I know all the arguments against it. Nobody wants to read poetry from a simpering fool who is not a poet. Or, wait a moment, if Mickey is a poet, there is still that thing about him being the worst poet in the history of American Literature. And who knows the truth about all those missing middle school students rumored to be in shallow graves in South Texas? Do we know for a fact they weren’t killed by being forced to listen to Mickian poetry until their brains turned to oatmeal and leaked out of their ears?
But Mickey does write poetry. Terrible poetry. We know about the oatmeal-brains thing because of the poetry posted on this very blog site. Terrorists could use it for evil purposes.
But he has already posted a test cover for a poetry book. That is a REALLY BAD OMEN!!!
I threatened to write a post about Dave Barry and the writing gods apparently thought that was a very very bad idea. They have tried to prevent me from carrying out this idle threat by attacking my computer with gremlins. Now my WordPress page is shrinking practically out of sight. I can barely see what I am typing. You don’t believe me? Here’s what it looks like at the moment;
They obviously tricked me into pressing the secret shrink button on my computer, and I have no idea where to find the un-shrink features. Not only that, but my Facebook page is automatically translating everything it can into French. They really don’t want me to tell you about Dave Barry. And why do you suppose that is?
Well, Dave Barry may actually be me from a parallel dimension. He started writing for The Miami Herald in the early 80’s, at about the same time I started teaching. He retired from that in 2004 after winning a Pulitzer Prize and started writing humorous novels…. the same thing I started doing when I left the job I loved and was good at. Okay, so I am stretching the analogy to the point that all the buttons are popping off its shirt… but the point is, we are alike in some ways and I admire his work and I steal things from it whenever I possibly can. Like this post. I deeply admire the way he can say witty and pithy things. Like some of these quotes;
So, you see, he is very good at doing what I want to be good at. He is a humor columnist and all-around imitation Mark Twain. And I have read and loved his novels. Especially the Peter Pan things he writes with a partner.
Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson
So, I will leave this post here even though I could talk for hours about how Dave Barry makes me laugh. I have to stop. the words on the screen keep getting smaller and smaller, and my old eyes are about to fall out of my head.
I admit to using AI art programs to help me create artwork. But I am not letting AI generate drawings for me. I use AI to add effects and details that my arthritic hands can no longer create. I have been drawing blue-skinned Nebulons for forty years. This picture is my drawing even though the AI finished it (except for the mouth and nose, which I had to redraw to finish this.) In fact, I drew and redrew this particular picture about ten times, something I can do digitally that ink and colored pencil on paper doesn’t allow me to do. One shot is all you get at the process the old way of doing it, unless you spend hours pixel editing with Photoshop. So, I am finished apologizing for the shortcuts I have been taking to make art since I took up digital tools. I get to call myself an artist no matter how offended other artists are becoming with the use of the AI crutches I take advantage of.
I might point out that whatever copyright violations are being done by AI art programs, that is not what I am doing. I am using digital art tools and an AI app that I am feeding my own artwork into. And the corrective decisions are made by me. I am drawing well more than 90 percent of the drawings myself.
But I don’t know why I keep feeling like I have to defend what I am doing. I have been drawing and redrawing and doing art for at least 62 years. And I have never made any substantial amounts of money for anything creative I have done outside of a classroom where I was the teacher.
Why do I worry about my own making of art anyway? I am nobody. Nobody will ever hang any of my work in a gallery. I have never been a commercial artist. I have only been paid a pittance for published cartoons a few times, and royalties for novels and essays a few times more. It never bothered me when I was teaching. I got the feedback I needed from students as I showed them the processes and techniques of being both a good reader and a good writer. I knew from them that my writing abilities were good and were teachable. I had student writers who won writing contests. I took on State tests and achieved writing scores for entire grade levels that were better than the English departments of the small towns around ours. I got real praise from more than one superintendent. I was an English department head and a Gifted Program coordinator. If I ever was somebody, it was then… doing that.
They told me in writing classes at both Iowa State and the University of Iowa that I would probably one day be a published author, and that I was a talented writer with considerable skill. Well, I’m a self-published author now. One that practically nobody reads. But the ones that do read my books seem mostly to like them, or hate them for spurious reasons in two cases. And I guess that is good enough. Good writers in the past have been ignored until after they were gone. I may remain ignored forever. But the important thing is that my art and my writing exist. For now. And maybe in people’s memories too for a while after that. Art needs to exist for its own sake, Its own secret purposes. And it was only my place to create them, not follow them to their ultimate purpose.
Whatever. I am nobody. And that’s okay. Nobody is really more than that in the long run.
