On beauty

Politics and Literature

2006-12-31T09:23:00.000-08:00

I found a fantastic article about the academy's infection with politics, especially as regards literature and philosophy (American philosophy). Some excerpts:

Reclaiming Negative Capability, by Ihab Habbib Hassan

Characters in a novel elicit comments more appropriate to a "real" person, say a dying aunt or a mugger in the street, and provoke outrage or approval as representatives of an entire category, WASPS, Women, Blacks, etc. They may even serve as evidence in a legal, class-action against the hapless author. No doubt, literalism, naiveté of a certain kind, abets this tendency. But so does the current rage for identity politics; and beyond that, the conviction that politics matters more than both literature and philosophy. Thus are all representations forged into weapons of social struggle; thus are poetry and truth instrumentalized.
p. 311

Yet the intellectual, once locked into an oppugnant stance, faces acute risks of another kind. Opposition is reactive; the gesture of perpetual rebellion condemns to perpetual adolescence. The gesture also shrinks the world, turning it into a Manichean battle between top-dogs and underdogs, victors and losers. Where is the freedom in this? And is siding with the weak the same as siding always with the truth? Put another way, opposition flattens and externalizes the character of the intellectual because it gives established authority a spiritual and psychological (not just political) interest that it does not deserve; it gives power a total, false grip on our lives. Thus politics, in the words of Fredric Jameson, arrogates to itself "the absolute horizon of all reading and all interpretation." 15 (Is it not a hushed intellectual scandal that Western Marxists have yet to reckon with their colleagues, their students, and above all themselves, for confidently spreading failed ideas through half a century?) Again, I prefer the Emersonian view of mind, a mind enabling itself, without rancor or reaction, to take hold of life. Thus ends "Experience": "The true romance, which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power" (p. 234).
p. 316

At this late point, I want to offer a historical glimpse of my subject, which is not intellectuals but negative capability. I do so because I want first to give the evidence of our time, and also because I find history ambiguously relevant to my theme. Always historicize, cry our ideologues, and they historicize always to learn from "history"--their interpretation of it--the same lesson. In this case, however, I find in history an ironic displacement: the old quarrel between philosophy and literature has turned into a more savage quarrel between politics and both.
p. 317-318

Heaney means triple "redress": how poetry restores something to the world, how it can re-establish itself as object and occasion of celebration, and how, finding its own rightness, poetry sweeps ahead into the fullest human self-realization. Thus to know poetry, Heaney says, "is to know and celebrate it not only as a matter of proffered argument and edifying discourse, but as a matter of angelic potential, a motion of the soul." 21

Unabashedly, Heaney speaks the language of spirit; but unabashedly, too, he fingers the loam of history. Indeed, for him the "frontiers of writing" are those we continually cross and recross, make and unmake, between poetry and politics, between sacred and profane knowledge, between the marvelous and the banal. This is no feeble piety; for poetry is "strong enough to help" (Seferis), respond, and answer "in its own language rather than in the language of the world that provokes it . . ." (p. 191). As a countervailing reality, poetry erects "a temple deep inside our hearing" (Rilke's phrase), at which we all need to worship in order to save both ourselves and the world (p. xviii).
p. 321-322

Happenstance

2006-10-01T22:33:00.000-07:00

Not sure what inspired me to see if this still existed, but I was curious, so I checked. Sure enough, there it was!

Well, I don't have anything profound to say at the moment, just that I was glad to see a couple people still checking the old posting-board. I'll be sure to put up a note the next time I'm blindsided by a person, thing, or event of extraordinary beauty.

Perfect Day

2006-08-14T17:24:00.000-07:00

Thoughts on happiness, perfection, and the connection between the two were on my mind at work today. To be completely honest, it started yesterday morning as I served cantankerous people food and listened to them immediately complain and openly scorn me. At first I was frustrated and irritated; what right did those people have to come to my restaurant and then dispense ill-will at little offense? However, it suddenly occured to me after listening to a man complain that his food was cold and he had waited nearly twenty minutes for it, so he didn't want it to be sent back, but he certainly didn't expect to be paying for all of it, even though he was going to be eating it (note-this man also happened to come in ten minutes before we stopped serving breakfast and already had a room full of people who had already ordered. The first thing he did when I brought his food to him was touch it to check the temperature, as soon as I had put the plate down. Subtle, buddy. Real subtle.), it occured to me then that my happiness was not contingent on his.
He didn't like the service he recieved.
Was that my fault? Was that my problem?
No and no.
I surely did commiserate with the poor soul; nobody likes to be kept waiting even when it is unintentional. The difference was that I didn't really care if he was happy or not. That fact was not going to change the outlook I had on my day. This might be a bit of a dangerous attitude by which to venture deeper into the food service employment chain, but I trust that I can wield it properly. I don't think that it is nihilism or apathy for customer satisfaction, just a reaffirmation of priorities. And my priority is my own happiness.

So............

On that note, let us turn to the connection of happiness and perfection. See, what is perfect is not always happy, and what is happy is not always perfect. Originally I was trying to think about what constitutes perfection and how to quantify or even vocalize the conception of perfection. There was this whole other tangential train of thought looking at the relationship between perfection and excellence and whether one was a subordination of the other or if the two operated in soleley autonomous spheres, but that is not the topic of right now, save to mention that excellence is a near semblance of perfection, but perfection is not excellence. Anyway, let us think of a cheeseburger with frenchfries. I love cheeseburgers. They make me quite happy. Even now, with dinner in the oven and a cup of coffee by my chair, just thinking about a juicy cheeseburger, richly melted cheddar cheese topped with crisp onions and pickles, thick slices of tomato, some fresh lettuce and a grilled kaiser bun dressed with a liberal helping of mayonnaise makes me salivate with happiness. Add in a side order of golden-brown frenchfries with a healthy (or not so healthy in one way of looking at it) helping of salt and you have yourself the cornerstone of an amazing meal. This cheeseburger is by no means widely regarded as emblematic of art, either high or low, but it is with all certainty, aesthetically pleasing to view. Something about how the tomato peeks out from underneath the fringe of lettuce, and there is just a hint of the pickle hidden in the middle. The way the golden-brown fries are tumbled helter-skelter like lincoln logs. The way the grease glistens in a soft sheen on the burger patty. These things just add up and you know that this is, without a doubt, a perfect burger. It makes you happy, and even more than that, you know that the cook who made this burger was also made happy by its perfection. Can one ascertain that the creation of perfection yields happiness? And furthermore, if this perfection is repeated over and over a countless number of times to the point at which it is no longer an awesome feat to achieve perfection, then the does the failure to attain the same quality of finished product result in unhappiness? Do the standards of perfection rely upon both the artist and the viewer?
I think that there must be a measure of impartiality when viewing art. The seasoned cook makes a perfect burger everytime and is aware of his skill, but thinks little of it, except to acknowledge that others find it remarkable. The junior cook makes a cheeseburger and thinks it to be the most aesthetically pleasing thing he has ever created, even when the diner percieves it to be less so than the casual masterpiece of the seasoned cook. So, then, does an artist have a wildly different view of the finished product, due to personal bias of either favor or unfavor? Maybe so, but in the end it might not matter. Just so long as everyone is happy in some matter or another, whether or not it comes from perfection.

Nostalgia: Drawing

2006-07-19T19:14:00.001-07:00

Interesting article on the NYT website about drawing. It is quite nostalgic, but I think rightly so.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/19/arts/design/19draw.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Changing of the Guard

2006-06-30T17:53:00.000-07:00

In all honesty, I feel that I should admit that I have been playing around with the notion of posting for quite some time now. I think I waited this long, though, to see if anyone else would post. And now after I put this up, I will wonder if anyone has ever read it. I will, however, still endeavor to focus on aesthetics and the pursuit of beauty.
First, a quick update on the times had since we left the fold and blinking stepped into the sun, if I may so generously borrow from Sir Elton John himself: I skipped the self-reflection process while in the midst of a flurry of packing up my house and moving to a new apartment, saving it instead for the first two long weeks of life in a new neighborhood. I must say that it is quite an enjoyable place over here on the east side. I cook sweet meals, drink cheap wine, listen to artsy music and write scribbles of poetry every now and then to keep busy. The leaves are green, the sun shines, and I sit on my back deck nearly every morning and night. It gives me no small amount of pleasure to both greet the day and bid it goodnight from the same orange chaise lounger that used to grace the porch of my good friends.
I try to use this time to think about life and am lucky now to have a flatmate who is quite capable of holding down her end of a stimulating conversation in a multitude of conversations. I think that this post is veering towards encompassing aspects of one that we had just a few nights ago... I work at the Spar, waiting tables and pouring beer like I was born to do. Fans of irony should note that I am well aware of my situation: freshly graduated english major, aspiring but struggling writer, hopeless romantic, waiting tables to cover my rent money....I appear to be adding new coats of stereotypes to my already shellacked exterior.
Anyway, we happen to have a jukebox containing the general assortment of music that one would expect to find in a dining and drinking establishment. Everything from Modest Mouse to The Killers; Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, The Shins and Wyclef Jean. See, the thing about jukeboxes is that they opperate in a context somewhat akin to a social contract. The bar says 'hey patron, i trust that you have good judgement in music, and i'll let you choose what you want to hear because i believe that you will be happier and thus will drink more.' To which of course the patron responds by oh so eloquently stating 'ho good barkeep, i would very much desire another scrumptious pint of beverage by which to slake my thirst. and then i'm going to play the same song that everyone plays.' That is correct, my dear reader, that is correct. Everyone who plays songs on the jukebox does so under the mistaken assumption that he or she is the only person who has both the desire and the means to hear the same song by the Killers.
Now I transpose that to my discussion with my flatmate in which I wondered if people would ever be praised for their talents rather than be compared to historical counterparts. When will our generation find a talented songwriter who is seen simply as just that, rather than being compared to Bob Dylan? Why do we always attempt to quantify and package bands by saying they sound like the early Van Halen, before Sammy Hagar slid too far down the slope, or like Jethro Tull with a harmonica rather than a flute? My flatmate argued that historical counterparts are the only relevant measuring stick that we have by which to reference music and sports and other such subjective talents. Me? I'm not so sure. I still think that Scott said it best when he mentioned that only when we stop viewing authors by their gender, race, political and social views, and a multitude of other things, and choose instead to judge them by the content of their works, will we truly be able to appreciate them.
Until next time...

