lately

I have to say, that although I am not having exhibits around town, or gathering up fame and notoreity like Banksy is, I am at least creating art regularly. Check this out if you doubt me. It's not much, it's not organized, but at least I'm cranking it out.

That's because I'm determined enough to keep creating that I put it on a schedule that is otherwise very full with writing. I need pop for my covers (see that Disney one? that will be a cover) but to make good covers I have to be in good practice, not only keeping an eye for what makes a good 6 X 9 or 6.25 X 10, but also evaluating how the cover will look when script is put in it. My titles sometimes change in the course of working with them, but they might change even according to the kind of space I have to put the words in.

Ideally I would organize this pop art and put it into exhibits - say, one for Disney, one for Illinois, one for anything else - and these would appear on my blog. This, as I've inferred, is not happening, or at least not happening well. Maybe what would be ideal would be if I were more like Banksy, and got in everyone's faces more readily. I noticed with joy the other day that a Banksy pop-art with Trump, Putin, and Jong-Eun got in my Facebook and I thought, that's clever. Somebody is getting himself out there. But it wasn't me; I'm still sitting here talking about it.

Some of the good pop art is related to the book of Quaker plays; I have Hoover, Nixon and Nayler so far but really this could be a whole collection. In addition I'm still creating a Cloud Quaker pop art every week here. Check it out. I like to keep it coming.

strategy strategy strategy

In keeping with my pop art strategy, on this blog one post down, I have to decide whether to shelve a couple of haiku books or maintain them as a kind of cover-design experiment where I'm the only one who buys them, yet they still allow me to crank out pop art over a period of time.

Not many people read haiku, and even fewer read a book called e pluribus haiku 2017, and even fewer of those would be willing to buy one, even if it had the best pop art cover a person could possibly imagine. But with making museum-grade pop art as a goal, I have to create a few just to get better at it. It's worth a couple of bucks to me to get a book with my own pop art on it; if I don't like it, who else can I expect to like it? I've worked hard on the haiku. I can wrap it in pop art and call it a product.

Taking three books off the market would free me from worrying about how to keep their ratings from going over the cliff. Two of them no longer show their kindle ratings, as no one has read them in a couple of years. What should I do, make a new account and go read them? No thanks. I don't even want to put them on the table for other authors to read, if it's not the kind of thing people would ordinarily want to read. But the real problem with them is that, as time goes on, the years attached to them (in this ase, 2016, 2017 and 2018) are not really that related to the haiku themselves; these are only the years in which I wrote them. That's right; I wrote a thousand haiku in each of these years, more or less, less in the case of 2016. That's a lot of work and a memory I'd like to preserve. When I put them all in e pluribus haiku anthology: 3487 haiku I figured I'd preserved them, and maybe so. The duplication alone is probably a good enough reason to can the old books. The pop art is the part that makes me reconsider.

Maybe what I should do is make a number of selfies that showcase the different pop art covers, like a museum wall with art on its walls. Show it off while it's here. Celebrate life, and put art in all corners of it.