically-active and culturally-revolutionary 70's dykes without mentioning Liza Cowan more than once. Some time during that summer, I found out that Alison Bechdel was having an art show at a gallery in her town of Burlington, and when I investigated it, I discovered the gallery was owned by none other than Liza. Now I knew what she was doing. I found the Pine Street Art Works website and munched my way through it, then went on to Liza's personal website and discovered her art.

Which blew me out of the water.

In August, partly as an antidote to extreme isolation and personal difficulty, I did something I never had before: I posted a comment to a blog. It was in response to attacks on Lesbian cultural institutions and to some really shitty thinking about children, both of which I found impossible to ignore. I was attacked, then defended, then found a small but growing online voice. In the course of that thread, Liza posted -- not about the main topic, about something else, but it was clearly her. Kinda cool.

I've been a leader since I was a teenager, and an artist (writer) for longer than that. I really despise the American cult of celebrity, how people fawn on those who have fame and a certain kind of ability. I find it self-disempowering and just plain icky, especially if I'm on the receiving end. If you want a relationship with me, ask for it, and accept my no if that's what you hear. If you want to fantasize about me, I don't give my consent. And if you don't have a personal relationship with me, trust me, you don't know me through my poetry, my other writing, or my activism. You know only those aspects of me.

I have demons and damage. I also pretty much like myself just fine, but the reasons I like myself are not necessarily what you'll see from my public persona. So I don't indulge in being star-struck, and I don't let others aim it at me. It's really easy to discourage, if you're honest and not passive-aggressive out it. And, of course, if you don't secretly crave it.

So I was reluctant to write Liza what I wanted to write her, which was basically, how the hell are you? How's it been for you the last couple of decades, as we've seen our movement revised, reviled, lied about in every possible way, and still they can't shut us up or kill us off? Mostly, I wanted to know if she was happy, what she was thinking about, and how she was expressing herself. It mattered to me.

I also wanted to tell her how much her work had meant to me and my life, because I think every artist and leader deserves to hear that in a non-adulatory way. But I had to make sure I wasn't coming from a place where there were any strings attached. Just a "thanks" was appropriate, I felt.

(Photograph by Liza Cowan, copyright hers)

So, it took me until October 13th. I had gone back to her website often, to look at the art again -- great art is something I never quite get enough of. And finally I wrote down what the art sparked in me, read it over, decided it was "clean", and posted it to her website.

Only it wouldn't go through. I tried three times and I kept getting rejected. I remember laughing out loud, thinking, "Well, either this is a sign or you're just not geek enough to figure out what's wrong." I let it go and went back to work.

A couple of hours later, though, I remembered there was another e-mail address listed somewhere on the website -- I'd noticed it because she'd used her real name, something few people did with their e-mail addresses any more. I went back, found it, and fired off my thanks. I returned to work.

Fifteen minutes later, she answered.

She knew who I was, had noticed and appreciated my comments on the thread, and we began talking. It's been a year of serious conversation. A completely cyber life, but I consider her a friend, a sister (in the 70's sense), and one of my most crucial supporters of my writing. She has a major gift for fostering the art of others, as well as her own -- as long as you work with her as an equal, she's not charmed by either self-abasement or self-absorption. She's hilarious. She can express herself as well as I can -- and, not to be immodest, that's the highest compliment I can pay somebody. She's an extraordinary mother; we bond a lot around mothering. She's generous and self-maintaining. She knows how to have reciprocal relationships where that's appropriate. She's loyal and she honors confidences. Her intellect includes Jewish irreverence, deep pragmatism, pop culture, academic, anti-academic and Buddhist ways of thinking. She's happy being a woman, and she defines that her own way. She's an extraordinary ally around class -- I trust her as much as I trust most working-class people, because she's worked her ass off to sort through the shit we get about class in this culture.

(Self-portrait by Liza, after a day of painting, showing necklace made for her by her oldest daughter Willa)

In other words, she's just fine, and better than ever.

So, thanks for the year, Liza. Hope there's many more to come. I've written two novels and started this blog, all with your support. I was online with you when I got the call about my father's death, and you were a rock to me throughout that. You are unsentimental about the hardships of my childhood -- you're very clear that I've done a great job getting past it, AND I'd be better off if I hadn't had to waste so much time on healing. (I think so, too.) You've opened up to me slowly, honestly, and intelligently. I think you're swell. I'm so glad I had the good sense to write you, and just as glad you had the good sense to write me back.



You go, girl. Eat your tomatoes and never let them shut you up. I promise to do the same. Love, Mags

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