If you like this blog, are you paying a red cent for it? Ah, the beauty of modern life, when the artists starve. But, but, but, you say, go get yourself an advertiser! Go get one yourself, say I, what I do is write. Get an agent! you say. Already written to and been turned down by 30 agents, say I, what I do is write. Oh, you have to schmooze, go to writer’s conferences to get an agent! I don’t schmooze, say I, what I do is write. It takes me all day to write; I have to concentrate on it to do it properly. I do a blog because what I write is good, but no-one will publish it because it’s not Dan Brown or J.K. Rawlings, which will surely bring in the big bucks, and they were never turned down by anyone, you know. Right.
Am I implying that people nowadays have no vision or judgement? Bingo! But does anyone play Bingo any more? After all, it requires everyone to be on the honor system, and what is that, anyway? Can’t we all just say that we hate big CEO salaries one month and then knuckle under and get one from a lobbyist, a few months later?
And independent films are never any good, and even if they were, distributors would always make sure the finest of those films would get wide distribution, wouldn’t they? In a pig’s eye! And I sold more than 93 copies of a book for children about saints last year, in a world that could sure use them, but who reads or buys books or cares about saints any more? Or children, for that matter. Oooh, am I being bitter and cynical? Bitter, yes, cynical, no. I speak the God’s truth, no more, no less. But then so did the original cynic, so, yes, I am a cynic, living like a dog in the marketplace, saying (as I’m sure Diogenes would have, if he’d had the chance) “The Emperor has no clothes on!”
But in order for you to believe it is the truth, I will have to lock it up from you and charge you for it. Honestly, I wish I could charge you for it, because until Utopia arrives and we don’t need money to buy groceries, pay is a good thing. And until it doesn’t take all day to write something worth reading, so that one can’t do it in the spare time carved from around another job, writers worth their salt (that’s pay, by the way) will need to find a way to make a living off their craft. Yet I maintain that we can’t get by without beauty; I see in the paper where a person can die of boredom. But we pay good money for our boredom!
Antoine-Auguste Parmentier understood that if you want people to value a thing, you don’t give it away free. He was the great French promoter of the potato, and has as a result many potato dishes named for him, a nice tomb in Pere Lachaise, a Boulevard and a Metro stop named after him. What Frederick the Great did in Prussia by force, Parmentier did through cleverness, and with a little help from two or three stiff sieges and famines. According to that well-supported-by-advertising free online information service known as Wikipedia, Parmentier was up against a scientific community that firmly believed the New World import known as the potato would give you leprosy (meanwhile, the Prussians were happily eating theirs without apparent ill effects), and he literally couldn’t give them away, so…
He locked up a whole warehouse of seed-potatoes and I suppose plants, and put an armed guard on it by day, with strict orders to allow people to help themselves once they had bribed the guards and strict orders not to guard the warehouse by night. And don't you know that those clever farmers got all sorts of potatoes and felt very pleased with themselves? What a genius the man was! He deserves two Metro stops, as far as I’m concerned…
Speaking of which, yesterday’s sunrise here in Bryan/College Station should have been locked up in a very exclusive room at the Louvre, or perhaps had a best-seller written about it, and then tickets sold to the first 1000 lucky winners of something or other, because anyone not looking at the sky between the hour of 7:00 and about 7:15 missed out on a unique moment in meteorlogical history – oh, wait, most days are unique… (ouch!). Seriously, many cloudy-blah mornings may come and go, each unique in some obscure way, but this was overwhelmingly and absolutely unique.
It began with the fact that the sunrise was clearly going to be a purply-pink color, with rays of gold-tipped magenta, and moved on quickly to the fact that the clouds seemed to be observing a strict adherence to patterns of parallel bands, at all scales of existence, so that tiny shimmers like the patterns of owl-feathers could be seen in the finest edges of things, as well as great waves precisely like the patterns on the sand of a placid beach, and frankly Marcelled clouds of in-between size were to be seen, all over the sky, from the wispiest edges of things to the thickness of a good blanket of stratus, with a taste and complexity that makes me think Someone read my blog about Lombardy Poplars, and how they seem like man-made down-beats in the landscape.
You can forget the “man-made,” because I have been reminded that repeating patterns are part of the toolbox of God, and that music began, after all, in the throat of some nightingale and the chatter of some brook, and we are just imitators of the great Original.
Now, I will lock that up so that someone thinks it’s important, but I will tell the guards to take bribes, and give it all away.
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