Anyone out there?

2006-05-15T16:18:00.000-07:00

Hey all,

I know class is over, but I wouldn't be averse to random postings from time to time. So, China (because you are probably the only one checking), I thought this was funny. I found it on Style.com. Here's what they said about the badminton birdie (you could probably get into a discussion of the practicality of art here... haha):

beauty in flight: Badminton birdie or art object?
Your grill is Vieluxe; the beer you serve is microbrewed. Shouldn't your Memorial Day badminton birdies be just as posh? Real goose feathers render this beauty the blue-chip stock of shuttlecocks. While more fragile than the everyday plastic variety, the increased flight quality—they're used in Olympic competition—more than makes up for the fact that you'll have to replace them with some frequency. And then there's the aesthetics. The cork head both pleases the eye and produces a satisfying bang, promising many happy returns.

hmmmm

2006-04-30T18:32:00.000-07:00

What do you think? I don't think I like it....or rather his attitude. But I don't know.

Click here.

Healing Literary Criticism

2006-04-06T20:30:00.000-07:00

I have been talking with a lot of friends about the race-gender-class approach to literature. Remember "the Last Will and Testament of an Ex-Literary Critic?" I do. I have felt that my whole life: "the erotic transport" of reading, the "secret glee" of nights spent with my favorite books and poems. But my papers never reflected this. I believe I actually did a postmodern ecofeminist reading of a set of poems last semester, if you can believe it, but I didn't come out of the paper with a wider appreciation of the poet. I just felt tired of her.

Also, I am immensely disappointed with the lit classes next semester. For the seniors in this class who may not have looked at the course offerings - the upper division classes focus almost entirely on race, class, or gender. Needless to say, I didn't sign up for any of them.

I suppose that what I am getting at here is the fact that literature is in trouble. Not everywhere, and not in all areas, of course, but departments are leaning farther and farther away from form. Chinua Achebe publicly dismissed Heart of Darkness for being racist, arguing that it should no longer be taught. Essentially, he says that we should toss the form away if the content is immoral. Content beats form.

But Dolen and I were talking in her office the other day about content and form, deciding that it is not possible to separate the two. Form is content, and content, form. Can you imagine one without the other? Can you imagine a line without color? It is not possible. So how can you privilege one over the other? How can you say that something's ugly content merits discarding a beautiful form? I want to put form (and beauty) back into focus. I want to re-unify form and content by stepping away from cultural studies and re-injecting a love of form into literary criticism.

But, my friend asked, in focusing on the beauty first, are we just hiding in art? Are we really going to ignore the "real world" just so that we can selfishly enjoy literature again? He said that the inequalities in race, gender, and class are problems that need to be addressed. He said that economic, gender, and racial disparities are actually growing, and we need to fix what's happening by drawing attention to it. Looking at beauty won't cut it in today's world.

I, too, am disturbed at the serious, varied problems riddling the earth. Though I would contend that we are a little better off than 50 years ago, I certainly acknowledge that there are intrinsic troubles everywhere. And I think that cultural studies in literature is not the way to address them. This is not to say that *literature* is not a way of effecting change, or even that literary criticism isn't, but that restricting departments and class offerings to race/gender/class studies has clearly been ineffective. If this works, shouldn’t these problems be getting better?

But since they dry out the books, taking away something pleasurable from the readers, the cultural studies actually hurt their causes. Imagine this. Somebody reads Faulkner and loves it, but is told that Faulkner is a racist, and that his books are racist. This prevents her from enjoying the book, for she suddenly has to feel guilty for liking a "racist" novel. She doesn't ever stop liking the book, but she can't think about Faulkner without a twinge of guilt. She can no longer talk about her pleasure, and suddenly any of the good the beauty in the book could have provided her is cut off. On some level she knows that cultural studies deprived her of her enjoyment of the novel, identifying it with something that deprives one of pleasure. And so cultural studies undermines racial activism.

So we know that jumping straight to the immoral parts of a novel actually works against morality. Does this mean that literature is lost? I say emphatically no, that, in fact, it has an immense power to enact social change. I accept Elaine Scarry's tenet that beauty incites deliberation, causing us to "gape" as we stare at it. Beautiful literature will draw us in, holding our gaze upon whatever it chooses. Let's look at (surprise) Lolita. I would never, ever, choose to read a 250 page psychological study on child molestation, but I ached after that book. And it forced me to look at child molestation, really look, feel, and even become halfway complicit in child molestation. With the little jabs of Lolita sobbing, Nabokov reminds us of Humbert's immorality. And these jabs are necessarily personal, shocking, revolting, nauseating. Beauty caused us to "buy in" to Humbert's system, allowing us to experience the horror of rape more personally than any imperious, moralizing cultural study would have done. So beauty is not responsible for immorality. Nabokov is very responsible in Lolita; he could have used his mesmerizing prose to lull us out of morality, causing us to forget morality. The little reminders of Lolita's pain shock us out of our reveries, affecting us more powerfully and viscerally because of the text's beauty.

And like all powers, if used irresponsibly, beauty can have some adverse consequences. It can distract us so that we forget the immorality. In a documentary about Charles Manson, I was shocked to see how beautiful he is. It would not surprise me if that aided people's willingness to prostitute themselves and kill others. And though his powers of persuasion extended far beyond his beauty, it certainly didn't hurt. I am confident in saying that his beauty gave him that much more sway, that much more influence over his followers.

But of course, this is no reason to go sit down and write off beauty. As I have already shown, it is the mechanism by which literature opens our eyes, by which we may willingly be led to moral truths. The examples of its misuse are always individual, for there is no one quality in beauty that bends us to immorality. And just as, within individual works, it can bend us to immorality, so it can direct us to morality. More broadly, I do believe that, per Scarry, the raw experience of beauty makes us more moral. It does imply some higher truth, for the same thrill that flashes up my nerves reading Lolita bursts upon the hiker in the Grand Canyon; the simultaneous ubiquity and diversity of the experience of beauty nods towards something greater. And I could rehearse Scarry's argument that beauty encourages lateral distribution, or Murdoch's contention that it de-centers us so that we may grow, or Schiller's that the aesthetic play-drive actually enables society's existence...

People will always read literature for the experience, so perhaps it is comforting to know that we can have that experience and become more moral, that beauty can take our hands and lead us far from ourselves.

Who said this?

2006-04-06T13:55:00.000-07:00

Anybody know who said this?...trying to link this quote to its author:

"we know we are rightly judging a thing to be beautiful by observing that our mental faculties are being stimulated in such a way that the imagination enters into a kind of freeplay with the cognitive powers producing a variety of pleasure completely independent of interest or concern over wether or not that thing taken to be beautiful actually exists."

Handshakes

2006-04-03T18:33:00.000-07:00

So I just finished doing some electrical wiring in a burst of energy and then sat down to my dinner in front of the tv when I saw a familiar smile bursting through the set. It was Jason! He was performing with a friend in a band on television in some kind of contest. But I only caught the last few seconds. I heard his friend say, "Jason's a really weird guy." I stayed with the show because it looked interesting...young people doing their artistic thing is always interesting to me. Then they announced the winner: Handshakes! Jason's group won the whole thing. Wow. I'm impressed.

But I'm not surprised. Kudos Jason!

Brimstone Ugly

2006-04-02T20:32:00.000-07:00

First off, let me say to my throngs of expectant readers, I’m sorry this is late. I had an incident involving a canary, a set of stilts and a premature mango prevent me from doing anything of value on Friday.

Now then, down to business. I’ve found it interesting, perhaps even Scarry, to superimpose Elaine’s theories above my literary endeavors. In the misty midst of her indulgently romantic crusade in the name of beauty, I see questions of what I shall call Humbertism peaking through the fabric. (Or shall we pull an Oprah and just call it what it is—?) Romanticized and well-articulated incest/pedophilism/predatory enactment of unfulfilled childhood fantasies/rape—whatever you like—can be measured on the Scarry scale for their quantitative allotment of beauty. If beauty is

1. sacred
2. unprecedented
3. life-saving
and
4. incites deliberation

my reply to H.H. (not Nobokov) would be as follows:

1. To call the practice of violation “sacred” is so obviously immoral that I will spare you a didactic rant. However, I will note that my, oh, my austere southern Baptist upbringing is such that I know I must be associating the sacred with the moral. To read Lolita is to question one’s eager desire to cast at the pedophile, what we would call in my family’s vein of the Church, hellfire and brimstone. Yet to read Nobokov is also to question one’s preparedness, or resume, upon which one feels qualified to pitch the sinner into the aforementioned mode of damnation. Scarry mentions that Odysseus feels that his nude arrival in front of, (ironically.) a young girl on a beach (no less!) is beautiful because it has something to do with intuition. Okay, so when one is in the presence of the sacred, one can sense it intuitively. Although H.H. would have us believe that his repugnant incest was ordained by the divine, I would contest. I still stick to Kant’s theory that beauty takes us by surprise. So does the sacred. Hummy’s actions were too premeditated to be instinctual, and too followed by flowing logic and defense (Nobokov wanted it this way, hence the letter format) for his takeness with Lolita to be attributed to a divine hand. In other words, any old nymphet would do (as we see in his lust after Lolita’s schoolmates and the local children), but he just happened upon this one.

