Post-Pasadena

Art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

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Sunny California

I had a wondrous time at Fujimura Institute with Joe Gallagher, Makoto Fujimura, Pete Candler, Jia Kim, Esther Meek, Curt Thompson, and Shann Ray. And some other in-residence Fujimura Fellows. Writers, filmmakers, philosopher, neuropsychiatrist, painter, cellist! Many chats, interviews, and a concert...

Most of all, thank you to Joe and Mako for inviting me. Thanks to writer Kristen Havens and actor Keisuke Hoashi for picking me up at LAX and taking me to dinner in Culver City and showing me their interesting life. Thanks to Dea Jenkins for a ride back to LAX. Thanks to Stephen Dudro for showing me around the Huntington and gardens on my first day before events began, and to Joe for taking me to the Norton Simon Museum in a free hour. Thanks to Eric Tai for the hand-drawn map, and to Julia for the kintsugi workshop.

And I flew home and caught a bug along the way, alas, but it does not seem to be The Bug.

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Lady Word of Mouth

I am planning to pay more attention to my Lady Word of Mouth site in this time of launch and event cancellations, and hope you will as well. Just yesterday my keynote talk and workshops were canceled in Albany, and I am sure many such planned or tentatively planned events are simply not going to happen. Please give some extra love to writers, artists, and indie filmmakers in this peculiar time. Today a page for Sally Thomas's new book, Motherland, went up. Please take a look!

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St. Patrick's Day Pandemic Book Launch

On facebook, I posted an imaginary book launch for Tuesday, when my novel, Charis in the World of Wonders, will be released. Ignatius has bumped up the pub date, and so perhaps they are hoping for the good interventions of the saint! That would surprise Charis, the Puritan girl, I expect...

At Cairn: Culture Care

Fujimura Institute 
Culture Care Day
Wednesday, June 24, 2015
Cairn University
Chatlos Chapel
200 Manor Ave.
Langhorne, PA 19047

"Join friends of the International Arts Movement and the Fujimura Institute for an evening of lectures and performances exploring Culture Care.

"IAM founder Mako Fujimura (author, Culture Care) will host an afternoon discussion with Dr. Esther Meek (philosopher and Fujimura Institute Fellow) and Dr. Peter Candler (author and Fujimura Institute Fellow) and Marly Youmans (poet/author). The evening benefit concert will feature Danielson and The Nine-Fruit Tree, MAE, Andrew Nemr with Max ZT, Ruth Naomi Floyd, Marly Youmans, Ron Witzke, and white lotus."

My event schedule for the day, subject to lots of change as we approach the day. This is probably not the final word:

Poetry and fiction reading at 11:00
Interview, conducted by Makoto Fujimura, after lunch
4:15-5:00 p.m. I'll be joining the panel on culture care. Chatlos Chapel.
6:30-9:30 p.m. I'll kick off the benefit concert with a tiny poetry reading. Chatlos Chapel.

Strong-minded words from Makoto Fujimura:

Younger artists often ask me whether their art is "good enough," and whether they are called to be an artist. My answer is: "if you are not sure, you are not called." That may seem harsh, but the reality of the arts requires that we follow our calling no matter what others think, or even what we believe ourselves. When art is simply what we must do to stay true to ourselves, it is a calling.

It is not surprising that Emily and Vincent--and their art--were marginalized, for both intuited that such an exiled existence was the only way to remain consistent with their humanity given the cultural pressures of their time. Yet  more than a century later these two exiled souls still speak eloquently to what our hearts long for. Her poems give us words to express our own resistance to utility. His paintings offer parables of beauty that sow seeds of authentic being into our wounded, dehumanized souls. Their works are antidotes to utilitarian drive for commercial and ideological gain, remedies for the poison in the river of culture. They offer our dying culture unfading bouquets, gifts of enduring beauty that we do not want to refuse (p. 63, Culture Care.)

...who you are and what you are built to do...

from Michael Lind, at The Smart Set:

"Artless: Why do intelligent people no longer care about art?"

The fine arts don’t matter any more to most educated people. This is not a statement of opinion; it is a statement of fact...

What happened? How is it that, in only a generation or two, educated Americans went from at least pretending to know and care about the fine arts to paying no attention at all?

Our culture...

The argument for culture care--

"Ki-Seki"
© 2014 Makoto Fujimura
Mineral Pigments, Sumi ink, silver, and gold on Kumohada paper
60.25 x 45.25 x 1.25 in
Private Collection
Prints are available - click here.
Frontispiece to Culture Care.

Though I've been and am still awash in away track meets, graduation ceremonies, awards nights, prom, and other festivities that pop up toward the end of a school year, I'll leave a little sheaf of quotes from my current reading. I'll be reading some more from the book while I am hanging out at the Toyota shop later in the day--it'll be a good clash of sensibilities, or maybe a

reminder of the need for repair!

The book is Makoto Fujimura's Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for Our Common Life, which I am spending some time with in preparation for reading at and participating in the June Culture Care Summit, sponsored by International Arts Movement and Fujimura Institute, at Cairn University in Philadephia. Here are some quotes from the part of the book that is foundational and sets up the terms of his argument for change.

In the aftermath of two World Wars, artists began to articulate the culture's dramatic loss of humanity... artists recognized the gap left by the weakening witness of the church in culture and increasingly came to see themselves as secular prophets and priests with a call to "speak the truth" against the "establishment." They intentionally isolated themselves from society and produced work aimed at shocking people into recognizing and decrying the horrors of the age. As critic Robert Hughes has noted, "the shock of the new" became a way of life in the twentieth century modernist experiment.

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Artists have been pressed--sometimes willingly and sometimes not--to speak not for their own work, vision, and principles but for (usually leftist) ideologies. The implicit and explicit cultural pressures for ideological uniformity are so high that one could say that in the culture wars artists are free to express anything other than beauty.

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With the exception of ideological uses, today's art has been commoditized to such an extent that we often see commerce as the prevailing goal of art, and value the arts only as transactional tools to achieve fame and thus wealth.

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Why is Culture Care needed? From the perspective of the arts, it is because today, an artist cannot simply paint; a novelist cannot simply write; a pianist cannot simply play. Utilitarian pragmatism and commercialism so thoroughly pervade culture that without some shift in worldview and expectation, what we do as artists--the activities of the arts--will be neither sustainable nor generative. We will not be able to resist their use as weapons in the culture wars. 

We need to recognize our time as a genesis moment.

Order here.

I recommend it--the book is suffused with Makoto Fujimura's bright vision of a world that is generative for artists and others, a world that flourishes and produces arts that our descendants will find worthy and beautiful. As a Christian, Mako tends toward the ideas of fruitfulness and wholeness that pervade the book. It is a book for anyone who cares about the vicissitudes of culture, and where our culture is headed after Modernism and its aftershocks.

The Magician's Card

The Magician’s Card by Marly Youmans

Poet, novelist, and short story writer Marly Youmans has written a compelling response to Makoto Fujimura’s On Becoming Generative: an Introduction to Culture Care! In the 10-page essay, Youmans explores the role of the artist in caring for culture through the powerful story of her friend Louis D. Rubin, Jr. You can download the full PDF for free here.

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About Fujimura Institute. Wander around in the project, resource, and event pages.