Closing Up

This is the End
Being that this blog has mostly been my artistic conversation with Luke, and being that I am now graduating STAC and moving onto the next phase of my life, I believe that it is time for me to bring this artistic journal, and phase of my life, to a close.

I have had some incredible times on this blog. It first began with my introspection into a world beyond reality; into a world of confusion and emotional turmoil. It moved into a blog documenting the process of my projects. Then it became my way of analyzing art and developing my library. Finally, it concluded as a combination of all three.

As I've said many times before, writing is how I make sense of the crazy and erratic thoughts in my mind. When this blog is gone, I will trust on my own that I am on the right track. I won't have Luke or anyone else to check on me. I'm taking off the training wheels and riding the bike. Not that Luke checked up on me too much anyhow, trusting that I basically knew what I was doing. Still, it is different now, without that pyschological cushion.

Right Now
Where do I stand? Well, this summer I am working for my father, taking Spanish tutoring, and travelling back to Romania. I can tell you that after all the stress of high school, I am delighted to have a bland office job. Half the time, I'm just reading the news or reading books while waiting for things to do. It's a simple, consistent life, and I like it quite a lot. It feels rewarding to work for money. At work, you get paid for your toils. At school, they give you a stupid amount of work and tell you "This is your own reward, so shut up."

I don't know if I would want to work an office job like that for the rest of my life, but if I were working for a corporation I truly believed in, I think I would be very happy. I could see myself as a higher executive of some sort. But I also feel I would want a job that involves interacting with people more, such as being a teacher. There are many possibilities. The future is bright.

I still have a desire to write and make art. However, I've been so happy to have free time, I've spent much of it lounging around. I started reading Diaries from a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, which I don't think is one of his more famous works, but I find it gratifying nonetheless. In a way, this blog has been my diary as a young artist. Many of my thoughts were concurrent with his. If I binded it in a book, could I market it? Probably not, but it's a nice thought.

I don't know if I want to become a full time artist, even if I had the choice. They say "if you do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life." Bullshit. Everything is work. When I was pulling together my book, was it all fun? No way! Sometimes it really sucked! I was not doing what I loved. I was doing something I needed to do that I mildly enjoyed but also drove me insane. So really, it doesn't matter if I'm working in art or anything else, because I'm going to be working no matter what. What matters is if, in the long run, you're happy with what you've accomplished and how you've contributed to improving society. That's what makes the work worth it, no matter what field you work in.


The Plan

STAC Blog
I am going to save a backup of this in a few safe places. Then this will be removed from the internet. Goodbye everyone.

EllenRoseWrites
I will backup and clear this out as well. My best posts are in my book, so there's no need to put them online. And everything else is just junk. Once I clear it out, I will decide what to do based on what I feel like writing and what I feel like posting.

My Personal Development
In lieu of my blog, I will start to journal more about my artistic issues as well as my thoughts for the future in general. This will help me maintain direction. Often, you know what you want to do deep down. It's simply a matter of listening.

Expectations and Art

For my Quest requirement, I decided that instead of working on an individual project (which I basically do in STAC anyhow), I would take a seminar on behavioral economics. As Steve Jobs said in his graduation speech, you can only connect the dots backwards, and sometimes the randomest subjects can contribute ideas in interesting ways.

One of the chapters in the book we are reading, Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, focuses on the effect of expectations. The basic premise is that if we believe something will be good, that will influence how good it actually is. For example, a 50 cent asprin will probably be better than a 5 cent asprin, but that's not because of the pill. That's because you assume the first pill will be more effective based on the price, so your body acts to release more hormones that decrease pain, which thus decreases your pain. This doesn't happen with simply price. Let's think about Coke and Pepsi. Most people prefer Coke. However, in a blind taste test, it is true that people tend to prefer Pepsi. This means that people will actively choose Coke over Pepsi, even if it tastes relatively worse. Why? Expectations. Coke is associated with a rich American cultural history. Pepsi is not. Coke is just a sugary soda with a great advertising campaign. We're all fooled by it, but in a way, that fooling can be good, because it makes us enjoy Coke a lot more.

