Saturday, November 5th, 2011
I’m posting this because (1) I need an easy entry because I’ve been away from the computer all day; (2) I came across this image in the latest issue of ARTnews and liked it; and (3) I’d never heard of Golubov, and thought I was pretty familiar with American non-representational painters of value (and he is American).
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Saturday, June 1st, 2013
This also is from the June issue of ARTnews.
Okay, Weatherly is a fine craftsman, and his still life is interesting–a fine expression of a now widely-accepted value of superior art: its reminding us of the ability of the ordinary to provide aesthetic delight. But nothing more. Thinking about why brought to mind Williams’s red wheelbarrow, but much better. Or does it? I think so because both works present ordinary objects sensitively-arranged. But Williams’s arrangement is also a poem. Weatherly presents a cup, Williams a wheelbarrow–and something made of words, beautifully-made of words.
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Saturday, January 26th, 2013
The following is a pwoermd Kevin Kelly posted to Spidertangle the other day:
hearthththrob
I like the way it makes me, at any rate, close to simultaneously strongly, sympathetically identify with the one whose heart throb is involved, and laugh at the poor jerk. The lisp of the heartbeats is any excellent touch, too. Not to mention the stuttering attempt to say, “the,” but not be able to. Never has “heart throb” been so fully writ.
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Topic: why some people like narratives about miserable people. A variation on why people like tragedy–as, on the surface, they should not, if my claim that the object of art is to give pleasure is true.
1. The standard answer: one experiencing the narrative experiences the beauty of the ugly material’s aesthetic expression. The artist provides a taming order to horror, and pleasurable details, for instance, as with Macbeth’s famous “sound and fury.”
2. A simple psychological answer: it results in an “Ah, I’m not alone!” for someone empathetic who is exposed to it.
3. Another obvious one: it produces in the person experiencing it the kind of happiness one gets from looking through a window of a snug, secure house at a blizzard.
Sunday, December 29th, 2013
It crossed my mind earlier today that a flair for the use of fresh language might be the most important attribute of a superior poet. Certainly E. E. Cummings had it, which is why he rates so high with me. In particular, I think the invention of new words or phrases, or the use of a word in a way it was never before used, like Cummings’s melding of “just” and “spring” in his famous poem about the balloonman, is about the most important thing a superior poet can do. Hopkins and Dylan Thomas are two others I quickly think of who did this. If I were fading out, I’d try to find examples, and mention more poets of fresh language. I might even come up with a Grummaniacal name for them.
For now, I just say that one way of recognizing mediocrity in a poet is his total conventionality of word-choice and use. You can recognize the subj-mediocrity by his used of dead poeticisms.
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It seems that almost every time I seem to be getting productive, something knocks me down. This time it’s only a lost entry–this one, that I was trying to correct some detail of and lost in the process–without realizing it, so was not able to try to find the lost material by backing up until it was too late. So now I have to spend an hour or so, restoring what I can recall of what was here two days ago.
And all three of my frames of “Triptych for Tom Phillips”:
About the ampersand, I commented something about how it expressed the essence of “andness.” I loved the way its bird regurgitated what looked like all of itself, while looking to continue “anding” forever. I said little about my full triptych except that if you click on them, you’ll see a larger image of them which may be helpful although still very small–and in black&white. The original frames are each eleven by seventeen. Oh, one thing I did point out was that the frames are about, “departure,” “journey” and “arrival,” and are intended to be about them in the largest sense, but particularly about them with regard to arriving–for either an engagent of it or its author.
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Sunday, 4 October 2011. Sunday is hazy to me now, three days in the past as it is. I played tennis early in the morning–badly. I didn’t return to my Shakespeare book, but evidentally got a blog entry posted, and probably wrote an exhibition hand-out or two.
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Friday, August 17th, 2012
Yesterday I finished reading Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October. It’s a mere “genre” novel, but I doubt any of the “art” novels of our time are better. I think critics have too long been under the influence of Henry James, whose forte was characterization, not plot, as Clancy’s is. I much prefer The Hunt for Red October to the one James novel I know I read, The Ambassadors–a penetrating psychological study of an absolute nincompoop as far as I’m concerned. The inability to be explicit does not seem the brilliant virtue to me it does to Jamesians.
I think taste in these matters boils down to which of a person’s awarenesses is stronger, his sagaceptual awareness or his anthroceptual awareness. I’ve discussed all this before, but haven’t anything else to post today, so here it is again. (I also want to make public my notion of sagaceptuality as much as possible so maybe I’ll get some credit for it when some certified theoretical psychologist discovers it.) It’s the awareness which tends to organize thinking in goal directed modes–i.e., to put a person on a quest. It could be a child hunting for pirate treasure on a beach, a girl pursuing a boy, me working up a decent definition of . . . “sagaceptuality.” It could also be a vicarious quest, as was the one I went on with the hero of The Hunt for Red October. With several of the heroes of that book, actually.