Did it become sacred? I think it became enchanting, but there is an electric fence around the sacred which a slimy rapist cannot penetrate. I think H.H. talked himself out of his moral obligation as an adult, and, Baptistly speaking, because he felt so guilty—enough so that he would traverse the US in it’s entirety, twice—he was aware of the fissure between his actions and morality. This is where I may have to break with Scarry, although I have not yet finished the book. I don’t think all types of beauty confer with morality. I think the sacred implies that which is moral. In Odysseus’s case, he may have felt stunned by the child because he was on dry land again, because she was innocent, because he wanted to violate her and that may, for some, be beautiful. There’s no accounting for taste. But the difference between him and Humbert is that H. acted on his impulse.

2. See above.

3. I renew my claim that one cannot harm others in the name of beauty. Having broken with the ever appealing malediction of my Baptist baptism and taken up with a Hindu interpretation of Buddhist Daoism (erg), I think it wrong to harm others. I carry spiders outside, down six flights of stairs in the winter. I believe that were beauty and morality to converge on a topic where the harm of another living being was in question, I might question the morality at work. Or, as often happens in the “Justice,” better yet, the Penal System, the life of an “immoral” person is placed below the life of a “moral” person. In this case I would opt for a minimalist’s morality in which one of the less-than-10 commandments would be “Thou shall not harm other living beings” even to save thy own damn life. I don’t give a rat’s butt if Humbert’s actions saved his life. He killed Lolita, in a very real sense.

My primary problem, thus, with H.H.’s actions was that not only did he repeatedly rape a pubescent child, but that said child showed little psychological damage. Were Lolita in the flesh, she would have been in therapy, on drugs, or in unhealthful life situations until she got into therapy or drugs. No matter if she “seduced” the adult or not. In the end, the claimed beauty did not only not save a life, but it snuffed two; three if we value Humbert’s enough to count his insanity and imprisonment.

4. I saw not a moment’s hesitation once Humbert2 arrived at the primary opportunity of violation. And after that, he raped her twice more the same night without “deliberation.” There was nothing immortal about his immoral actions, and so he stood in the shoes of a man, by Scarry’s standards, who was about to do a not beautiful thing.

By our current mode of thought, Elaine Scarry’s mode, Humbert could not make a case for his actions that used the term “beauty” in the same way one might claim “temporary insanity.” This, I believe, stems from the fact that the Scarry mode of thought regards beauty and morality as being synthesized. And I think we might all agree that Humbert’s impulses and thoughts may have been beautiful (hence the form of the writing, too), but his actions—because of their lack of morality—are brimstone ugly.

Searching for Stars

2006-03-31T15:10:00.000-08:00

I try to live without having regrets. Not so much along the lines of being an extreme athlete who lives on the edge and grabs each day by the throat to experience it more fully, but rather I try to convince myself that each decision I have made will produce healthy results. My choices may not always be revealed as correct, or right, or moral, or a multitude of other defining terms, but I attempt to not let the memory of the past and the possibility of what might have ensued had I made a different decision rule me.
I know that my life is filled with faults and that there are plenty of opportunities for others to remind me that I am consistently insufficient in certain measures, but be that as it may, aren't we all trying to make it through another day? I wish that I had the ability to take weekend trips whenever I wanted. That I had the mental fortitude to work harder at my writing and to engage myself more fully in a scope of literature and music. That I took the time each day to cook a decent dinner and enjoy it while listening to some Joni Mitchell or Tom Waits or Sade or any other great ambient musician. That I had the courage to tell people exactly how I felt about them, either in admiration or dissapointment.
I say these things, in part, due to my respect for people who appear to have much better grasps on their lives than I have on mine. The people of whom I model my wish list off. I'm not even sure how I qualify these people and, in some cases, why I strive to emulate them. I have a best friend who announced to me that he will be getting married in June of 2008. I have absolutely no desire to have a spouse by then, but I still respect him for the degree to which he appears to have control over his life.
This is getting further and further from any aesthetic topic that I might have been trying to make with my first few sentences, but I think it's too late now to erase this. I could make a half-hearted argument about how my attraction to the simplistic and definitive nature of math is an analogy for the resolution I'm searching for on my own, or how Humbert Humbert is the embodiment of dueling partitions of the same psyche; a complete lack of control faced with a model of himself with which he cannot reconcile. I could even go so far as to say that the beauty in the actions of people whom I admire is what drives me to yearn for a recreation of them in my own body and life. But the truth is that I don't understand what it is, precisely. What the answer is. And I'm hesitant to say things that I'm not sure of, so I will doubtlessly keep thinking on it until I have thoroughly flogged the dead horse.

More Lolita Talk

2006-03-31T06:55:00.000-08:00

To appreciate a novel as an aesthetic object, we generally look to the text, examining the form and content of the prose. But why should we neglect the aesthetic of the book as a whole? Graphic artists work to create book covers which draw us in and, whether we like it or not, they inspire our first opinions of any new book.

On that note, I found it interesting that there was such variation in cover designs for different printings of Lolita. Looking around the class, each person’s book cover highlighted a different characteristic or interpretation of Lolita. One is a close-up of a woman’s mouth, showing only one half of her slightly parted lips. The sensuality this photograph indicates is obvious, but it is particularly interesting that the mouth does not even seem to belong to a child. The image of Lolita as a wayward and abused child has given way to a picture of a seductress. Before reading the first page, the reader already shifts part of the blame away from Humbert and towards this sultry version of Lolita. This cover also highlights the idea of Lolita as an object of desire. Her smile, which Humbert describes in great detail, is enough to enrapture men of all ages. By focusing on one small fragment of a face, this cover design also implies that we can never really know Lolita beyond Humbert’s perception and description of her.

Another cover displays only the lower portion of a young girl’s legs. The wide skirt, saddle shoes and lacy socks do not fit descriptions of Lolita’s clothing in the book, and seem characteristic of a girl even younger than Lolita. Rather than pointing at the sensuality of the novel, this cover focuses on the youth and innocence of the title character, therefore inspiring the reader to place more blame on Humbert. Each of these cover designs magnify one aspect of Lolita’s character, while neglecting to display any images from the novel itself.

The cover of my edition (which I could not find a picture of) takes a thoroughly different route than the previously discussed images. Instead of abstracting the idea of Lolita, this cover displays her as a person in a situation similar to many in the novel. It shows a girl of twelve or thirteen, wearing clothes that Lolita is described as owning, standing behind a bicycle. The grainy, black and white image resembles a photograph taken mid-century. Although this cover does the best job of actually representing images from the novel, it is by far the least interesting and aesthetically pleasing of the three. It doesn’t inspire the reader to draw any further conclusions from the image, and although it accurately represents the plot of the novel, it does not present Lolita or Lolita as an aesthetic object.

...and one more thing.

2006-03-25T13:18:00.000-08:00

Nothing to do with Lolita, and I'll probably get a few hate comments for this, but this amused me and I like to share amusing things with others when the few occasions arise. I recently read the October 2005 issue of Spin, and it contained a great interview with Noel Gallagher of Oasis. When asked what he would say to Blur's Damon Albarn, were he to run into him:

"...what would I say to him? I don't know. It depends what he was wearing. If he was wearing something ridiculous, I'd tell him to sort his fuckin' wardrobe out. If he looked cool, I'd say 'Hey, fuckin' hell, man, you're looking well.' But if he wasn't, I'd say, 'You're looking like a fat idiot, why don't you go get on the treadmill?'"

This coming from the man who claimed Jack White looked like "Zorro on donuts." Sorry, had to share with someone. He amuses me. Back to the Lolita talk.

All this talk is useless.

2006-03-25T12:20:00.000-08:00

A couple of things; first, I saw Stanley Kubrick's film version of Lolita a few months after reading the book for the first time, and what threw me off and gave me something else to think about was how appearances change our views on morality. Specifically, when I first read Lolita, I fell in love with the language itself, which Nabokov had an amazing grasp of, particularly considering that English is not his first language. However, I'd thought nothing of Humbert himself, other than the possibility that he was (to put it frankly) a pervert with an elegant wording, going after an easy target of a child. The love was apparent not in the characters themselves, but in Nabokov's wording, and knowing that I held a book in my hands, I was able to separate Nabokov from his characters, even if he did pass his gift of language onto Humbert. But in Kubrick's movie, Humbert was extraordinarily handsome, and Lolita did not look like a mere child but indeed a young adult (mature nymphet) who seemed to be asking for Humbert's behavior. Perhaps Kubrick intended that to happen, or perhaps he interpreted the book with more regard for characters than language. But because the film had those two beautiful characters with which to create a Hollywood love story (Lolita's age being the only factor separating it from other romantic films), I found myself having less of a problem with the plot itself and even found myself secretly hoping that the handsome Humbert would still come out a fortunate protagonist in the end. The end of the book found me thinking "bastard" and able to see the characters for what they are, noting all the way through that Nabokov was the best part of his own book. Perhaps this is why it's often suggested that attractive people can get away with more than unattractive people. Still, beauty is subjective, so I'll end that discussion there.

Next, I don't know what was discussed in class, so this might be redundant, and I don't know if you all have the same afterword that I do, since I have an older version of Lolita on hand. But, I'm fascinated by one of the things that Nabokov has to say in reference to the subject of his book:

"I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and...Lolita has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being where art is the norm. All the rest is either topical trash or what some call the Literature of Ideas, which very often is either topical trash coming in huge blocks of plaster that are carefully transmitted from age to age until somebody comes along with a hammer and takes a good crack at Balzac, at Gorki, at Mann." (p. 286 in the 1977 Berkeley pressing)

He also goes further to shoot down the idea of symbolism, disputing the theory that Lolita represents the power struggle between Europe and America, and says it is "childish" to study a work of fiction if one wants to gain insight into a social category of any type. Admittedly, I was extremely grateful to read these notes from him because he makes acceptable an appreciation of his writing strictly for the language; my ability to distinguish Nabokov's language from Humbert's likability is perfectly acceptable according to Nabokov's intentions, and knowing that I may appreciate something for its aesthetic value despite what morals it appears to push (or not push, as it turns out) is relieving to me as a reader.

