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TO_HERE_AND_THE_EASEL

                                                     May 24, 2019

Theodore Sturgeon's "To Here and the Easel"                 MISSING_PIECES
is a story with a number of aspects to it--
                                                STURGEON
It is about a blocked-artist, a painter that     
finds he can't paint, and isn't sure why...             FANTASTIC_VEIL
                                           
He eventually comes to a great realization         Or maybe it's about a
about his hang-up; he needs to learn to            capricious, hyper
deal with the inevitable imperfections of          beatnik racing about
reality (or the aspects of the real that he        playing minor pranks...
perceives as imperfections?).  Embrace the
brown spots on the flower, rather than             Or maybe it's about
idealize them away.                                the texture of language,
                                                   modern babble vs
     AMERICANBEAUTY                                archaic formalities...

                                                   Or maybe it's about the
   This resolution to the story doesn't            furniture of a fantasy
   strike me as perfectly convincing--             story applied to a purely
   Sturgeon comments somewhere that he             psychological one.
   himself wasn't sure how to end it, and
   ended up asking an artist friend for
   advice.  In the text, Sturgeon                         THE_IRON_KEY
   essentially acknowledges the problem,
   with a remark about how most artists
   deal with this issue early, though this
   one is dealing with it late.

       But it is, however, reasonably tightly
       integrated into the story, which along       And what else?  If you
       the way features a woman pretty only         want to write a tale of
       on the outside, and another plainer one      an artist plagued by an
       but with one really striking feature--       existential crisis
                                                    (rather than merely a
                                                    crisis of existing), what
                                                    angle can you pick?
                CHEESECAKE
                                                       Every confusion,
                                                       every hang-up,
                                                       will seem obvious
                                                       and trivial to
                                                       those who've
                                                       gotten past it.

                            Frequently, it will just come off as an
                            excuse, dressing up a simple, common set
                            of issues with procrastination and the
                            feel of failure.  It's embarassing to be a
                            fuck-up in the same way that everyone else
                            is, so instead we try to glorify it as a
                            great intellectual struggle.

                            But would you want to argue that there are
                            no such struggles?  If there's no deep
                            challenges in the work, is the work really
                            worth all that much?





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