I began this post with a very excellent video that you probably will not watch, but I found it fascinating and it, in fact, inspired everything I want to talk about in this post. It is about the AI art programs that are running amok in the art world. I am, after all, an artist. Specifically, I am a storyteller and cartoonist. I know how to draw. I can prove it.
Here’s the proof. This is an original oil painting that I did in the 1980s. The only tools that I used to create this picture are a set of oil colors in tubes, a painter’s pallet, three different sizes of sable brushes, a pencil, and a magazine picture of a Vietnamese boy’s face. This was done at the height of my skills as an artist. But I also have to admit that I was diagnosed with arthritis in 1974 after painting the family home’s exterior. Now, 49 years later, the length of time the disease has been gnawing at my joints, I don’t quite have the same sophistication and ability as an artist, a creator of images. That is why digital art tools have been such a boon to me.
This is a colored pencil drawing I created in the 1990s. It is modeled on a young Hispanic boy who lived in the same apartment complex as I did. He was not green. At least I don’t think my color blindness was that bad back then.
I loaded the original drawing into the Drawing Pad digital art program. I put a layer on top of it in my touchscreen phone. I then basically traced the original drawing using the digital stylus that I bought to use in place of a pencil, pen, or paintbrush. I used it in pen mode first to draw the outline. You can see how much it was simplified. This made it easier to do on the small screen I had available on the phone despite my arthritis. I then used the stylus in watercolor paintbrush mode to color in the face and hair. I changed the eye color so I could do the eyes more consistently with a manga-cartoon style of softening levels of color. It gives it a more liquid and realistic look.
So far, I have shown you proof that I can draw well even now with the arthritis affecting my fingers.
Now let’s talk about the Artificial Intelligence programs that have been released into the internet to eventually take away the rulership of this planet and keep us monkey-people in zoos for the amusement of the computerized mega minds that will replace us as the dominant force of civilization on this planet.
AI art programs like the infamous Dall-E programs allow you to write a short description of the artwork you want to see, and the program generates something randomly to fit your descriptors. It pulls from a database scraped from the internet at large, including all the artwork I have posted here on my blog, Instagram, and Pinterest, and adds it all to a dataset that allows it to recognize, interpret, and produce something that conforms to what you have asked for even though it pays no artist any royalties or user fees for drawing from other artists’ artworks.
I promise I will never use an AI program to do that. If you see my name on any artwork like that, then I am dead and being impersonated by an AI entity.
Here is the only way I use AI to aid me in the making of artwork. It is a program called AI Mirror. You give it a photo or a png of an artwork and it redraws it in a specified style.
This is an artwork that I did earlier this year in colored pencil. I was not satisfied with my arthritis-impaired ability on this project. The eyes were too owlish and dark. The lips are too dark and thick. But you can’t erase colored pencils and ink on paper and fix things as easily as you can digitally on a touch screen. So, I used the AI Mirror to correct it.
I used the AI Mirror to fix it in stages like this, simplifying and redrawing it like this first. And then advancing it to this.
This is the finished project, simplified and made more elegant with digital tools.
You can argue that my final product is not better than the colored pencil original. But I like the fact that the AI and the digital tools allowed me to correct what I didn’t like.
The problem with AI art programs, which probably won’t be the ones that outsmart and replace humanity, is that they do so much for you that you are no longer an artist if you use them. So, I guess that I am saying I think that I am an artist, however wrongly, while using these programs because I put the work in both before and after using the AI application. My fear is since nobody sees me as an artist or hears me as a writer anyway, that my art and my stories will be snowed under a mountain of AI generated schlock that is certainly no better than my schlock, and inferior to my best stuff.
If you cruise the bargain sections in an old used book store like Half-Price Books, eventually you are going to find something priceless. This book I am showing you is that very thing for me.
It was copyrighted in 1978. The inscription inside the front cover says this was a Father’s Day gift on June 19th, 1988. Someone named Gary gifted it to someone named Claude in Burleson, Texas. It was probably a cherished book until someone passed away and the book changed hands in an estate sale.
Howard Pyle
The book chronicles the height of the publishing era when being able to print books and reproduce artworks began entertaining the masses. Always before painters and great artists worked for a patron for the purpose of decorating their home in a way that displayed their great wealth. But from the 1880’s to the rise of cinema, magazines and books kept the masses entertained, helped more people to become literate than ever before, and created the stories that made our shared culture and life experiences grow stronger and ever more inventive. The book focuses on the best of the best among a new breed of artist… the illustrators.
These are the ones the book details;
Howard Pyle, N.C. Wyeth, Frederick Remington, Maxfield Parrish, J.C. Leyendecker, Norman Rockwell, Charles Dana Gibson, Howard Chandler Christy, James Montgomery Flagg, and John Held Jr.
