Norman Mailer's Lego Utopia

Today I learned that Norman Mailer built a 7-foot tall Lego utopia which he keeps in his apartment in Brooklyn Heights.



"Thirty-three years later, however, the city still stands in Mailer’s living room in Brooklyn Heights, and its creator remains enthusiastic about his project. “It was very much opposed to Le Corbusier. I kept thinking of Mont-Saint-Michel,” he explains. “Each Lego brick represents an apartment. There’d be something like twelve thousand apartments. The philosophers would live at the top. The call girls would live in the white bricks, and the corporate executives would live in the black.” The cloud-level towers, apparently, would be linked by looping wires. “Once it was cabled up, those who were adventurous could slide down. It would be great fun to start the day off. Put Starbucks out of business.”

I wonder where it is now that he has passed away?

Louis Adamic on BMC

All quotes from Harper's Monthly Magazine, "Education on a Mountain"

"They [the students] swim in intellgience and the desire to improve themselves.  Then uncertainty steals upon them, and they sink again into depression.  Not that the process ends here. They are continuous waves" (524)

"Men suffer most from unacknowledged self-contempt... He tries to act in such a way that he will be respected by others, and he becomes confused into thinking finally that this assumed self-respect he has pawned off on others is a reality. But underneath he knows or feels that it is all a lie.  Behind the front he offers to the world he is a disorderly person.  He never knows when he walks into a room but that the enemy is waiting for him, ready to show him up for the liar he is.  And yet, unconsciously, he longs for this very thing to happen to him.  But at the first onslaught of the real enemy he will fight as if he were a real enemy instead of a friend.  He has constructed and elaborately decorated the superficial self that he is to present to society.  It is as if he wore a carefully designed [pasteboard] mask, to the making of which he ha s given the most tender care, and behind this lives the real man, growing increasingly chaotic, miserable, and unhappy, longing for his deliverer but ready to receive him as an enemy.  The task of the college is to be his enemy-friend [frenemy]: the bitter enemy of the superficial self, the friend of the real self.   But the real one is starved, emaciated.  It must be fed back to life, while the superficial one must be attacked without mercy." [524]


"[John Andrew Rice says] A good teacher is always more a learner than teacher, making the demand of everyone to be taught something....A man who never asks himself any questions had better not try asking others....A teacher must have something of humor, a deeply laid irony, and not be a cynic.  In the center of his being should be a calm, quiet, tough. ["But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy."] He must have in him the principle of growth; like the student, a sense of justice and a great capacity for dejection.
Teachers in a place like this, where education is taken seriously, should always bear in mind that they are the central problem; that we would provide the students with a liberal education if we merely gave them the privilege of looking on while we educated ourselves.  Also, that it's wrong for us to want others to be like ourselves; that we must want to attend to being the sort of people that others ought to be like." (526)

Poems as Constellations

Approach to the poem must be from afar off, even generations off. A reader should close in on it on converging lines from many directions like the divisions of an army upon a battlefield. A poem is best read in the light of all the other poems ever written. We read A the better to read B (we have to start somewhere; we may get very little out of A) .We read B the better to read C, C the better to read D, D the better to go back and get something more out of A. Progress is not the aim, but circulation. The thing is to get among the poems where they hold each other apart in their places as the stars do.

Robert Frost, "The Prerequisites," Selected Prose of Robert Frost, ed. Hyde Cox and Edward Connery Lathem (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966) , p. 97.




[W]hat happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. ...The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.

T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," Selected Prose, ed. John Hayward (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), p. 23.

Whow‽

I invented a new word today when I had a pen stutter while annotating:

"Whow"

"Whow" expresses both the exclamation of surprise (wow!) and the question implied ("but how was it done?") -- best coupled with the new hybrid punctuation "?!", the so called "interrobang":‽




Another neologism tonight: "connecticanadian" (noun or adjective), must be said aloud for full effect "con-ECT-uh-kuh-NAY-dee-an" -- refers to a Canadian transplant to CT; very friendly, garrulous type, says "sohwry" a lot, usually Caucasian.

