EthicalDative

Is Divine Wet Work an Anomaly or a Feature?

Posted on March 22, 2025 by JMN

After the first death there is no other.
(From Dylan Thomas’s “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London.”)

A euphemism I retain from immersion in spy thriller fiction is the term “wet work.” In the genre it means killing people, and torturing them as a form of information retrieval. There were spooks in the fictions whose job description included performing wet work; others who delegated the nastiness to specialists.

Art imitates life in so many ways. War is delegated nastiness on an industrial scale. Our woebegone world is awash in wet work, wasted by a wanton welter of wizard weaponry. It makes you puke your weltanschauung.

Wet work deemed “holy” is interesting. In ancient writings a Maker cheerleads the killing of certain of His creatures by others of His creatures. Some, after dying in this dimension, are consigned to a sempiternal state of agony in another dimension. This mode of operation is so… ungodly… for lack of a better word. Faith only knows. It says Maker calls the shots, come what may.

Religion and AI share at least one trait: Both have the potential for bringing good things to life, but we must protect ourselves from the power of each to hurt us. Silicon doesn’t have nerve endings. A capacity for suffering is the franchise of homo sapiens, not machina sapiens. Religion knows this in its bones. That’s why textbook Hell is being burned alive, not rendered stupid.

Posted in Commentary | Tagged art, language, spirituality | Leave a comment

Did Someone Mention Drugstore Cowboys?

Posted on March 20, 2025 by JMN

After making a name for himself in the country-music world with his dramatic masks, Orville Peck will be (mostIy) barefaced in his Broadway debut — eye shadow notwithstanding. “I’m here to play this role and to bring respect and integrity and hopefully a good performance to it,” he said in a recent interview. “It’s not about me.” Credit…Thea Traff for The New York Times. [New York Times caption and illustration]

The Lone Ranger rides again! That was my first take on the photo. Then it stirred my childish you-haven’t-earned-your-Stetson attitude. I was sure the article would nudge me toward curdled cowboy hat bête noire-ism. But wait:

As he cavorted across the makeshift stage, Mr. Peck flexed his muscles, narrowed his eyes and sang in a booming baritone — he looked rascally, menacing, in heat. But then he extended a leg, lifted his opposite heel and, lickety-split, stuck out his buns. The butch-femme push-pull that defines his country persona was there, even if his mask was not.

When I finished the article, I was grinning pleasantly. Sometimes it’s best to resist an attitude. (Who knew?) Art, with a hefty pinch of cheek and dash, can do wonders for a tired stereotype. You go, masked dude!

“The irony is that if I put my mask on, I’m suddenly not anonymous anymore… I just take my mask off and walk around like normal and then no one knows who I am.”
(Orville Peck)

(Erik Piepenburg, “Orville Peck Confirms He Will Perform Unmasked in ‘Cabaret’ [Orville Peck Takes His Face Out for a Spin].” New York Times, 3-17-25)

Posted in Commentary, Quotations | Tagged art, style | 1 Comment

The ‘Color(ed) Theory’ of Artist Amanda Williams

Posted on March 17, 2025 by JMN

Amanda Williams, “She May Well Have Invented Herself,” 2024, a painting with Williams’s Innovation Blue pigment, Alabama red clay gesso on wood panel[.] Credit… Amanda Williams; via Casey Kaplan, New York; Photo by Dan Bradica Studio [New York Times caption and illustration]

“There is something anthropomorphic about this work… I didn’t force it. That’s what made it powerful.”
(Amanda Williams)

In her studio, Williams experimented with her Prussian blue, layering, diluting and pouring the paint, letting it crack, pool and bleed across the canvas. The apparition on the first canvas was the only full human form to materialize… The rest of the resulting paintings — such as the evocatively titled “Historical Elisions, Gap for Blue” and “Blue Smells Like We Been Outside” — produced their own ghosts, neither fully figurative nor entirely abstract. Some suggest torsos, while others allude to landscapes, rivers, or veins.