N.C. Wyeth
Wyeth was most famous as a book illustrator for Treasure Island, Kidnapped, other books by Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, and a famous volume of tales about Robin Hood.
Frederick Remington
Remington is a name you probably know as a maker of Western art. He was a famous painter of cowboys and Indians and the American frontier.
Maxfield Parrish
Maxfield Parrish is my all-time favorite painter. His work is something I gushed about in previous posts because I own other books about his fanciful works painted in Maxfield Parrish blue.
Also Maxfield Parrish
J.C. Leyendecker
You will probably recognize Leyendecker’s work in magazine and advertising illustration as the standard of the Roaring 20’s. His paintings set a style that swept American culture for more than a decade, and still affects how we dress to this very day.
More Leyendecker
Even more from Leyendecker
Norman Rockwell
Norman Rockwell and his work for The Saturday Evening Post is still familiar to practically everyone who reads and looks at the illustrations. As you can see he was a master of folksy realism and could do a portrait better than practically anyone.
Also Rockwell
I have also written about Norman Rockwell before too. I have half a dozen books that include his works. My wife is from the Philippines and she knew about him before I ever said a word to her about him.
Charles Dana Gibson
As you can plainly see, Gibson was a master of pen and ink. His work for Collier’s and other magazines thrills in simple black and white. More cartoonists than just little ol’ me obsess about how he did what he did.
Also Gibson
James Montgomery Flagg… with a name like that, who else could it be?
John Held Jr.
The work of Held is stylistically different than all the rest in easily noticeable ways. He’s the guy that made all the big-headed Pinocchio-looking people in the 1920’s. You may have seen his work before, though you probably never knew his name.
This bit of someone else’s treasure hoard will now become a part of my own dragon’s treasure, staying by my bedside for quite a while, while I continue to suck the marrow from each of its bones. I love this book. It is mine, and you can’t have it… unless you find your own copy in a used bookstore somewhere.
No, that is not a typo. I only meant “gifts” in pun form. Sometimes you don’t feel much like talking and, after all, the “picture can be worth a thousand words”, especially if the picture moves.
As you can see, I am spending the day with the Ghost of Christmases Past. Have a wonderful holiday, however you may celebrate it. I will offer more goofy stuff by Mickey after the Ghost of Christmases Future gets done with me.
Here is a goofy bit of physical philosophical reasoning and mad notions from a twisted mind. Time is a measure of the movement of physical mass directed by the random energies of the universe. If you could step out of time and take a look at what physical reality looks like seen from outside time, you would see one huge lump of you going and being everywhere you have ever gone and doing everything you have ever done… all at once as only one thing. It would look really weird because your eyes work only inside the flow of time. You can’t see everything that exists, ever has existed, and ever will exist all at one moment in time. But if there is eternity… doesn’t it exist outside of time?
And so, saying all things are one is basically true. But it doesn’t make any sense.
And so we see things in stages, making progress toward a goal. Even though it is all one big picture.
Catch a Falling Star 
Dave Barry
I threatened to write a post about Dave Barry and the writing gods apparently thought that was a very very bad idea. They have tried to prevent me from carrying out this idle threat by attacking my computer with gremlins. Now my WordPress page is shrinking practically out of sight. I can barely see what I am typing. You don’t believe me? Here’s what it looks like at the moment;
They obviously tricked me into pressing the secret shrink button on my computer, and I have no idea where to find the un-shrink features. Not only that, but my Facebook page is automatically translating everything it can into French. They really don’t want me to tell you about Dave Barry. And why do you suppose that is?
Well, Dave Barry may actually be me from a parallel dimension. He started writing for The Miami Herald in the early 80’s, at about the same time I started teaching. He retired from that in 2004 after winning a Pulitzer Prize and started writing humorous novels…. the same thing I started doing when I left the job I loved and was good at. Okay, so I am stretching the analogy to the point that all the buttons are popping off its shirt… but the point is, we are alike in some ways and I admire his work and I steal things from it whenever I possibly can. Like this post. I deeply admire the way he can say witty and pithy things. Like some of these quotes;
So, you see, he is very good at doing what I want to be good at. He is a humor columnist and all-around imitation Mark Twain. And I have read and loved his novels. Especially the Peter Pan things he writes with a partner.
So, I will leave this post here even though I could talk for hours about how Dave Barry makes me laugh. I have to stop. the words on the screen keep getting smaller and smaller, and my old eyes are about to fall out of my head.
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Tagged as book review, Dave Barry, fiction, humor, writing