Relating this to Sarah's post, while I completely understand the idea that a mask takes away the individual beauty of a model and seems somewhat degrading, Nabokov would likely validate the designer's claim that masks serve no other purpose than to retain beauty where it should exist. A designer does not need models with interesting or beautiful appearances that benefit anyone in particular; he simply needs graceful figures on which to carry his clothes, the true point of displaying clothes in a fashion show, and by using a mask to take away a model's individuality, the focus remains on the clothes and not the model. The mask is not an insult to individual beauty, nor does beauty need its own moral code, but the mask keeps the focus on aesthetic value, and only on the aesthetic value of the object meant to be on display.

Finally, there was a moment early in chapter 13 when Humbert said "I want my learned readers to particpate in the scene I am about to replay; I want them to examine its every detail and see for themselves how careful, how chaste, the whole wine-sweet event is if viewed with what my lawyer has called...'impartial sympathy.' So let us get started. I have a difficult job before me." I felt that in telling the reader what his/her role specifically is, Nabokov is putting himself in Humbert's place, giving the illusion that he is speaking as Humbert but really speaking as himself, manipulating the reader and making him/her feel further sucked into the story by using Humbert as a sort of middle man between writer and reader. Because Nabokov only wants his novel to be used for aesthetic purposes, his character may truly be viewed as an interpreter of Nabokov himself, using Nabokov's writing style as his own speech, using the reader as an audience member for his behavior just as the reader would act as audience member for Nabokov's writing (as art). I can't think of any other writer (at least, off the top of my head) who manipulates the reader this way, and in a secondary language at that. Absolutely brilliant, and without the intention of doing it. Amazing.

Vincent Gallo and the Art of Identity

2006-03-24T20:26:00.000-08:00

Vincent Gallo, one of the most ignomatic and potentially offensive Indie-Society Icons, makes art that centers around a persona (I hope) he has created. Writing, Directing, Starring, and Soundtracking two full length movies, releasing solo albums, and modeling for Calvin Kline, Vincent Gallo radiates pop-stardom. On his merchandise website:

http://www.vgmerchandise.com/misc.html

He now sells his sperm, blankets from his youth, charles manson paintings, and 'Fantasy Weekends' in which he will travel to womens homes and sleep with them for a night for $50,000 (certain discounts for people of specific sexual affliations or ethnic groups). The text he writes, the interviews he does, the characters he plays in movies all carry them same archetypal abrasive foul mouth, and potentially bigoted persona.

"I, Vincent Gallo, star of such classics as Buffalo 66 and The Brown Bunny have decided to make myself available to all women. All women who can afford me, that is. For the modest fee of $50,000 plus expenses, I can fulfill the wish, dream, or fantasy of any naturally born female. The fee covers one evening with Vincent Gallo. For those who wish to enjoy my company for a weekend, the fee is increased to a mere $100,000. Heavy set, older, red heads and even black chicks can have me if they can pay the bill. No real female will be refused. However, I highly frown upon any male having even the slightest momentary thought or wish that they could ever become my client. No way Jose. However, female couples of the lesbian persuasion can enjoy a Vincent Gallo evening together for $100,000. $200,000 buys the lesbos a weekend. A weekend that will have them second-guessing."

-A quote from the "Vincent Gallo Fantasy" offer

Is he kidding? Being Ironic? Is the Vincent Gallo he portrays the sincere/real Vincent Gallo? I'm interested in how much playing with identity can be considered art, and how much is just who somebody is (is anyone actually is anyone). Obviously we cannot actually enter into a person's mind and share their perspective, but we still consider some people to be more genuine then others.

I personally hope he is not actually like this. I own his movie "Buffalo '66" (which is odd and great) and is seem that him writing a character for himself that is 'actually how he is' (consistant with all the other 'persona' schtick) seems unlikely. There is also the question that acting consumes people and they 'lose' their real selves (especially in cases of celebrity).

"The Arbitrary Power of Beauty"

2006-03-21T00:32:00.000-08:00

Wasting time today, I found this comment about Undercover's last fashion show, which had the women wearing masks. They literally stumbled down the runway because they couldn't see out of these woolen things pulled over their faces.

"Sometimes a mask is just a mask. The elaborately pierced and studded hoods by Jun Takahashi of Undercover provoked editorials that ranged from puzzled to pissed off. In Newsweek, Anna Quindlen worried about becoming a faceless society. Confronted with such controversy, the Japanese designer insisted he had no motivation for swaddling his models' heads in leather, gauze, or wool beyond this simple fact: 'I think it's beautiful.'"

I, for one, don't find this beautiful. It seems fetishist and cruel to throw a sack over a woman's head and present her to an audience. It objectifies her in a way that robs her individuality much more than the usual fashion-presents-woman-as-object fare. Maybe masks seem especially terrifying to me because of the way they confine one's features, but this presentation undermined any of the beauty I can usually find in disturbing things. Usually there's a rush of relief at seeing something new, but this feels like the hard line of morality Mary talked about in class today.

But I wonder how hard it is, or perhaps whether I could be made to forget it. If I was bombarded with enough images of women wearing masks from sources I trust and respect, if masks started appearing in stores, if people started wearing them around campus, would I want one, too? I think that Nabokov asks us those kinds of questions in Lolita. If we spend enough time in a world of beauty, do we forget morality?

When I said in class "maybe beauty has its own moral code," I meant that it might exist along with Morals, that beauty's morality and Morals are so different that they exist in different spheres, they have no bearing on one-another. But I think now that beauty does not have its own moral code - that is not to say that it is valueless by any means - rather that it is so free of a moral code and so pleasurable that it allows us to forget morality altogether. It lulls us out of morality.

But there is a paradox here - by pushing us away from morality, does it cause us to snap back all the more quickly? Maybe I can realize my own morals more fully beacuse beauty begins to tug me from them. But I say no to this; we are too easily led by beauty to have it shock us into morality. It takes something as powerful as pedophelia and rape to remind us of Morals against Lolita's achingly beautiful prose. But perhaps that forces us to work for Morality, which causes us to invest in the Morals, which strengthens them on the inside. While this is a stronger argument, I think this varies from situation to situation. The tension in Lolita draws me away from the morality enough so that I can actually look at child-rape. It's something I couldn't abide looking at otherwise. But it might numb me to a less obvious Moral travesty - I would bet that Nabokov could convince me that, say, covering a model's face (and restricting her individuality, as I said above) was alright.

In fact, this is an argument for beauty's numbing qualities in terms of Morals - I only notice the moral outrage of restricting a woman's image and individuality when the moral is much larger than the beauty. In a more normal fashion show that might be said to impinge on the model's individuality, the beauty would make me buy-in to the program, not notice the amorality of clothing women in corsets. Or what about JFK? Though I agree with much of what he did politically, I think that the reverence he still commands has more to do with his youth, early death, and beauty than his policy. People have forgiven him his affairs in a case of beauty subverting Morality. Mary Wollestonecraft called this "the arbitrary power of beauty;" I think that ad campaigns use beautiful people not because it implies "if you buy this, you will look like this," but because we assume that a beautiful person has more authority. Product X must be good because beautiful person Y is telling me so.

But then again, there is the question of whether this morality-free zone might actually be a fertile ground for new morals. Its distance from society might allow us to pick out real Morals from societally conditioned ones (one culture might find nudity morally offensive while another sees it as the natural way of being). A clearer vantage point, if you will. And I think that we do need to rest from Morality at all seconds and just enjoy things. I enjoy many beautiful things that may not be moral, and to hell with it. But I can no longer say for certain that beauty makes us more moral.

On the Importance of Beauty

2006-03-12T21:44:00.000-08:00

Warner Herzog wrote this in reply to fans' (and his own) complaints about the Discovery Channel's airing of "Grizzly Man." Herzog directed the film, which Discovery chopped up with an extra hour of commercials and added commentary. He said,

"Discovery added a full hour to the film...without delineating clearly where my film ends and where the additional materials start... Sure, centuries from now our great-great-great-grandchildren will look back at us with amazement at how we could allow such a precious achievement of human culture as the telling of a story to be shattered into smithereens by commercials, the same amazement we feel today when we look at our ancestors for whom slavery, capital punishment, burning of witches, and the inquisition were acceptable everyday events."

A Brahmin, a German and a Dame are in a room, right...

2006-03-03T19:34:00.000-08:00

Upon reading UR Anantha Murthy’s first novel, Samskara, one cannot help but think lovingly of Kant and Hume. And Murdoch. Okay, so, one can’t help but think of an 18th century German philosopher, a portly Scottish philosopher, an Irish-born British dame, and a revolutionary South-East Indian Brahmin, together in a closed room discussing social class, beauty, morality, and sex. Right.

In the novel, Praneshacharya, a Brahmin of the highest Indian caste and most holy Hindu ceremonial rite, goes on a hero’s quest. When a plague breaks out, Praneshacharya wanders away from the sheltered village where he has passed all of his holy life, and stumbles into the forest wondering where his life will go from here. He encounters on the path, a young woman of a different cast. She bends to touch his feet in devotion after realizing that he is a Brahmin, and instead her breast bumps his knee. They have sex, blah blah blah, and it is the most meaningful thing the old chaste Brahmin has ever experienced. After he awakes, Praneshacharya begins a long and aimless journey of the mind. His worldview, that is to say his moral view, has suddenly been turned on its head and he cannot tell why or by what means. Aye, there’s the rub.

