10E 0.1: Cooper Renner and Dr. Polidori’s Sketchbook
by BL Pawelek
(an FMC original)
Describe Dr. Polidori’s Sketchbook in ten words (no more, no less).
CR: Lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies and drawings.
Five Questions Here:
1. Polidori had a quick, short life. What is his saddest fact?
CR: Byron called him Polly-Dolly (although I’m not sure that’s how he would have spelled it.) Wouldn’t that make anyone happy to die young?
2. So what is so bad about the Skeltonic form?
CR: You can’t write a limerick in iambics.
3. Are you trying to make the chicken hawk a popular haircut?
CR: The Chicken Hawk is a direct copy of innumerable bad haircuts on ancient busts of Caesar Augustus, but generally considered an improvement on Julius Caesar’s comb-over. At least Russell Crowe seemed to think so in adopting it for “Gladiator”.
4. What is your best line from The Vampyre?
CR: “It was then that I found myself the object of the gaze of a predator whose hungers had never been denied.”
5. You had rather I didn’t what?
CR: It out-Bartles Bartleby. Pray you avoid it.
Five Questions There:
6. What is the best and worst thing about the Romantic Period?
CR:
— The best thing: “Christabel”; the worst thing: virtually everything Wordsworth wrote after “Lyrical Ballads.”
— The best thing: “Don Juan,” which is hardly a Romantic poem at all, though written by the man whose life is supposed to be almost prototypically Romantic; the worst thing: rhapsodic solipsism.
— The best thing: rhyming Blake; the worst thing: non-rhyming Blake.
— The best thing: JMW Turner; the worst thing: that oaf Shelley and his skylarks.
7. If you had to choose, are you a writer or artist?
CR: I suppose my writing is considered more accomplished (or should I say less unaccomplished?) than my art, if that’s a criterion. If number of years I’ve spent with one or the other is a criterion, then writing wins again. If the amount of time I spend NOW is the criterion, or the pleasure I have in doing one or the other, then drawing is the clear victor. I haven’t chosen, have I? I suppose if anything I have done is still remembered in ten years, it will most likely be a piece of writing.
8. What is the hardest part of a self-portrait?
CR: Accuracy. In every sense.
9. What one piece of art do you wish you created?
CR: “Discreet Music” by Brian Eno. Oh, wait, that’s music. “Do the Brown Nose” by the Dead Milkmen. Oh, wait, that’s music too. The famous bust of Nefertiti? “Starry Night”? Any one of a zillion unfinished sketches by Michelangelo? You ask hard questions. One of Rothko’s enormous canvases? Can I have “Discreet Music”?
10. Besides a skylark, what is your favorite songbird?
CR: There is something raucously charming in the rackety squawk of a green parrot building a nest on top of a telephone switchbox in suburbia.
In ten words (no more, no less), describe your next project?
CR: Lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, Malta, knights, werewolves.