Now my thought is, how does this apply to art?

Yesterday, I was browsing through the exhibits at the ESP showcase. Clearly, the students put a reasonable amount of work into their projects, and their projects were probably reasonably good (or at least not completely terrible). Still, it was hard for me to invest myself in their work. It was hard for me to take their poetry seriously.

Was the issue the quality of their writing? Or was the issue that these were a bunch of teenagers who are relatively unknown?

Of course I am not expecting the highest quality from a bunch of teenagers. However, especially in regards to the poetry, I didn't think there was a significant difference between these teenagers and current writers today. Honestly I'm not a big fan of post-modern writing today, but many are, so clearly there's a niche for it somewhere.

I think with much of this writing, especially nowadays, it matters less how you write and more how you look when you write. It's about the appearance of cool, not just with the book, but with the authors themselves.

Here's an example. For most people, Maya Angelou is the only living (or recently deceased) poet they can actually name. I haven't read too much Maya Angelou, but I assume she is reasonably good at what she does. On the other hand, I don't think her magic comes from the words alone. She is also an excellent speaker, and she has a very interesting life story. These things add to the image of Maya Angelou. See, I haven't read her poetry, and I already assume it's good.

I started reading The Stranger by Albert Camus last night, and as I was reading it, I couldn't help but think "Albert Camus is so cool." His writing did not contain any flowerly language, but I was completely seduced by his style, which is straightforward and light with a touch of cynicism. Perhaps the reason I was more instantly drawn in was because I read about Albert Camus in Cultural Amnesia, and Clive James spent at least 6 pages talking about how Albert Camus was so cool.

Look at him. Look at that trench coat.

This cool factor made the book all the more enjoyable, but it is likely created entirely by my own mental perceptions.

So perhaps one of the ways to make good art is not to improve craft, but instead to shape yourself as a human being to make yourself appear more charming and likeable. Then, people will go into your art with the assumption that it will be good because they like you, and the art will be much more pleasing to them because of that.

Foucault's Pendulum

I once read a New York Times article that said there is no shame in taking a break from or abandoning books. We are not obligated to books.

I must admit, I am extremely confused about what is happening in Foucault's Pendulum. I breezed through much of the middle on a car ride to Rochester, and I don't think I was paying enough attention, because I feel like I've basically opened to a random page. I am having a lot of difficulty following all of the medieval stories, and I think there are fundamental historical facts that I still don't know. For example, I still don't know what the Rosicrucians are, even though the book probably explained it and they are mentioned nearly every five pages.

One thing that I could do is start the book over from the beginning and try to catch up on what I missed. This, however, seems like a LOT of time that I do not feel like investing.

So I don't think I shall be joining Foucault's Pendulum Club. I am somewhat disappointed, but there are also many other books that I want to read, and I'm ready to move on to them, at least for now.

If someone can explain to me what's happening enough so I can figure out what I missed, I'll continue, but otherwise I'm throwing in the towel.

I Finished

I finished and I am in shock.

I did it again. I did an entire crazy self-produced project again.

And now that I did it again, I completely understand why I was so traumatized the first time, and why I abandoned music completely.

Making art product isn't just difficult. It's extremely difficult.

When I made the transition between creating for my blog and creating for my book, I did not realize how drastic it would be. Creating for my blog was a lot of fun for me. Even when I wrote something bad one day, I would have fun writing something else the next day. I kept it up for 100 days. That's a significant achievement. People enjoyed reading my blog. I even had someone find me during school to tell me how much she liked it.

Writing was my way of making sense of the world. It helped me contextualize my thoughts, and it also gave unpresidented solutions to my current conundrums. Writing was a way of mentally filing my thoughts about the things I could not discuss.

When I started the book, I stopped my daily creative writing because I simply lacked the time and energy. And I do miss it.

