How Felicity Came To Live With Us: A story about paintings, movies, Rob Norris, and ten-year quests

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Ten years ago, almost to the week, Erin and I went over to Austin to see the joint AFI/Alamo Drafthouse Ten Year Reunion showing of Dazed and Confused. Most of the cast was going to go; they were showing it on a giant outdoor screen “at the moon tower,” complete with keg beer, etc. Tickets were reasonable! We had very little money at the time — I was working, but my client wasn’t paying me often or enough — but we squeezed this out by eating cheap and whatnot.

We made it a weekend, and had dinner at a nice little bistro down on the quiet end of Sixth Street, where we dined with Ol’ Mr Rob at his suggestion — which is its own story, since Rob was in the early stages of dating Mrs Norris at the time, and was sufficiently smitten in an adorably obvious way that he rushed off at meal’s end to visit her at her coffee shop job. (Erin and I ended up getting married not very long after Rob and Joanna, as it happens.)

After Rob made his exit, Erin and I walked around the little gallery-cluster near the restaurant before heading back to the hotel. They were all closed, which is a crucial bit of data, but we saw something amazing and wonderful that resonated immediately with both of us. It was a completely serious painting of a very Victorian and proper-looking otter, done in a very formal style, entitled (in our memories) “Eugenia Smelt, Spinster.”

We made a point of going back the next day, but the price was completely out of reach. I remember it being something close to $1,000, which we simply couldn’t do at all. We left without her, full of regret, and in so doing made a critical error: we did not capture the artist’s name.

Time passed. Money became less tight again, finally. Five or so years ago, I remembered Miss Smelt and hatched a plan to find the painting, or another one by the same artist, as a gift for Erin. And so I began to search online for this phantom artist. I called the gallery, which had (inevitably) changed hands, so they had only a vague idea of the artist I was trying to find. I’ve been told any manner of stories about who she was, or what happened to her in my years of searching, and none of the stories were encouraging. She quit painting. She moved to Ouagadougou. She had a nervous breakdown. No one knows where she is. Her name? Oh, no idea.

All of this sucked. It sucked more because I had a really hard time constructing Google queries that didn’t produce page after page of hits for people who paint portraits of your pets — we loved Bob, but no thanks.

At some point, finally, I figured out who the artist was: Sarah Higdon, and she was clearly still painting. Suddenly, she was on the Internet, and I even managed to find a photo of the Eugenia Smelt painting (which Higdon named “Eugenia Smelt, Unmarried” — I figure the gallery owner took liberties, because Erin and I both remember it the other way).

Here it is, for reference:

Sarah Higdon Eugenia Smelt

Well, with a web presence, contacting her must be easy, right?

You’d think that. Not so much. I hit a couple email addresses at various galleries, and even one or two that I thought would be the artist herself, but never hit pay dirt. I even wrote to people who had other of her works. They always either bounced, or garnered no response at all. I’d really almost given up, until this April when I thought to try one more time. Here’s what I said:

Ms Higdon,

Some time ago — I think in 2004, but I may be mistaken [I was a year off] — my wife and I were dining at Cafe Josie in Austin on a trip over to see the AFI “Dazed and Confused” anniversary viewing. We remember the trip well, not just because of the fun we had on Saturday, but also because we saw some paintings through a gallery window near Cafe Josie that we really, really liked.

We visited the gallery on Saturday, and admired the works some more, but could not at that time justify spending money on art — the tech downturn was hitting our house kind of hard at the time. Thankfully, that state of affairs didn’t last, but it did keep us from taking one of the works home with us at the time. Foolishly, though, we failed to note the name of the artist whose work we liked so much.

Since then, we’ve periodically tried to figure out the artist whose work we saw then, but only recently have we made a real quest of it. That’s why I’m writing to you today: I think it’s your work we saw, and that it’s your work we want to hang in our house.

The paintings we saw that weekend were decidedly and delightfully odd: they were paintings of anthropomorphized animals in odd or vintage clothing, in the style of late-19th/early-20th family portraits. The animals are mostly, but not completely, realistic — more than cartoony, but definitely not photorealistic.