In the Hindu psyche, good and holy are not equal. Brahmins are born into a holy caste, but they are by no means guaranteed to be good. Thought, when they wander from town to town, people are expected to feed them, clothe and shelter them. Prostitutes are supposed to lower their prices for a Brahmin because they bear the mark of holiness. (Note that this is also outside the realm of Judeo-Christian-Islamic thought in which God is inarguably holy and good. Some Hindu gods are chaste, and some are practitioners of sensuality: so are their messangers.) The food freebies, cheap sex and consistent lodging are inarguably “agreeable,” they are “what gratify” the otherwise boring life of Brahminism (Kant, 102). And while this lifestyle, which is agreeable, may have the potential to be “good...and esteemed,” in a contemporary world it has come to be abused (Kant 102). That is to say the Brahmins don’t feed the poor or touch the lepers, they read texts and offer “the sacred balsam plants” to lifeless statues (Murthy, 14). Theirs is a life that consists mostly of the agreeable, and contains few moments of “objective worth” in which the participants have “some interest” invested in the “end” of their actions (Kant 102, 100).

As a Brahmin chaste to the core, Praneshacharya knows no act that is good, that “pleases on its own account” (Kant 99). Rather, all his acts are gratifying only because he knows that they commend him to the gods. He orbits the agreeable. His morality is outwardly chaste but inwardly selfish and absolutely contextualized, and when he is asked to answer a moral riddle without referencing the holy texts, he cannot do it. He has no “spiritual…instinct” or personal ethical values (Murdoch 83). Assuming, as we are, that beauty leads to morality, Murdoch might assert that Praneshacharya has no morals yet because he has not yet experienced the “‘unselfing’” so “popularly called beauty” (Murdoch 82). Hume might suggest that our hero has not experience beauty because he cannot “preserve his mind free from all prejudice,” including his selfishness (Hume 239). But Kant might argue that Praneshacharya is in the perfect position to be suddenly and radically transformed by beauty: he is in a state of “complete indifference” (Kant 98).

Using a conglomeration of our knowledge of aesthetics, beauty and morality gained thus far, we can form a hypothesis regarding the Brahmin’s sexual rebirth. First, the sexual experience is judged to be beautiful as it involves a “free play” between “the imagination and the intellect” (Kant 116). During the sexual experience, our hero is “bewildered” and imagines “a pair of doves” flying over his legs which “ebb like the ocean” (Murthy 63). His imagination suddenly conjures new images and potentialities. The act occurring is, in fact, beautiful. It is beautiful, too as a work of art, in the setting, tone, and form; and, if you’re into 60 year old Brahmins, content. Indeed, although our Praneshacharya once regarded himself as having been “born with a ‘Good’ nature” and having lived life as “a ‘Man of Goodness,’” he does not start to question his “beliefs” and “cultivate his salvation” until after his sexual experience (Murthy, 76). And the experience was able to receive him at such large consequence because he had no intention of having said experience. His actions were without expectation, anticipation or self. In short (and in fact) they were virginal.

In his meanderings that follow, Praneshacharya begins to wander into the world of non-holy life and is thus faced with a range of new experience that forces him to form his own ethical opinions. And, Kant tells us, because of the effort involved as he is moves toward his own constellation of ethics, he is moving toward his own good. His inner state is pure, Murdoch would note, and although his actions were estimable before, now his intent is estimable, just like our hypothetical mother-in-law, “M.” This rich inner ethic and the hitherto unknown sense of self is the “implication of [his] experience with beauty” (Murdoch 82).

40 oz. to Freedom

2006-03-03T15:23:00.000-08:00

It's that magical time of the year again when young college students turn their minds to the thoughts of far off and exotic destinations, shortlived romances, and consuming copious quantities of alcohol. That's right, spring break. And as much as I would like to consider myself a member of the aesthetic elite who need not engage in such hedonistic pleasure, I will admit that I too have my own plans that involve traveling from Tacoma to a distant place where a few drinks will most likely be consumed. However, I'm hoping to connect with the aesthetic experience while doing so due to the nature of my plans. The Canyonlands of Utah are my destination and, having never been there, I am hoping to view nature that is not only beautiful but sublime. And you were all wondering how the title of this post was relevant. Unfortunately since I haven't as of yet been there, it means that I will have to forgoe the pleasure of describing the landscape and refer to The Unicorn instead.
A point that struck me was when Marian commented to Effingham, "I hadn't expected such an extreme landscape. It takes getting used to. Sublime rather than beautiful, isn't it?" (Murdoch 84) What exactly is that distinction and where does it come from? The lands that surround Gaze Castle certainly seem to verge on the extreme with a treacherous bog, towering cliffs, an angry sea, and desolate plains all drawn out in garish colors. So is the sublime landscape one which is not precisely attractive, but rather shocking? Shocking not in the sense that it is replusive or startling, but more that it arrests the attention and captures the mind of the viewer. Sublime is an act that seems to require participation whereas beautiful invites observation and, at least according to our friend Kant, disinterest. Here is a question for anyone who reads this: the sublime is most often referred to in the context of landscapes (sweeping vistas, desolate glaciers, towering mountains, infinitely large deserts that remind us of our own humble size) but are there other experiences that could be called sublime? And if so, what qualifies them as such rather than as members of Scott's now well-read list of that which is aesthetically pleasing?
Examine Effingham's moment of lucid clarity that comes as a result of nearly dying in the bog: he first comments "How beautiful the bog looks in the sun. So many colours, reds and blues and yellows. I never knew it had so many colours." (Murdoch 170) Having experienced the bog first as an object of the sublime, he has transgressed it and in his survival is now able to see it differently. Perhaps it is the fear of the land that moves people to call it sublime. Either way, I hope to experience it first hand in a little over a week. But that right there makes me question my pending analysis of what I will see. Can it really be either sublime or beautiful if I have the expectations that it will garner such praise? In prematurely elevating it to such a pedestal all the while confining it to a pigeonhole of a definition, am I not destroying the possibilities? Only time will tell.

Addendum to my last entry...

2006-02-24T15:04:00.000-08:00

I made a mistake in my last entry; rather than checking in the book to see whether the Beethoven was played, I just assumed it. So perhaps Marian's clear thoughts are a little strange. Or they attest to the power of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. Just had to acknowledge that mistake.

Lucidity, Irrationality, and Live Music

2006-02-24T11:11:00.000-08:00

Hannah and Marian's different reactions to the music in The Unicorn's Chapter Sixteen came as no surprise; it is not coincidental that Hannah had her breakdown in the presence of so much music, nor that Marian thought so deeply and incisively while Beethoven floated through the air. It is as if the music somehow enabled their divergent emotional reactions, simultaneously clearing the way for Marian's lucid musings and unleashing Hannah's pain. This scene suggests some of art's wide-ranging impact, and since we are in a blog - as Scott neatly put it "the World Series of opinionage" - I want to share some of my experiences with music, because I think they underline what happened in The Unicorn.

Live music changes me. I always regret not bringing a journal to live performances because I have these moments of incredible lucidity. Somehow, it unclutters my thought so that it flows through series of epiphanies. I don't always have such bursts of clarity at a performance - twice I became exceedingly irrational at a live performance; once I had a sort of panic attack, while another time I became euphoric, giddy. These reactions, however, certainly don't accompany "good" or "bad" music. I have felt the clarity at everything from my sister's middle school choir concerts to the opera. This is interesting, too, because, per Hume, I have very little "taste." I am the first to admit that my knowledge of and attachment to music is limited. So perhaps this emphasizes that there is value in experiencing art outside of taste. The clarity *is* an odd experience - neither the aesthetic rapture nor the intellectual engagement that are typical, I think, of art.

So I guess what I am left with at the end of this entry is a question for which I have no answers. What is this effect? Why does live music unclog (or trigger) us? I might think that it has something to do with the energy of a *real* performance. Listening to an album doesn't ever cause me to react so strongly - at risk of sounding new-agey, perhaps you are sharing the performers' energy at a live show - there is a sensible human connection absent on cd. Why this might elucidate my thinking or trigger my emotion, though, I can't say.

A poem, a rant, a conclusion.

2006-02-22T20:05:00.001-08:00

A slight detour from formal discussion on aesthetics and the like, but when Emily came in and showed us slides on Monday, there was one that featured part of a Henry Dumas poem that shook me up for the rest of class. Not usually affected by poetry, but for some reason this one haunted me a bit, so I felt it appropriate to share the whole thing, of which we were only given the second through fifth lines:

THE PUPPETS HAVE A NEW KING
Ulwaca ulooooooo!
Oh these cold white hands
manipulating
they broke us like limbs from trees
and carved Europe upon our African masks and made puppets
Ulwalalooooo!
Bring out the Pygmy juju
Let us, like little black spears, bore our way.

Damn. Now that that's out of the way...I definitely took to heart the other day's discussion of art that only becomes art when politicized, or of how politics change art's meaning (this was Jason, I think?). I gush about Camus all the time, but I distinctly remember the first time I fell in love with The Fall, because I read his pessimistic words on human selfishness and loved how well he grasped the human mind. I didn't feel any more hopeful about humanity or myself after reading that book, but I loved that he acknowledged ideas I'd kept to myself for years and thought true. It really felt relieving to know that someone else felt so strongly about how people think and gave me a reason to consider his reasoning as solid understanding. One of the things he/his main character had discussed was that humans pretend to condemn selfishness although we all understand in our minds that selfishness allows us to bring ourselves pleasure and happiness, and I appreciated his acknowledgement of that hypocrisy between action and thought. But then! It was brought to my attention that Camus was a Libertarian (this, of course, came after an unrelated incident where a Republican acquaintance tried convincing me that all people were selfish but that liberals hypocritically masked it by prioritizing others while in the spotlight). Once I considered the author behind the writing, and the possibility of politics playing more of a role in The Fall than psychology or emotion...the book was slightly ruined for me. Not because I'm firmly against Libertarian ideas, but because I'd grown attached to the book for the emotional connection that I (or anyone, regardless of affiliation) could make with it, and politicizing the work narrowed the audience that was meant to appreciate it.

