It seemed fitting, as the first half of the double-feature AHS season came to a close this week that we screened the classic A Bucket of Blood at the library, which too is about art and fame and how both make monsters of us all. Also fitting that I am just about to start work on finalizing animal, vegetable, monster for publication this winter, and that book's particular themes on artmaking and monstrosity. Also, online conversations about the "art monster" cropping up occasionally. What is it that makes creatives sort of monstrous in a world that either at turns adores or ignores, depending on your genre and level of success?
AHS, in very Stephen King set of characters and setting, offers us the comparison on genius to parasitism, putting at it's center a failing screenwriter taking pills, known as"the muse", to not only be prolificly brilliant, but financially successful. Ditto his daughter, one of the best/worst AHS villains ever--one with not even a single redeeming quality (rare in that universe--even the anti-christ in Apocalypse was a bit more likeable.) The artists on the drug, mostly writers of some breed, spend a lot of time justifying their terrible behavior in the name of their own importance in the world. Their derision for the ordinary people, or the pale hacks who take the pill but lack the genius, goes deep. So much can be said of writers and their social vampirism--feeding and regurgitating the stories of others. The screenwriter's wife, who takes her interior design cues from instagram, predictably, becomes one of the pale people, assisted by her violin protege daughter, who repeatedly berates her mother for being talentless. Other characters, better characters, with talent but also with some sort of conscious are either murdered or self-destruct--a sense of moral right and wrong seemingly incompatible with the world of art and commerce.
I have a theory sometimes that scarcity is what makes the monsters monstrous...and nowhere does their appear to be more scarcity than poetry, a genre mostly ignored by even the tiny number of readers who actually read books at all. In some circles, the prizes, the accolades, the attention one may gain my climbing to the top of the pile of bodies is worth kicking a few other's down the side of the hill. It's this that makes poets snarky and mean, sometimes sheltering tiny egos that barely make a flicker. I've never seen the sort of fighting in other creative pursuits as I saw in various poetry pissing contests in the early aughts. Even now sometimes, though I am less in it, I hear world of some argument happening somewhere over things no one else in the poetry world cares about, one reason I have always preferred the company of other creative fields, They surely have their monsters, but still it seems different and far less shark infested waters.
