About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
For the time being, the detective story ‘The Case Of The Five Ties’ will be discontinued. Writing crime fiction isn’t at my core, it seems.
As large organizations must ‘strategically realign and re-position‘ themselves due to ‘changing market conditions’, I, too, must ‘implement departmental changes‘ within Navincorp. Wiley, Harry and Oliveira are now free to find meaningful work in different stories, with different character arcs. Many plots are doing quite well right now. Handsomely, in fact.
To those saying my brisk and sudden beeline towards the tall grasses, where a man may find quiet repose, lacks certain qualities of leadership. Cowards, all of you.
Thanks for the email suggestions. A few of you should CLEARLY be writing your own stories. Keep at it.
Harry Gruyaert’s celebrated, but I’d argue he’s still underrated for his mastery of color.
From Kenn Sava, Gruyaert’s not a portraitist, per se:
‘It’s not the person that interests me most. It’s the person in its environment. To me, all the elements are important. I don’t have any particular intention. It’s just what I see.
I think humans have such a great idea about ourselves, but nature is so much more powerful.’
According to the interview, American pop-art influenced Gruyaert, potentially freeing him from elements of European formalism (pushing him into some great color work). If you’re interested in seeing fine color, atmospheric and ‘lived-in’ photography, I’d recommend Rivages.
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As for pop-art, it can often be colorful, innovative, intuitive and non-serious…on the surface.
Frank O’Hara’s mid-century American poems are surprisingly visual. The idea of a wild freedom wrapped within casual conversation; a moment to moment associative intensity is achieved through O’Hara’s form. This is often where we long to be, on the edges of possibilities, living intensely with others (even through memory, sometimes especially through nostalgia and memory).
Also, the poem suggests this freedom as a return to our animal natures; which involves a certain view of Nature, functioning as a Romantically primitive return to Nature. Frankly, it’s a pretty good love poem.
Animals
Have you forgotten what we were like then when we were still first rate and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth
it’s no use worrying about Time but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves and turned some sharp corners
the whole pasture looked like our meal we didn’t need speedometers we could manage cocktails out of ice and water
I wouldn’t want to be faster or greener than now if you were with me O you were the best of all my days.’
As for color, perhaps this also doesn’t mean color must be completely abstracted into the ambitious meaning-making mission of Mark Rothko. I mean, the sky is blue, the trees green, and the balloons red and yellow.
‘Mark Rothko sought to make paintings that would bring people to tears. “I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on,” he declared. “And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions….If you…are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point.”
Seal the compound…I mean chapel. (come to Houston, land of little zoning, fair pilegrim).
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Readers will know this blog maintains skepticism for pop-art Neo-dadaism and the consecration of ordinary objects along the Duchamp line (‘American Standard’?). Making Duchampian exceptions rules, even clever rules, can desecrate what’s important.
Everyday people, living right, must keep the important things in view, namely wife/husband/children/parents/death/taxes/health/time; not merely their own impulses nor artistic visions (artists remain acutely aware of such indifference). Meaning is usually to be found within love for another, and this usually means everyday people (& the everyday within us) lives between the sacred and profane: The 9-5 grind and the unexpected conversation about grandma’s death, the enveloping silence afterwards.
Artists, at their best, point towards wisdom, truth and beauty regarding everyday things. All the artists I’m linking to are doing so in one way or another, although ‘how’ and ‘how well’ are endlessly disputed.
I’ve already seen a thousand urinals in my life, Marcel, even a few in my dreams.
The triumph of the conceptual over the actual, the mass-produced over the created; perhaps these aren’t entirely healthy trends. The retreat into (S)elf, and the retreat into irony alongside (A)rt as commodity, perhaps these are dead-ends as much as they are freshly-paved streets. The lamentations of art as (R)eligion could be a leading indicator of a deeper hunger for meaning; a hunger with as many bad as good outcomes for artists and everyday people…
Some food for thought, Dear Reader.
As a contrast, here’s some American art that’s more grounded; some realism with psychological depth, albeit with impressionist influence.
I think Raymond Chandler’s High Window is among the best of the American detective novel.
Here are some quotations of his, if you’re interested.
“Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but good-hearted and peaceful. It had the climate they yap about now. People used to sleep out on porches. Little groups who thought they were intellectual used to call it the Athens of America.”
Here is the link. It’s been a long time since they just reviewed the book and not the author.
Boy, oh boy, James Ellroy: America’s best current historical crime fiction writer, showing up to entertain, shock and vulgarize:
The poem that most came to mind after looking at Hopper:
Acquainted with the Night
I have been one acquainted with the night. I have walked out in rain—and back in rain. I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane. I have passed by the watchman on his beat And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet When far away an interrupted cry Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-bye; And further still at an unearthly height, One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. I have been one acquainted with the night.
Give me one minute and your mind. 1. Please read the poem aloud. 2. Take a closer look at the photo 3. Play the first 30 seconds of Chopin’s Nocturne in B-flat minor, Op 9, No. 1. (past the 00:26 mark).
The goal: Create a dreamy, contemplative experience before you move on.
Who knows how people come to haunt their own lives?
Warner had been in some kind of band, then out wandering the street for fifteen years. He’d emerge from time to time with ideas. Harry noticed three new crosses behind his left ear and a long, purple scar on his right hand.
—
‘It’s free if you guys want it. That’s what I’m saying.’
‘People meet every night. That’s free?’ Harry asked.
‘What I’m giving you. Something’s going on. Guys in Bremerton. The construction guys. Everybody knows.’
‘Knows what?’
‘I can’t tell you all of it. I don’t know. You sit there all night and they give you $75. That’s real fuckin’ money.’
‘What I’m tellin’ you is you get $20. For showing up. $50 for the night.’
‘That’s $70. I need a place, Warner. Names.’
‘You smell like shit, Warner. Don’t touch my desk.’ Wylie handed him a Red Bull.
‘I don’t have to be here.’ A long pause. Warner looked down at his feet. ‘Oliveira.’
What’s he look like? Harry asked.
Brown guy. Glasses. Like a banker. Short hair. He speaks German too. Good English.’
‘And you guys work?’ Harry asked.
‘You ask around. You show up but nothing happens. They take one group of guys, and disappear. Like a Penske truck. Illegals. Then it changes.’
‘What changes?’
‘The place. You gotta know someone, then it’s somewhere else. But you gotta know someone.‘ They pay out, man.’
‘German?’ Wylie asked, staring.
‘Yeah, it’s fuckin’ German.’
‘Get me in,’ Harry said.
‘Ronnie’s on 4th near the stadium.‘ $500 now and $500 when we’re done.‘
‘$100′ right now and we talk when it’s done’ Harry said, handing Warner a bill. I’m good for it.
‘Tonight,’ Warner shuffled out staring at Wylie.‘You can’t come, asshole,’
‘Text me, Harry.I got like five phones.‘ He shouted from the hall.
—
‘Oliveira’s Portugese’ Harry said. ‘Popular name.’
‘There are Germans in Brazil. Supermodels.’ Wylie said.
‘Lots of places to learn German’ Kathy was standing in the doorway. ‘I’ll check AI, incarceration, sex offenders, construction companies. Brazilians just replaced my neighbor’s roof’
‘II’ll talk to Skoda. He does data privacy. Maybe he knows something.’ Wylie said.
‘Lots of companies unloading on the Island.’ Harry said. ‘Fifteen million is serious money.’
‘There was a strike last year. Remember the Asian front food company near Georgetown?’ I can’t remember the name….lots of fraud’ Kathy said walking out. ‘My friend knows someone who works delivery. I’ll look that up, too.
‘Who makes money on each shipping container?’Who touches these containers?’
From our rather reasonable AI overlords: ‘Common skepticism is a healthy critical attitude towards dubious claims, while philosophical skepticism challenges foundational knowledge and the justification for belief itself, demanding proof for everything, a stance few people adopt in daily life.’
I knew a philosophic skeptic, he was smarter than me & fun, but, man…what an asshole.