I have no idea if any of that specifically applies to what you said in class, Jason. I don't care, I just had to get that out. But the point is that I hate the combination of art and politics as much as I hate analyzing music for its lyrics. Form is highly underappreciated these days.

A Beautiful Book

2006-02-22T15:03:00.000-08:00

I own this book. It discusses aethetic proficency in desseminating statistical information. It is by and far the most beautiful art book I've ever seen.

On the importance of "good taste"

2006-02-22T11:09:00.000-08:00

Since our discussion of Kant and Hume last Friday I have been fixated on the concept of "taste" as a means of societal betterment. Since the blog is essentially the World Series of personal opinonage, I think I'll take the opportunity to lay out some mundane, day-t0-day things that I find tasteful and distasteful; then I may be able to make a generalization about them or draw a conceptul line separating the different groups.

Some things that I (personally) find distasteful, though by no means expressly evil or wrong:

- lack of punctuality
- eating while standing up
- particularly informal and/or misspelled emails
- addressing strangers (such as when asking the time or for directions) using "hey" as your sole salutation
- asking a friend what a book they're reading is "about" before asking who it's by
- fast food

Some things that I find tasteful, though not necessarily virtuous or universally correct:

- good penmanship
- gift giving
- clean kitchens
- politeness to strangers and shopkeepers/ food-service employees
- good editions of paperbacks
- letter-writing (occasionally) in leiu of email or phone calls
- an interest in asking questions about things; also, understanding things that you don't really need to understand, simply because the workings of things are interesting, i.e. how a clock works or the rules of hockey (neither of which I understand)
- picture frames

Hmmm... before crafting this list I thought it would be much more... well, something. Anyhow, I think that if everyone considered "good taste," or for that matter any articulated aesthetic sensability something worth working toward, we couldn't help but be in a better place as a large group of people. As it is now, however, I get the impression that we're supposed to avoid concious decisions about how we speak, act, or dress on the grounds that they're contrivances and don't represent "who we really are."

Take, for example, a suburban 15-year old who comes across a Misfits record and, after some consideration, decides that, for whatever reason, the punk-rock ethos is preferable to his current way of looking at things and adopts the appropriate dress and reading material in a concious attempt to become a part of a movement to which he is otherwise unrelated. His actions would likely be labeled as pretension or artifice on the grounds that they were carefully and cerebrally considered beforehand. Conversely, the teen whose justification for wearing the same clothes, buying the same records, etc... was something like "I dunno, I just like it" would be seen as somehow more genuine.

The difference is that the first teen made an aesthetic decision, one that was a matter of taste (the punk-rock style appealed to his tastes in some way that his former style did not) , whereas the second teen has made no such decision, coming to his conclusions rather by some sort of cultural osmosis, but one that we would probably deem more sincere.

It seems to me that the concious cultivation of taste and aesthetic sensibily (in whatever form they take for you) would yeild a better, more interesting society. Our current "take what you've got and stick with it" approach appears limiting. People would probably enjoy more things if they were dedicated to approaching and understanding them as matters of good taste.

Taste and Morality

2006-02-17T19:54:00.000-08:00

“…Where the ideas of morality and decency alter from one age to another, and where vicious manners are described, without being marked with the proper characters of blame and disapprobation; this must be allowed to disfigure the poem, and to be a real deformity.” (246, Of the Standard of Taste)

If, as Hume states, we “cannot prevail on ourselves to enter into [the artist’s] sentiments” when the object does not fit into the morals of our age, must we also reject all art forms which were at any time in disagreement with our virtues? It is understandable that Hume places such importance on the current moral similarities. After all, it is difficult to appreciate cultural relativism when we are faced with an image or idea which affronts our very concept of humanity and virtue. Even anthropologists, who are trained to objectively view cultural differences, may be challenged by artwork which highlights the importance of genocide or cannibalism in a society. Despite such cultural and moral differences, must an artwork become entirely “deformed” in the eyes of the viewer? Since Hume ultimate concedes that beauty lies within both the subject and the object, then even an artwork which is morally repulsive to viewers from our society must be possessed with some amount of beauty. If an object possesses beauty in one culture, mustn’t it still have that beauty in another culture, or does Hume’s notion of the objectivity of beauty apply only to groups with similar taste?

"The Babbling Barista" or "Suspension, Suspension"

2006-02-17T17:14:00.000-08:00

As a barista at North Tacoma’s most widely trafficked hangout, I have the misfortune of being privy to a spectrum of human “taste and apprehension” (Hume, 227). I tend to think myself sided with Scott in his argument that people with Taste are “better people,” even while being exposed to the tantrums of full-grown adults over, literally, spilled milk (Scott, 2.17.06). Yet, I was surprised at how strange it sounded to hear the proposed close relationship between aesthetic taste and moral behavior pontificated. It seems like a rather quick leap. As artists of one vein or another, we the liberally educated tend to try and believe in our lifestyle. If we were to “give art a chance,” we may be so lucky as to soon notice that it “saves lives,” and better enables us to “envision world peace” (per bumper stickers). But I find it difficult to defend the spray painting of walls and typing of words as fortified vehicles to moral good: especially when my economic equals back home are slaving in kitchens to support siblings; working combines to pay child support; and packing their duffel bags because the only the army will pay their white ass to get a degree.

Hume asserts that it takes sense, imagination, practice, aesthetic awareness, exposure, and a suspension of being for a person to even begin to acquire taste. But before all this, he defines taste as the thing we relay on when we judge “an act to be virtuous” as much as it is our touchstone when we “judge a work of art to be beautiful” (Hume, 226). The issue I take with this is that a.) It’s economically elitist in practice and b.) Those in the economic strata that have leisure to gain Hume’s taste, so called, don’t seem to practice the morality side of it. Now, this is a sweeping generalization. Let’s confine it to the café, shall we?

When I’m at work, I notice that the people who wear expensive clothing items tend to leave their dishes and newspapers strewn about the table, napkins on the floor, spilled coffee in puddles and sometimes, a nickel or two. Although busing your own table is a particularization of the golden rule, and not among the Ten Commandments, per say, it is an act of basic kindness. And one I would go so far as to deem “virtuous” when I’ve got a colicky staff to handle and a line of under-caffeinated junkies (Hume, 226). And granted, common sense dictates that if you’re wearing a white mink jacket (they do) you probably don’t want to risk a spill on the way to the dish bucket (they don’t). Let the lackeys do it. Simultaneously, these are the folks who can tell a late Baroque brushstroke from an early Rococo brushstroke, and deem one more beautiful than the other, per Hume’s theory of relativity. Don’t get me wrong. These multi-millionaires (yes) have plenty of sense—they know which vote will protect their 401K and which won’t. They have imagination—they find many topics of artful conversation to fill their café time. They practice aesthetic values by going to so many high-art events, and therefore appear, if not per their attire alone, to have aesthetic sensibility. They are most certainly exposed, and many practice art themselves; painting huge leather canvases, publishing photos taken with high-tech digital cameras, and accessorizing, nay, embellishing, their spacious offices and businesses. They belong to a social class, the economic understudy of George W’s social class, that propagates unmoral (in my opinion) acts. War, for example. As far as I can tell, they lack only one element. The suspension of being.

I’m not trying to say that being broke gives you more taste, though I might be saying that Hume wasn’t an economist. But mostly I’m trying to plug a hole in the defense of the relationship between aesthetics and morality in our gritty contemporary world. It seems to me that Hume may be on to something, and as our definition of art changes, as China noticed, maybe Hume’s road to becoming an aesthete becomes more accessible. This all because the art and the virtue seem to cover more ground now than in 1759, when America and all its inventions (i.e. hip hop) were just a twinkle in some patriot’s eye. Likewise, being well-exposed, well-trained and well-practiced doesn’t give or remove your quality of taste. It all pivots on this most consequential and final qualification of suspending being. Otherwise, despite the Vera Wang or the Fubu label, “Life is” merely “an imitation of Art” (Wilde, 40).

Drown My Sorrow

2006-02-17T11:19:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about Lucy Greely lately and how we have been tearing her apart on multiple levels, condemning and crucifying her with almost a sense of glee. I think that one of the strongest reactions that I was able to synthesize out of our class response (and I hope that I'm not taking too many liberties with my analysis) was that we felt as though she had perhaps wasted an opportunity. Again and again we (self very much included) pointed out that her narrative existed as a solipsistic monologue that dwelled upon a seemingly never-ending well of self pity. But what was it about that that we found so wrong? I like to complain about things, to talk about how hard my life is and how I never get a chance to relax and enjoy it. Except, the problem is that everyone feels that way to a certain extent. Honestly, Lucy Greely and I could play the 'My life is harder than your's' game and she would probably win. I'd probably lose against just about everyone. Not necessarily because I have an easy life that I like to imagine is much harder than it actually is, but because I really don't care. As far as I can tell, it doesn't really change anything. If you need the reinforcement that you are going through lots of trials and tribulations, that's your thing and I'll feel bad for you and ask if there is anything I can do to help, but not if you keep harping on it.