I think, at long last, that you are that artist. I first found your web site at SarahHigdon.com, but the clincher is that I think “Eugenia Smelt, Unmarried” (pictured on your Facebook page) was the painting we so fell in love with 9 years ago. Are prints available of that piece? I assume the original has long since sold, but do correct me if I’m wrong…

Best,

Chet Farmer

Sarah replied in less than two hours. When the first line of her mail was “Yay! Quests!”, I knew it was a good sign. Eugenia was of course long sold, and no prints exist, but she’d be happy to paint something similar for us on commission. Would I be interested?

YOU BET YOUR ASS I WOULD. Paypal ensued. The original plan was for this to be Erin’s birthday present — in July! — but when Sarah replied and delivered so quickly, I knew I couldn’t possibly wait.

The new painting arrived on Monday. I somehow managed to keep my mouth shut about it, and just left the box on the couch for Erin to discover when she came home from work.

Heathen Nation, please meet “Felicity Elkins, Alone with her Clam”. We are very pleased, as I think this photo makes obvious:

2013 05 20 18 13 21

Yay for Sarah Higdon, yay for cool paintings, and yay for QUESTS FULFILLED.

Finally, an asshole served in full

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Bitter, dejected, and fundamentally unsuccessful writer Robert Clark Young has had a pretty bad couple of weeks, and it couldn’t happen to a better asshole.

Young came to my attention first several years ago when he was instrumental in the derailing of a friend of mine’s career over false allegations that my friend stole work from another author. Brad had written an award-winning book, and was set to begin a tenure-track career at Mississippi State when this whole thing hit. Despite clear evidence he intended no wrongdoing and no small amount of support from the actual literary community, his book was pulped and his job offer rescinded. Watching this happen to a very talented friend was really, really awful. (The book was eventually republished — which tells you all you need to know about the plagiarism allegations — and you should read it, because it’s fantastic.)

Young was off my radar for a few years, until this spring. Remember that scandal about female writers having their articles on Wikipedia moved out of the “American Novelists” category and into the “American Women Novelists” category? The writer Amanda Filipacchi wrote about it for the New York Times, which shed a great deal of light on the normally fairly obscure process of Wikipedia editing. She had her article at Wikipedia vandalized and trivialized for her trouble — largely by a pseudonymous editor named “Qworty”.

It turns out Qworty had a host of “revenge edits” to his credit, frequently sliming writers he, for some reason, didn’t care for — including literary giant Barry Hannah, a mentor of Vice’s. When taken in toto, it became clear that the “list of writers Qworty hates” was overwhelming similar to the list of writers Robert Clark Young is known for hating. Imagine that.

The first link contains Salon’s rundown of the whole affair. The second is a drier but no less interesting discussion at a sort of ombudsman site about Wikipedia itself. Read both, and join me in the schadenfreude. Young has no job offer to rescind or recent book to pulp or awards to withdraw, so we’ll just have to content ourselves with the public shaming of a deeply creepy and vindictive jackass.

I’ll take it.

In these pics: LOTS AND LOTS OF JOY

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Of general interest, perhaps, are pictures of The Joy Formidable playing at Fitzgerald’s earlier this month.

Of more narrow interest are deeply joyful pictures of Frank and Hadleigh’s wedding weekend in Jackson, which was SO SOUTHERN.

(Heathen Nation: “How Southern was it?”)

Well, I’ll tell you: It was so southern that the officiant was a blood relative of Flannery O’Connor.

Finally, because if I don’t include this, someone will complain: one more pic of Joy.

Posted in Pix

Astros to Houston Area Women’s Center: Drop Dead

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The heretofore anchor donor for the Houston Area Women’s Center’s fundraising efforts has pulled out and abandoned them.

Help the HAWC with a single donation here. Or, better, do as I do and give them a monthly donation. You never notice it, but they damn sure will.

I joked about refusing to support or care anymore after their move to the AL, but this is seriously bullshit. They can fuck off as far as I’m concerned, for now and evermore. I’ll take what little baseball amusement I need from the Nats.