Brave New World

“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”

“In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”

“All right then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”

“Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.” There was a long silence.

“I claim them all,” said the Savage at last.

Neuhaus - Hermeneutics of Suspicion

Neuhaus speaks of "the toxic cultural air of a disenchanted world in which the mark of sophistication is to reduce wonder to banality. Even more, the acids of intellectual urbanity turn sacrifice into delusion, generosity into greed, and love into self-aggrandizement. In academic circles, this is called 'the hermeneutics of suspicion,' meaning that things are interpreted to reveal that they are not in fact what they appear to be. At least things that seem to suggest the true, the beautiful and the good are not what they appear to be. They must be exposed and debunked if we are to get to 'the truth of the matter.' The false, the self-serving, the ugly and the evil, on the other hand, are permitted to stand as revealing 'the real world.'" (Chapter 4 of Death on a Friday Afternoon, p. 125)    

Santayana on William James

"Perhaps in the first years of his teaching he felt as a military man might feel when obliged to read the prayers at a funeral.  He probably conceived what he said more deeply than a more scholastic mind might have conceived it; yet he would have been more comfortable if someone else had said it for him.  I think he was glad when the bell rang, and he could be himself again until the next day.  But in the midst of this routine of the class-room the spirit would sometimes come upon him, and leaning his head on his hand, he would let fall golden words, picturesque, fresh from the heart, full of the knowledge of good and evil." -- George Santayana on William James

Luna 3

October 4, 1959 -- the Soviet Luna 3 launches.  Three days later, it would take the first ever images of the dark side of the moon.  With no rockets to correct or aim the Luna's course, the means of getting this four foot tall hermetically sealed cylinder (read as: fancy garbage can) boomeranged into space, pointed in the right direction at the right moment to take a set of photos, develop the film, scan the film, and transmit them back to Earth was nothing short of a feat of technological acrobatics.

"Photograph 1" -- the first transmitted image. What a shame that all the original photos burned up with the ship.

The radiowave transmission of the photographs in the Luna 3 operated via a scanner which measured the intensity of light and dark pixels on the film.  These areas (pixels) would be assigned an electronic value according to their intensity, encoding the image in a series of numbers which could then be transmitted back to earth via electromagnetic waves (radio waves) and reconstituted as an image--not unlike how a TV works.  (Note to self: look up a better explanation of my cursory understanding of this.)

The Luna 3 spent the following five months locked in a looping ellipse, completing eleven orbits around the moon and Earth before falling back to Earth and disintegrating in the atmosphere in March, 1960.

A 2D image of 4D gymnastics.

(Rotated to approximate the photograph from the Luna 3).

The dark side of the moon (or, more accurately: the far side of the moon), as pictured by the Apollo 16 in 1972 -- Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon came out shortly after, in March, 1973.

Andrew Klein

Met an amazing artist on the bus home from a wedding in New Bedford today -- thought he was interesting from the moment I met him, but I had no idea how interesting.  This is just a note to self for later.

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.595711373798567.1073741831.188750624494646&type=3

http://andrewkleinpaintings.com/index.php?page=biography

Bon Appétit, Millie Brown!

Or, Millie Brown Vomits Art

Millie Brown is one strange, strange artist.  She gulps down tall glasses of milk dyed with food coloring and then vomits all over a canvas she has placed on the floor.  Then she gulps down another color of milk and does it again (and again) until she is satisfied the work is complete, all the while accompanied by two singers dressed as turtlenecked milk bottles singing Delibes' "Flower Duet."  It should come as no surprise that the response to her work has been overwhelmingly negative for exactly this reason.  Because she has Lady Gaga's support, many people are accusing both of them of glorifying bulimia.  Many more people are saying her work is not art.

I think there is absolutely no question it is art.

I find it fitting that the YouTube video says "No description available."