Commoners have good reasons to be skeptical when it comes to modern art:
‘Titled Comedian, the humoristic piece can be considered a challenge to the sometimes-absurdist nature of the art market and the art collecting world. “To me, Comedian was not a joke; it was a sincere commentary and a reflection on what we value,” said the artist in an interview at the time. “At art fairs, speed and business reign, so I saw it like this: if I had to be at a fair, I could sell a banana like others sell their paintings. I could play within the system, but with my rules.”’
Who can forget the transcendent darkness of this photo (the shock-concept and the celebrity overshadowing the skill/visual impact).
‘He immersed a crucifix he bought in an antique shop in his own urine.‘
Fellow commoners, we have as a counterpoint, rather beautiful, innovative classics like Falling Water, by Frank Lloyd Wright. A pain in the ass to maintain, but still a place for the genuine:
As I see the world: We have beliefs, and we’ve usually locked them away beyond critique. So has most everyone else. Some beliefs have more truth in them than others.
We use shared beliefs to form and maintain relationships. We use them to get stuff and give other people stuff. We rely on shared beliefs to organize events/clubs, workplaces, and hierarchies of judgment and knowledge, without killing each other. Shared beliefs regulate and help us navigate our emotions, as well as our personal, interpersonal and social behavior. We outsource much of our thinking to shared beliefs, while forgetting they’re even there. We’re often proudest of passing our beliefs on if we think they’re true, lasting and important.
The rub is the relationship these beliefs have with truth, and knowledge. A modern rationalist might say something like: ‘We have access to enough scientific and economic knowledge to run the government, and effectively plan your life. (M)an is something holy, and we’ve only just begun perfecting (M)an.Go ahead be creative and vote for the $1 billion arts package or else.‘
A typical Catholic might say something like: ‘Let’s check in with Canon Law. The Pope is closest to God, then the Cardinals, then the Archbishops etc.’ We’re only redeemed through Christ. So….that’s what art should be doing. Capiche?
What if a radical questioning of belief becomes the norm, around which people are…still believing?
What, then, do people actually believe?
What do artists, often radically questioning belief while making stuff, actually believe?
Those increasingly ridiculous artist statements? Some curious mix of irony, doom and nihilism all the way down? Modern mysticism?
A digression: Let’s say a kid in bad neighborhood, at a vulnerable age, joins a gang. He gets protection, savage discipline and access to stuff. The gang serves dark masters of the soul of course (in our case: How to rob specific makes/models of cars and sell them for parts, leaving a trail of harm, making the kid violent and dangerous).
Let’s also say the same kid in a bad neighborhood, on weekends, hangs with his uncle. His uncle fixes cars. Our kid learns to honor something within himself, other people, and the world. Like his time with the gang, life unfolds as a series of challenges, struggles and possibilities. Yet, his lifespan probability opens from twenty-two to sixty-four. Much better of parts of the kid’s nature come forwards. People drive their cars away, grumbling over the price and the delays…but, still.
Clearly, one path is better for the kid, the neighborhood and the rest of us?
Surely?
Now, what if, at school, that same kid is particularly talented, smart and sensitive? What if he is guided by someone towards personal self-expression, and even the eventual self-doubt, poverty and emotional rollercoaster of a typical artist’s life?
Shouldn’t the kid at least be taught how to notice things? how to describe how a good painting looks? how to draw? how to draft? how to mix paint?
Surely?
These days, it seems we find ourselves in a ‘post, postmodern landscape.’
What is this curious, Western belief to ‘blank-slate’ everything? How can it be true that the kid’s emotions are a reservoir and his reason a man-made, oppressive dam? That he just needs to make a dark, mixed-media video collage and he’s arrived?
It seems making simple moral judgments in real-world scenarios raises serious questions about the Romantic/Modern/Postmodern projects.
The case for the visual art over the primacy of concept/idea: Lets say you’re looking at John Singer Sargent’s ‘Lady Agnew Of Lochnaw‘ (somewhere between realism/impressionism). You’re not looking at merely the idea of painting (good paintings already have ideas in them).
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Maybe you want to touch her skin? How did he paint like that? Look at the color and light. What is the artist saying? This painting took six sittings, but, arguably, a lifetime and maybe the better elements of a civilization to achieve.
A simple case: The Duchamp/Warhol line (concept/idea over visual communication/technical skill) warrants tremendous common-sense skepticism (I’ve gone a little deeper…but you get the point). Enough already.
Bananas duct-taped to walls and crucifixes dunked in piss are not just wasting our time, perhaps they’re harming our imaginations.
There are so many reasons to doubt so much bullshit within modern/postmodern thinking, while at the same time learning from the good.
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Tom Wolfe went on the T.V. with William F Buckley (too political for my taste) to discuss his book: ‘The Painted Word.’
At min 5:39 Wolfe argues the following (one part of the art/money/celebrity feedback loop):
‘It’s really a religious thing. One thing I didn’t say in The Painted Word, that I should have said, is that art today, is the religion of the educated classes. I don’t mean that by analogy, it isn’t like being a Baptist in 1870, it is being a Baptist in 1870.’
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From Art vs Machine: Here is a video making the case that Jackson Pollock achieved something, but it wasn’t really the innovative use of drip-paint.
Maybe it was kinda beautiful in its own way? Romantically Primitive?
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Also, are Robert Hughes criticisms’ of Andy Warhol’s art really blocked by YouTube?
Making a hero of the androgynous anti-hero is orthodoxy these days, but also pretty tired (the Warhol to Bowie line seems over-rated):
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What came before modernism/postmodernism? Why the below video might be worth listening to (min 34:22):
‘There was a great turn towards emotionalism. There was a sudden interest in the primitive and remote; the remote in time and the remote in place. There was a outbreak of craving for the infinite’
A movement emerged, about 1760–1840, which has deeply affected our conceptions of the Self, Art, heroes and villains, and most importantly, what makes life worth living.
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable, Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier; Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce; Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges. The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten By the dwellers in cities—ever, however, implacable. Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting. His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom, In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard, In the smell of grapes on the autumn table, And the evening circle in the winter gaslight.
“Paterson lies in the valley under the Passaic Falls its spent waters forming the outline of his back. He lies on his right side, head near the thunder of the waters filling his dreams! Eternally asleep, his dreams walk about the city where he persists incognito. Butterflies settle on his stone ear. Immortal he neither moves nor rouses and is seldom seen, though he breathes and the subtleties of his machinations drawing their substance from the noise of the pouring river animate a thousand automations. Who because they neither know their sources nor the sills of their disappointments walk outside their bodies aimlessly for the most part, locked and forgot in their desires-unroused.‘
I have come to a still, but not a deep center, A point outside the glittering current; My eyes stare at the bottom of a river, At the irregular stones, iridescent sandgrains, My mind moves in more than one place, In a country half-land, half-water. I am renewed by death, thought of my death, The dry scent of a dying garden in September, The wind fanning the ash of a low fire. What I love is near at hand, Always, in earth and air.
Having used every subterfuge To shake you, lies, fatigue, or even that of passion, Now I see no way but a clean break. I add that I am willing to bear the guilt.
You nod assent. Autumn turns windy, huge, A clear vase of dry leaves vibrating on and on. We sit, watching. When I next speak Love buries itself in me, up to the hilt.
‘The minor vogue and rapid extinction of Imagism, a movement whose influence we still feel, has been hashed over by literary critics for a century. Its rehearsal here is merely to bring the poem into focus within the slow progress toward the densities of language, the images like copperplate engraving, that made Pound Pound’
Thorough and well done.
The result would echo back to the States years later:
The Great Figure
Among the rain and lights I saw the figure 5 in gold on a red firetruck moving tense unheeded to gong clangs siren howls and wheels rumbling through the dark city.
This blog tends to look cautiously at many of the ideas of the Romantic poets, and the break to modernism, but not necessarily the poems themselves. The echo ripples outwards:
…
Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout
Down valley a smoke haze Three days heat, after five days rain Pitch glows on the fir-cones Across rocks and meadows Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read A few friends, but they are in cities. Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup Looking down for miles Through high still air.