Par for the course with the GOP, of course

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Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) is so upset about the IRS targetting anti-tax Tea Party groups that he’s insisting that the IRS commissioner resign.

What makes this hilarious? Rubio is apparently unaware that, at present, there is no IRS commissioner, and hasn’t been since Bush’s appointee resigned last November. This is, in no small part, because the Senate Republicans are more or less refusing to confirm anybody for anything, though Obama’s folks aren’t pushing that point nearly hard enough.

Consequently, dear Marco, there is no head to roll here because there’s nobody in the office. Oops!

Two Bits about the IRS and the Tea Party

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First: I get that it seems untoward, but it’s a group hostile to taxation and shot through with some wingnuts. Complaining about increased IRS scrutiny seems a lot like NORML complaining about the same thing. Neither should happen, but when you have people paid to find lawbreakers and groups dedicated to changing/breaking those laws, well…

Second: there is, obviously, more to it than you’ll see on TV.

Saban’s Halo

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It appears Saban’s gridiron success is resulting in a dramatic uptick in applications to UA, and the upshot is a LOT more out of state tuition revenue:

Since 2007, Tuscaloosa has swelled its undergraduate ranks by 33% to over 28,000 students. Faculty count has kept pace: up 400 since 2007 to over 1,700. But it’s more than growth — it’s where the growth is coming from. According to the school, less than a third of the 2007 freshman class of 4,538 students hailed from out of state. By the fall of 2012, more than half (52%) of a freshman class of 6,397 students did. Various data from US News and the New York Times shows that the school’s out-of-state tuition cost — nearly three times higher than the rate for in-state students — rose from $18,000 to $22,950 a year during that period.

Add it all up — more students from outside Alabama paying ever-increasing premium tuition bills — and the school realized $50 million more in out-of-state tuition revenue for last fall’s incoming class than it did for the same class in 2007 ($76 million vs. $26 million).

It’s not just money, either:

For the admissions office, more applications mean more selectivity. Six years ago, 64% of students applying to the University of Alabama were accepted. By 2012, the acceptance rate had dropped to 53%. About one in four students from the 2012 freshman class carried a 4.0 high school GPA. The class also includes 241 National Merit Scholars, more than any other public university in the U.S.

Roll Tide.

This is immensely, profoundly fucked up.

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And I say this as a notional beneficiary:

BJ2VfooCcAAcgRj

Yeah, that’s right. The top-paid state employee is a coach of some kind in 40 states (unless I miscounted), excluding only Nevada, Montana, the Dakotas, Maine, New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, Delaware, and Alaska.

Via Deadspin.

Politifact is still truly, deeply awful

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Maddow covers it in depth here, but the precis is that they’re rating Martina Navratilova’s statement that one may be fired in 29 states just for being gay as “half true” instead of (as it actually is) COMPLETELY TRUE because of weaselword weaselwordweaselword. Check it out — even though they completely admit in the article that her statement itself was true.

Politifact is so deeply afraid of being seen as left-leaning that they repeatedly make up reasons to represent statements by those on the left as mendacious when they clearly are not.

Fuck. Them.

Birds of Prey Know They’re Cool

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Tiny HD cameras have made high-quality video way easier to do; what these guys capture would impossible without it.

What is it? Oh, just point-of-view footage of a falcon diving at 200MPH+ to snag a duck from above. Taken with a camera mounted on the falcon’s back.

Link fixed.

Life in the Future

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It’s sort of weird the degree to which I no longer think it odd that I need to coordinate business activities in any given day across more than 3 or 4 time zones.

My personal high is eight: Singapore, all four in CONUS, the UK, Vienna, and Abu Dhabi. It would’ve been nine, but by that point we no longer had an Indian subsidiary.

Every programmer’s conversation with finance people, ever

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Programmer: So we’ll see only record types A, B, and C, right?

Finance: Yes. That’s all.

Programmer: Never D? We have some D here.

Finance: Actually, yes. You need to do $special_thing with D records.