Here is why I think it is art.  Millie Brown's work has a tremendous line of art historical precedent -- art made with far grosser effluvia that was easier to create and sells for more money.  Heck, she is only making $20,000 a canvas and look at all the work she has to do!

Andy Warhol's Oxidation Paintings (better known as "Piss Paintings" -- take a guess how he made them) sell at Christie's for $1,900,000.

If only I could get paid for peeing on things.  I'm just lucky if I don't get a ticket.

Piero Manzoni canned his own shit (a lot of it).

Each can sells for $50,000-$60,000 at auction.  But then again, look at Manzoni's face: who could resist that shit-selling smile?

You'll be glad to know that it turns out it wasn't actually shit, he was just relabeling cans of pasta sauce.  Again, a way better (read as: more practical) plan than vomiting on a canvas.

And let's not forget Cy Twombly's smeary pink and brown fecal efforts to mock Jackson Pollock's drip paintings.

Which brings us to Jackson Pollock himself: the first man to paint with his canvas on the floor of his studio; the first man to make a work of art simply by dribbling paint all over a canvas and allowing the alluvial action to produce an image; a man known for his "dance" around the canvas, expressing his inner Jungian subconscious for the benefit of mankind.  Millie Brown has taken several pages from Jackson Pollock's book by painting with her canvas on the ground and allowing the paint to simply dribble (or heave, or gurgitate) onto the canvas.  She takes Pollock's idea of expressing her inner self even further by imbibing her paint and upchucking it directly -- literally -- from inside her... her stomach.  She claims she suffers from serious migraines, and I don't doubt she does; that's the inevitable result of literalizing Pollock's efforts to externalize one's interior genius.

Note also: Jackson Pollock did his works with style and glamor.  He was a celebrity as much as any artist ever was.  Having Lady Gaga on your team is nothing compared to Pollock.  Since I've tabled the issue of bulimia, I'll also table the issue of alcoholism and Pollock's mental health.

And that's just getting to the 1950s.

In 1946, Marcel Duchamp ejaculated a painting (Paysage Fautif) and gave it to his girlfriend, Maria Martins.

 What a charmer!

And Duchamp started his work decades before that.  It took him years to get to ejaculating paintings.  As everything in the twentieth century inevitably comes from Duchamp, so too can Millie Brown's vomitorium paintings can be traced back to Duchamp's watershed piece, The Fountain (1917).

In short, bravo Millie Brown!  There's no question that what you are doing is art.  The question is whether it's original, or any good, and whether or not the paycheck is worth the migraines.






Edit -- 11/1/2014 -- you'd think this sort of stuff would reach a level of one-upsmanship where no one would want to go, and yet, here we are again.

Edgar Lee Masters and Carroll Cloar

The best thing I've read this week is Edgar Lee Masters Spoon River Anthology.  Coincidentally, the most interesting art I've happened across this week is Carroll Cloar, a southern surrealist. 

Fiddler Jones
~~~
THE EARTH keeps some vibration going   
There in your heart, and that is you.   
And if the people find you can fiddle,   
Why, fiddle you must, for all your life.   
What do you see, a harvest of clover?            
Or a meadow to walk through to the river?   
The wind’s in the corn; you rub your hands   
For beeves hereafter ready for market;   
Or else you hear the rustle of skirts   
Like the girls when dancing at Little Grove.     
To Cooney Potter a pillar of dust   
Or whirling leaves meant ruinous drouth;   
They looked to me like Red-Head Sammy   
Stepping it off, to “Toor-a-Loor.”   
How could I till my forty acres     
Not to speak of getting more,   
With a medley of horns, bassoons and piccolos   
Stirred in my brain by crows and robins   
And the creak of a wind-mill—only these?   
And I never started to plow in my life     
That some one did not stop in the road   
And take me away to a dance or picnic.   
I ended up with forty acres;   
I ended up with a broken fiddle—   
And a broken laugh, and a thousand memories,     
And not a single regret.   


Edmund Pollard
~~~
I WOULD I had thrust my hands of flesh   
Into the disk-flowers bee-infested,   
Into the mirror-like core of fire   
Of the light of life, the sun of delight.   
For what are anthers worth or petals            
Or halo-rays? Mockeries, shadows   
Of the heart of the flower, the central flame!   
All is yours, young passer-by;   
Enter the banquet room with the thought;   
Don’t sidle in as if you were doubtful     
Whether you’re welcome—the feast is yours!   
Nor take but a little, refusing more   
With a bashful “Thank you,” when you’re hungry.   
Is your soul alive? Then let it feed!   
Leave no balconies where you can climb;     
Nor milk-white bosoms where you can rest;   
Nor golden heads with pillows to share;   
Nor wine cups while the wine is sweet;   
Nor ecstasies of body or soul,   
You will die, no doubt, but die while living     
In depths of azure, rapt and mated,   
Kissing the queen-bee, Life!   

