I've always despised walking through a museum and having a third party
attempt to convince me what the artist was thinking when they were creating
based on a bunch of rumored factoids. I think that defeats the entire
purpose of what art is all about.
Explanation ruins expression.
On Tue, Dec 31, 2002 at 9:19 PM, Ana Olinto <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> alison, blind "generalization" is one thing, philosophical reasoning -
> which
> necessarily work with some generalization, for reasoning is thinking and
> we necessarily think in generals, as we feel in particulars - is quite
> another.
> i miss precisely the mutual fertilization of thinking and feeling in
> today's
> world.
> i do appreciate the novel form, its architecture, and often think how my
> favourite novelists are more profound, complex and even more modern and
> better writers than most poets.
> you are right when you say philosophy "doesn't reach beyond the ratio" and
> the reason for that is that it is rigorous reason by definition. when you
> said
> desborders' book deals with some philosophical issues, it ocurred to me
> that if the way in which she grasped them was especially systematic and
> coherent she could even have studied philosophy and written a philosophical
> treatise - it was an extreme idea, a provocation; i don't know her work,
> only
> know she is a novelist, and, knowing the novelist's general state of mind,
> i
> think it's certainly more likely that she would better have written a long
> meditative poem, perhaps with some narrative - the best narrative
> achievements from the novel - parts.
> on the other hand, i think you are right when you say poetry is far from
> popular in today's world. and you would also be right if you said i can't,
> with
> my reasoning, stop most people - even the most informed and even cultured
> people - from prefering novels, and even more the cinema, and ignoring
> poetry,
> painting and serious reasoning.
> i think the most serious artists nowadays, the ones most serious about form
> - and
> its shaping of content - , can only be one more tribe, just as the hip-hop
> is one,
> the drum'n bass is another, and the neo-punk another - and i'm not joking:
> i think this is the good and the bad of democracy.
> x------------ana
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Alison Croggon" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Monday, August 10, 2009 8:53 PM
>
> Subject: Re: "incapacity"/New Formalism
>
>
> Hi Judy - The US has Melville, what else does it want? I guess I get
> tired of generalisations... they almost always dissolve when you
> actually look at them. If there are problems, which there are
> everywhere, it can't be about history. Russian literature dates itself
> from Pushkin, which makes its history much shorter than than the US.
> If there's anything weird it's the idea that writing is professional
> and needs qualifications and ends up being a career, like entering a
> corporation. That's fairly corrosive.
>
> Ana, The novel is a gorgeous form. I find myself fascinated by its
> architecture, by everything you can put in it. It's like any writing,
> it can be whatever you make it. All you have to do is imagine it. (In
> talking about the dance, everyone has forgotten Tristram Shandy and
> Swift's bizarre adventures like Tale of a Tub. Or Melville). If a
> novel were simply narrative + philosophy, with character puppets
> illustrating some abstract point, what would be the point? It's
> narrative + philosophy + sensual and emotional imagination.
>
> The value of Desbordes is she evokes people who disappeared through
> the cracks of history, who never presumed to have a philosophy or a
> voice, and in the humility of her imagining is something much more
> complex and humane than can be reached by philosophy, which seldom by
> its nature reaches beyond the ratio. I don't claim a novel is superior
> to poetry or anything else (or that poetry is superior, or whatever):
> those arguments are insane. But I do value novels, and I do think the
> form is far from dead. Certainly people have not stopped reading
> novels, like they've stopped reading poetry, and we have both popular
> and art forms, which all art forms need to stay lively. It's hard to
> think of poetry as a popular form, except maybe in children's books.
> I've never known much or cared much about fashion.
>
> xA
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 3:03 AM, Judy
> Prince<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> And again, Ana, I can only echo "YES!" to what you've written!
>> I believe, at least for my native country USAmerica, that becoming
>> 'famous'
>> or 'sanctioned' or 'well known', or of course 'a bestseller', defines our
>> writer aims.
>>
>> In USAmerica, as well, we've a tradition supporting superficiality; we've
>> little history; we're a hodge-podge of ethnicities; we're loose in a big
>> pond of little identity-crises'ed fishes, making our own insignia, logoes,
>> impressa, shields, crests.
>>
>> We seldom react to our perceived past going back more than a generation.
>> An
>> abiding, divisive, brutal, long-accrued story belongs to others, not to
>> us.
