porkchops & applesauce
when peter, on the 1970s tv show the brady bunch, was told by a girl he was keen on that he had no personality peter then spent the remainder of the show trying on different personalities to fit. hence, he did a weak humphrey bogart impersonation and when he asked his mother and alice what was for dinner he then repeated porkchops & applesauce with bogie's nasal vowells and hard consonants. did it work? i think personality is protean but also fixed.
personality is that core of our being that remains when we stop performing. but when do we stop performing? some of us are better actors than others but all of us do our pose in some fashion or another. in other words, what is the fundamentals of an artistic personality. i mean artistic in a very limited sense since i think creativity is not confined to those of us who write, draw, paint or make music or images. one can make a household with as much flair and verve was rembrandt creating an etching.
but what is make-up of the personality of the artist. much has been written and speculated and analyzed and profiled about it. one thing i've always thought common to most writers is that writers are by nature loners. but that is not always the case. i am a loner both by nature and preference but even loners crave company. i'm happiest when i can sit, read, watch, and write all by myself. but that doesn't mean i want to be alone, all the time. when i suggested that writers are loners to a poet friend he gave me a sidewise glance and said that he wasn't a loner. or something to that effect.
and but so anyway the personality as i've said at the beginning of this post is both fixed and also changing. the richard lopez writers friends meet is not always the same richard lopez co-workers know. both groups would of course recognize me since there are many things about my personality that are unconscious. however, probably there are certain dynamics of my personality that are emphasized with one group or another. there might be a personality profile for artistic types but i'm pretty sure that that profile is often turned on its head.
in the end peter did find a more perfect fit for a personality. he found it when he stopped looking. tho i'm sure there could be just a dash of bogie and a smidgen of whatever else personality he was trying on. for we are always changing into something else. i is an other, as the poet said. i is you.
7 Comments:
I'm not sure if it is necessarily about being a loner (though I tend to prefer my own company) as much as making a choice between writing and socializing given the limited time we have. Then again the internal nature of our enterprise can make us solitary birds. Ryan
agreed, ryan. but i know some people who are total social animals and even the thought of being alone for a few hours makes them nervous with dread. as for me i love being solitary and get a charge out of it. i love also the company of people, friends and especially my family, but i remember reading somewhere of another poet who was writing about correspondance. the poet said after a visit with a poet friend that he couldn't wait to get home to write his friend a letter. he could somehow say more in the missive than he could face-to-face. i think i know how that poet feels.
Likewise, I usually feel more at ease writing than in conversation, though it depends on the circumstance, topic etc. What perplexes me most are those writers who prefer collaboration. When people say literature is just wank I agree. It is something best done alone.
ha ha! yes, ryan, i do enjoy a good wank now and then but i do like to collaborate too and have done so a few times. i'm in the middle of collaborating with john bloomberg-rissman on a series of sonnets. what i like about collabs is that it breaks me out of my received forms and habits. if writing is like a sex act it is also about many kinds of acts that are done singly, couples and in groups. the pleasures we get are both selfish, as in my pleasure, and unselfish, since we are sharing. but like you i also would rather be alone but it depends on the circumstance. i was in an email conversation with a poet this morning and i thought that i'd rather have that conversation not in pixels but face to face over a few beers. then i'm sure that if i had that conversation over a few beers i'm sure i'd be itching to get home and write an email to that poet with real depth of feeling.
Okay, okay, I concede that the logic of my analogy was going to exhaust itself. When will we see the progeny of this collaboration?
hopefully we shall unleash the mutant spawn in the near future. look for upcoming tag lines like I WAS A TEENAGE SONNET or SON OF SONNET: THE BEGINNING.
we'll see.
Will do. R
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