Once we start arriving at ‘ecological’ appreciations of nature, and the postmodern, confessional altar of Self and the turn inwards to the Self a subject for the art, and the desperate search for meaning, I get more and more turned off, for my own reasons. Such good poems will carry on.
‘For yet another cause of unhappiness was the encroachment of machine industry and its attendant uglification of town and country. The Romanticists had sung in an agrarian civilization; towns were for handiwork and commerce. Industry brought in not factories only, and railroads, but also the city — slums, crowds, a new type of filth, and shoddy goods, commonly known as “cheap and nasty.” And when free public schools were forced on the nation by the needs of industry, a further curse was added: the daily paper, also cheap.’
‘Although Cole had ample commissions in the late 1820s to paint pictures of American scenery, his ambition was to create a “higher style of landscape” that could express moral or religious meanings.’
‘In the late 1830s, Cole was intent on advancing the genre of landscape painting in a way that conveyed universal truths about human existence, religious faith, and the natural world. First conceived in 1836, the four pictures comprising The Voyage of Life: Childhood, Youth, Manhood, and Old Age fulfilled that aspiration.’
These scenes in the Romantic style can have an emotional pull for me, as generally does the work of the Hudson River School. Such allegory certainly tends to function as a vehicle into memory (Cole’s work has really stuck with me…in a sort of haunting way, mixed with some thought of how I’m supposed to live and what might be coming next).
Also, the wild, untamed nature we Americans have often faced is perhaps requiring of a spirited and grand attempt at putting our experiences within Nature into some context: To soar as high as our hopes often do.
Or at least, to find in paintings: Familiarity. I like to see the roll of a hill like I’ve seen, or an opening of clouds, sky and light like I’ve seen.
Perhaps Wild Nature can be ordered in a Romantic, neo-classical or more modern way. Perhaps Nature can be made, with the tools at our disposal, to conform to some of our deeper ideas about Nature, mirroring our hopes in some recognizable fashion; giving some basic comfort and meaning.
Maybe, after all, we can find a home here.
On the other hand, allegory with overt moral/religious meaning can also come across as heavy-handed, sentimental, and moralistic. Too lush and pretentious; perhaps a bit anachronistic.
Do I really have to hunt for all the symbols and put the puzzle together?
‘So, you’re going to reveal universal truths, eh?’
—
This can seem distant from the experiences of the modern viewer, often finding himself a little further down the modern/postmodern ‘river’, where such attempts at universality might seem a wash.
Much more common these days are the very personal shards and glimpses of the inner life of an artist, attached to high ambition and great talent surely in some cases; as well to form and tradition, but generally making less bold claims to knowledge than ‘The Voyage Of Life‘.
In painting, I’m reminded of the abstract expressionist movement seeking meaning in reducing experience to the abstract in order to reveal something essential within Nature, or essential about our relationship to Nature: A transcendent place where shape, form and color can be isolated from anything immediately recognizable in the world.
‘The movement’s name is derived from the combination of the emotional intensity and self-denial of the German Expressionists with the anti-figurative aesthetic of the European abstract schools such as Futurism, the Bauhaus, and Synthetic Cubism. Additionally, it has an image of being rebellious, anarchic, highly idiosyncratic and, some feel, nihilistic.[5] In practice, the term is applied to any number of artists working (mostly) in New York who had quite different styles, and even to work that is neither especially abstract nor expressionist.’
The exploration of the Self is often pursued, as well as that of Nature, but the general hope that it might all make sense (life, death, Nature, purpose etc) in many more modern movements is often left abandoned.
Or so often, as we’ve seen in the past few generations: The pursuit of The Self can easily become subsumed to the pursuit of fame, celebrity, and money.
***
Towards a theme: Perhaps you’ve also heard of the Rothko chapel, in Houston, Texas.
Mark Rothko undertook the idea that within the modern context, one could create temples of universal meaning through aesthetics, art, and beauty:
‘The Rothko Chapel, founded by Houston philanthropists John and Dominique de Menil, was dedicated in 1971 as an intimate sanctuary available to people of every belief. A tranquil meditative environment inspired by the mural canvases of Russian born American painter Mark Rothko (1903-1970), the Chapel welcomes over 60,000 visitors each year, people of every faith and from all parts of the world.’
“When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation…”
‘The notion of carefully wrought bullshit involves, then, a certain inner strain. Thoughtful attention to detail requires discipline and objectivity. It entails accepting standards and limitations that forbid the indulgence of impulse or whim. It is this selflessness that, in connection with bullshit, strikes us as inapposite. But in fact it is not out of the question at all. The realms of advertising and of public relations, and the nowadays closely related realm of politics, are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept. And in these realms there are exquisitely sophisticated craftsmen, who with the help of advanced and demanding techniques of market research, of public opinion polling, of psychological testing, and so forth, dedicate themselves tirelessly to getting every word and image they produce exactly right.’
The incentives of print/online clickbait aside, our author can’t just write about something so boring and conventionally dull as taking a walk through the city at night, partaking in the pleasures of the flaneur.
A self-date is about reclaiming that control. The choice is yours: What would you do with your time if no one else got to call the shots? For how long would you do it, and when?
I’m being an a**hole here, but, must everything be given a theory and an explanation?
I mean, you can’t handle that kind of freedom to take a walk, right? Nor be alone with your thoughts?
Therapeutic, conformist psycho-babble is pretty common out there, as well as articles about aloneness away from these incessant screens and inter-connectedness.
As I age-out into irrelevance (Gen X), spinning sadly into forgetting, weakness and oblivion, I’d like to remind younger folks: I didn’t ask to be born in something like a Great Unwinding, either. I’ve found some poems, photographs, music and paintings which I love. I hope you come to appreciate them, too. I’ve found work which challenges me, and some principles I find worth defending (speech, property, and the honor freedom requires).
This technology will end up being the main story of our times, quite likely.
Everybody wants to be a (S)elf, nobody wants to be a (S)elf.
I’m pretty sure: The nihilist fog has settled in and will be here for awhile. American politics will likely become even more contentious. Political parties will be increasingly full of (S)elves and (C)auses, as well as the odd principle. Cynicism and ironic detachment will wear much easier than patient duty. Many institutions are becoming captured by true-believers. Righteous people, of course, will often prevail (not necessarily right, nor truthful, nor reasonable…especially in groups and through the laws).
If you’ve read thus far, thank you, so here are some past thoughts and links for free:
We should be comforted when corporate/bureaucratic art is bland, bad, and uncommunicative. After all, do you think you’d trust a bank more or less if it had a shocking modern/pop art sculpture in the lobby?
What about when their marketing team tells you how you should think, behave and act?
The attempt to seek collective purpose and postmodern meaning in modern art, music and even cartoons etc. is fast upon us. The flirtations with nihilism can encourage more desperate collectivist/ideological impulses to fill the void. The excesses are many.
As for a critique of Albany Plaza, another modernist/bureaucratic concrete wonderland, here’s Robert Hughes:
‘At their best, the Schiffs can be models for renewing the unquenched aspiration of a century ago, to place art and its imaginative demands at the center of an effort to build a more humane future’
Humane. Human. Human rights. Make it new. Break with the past. Shape man’s destiny upon new foundations of knowledge, explore new possibilities, and perhaps shape men themselves.
Why, there’s a whole philosophy under there. Not a religion necessarily, and not always moral claims to knowledge, but a whole framework nonetheless.
Well, some of it, anyways.
Related On This Site: MOMA is private, so perhaps it’s not as decadent if they display Tilda Swinton in a box:
Well, trying to suffuse an architectural movement with an entire political philosophy might be a little much, but more ‘local’ would be nice. Also, The Northeast has lost population, while many cities and the Southwest have gained.
