FICTIONALIZA- IN WHICH I PLAY A CAMEO ROLE IN MAGGIE JOCHILD'S NEW NOVEL

Ok, this is too cool. I've become a cameo.

For any of you interested in reading about Pine Street Art Works, Art Hop, Liza Cowan, Alison Bechdel and Phranc in an amazing novel-in-progress, I urge you to check out Maggie's Meta Watershed.

Maggie Jochild writes a blog that not only has some of the most astute political commentary available in the blogosphere, but she also regularly posts chapters of her two novels-in-progress: Ginny Bates, and Skene. This is a blog to bookmark! And read seriously, because we all have a lot to learn from Maggie.

In the novel, Ginny Bates, the main characters visit Pine Street Art Works during Art Hop in 2006. That was the year Alison Bechdel and Phranc teamed up for a show called Paper Play. And what a show it was! Ginny and Myra travel from Seattle to see it, and then go on to visit Emily Dickinson's home in Amherst. Oh, and in the novel they actually buy some art, and I agree to ship it the next week, which is how you can know it's fiction. In real life it takes weeks for me to pack and ship big pieces like that. And nobody has ever bought more than one piece from a show. But, hey, I'm not complaining. Bring on the art buyers, the more the merrier.

Fictional characters can pay with fictional money. Everyone else, I take checks, plastic or cash.

Comments

[Myra Bates-Josong]

What do you mean, fictional?

[Ginny Josong-Bates]

Yes, we went on a spending spree, a list of which is apparently going to get posted thanks to Myra running her mouth about it, but we BELIEVE in supporting art. And Liza's gallery has such a range to offer.

You know, years ago, before I was with Myra, I spent the weekend in Eureka, California, mostly hiking by the ocean and through the redwoods. But at one point I visited a small gallery, and there were a series of paintings on foil by someone whose name I cannot now remember, a man. One of them was of a hillside, and the title was "Five Miles From Home". It clenched my heart. The price was $150, and to buy it would have meant cutting back on movies and eating out for a month. So I walked out without it.

I'm telling you, not a week goes by without me remembering that painting, the way it caught the light, the emotion it evoked in me. I've never stopped regretting not having it with me now.

Myra would speak up here and say that most people in the world cannot even consider spending $150 on a painting, much less the over-inflated prices my own work brings, and I completely agree. But art is there for all of us. Myra's wall over her desk is covered with images she's gathered for three decades, and a fair number of them are art postcards she bought at shops and galleries when she could not afford the paintings. She bought a Fiesta Ware butter dish when she could afford nothing else, used books after the hard-back went into paper -- art is sustainable at all different levels.

And it's the one thing that "they" cannot actually suppress or award in a no-bid contract to Halliburton. Galleries and publishers foster revolution as much as writers and painters do.

[Jan]

Amen to your comment about Maggie's political astuteness, Liza. I learn from her blog every day.
Jan