EthicalDative

Compensatory Autophilia Pathology Smackdown

Posted on January 1, 2023 by JMN

Score: Thunberg 1, Tate 0. Game over!

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‘Mystique of Belatedness’: Mything the Point

Posted on December 31, 2022 by JMN

The Thomas Hardy Tree toppled over in a London cemetery. Acrylic on cardboard.

Thank you for your visits to this blog and for indulging its mischief in 2022. More joy and less loss be ahead for each and all!
(JMN)

“I’m convinced. Eliot finished poetry off.”
(Matthew Walther)

The problem is not that Eliot put poetry on the wrong track. It’s that he went as far down that track as anyone could, exhausting its possibilities and leaving little or no work for those who came after him. It is precisely this mystique of belatedness that is the source of Eliot’s considerable power. What he seems to be suggesting is that he is the final poet, the last in a long unbroken line of seers to whom the very last visions are being bequeathed, and that he has come to share them with his dying breaths.

(Matthew Walther, “Poetry Died 100 Years Ago This Month,” New York Times, 12-29-22)

I would say the visions are being “vouchsafed” rather than “bequeathed.” It’s more poetic! Of all the examples of poetry in its pomp to adduce, Walther picks Robert Southey. John Donne would sound more contemporary.

What’s all this death talk about poetry anyway? (Next they’ll claim figurative painting is dead. Or God is dead. Wait, they already did!)

Isn’t it poetry’s remit to induce ejaculatory befuddlement in its perennially scant coterie of adepts? There’s plenty of grist for that mill. This lurching old world of ours affords ample scope for misery as keen as T.S. Eliot’s to flourish for another thousand years.

Posted in Commentary, Quotations | Tagged language, personal, poetry, rhetoric, society | 2 Comments

Paint What You Fear

Posted on December 30, 2022 by JMN

Vija Celmins, “Gun with Hand #1” (1964), oil on canvas. Credit… via Museum of Modern Art. Gift of Edward R. Broida in honor of John Elderfield.

When my dad died in 2013, his shed (now mine) was full of guns. I inherited his art supplies, so I took up painting again after a long hiatus. My subjects came to be things I was afraid of. The shed started filling up with paintings that had guns in them. Also, men wearing cowboy hats, a source of dread since childhood. In 2016, paintings of Trump joined the flow. I think the exorcistic daubing helped; I’m purged of those subjects now, if not of the fear.

I was intrigued to discover that Vija Celmins also painted guns. One of them appeared in an October exhibition of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles commemorating Joan Didion, dead at 87 in 2021. Hilton Als, a longtime friend of Didion’s, was co-curator of the show.

Als used a Vija Celmins painting depicting a disembodied hand firing off a gun into a vast expanse — “Gun With Hand #1” from 1964 — in a part of the exhibition that covers the ecstatic review in The New York Times of “The Executioner’s Song,” the book by Norman Mailer about the execution of Gary Gilmore. “She talks about the weird, inarticulate nature of the West and the sky,” Als said of the review. “And I immediately thought of Vija Celmins. And then when I was going through Vija’s work there was a gun — someone shooting a gun in the kind of space Didion was describing.”

(Adam Nagourney, “Joan Didion and the Western Spirit,” New York Times, 10-6-22)

Posted in Commentary, Quotations | Tagged art, literature, painting, personal | Leave a comment

‘We Have to Make Forms That Celebrate the Possibilities’: Torkwase Dyson

Posted on December 29, 2022 by JMN

Torkwase Dyson’s suite of paintings shown at the New Orleans Museum of Art in 2020, inspired by the environmental crisis of the Gulf Coast. It was called “Black Compositional Thought: 15 Paintings for the Plantationocene.” Credit… Torkwase Dyson.

“The paintings introduced a range of blue colors — oceanic, but resisting a direct reading.”

This review bristles with strange energy, coercive structures, geographies of enclosure, and the verb catalyze. But of all the advanced art talk on display, my favorite specimen is “resists a direct reading.”

(Siddhartha Mitter, “An Artist’s Gateway to Freedom and Possibility,” New York Times, 11-10-22)

Posted in Commentary, Quotations | Tagged art, journalism, language, painting, rhetoric, style | 2 Comments

Angry Centrist?

Posted on December 29, 2022 by JMN

“When was the last time you encountered an angry, inflexible centrist who aggressively demanded that you see things from several points of view?”
(Brian L. Ott)

(Brian L. Ott, “I Studied [***’s] Twitter Use for Six Years. Prepare for the Worst,” New York Times, 11-20-22)

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A Dawning in December

Posted on December 25, 2022 by JMN

From Larson’s “Daily Dose” — https://www.thefarside.com .

While washing up dishes on Christmas morning I happened to hear the King’s Christmas Message on British radio. It was Charles the Third’s first go at what his mother had done 69 times before him, a ritual address to the nation he “serves” by a hereditary, wealthy, “working” monarch. Stuck into my soapy chore, I let Windsor’s hallmark, posh drawl rinse my mind. As he spoke I echoed various phrases in booming, plummy voice, trying to ape his received pronunciation.