Programmer: Okay, so A, B, C, and D after all. That it.

Finance: That’s all. We promise.

(Weeks later)

Finance: Where are my E records?

It’s distressing to me the degree to which rigorous logical thinking is completely alien to corporate finance people. I am reminded of the wise words of my friend R., who said “Normal people don’t see exceptions to rules as a big deal, so they forget to mention them. This is why programmers drink so much.”

Books of 2013, #19: The Player of Games, by Iain M. Banks

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It’s possible that you, like me, actually thought there were two well-received writers with minimally different names: the author of the much-lauded and long-running Culture series of hard-SF novels, called Iain M. Banks, and the literary novelist unconcerned with spaceships and robots and impossibly advanced spacefaring civilizations called Iain Banks.

Well, hold on to your hat, because if you’re as under a rock as I was about this, you’ll be shocked to hear that they’re the same guy. (The differentiating “M” probably says more about the degree to which science fiction is considered a ghetto than anything else I can think of.) Banks has written ten works in the Culture, plus some other non-Culture SF works, and in addition to 15 works of literary fiction, all since 1984. That’s a pretty solid output for either name, and a tremendous amount of output for one dude, but there you go. It’s little wonder the Times named him in their 2008 list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.

Anyway, I’d been curious about the Culture books for a while, and Googled around to see where I should start quite a while ago. The easy answer is to read them in publication order. If you do that, as I did, you’ll start with 1987’s Consider Phlebas. And you may well stop there, because Phlebas is a goddamn train wreck of a novel that really didn’t hold together well at all for me. It remains one of the few books I’ve simply abandoned despite being well over halfway done; I realized there was nothing that could happen that I would care about, and that I was wasting my time. Learn from my lesson.

I mentioned this reaction to some Culture-phile friends, and several of them said “Oh, gosh, yes, Phlebas is a terrible place to start. Try again with his second one, The Player of Games. It’s much, much better. You can ignore Phlebas completely.”

And so I did, and so it was. I really enjoyed it, and tore through it in a matter of days. Banks’ Culture is a phenomenally advanced spacefaring civilization spanning galaxies; they’ve solved the FTL problem thousands of years before, live predominately on enormous man-made orbital structures, and are mightier and more advanced than any civilization they encounter — not to mention considerably more enlightened. They exist in a post-scarcity state, where people may do more or less as they wish provided they don’t harm others. From Wikipedia:

The Culture stories are largely about problems and paradoxes that confront liberal societies. The Culture itself is an “ideal-typical” liberal society; that is, as pure an example as one can reasonably imagine. It is highly egalitarian; the liberty of the individual is its most important value; and all actions and decisions are expected to be determined according a standard of reasonability and sociability inculcated into all people through a progressive system of education. It is a society so beyond material scarcity that for almost all practical purposes its people can have and do what they want. If they do not like the behavior or opinions of others, they can easily move to a more congenial Culture population centre (or Culture subgroup), and hence there is little need to enforce codes of behavior.

In The Player of Games, Banks gives us Culture citizen Jernau Morat Gurgeh, a famous game player and scholar, who by hook and crook finds himself recruited by the Contact organization — responsible for finding, evaluating, and possibly contacting other cultures — to visit a far-away civilization called the Empire, steeped in power politics and (frankly) a sadistic glee in the suffering of others. The Empire is FTL-capable and includes several star systems, but like isolated central Asian tribes of the 19th century, cannot comprehend precisely how outclassed they are by the Culture — who, for their part, really have no interest in fighting at all. They mostly want to discourage or destabilize the existing retrograde, barbaric societal order in the hopes that something more reasonable will arise.

Their means are simple: the Empire is ordered entirely around a fiendishly complex game called Azad. Empire citizens learn it from childhood; performance in Azad tournaments determines one’s place in society. The winner of the periodic tournament becomes Emperor. Having made contact with these barbarians, the Culture send Gurgeh to enter this same tournament, figuring a “filthy alien” doing well at their holy game might be the push they need. Madcap hilarity ensues, obviously.