‘Classical architecture is not just about history; it’s also about light, color, and human proportions, all of which help us understand it and relate to it so naturally. “People will not look forward to prosperity,” Edmund Burke once said, “who never look backwards to their ancestors.” In politics, as in architecture, tastes evolve. But lasting institutions can be built only on strong foundations.’
Some cool photos at the link.
As previously posted on this site. When the Romantic became the Modern, and a great American poet tried to find place in the world, something that would carry from generation to generation.
Postcard From The Volcano
Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill;
And that in autumn, when the grapes Made sharp air sharper by their smell These had a being, breathing frost;
And least will guess that with our bones We left much more, left what still is The look of things, left what we felt
At what we saw. The spring clouds blow Above the shuttered mansion-house, Beyond our gate and the windy sky
Cries out a literate despair. We knew for long the mansion’s look And what we said of it became
A part of what it is . . . Children, Still weaving budded aureoles, Will speak our speech and never know,
Will say of the mansion that it seems As if he that lived there left behind A spirit storming in blank walls,
A dirty house in a gutted world, A tatter of shadows peaked to white, Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.
The Prospect has a good article here on Parmenides (no longer free). Stanford’s page here.
“By these arguments, Parmenides arrives at his picture of the world as a single, undifferentiated, unchanging unity. Needless to say, scholars have disagreed over exactly what he meant. They have questioned whether he meant that the universe was one thing, or only that it was undifferentiated.”
“According to Hume, the idea of a persisting, self-identical object, distinct from our impressions of it, and the idea of a duration of time, the mere passage of time without change, are mutually supporting “fictions”. Each rests upon a “mistake”, the commingling of “qualities of the imagination” or “impressions of reflection” with “external” impressions (perceptions), and, strictly speaking, we are conceptually and epistemically entitled to neither.“
and also:
“Unlike Hume, however, he (Kant) undertakes to establish the legitimacy or objective validity of the schematized category of substance and, correspondingly, of the representation of time as a formal unity with duration as one of its modes.“
I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman – I have detested you long enough. I come to you as a grown child Who has had a pig-headed father; I am old enough now to make friends. It was you that broke the new wood, Now is a time for carving. We have one sap and one root – Let there be commerce between us.
The black and white was made in 1924, and is probably most evocative of noir.
I think Raymond Chandler’s High Window is the best of the detective novel.
Here are some quotations of his, if you’re interested.
“Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but good-hearted and peaceful. It had the climate they yap about now. People used to sleep out on porches. Little groups who thought they were intellectual used to call it the Athens of America.”
Here is the link. It’s been a long time since they just reviewed the book and not the author.
The poem that most came to mind:
Acquainted with the Night
I have been one acquainted with the night. I have walked out in rain—and back in rain. I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane. I have passed by the watchman on his beat And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet When far away an interrupted cry Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-bye; And further still at an unearthly height, One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. I have been one acquainted with the night.
If you were a kid at the right time, you caught snatches of detective shows on T.V; maybe without having ever watched a full episode.
Columbo seemed rumpled but classy, deceptively ensnaring his prey. Magnum P.I. drove a Ferrari and had a friend with a helicopter. Matlock was clearly for the Olds.
One night, we caught an episode of Stacy Keach as Mike Hammer. The intro screen advertised ‘Mickey Spillane’s’ Mike Hammer.‘
Intrigued by a rumor filtered down from the adults, my brother grabbed a phone book. Mickey Spillane’s listed. He lives nearby.
‘It’s ringing.‘ He says.
‘Mr Spillane? I just wanted to say we’re here watching Mike Hammer and we’re nearby and we really like it.’
‘Yes.‘ my brother says. ‘Sure.’
‘Thank you Mr. Spillane.‘
—
The photo below reminds me of a poster for a knock-off T.V. detective.
I’m strolling by and see a single shaft of weak light falling though a Pioneer square bar. It’s falling right on this gentleman on the corner seat. He sees me seeing him.
Should I take the shot?
I raise my camera and start snapping away as I walk towards the entrance (me and God/the Gods are working this behavior out).
—
There’s absolutely nothing funny about Telly Savalas playing Kojak as reported by Norm MacDonald to Jerry Seinfeld, shattering naive fictions in solving a T.V. crime-drama:
Even funnier (generic tattoo, but for eggheads….the kinds of people visiting France for a week in college expecting to run America someday): Yes, that’s a Chinese brothel.
Forget LLMs, and neural modeling. ‘You can do anything‘ at Zombo.com
“First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility.’
‘Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied. ‘
‘Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. ‘
And not only this, but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience.”
Having used every subterfuge To shake you, lies, fatigue, or even that of passion, Now I see no way but a clean break. I add that I am willing to bear the guilt.
You nod assent. Autumn turns windy, huge, A clear vase of dry leaves vibrating on and on. We sit, watching. When I next speak Love buries itself in me, up to the hilt.
Land-art pieces are site-specific. They require you to be there and experience them, designed as they are to be within the specific spaces they occupy.
In so doing, they break from previous modernist ‘Readymades‘ and reproduced images (I don’t know about you, but I’m tiring of so many commentaries on consumerism, the desire for craft over mass production, a certain collective vagueness against such disposability…the dream of unique Selfhood, celebrity even, amidst a thousand urinals).
As a viewer, you’re supposed to interact with these pieces and start feeling and thinking differently than perhaps you might have otherwise. Walk around, through, and over them. View one hillock from another. Walk back over to the first hillock and look from whence you came. The view is never quite what you were imagining.
Time is clearly intended to be an element, here; the long sweep of geologic and/or historical time as the artist understands it, as well as the relative brevity of personal time during just a 10-minute visit.
These pieces can act as signposts towards Nature and what we can begin to observe of our specific natural environments (steel rusts in unique, but perhaps underlying, patterns…winds blow at different angles and around different obstacles in one grove as opposed to another, these lichens are growing here…other lichens over there, are they the same species?).
If you pull the piece out of its specific environment, it may just wither and die, looking out-of-place as many other products of civilization do amidst natural settings (a jar in Tennessee). Perhaps, though, they won’t look quite so out-of-place as mass-produced objects because of such careful design and attention to detail.
That said, these pieces will eventually look quite awkward undergoing the changes they will undergo if Nature’s Laws are any guide (Romantic/Modernist recreations of Nature can promise the comforts of Home).
Here’s Wikipedia, keeping it simple:
‘Land art, earthworks (coined by Robert Smithson), or Earth art is an art movement in which landscape and the work of art are inextricably linked.’
‘Robert Smithson and Richard Serra both believed that sculpture should have a dialog with its environment. This program explores the challenging dialectic of the site-specific sculpture of Smithson and Serra through examples of their work. In an interview, Serra discusses the aspects of time and context in relation to his art as well as the influence of Smithson.’
Maybe it’s worth pointing out that Serra seems interested in symmetry, visualizing and realizing abstract shapes with the help of some mathematics and the practice of drawing/drafting. Interesting problems can arise from tooling around with shapes on paper (a practice of Serra’s), the kind I’m guessing folks fascinated by puzzles and software and math love to solve.
But Serra’s not a mathematician nor an engineer nor an architect. He’s not writing a proof for its own sake nor building bridges nor houses for practical use.
Rather, the intuitive and creative impulses of the artist take over in his work, a kind of creative exploration, as well as the dialog between fellow artists, living and dead.
Much (A)rt, of course, is useless for most, if not all, purposes. It’s one of the things that can make it meaningful for people. There can be a significant gap between what the artist may have felt, thought and realized, and which emotions, thoughts and experiences any viewer/listener might have in interacting with a particular piece.
Serra, in his work, wants to alter the thinking of anyone moving through the space he creates by manipulating specific substances like steel (he has a facility with the material), and by getting viewers to a point of reorientation of spatial and temporal awareness.
Of course, this involves reorientation towards certain ideas as he understands them, and by promising people a return to themselves, or a state of experience and creative play perhaps similar to that of the artist.