>> Our hate is contemporary; our philosophy is William James; our music is
>> not
>> ours unless it's African-American, southern white, or native American, so
>> we
>> denigrate these.
>>
>> We haven't a THINKING tradition; we haven't a WORD-LOVE tradition. We have
>> a marketing, money-making tradition.
>>
>> How, then, can we have excellent novels, short stories, plays, or poems?
>> We
>> cannot, except for the exceptional: TS Eliot.
>>
>> I love Chekhov's short stories. I love Lermontov, Gogol----but not Tolstoy
>> whose thought ran less subtly and less deeply than the others.
>>
>> I enjoy your messages thoroughly!
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Judy
>>
>> 2003/1/1 Ana Olinto <[log in to unmask]>
>>
>> alison, i think i should admit, with judy, that i usually don't read many
>>> novels - in my case, contemporary ones, i do read some earlier ones - and
>>> that, in consequence, i'm not the best person to talk about them - in my
>>> case,
>>> not about contemporary ones.
>>> but i think it would be also interesting to ask us why.
>>> i'm no, as my posts may suggest, sectarian. my favourite novelist may
>>> well
>>> be
>>> dostoievsky - the opposite of valéry; i prefer a good
>>> contemporary neo-classical musical composition than most - in fact all -
>>> contemporary musical "geniuses" i know.
>>> my favourite contemporary poet here in brazil is alberto cunha melo,
>>> despised by the avant-garde and self-confessed "neo-classic" who
>>> tastes like the past and for most of the time writes in octossylabes.
>>> i must admit that the reason i don't add contemporary novelists to my
>>> list of good contemporary artists is plainly because i don't read
>>> contemporary novels, and the reason for that is plainly that, contrary
>>> to listen to a cd and reading one poem, it takes a lot of time to do
>>> that.
>>> the contemporary novelists you cite may well be more contemporary
>>> - and better - than alberto da cunha melo's poetry - they most likely
>>> are.
>>> yet, i do worship dr. faustus.
>>> the question is, i tend to see as dispersive too much attention to too
>>> many
>>> -
>>> or too recent - novels. we should be whole, integral beings, and i think
>>> a
>>> philosophical grounding is as important - and in some aspects more - than
>>> art.
>>> i think hermann broch is the last novelist i see as fundamental. when you
>>> say
>>> someone has just written a novel which studies "silence and selfhood", i
>>> tend to
>>> think it would be more enlightening to write a philosophical treatise on
>>> such themes
>>> - in the manner of husserl, whitehead or bergson, three twentieth century
>>> philosophers of whom i'm fond, from completely different schools - or a
>>> philosophical "meditative" poem on them, such as eliot's four quartets is
>>> a
>>> meditative poem on the theme "time" - and i certainly wouldn't recommend
>>> her to
>>> write it in husserl's or whitehead's of bergson's or eliot's style, but,
>>> quite
>>> enthusiastically, in michele desborders' .
>>> what i'm questioning is not the talent or insights of all contemporary
>>> novelists,
>>> but the contemporaryness of the novel form. however unusual and
>>> surprising
>>> a
>>> novel may be, it does takes what frederick called a sustained "relentless
>>> cumulative
>>> power" to write one, and i'm questioning the presence of this power in
>>> today's
>>> world.
>>> it is not the narrative form that i see as out of fashion - though i do
>>> see
>>> the
>>> dancing, no-aim feeling as indispensable in a contemporary art book, but
>>> you
>>> can have a narrative - something which is closer to prose than to poetry,
>>> and that
>>> tells some story - with that characteristic - , but just a too coherent
>>> and
>>> too big
>>> narrative book.
>>> x-ana
>>>
>>>
>>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Alison Croggon" <[log in to unmask]
>>> >
>>> To: <[log in to unmask]>
>>> Sent: Sunday, August 09, 2009 6:26 PM
>>>
>>> Subject: Re: "incapacity"/New Formalism
>>>
>>>
>>> Hi Ana - I don't know about claims about what seems contemporary or
>>> modern, or that prose narrative isn't capable of contemporary
>>> purchase. I think story matters just as much now as it ever has. I've
>>> read some astounding novels in the past few months, from the lyric
>>> exploration of silence and selfhood in Michele Desbordes (who is
>>> extraordinary in my book, and whose books only came out in the past 10
>>> years, although to my sadness she died not so long ago) to the
>>> astounding mid-20th century polyvoice epic of Victor Serge to the
>>> wickedly funny and black fables of Arto Paaslini. Robert Pinget, WG
>>> Sebald, Thomas Mann (Dr Faustus), Christa Wolf. These are just names
>>> plucked out of a hat, but none of them work in the way you (or Nerval,
>>> who write some mean prose himself) describe.
