Down the Rabbit Hole

Ode to my Creative Idols

30-Day Blogging Challenge
PROMPT May 1st
Write about one (or more) of your creative idols. Who do you look up to? Whose work are you most inspired by? Why?

Playing catch-up this morning after I was waylaid by my 2nd dose of the covid vaccine this weekend. Today I am kicking off the week, fever and chill free and hopeful. I am looking forward to reaching full immunity by mid-May, and of reconnecting with friends and family after a long isolation. So...my creative idols...I feel like I've done this one before but for the most part my creative idols are authors.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez tops my list and has since I first read, Love in a Time of Cholera. I was impressed by the absolute beauty conveyed in prose, beauty that survived being translated into English from his native Spanish. To this day, I've not found passages in any other works that expressed the same loveliness of his phrasing. His writing has an amazing candor to it that crosses cultural divides and generations.

“To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else's heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

I could not be a writer of erotica and not pay homage to DH Lawrence or Anis Nin. I see them as a founders of the erotic genre, incredible talents who paved the way for an underrated genre, unfortunately represented today by lesser talents. Every reader that claims to have discovered erotic by reading "Fifty shades", came to the genre without the benefit of the tremendous literary power of these early pioneers. These were authors who challenged the brave new world, sometimes as great expense and disdain, to unapologetically write about the human condition, about female sexuality and the balance of instinct and social acceptance.

“Instead of answering her as soon as he saw her hair grow electric, her face more vivid, her eyes like lightning, her body restless and jerky like a racehorse’s, he retired behind this wall of objective understanding, this gentle testing and acceptance of her, just as one watches an animal in the zoo and smiles at his antics, but is not drawn into this mood. It was this which left Lilith in a state of isolation - indeed, like a wild animal in an absolute desert.”
― Anaïs Nin, Delta of Venus

Cool, unlying life will rush in,
and passion will make our bodies taut with power,
we shall stamp our feet with new power
and old things will fall down,
we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like
burnt paper.”
― D.H. Lawrence

My list is a good deal longer and would read like a master class in the craft..

James Lee Burke for example, an absolute master in character creation. His characters breathe and live and die among the pages of his novels and then they haunt you like mad demons...like people you have actually physically known.

Lewis Carroll gave lie to Alice in Wonderland and she is my ultimate favorite literary character and kindred spirit.

Mo Hader, the British author who's work The Devil of Nanking taught me there is a kind of terrible beauty in the telling of the visceral darkness of human beings.

Authors are some of my most favorite creators on the planet. I have learned something from each any every one on this list and countless more.