In the beginning of the project, I started seeing the same problems I encountered two years ago that I completely forgot about. Stress. Burnout. Time constraints. Perfectionism. Criticism.

It felt like Deja Vu, and in more ways than one. I realized that my last two years of high school were quite similar to my first two years of high school. They both began with an emotional crisis, and ended in a massive final project. Even many of the events in between are similar, but I don't want to get into details.

I was afraid that I would run into the same issues again. However, as I reflected further, I saw that I had fixed many of the mistakes I made in my first two years of high school. Instead of being depressed, I was happy. Instead of passing off school work, I was achieving the highest grades I'd ever received in my life. Instead of destroying my social relationships, I was healing them.

And now, I was going to do this project the right way.

My primary goal became to avoid burnout while still making a worthwhile project. In many respects, I succeeded. In other respects, I failed miserably. There were nights where I only got four hours of sleep because I couldn't get the project out of my mind. There were times where I ranted about all the work I had to do, probably for longer than I should've. However, I never yelled, I still did all my homework for my classes, plus my other STAC projects, and I even managed a social life in between.

Today was a rough day, and I must admit I didn't maintain my composure the whole time. In addition to feeling the final day pressure of the project, I was also attempting to sign up for my college classes for the first time (of course all the classes I wanted to take were full, and I somehow managed to place into Intermediate Spanish even though I've never taken a Spanish course in my life), I screwed up my homework for my behavior economics seminar, and my brother got me an oreo smoothie even though I don't like chocolate. Small things, but when the pressure is already built up, it's very easy to explode. I took a nap while listening to obscenely happy music, and thankfully that calmed me down before I started becoming really emotional.

That's the thing about emotions. Sometimes your mind has to say "Look, I know you feel upset right now, but you really have to calm down or else you may do something you'll regret later. The feelings will pass. You do not need to act upon them." Then you go and do a mindless activity you enjoy, like sleeping, or browsing Pinterest, or reading a book, and it's all okay in the end.

So I did a better job taking care of myself emotionally, and that's great. However, that's not the most important thing I learned during this project.

No. The most important thing I learned was having my own opinions.

I made the cover for my book, and I showed it to a bunch of people because I thought it looked quite nice. Most people agreed. However, I had a friend who told me he didn't like the green boxes because they looked "old fashioned, too much like 2006 graphic design." I was also told that my cover was not very relevant to my book, and the bland alternative cover I created was a better choice because it was more relevant.

Bland Alternative Cover

I told Luke these concerns, and his response was something along the lines of "2006? What the heck was graphic design like in 2006? Does this kid even know what he's talking about? I don't think these opinions are helping you. You don't need these opinions. You shouldn't even ask for these opinions. You can decide things for yourself."

Most people hearing that would probably agree and move on. But me? I nearly started crying, precisely because this is an issue I've been having a lot of difficulty with, not only as an artist but as a human being.

I realized that I seek confirmation in nearly everything that I do. And I mean everything. Art opinions, political opinions, opinions about school, opinions about what I should be doing in college, opinions about other people, even opinions about how hungry I feel in my own stomach.

As I went home that day, I thought about how I feel pressured by the people around me who tell me what I should do and think. I also thought about how I often attach myself to these kinds of people intentionally. If I don't like the pressure, why do I keep inviting people to come in and push me around?

I think that deep down, my fear was that I wasn't a good person. Left to my own devices, I feared that I would make the mistakes I always make that cause pain to myself and others.

However, after meditating to myself, I saw that deep down, I am not a bad person. My animal instincts are not nihilistic. I make mistakes as much as anybody else does.

Perhaps I felt that if other people decided things for me, I could blame my mistakes on them, and therefore not feel as bad about myself.

I thought about the times that people asked for my opinion, and I said things that were outright junk just to prove that I had something valid to say. If that was what I did for other people, isn't that exactly what people were doing to me? Most of the opinions people were giving me were probably half-assed, just a statement to prove they had something to say. Why do I need other people's half-assed opinions when I have my own? In fact, my own opinions are probably better for me, because I know myself better than others know me, and therefore I have an ability to make better choices for myself.