Here’s a Charlie Rose interview:
More about Land Artists:
Any thoughts and comments are welcome. Feel free to highlight my ignorance…
The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster,
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
– Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Immediately, I think of Edward Hopper: The lonely cityscape at night or the familiar glow of gas station lights cast into the American wilderness. The eye might want to linger among the colors, shapes and clouds even though the mind knows this is pretty much an empty street in a ‘post-industrial’ zone.
Perhaps it has do with another strand of expression: The break into free verse from past forms. The move from American Romanticism to Modernism which occurred this early past century. William Carlos Williams produced many good poems from a process of earnest, scrapbook-style intensity in trying to discover, redefine, and order a new poetic form within a modern ‘urban landscape.’
The individual artist is quite alone in the task he’s set before himself, and like much of modernism, it’s a rather big task.
Pastoral
When I was younger it was plain to me I must make something of myself. Older now I walk back streets admiring the houses of the very poor: roof out of line with sides the yards cluttered with old chicken wire, ashes, furniture gone wrong; the fences and outhouses built of barrel staves and parts of boxes, all, if I am fortunate, smeared a bluish green that properly weathered pleases me best of all colors.
No one will believe this of vast import to the nation
Perhaps I’m not wrong in having called Halloween horror stills and movie images to mind (it’s my mind, after all, so maybe I’m just thinking of Devil’s Night). I really enjoy the light on the dumpster and the side-front rectory wall. There seems to be a little more mood here, more drama, so maybe Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘psychological intensity,’ his surrealism, and terror are more appropriate for comparison.
Poe was a bit mad, after all, despite his fascinatingly untamed and powerful imagination. He achieved a uniqueness and completeness of vision few artists do. Maybe there’s a bit of the sullen, self-aggrandizing earnestness in him of the teenager (J.D. Salinger); the desire to shock, delight and terrify.
The mind is as though a chamber, the horror rises to fever pitch, the lush rhyme matches an increasingly desperate search for truth and beauty in the world (Poe had very much his own Romantically inspired metaphysics).
Alone
From childhood’s hour I have not been As others were—I have not seen As others saw—I could not bring My passions from a common spring— From the same source I have not taken My sorrow—I could not awaken My heart to joy at the same tone— And all I lov’d—I lov’d alone— Then—in my childhood—in the dawn Of a most stormy life—was drawn From ev’ry depth of good and ill The mystery which binds me still— From the torrent, or the fountain— From the red cliff of the mountain— From the sun that ’round me roll’d In its autumn tint of gold— From the lightning in the sky As it pass’d me flying by— From the thunder, and the storm— And the cloud that took the form (When the rest of Heaven was blue) Of a demon in my view—
Are you looking at beautiful photos and feeling sorry for Detroit, and yourself? See Time Magazine’s photo essay by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre (less porn-like, more thoughtful).
My brother comes home from work and climbs the stairs to our room. I can hear the bed groan and his shoes drop one by one. You can have it, he says.
The moonlight streams in the window and his unshaven face is whitened like the face of the moon. He will sleep long after noon and waken to find me gone.
Thirty years will pass before I remember that moment when suddenly I knew each man has one brother who dies when he sleeps and sleeps when he rises to face this life,
and that together they are only one man sharing a heart that always labours, hands yellowed and cracked, a mouth that gasps for breath and asks, Am I gonna make it?
All night at the ice plant he had fed the chute its silvery blocks, and then I stacked cases of orange soda for the children of Kentucky, one gray boxcar at a time
with always two more waiting. We were twenty for such a short time and always in the wrong clothes, crusted with dirt and sweat. I think now we were never twenty.
In 1948 the city of Detroit, founded by de la Mothe Cadillac for the distant purposes of Henry Ford, no one wakened or died, no one walked the streets or stoked a furnace,
for there was no such year, and now that year has fallen off all the old newspapers, calendars, doctors’ appointments, bonds wedding certificates, drivers licenses.
The city slept. The snow turned to ice. The ice to standing pools or rivers racing in the gutters. Then the bright grass rose between the thousands of cracked squares,
and that grass died. I give you back 1948. I give you all the years from then to the coming one. Give me back the moon with its frail light falling across a face.
Give me back my young brother, hard and furious, with wide shoulders and a curse for God and burning eyes that look upon all creation and say, You can have it.
We were supposed to do a job in Italy and, full of our feeling for ourselves (our sense of being Poets from America) we went from Rome to Fano, met the mayor, mulled a couple matters over (what’s a cheap date, they asked us; what’s flat drink). Among Italian literati
we could recognize our counterparts: the academic, the apologist, the arrogant, the amorous, the brazen and the glib — and there was one
administrator (the conservative), in suit of regulation gray, who like a good tour guide with measured pace and uninflected tone narrated sights and histories the hired van hauled us past. Of all, he was most politic and least poetic, so it seemed. Our last few days in Rome (when all but three of the New World Bards had flown) I found a book of poems this unprepossessing one had written: it was there in the pensione room (a room he’d recommended) where it must have been abandoned by the German visitor (was there a bus of them?) to whom he had inscribed and dated it a month before. I couldn’t read Italian, either, so I put the book back into the wardrobe’s dark. We last Americans
were due to leave tomorrow. For our parting evening then our host chose something in a family restaurant, and there we sat and chatted, sat and chewed, till, sensible it was our last big chance to be poetic, make our mark, one of us asked “What’s poetry? Is it the fruits and vegetables and marketplace of Campo dei Fiori, or the statue there?” Because I was
the glib one, I identified the answer instantly, I didn’t have to think — “The truth is both, it’s both,” I blurted out. But that was easy. That was easiest to say. What followed taught me something about difficulty, for our underestimated host spoke out, all of a sudden, with a rising passion, and he said:
The statue represents Giordano Bruno, brought to be burned in the public square because of his offense against authority, which is to say the Church. His crime was his belief the universe does not revolve around the human being: God is no fixed point or central government, but rather is poured in waves through all things. All things move. “If God is not the soul itself, He is the soul of the soul of the world.” Such was his heresy. The day they brought him forth to die, they feared he might incite the crowd (the man was famous for his eloquence). And so his captors placed upon his face an iron mask, in which
he could not speak. That’s how they burned him. That is how he died: without a word, in front of everyone. And poetry — (we’d all put down our forks by now, to listen to the man in gray; he went on softly) — poetry is what he thought, but did not say.
I claim no special literary insight, other than these five short stories have stuck with me, as they have for many other readers besides. Links included.
Catch-up with Turkey, Nippers, and Ginger Nut; their daily routines at the office.
Our narrator:
‘I am one of those unambitious lawyers who never addresses a jury, or in any way draws down public applause; but in the cool tranquillity of a snug retreat, do a snug business among rich men’s bonds and mortgages and title-deeds. All who know me consider me an eminently safe man. The late John Jacob Astor, a personage little given to poetic enthusiasm, had no hesitation in pronouncing my first grand point to be prudence; my next, method.’
We all want to be alone, and to be with others, and Bartleby…Bartleby would just prefer not to:
As they were for many other high-school boys, the first lines were enough for me:
‘A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below. The man’s hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord. A rope closely encircled his neck.’
‘Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man?
O’Connor’s Southern Gothic style often flirts with the grotesque, and can traffic in the macabre, but there’s reason behind it, and a brilliantly skeptical, humane eye. Few writers get so many things right, in my opinion.
The world is changing, and so is the South.
Julian’s mother is living in the past:
‘They had reached the bus stop. There was no bus in sight and Julian, his hands still jammed in his pockets and his head thrust forward, scowled down the empty street. The frustration of having to wait on the bus as well as ride on it began to creep up his neck like a hot hand. The presence of his mother was borne in upon him as she gave a pained sigh. He looked at her bleakly. She was holding herself very erect under the preposterous hat, wearing it like a banner of her imaginary dignity. There was in him an evil urge to break her spirit. He suddenly unloosened his tie and pulled it off and put it in his pocket’
A lot can be ‘swallowed’ up in the desert, lost in translation; across time, language and civilizations.
