A peaceful easy feeling with the anxiety of performing at my best among friends,ideas,povs & the movements Between.
4 Likes
Honestly, I think critics are great because we are hardworking, distracted, common readers. There is so much, too much, to read, view, watch, experience, when it comes to film, poems, short stories, essays, works of art, dance, theater, opera, music, what have you. The past is an enormous gift, but also, in a way, an enormous and overwhelming burden - where in God’s name do we even start? I think a good critic, like Bloom or Sedgewick or Perloff or someone I used to like more, A.O. Scott, or for that matter James Wood or Darryl Pinckney, and plenty others as well, help us think more deeply about what we care about, while at the same time introducing us to works that can transform us, that can literally change our lives, and make us think and feel in new and different ways. Critics are essentially guides to the labyrinth that is art and literature. Good critics have thought very deeply about such things; if you read them a lot, they can help clarify one’s own taste, aesthetics, preferences, etc., through agreement and disagreement with them. Really, good criticism is an art form in itself.
I happened across a post from some time ago, written by @madrush , with a Latin phrase I was new to: “De gustibus non est disputandum” - “in matters of taste, there can be no disputes.” Essentially - correct me if I’m wrong here - but the idea being that taste is utterly subjective, and there is no use arguing about one’s subjective preferences. But I guess I find behind or within that idea something somewhat “anti-intellectual,” in the sense that I find it valuable to really think about why one likes one thing rather than another, and I find it useful to have such conversations, which can often clarify to both/all participants what they value in a work of art, or even beyond art and into life and existence themselves. Also, this phrase, if I am understanding it correctly, also suggests a kind of nihilistic relativism when it comes to matters of taste (you like this, I like that, and never the twain shall meet), which I think is incorrect, i.e. many of the works of literature in our “canon,” like Henry James, or Shakespeare, or Dickinson, or Richard Wright, Blake, Whitman, Milton, etc. ad nauseum, are mostly part of our canon because they are the result of scholarly consensus. In other words, the fact that we are reading and performing and imbibing Shakespeare, say, centuries after he wrote, suggests that there is something about Shakespeare that is not just subjectively good but objectively good. Scholars and critics, if they are any good, are trained to see this; in that sense, criticism is really a discipline, like anything else. It really isn’t just one blowhard offering his or her subjective opinions about whatever. It is often the accumulation of many years of reading and thinking and experiencing and feeling.
Criticism is also helpful because it de-idealizes works of art (and artists). In other words, while I do personally like criticism that is appreciative - I really can’t stand the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” that is just relentlessly negative and resentful and allergic to gratitude - most robust appreciations see the good and the bad about an artist’s work. Whitman, for example - good criticism does not idealize Uncle Walt as a sage only, and then write drooling hagiographies about him (which is what happened right after Walt passed away). Good criticism acknowledges that when Whitman is at his strongest, he is absolutely tremendous; but, when he is not at his strongest, his poetry lags and droops and becomes a caricature of itself or himself. Ashbery’s late phase, for me at least, is pretty disappointing; Wordsworth seems to have ossified over time and lost aspects of his inner radicalism that made the Prelude astonishing; someone recently commented on Twitter that Blake was a great poet but not a great writer. But these are very important distinctions - i.e. there are some religious geniuses, like Joseph Smith, who were powerful visionaries but not very good writers, and so on.
Not everyone likes to read criticism - some people are perfectly comfortable with what they like, and that’s fine. There are millions of Thomas Kinkade blankets sitting quite happily on couches everywhere. But if we are mature art-appreciators (not to mention mature artists), sooner or later, I’d think and hope, we’d read criticism as a sort of sobering educational process of development (our own personal “kunstlerroman,” to use a term @achronon is probably familiar with), where we can learn about the dangers of sentimentality, say, or the meaning and contours of camp, or just a sense of the absolutely astonishing tradition that came before us, and that informs us utterly, even if we are in denial about this. I"m all with Emerson’s call for not seeing through the dead eyes of the past or whatever, but of course, Emerson was not exactly a naive or immature reader or writer, and he had a powerfully robust sense of who and what came before him. In the poetry world, because there is often such resentment towards the abstraction called “dead white males,” there is often not really a sense of the actual tradition we emerge out of. This has often seemed to me to be utterly disingenuous. There are inane articles online that say things like, “we don’t need to read Mark Twain anymore - he was a racist!” which are completely shallow, and “paranoid” (Sedgewick’s term), and really totally beside the point. Good criticism points things like that out - it does not settle for the superficial cant that claims to be thinking online, (how many “thinkpieces” do we actually need to read?), but instead goes deeper, recognizing that what we value carries immense weight for the present and future of our culture , society, country, world, not to mention our own immediate and actual felt lives. Good criticism, in that sense, is a needed corrective - it de-idealizes, contextualizes, evaluates, and so on - things that we all often need help with, if we’re going to think about art and literature with any clarity, depth, or even originality (interesting word) whatsoever.
5 Likes
I am a big fan of appreciative critique & in fact my first personal of was with my Parents & Myself,it Healed a whole bunch of baggage & Lighted the Weight on this Heart of a Human Being.Thank U for your Art-iculation😎
5 Likes
What I like most about this phrase is that it was a saw to the Romans, and it’s a saw for us still.