I'm starting to internalize a lot of things. Many say internalization is bad, and I would agree with that in most cases. For me however, I think internalization is empowerment. It's basically me saying, "I have these thoughts and opinions, and I'm not even going to say them because I don't care what you think."

Sharing invites opinion. Always. There will always be people who need to give some kind of response, even when it's not welcome. That's why it is good to be careful with your words.

I must admit, when I began this post, I planned to talk about how completing a massive project puts you into a state of shock that borders on existential crisis. But now, I'm feeling more optimistic.

Does this book have mistakes? Probably. Are there things I could have done better? Oh yeah.

But the most important thing is that I have matured a lot, and the lessons I learned during the process of completing this project will make me a better person for the rest of my life.

Design and Branding

In the beginning of April, I developed a spontaneous interest in graphic design. I particularly liked Swiss graphic design because of its simplicity and purity.

These are basically the standards for Swiss international style

• Sans-serif font in focus (specifically fonts like Helvetica)
• Angles
• Geometric shapes
• Monochromatic images

For my book, I thought it would be a good idea to implement this style. It's easy to do, it looks goods, and I like it.

Covers
These are my drafts for the front and back cover so far. I haven't decided as a title yet, so I simply put "Malarkey." The back will likely be filled with false praises.

I put a rose on the front cover because my name middle name is Rose and my blog was Ellen Rose Writes so it seemed appropriate. On the back I wanted the image of a garden, so I put a field of tulips. The green boxes are there for flavor. I think they add a nice touch.

The front cover has its text and images at an angle, while the back cover is parallel. I'm not sure if this inconsistency is an issue.

I am very pleased with this design, although I do not know how relevant it is to my book or its content. That is a bit concerning, but I could probably make something work.

Interior Layout

Translating Swiss design to the interior is not an easy task, considering that the design was mostly utilized on covers, which are more imagistic and less paragraph-based.

Fonts

To keep up the consistency of the cover title font, I made the headings in Helvetica (particularly Helvetica Neue but the two are quite similar). The text I put in Garamond because a number of websites recommended the two as a good match, and one website said that sans-serif fonts in large paragraphs are difficult to read, which I agree with.

Images

I've been debating how to include images into my work. Pieces that have long sentences and paragraphs do well with an accompanying top image.

However, poetry or lists do not fair well with this layout.

Text, where you go?

One solution is to center the text.

Another solution is to put the image on the previous page.

Geometric shapes work well for my soap suds piece, because I can make the circles represent soap suds. However, some other pieces don't lend as well to pure geometric shapes.

To maintain the style, I made some images monochromatic.

Concerns

I have two primary concerns

1. Is Swiss style too edgy/robotic?

Yes, the covers look great, and its nice to have a clean aesthetic. However, is there TOO much Helvetica? Does the edgyness of the design detract from the material?

In addition, am I losing out by not utilizing my drawing skills that I've been recently developing? Though I am not utilizing these skills, I do save time by creating everything digitally, and I do think it is a valid design choice.

2. How will I get all of the images I need?

I want to avoid copyright as much as possible. This involves making my own images. The first image of the soap suds was made by me. The second picture was a photograph taken by me. Simple enough.

What about another piece that is dedicated to Tommy Wiseau? How am I supposed to get an image of him without copyright issues? I don't even know how I would create one of my own.

Other pieces like Io the Disney Princess may require me to take my own photographs. This is possible, but it is also time consuming.

I basically have nine days from this point, and I still haven't revised all of my pieces.

Does every piece even need an image? I suppose that's something else to ask.

Summary

I do think I can pull this off if I cut corners. I've already started and I have many images done.

I would like to know if I'm going in the right direction with my bold design choices, or if my book is starting to look too mechanical.