Which moves me a step closer to my long-winded point: that Lucy never really accomplished anything with her narrative. She had a unique point of view and the opportunity to reach out to people and tell them about it and rather than delivering even the weakest of Oprah life lessons, she subjected her readers instead to over 200 pages of complaining. I don't want to suggest that she should have always been making lemonade out of her lemons because she was dealing with some pretty sour fruit, but I was hoping to achieve some resolution from her situation. It felt as though the only conclusion that Lucy could come to managed to wrap everything up into a neat little package of realizing that she had been self centered and had manifested the image of how everyone saw her without any confirmation of that reality. Hadn't she missed the chance to tell us that multiple times already? Like when she was talking with her horse trainer and realized that he was looking her in the eye - to which her response was to assume ugliness and duck her head in shame.

Lucy Lucy Lucy, facts of life state that some people are found more attractive than others. Some people need a little bit of help to enhance their attractiveness, others are happy no matter what image they present to the world.
Brad Pitt: attractive (http://www.iranmania.com/fun/screen_savers/1024/BradPitt01_1024.jpg), Steve Buscemi: not so much (http://us.movies1.yimg.com/movies.yahoo.com/images/hv/photo/movie_pix/sag/sag_awards_2005_photos/steve_buscemi/sag2.jpg). If one allows his or herself to fall into the traditional categorization of Beautiful or Ugly, there isn't a whole lot that can be done. But maybe, just maybe, we should redefine our measuring stick so as to not compare ourselves to celebrities who have far more time and money to indulge in self-beautification. Maybe we should stop worrying so much about what we look like and focus instead on what we can do with ourselves.

So what I'm trying to say is that I think Lucy got perhaps a little too caught up in feeling sorry for herself and acting the role she thought she was supposed to occupy. In writing about what she went through, she presented a great look at how horrible it was, but I fail to see how that results in anything other than a cry for pity and acknowledgement. I'll even go out on a limb here and hypothesize that if this narrative had been presented with more of a sappy 'This is what I've learned from my adversity and the challenges that I have had to overcome' tone, we might have been a little more receptive to it. As it was, though, I ended up losing my patience for the book and closed my eyes to it.

Some Thoughts: Art, Reader-Response, Imitation

2006-02-10T20:27:00.000-08:00

**I am responding to China's comments on my last blog entry**

China - I see your essential point - it's neo-Platonic, no? Because if the craftsman creates something (i.e. a work of art, a chair, a computer), it has some imitative component, if your argument about potential extends to all objects. So there must be an original bed: for Plato, the ideal bed.

I am interested in your example of the student and the novelist. You equated the student with the artist, and thus an essay with art. But I would not call an essay a work of art. I mean, I suppose that one could tweak one's viewpoint (per Ziff) to see it as art, but most would agree that an analytic essay is more a work of reason than aesthetic ecstasy (and yes, the two are separate here. I think that they can get close together and that they depend upon one-another, but that is for another blog entry. For now, they are distinct, as they are often in literary criticism). We literary critics may want to put our emotion into papers, but they are not intended (there's that word again) for aesthetic appreciation. One lauds a critical piece for its clarity, its complexity: its logical, comprehensive, innovative claim. So I guess the question is: is a writing about a work a piece of art in itself? Can it ever be? Hm.

Reader-response criticism will be helpful here, for it posits that the reader completes a piece by realizing part of its potential. But my preferred version of reader-response criticism doesn't presume to call the reader a second author. Rather, a reader completes the half-finished sculpture of the poem, creating meaning. So, how is this any different from what the artist does? Doesn't the artist just complete something else's meaning? Yes and no. The artist may realize a part of some object's potential, but he creates another part-sculpture, if that makes sense. An artist continues to spawn meaning by creating a definite form, be it music, poetry or dance etc. So then the question is whether the essay is another half-completed structure, another vessel to spark meaning.

I am not sure. Ideas? I am inclined to say no, because, as I said above, it is not just about meaning (which an essay certainly has), but about form. I agree with Bell's claim that form is essential to aesthetic experience. And, for the most part, an essay's form is less about emotion and space for the reader (viewer, audience-member etc) than logic, understanding, clarity, and simplicity of form. It is not meant to inspire, but to inform. Rational instead of emotional. But perhaps I need to say my definition of art:

Art is any human-produced aesthetic object.
An aesthetic object is any object that elicits an aesthetic experience from its viewer.
Aesthetic experience is difficult to describe (and impossible to prove rationally, but isn't that what is so wonderful about it?)

So this leaves room for anything to be an aesthetic object, really, but art has to be human-produced. Humans had to have given it its physical form, even if that action consists in moving a piece of driftwood into a gallery, or aesthetically viewing a bowl of pudding.

Okay, so I know that my definition of art might be a little controversial, and implicit in it is my valuation of the aesthetic experience. I am noting a difference between rational, intellectual objects and aesthetic objects, though there is, of course, overlap in each category. So those are some thoughts.

Mmm, bile.

2006-02-10T17:19:00.000-08:00

I guess I'm having somewhat of an awkward time reading Autobiography of a Face because (brace yourself for the cliche answer) my uncle's going through a third bout of cancer at the moment, and at 44, I feel that he's way too young to deal with this kind of life punishment, so hearing a story about a kid enduring it isn't exactly comforting when kid in question lost part of her jaw in addition to her hair.

That out of the way, I agree with so many different things that have been said in class: that regardless of how unique your story is, it takes a narcissist to write an autobiography or memoir; that our "heroine" doesn't have to be mentally ill to sound a little mad; that I would appreciate this so much more if it were fiction because I wouldn't have to worry about how much of the story was exaggerated. I really don't think I could say anything original at this point that hasn't already been said about autobiography in general.

What I will say is that Grealy is very good at bringing descriptions of events and emotions to life, regardless of how ambitious a writer she is or isn't. Her accounts of vomiting until there's nothing but green bile, causing her to eat specific foods so that she has something to purge or can make it less nauseating to look at...I can physically feel and picture everything she describes at these points, including the exhaustion that would consume me, were I to make getting sick the major event of my day. And while I may not understand how reliable a narrator Grealy is, given the time that had passed between her earliest experience and the writing of her book, I do respect the fact that she gives people like her parents human flaws easy to relate to. The relief she feels when her dad leaves her to get the car and give her some peace (p. 84-85), for instance, was probably what most stood out to me. To be a patient in a hospital, or any position warranting pity from most people, is humiliating when you want to be treated with dignity, and I appreciate that Grealy could acknowledge that unspoken idea aloud with her readers.

Do I think she made her family members and herself into characters, though? Absolutely.

Raindrops Falling On My Head

2006-02-03T15:18:00.000-08:00

Given the current state of the weather, it seems rather appropriate that my musing comes from the rain and the dichotomy between nature and the influence of man, withthe overarcing theme of beauty as a metaphorical umbrella. See, I was walking home late a couple of nights ago, wandering through the rain when I got to the intersection of 6th and Lawrence where the streetlights were shining and cars were occasionally passing through. I could see raindrops bouncing off the pavement, ferocious little ricochets caught in the illumination of headlights. To me, the sight of those raindrops was one of beauty.
The more that I thought about it, though, I started to wonder on various aspects of the situation and, especially after reading the Oscar Wilde piece, to what degree did nature play? The rain was a base of nature to be sure, whereas the lights, the cars, the pavement all were not. If it were to arise singularly from nature, I imagine that I would have to have witnessed rain falling on rock with the moon and stars as my source of light. While that might have been an equally beautiful scene, it would not have been the same at all.
To incorporate Oscar Wilde into these thoughts, were the feelings I felt ones that arose from nature itself, or rather from how art has taught me to feel? Take for instance Hopper's painting Nighthawks (http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/hopper/street/hopper.nighthawks.jpg). Even though there isn't any visible sense of rain, I kind of feel like it is a very noir sort of setting where rain might be completely appropriate. So have I taken these feelings and transported them to settings of my own discovery?
Further complications of things came when I wondered whether or not my reaction was completely individual to myself, or if others might not feel the same way. Granted, there is little doubt in my mind that inhabitants of desert areas would feel completely different about the rain than those who live in areas frequented by monsoons. Maybe I'm just overly romanticizing the rain and that is all there is to it. My own personal beauty.

Japanese Gardens and Human Beauty

2006-02-03T12:25:00.000-08:00

After class on Wednesday I started thinking about the connection between highly manicured Japanese gardens and human beauty. I find it hard to view the gardens as products of nature since they are so deliberately sculpted, groomed and arranged. In this sense, because they are the creation of humans, they seem to be works of art. Although nature may have created the materials, that nature slowly evaporated as each hedge was pruned and each branch was molded into a specific shape. If man’s intrusion on nature can be viewed as art in this sense, how are we to view ourselves?

Humans may be products of biological nature, but no one (or at least very, very few) exists in a truly natural state. We are continually sculpting, grooming and arranging ourselves (using products from Sephora’s beauty tool aisle, among others) to appear as our idea of perfection, or at least something more perfect than we are by nature. Does this mean we create works of art every morning when we shower and dress ourselves, every time we shave our faces or our legs and every time we exercise?

Ruminations on Mr. Wilde

2006-02-03T11:02:00.000-08:00

I suppose I must begin with the admission that Oscar Wilde is, without a doubt, my favorite dandy, dead or alive (save perhaps M. Erik Satie). He never fails to reassure his readers that behind each of his arguments is a man of infinite wit with a fondness for jest. He's a pleasure to read, to put it simply.

As for his claim that it is life that imitates art, rather than vice versa, I think he is quite on the money. While the point is well made that before there was art there was nature, I think the bulk of his rather weighty argument rests on the statement that "to look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and only then, does it come into existence" (41). All our lives we have been trained by works of art and other cultural artifacts to direct our aesthetic attention, our beauty-seeking antane in the direction of a fairly agreed-upon set of objects occurrences. It would be problematic, or at least a bit cocky to assume that we have an innate sense or any a priori knowledge of the beautiful and the aesthetically pleasurable (though, oddly enough, Mr. Wilde would probably credit himself with this preternatural and inextricable good taste). Instead, we have a grand body of recieved information about what constitutes beauty, likes and dislikes that are, more or less common throughout a given social group.