Yesterday my wife talked me into going to the singing-club’s Fest in her home village. Yes, her sister sings with the group, and these village get-togethers are refreshing in that people actually engage in face-to-face conversation and there’s plenty of simple food and drink. On the menu, so to speak, was something called Ploatz in these parts, and it’s something you only get in these parts. Basically, it is a normal sourdough-rye bread dough rolled out flat, but not too thin, that is topped with something akin to mashed potatoes laced with bacon fat or a really heavy sour cream mixture clogged with fried onions. It’s a traditional “delicacy” from this area, and hardly anyone knows how to make it anymore. And that’s why I went, because I hardly get Ploatz anymore.
My brother-in-law told me that what you really need to complement it with drink-wise is a Furztrockenen (lit. “fart-dry”; i.e., you can’t get it any drier) white wine. Hmmm, I thought. Given that Ploatz is local, North-Hessian, so to speak, and he comes from the Ruhrpott over in the Rhineland, why does he think so? We lived in Swabia (a German wine-growing region) and they made something they called Zwiebelkuchen (lit. “onion cake”) which is a very quiche-like dish (which is not unusual since Alsace is only about 50 km away, now French, but not always), but you can only get it in the fall when the first wine grapes have been harvested, because traditionally, there, you drink Neuwein (lit. “new wine”; that is, wine that has just started to ferment, so it is slightly carbonated (the yeast are working overtime) with a sweet, but slightly yeasty taste. Some people (even locals) love it, others hate it. Well, here in North Hessen, there was nary a vineyard till some “yuppie” (and I use the term endearingly) a couple of villages to the East of here planted one which produces, now, a very small yield of wine. Much farther to the East they are trying to develop a wine-growing region, but that really takes a lot of time. So, traditionally, what you drank with your Ploatz in these parts was beer, because everybody drank beer and that was that.
What is there to discuss? Well, nothing really. We joked around about the beer and wine and whether Ploatz and Zwiebelkuchen are even comparable, let alone the same thing, but in the end, it really doesn’t matter, because there is really nothing to discuss, let alone dispute. A lot of things in life are like that, and somebody somewhere somewhen let loose a witticism that stuck and we have a saw to toss about today.
That same kind of process can be observed in other areas of life, such as fashion, popular music, or even what people like to read. I can’t take best-sellers, for example, but I know any number of people who swear by them. Among aficionados in any particular area or genre, I’m sure there is more than enough to discuss, but things do get a bit complicated when we take those “discussions” “to the next level”, if you will.
Having started out my potential professional career as a wannabe secondary English teacher in the backwoods, literally, of Western Pennsylvania, I had a lot of high ideals. The reality with which I was confronted, however, didn’t always resonate with those ideals. Oh, I managed to awaken a taste for the Bard, in individual cases, but not generally, but there were not a lot of disputes, believe me. Back at college, there were a few folks with whom I could discuss literature in a different way, and it became clear to me that it was a pretty small subset of the general population with whom I could. The more serious one was about it all, the more “exclusive” the club became. Not much has changed in all my travels.
The saw is still a saw because it is still generally true. But, that doesn’t stop any of us from doing something different. That’s why I, for one, appreciate you raising the issue of literature and criticism here, for there are folks in these parts who don’t mind hearing about or even discussing such matters. Keep it up, sir. I still stand to learn something, even at my age.
5 Likes
The words you speak become the house you live in.” — Hafiz
“I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this.” — Emo Philips
4 Likes
Here is a link to John Horgan’s online book. Horgan is a mixed bag, he is sometimes too conservative but he does have a criticism of current reductive materialisms that is useful. I think his choices are pretty good here. As we move from deficient rational phase to more Integral structure, we should expect lots of oscillations. The Stuart Kaufman chapter interests me the most as he is working with different logics in phase spaces and the direct experience of telepathy.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwiv78yL2arjAhVlUN8KHY5MC2EQFjAAegQIBBAB&url=https%3A%2F%2Fmindbodyproblems.com%2F&usg=AOvVaw1tqZ1yECFFiDroPRmPdrif
4 Likes
Hey fellas, just want to say how much enjoyed listening to the talk. It’s been an intensive week and it seems I have miles to go…
But the art of your co-imaginative conversing brought some serviceable joy to a solitary evening. I am reluctant even to begin responding to the topic at hand; I would have to go on and on and on and on and on about the magic of these weird squiggly lines.
I will distill it to one image:
When I am reading at my best (in my body) I am a like…
a honey bee—
pollen-carrier (despite myself)
& nectar-gathering (my desire)
book to book — mind to mind —
symbol to symbol — body to body —
following my particular
scent-sense
of buzzing colors
& mellifluous intensities
space-swirling
line-squiggles thru information-blare
zooming-in on flower galaxy
and drinking my fill
shaking my bum-brain
zim-zumming w/ gamma-waves
shooting Imaginal rays
— outta buggy eyes!
hive
awaits
(peaceful
home
between
covers)
bellyful
of ambrosia
drops
drip
sweet
surrender
to my Quantum
Queen
(everyone is
busy)
geometric structures
self-assemble in soft wax
voices aromatic
touch — musing & mulling
cast errant
spells
exude thick-glistening
golden-sweet globs
to whomsoever
needs
7 Likes
Licking my lips… after feasting.
Honey’s the Healer, sings The Queen.
6 Likes