Strange Doctrines

And Be Sure to Blog Every Now and Then

[W]here are you hurrying to?
You will never find that life for which you are looking.
When the gods created man they allotted to him death.
But life they retained in their own keeping.
As for you, Gilgamesh, fill your belly with good things;
Day and night, night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice.
Let your clothes be fresh, bathe yourself in water.
Cherish the little child that holds your hand.
And make your wife happy in your embrace.
For this too is the lot of man.

From The Epic of Gilgamesh (Sandars, Nancy K., trans. )

(Via Brad DeLong.)

Ouch

Good line from Thomas Mallon's New Yorker piece on Ayn Rand:

In this book ["The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature"] and in a later one, "The Art of Fiction: A Guide for Writers and Readers," Rand generally relies on the same little shelf of Western literature (Hugo, Duma) that she managed to read when very young, between movies.

Ad-Versity

"The poet presents his thoughts festively, on the carriage of rhythm: usually because they could not walk."
      -Nietzsche, Human, All-Too-Human, sec. 189

I used to think this passage was derogatory of poets, with the idea being that their thoughts were too feeble to withstand presentation in straightforward prose.

But as I read the passage again just now, it occurred to me that Nietzsche's idea might be the opposite: the poet's ideas are so profound that prose is too feeble a mode of presentation to express them.

I still prefer the first reading.

Riddle

How many legs does a bullshit artist have if you call him "the nearest thing to a philosophical genius the history of art has produced"?

(Via Arts & Letters Daily.)

Why I Am Seem So Smart

Arthur Krystal ponders why it is that "most writers . . . seem to be smarter in print than in person."  He conjectures that it's because there is "a rhythm to writing that catches notes that ordinarily stay out of earshot. At some point between formulating a thought and writing it down falls a nanosecond when the thought becomes a sentence that would, in all likelihood, have a different shape if we were to speak it."

Well, yes, that's true. But the nanoseconds also allow drafts of pomposity to spill in, tangents and other clutter to accumulate. Which is why it's surprising that Krystal says not a word about redrafting. Redrafting is what allows the writer to get rid of the less smart-seeming stuff. (“I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit.” Hemingway.)  So if there's one thing about the process of writing that most makes you seem smart, it's the redrafting, not the writing.

For example, none of the sentences on this page is the same as it was first typed. (It's all a fraud.)

(Via Arts & Letters Daily.)

This Is Not a Pipe

This is a stick-up: Magritte's "Olympia" stolen at gunpoint.

(H/T Rob Sica.)

Rilke

Vain. Self-pitying. Obsessive. Narcissistic. Snobbish. Whining. Arrogant. Childish. Demanding. Lachrymose. Neurotic. Given to tantrums and panics. Self-indulgent. Spiteful.

But enough about me. There's some discussion of new volumes about Rilke here. (One quibble: the quotation of Nietzsche is hardly his last, best-informed word on Salomé; her breasts were definitely real.)

(Via Arts & Letters Daily.)

Free Fallin'

Malcolm Gladwell observes in this week's New Yorker:

A recent report by Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube’s bandwidth costs in 2009 will be three hundred and sixty million dollars. In the case of YouTube, the effects of technological Free [i.e., extremely low-cost digital infrastructure] and psychological Free [i.e., the robust, irrational consumer impulse to desire "free" stuff] work against each other.

[YouTube] tries to sell advertisements alongside its videos. The problem is that the videos attracted by psychological Free —pirated material, cat videos, and other forms of user-generated content—are not the sort of thing that advertisers want to be associated with. In order to sell advertising, YouTube has had to buy the rights to professionally produced content, such as television shows and movies. Credit Suisse put the cost of those licenses in 2009 at roughly two hundred and sixty million dollars.... Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube will lose close to half a billion dollars this year. If it were a bank, it would be eligible for TARP funds....

It's true. But beside the point for now. For behold- free non-fuzzy, only moderately-compressed Boulez with Chicago symphony.

One of the Classic Blunders

Wallace Shawn writes about why he writes about sex:

One reason is that sex is shocking. Yes, it's still shocking, after all these years - isn't that incredible? At least it's shocking to me. And I suppose I think it's shocking because, even after all these years, most bourgeois people, including me, still walk around with an image of themselves in their heads that doesn't include - well - that. I'm vaguely aware that while going about my daily round of behaviour I'm making use of various mammalian processes, such as breathing, digesting and getting from place to place by hobbling about on those odd legs we have. But the fact is that when I form a picture of myself, I see myself doing the sorts of things that humans do and only humans do - things like hailing a taxi, going to a restaurant, voting for a candidate in an election, or placing receipts in various piles and adding them up. If I'm unexpectedly reminded that my soul and body are capable of being totally swept up in a pursuit and an activity that pigs, flies, wolves, lions and tigers also engage in, my normal picture of myself is violently disrupted.

The whole thing is brilliant, witty and fascinating, but I think I especially liked this:

It can only be seen as funny that men buy magazines containing pictures of breasts, but not magazines with pictures of knees or forearms. It can only be seen as funny that demagogues give speeches denouncing men who insert their penises into other men's anuses - and then go home to insert their own penises into their wives' vaginas! (One might have thought it obvious that either both of these acts are completely outrageous, or neither of them is.)

RTWT.

(Via Sign and Sight.)

UPDATE: This made me think of a classic scene in "Heaven Help Us" that features Wallace Shawn as Father Abruzzi, giving a commencement speech for the inaugural coed high school dance. The theme: Lust - the beast within you.

BTW, one of the commenters on the youtube thread notes that Shawn has "been around alot. He was in a Chaka Khan Video called "It's My Night" and he also played a friend of Cliff on The Cosby Show."