When the address ended, a choir boomed “God Save the King,” and I reflexively launched into “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” which is what we sing to the tune filched, I presume, from our colonial lordships. I had just heard a man cosseted in privilege express himself warmly, with tenderness and acknowledgment, even a certain humility, in celebration of his country and its citizens. Call it what you will, it was unifying, dignified, articulate, and convincing enough for its moment and purpose.

I realized I’d never ONCE heard anything approaching such an affirmation, convincing or otherwise, from a certain former elected U.S. head of state whose baneful legacy persistently distorts our past and encumbers our future. I saw at my kitchen sink, more clearly than I had before, why I hold in such low regard a man so failed at all but grift.

Posted in Commentary | Tagged miscellaneous | 2 Comments

A Flat-Out Wish for the Season

Posted on December 25, 2022 by JMN

Christmas Eve, Mall of America, Bloomington, Minnesota. Two groups of young men argue in Nordstrom’s, shots are fired, 19–year-old lies dead, suspects being sought. The site of 500 retail stores and 19 full-service restaurants is closed for the evening.

“We had 16 cops in the mall, and they still decide to do this. I’m at a loss.”
(Police Chief Booker Hodges)

Chief Hodges continues:

“This is absolutely ridiculous. I mean, I can’t even think of another word. This is just flat-out stupid… I mean, this is before Christmas, and now [the victim’s family is] having to bury one of their loved ones… If someone’s going to have blatant disrespect for humanity, I don’t know what we can do to stop some of these people… Make no mistake, you are going to get arrested, and we are going to lock you up. It’s just a matter of when that’s going to happen.”

(Eduardo Medina, “Gunfire at Mall of America Leaves One Dead and Shoppers Fleeing,” New York Times, 12-24-22)

Chief Hodges and his 16 cops aren’t alone in feeling stymied. Hundreds of Texas law officers were unable to stop a lone teenager from killing 21 people in Uvalde. Let Christmas 2022 bring joy, justice, solace and less “stupid” death for all.

Posted in Commentary, Quotations | Tagged language, rhetoric, society | Leave a comment

‘Res Ipsa Loquitur’: The Thing Speaks for Itself

Posted on December 23, 2022 by JMN

“Zelensky is basically an ungrateful, international welfare queen.”
(Donald Trump Jr., quoted at https://www.washingtonpost.com/doonesbury/, 12-22-22)

Billingsgate of this sort pervades the lowest rungs of public discourse in America. What’s notable for the student of rhetoric is how, even though the target of the slur is male, the speaker doesn’t say “welfare king.”

“When a man’s honor hasn’t been soiled by baseness, then every garment he puts on is beautiful.”

That’s the first verse of the legendary poem of a sixth-century Arab Jew whose name is proverbial for fidelity. President Zelensky, in his commanding olive-drab attire, epitomizes what the poem celebrates — a stalwart authenticity that deeply disquiets reactionaries.

Posted in Commentary, Quotations | Tagged language, poetry, rhetoric, society | Leave a comment

Field of Blood

Posted on December 22, 2022 by JMN

I’ve read and listened to Edith Sitwell’s darkly musical poem “Still Falls the Rain,” guided there by poet Charles Behlen. It spurred a flurry of reference tracing; soars over broad reaches of scripture and fable in a short space; has structures to ponder.

Christ that each day, each night, nails there have mercy on us… The light that died the last faint spark in the self-murdered heart… Dark-smirched with pain as Caesar’s laurel crown…

Poetry! Speech that’s shivery, oblique, steep, loosed from the modulation of transition markers and clarifying relators. Where’s not to be staggered?

I feel like I approach a poem as I would a Formula One race car sitting on the track. I don’t have the road sensitivity and reflexes of a Hamilton or Verstappen that would let me know firsthand the G-force of hairpin curves rounded at irrational speeds, and the blurred scream down straightaways. I please myself instead with gaping at its innards and fingering its surfaces, busily inquisitive over details of design and fabrication that make the beast corner so sweetly.

Posted in Anthology, Commentary | Tagged language, poetry | Leave a comment

Fleet Street Drool: Victoria Newton and Jeremy Clarkson

Posted on December 19, 2022 by JMN

A review of Belarusian poet Julia Cimafiejeva’s book Motherfield ends with this observation: “She wields her flexed, forceful verses like that mightiest of muscles — the tongue.”

That comment pairs with the ancient cliché that “the pen is mightier than the sword.” Would it were true! At least Putin would be brutalizing Ukraine with words, not sticks and stones.

Apologists for verbal violence spewed by the likes of Clarkson and approved by his editor Newton say “it’s only words,” and is shielded by freedom of speech. The threadbare dodge is absurdly disingenuous. Malignant words can wound and sicken, ripple far and wide, and have lasting, unpredictable consequences up to and including mayhem and death.

Posted in Commentary | Tagged journalism, language | Leave a comment