Walter Horatio Pater in a Nutshell

 All of this is from The Renaissance (1877); final edition (1894).

Hugely influential book on Oscar Wilde

Outlines the concept of aesthetic a priori

Hugely influential on Clement Greenberg / Abstract Expressionism (see: "Modern Painting" and "Towards a New Laocoon")

Hugely influential on Susan Sontag, whose "Against Interpretation" is essentially a ersatz twentieth century transcription of the below -- she rails against hermeneutic analysis and calls for "in place of a hermeneutic we need an erotics of art."

“Preface to the Renaissance”

To define beauty, not in the most abstract but in the most concrete terms possible, to find not its universal formula, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that [vii/viii] special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics.

What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me? What effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? and if so, what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by its presence, and under its influence? 

And he who experiences these impressions strongly, and drives directly at the discrimination and analysis of them, has no need to trouble himself with the abstract question what beauty is in itself, or what its exact relation to truth or [viii/ix] experience--metaphysical questions, as unprofitable as metaphysical questions elsewhere. He may pass them all by as being, answerable or not, of no interest to him.

Our education becomes complete in proportion as our susceptibility to these impressions increases in depth and variety. And the function of the aesthetic critic is to distinguish, to analyse, and separate from its adjuncts, the virtue by which a picture, a landscape, a fair personality in life or in a book, produces this special impression of beauty or pleasure, to indicate what the source of that impression is, and under what conditions it is experienced. 

What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects. He will remember always that beauty exists in many forms. To him all periods, types, schools of taste, are in themselves equal.

those who prosecute either of them are generally little [xiii/xiv] curious of the thoughts of others.

“The School of Giorgione”

It is the mistake of much popular criticism to regard poetry, music, and painting — all the various products of art — as but translations into different languages of one and the same fixed quantity of imaginative thought, supplemented by certain technical qualities of colour, in painting; of sound, in music; of rhythmical words, in poetry.

Each art, therefore, having its own peculiar and untranslatable sensuous charm, has its own [130/131] special mode of reaching the imagination, its own special responsibilities to its material. One of the functions of aesthetic criticism is to define these limitations; to estimate the degree in which a given work of art fulfils its responsibilities to its special material; to note in a picture that true pictorial charm,

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it. That the mere matter of a poem, for instance, its subject, namely, its given incidents or situation — that the mere matter of a picture, the actual circumstances of an event, the actual topography of a landscape — should be nothing without the form, the spirit, of the handling, that this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter: this is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different degrees.

Art, then, is thus always striving to be independent of the mere intelligence, to become a matter of pure perception, to get rid of its responsibilities to its subject or material; the ideal examples of poetry and painting being those in which the constituent elements of the composition are so welded together, that the material or subject no longer strikes the intellect only; nor the form, the eye or the ear only; but form and matter, in their union or identity, present one single effect to the "imaginative reason," that complex faculty for which every thought and feeling is twin-born with its sensible analogue or symbol.