Shop Class Warfare: Hard Work as a Waste of Time

Last Sunday I had to fix an electrical problem on one of my semi-hollowbody guitars. Determining the problem, finding a store that had the part, and doing the replacement - all told, it took me about four hours.

"Soulcraft"? I'd rather have spent the time practicing. Or even reading a book-length version of a dubious argument.

Deep Cuts

When you're in a band and you're out doing promotional interviews, inevitably you wind up (let's face it) tailoring some of your answers to dovetail with what you think people would like to hear.

The result, especially from less artful practitioners of such dissimulation, is answers of let us say dubious plausibility.

The lead singer in a country rock band I was in some years back provides what is still my favorite example:

Q. Which artist or album is your greatest musical influence?

A. Johann Strauss.

Good News, Bad News

The good news is I learned something new today: the Jobim/Moraes classic, elegant but lamentably overplayed-by-hacks "Girl from Ipanema" was inspired by an actual girl (now obviously a woman), whom Jobim and Moraes once ogled admired as she walked past their perch at the "Veloso" bar-café (which is in Ipanema, as you might have guessed).

The bad news is I learned this from watching a segment of America's Top Model.

Everybody's Very Happy

From Edward B. Rackley, "Werner Herzog: Beyond the Syphilitic Machine":

In a recent interview with an awestruck Henry Rollins in annoying gee-whiz mode, Herzog was not expansive but did confirm that he’s living in Los Angeles and liking it. “LA is the city with the most substance in the US, period.” Henry tried to wrap his head around that one and couldn't. He leaned forward: "And all the plastic surgery? What about that?" 

Herzog smiled, unfazed: "Hollywood is where the dreams of the world are organized and manufactured … including stupidity."

The Use and Abuse of Mendacity for Life

Kurt Vonnegut:

Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on.

Expressive Differential in the Arts

I have never seen a work of visual art that has moved me aesthetically as much as I am moved aesthetically by a beautiful natural landscape.

Whereas I have never heard a natural soundscape that has moved me aesthetically as much as I am moved aesthetically by a beautiful work of sonic art.

I don't know what, if anything, this asymmetry means.

And More!

Ah, the National Review serves up a wonderful treat: their list of "Best Conservative [sic] Movies." Complete with such conservative fare as Gattaca, The Lives of Others, and Groundhog Day.

What makes a film "conservative"? It must "offer compelling messages about freedom, families, patriotism, traditions, and more" (my emphasis). [1]

They are so strict.
______________
NOTES

1. Which I guess explains why that movie about the flaying of Jesus didn't rate as much as an "Also-Ran"  -- not enough patriotism. (But then what about Rambo?)

(Via Jason Linkins at the Huffington Post.)

Being and Alienness

From Solyaris:

SNAUT

When man is happy, the meaning of life and other eternal themes rarely interest him. These questions should be asked at the end of one's life.

KRIS

But we don't know when life will end.... Not knowing that day makes us practically immortal.

If You See One Movie In Your Lifetime...

...it would probably have to be director Danny Lerner's mystery-action-thriller Sharks in Venice (Spoiler Alert ahead!)*:

While in Venice to investigate the disappearance of his father, diver and archaeologist David (Stephen Baldwin) stumbles upon a lost Medici treasure. But when the mob learns of David's discovery, they kidnap his girlfriend and demand that he recover the fortune. There's only one small, flesh-eating problem: A killer shark has found its way into the city's canal system, and David could be its dinner if he's not careful.

*Courtesy warning, just in case you wanted either the shark element of the plot or Stephen Baldwin's dramatic participation in the film to remain a surprise.

More Alt than Thou

I don't listen to Billy Joel. In fact, I don't [much] listen to pop music generally. Not even the Beatles. I'm not a snob about it - I enjoy some pop music if it happens to be playing. I just don't seek it out, and happen to think there are richer areas for mining elsewhere.

But by any objective criteria, Billy Joel is a competent pop singer, piano player, lyricist and songwriter. So this business of trying to argue Billy Joel is the "Worst Pop Singer Ever," or worst anything ever, is simply preposterous.

But then "arguing" isn't really the right verb, is it, since nothing resembling an argument appears anywhere in Ron Rosenbaum's article. The only thing approaching "argument" is this attack on Joel's originality:

"She's Always a Woman": First, has there ever been a more blatant—or blatantly inept—case of attempted artistic theft than "She's Always a Woman"? It's such a lame imitation of Bob Dylan's "Just Like a Woman." (B.J.'s woman "hides like a child" where Dylan's "breaks just like a little girl.")

Yes, Joel uses 'hide' and 'child' - direct lifts of Dylan's 'break' and 'girl'. (You probably didn't know that not only individual words but their most distant synonyms are copyrighted. Writer beware!) And of course both songs have the phrase 'a woman' in common -- a phrase that's never appeared in any other song lyric, ever.

So yeah, other than the fact that the two songs are in different keys, have different metrical structures, employ different song forms and melodic material, and have absolutely no distinctive lyrical content in common, you really couldn't tell the two apart.

Oh, and Rosenbaum is not a posturing imbecile.

But he's hip. There's no point in denying that.

Ain't Whistlin' "Dixie"

In a review for Dennis Dutton's The Art Instinct, John Derbyshire chalks Anton Webern's "predict[ion] that mailmen on their rounds would one day whistle his atonal non-melodies" up to "wishful thinking" grounded in "Blank Slate" type reasoning.

Derbyshire underestimates human malleability on this score (pun intended). I am entirely apt to hum the eerie-beautiful theme from Bartok's Music for Strings, say, or the 12-tone head of Wynton Maralis' "Down with Homey," even though I was 18 before I heard my first atonal music.

Now if I can just score a job at the post office...

(Via -- who else? -- Dennis Dutton.)