This whole setup may seem obvious — a game used as a metaphor for both state and the competition between states, and used to highlight the differences between modern egalitarian societies and repressive ones, etc. — but Banks handles it with a deft hand, so it doesn’t ever come close to collapsing under its own weight (which is, sadly, a common problem in the so-called “literature of ideas”). Plot and pacing are miles ahead of Phlebas. I’m intrigued by the Culture, by its interaction with other civilizations, and by the ways in which Banks explored those issues here. This is idea-SF done very, very well, and I’m no longer surprised about why Banks is so beloved.

It’s a certainty that I’ll read more Culture novels, and soon, but I do intend to savor them; the sad news this year — and what prompted me to finally go read Player — is that Banks announced about a month ago that he has terminal cancer, and is unlikely to live more than another year. There will be no more Culture novels; his literary novel The Quarry will be his last. In the Culture, one gets the idea that genofixing has long since done away with anything as banal as cancer; it’s a damn shame that the mind who gave us this fascinating far-future place cannot emigrate there instead of dying in Scotland.

Books of 2013, #18: Zombie Spaceship Wasteland, by Patton Oswalt

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I’ll make this brief: Oswalt is brilliant, and is a gifted writer, but he allows his comic sensibilities to get in the way here. The memoir portions of this collection of essays and assorted other bits are very strong, and I’d love to see more of that kind of thing from him — God knows he’s good at it, and it seems likely he’s got more such stories.

But what drags this book down are the filler bits where it feels like he’s trying to force standup material into essay form. He actually addresses this in the book, saying explicitly that he’s insecure about the personal essay portions and hopes to do more of them in the future as his comfort level increases; I hope so, too. I’d happily buy and read more. As for the rest, I found myself skimming rather than savoring those parts of this otherwise solid debut.

Zombie Spaceship Wasteland at Amazon.

Books of 2013, #17: Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn

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Jesus, what tripe. This is a dumb person’s idea of what a smart person’s mystery is. It’s chock full of badly fleshed stock characters, entirely too many un-shocking developments that Flynn clearly sees as revelatory, and runs out of steam well before it runs out of pages. There is not a single “surprise” in the book that isn’t telegraphed WAY WAY WAY in advance, and that any halfway intelligent reader will see coming.

I’m reminded of something Dorothy Parker said: “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”

The only upside is that I now have a CLEAR CHOICE for “worst book read this year,” whereas before it was a tossup between The Night Circus and Empire State — neither are even in the same league of awfulness as Flynn, so congrats for that.

Books of 2013, #16: How to Sharpen Pencils, by David Rees

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Look. I’m not quite sure what to say about this, other than it’s brilliant. There’s a lot going on here that has nothing to do with pencils, but also a shocking and unironic amount that is, clearly, 100% about pencils. It’s weird, and very hard to describe.

It’s short, fun, and perfectly apes the sort of mid-century trade guides that you may have encountered in your youth with something that’s not quite a wink and not quite sincerity while being a bit of both. I mostly read it because Rees was on the JoCo Cruise, and seemed remarkably funny — plus, possessed of a completely nonironic enjoyment and knowledge of pencils and pencil history. I’m still not sure what inspired him to do this book, but I can say it was fun to read.

Also, owing to a post-cruise email dialog with Rees and my own nerdery, I now have distinct preferences when it comes to pencils. Make of this what you will.

Oh, one other MS150 thing

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Faced with the choice, we decided this was a measure of safety and not in any way creepy:

Sniper smaller

It may not be immediately clear what I’m talking about. Let me help.

Sniper cropped

Yup. The world we live in.

Still Standing: After the MS150

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Or sitting, or whatever. I rode the 100 on Saturday, and 66 on Sunday. I rolled into Austin at about 1:00 yesterday afternoon — inadvertently well ahead of most of my team, from whom I’d gotten separated. I lost too much time stopping on the long Saturday ride, so on Sunday I only hit one official rest stop to refill my water bottles; that turns out to be the secret to getting in ahead of everybody else.