This body of aesthetic information covers enough territory that we rarely find ourselves in a situation that is not represented by some familiar work of art or cultural artifact, whether it be a painting in the Louvre or reality TV. Our own experiences, then, are inseparable from those that we are, willingly or otherwise, exposed to in the business of everyday living. And, like it or not, this is sure to affect our experience of living as well.

Fog, like any easy-on-the-eyes natural phenomenon existed long before it was painted by painters, but only as a physical, passive entity. Not until it was recreated by the hand of an artist did it become an aesthetic object; even if we were to suppose that pre-historic, pre-artistic man had an affinity for fog, he certainly did not have a concept that fog was a thing of beauty worthy of our affection or know that he was supposed to appreciate it.

Lastly, I second his motion that art never expresses anything but itself. Like a spoiled child or a delicate, opium-ravaged Romantic poet, art will quickly collapse under the weight of the world if it is asked to do anything other than just want it wants to at any given moment.

And Wilde's appeal to Walter Pater's famous claim that all art aspires to the condition of music sits nicely with me as well.

Art is an expression of human life, so art is mainly imitating life

2006-02-02T18:45:00.000-08:00

The bird is imitating art, but he cannot be consciously doing it because he lacks the mental capacity to imitate art. This is a funny picture and goes along with Oscar Wilde’s essay, so I wanted to include it.

The Merriam Webster dictionary defines nature as, “the totality of physical reality exclusive of things mental”. This definition shatters Widle’s claim that life imitates art more than art imitates life. True nature in its entirety is free from the mental because it exists in an uncultivated realm. True nature cannot imitate art because nature is free from the mental.

Humans are imitative creatures. A child imitates their parents to learn new and acceptable behaviors. Life as a reflection of art, primarily atleast, doesn't work. Dewey explains art's role in life, "The self-conscious aim of life is to find expression, and Art offers it [...]". Art is an expression of life; therefore art is primarily imitating life.

Aspiring to Psychopathology...or Beauty

2006-02-02T15:24:00.000-08:00

Last year I saw a German Shepard get hit by a car on a busy street. I pulled over as a crowd gathered, including some acquaintances I had made through my job—one of which a woman who always wears a pendant with saint Francis of Assisi, the patron and protector of animals. “Thank god!” she exclaimed. “We were just praying for a truck.” We loaded the limp dog, whose collar read “Waldo” into my truck bed and sped to the other side of town. I had found him just in time, I thought, as I watched the nurses carry him on a piece of plywood into the vet’s office. The next day I returned to the gas station near the accident to rinse the dried blood out of my truck bed when my pendant-wearing customer approached me to report that Waldo had died.

Myself? I did and have referred boldly to this as “an experience,” though it is blatantly contrary to the definition John Dewey takes. It was a “continuous merging” filled with “holes, mechanical junctions and dead centers” (48). The woman’s pendant held no power to stitch the seemingly arbitrary events together, and my good timing was to no avail. I didn’t even make any new friends.

Despite the lack of resolution, I was moved and felt—dare I say—“a satisfying emotional” sensation as I watched the bright red fluids dilute and trickle off my tailgate (49). Arguably my emotions in this instance were “pathological” or attached to the animal’s loss rather than any present coherent development (50). But even in reviewing Waldo’s last day, I am certain, and in fact I will swear on my art, that they were “attached to [the] event” in its “movement,” and not “intruder[s]...from without” (51, 53). I know this because I felt nothing but “intensified” clarity as I supported the dog’s broken neck and as I sped down the sun-speckled street, scanning for cops. I was thrilled and evoked by my timing, and moved by the smell of the animal, the sweat and thick hair. Not to say I enjoyed his pain, but I was moved by it. It was cinema-graphic in its precision, and even if the events had no outwardly apparent “consummation,” I felt that I brought a “quality of intelligence...upon the perception of relations” (51).

This is hard to write about and probably harder to read about, because we haven’t talked about plain old daily experience as being aesthetic yet, and because I am knowingly contradicting Dewey’s detailed argument of the seamless nature of experience. Also, because my aesthetic experience, so called, was both totally made of Semblance, and yet fully grounded in reality (see Schiller, number 4). This does touch on Dewey’s default argument that “we drift,” but that such happenings have no “initiations [or] concludings” (50). On a totally personal level, I object to that. What arose in me in those moments were awe, fear, excitement, and anxiety. Indeed these emotions have been “absorb[ed] and carr[ied] on” since then to a more complete cognition of what it will mean to die (50). That experience was a review of “everything [I’d] ever lost and the premonition of everything life will take from” me (Ellen Hawley in What We Forgot to Tell Tina About Boys). I feel the same arguably aesthetic emotion when I listen to Handel’s Oratorios, read T.S. Eliot’s Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, or sit before Picasso’s Guernica. It is an emotion that is sometimes nothing more than play-drive, and sometimes an emotion filled with memories, that is to say—Mr. Schiller—filled with extraordinary reality.

Imitation and a Cultural Aesthetic

2006-01-28T14:57:00.000-08:00

You make a good point, China; there are certainly cases that art is imitative. I guess that what I resist the idea that it is *always* imitative. That is, there are many times (take Van Gogh's renderings of his Room at Arles) when an artist will paint a craftsman's work but ask us to view it differently. So while it has the capacity to imitate, like you are talking about, it is not in essence imitative, for it will not always do so. It's a fine line.

Also, speaking about culture and art - I think it is really easy to see how our aesthetic sense is culturally conditioned in fashion. I would argue that some of the "high" fashion houses' clothes are art (they are creative, often provocative, often beautiful). Looking at how fashions change from season to season, year to year, and decade to decade can be incredibly revealing. Every ten years or so, there are a couple of collections that re-attune our aesthetic senses; the pattern is clear, as one issue of Vogue pointed out. A controversial new shape enters the fashion realm and people hate it at first. But, as time wears on, they begin to see its beauty and indeed emulate it. Take Marc Jacobs Fall 2005 collection (follow link). Called "lumpenly ugly" and full of "prom dresses for pregnant teenagers," it sold remarkably well and is already rippling through other collections. A collection like this overturns and reconditions our sense of the beautiful.

I just find it really interesting to watch fashion as a cultural register of sorts, because it is so visible and updates itself twice a year. More conventional forms of art take much longer to sort themselves out - books take years to write and more time to publish, paintings must make their ways into galleries and then people have to see them, but fashion is thrown at us in magazines, on tv, and in stores.

A Preternatural Understanding of Creative Aesthetics

2006-01-27T08:23:00.000-08:00

"Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem" is the collaboration between French Disco House artists Daft Punk, and anime artist Leiji Matsumoto. Both the album (which is widely accliamed as one of the best albums of this decade) and the animation we concieved together as a 'Fantasia' esque project. No dialogue and only the album's nuances provide the narrative. This film, of which many fans of either artist is entirely ignorant, displays a consumate understanding of both the aesthetics of dance music and the mindframe (emotionally and professionally) that allows it's fruition.

If any of you all want to watch it let me know. We are having a screening this evening.

Trying to befriend desparate parts of the reading.

2006-01-27T08:07:00.000-08:00

Ok, so like, the readings:

"It is out of participtation in the general system of symbolic forms we call culture that participation in the particular we call art, which is in fract but a sector of it, is possible. A theory of art is thus at the same time a theory of culture, not in autnomous enterprise." Geertz 115

and

""We are interested in the intention of picutures and painters as a means to a sharper perception of the pictures, for us. It is the picture as covered by a description in our terms that we are attempting to explain; the explanation itself become part of a larger description of the picture, again in our terms." Baxandall 245

Though these are not in direct dialect, it is clear that they obviously dissent in several ways from each other. What is said that maintains continuity between the two (at least in my own phrasing) is the following:

Culture is an inevitable part of art, and an inevitable part of communication, and also of any representational system. So when we see a piece of art on our 'own terms,' their is an inference that we seek culture. Our opinion and perception, even prior to viewing the art is set by culture, and we are (as individuals) products of our culture. So when we set art interms of ourselves, and our view we both are culturally biased towards it, and it is culturally biased back towards us. Thus, if the culture we project upon the art is an object version of the cultural bias we innately possess, it will be prone to certain emphatic rejection or integration of the art.

Expanding on today's class discussion...

2006-01-23T16:29:00.000-08:00

I love blogs solely for days like this, where I need to bring up a discussion point but don't form my argument until we're about to leave class...

Anyway, what struck me was the idea of not wanting to consider art an imitation because it's only half-complete if it has not yet been evaluated by an outsider. My response to that, in defense of art as imitation, is the question of what happens when the craftsman is able to evoke an emotional reaction with what he makes. Supposing the craftsman builds an object using the ultimate object as a model, and the artist creates an image of that object...if the craftsman built an object that made its consumers/witnesses strongly react, and the artist were able to capture both the object and the feeling it resulted in, then wouldn't that piece of art be an imitation of the craftsman's experience because the beauty conveyed in the art is beauty that resulted from the craftsman's creation? If you were to merely paint a picture of the craftsman's chair, for instance, it is unlikely that your painting would give your audience a brand new reaction not already associated with the craftsman's original chair, unless you completely skewed your picture of that chair, in which case you're not imitating the chair itself but any emotional reaction that you have over the chair and wish to convey. Ah...so in short, I do think art is imitation.

Unabridged Lolita released in Chnia

2006-01-19T22:51:00.000-08:00

It appears that the first unabridged Lolita has been released in China. I had no idea that they had censored parts of the novel. Speaking of reading this controversial novel in other cultures, one that's on my list is Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi. Has anyone read it?

Welcome!

2006-01-18T10:54:00.000-08:00

Welcome to Aesthetics and Cultural Production!