Things don’t always end well for the intellectually curious and naive…:
‘It occurred to him that he ought to ask himself why he was doing this irrational thing, but he was intelligent enough to know that since he Was doing it, it was not so important to probe for explanations at that moment.’
‘When the short days of winter came, dusk fell before we had well eaten our dinners. When we met in the street the houses had grown sombre. The space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed.’
O hushed October morning mild, Thy leaves have ripened to the fall; Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild, Should waste them all. The crows above the forest call; Tomorrow they may form and go. O hushed October morning mild, Begin the hours of this day slow. Make the day seem to us less brief. Hearts not averse to being beguiled, Beguile us in the way you know. Release one leaf at break of day; At noon release another leaf; One from our trees, one far away. Retard the sun with gentle mist; Enchant the land with amethyst. Slow, slow! For the grapes’ sake, if they were all, Whose leaves already are burnt with frost, Whose clustered fruit must else be lost— For the grapes’ sake along the wall.
Beauty, ugliness, youth, strength, and decay: Via Mick Hartley Bruce Davidson at Magnum’s ‘Subway‘.
Many of the images in Subway are sensual, dangerous and raw, but then again, so was the NYC subway in about 1979 or 1980. Davidson plays with different exposures, techniques and settings, eventually deciding on using color to depict what he saw. He also reportedly toned-up physically, geared-up, and mentally prepared himself to get off and on those subway cars during the project. He had some undercover city cops with him a few times.
Imagine how conspicuous a new Nikon/Canon DSLR and a flash would make you in one of those cars at night (he, in fact, had one camera stolen).
Come for the raw, dangerous subject matter and the vicarious risk (oh yeah, it can happen again…just stay tuned). Stay for Davidson’s compositions, subtle use of light and color, and the genuine humanity he found within his larger vision.
Is a certain dangerous, glamorous adventure beneath you?
What about in your prime?
What can the ‘rebellious’ artists overlook in their search for ‘humanity’? What can they see pretty clearly through the lens?
—
—
It’s not like these problems haven’t been with us for a while. Without police protection, you’ll probably get worse outcomes and more retributive violence. A reader sends a link to The Confessions Of Bernhard Goetz, subway vigilante:
There’s a lot here: Genuine threat (thugs), fear, real victimization (previous muggings and a likely soon-to-be mugging), but also serious ignorance and over-reaction.
I imagine Goetz was a bit like a feral animal fleeing out of that subway car, up the station stairs and into the night.
From min 33:40:
The question to be litigated was whether the community would make a judgment about his (Goetz) own good faith belief….are we in a position to condemn him for over-reacting?
—
Great interview on matters of NYC crime from a reporter and a cop active at the time. From Jeffrey Epstein to the Bernie Goetz backstory (starts at min 26:00):
NYC couldn’t protect Goetz from a robbery 6 months before (permanent trauma and kneecap damage), and wouldn’t let him get a gun. He likely saw his assailant likely get out of the precinct before he did that time around.
So, a law-abiding equipment-tester gets and muggable-looking guy gets a gun, ready for the eventual ‘give me five-dollars’ subway fun.
And…he overreacts…but…can you blame him?
—
From The Warriors to Dirty Harry to Death Wish, a certain gritty, pulpy style was born. One of the main desires of men, especially, is to quash injustice and heroically protect that which falls under their honor. When the authorities can’t combat crime in public transport, or choose to enforce the law selectively, then the desire for vengeance, punishment and order finds outlets.
‘The minor vogue and rapid extinction of Imagism, a movement whose influence we still feel, has been hashed over by literary critics for a century. Its rehearsal here is merely to bring the poem into focus within the slow progress toward the densities of language, the images like copperplate engraving, that made Pound Pound’
Thorough and well done.
The result would echo back to the States years later:
‘Imagism was a sub-genre of Modernism concerned with creating clear imagery with sharp language. The essential idea was to re-create the physical experience of an object through words. As with all of Modernism, Imagism implicitly rejected Victorian poetry, which tended toward narrative.‘
And:
‘The most exemplified phase of Modernism, referred to as “High Modernism,” occurred during the inter-war years (1918-1939). This was the time when writers synonymous with Modernism, such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and D.H. Lawrence, thrived. While Victorians typically concerned themselves with rendering reality as they understood it into fiction, Modernists recognized that reality was subjective, and instead strove to represent human psychology in fiction.‘
During the post-war years, the confessionals, with a fair amount of free and blank verse became dominant, with a kind of feelings-first, psychological exploration of the (S)elf.
This blog tends to look cautiously at many of the ideas of the Romantic poets, and the break to modernism, but not necessarily the poems themselves. The echo ripples outwards:
…
Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout
Down valley a smoke haze Three days heat, after five days rain Pitch glows on the fir-cones Across rocks and meadows Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read A few friends, but they are in cities. Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup Looking down for miles Through high still air.
Once we start arriving at ‘ecological’ appreciations of nature, and the postmodern, confessional altar of Self and the turn inwards to the Self a subject for the art, and the desperate search for meaning, I get more and more turned off, for my own reasons. Such good poems will carry on.
Any thoughts and comments are welcome.
—
Addition: Meanwhile, comics are so much the cultural bellwethers, there are now videos about podcasts (male gossip-mongering). People, generally, and guys specifically, seek discussions of truth from guys getting paid to deliver jokes (often vulgar, usually funny). Also, of course, the ‘how to live, what to do?’ questions.
In the postmodern void, politics (a thing) has become for many more people a defining, tribal thing, and we’re all along for the ride.
Also, podcasts make you feel connected in a world of increasing technological dislocation (as well as the same old dislocations). There’s a much more personal, easily available way to make you feel connected, and less lonely.
Certainly, more than dead poets, for most people most of the time, nowadays.
‘My college art history course conveyed the Modernist Establishment party line that the practice of painting was teleological, that its ordained end was the Platonic ideal manifested by the New York School of Abstract Expressionist art. That’s the message I got by the end of the school year. And it was confirmed by the many examples of that style displayed on the pages of Time magazine in the late 1950s.’
and:
‘One such painter was Jasper Johns (b. 1930) who chose to paint objects that were already flat…’
As for the Abstract Expressionists, my grandfather was friends with Eddie Dugmore, and we had a painting of his up on the wall. I remember that it was abstract, and dark, and kind of raw.
Did you know Hawthorne had a son who wrote for Hearst and rubbed shoulders with Twain?:
‘Over the course of his long life, Julian Hawthorne seems to have met every major literary and public figure of his time. As a child, he sometimes listened in as his father conversed with Emerson, Thoreau and Melville. At birthday parties, he played games with little Louisa May Alcott.’
‘We stayed for the afternoon talk-in which Richard Schrader revealed how slanted and inaccurate Mencken’s account of the Scopes evolution trial had been…’
The business of monkeys…
I’m often returned to the simple pleasures of bookishness while reading Dirda.
“As a student of his native literature, Mencken favours writers with the authentic American yawp – Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, the humorists George Ade and Ring Lardner. Huckleberry Finn is the novel he loves most (followed, somewhat surprisingly, by Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim). He judges Emerson to be overrated – “an importer of stale German elixirs, sometimes direct and sometimes through the Carlylean branch house”. He can’t bear the circumlocutions of Henry James and the gentility of William Dean Howells”
Menand wonders in his new book, why it often can take 9 years for a humanities PhD to get their doctorate. He suggests part of the answer lies in the numbers: fewer opportunities and fewer university programs since 1970. Overtrained and underpaid.
It is the word pejorative that hurts. My old boat goes round on a crutch And doesn’t get under way. It’s the time of the year And the time of the day.
Perhaps it’s the lunch that we had Or the lunch that we should have had. But I am, in any case, A most inappropriate man In a most unpropitious place.
Mon Dieu, hear the poet’s prayer. The romantic should be here. The romantic should be there. It ought to be everywhere. But the romantic must never remain,
Mon Dieu, and must never again return. This heavy historical sail Through the mustiest blue of the lake In a really vertiginous boat Is wholly the vapidest fake. . . .