Too Personal

I am coming into contact with an issue that many artists likely face once they start to make enough work, but I shall discuss it anyhow.

Art is autobiographical. But when does art get too autobiographical?

As I talked about in my previous post, I'm generally averted to serious art because it seems too linked to me emotionally. This causes some issues.

1. People may not care about my emotions very much, and thus it might be more of a self-satisfying rant than anything else
2. People might start questioning my personal motivations for each piece, thus trying to examine and analyze my psychological issues more than I am comfortable with
3. It's hard to emotionally detach from the work, making it more difficult to digest criticism
4. Most of the time, I am not a very serious person, and writing serious pieces can put me in a mood that I don't like, or that I do not see as a predominant mood

Let me address each of these one by one

Who Cares?

There are two answers for this.

(1) I care about my work, even if no one else does. I can write work without the intention of sharing it with anyone, and that's okay.

(2) If other people care about my work, that gives it public value. What determines if they care? I don't know, but if they care, then it's important. Nirvana was the music of one incredibly angsty man, but a lot of people care to hear it. Allie Brosh only writes stories about herself, and people care about that.

Close friends and family generally care about my work, mostly because they are obligated to. How can I tell if other people care? I suppose I simply need to put myself out there more. If I don't get positive responses, clearly I will have to change something.

Psychoanalysis

I don't want my art to turn into Read It and Weep. For those who don't know, it's a Disney channel film about a girl whose diary becomes a best seller, and all the people in her life realize the characters are based on them, which causes them all to hate her. That's scary! I don't want to do that. I love my friends. Though I get upset with them sometimes (as everyone does with their own friends), overall they are incredibly wonderful people. 

Of course, it's usually negative emotions that drive you to make art. You don't make a story about "the day that was wonderful where nothing went wrong." So if art tends to be autobiographical, and art is also inspired by negative experiences, that could make a dangerous combination if one is not careful.

Still, you have people like Taylor Swift who write about all of their ex-boyfriends, and people eat up that crap like desert.

I think the best way to deal with this is to listen to my gut. If I think, "This could cause problems," then there's a really good chance I'm right. If you've seen some of the stuff I've written on this blog, or the crap that's come out of my mouth, you can see that I am a person with few boundaries. So if my gut is trying to tell me something, I'm probably doing something very risky, and I should re-evaluate.

Emotional Detachment

I think the simple solution to this issue is time. Right when I write something I care about it. Next week I care a little less. A month later and it's sitting at the bottom of my dusty mental shelf, beneath the new load of things I have written to supplant it.

Mood

I think the way to deal with mood is to simply make a choice on the mood that you want. Of course, you don't want to make a choice that suppresses your creativity. On the other hand, you need to be careful of engaging too heavily in certain moods, or else you will go insane. 

For example, I realized listening to Nirvana would worsen my already negative mood and lead me to make poor decisions. It would perpetuate bad feelings and bad habits. So, I forbade myself from listening to Nirvana nearly two years ago. That's also about the same time my enduring depression ended. There is probably more of a correlation between the two than I would like to admit.

Nirvana is an excellent band, no doubt. But I can't make art like Nirvana because Nirvana has caused harm to my life, and I would never want to do that to other people. Yes, it was also good for me to listen to Nirvana when I was depressed because I felt like Kurt Cobain sympathized with me, but the relationship between me and the ghost of Cobain was horribly toxic.

Some artists thrive in negativity. Negativity is addictive, both to the artist themselves and the consumer of art. Must we sacrifice sympathy for emotional stability?

Let me give you a notorious example. In Goethe's book The Sorrows of Young Werther, the protagonists commits suicide in a glorified manner. This resulted in a phenomenon called copycat suicide, where men were inspired by Young Werther to take their own lives.

Should Goethe be at least partially responsible for these deaths?

Of course that's pretty extreme, but I think it gets my point across.

I think the decision of mood has been at least partially made for me. I do not want to make art that drives people to be depressive or suicidal. At the same time, I do not want to be a comedic fluff, or else I wouldn't be having this conflict in the first place.