[… A] wall installation titled “Run Together and Look Ugly After the First Rain,” 2025; center, “I Don’t Sing If I Don’t Mean It,” 2025; right, “Blue Smells Like We Been Outside,” 2025. Letting Prussian blue crack, pool and bleed across the canvas created apparitions that suggest torsos, landscapes or rivers. Credit… Elias Williams for The New York Times. [New York Times caption and illustration]

The blue originated in the workshop of George Washington Carver, the Tuskegee food scientist known mainly for his research on peanuts. Carver was an amateur painter who developed and patented his own pigments, including a Prussian blue, from the Alabama soil Black farmers worked at the turn of the 20th century.

Williams discovered in her research that Carver registered a patent in 1927 which described refining red clay soil into paint and dye.

Her works seem to evoke a topography of water and land. Center: “And My Arms Thrown Wide in It, As if for Flight,” 2025. Right: “The Dream Is the Truth. Then You Act and Do Things Accordingly,” feels spectral, 2025. Credit… Elias Williams for The New York Times. [New York Times caption and illustration]

Williams, a Cornell-trained architect, has a deep understanding of color… Williams uses color to alchemize fraught histories into expressions of joy and resilience… For her 2015 project “Color(ed) Theory,” Williams coated eight homes scheduled for demolition on Chicago’s South Side in bold colors — “Currency Exchange yellow,” “Flamin’ Hot orange,” “Crown Royal purple” — referring to consumer products associated with Black life in America… “Amanda understands color tactically, strategically, and historically,” said Michelle Kuo, the chief curator at large and publisher at MoMA. “She’s not just using it for its visual impact, but to map out ideas of place, memory and Black culture. That really is her superpower.”

A wall installation, “Run Together and Look Ugly After the First Rain.” Credit…Elias Williams for The New York Times. [New York Times caption and illustration]

“I want to make sure that the work… stands on its own… It doesn’t have to just carry the baggage of history.”

(Amanda Williams)

(Elly Fishman, “With 100 Pounds of Blue Pigment, an Artist Conjures Spirits of the Past,” New York Times, 3-15-25)

Posted in Quotations | Tagged language, painting | 4 Comments

Atlas Shrugged and Put on a Hat

Posted on March 12, 2025 by JMN

“If you don’t like country music, get outta the way! Cause we’re KBUCK and we’re gonna keep comin’ atcha!”
(A radio station, name disguised)

In Arabic, ignorance is expressed with a verb, not a predication. It’s not a state you are in, but an act you perform. The root is j-h-l and “I am ignorant” is ‘ajhal(u). A closer translation might be “I do ignorance.”

A perspective emerges in which a state of unknowing is achieved by an act of avoidance; it’s not a condition foisted upon a supine recipient.

That small meditation on language sparked what follows, which coheres, if at all, by the sheerest of threads.

Truly I have done ignorance, for I fear men in Stetson hats. In my little boy brain they waft a profile of aggressive callousness, a hankering for dismissive swagger.

It’s phobic, not objective, and has caused me to ignore country-western music.

By shunning an art form embedded in my culture, I’ve cold shouldered an ethos that recoils from things I hold dear, but also exults in postures that feel elemental to me.

Hey, KBUCK, I’m gettin’ in your way now. Come at me! I’m listening on the radio in my car. Yours truly, JMN.

“I feel like a stone that you’ve picked up and thrown to the hard rock bottom of your heart.”
(Refrain on the radio)

On my walks in Fairview Cemetery one day I found a puppy hanging out there. Took him home, named him Mel. When the vet examined Mel, he found a festering bullet wound. The projectile had passed through the pup’s neck, narrowly missing his trachea. Mel lived with me to be a grizzled old sweetheart. On our many walks in the small town, he would always sit down abruptly and refuse to move whenever he spied a man in a Stetson hat. You’re probably imagining the same thing I did: The man that shot him wore a hat. I would always let the dog lead us in a different direction.

Posted in Commentary | Tagged language, music, personal | 7 Comments

Landscapes with High Horizon Lines, Shot Through with Blood and Shrapnel

Posted on March 9, 2025 by JMN

Nearly every work from Kiefer takes up a wall or a room. Credit… Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times. [New York Times caption and illustration]

His layers of paint, a mudlike impasto, oil and acrylic paints mixed with raw materials like soil, iron, straw and dead leaves, form deep furrows on the canvas. These landscapes, with van Gogh’s high horizon lines, all seem to be ruins, shot through with blood and shrapnel.

