Day 47: T. S. Eliot, Donald Barthelme, Mark Rawlinson
T. S. Eliot - Ash Wednesday
Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?
Read the rest here
I enjoyed reading this poem out loud quite a lot, which surprised me. I have heard Eliot is impossible, that he is only for the scholars. Well, I didn't know what he was talking about quite a bit of the time, but I got the emotion. The language is like a throbbing and swelling church sermon with lots of inner rhymes and repetitions and rhythmic stresses.
It shows a person who has lost all hope and is taking refuge in a higher spirituality. For Eliot it was Christianity (and this poem was a turning point detailing his conversion). For me in my hopelessness it was Buddhism, of "taking refuge in the dharma" which helped me find a way out of nihilistic despair.
I need to get back to meditating at some point, get back to vegetarianism - I have been a bad buddhist, but it has at least given me some ethical principles to follow whereas before there were none beyond common sense, and commonsense is always manipulated or debated.
I liked reading this one.
Donald Barthelme - King of Jazz
I've been avoiding the postmodernists for so long because I know I will probably enjoy them too much, and also, because of past difficult experiences with postmodernist fiction lovers.
This is a three page story in the Sudden Impact anthology and god is it fun!!!
It really takes the piss out of jazz writing,.and writerly efforts to turn sound into words. A famous example, and one which I love, is Ralph Ellison in the Invisible Man describing how Louis Armstrong "bent that military instrument into a beam of lyrical sound".
The whole story relentlessly parodies popular depictions of Jazz musicians, but becomes most pointed in the longer speeches:
"Yes, that's Hokie's famous 'English sunrise' way of playing. Playing with lots of rays coming out of it, some red rays, some blu-rays, some green rares, some green stemming from a violet center, some olive stemming from a tan center–"
and later:
"You mean that sound that sounds like the cutting edge of life? That sounds like polar bears crossing Arctic ice pans? That sounds like a herd of musk ox in full flight? That sounds like male walruses diving to the bottom of the sea? That sounds like fumaroles smoking on the slopes of Mt. Katmai? That sounds like the wild turkey walking through the deep, soft forest? That sounds like beavers chewing trees in an Appalachian marsh? That sounds like an oyster fungus growing on an aspen trunk? That sounds like a mule deer wandering a montane of the Sierra Nevada? That sounds like prairie dogs kissing? That sounds like witchgrass tumbling or a river meandering? That sounds like manatees munching seaweed at Cape Sable? That sounds like coatimundis moving in packs across the face of Arkansas? That sounds like - "
I love it.
Mark Rawlinson - Ed Ruscha and Things of Interest
I'm back at Uni now so I have to read more art books. For my current walking and mapping project, Ed Ruscha is useful for me. He is most famous for his boring photographic art books such as 26 Gas Stations and Every Building on the Sunset Strip. I don't think that these books are boring, as boring is always someone's interesting, and only takes the finding out the reason why it's interesting to someone to make it interesting.
Ed Ruscha mostly refused to give "intellectual explanations" of his projects, playing a kind of philistine character (which was a good marketing gambit in the 70s). Critics and writers were left to defend his work themselves. So this essay explains both the criticism against his photographs (being that they are intentionally ugly, amateur, and boring) and defenses of his projects enduring appral and influence.
The most interesting thing about this essay is the author 's use of Sianne Ngai's writing on the affect of the interesting (see Our Aesthetic Categories). I have read this book a couple times and find it opens up a lot of ways to think about conceptual art as well as "boring art".
The rest of this book shows all the other artist books that have been inspired by Ed Ruscha. Many of them more or less repeat his exact same subject matter or aesthetic and their books use the same style of cover and typeface. I find this homage-ery a bit tedious, especially when the book is just something like "52 Shopping Trolleys" which to me is just plagiarism rather than subversion or play.