>>>
>>> I do agree however that poetry is a lot like dance. At least, whenever
>>> I write about dance, I always end up talking about poetry. I tried to
>>> explore this in a piece on a work by choreographer Lucy Guerin, who
>>> lately has been working quite a bit with language -
>>> http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com/2008/10/miaf-corridor.html - which
>>> I'll take the liberty of quoting below, only because it's pertinent to
>>> this discussion:
>>>
>>> Like novels or short stories, theatre finds its poetic through
>>> narrative. The narrative might be displaced or distorted or multiple,
>>> or it might be absolutely linear; but however it appears, narrative is
>>> a tendency that the form must wrestle with, either to reject or to
>>> accept, to reveal or to distort. Poetry, on the other hand, need not
>>> deal with narrative at all: a poem might be an epic story like
>>> Paradise Lost, or it might be a vivid glimpse of a moment, as in Ezra
>>> Pound's In a Station of the Metro. It's up to the poet, a decision
>>> that can be freely asserted because of the nature of poetry itself.
>>>
>>> What is primary in both poetry and dance is its materiality. Just as
>>> poetry foregrounds the sensuous and rhythmic qualities of language, so
>>> dance celebrates the sensuous and rhythmic qualities of gesture.
>>> Neither needs to be more than the dynamic and immediate movement of
>>> exchange between reader and page, singer and listener, audience and
>>> performer, and for each this contract is more easily grasped than in
>>> theatre or in novels, where the tending towards narrative and
>>> explication must be resisted with active violence.
>>>
>>> xA
>>>
>>> On Wed, Jan 1, 2003 at 7:02 PM, Ana Olinto<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>>
>>> i think the last posts by dominic, frederick and alison touch the heart
>>>> of
>>>> my question. i think valéry was right when
>>>> he saw something new and irreversible in nerval, poe and then
>>>> baudelaire.
>>>> he defined prose as closer to walking, in which all our movements are a
>>>> consequence of aiming at some spot,
>>>> and poetry as closer to dance, in which all our movements are an end in
>>>> itself.
>>>> sappho's "more than a hero" is narrative, linear, but doensn't feel like
>>>> having, in its movements, an aim in mind -
>>>> or at least not in an emphatic way .
>>>> now, the difference between sappho and modern poetry is only one of
>>>> degree.
>>>> modern poets just intensified the
>>>> feeling of not aiming at anything.
>>>> this dancing, no-aim feeling can be seen as typical not so much of
>>>> poetry
>>>> as
>>>> opposed to prose as of modern,
>>>> radically non-linear, as opposed to orthodox sensitivity.
>>>> that's why i do tend to see the novel form and even more the epic form
>>>> as
>>>> not sufficiently contemporary - just as
>>>> the sonnet form, and, in music, the sonata form - the musical feeling of
>>>> aim
>>>> - or what francis bacon called what can
>>>> be seen, in painting, as a picture which "tells a story".
>>>> it is not necessarily much attention to sounds or even to the whole
>>>> texture
>>>> of words - not necessarily hermeticism
>>>> or even much complexity which makes a text feel contemporary (it's not a
>>>> question of a poetry versus prose
>>>> dichotomy). to my mind, it's the no-aim feeling.
>>>> chekhov said he usually composed a tale, and then threw away the
>>>> beginning
>>>> and the end: that has to do with what
>>>> i'm calling no-aim. what makes chekhov so modern and almost contemporary
>>>> is
>>>> the no-aim feeling he gives us,
>>>> even writting in prose, and a very linear one - it is in its totality -
>>>> and
>>>> not just the totality of the tale, but also each of the
>>>> totalities which constitute each of its paragraphs - that it ceases to
>>>> be
>>>> linear.