Kiefer’s “Under the Lime Tree on the Heather” and Vincent van Gogh’s “Wheatfield With Partridge” at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which juxtaposes Kiefer’s landscape paintings with van Gogh works. Credit… Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times. [New York Times caption and illustration]

(Nina Siegal, “Anselm Kiefer Wonders If We’ll Ever Learn,” New York Times, 3-7-2025)

Earth to Anselm Kiefer: The answer is no.

Posted in Commentary, Quotations | Tagged language, painting | 3 Comments

When You’re Gagging on Humbug, Remember Someone Fondly

Posted on March 7, 2025 by JMN

The family must have had a matriarchal streak, for I was grandly mothered.

Grandmother had a choir-dominating soprano voice in the native stone church. She knew her way around the hymnal. Could coax some harmony from the ivories of an upright piano. Reveled in a good singin’ in the living room: Rock of Ages, The Old Rugged Cross, Bringing in the Sheaves.

When Elvis reached the West Texas scene, she sniffed that she couldn’t fathom how anyone could find his music pretty. In its way her assessment was accurate. It wasn’t.

Oh, she could curse, and kept a shotgun in her kitchen in the day — it was a wild, lonely place and lean times. But her nature was sweet. She was a placid, benevolent, stalwart, indulgent, inquisitive, supportive, gregarious, voluble presence. A loyal correspondent in a strong cursive hand.

I never knew her as “granny” or “nana” or the like. She was Grandmother.

Posted in Anthology, Commentary | Tagged personal | 8 Comments

Messy Bacon

Posted on March 5, 2025 by JMN

[Francis] Bacon in his London studio in 1975. Credit… Terence Spencer/Popperfoto, via Getty Images. [New York Times caption and photo]

I know an artist who thinks her studio is cluttered.

The photo is from this article.

Posted in Commentary | Tagged art, painting | 1 Comment

Coda to the ‘Strawberry Roan’

Posted on February 27, 2025 by JMN

Only once before have I presumed to “write a song.” I use scare quotes because I’ve really no idea how it’s done. This latest go-round involves new lyrics for an existing tune. I posted the first version here, and have since added a coda. The last line of the posted version is changed to:

Old roan horse, she’ll lead me to you. (versus Old roan horse, she’ll know what to do.)

I had rejected the “lead me” line earlier, feeling it was implausible on top of sentimental, too close to Disney. Horses return to where they’re fed, and they don’t play Lassie. But here’s the thing: Whereas sentimentality pollutes poetry, it sits pretty in songs. Songs are not poems, nor poems songs (in my view).

The coda is a fourth stanza with a diverging rhyme scheme (AABB) sung with melodic variation. Reprising certain imagery, then invoking redundantly the bondedness of the humans to each other and to the beast, makes the story arc feel more complete:

We’ll tarry a spell where the shadows grow long,
Lay us down softly in mourning dove song,
Then the old roan horse will carry us two,
The two of us home on her back, me and you.

An interesting trait of songs is their affinity with nonstandard grammar. She don’t, he don’t or it don’t often fits a country-western song’s rhythm and spirit better than “doesn’t.” The same is true with “ain’t” versus “isn’t” or “aren’t.” Songs are amenable to nonstandard or antiquated usage. I was aware of using beat-driven idiom in previous stanzas of the “Roan” lyrics:

A sip of sweet water is nought but her due
…
The ranchwoman gazes where last she did see
Her good man a-mounted set out for Old Blue

We embrace old-timey, emotive, even mawdlin language in minstrelsy and balladry which we would find distracting in other contexts.

So in my lyrics, the cattleman’s horse has wandered home riderless. The ranchwoman mounts it and rides to where her husband lies in some disabled state. Maybe she splints his injured ankle and the two return home double mounted. Maybe she finds him dead from a rattler’s bite, and returns with his body draped across the saddle. Perhaps, in grieving over his corpse in cottonwood umbrage at creekside, enveloped in the lonesome plaint of mourning doves, she herself expires, plumb heartbroke, and the two of them go dearly departed, spirit-wise, into the cosmic by-and-by, transported on the back of an astral roan. It could happen — it’s a song!