What happens is that we all have an instinctive recognition of certain goals–for instance, the capture of a mate. We usually have some instinctive goal pursuit drive that the object we recognize as a proper goal makes available to us. What it does, basically, is lock us onto the object it is our goal to capture (or escape from) and energize us when we are effectively closing in on it (or escaping it), and de-energize us to take us out of single-minded ineffective pursuit and expose us to other possible better kinds, until one of them is judged to improve out pursuit. In other words, just a homing device, with many different possible targets, like a possible mate, or food, or beauty, or fame. Nothing much to it.
Anthroceptuality is simply interest in oneself and others. When it is dominant, other instincts rule us, such as the need for social approval. Needless to say, both anthroceptuality and sagaceptuality will usually be in some kind of partnership–with other awarenesses. But some, as I’ve said, will be stronger in sagaceptuality than anthroceptuality, and some the reverse. The former will prefer plot in the stories he reads or movies he watches to characterization; the latter will consider plot trivial compared to characterization. I’m convinced that normal men are sagaceptuals, normal women anthroceptuals. But not necessarily all the time.
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I’m posting this because (1) I need an easy entry because I’ve been away from the computer all day; (2) I came across this image in the latest issue of ARTnews and liked it; and (3) I’d never heard of Golubov, and thought I was pretty familiar with American non-representational painters of value (and he is American).
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Thursday, February 9th, 2012
Me Versus B. H. Fairchild and Others He quotes
Language can be a way of rescuing the hidden life, and that way is poetry. You can’t rescue any hidden life, whatever that is, with prose? Or some other art? Or science? Why wouldn’t using language to drown certain aspects of unhidden life be equally or more valuable?
Glenn Gould: “The purpose of art is the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.” And wonder is everything to a poet. It sure isn’t everything to me. It and serenity are only two of many pleasures it is the function of art to provide. Its manner of providing them is what sets it apart from verosophy and other endeavors which can, and try, to lead to wonder and serenity, and other pleasures.
Mandelstam: “We will remember in Lethe’s cold waters / That earth for us has been worth a thousand heavens.” Nice thought–but unattainable heavens to dream toward are a high good, too.
Seven propositions:
1. By way of Wittgenstein and Heidegger: A poem is a verbal construction which, through an array of rhetorical and prosodic devices of embodiment, achieves an order of being, an ontological status, radically different from that of other forms of discourse (with the exception of certain kinds of descriptive and fictional prose). I agree: a poem is a verbal construction different from almost all other verbal constructions.
2. Poetry occurs at a considerable distance from the ego. As does almost anything else I can think of, when it isn’t nothing but ego.
3. There exists an infinity of nonverbal meaning. Which the infinity of possible verbal meaning can express.
4. Science is progressive, but Art is not. It doesn’t get better; it just gets different. (The relevance and utility of all poetic forms.) See Mandestam. All the arts, like all the sciences, have become vastly superior to what they were hundreds or thousands of years ago, but anti-progressives mistake the sentimentality that becomes more and more attached to the old because of their age for aesthetic rather than nostalgiacal value. Compare the clumsy “novel” in the Bible about David with almost any competent commercial novel of today, for instance. Consider how much more of existence the best art of today is about compared with earlier art. For just one thing, today’s art has a vastly larger tradition to make allusions to than previous art had. There have been artists in the past as great as our best, but what our best have produced is significantly better than what they did in part because of the what the artists of the past did. (Note, this is a subject requiring a book.)
5. Rules are made to be broken; techniques are made to be used. (They were never rules anyway; they were techniques. The freedom of the artist, like that of the lathe machinist, is the freedom to choose those techniques, those tools, that he deems necessary for the task at hand. The refusal to use technique–and, obviously, to learn it–is the refusal to be an artist, or at least a free one.) I more or less agree with all this, but I wonder how one can avoid using some technique.
6. Form is an extension of subject matter rather than of ideology or religious belief. Every work of art requires a container; I call that container form; one calling it “an extension of subject matter,” if I understand him, needs to tell me what, then, is containing it and the subject matter it is an extension of. I don’t know what ideology and religious belief have to do with it; how would they be not subject matter?
7. Meter is not the reins to keep the horse of the poem in check; it’s the heartbeat of the horse. Drop the reins. (Clearly this is an argument for meter rather than against it.) It is almost impossible to convince poets who never bothered to learn prosody that meter is something that emerges from within the language rather than something that is imposed externally upon the language. Even conversational English is very loosely iambic. I think meter is both natural and imposed–necessarily imposed to add predictability to balance the difficult-to-accept unpredictability of horses going beyond prose that poetry at its best is.