It is the art of music which most completely [138/139] realises this artistic ideal, this perfect identification of matter and form. In its consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression; they inhere in and completely saturate each other; and to it, therefore, to the condition of its perfect moments, all the arts may be supposed constantly to tend and aspire. 

“Conclusion to the Renaissance”

[I’ve essentially copied the whole thing.]

What is the whole physical life in that moment but a combination of natural elements to which science gives their names?

At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action. But when [235] reflexion begins to play upon these objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like some trick of magic; each object is loosed into a group of impressions–colour, odour, texture–in the mind of the observer. And if we continue to dwell in thought on this world, not of objects in the solidity with which language invests them, but of impressions, unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them, it contracts still further: the whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual mind.

It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off–that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves.

The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation.

A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.

While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.

The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, [238] or of what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us.

Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among “the children of this world,” in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time.

Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.

William Empson - 7 Types of Ambiguity

“…a grunt it at once too crude and too subtle to be conveyed by the alphabet at all.”

“…or like the growth of a flower, which it would be folly to allow analysis to destroy by digging the roots up and crushing out the juices into the light of day… I myself, I must confess….unexplained beauty arouses an irritation in me, a sense that this would be a good place to scratch; the reasons that make a line of verse likely to give pleasure, I believe, are the reasons for anything else; one can reason about them; and while it may be true that the roots of beauty ought not to be violated, it seems to me very arrogant of the appreciative critic to think that he could do this, if he chose, by a little scratching.” (9)

“the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.” (3)

“…is all good poetry supposed to be ambiguous?
I think that it is.” (xv)

“What I would suppose I that, whenever a receiver of poetry is seriously moved by an apparently simple line, what are moving in him are the traces of a great part of his past experience and of the structure of his past judgments.” (xv)

“rookie” analysis / Macbeth. (18)

“The human mind has two main scales on which to measure time.” (analysis)

ITALIAN ASSASSIN BOMB PLOT DISASTER

Headline analysis (236)

“The object of life, after all, is not to understand things, but to maintain one’s defences and equilibrium and live as well as one can.” (247)

“They must possess a fair amount of equilibrium or fairly strong defences; they must have the power first of reacting to a poem sensitively and definitely (one may call that feminine) and then, having fixed the reaction, properly stained, on a slide, they must be able to turn the microscope on to it with a certain indifference and without smudging it with their dingers; they must be able to prevent their new feelings of the same sort from interfering with the process of understanding the original ones (one may call that ‘masculine’) and have enough detachment not to mind what their sources of satisfaction may turn out to be.” (247)

“…whether a scientific idea of truth is relevant to poetry at all. It would be tempting, then, to say I was concerned with science rather than with beauty; to treat poetry as a branch of applied psychology.  But, so far as poetry can be regarded altogether dispassionately, so far as it is an external object for examination, it is dead poetry and not worth examining; further, so far as a critic has made himself dispassionate about it, so far as he has repressed sympathy in favour of curiousity, he has made himself incapable of examining it.” (248)

Analytical critic vs appreciative critic. (both in the same; poetry creates the dogma, dogma creates the poetry). (249)

"prosaic knowledge" (252) of criticism "I admit that the analysis of a poem can only be a long way of saying what is said anyhow by the poem it analyses." (a poem says what cannot be said, or what cannot be said any other way -- see: heresy of paraphrase) ...so what's the point?  The point is "such an advance in the machinery of description makes a reader feel stronger about his appreciations, more reliably able to distinguish the private or accidental from the critically important or repeatable, more confident of the reality (that is, the transferability) of his experiences....  What is needed for literary satisfaction is not, 'this ia beautiful because of such and such a theory,' but 'this is all right; I am feeling correctly about this; I know the kind of way in which it is meant to be affecting me." (254)

Best reading: Chapter 1, 2, 8.


So-- for all of Empson's pretensions towards a more scientific criticism, he is not nearly as radical as some of the other New Critics (though Empson is on the earlier side, and British side of things).  He does indeed believe that the full dissection of a poem can kill it.  He is more for a middle ground.