EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

Words on Words and Songs on Sound

My beat is art history and I’ve spent15 years reading nothing but non-fiction loosely or closely related to art.  My knowledge of contemporary literature  is tenuous at best; my familiarity with music worse but I have a belief based on truly profound levels of ignorance that something equivalent to “every painter paints himself” happens in all media whether literary, aural or visual. Hollywood films and Broadway musicals continually demonstrate that the best are all about acting and showbiz: The Sound of Music, Chorus Line, 42^nd Street, The Producers etc. etc.. There are even more movies in the same vein.¹ The last one I saw – Ewan MacGregor in Salmon-Fishing in the Yemen (2012) – is all about putting on a Hollywood production in reality with Ewan MacGregor, a Scottish salmon specialist, as the director and a striking Yemeni sheik in shades as his wealthy producer.

Last month Christine Brooke-Rose died. I read her obituary in the New York Times yesterday morning, the first I ever heard of her.² She was an inventive writer, so it said, a linguistic escape artist who donned “self-imposed syntactic shackles” in book after book. In Between she called into question the very nature of identity through avoiding the verb “to be” in all its forms. In Next, a book about have-nots in London, she skipped the verb “to have.” In Texterminator - the title alone makes my point - famous literary characters by Austen, Flaubert, Rushdie meet in San Francisco to plead for their continued existence. Whenever I hear about the art of a great musician, poet or writer, I am continually struck at how self-referential their work is. Art from fine minds always seems to be about creation and the creative moment with books on writing, poems on poetry and songs on sound.  

1. See "Eco on Musicals" at: http://www.everypainterpaintshimself.com/blog/echoing_eco_on_musicals/

2. Margalit Fox, "Christine Brooke-Rose, 89, Inventive Writer", New York Times, Tuesday April 10th 2012, p. A17