A poet is always limited by the fact that he has to write for other human beings. Just to be argumentative, I would say that a poet’s having to write for others (and he needn’t) greatly increases his field of play. (Note that our Wilshberian’s poet writes rather than composes. It never occurs to any Wilshberian that a poem might be more than words.)
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Wednesday, February 8th, 2012
“Philogushy” is my term for “love of gush.” It’s practiced a good deal by poets. Once again I could think of nothing to post here, so I stole the excerpt below from 25 pages of journal entries by poet B.H. Fairchild that are in the latest issue of New Letters, a magazine I’m reviewing for Small Press Review. I knew nothing about Fairchild but apparently he’s very well-known, and a grant-winner.
Language can be a way of rescuing the hidden life, and that way is poetry.
Glenn Gould: “The purpose of art is the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.” And wonder is everything to a poet.
Mandelstam: “We will remember in Lethe’s cold waters / That earth for us has been worth a thousand heavens.”
Seven propositions:
1. By way of Wittgenstein and Heidegger: A poem is a verbal construction which, through an array of rhetorical and prosodic devices of embodiment, achieves an order of being, an ontological status, radically different from that of other forms of discourse (with the exception of certain kinds of descriptive and fictional prose).
2. Poetry occurs at a considerable distance from the ego.
3. There exists an infinity of nonverbal meaning.
4. Science is progressive, but Art is not. It doesn’t get better; it just gets different. (The relevance and utility of all poetic forms.) See Mandestam.
5. Rules are made to be broken; techniques are made to be used. (They were never rules anyway; they were techniques. The freedom of the artist, like that of the lathe machinist, is the freedom to choose those techniques, those tools, that he deems necessary for the task at hand. The refusal to use technique-and, obviously, to learn it-is the refusal to be an artist, or at least a free one.)
6. Form is an extension of subject matter rather than of ideology or religious belief.
7. Meter is not the reins to keep the horse of the poem in check; it’s the heartbeat of the horse. Drop the reins. (Clearly this is an argument for meter rather than against it.) It is almost impossible to convince poets who never bothered to learn prosody that meter is something that emerges from within the language rather than something that is imposed externally upon the language. Even conversational English is very loosely iambic.
A poet is always limited by the fact that he has to write for other human beings.
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Most of the other entries are at this level. some stupid, some interesting, none what I’d call a serious attempt to understand what poetry is, rather than what the effect of poetry the definer admires is. Subjective philogushy rather than objective verosophy. I’m not going to discuss any individual entries now so as to leave myself something to write about tomorrow.
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In a shift in my way of describing varieties of visio-textual artworks, I’m trying out a taxonomy of words and wordlike, uh, expressitons. Don’t worry, I’m sure I’ll change the latter to something better. I threw it onto the screen within a second or two of reaching where it put it in my sentence. What I’m talking about are things that act in an artwork the way words act in standard poems. It would include a brush-stroke in a painting, say, or a dot of paint, or maybe an entire shape. I got the idea of calling such a thing a kind of word, by the way, when I thought I might send Geof a pwoermd consisting of a scribble of paint, using the logic that since a visual poem, for him, need not have words, a visual pwoermd need not, either.
Here are the kinds of words I thought of:
1. word — a standard word (or fragment of such a word that contains enough of what it was whole to be read as a word) in a semantically rational context; e.g., “gulp” in “I gulp water just before playing tennis.”
2. nullword — a standard word (or fragment of such a word that contains enough of what it was whole to be read as a word) in a semantically incoherent context; e.g., “gulp” in “water I just tennis before gulp playing.”
3. unword — a nonsense word; e.g., ” gspp”
4. fragword — a fragment of a word incapable of easily being read as a word, and in a context in which it would be incoherent even if read as some word; usually intended to represent language, never to be language.
5. preword — something in a photograph or work of visual art that a word exists for–for instance, a tree.
6. visword — an element in a visual artwork like some of Scott Helmes’s visual haiku that is wholly atextual but intended, it would seem, to represent a word. Helmes’s visual haiku generally consist of three shapes, each suggesting a line in the classical three-line haiku; hence, each shape must contain a set of words adding up to five or seven syllables.
The use of these terms: I can now call poetry that is significantly visual visual word art; I can call visual art with semantically meaningless words in it, visual nullword art; visual art with nonsense words visual unword art; and three other kinds of visual n-word art. Then I will be able to communicate with the five or six people in the world who would are capable of telling the difference between these forms of art effectively.
Tags: Aesthetics
numwords
Good one, mIEKAL.