Coda to “One always has to spoil a picture a little bit”

Seems I wasn’t quite done with the matter of Letter No. 139:

• I may have suggested that I think some sort of flaw is essential for a work to pass muster as art. Not so. Something that didn’t make it into the final draft, from the cutting room:
  • I could stare at a Vermeer for a month and never find the bad bit. Bach’s compositions are not diminished by their mathematical rigor. Is architecture not art because it has to meet exacting engineering standards and safety codes? It’s been said Ansel Adams didn’t make mistakes. Well, of course he did, but he threw them away. I bet some of those discarded prints were interesting. A few, perhaps, more interesting than the ones he selected for release. It happens.
• Another paragraph whacked from an early draft:
  • Maybe the crux is this: Perfection can intimidate by how it feels remote and machine-made. All artists use technology — a paintbrush is technology, and so are toe shoes — but when something is too much a technological feat rather than a creative breakthrough, we hold back emotionally. A British scientist named Ben Jensen figured out how to create a coating of vertically aligned carbon nanotubes that absorbs 99.965 percent of light. The result was Vantablack, the ultimate black, a perfect black, a black hole of color. It has uses as a coating, but to me, the only thing interesting about it is how it was made. I can’t imagine it having much use in art besides gimmickry. Sure, as an aging nerdboy with punk sympathies I’d love a pair of Vantablack jeans, but no one will ever use Vantablack paint to make a black painting that approaches any of Franz Kline’s. The irregularities in the paint and the stroke make art; Vantablack can only swallow light.
• I sometimes hear from an astute, intelligent Joggler named Chris, and I always appreciate his trenchant comments. Joggle 139 prompted this response from him: “But I have a bone to pick with your comment that, quoting Delacroix, ‘Cold exactitude is not art.’ Photography can be coldly exact and still be art. I've got a couple WPA prints on my wall — Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans.  Their art is in selection of subject, composition, angle, all that. The NYT obits regularly remind us of other photographers who produced images that qualify as art. ‘Exactitude’ is not, by itself, a disqualifying quality.” To which I say when you’re right, you’re right. Well said. Another bit of the essay excised by the sketchy dope who edits Dr Essai’s transmissions concerned how digital photographers have learned to improve their images by adding grain, to counteract the coldly exact way a computer makes a picture from the information collected by a camera’s digital sensor. This could be seen as nostalgia for film grain, but I think it has more to do with expressiveness. One thing that makes photos of 1940s and 1950s jazz musicians so evocative is the grainy chiaroscuro of those images made in terrible light with black-and-white film pushed to its limit.
• When I taught writing at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, I emphasized close reading of exemplary pieces by McPhee, Didion, Kidder, Talese et al. I tried to get my students to appreciate the craftsmanship and precision. Sometimes I had to address reasonable skepticism from a student who doubted that every little masterful element in a story was deliberate, never a happy accident. No one writes with that kind of calculation, went the argument; what about all the stuff that came to the author’s mind from seemingly out of nowhere and found its way into the story as the writer thrashed around, trying to find her way? You’re right, I would respond. There is a mysterious element of randomness in composition. That deft turn of phrase or resonant echo or telling snatch of dialogue go into a draft because the writer had calculated exactly what was needed in the fifth line of the 16th paragraph. But, I told my students, the great writers revise and rewrite and revise and rewrite on and on and on, and by the time they release a story into the wild, every word has been retained for a reason, every sentence had a purpose. Okay...so account for those bad bits, those wobbly graphs, the questionable digressions, the awkward transitions that you seem so enamored of as signifying art. Are those, too, intentional? Nope. Those are just miscues, errors in judgment, flubs. Experienced scribblers know the joy of looking over a published piece right after it comes out and immediately finding some clumsy prose that catches the eye before anything else. We groan and think, What idiot put that in there? (Then we blame the editor.)
• Some artists are more open to acknowledging flaws and human error than others. Saul Bellow once had a student ask, “Professor Bellow, what is The Adventures of Augie March about?” The author replied, “About 200 pages too long.”

If you need to refresh your memory of Joggle 139, or now have an irresistible urge to comb it for all its flaws, you may find it here.

Thank you for reading. Your comments welcomed.