“As Amos Oz, the Israeli novelist, once put it, ‘Facts at times become the dire enemies of truth.’ Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ is a poor factual account of what happened in a Basque village on April 26, 1937, and a magnificent rendering of what has happened in every village that was ever bombed in any way. The painting is a perfect journalistic dispatch, if measured by how much universal truth it contains.” (Roger Cohen, NYTimes, 4-1-18)
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
“Dirge Without Music,” poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay
https://www.poetryfoundation.org
I’m attracted to the elegiac mode. This poem is formal, but with half-rhyming that doesn’t chime: “crowned” with “resigned,” for example. The speaker quarrels with how we handle death.
I’m happy to learn there’s an institution in France named the Banditry Repression Brigade. It handles art theft. Mentioned in an article in The Guardian by Kim Willsher, 4-4-18.
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
“Abe has not been able to shake allegations that his government gave huge discounts in land sales to two education institutions linked to associates *of he* and his wife, *and then* tried to cover up the links.” (Washington Post, 4-16-18)
“Of he” doesn’t work. “Him” is needed for object of the preposition.
“… wife, then tried….”
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
Spunk McGruder was Athletic Director when Don Bob Rooke quarterbacked us to Bi-District. The Stags had the Fearsome Foursome on the line: Chance Purvis, Boog Jeeters, Colt McGruder, and Skeeter Muncie.
Not one of those boys went on to play college ball. Skeeter got an offer from Tarquin, but got messed up in that silly fight when somebody called him a cob shucker. Since then his head goes like he’s agreeing with you all the time. Colt tore his meniscus up his senior year in the game against Hempe.
Chance is lucky they saved his leg. He skidded two-hundred-odd feet on that motorcycle. I told Chief Alejo they ought to padlock the gravel pit. But you know who squawked the loudest? Chance’s dad Barnett! He rides his four-wheeler there and shoots at the turtles. Says he wouldn’t have a place to recreate if they closed it. Kandiss just shook her head, said Barnett’s main recreation is pouring something down his gullet.
After Don Bob graduated, Rowena and Marvin wanted him to get his Associates in Kinesiology at Blane so he’d have a shot at coaching, but he wound up joining the military.
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
Giles and Trevor depart the suite of rooms they share in University College at 4:03 p.m. destined for their 5-o’clock rendezvous for high tea with Felicity and Nigella 30 kilometres thence. Giles’s vintage Morgan will average 44.2 kilometres per hour past the meadows and Gothic spires at which they will gaze with languid indifference.
Question: Estimate the cost of the bespoke Savile Row blazer that Giles is wearing. Express your guess first in euros, then in real money. Hint: Do not fail to valorise duly the garment’s double-vent-and-breasted design, handsewn stitching, and cathay silk lining, which is… well… rather fine indeed.
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
Sontag: “When suffering and pleasure are experienced vicariously, people can afford to be intense.” [Porno]
Excessive susceptibility to the visual; is this the most “intellectual” of the senses?
Ortega: “La dirección en que el ver va diferenciándose del palpar consiste en estas dos notas: el alejamiento progresivo del objeto que hiere el sentido y el irse convirtiendo ese objeto en puro color… En rigor, las cosas que hay detrás de los colores no le interesan.”
The need for visual stimulus denotes inhibitedness or deficient sensuality (defective sexuality).
The imagination: porno = fairytale. Healthy realization of fantasies.
Datum: It’s more fun to watch than to do the acts portrayed.
Datum: It’s hard to envisage exotic sex with persons one knows fairly well (and likes?).
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
Written in the 70s, 70s-8. (Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
… We’ll have sex if you love me. Or: We’ve had sex; how can you not love me? Or: We love each other; let’s marry so we can close the deal in bed. Or: My self-respect is so down; I can’t risk having sex and then your pulling out.
My verse failed insofar as it tried to “express” me and my personal history. The advice: “Get more emotion!” was non-productive or even obstructive, maybe because of the false way I understood and tried to implement it. It caused me to delve into the past and try to
locate things I could feel strongly about; then to try to construct poems around those feelings. I was dead to the past.
Sontag’s emphasis on form as content, source of emotional power, seems more pertinent. *Essay on Bresson.*
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
Written in the 70s, 70s-7a. (Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
Written in the 70s, 70s-7. (Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
Abstraction: flight from interpretation: return the sensual to art (music as well).
The person who violently and persistently jars his senses with drugs, sex, food, is the opposite of voluptuous; he is frigid. The capacity for sensuality is in inverse proportion to the power of the stimuli needed to experience pleasure. The sybarite is impotent, the ascetic a voluptuary.
A negative effect of graduate school was disenchantment with critical thought. The effort to write engendered a silly disdain of ideas and analytical process.
How easily he surrenders to games. Ambition retires to the courts.
The insertion of beads…
Sex is the currency of exchange in most sentimental transactions: I love you;
“Lurchingly?
I’ve read and admired Peter Schjedahl’s writings about art in the New Yorker for years. His recent article is entitled “The Lurchingly Uneven Portraits of Paul Cezanne” (New Yorker, April 9, 2018).
The piece is unhelpful to me as an amateur engaged in people painting. Schejedahl lingers at the level of pronouncements that hover above practice. In “Self-Portrait With Bowler Hat,” I’m interested in how Cezanne handles the beard with its glimpses of underlying flesh, and the peekaboo lips with their highlight. In “Madame Cezanne In a Red Dress” I’m interested in the sketchiness of her facial features and her severe hairdo.
Schejedahl has a formidable eye and range. I would welcome more brush-to-canvas observations from him now and then. How precisely did Cezanne fall short, from a painterly standpoint, in specific instances, according to this eminent, highly readable critic?
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)