Where is the balance? Perhaps I will not understand my general mood (and general style) until I make more work. I will have to swing between two sides of the pendulum before I fall into balance.

Although after bringing up this idea, I'm actually very interested in discussing the question of art and mood, and art's obligation to society as a mood setter.

Serious Art and Victory Lap (by George Saunders)

Serious Art
Most of this week, I haven't been doing my usual silly daily posts. I haven't wanted to write lists. I've wanted to write stories. Somewhat humorous stories, but mainly serious. I don't know why exactly. Perhaps the stress of APs put me in a more somber mood. Or maybe I'm starting to mature...Maybe not that.

I've always had more ambivalent feelings about serious art. I think this is because I set up a construct for myself where I can only tell a tragic experience if I've had a decent amount of personal experience dealing with it. Otherwise, I wouldn't know what it's like, and the story would simply come out shallow. On the other hand, I do not think my life is very tragic, so my material is limited. In addition, I think that simply writing about myself over and over again is sophomoric. Of course every piece of art is autobiographical, but when it becomes more explicit, where is the line between art and whining?

This is why I feel much more comfortable in humor. Humor isn't feeling emotion. It's mocking emotion. It's so much easier to mock emotion than to feel it, because feeling emotion is uncomfortable and unpleasant. Not to mention, it is easier to handle criticism for a humorous piece than for a serious one, because a criticism for a serious piece feels more personal. Also, I think I'm better quality-wise at humor.

In my ideal world, I would be able to combine both seamlessly and create a story that contained emotional depth without overdoing it. Something that says "This is how people feel, and it's kind of silly, but it's worth acknowledging nonetheless because it's tough to deal with."

I think this has something to do with my attitude about emotions in general. I believe that emotions should not be ignored, but at the same time, I think giving them too much value causes people to be controlled by their emotions, which leads them to making poor decisions. There is a line between underacknowledgment and overacknowledgment, but it is blurry.

Regardless of my apprehensions, I've decided to try and write serious stories anyway. I actually enjoy them quite a bit, because I find them a useful way to work through my own thoughts and issues. My art has given me insights on my own life. I'll give myself better advice in my art than I do in my head. Isn't that funny?

If my work seems mediocre and juvenile, I don't think that's much of a surprise considering that I'm only seventeen. Also, I only started creative writing on a regular basis a few months ago. At this point, I think I'm still allowed to suck.

Victory Lap
Now this is only the first George Saunders piece I have read, so I do not I have seen enough to make judgments about him as a whole. But I definitely had some strong opinions about the piece that I did read.

Saunder's style was completely unexpected to me when I first read it. Nearly every sentence was a fragment, proper grammatical rules for dialogue were completely abandoned, and he used {} symbols, which I can't even name. I don't think I actually understood what was happening until I was halfway through the story. The more I read, the more I enjoyed Saunder's style. It's an adapted taste, like Tom Waits.

When I reached the end, I had very mixed feelings about the story as a whole. My problem with it is that it did not seem realistic. I'm not saying that all stories need to be realistic. Science fiction is great. However, I felt like it was passing itself off as something legitimately realistic, even though the situation did not seem very plausible. This made the piece seem a bit contrived to me. I know that pedophiles and crazy people exist, but the whole scenario of a man going to a girl's house and having the girl be rescued by a teenager beating the man in the head with a geode, I don't know. Maybe the flaw is with the genre more than the writer. Maybe it's just not my type of art.

After reading Victory Lap and having these complaints, I decided to try to write my own piece in his style that seemed more realistic. They say "make the art that you want to see." That's what I did.

But being of serious nature, I don't particularly feel like sharing it.

My Future Art

The works that I've been gathering for my book have been the best humorous pieces. However, if some of my more serious pieces are legitimately good, I may want to include them too and give the book a theme of duality.

Before I decide that though, I need someone to tell me if my serious work is junk or not, because it's difficult for me to tell.