Posted in Anthology | Tagged language, music, rhetoric | 2 Comments

A Bath of Warm Syrup Cooked from Stalk Cut in the ‘Family’ Canebrake

Posted on February 22, 2025 by JMN

My car radio is newly parked on my local country-western music station. It’s giving me the opportunity to hear music tangled in my ranch roots. The music partakes of both the familiar and the strange. In certain respects I’ve changed and it hasn’t. Or maybe I thought I had, and it has — knowing what’s true is all but impossible these days.

The vocals seem weighted male, and have a strong-arming thrust to them. I suppress a reflex to run from these guys. Yet they’re telling me something I need to stand and hear, which is the voice of an America that elected MAGA.

Johnny-Cash-like baritones are rare in current country-western. In its classic conformation, the genre is the domain of the nasal tenor with a drawl. The celebration of women is jauntily sexual alternating with ostentatiously reverential. There’s many a gusty apology to a long-suffering woman for having strayed while liquored up. I’m changin’, honey!

The songs occupy a tightly defined range of key and chord sequence. The lyrics are comfortable with unabashed schmaltz. The fellas sing about their feelin’s with loquacious earnestness and stick-to-your-ribs wit. It has taken me aback how verbal the songs are. Almost every ballad leaves me doing an eye roll, yet singing its hook at the next stoplight. This is music running strong in deep fissures.

Vibes gleaned from the radio coalesce around a resounding affirmation of contentment with a personal and cultural status quo. The troubadour is profoundly proud of who he is, what and where he comes from, resolved to be none other. There’s an exaltation of, and exulting in, rural landscape, the old ways, talking damn straight, standing tall for the Protestant red-white-and-blue.

The paeans to we’uns (apologies — the pun is decadent) go with slaphappy scorn for the mincing modalities of the nabobs of knowledge, the prissy castrati, the preening city dwellers who haven’t a clue as to what it’s all about.

Posted in Anthology, Commentary | Tagged language, music, rhetoric | 12 Comments

Looking and Listening Versus Seeing and Hearing

Posted on February 20, 2025 by JMN

I relish the tension that exists between certain verb pairs often used as roughly synonymous. This isn’t scientific, but here’s how I think of a couple of common verbs: “Look” describes the action of directing the eye to a focal point. “See” connotes cognitive reception of what the eye has detected. “Listen” describes the action of focusing the aural faculty on sound. “Hear” connotes cognitive extraction of definition from the noise.

Consider this exchange:

— Did you see the tiger?
— No, I thought it was a shadow.

Or this exchange:

— Did you hear the explosion?
— No, I thought it was thunder.

Of course in each case the second speaker could have prefaced his answer with “yes,” followed by the same wording. It’s still a statement that something was picked up by the sensing faculty, but was not made sense of by the cognitive faculty. It was “translated” erroneously.

I want to compel the meditation to encompass “read” versus “understand,” with specific application to poetry. At one time I thought that rhythm and rhyme, metaphor and simile, were meant to give more immediate effect to poetic discourse, to make it easier to remember by being memorable. “Wine-dark sea” registers and lodges.

But it’s more realistic, I think, to posit that the poet, often as not, injects friction into the reading experience, such that the payload carried by the text may not be readily apparent. My use of the term “payload” betrays a bias that the sense-making reflex of the human is indomitable. We look for meaning, within, beyond, beneath the wording, wherever we can extrapolate, imagine, concoct it. The doing so goes with language, which is what poetry is built from, on, with and around.

I scrounge for analogies with which to evoke how verses can feel:

X-ray language: A configuration of bone. Animal or human? A wrist? A wing?

Scaffolding language: Erected around an indistinct edifice. Bell tower? Skyscraper? Rocket?

Disarticulated language: A stream of lexemes with sparse intercalation of relators, no capitals, no punctuation, ragged lineation. What is its “story” when the dust has settled?

There’s a rhetorical much-making around “stories” in Poetry, March 2025.

stories span through time
alongside life, stories extend
with prayers, stories extend
with songs, stories extend
the stories are still moving
(Manny Loley, from “From the Mesa: A Reflection on Language, Poetics and Personhood”)

Go on, soi-disant poet, spin me a story. Make it short, tart, square, level and true.

Posted in Anthology | Tagged language, poetry, reading | 2 Comments