terribly

James Hall. “By the light of the fallen moon: The yearning Platonic romanticism of Constantin Brancusi.”

Nov 192010

TLS 2004.03.05

-Brancusi called himself “the peasant from the Carpathians.”
-Had a lifelong fascination with Platonism.
-Minimalists were influenced by him.
-Cruel, Dadist wit: his sculptures often demonstrate a brutal and brutalized object that fails to find wholeness.
-Played a pioneering role in assemblage.
-After 1914 made the base of the sculpture an integral part of the sculpture.

“The Kiss”
– dramatic repudiation of “beefsteak” sculpture
– influences: Egypt, Romanesque figures
– philosophically, the sculpture is classical however: Plato’s Symposium: “lovers are the result of a bisection which has reduced us to a condition like that of flat fish, and each of us is perpetually in search of his corresponding tally…Love is the name for the desire and the pursuit of the whole.”

-Did many variations on the theme of the sleeping or severed head.
-standard Symbolist prop: evoke castration anxiety; Bracusi’s are more ovoid forms (eggs) and pregnant with the suggestion of new birth (birth of ideas as well?)
-suggestive of lightbulbs (electrification was just beginning: he was interested in new technologies)
-Sleeping white heads “allude to this brave new world presided over by electric satellites. Their perpetual mineral brightness suggests that our own condition will soon be one of sleeplessness, no longer subject to the natural phases of the moon.”

-A continual sense of dislocation and of friction between forms: the seamless flow of contours is repeatedly disrupted and sliced into.

-Fountains and water were important to Brancusi: “Sculpture is water.” (Brancusi”)

-“His multipart sculptures might therefore be said to aspire to the condition of dry or frozen fountains. They are mirages as much as oases – illusory utopias.”

-Friend of Duchamp and Leger: Duchamp’s “Fountain” (1917) builds on Brancusi ideas; Duchamp often represented Brancusi in New York to clients.

Book Notes

Nov 192010

David McKitterick. Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order. 1450-1830. Cambridge.

– trade in books was international from the beginning

– the literature produced includes all genres of print

-Gutenberg was not imitating a manuscript but making a book as it was understood by his clients

-early books were a hybrid of print and manuscript, of old and new technologies

-early readers made no distinction between printed and manuscript books

-no sudden break in the production of manuscripts in 1500: manuscript production continued until well into the 17th century in England (and until the 19th century in Spain, Italy and Eastern Europe)

-if print did bring about a revolution, it was a gradual one that took over 200 years

-“In practice, each new technology does not replace the previous one. Rather, it augments it, and offers alternatives.”

-the 18th century sees a standardization in printing that is part of a larger movement in the standardization of all manufacturing processes.

-development of illustration should be seen as a process parallel to the history of the printed word.

The Distance, The Shadows. Selected Poems of Victor Hugo. trans. Harry Guest. Anvil.

Selected Poems of Victor Hugo. ed. and trans. by EH and AM Blackmore. (University of Chicago Press).

Note: AVOID the new Victor Hugo Selected Poems Penguin edition by Brooks Haxton (“the least satisfactory of the three bilingual volumes under review”)

Simon Morley. Writing on the Wall: Word and image in modern art. Thames and Hudson.

Barbara Newman. God and the Goddesses: Vision, poetry and belief in the Middle Ages. University of Pennsylvania Press.
-four cases: Dame Nature, Lady Love, Holy Wisdom, Mary.
-the agency of female divinities opened a range of possibilities for medieval believers for addressing gender specific psychological and cultural needs.

C. K. Williams – Marina

Poems

Nov 192010

As I’m reading Tsvetayeva’s essays,
“Art in the Light of Conscience,”
stunning- “Art, a series of answers
to which there are no questions” –
a tiny insect I don’t recognize
is making its way across my table.
It has lovely transparent wings
but for some reason they drag behind
as it treks the expanse of formica,
and descends into a crack.

“To each answer before it evaporates,
our question”: composed in Paris
during the difficult years of exile.
But which of her years weren’t?
This at least was before the husband,
a spy, an assassin, went back,
then she, too, with her son,
to the Soviet madhouse, back.
“This being outgalloped by answers
is inspiration.” Outgalloped!