It was: intense and amazing. I said as the weekend approached that I didn’t think I’d do it again if I did well this time around; training and preparation took so much time this spring that we missed or gave short shrift lots of activities we’d have liked to do. I’m not exactly sure when I changed my mind about that, but it was somewhere between Erin’s cheers at the century finish line and the intense team greeting we made a point to give all of our teammates when they arrived at our tent. This, it should be noted, is not universal — I didn’t hear anybody else making NEARLY as much noise when their folks came in, on either day. I think plenty of people end up on teams that are really just shared logistics at camp and little else, but the core of the Karbach team trained together all spring, and drank beer together, and as a result we really felt like a true TEAM. There’s even talk of doing more rides together this summer, which is something I’m absolutely going to do.

I should note that it’s not just me who had a change of heart about future MS150s; the Intrepid and Awesome Mrs Heathen (2013 Cheer Champion) was pretty clearly on board by sometime Saturday night, and probably for the same reaosns; on both days, she was enthusiastically helping to welcome our riders — an activity that extended well into Sunday afternoon, since we didn’t leave until about 5. It felt good to stay, and cheer, and encourage, and high-five, and just bask in the afterglow of the ride.

TL;DR? Was it hard? Yeah. I rode my bike to freakin’ AUSTIN. Was it worth it? You bet your ass.

Despite all this feel-good tomfoolery, do I have some snarky comments for you? OH YES:

  • Helpful hint: Check out what certain jersey patterns mean before you decide to use them for your whole team, especially if they’re not all made of monster climbers.

  • I’m no hardcore biker — I’m old and heavy and slow — but I also ride a pretty normal bike. By which I mean it’s only considered expensive when compared to Wal-Mart bikes. It’s a good bike, and it’s a nice bike, but it’s not super-fancy or anything. Buying a high-end tool when you’re a beginner runs the risk of making you look like an ass. ProTip: You don’t look like a jerk if you have to walk up a hill, unless the bike you’re pushing up the hill you couldn’t climb otherwise is $8,500 worth of carbon fiber race bike.

  • Oh, Austin, you’re adorable. Your tour course pylon placement can best be described as idiosyncratic. I’m all about you staying weird, but don’t you think “in a straight line” has some advantages vs. “all over the goddamn road?”

  • As long as we’re snarking on Austin: the signs insisting that MS150 riders ride only in the 2-foot bike lanes (that were filled with debris) had all the charm, authority, and effectiveness of a hall monitor whining about tardiness on the last day of school. There were 13,000 of us; the ROAD was our bike line.

So Here I Go

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Tomorrow morning at the absurdly early hour of 6:45AM, I’ll start the MS 150. If you haven’t ridden it, you are probably unaware that there are three starting points, resulting in three different distances for the first day. I feel strong, and the weather is good, so I’m planning on doing the full 100 mile route tomorrow.

Wish me luck.

I will, after the ride, reach out personally to each of you who have donated so generously in my name. I’m incredibly lucky to count such a generous and supportive group as my friends. I am amazed and gobsmacked by the level of support you’ve given me; at last count, over $2,500 has been donated to NMSS under my banner. That’s incredible. It’s a nice bit of good news, at least, at the end of a bleak and trying week — and it’s really only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the ride. With 13,000 other riders telling simliar stories of their friends’ generosity, it’s likely the final fundraising total will be more than $15,000,000 — and that’s over and above the cost of the event.

I mentioned this on Facebook yesterday, but I want to note it again, here: If you donated in my name with a particular victim of multiple sclerosis in mind, please share their name with me, by email or in a comment here; first names only are fine if privacy is a concern. I may need a boost on that 100 mile ride tomorrow, so I have written the names shared with me so far on my race bib. This ride is for all victims of MS, but my ride is for these people dear to my own friends in particular.

Thanks again.

(Here comes the final pitch: If you’ve been putting off donating, it’s not too late. Consider giving “to” the Karbach team generally instead of to me (we need a bit more then $6K to meet our team goal), or pick a name from that list that’s below the $400 minimum — riders who don’t reach it will have to pay it themselves, in addition to the hundreds it costs to enter the ride.)