It is least what one ever sees. It is only the way one feels, to say Where my spirit is I am, To say the light wind worries the sail, To say the water is swift today,
To expunge all people and be a pupil Of the gorgeous wheel and so to give That slight transcendence to the dirty sail, By light, the way one feels, sharp white, And then rush brightly through the summer air.
***Wallace Stevens is often going meta and abstract, confusing nearly all readers, while indulging heavily in a lush Romantic style which later transitions to more blank verse modernism. He’s sailing and he’s writing. He’s charting new waters, the old dandy.
No, it doesn’t mean endless revolution, nor mere liberation. It requires courage, sacrifice and humility. Even when you’re in the sh*t.
All the best to you and yours.
“When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation…”
Dan Robinson was the guy heading south, then rapidly east, in the hopes of staying on a parallel northward track to the May 31st, 2013 El Reno, Oklahoma tornado. I can appreciate a man driving towards such a thing.
‘I was not trying to get close. I knew from how the tornado first appeared that it would be very large, violent and dangerous. My goal was simply to remain in a good position for photography and video, which I felt would be best with the tornado backlit by the bright skies to the southwest. I wanted to be just close enough to have a high-contrast view. ‘
It turns out that particular evening, many of the variables leading to supercell formation, and even EF5 tornado formation, were in place. So many were in place, in fact, that this became one of the most violent and dangerous tornadoes ever recorded.
It changed directions suddenly. It slowed down to 5 mph and sped up to nearly 50 mph. 2.6 miles wide at one point? 300 mph wind?
Eight people died.
The guy in a Toyota Yaris, slipping on a wet, gravely Oklahoma road unable to disable traction control doesn’t exactly come off a hero. The guy suddenly racing for his life, enveloped in the outer wind-field, is easily criticized. Bigger balls than many? Maybe. Stupid enough to get killed? Possibly.
Thanks, Dan, for chasing on your own dime, sharing your information, and respecting the wishes of the families of those in the car behind you. That was the last anyone saw of them.
‘The most useful definition of modernist fiction I’ve encountered comes from Brian McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction. He says modernist fiction tends to “foreground epistemological questions” such as “How can I interpret the world I’m part of? What is there to be known? Who knows it? What are the limits of that knowledge?” In contrast, postmodernist fiction tends to “foreground ontological questions” such as “What is a world? What kinds of worlds are there and how are they constituted? What happens when…boundaries between worlds are violated?’
As to the epistemological questions surrounding Modernism, below are four poems. Hopefully, each is a representative example of a move away from the Romanticism that had been prevalent up until the late 1800’s.
In addition to the move away from traditional Romantic rhyme and meter towards modern blank verse, there’s also a certain conception of the Self rendered in them; a presentation of our natures that might be worth examining in some detail.
I believe we can see clearly a move away from tradition towards the Self, the Poet isolated, the poem itself as a means of communication, and an anxiety so common within the 20th century.
‘At the heart of Bloom’s project is the ancient quarrel between “poetry” and “philosophy.” In Bloom’s opinion, we ought not have to choose between Homer and Plato; we can have both, as long as we recognize that poetry is superior.’
Says the guy who writes about poetry…
What does one find within, as one looks without, waking from sleep and dream?
What kind of world is this, and can the poet actually help us know it?
You tossed a blanket from the bed You lay upon your back, and waited; You dozed, and watched the night revealing The thousand sordid images Of which your soul was constituted; They flickered against the ceiling. And when all the world came back And the light crept up between the shutters And you heard the sparrows in the gutters, You had such a vision of the street As the street hardly understands; Sitting along the bed’s edge, where You curled the papers from your hair, Or clasped the yellow soles of feet In the palms of both soiled hands.
—
The world will stain you, and it is a fallen, modern world, rendered profoundly and exquisitely.
As consciousness creeps in, building a bridge to the day, to the world, to the facts left as though they were the first facts, the light as though it were the first light, what one finds is distressing, both within and without.
That distress must be ‘made new,’ which is to say, the suffering (original?) in which we all sometimes find ourselves must match our experiences within the modern city and world, at least, the world created within Eliot’s lyrical verse.
Of the four poems, only the first and last have a 3rd-person subject.
—
Wallace Stevens‘ ‘I’ is in a more contemplative state, but it’s an ‘I’ exploring similar themes, and experiencing some distress in trying to know how the world actually is, and what might lie within.
The journey to The Self may not be a journey for the faint of heart.
The Poems Of Our Climate (stanzas II and III)
II Say even that this complete simplicity Stripped one of all one’s torments, concealed The evilly compounded, vital I And made it fresh in a world of white, A world of clear water, brilliant-edged, Still one would want more, one would need more, More than a world of white and snowy scents.
III There would still remain the never-resting mind, So that one would want to escape, come back To what had been so long composed. The imperfect is our paradise. Note that, in this bitterness, delight, Since the imperfect is so hot in us, Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.
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Even if the verse can describe a perfected world, delivering us, perhaps, a little closer to perfection, our poet is still not free from the impulses and desires which simply never cease.
Interestingly, we end-up not with a discussion of the heart, the spirit, libido etc. as a source for those desires (for Plato, the irrational), but rather, for Stevens, just a mind.
We also find more Romantic elements of language and an almost baroque/rococo arrangement of words and ideas, dandyish even, yet combined with an intense effort to abstract, define, and clarify. From here, the poet may proceed on his task of flawed words and stubborn sounds.
***I find myself thinking of elements of modern architecture and abstract-expressionist painting. The meaning, or at least some delivery from our restless existences, can be found within the abstract itself. Or at least within a retreat to the abstract for its own sake, away from the world.
The modernist, glass-walled house on the hill will exist in its own space, offering and defying meaning. The structure’s own shapes will be stripped down to often mathematically precise forms interacting with Nature. These shall guide Man, or at least offer individual men a little refuge.
It is perhaps in Stevens’ poem we can see the questions of knowledge about the world suggesting questions about whether there is a world at all, or, at least, what kind of worlds each Self might be able to inhabit.
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Here’s one of Robert Lowell’s poems, occurring a generation later, in the mid 20th-century, as part of the confessionals.
The Self is extremely isolated. In fact, Lowell went more than a little crazy. Unlike the known nervous breakdown of Eliot from which Eliot recovered, Lowell’s life was essentially one long breakdown from which he never recovered.
Here he is, looking back:
Epilogue
Those blessed structures plot and rhyme- why are they no help to me now i want to make something imagined not recalled? I hear the noise of my own voice: The painter’s vision is not a lens it trembles to caress the light. But sometimes everything i write With the threadbare art of my eye seems a snapshot lurid rapid garish grouped heightened from life yet paralyzed by fact. All’s misalliance. Yet why not say what happened? Pray for the grace of accuracy Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination stealing like the tide across a map to his girl solid with yearning. We are poor passing facts. warned by that to give each figure in the photograph his living name.
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The weight of having to make that meaning, for yourself, and by yourself, is a horrible weight indeed. One can glorify one’s Self and family, but that, alas, only goes so far. Rhyme and form still carry one’s living name, as far as they do.
Of course, there’s still wonderful rhythm and form here (this is excellent verse), but blanker now, with a relentless focus on the ‘I.’ The poet is perhaps talking a little more to himself, and the poem keeps self-consciously calling attention to itself.
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In fact, it reminded me of the poem below, by Robert Creeley, which was published a few years afterwards.
From this page:
‘Creeley was a leader in the generational shift that veered away from history and tradition as primary poetic sources and gave new prominence to the ongoing experiences of an individual’s life. Because of this emphasis, the major events of his life loom large in his literary work.’
There’s Nothing but the Self and the Eye seeking and making meaning, by itself within a void of emotionally compact and precise language (of course there’s still form and other things besides).
Can the poet fit inside the little abstract chapel of words he’s building for himself (let alone the world, tradition etc.)?