Still lugging its filigreed train,
the insect emerges: fragile, distracted,
it can’t even trace a straight line
but it circumnavigates the table.
Does it know it’s back where it began?

Still, it perseveres, pushing
courageously on, one inch, another.
“Art.. a kind of physical world
of the spiritual… A spiritual world
of the physical… almost flesh.”

One daughter, dying, at three,
of hunger, the other daughter,
that gift of a sugar-cube,
in her mouth, drenched in blood…
“A poet is an answer… not to the blow,
but a quivering of the air.”
The years of wandering,
the weary return, husband betrayed,
arrested, daughter in a camp…
“The soul is our capacity for pain.”

When I breathe across it,
the bug squats, quakes, finally flies.
And couldn’t she have flown again,
again have been flown? Couldnt she,
noose in her hand, have proclaimed,
“I am Tsvetayeva,” and then not?
No, no time now for “then not.”
But “Above poet, more than poet…”
she’d already said it, already sung it:
Air finished. Firmament now.”

Anne Carson – XX. So The Hall Door Shuts Again And All Noise Is Gone

Poems

Nov 192010

my pulse grew less and less

JOHN KEATS
“Ode on Indolence,” line 17

XX. So The Hall Door Shuts Again And All Noise Is Gone

In the effort to find one’s way among the contents of memory
(Aristotle emphasizes)
a principal of association is helpful—
“passing rapidly from one step to the next.
For instance from milk to white,
from white to air,
from air to damp,
after which one recollectes autumn supposing one is trying to recollect
that season.”
Or supposing,
fair reader,
you are trying to recollect not autumn but freedom,
a principal of freedom
the existed between two people, small and savage
as principals go—but what are the rules for this?
As he says,
folly may come into fashion.
Pass then rapidly
from one step to the next,
for instance from nipple to hard,
from hard to hotel room,
from hotel room

to a phrase found in a letter he wrote in a taxi one day he passed
his wife
walking
on the other side of the street and she did not see him, she was—
so ingenious are the arrangements of the state of flux we call
our moral history are they not almost as neat as mathematical
propositions except written on water—
on her way to the courthouse
to file papers for divorce, a phrase like
how you tasted between your legs.
After which by means of this wholly divine faculty, the
“memory of words and things,”
one recollects
freedom.
Is it I? cries the soul rushing up.
Little soul, poor vague animal:
beware this invention “always useful for learning and life”
as Aristotle say, Aristotle who
had no husband,
rarely mentions beauty
and was likely to pass rapidly from wrist to slave when trying
to recollect wife.

From The Beauty of the Husband

Epigrams of Homer

Orts

Nov 192010

V. Thestorides, full many things there are that mortals cannot sound; but there is nothing more unfathomable than the heart of man.

XII. Goddess-nurse of the young (Hecate), give ear to my prayer, and grant that this woman may reject the love-embraces of youth and dote on grey-haired old men whose powers are dulled, but whose hearts still desire.

XIV. Potters, if you will give me a reward, I will sing for you. Come, then, Athena, with hand upraised over the kiln. Let the pots and all the dishes turn out well and be well fired: let them fetch good prices and be sold in plenty in the market, and plenty in the streets. Grant that the potters may get great gain and grant me so to sing to them. But if you turn shameless and make false promises, then I call together the destroyers of kilns, Shatter and Smash and Charr and Crash and Crudebake who can work this craft much mischief. Come all of you and sack the kiln-yard and the buildings: let the whole kiln be shaken up to the potter’s loud lament. As a horse’s jaw grinds, so let the kiln grind to powder all the pots inside. And you, too, daughter of the Sun, Circe the witch, come and cast cruel spells; hurt both these men and their handiwork. Let Chiron also come and bring many Centaurs — all that escaped the hands of Heracles and all that were destroyed: let them make sad havoc of the pots and overthrow the kiln, and let the potters see the mischief and be grieved; but I will gloat as I behold their luckless craft. And if anyone of them stoops to peer in, let all his face be burned up, that all men may learn to deal honestly.