In Life As In Art is a personal blog foremost, the harmless kind where thoughts are put down for no particular reason other than for me to make sense of them and keep a record. I edit academic texts for a living, which means that my voice must take a back seat while I amplify others’. To keep sane and not lose my voice entirely, I need to write.
In this blog, I’ll be mainly writing about the books and graphic novels that I read. There might be a personal update or two in between, but I will try to keep the blog from turning into self-absorbed noise.
Art is not apart. It is a continuum within which all participate; we all function in art, use the skills of art, engage in the action of artists, every day. Underneath the surface distinctions that make individual lives seem very different, art is a common ground we share.
Eric Booth, The Everyday Work of Art
Art has to be a kind of confession. The effort, it seems to me, is: if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover, too, the terms with which they are connected to other people.
This has happened to every one of us, I’m sure. You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discovered it happened one hundred years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.
James Baldwin (Interview by Studs Terkel, Almanac, WFMT, Chicago, December 29, 1961)
It is hard to find people who know how to listen. Perhaps that is why blogs are written.