For all the talk about ‘space,’ there seems very little.
The Window
Position is where you put it, where it is, did you, for example, that
large tank there, silvered, with the white church along- side, lift
all that, to what purpose? How heavy the slow
world is with everything put in place. Some
man walks by, a car beside him on the dropped
road, a leaf of yellow color is going to
fall. It all drops into place. My
face is heavy with the sight. I can feel my eye breaking.
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The distress is still there…but I’d argue that we are now a good distance away from the grandness of Eliot’s vision, his religiosity and virtuosity with form and meter at the dawn of Modernism. Very few people can/could do what Eliot did (addition: even if he can help us gain knowledge of our Selves or the world).
That said, it’s unclear there’s enough tradition and confidence to even undertake such a project, now, even as such talents come along. The state of things is more scattered. We’re in a very different place of selves and artists isolated, of anxiety and post-anxiety.
Aside from the very accomplished poets above, in terms of both knowledge (epistemology) and being (ontology), we often have writers feeling pressure to weigh-in on such questions without even being about to write that well; artists who can’t draw or paint that well, and frankly, quite a bit of bullshit besides.
So, where are we headed? Who’s ‘we’ exactly?
Predictions are hard, especially about the future.
As previously posted:
Why not just put a few algorithms to work in writing those artist statements?
‘In “Sea Change,” Graham becomes Prospero, casting spells by spelling out her thoughts to merge with ours, and with the voices of the elements. The result is a mingling of perceptions rather than a broadcasting of opinions. Instead of analysis, the poems encourage emotional involvement with the drastic changes overwhelming us, overwhelm- ing the planet.’
and:
‘Strengths and weaknesses, flows and ebbs, yet every poem in “Sea Change” bears memorable lines, with almost haunting (if we truly have but 10 years to “fix” global warming) images of flora and fauna under siege. Jorie Graham has composed a swan song for Earth.’
Oh boy.
What are these poems being asked to do?
And moving away from poetry into the realm of ‘performance art,’
Imagine a bathtub draining. All the water molecules feel a downward pull to the center of Earth’s mass. The tub floor is tapered slightly, causing the water molecules to flow in one direction. There are about a dozen holes in the drain cover, where the downward pull is exponentially greater.
All the molecules in the tub gather here, eventually passing the cover. The convenient shape to balance these known forces is a vortex.
Zip, off you go.
Out on the Great Plains, East of the Rockies, hundreds of miles of cooler drier moves down from the North.
Warm, moist air rolls up from the South and East, mostly from the Gulf of Mexico.
These differing air masses have different densities, temperatures, and directions of motion. Warm air holds more moisture, and rises. Cool air is harder to lift. Breezes kick up. Clouds heap on the horizon.
Huge complexes called supercells form. These cloud-machines can rise up to 50,000 feet, seeming to collect all the smaller storms around. They have a center called a mesocyclone which rotates. They have a gust front ahead, and downdrafts behind.
On the gust front, perhaps something like our water in the bathtub, rising air is being fed into the supercell quickly enough; the air molecules forced upward intensely enough, that vortices form (the pressure releasing against gravity).
A lot of the power of this cloud machine becomes concentrated. Cyclonic ropes and columns spin down from cooler parts of the storm. These anti-cyclonic (our hemisphere) ropes and columns of rising air stack up in one area.
Zip…off you go.
If you’re anywhere near a tornado you’d hear a guttural roar of wind. It’s described as a loud, terrifying sound you haven’t quite heard before.
Your ears would pop. You’d be pelted with rain or hail, then pierced with dirt, mud, rocks, splinters of wood and bits of tree bark. Aluminum siding might fly by, or structural materials and other larger objects might slam into you. If you found yourself inside, you’d be desperately gathering your loved ones in the safest place possible.
You’d be hoping whoever built this building built it well.
You’d be hoping wherever this tornado moves, it’s away from here.
—
This monster just passed through Greenfield, Iowa. The people there could use some help. Sometimes help is for the right reasons, and pretty easy.
“I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the Stern Fact, the Sad Self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.”
Andrew Wyeth homepage here with some images included.
There are definitely interesting things going on with light in Wyeth’s work. It fills his paintings. I also find my eye and mind hovering between realist depiction and abstract arrangement of objects on the canvas.
Ferguson:
‘Beneath the frequent prettiness, most of the pictures are just this side of harrowing, not just lonesome and melancholy but portraits of life as it seeps inevitably away. The wind that lifts the lace curtain in Wind from the Sea makes the hair on your arms stand up. Jamie Wyeth, Andrew’s son and a celebrated artist himself, confesses to being puzzled by the benign view of Wyeth’s work. “My father’s work is terrifying,” he said. It’s not sentimental. It’s luminous! But in a creepy way.’
Wyeth reached a level of popular appreciation few artists ever receive in their lifetimes.
Like many Americans, I find myself drawn to what I would call a New England plainness and Yankee work ethic and aesthetic, which is evident is some of Wyeth’s landscapes, at least. Long winters and deep woods. Shorter distances and stonier soil in the meadows. Perhaps a Puritan, high-minded spiritual reserve.
Or perhaps the Shaker work song ‘Simple Gifts’ adapted by Aaron Copland might be a good example of what I’m trying to get at.
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So, is this representative of Wyeth? Perhaps. He did much of his work in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania and Maine, but according to Wikipedia there may be other influences as well:
‘N.C. also fostered an inner self-confidence to follow one’s own talents without thought of how the work is received. N.C. wrote in a letter to Wyeth in 1944:[8]
“The great men [ Thoreau, Goethe, Emerson, Tolstoy] forever radiate a sharp sense of that profound requirement of an artist, to fully understand that consequences of what he creates are unimportant. Let the motive for action be in the action itself and not in the event. I know from my own experience that when I create with any degree of strength and beauty I have no thought of consequences. Anyone who creates for effect — to score a hit — does not know what he is missing!”‘
So, I’m speculating. Addition: There’s also a strong modernist-influenced creative imagination at work here too, and like Hopper, the American question of what to do with all that space and wilderness.
Yet, a man able to walk familiar land, seeing it anew with keen eyes, hoping his senses pick up more than he knows, having a medium with which to express his thoughts seems a man who’s had some success in life, regardless of popular appreciation.
Of course, a concupiscent eye must come into tension with other parts of a man’s character.
Or at least when there was a tittering about his ‘Helga‘ paintings a while back.
Ferguson:
‘Stopping to rest near a group of European spring beauties, he saw on a trail above him a young woman on a walk. Assuming she was alone, she moved off the trail, lifted her skirt, and defecated in the grass. Wyeth was charmed. “The white curve of her bottom was amazing,” he told Meryman. The little lumps she left tumbled downhill and stopped in the patch of spring beauties.’
‘What I have to say is largely in support of the following proposition: Literary criticism should be completed by criticism from a definitive ethical and theological standpoint.’
Eliot, T.S. Selected Prose Of T.S. Eliot. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1975. Print.
Addition: Maybe, just maybe, as a friend points out. Compared to the current radical models clamoring for the syllabus, such a suggestion has become radical.
The Prospect has a good article here on Parmenides (no longer free). Stanford’s page here.
“By these arguments, Parmenides arrives at his picture of the world as a single, undifferentiated, unchanging unity. Needless to say, scholars have disagreed over exactly what he meant. They have questioned whether he meant that the universe was one thing, or only that it was undifferentiated.”
“According to Hume, the idea of a persisting, self-identical object, distinct from our impressions of it, and the idea of a duration of time, the mere passage of time without change, are mutually supporting “fictions”. Each rests upon a “mistake”, the commingling of “qualities of the imagination” or “impressions of reflection” with “external” impressions (perceptions), and, strictly speaking, we are conceptually and epistemically entitled to neither.“
and also:
“Unlike Hume, however, he (Kant) undertakes to establish the legitimacy or objective validity of the schematized category of substance and, correspondingly, of the representation of time as a formal unity with duration as one of its modes.“
