In the dead of winter not a tweet is to be heard. Instead, even on a clear day, the cold wind whooshes noisily at the window. I have often wondered why the wind hitting the window and screen makes that moaning sound only in winter. The wind still blows in the summer, and from many different directions too. But it doesn't make the noise. Why would that be? My would-be but impotent scientific mind wants to know. What's the main difference between summer and winter? It's hot or cold, duh. So something in the cold temperature makes the wind make that noise. Either it's because the wind is colder or the screen and glass are colder, or both. My hypothesis about this winter wind sound is that because things contract in the cold, the screen and the glass are at a higher tension in their frames. Thus the wind will make an audible vibration, like a sort of stringed instrument, when the tension is tight enough. In the summer, when the tension is less, the wind doesn't make the same sound. I may be completely wrong about this, but that's my offering of rationality for the day.

When I was at university, a millennium ago, I took some creative writing classes. (Interestingly, I never took a studio art course there. I later studied briefly at another university's art school.) I practiced writing prose but mainly poetry. The prevailing ethos there, as in many schools in the intellectual Northeast, was that fantasy, especially of the "genre" sort such as science fiction, Tolkien-style fantasy, mythology, or horror, was something you had to leave behind to be a "true" writer. All of the creative writing teachers insisted that you should only write about things in your own experience. As one of the creative writing professors said to his class, "Write about sex. Write about your dead grandmother. Write about your life. Write about sex." So we got a lot of stories about sex, and dead grandmothers, and bouts of depression in which the writer cut herself just to "feel something." I didn't write about any of these things. I think I decided to quit that class.

All I wanted to write was fantasy, whether in prose or poetry. I secretly harbored (and still do) an extensively plotted inner world which had loads of stories and characters in it, but no sex (happened "offstage") or dead grandmothers, or suicidally depressed college students. I didn't talk too much about this fantasy world, because the general rule was that once you became an adult, a responsible and productive adult, your creative life would be spent writing about REAL things. The writing professors, in fact, would not accept stories written about fantasy worlds. It was not writing. Fantasy characters were not acceptable, only characters based on people who were living right around you. The superheroes and unicorns must fade away, replaced by leftist demonstrators and bewildered and sometimes violent ethnic minorities.

The same went for art. If you wanted to learn art, you painted real stuff. Models, still lifes, interiors, fruit, a landscape or two. Abstractions were OK, as long as you followed the rules of composition. But dragons, unicorns, and hobbits were verboten. You are a real artist, and you are expressing real thoughts and emotions, not third-hand cliches from some neo-Wagnerian pastiche. Professional fine artists of that era for decades depicted lawn chairs, children's toys, swimming pools, city and road scenes along with sophisticatedly casual interiors in the style of American artist Fairfield Porter.

Fast forward from the 1970s to 2008. There now exist entire schools devoted to the production of fantasy art and scripting, which is called "entertainment design" and can be highly lucrative for the few who can stand the intense pace and the competition. Our media culture is saturated with fantasy and science fiction, to the point where you cannot turn on the TV or look at a magazine without seeing something related to it. Popular culture has even become a subject for university studies, though more traditionalist thinkers regard such studies as an abomination. Art professors are faced with students whose only artistic output is copies of copies of copies of Japanese anime cartoons. What ever happened to the dead grandmothers? There's still plenty of sex, but the lawn chairs have disappeared.

I have an embarrassing craving for fantasy art that has never gone away. I still maintain a comic book collection. I am not an "entertainment designer," nor do I have the energy to try to become one. I have tried to stay away from fantasy in the last few years because I want to be a "real" artist the way those university art teachers were. But I feel more and more remote from artistic inspiration, the more I try to fulfill the "paint real things" diktat. If I paint barbarians and unicorns and wizards, then I must forfeit the chance to be a Serious Artist. I have limited time to make art of any kind. I am stuck between two very different aesthetic eras. Meanwhile, I wait patiently for the birds to start singing again.

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