>>>> a good chekhov tale is not very different, structurally, from the best
>>>> longer narrative poems by elizabeth bishop - a
>>>> chekhov fan herself - but of course there is a lot of difference in
>>>> style
>>>> -
>>>> and of course she intensified a lot the thing,
>>>> and cared a lot more about resourses more typical to poetry - thanks to
>>>> nerval, poe, baudelaire and their followers.
>>>> it's not so much a question of superficially "modern" resources, such as
>>>> playing with time structures or making
>>>> your narrative more fragmentary and saturated with "poetic", as opposed
>>>> to
>>>> prosy, components: you can have all
>>>> flashbacks, word-games and local non-linearity and still direct us to a
>>>> closed aim.
>>>> i agree that "it is hard today for an intellectual to be clear what his
>>>> tribe values, goals, heroes and enemies are, or
>>>> about what one's 'tribe' is" and that the sustained "relentless
>>>> cumulative
>>>> power" of traditional epics - and novels -
>>>> were possible thanks to that power, now dead.
>>>> this doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't have any philosophical grounding
>>>> today. on the contrary, i see as most negative
>>>> precisely the fact that any groundings are lacking in today's world, and
>>>> defining frontiers in art procedures - and here i
>>>> suspect frederik will agree with me - is a sign of some grounding.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Alison Croggon" <
>>>> [log in to unmask]>
>>>> To: <[log in to unmask]>
>>>> Sent: Friday, August 07, 2009 7:16 PM
>>>> Subject: Re: "incapacity"/New Formalism
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I was thinking of gypsy tales, Eulenspiegel, Gilgamesh, folk tales...
>>>> (I'll pass over the "oral traditions are not literature" question,
>>>> which is very wobbly - there's lots to learn about story telling from
>>>> oral tales).
>>>>
>>>> I'd say the primary shape of epic is circularity. And Sappho's "How
>>>> like a god he seems to me" is a narrative as much as Homer is.
>>>>
>>>> I can't see that that the structural demands of story in prose and
>>>> poetry are very different. You have to tell a story in a way that
>>>> commands attention. I ended up thinking that was a primarily question
>>>> of rhythmic control, in the sense of large movements and at the level
>>>> of the sentence/line.
>>>>
>>>> I've never got linearity as applied to story, unless it means one
>>>> thing after another moving forward in literal time, as Hal suggests;
>>>> in which case lyric is definitely linear too. Every story goes
>>>> backwards and forwards, because it reflects how memory works - I can't
>>>> think of a single epic poem without divagations and distortions of
>>>> imagined time - the lnvocation of the muses in the present that begins
>>>> the Iliad or the stories of the gods, the bizarre leaps back and forth
>>>> in Beowulf, Aeneas's visits to the dead, Milton's sudden moving
>>>> description of his blindness in Paradise Lost, etc etc.
>>>>
>>>> xA
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> "simplest kinds of story telling (oral tales, say) are often far too
>>>>> fragmentary" - depends, I suppose, what you're thinking of. Marko the
>>>>> Prince and other oral epics of Serbia - very straightforward and
>>>>> Homeric.
>>>>> Likewise Gilgamesh, probably based on oral tales. And then the crucial
>>>>> term
>>>>> is "based on." I was talking about literature, not oral traditions.
>>>>>
>>>>> Vergil: Augustus and Rome. Tasso: aristocratic Catholic Europe. Camoes:
>>>>> imperial Portugal and expansionist Europe. Milton: the radical
>>>>> Reformation.
>>>>> Nazim Hikmet: the international proletariat. Tribes.
>>>>>
>>>>> The inherent requirements of narrative poetry are very different from
>>>>> those
>>>>> of the novel. "[Moving] forward and backward in space and time in ways
>>>>> that
>>>>> are not straightforward at all" gets in the way. Linearity (I'll drop
>>>>> the
>>>>> quotes), coherence, relentless cumulative power, are needed. Their
>>>>> absence
>>>>> - a refusal to differentiate between narrative and lyric - makes
>>>>> Walcott's
>>>>> Omeros unreadable. Their presence makes Glyn Maxwell's Time's Fool
>>>>> lastingly enjoyable and useful, despite the relative triviality of its
>>>>> theme.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Editor, Masthead: http://www.masthead.net.au
>>>> Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
>>>> Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Editor, Masthead: http://www.masthead.net.au
>>> Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
>>> Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com
>>>
>>>
>>
>
>
> --
> Editor, Masthead: http://www.masthead.net.au
> Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
> Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com
>
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