January 2012
32 posts
2 tags
Esthetics have devolved into rare types of stupidity. Each kind of stupidity may be broken down into categories such as bovine formalism, tired painting, eccentric concentrics or numb structures. All these categories and many others all petrify into a vast banality called the art world which is no world. A nice negativism seems to be spawning. A sweet nihilism is everywhere. Immobility and...
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« I was on a panel with other critics and someone... →
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The Star-Die Above the Fountain: When Celan Met...
(Photo Source)
Seasons go by. A few. One day, Paul Celan tells me he has written to Heidegger.
— I’ve much read Heidegger. I’ve much annotated his books. I just wrote him. I don’t expect a reply.
A few weeks later:
— I’m going to Germany. I’m going to meet Heidegger. I hope he’ll hear me.
Later:
— In Todtnauberg there is a fountain crowned with a starry die, and I thought about our...
I want to go with you to the city with a name short as life, where the eagle sun circles in the blossoming columns, undried drops on milky hills, below the heat squeezes out a tear from swollen fountains, and in the cathedral-oaks between the petrified branches the angels have woven their nests in taut gilt leaves, where more alive than the vine, transparent and warm-loving the marble burgeons...
-Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed. See also.
“And the too much of my speaking:
heaped up round the little
crystal dressed in...”
– Paul Celan, from “Below” in Poems, trans. Michael Hamburger
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“… I already loved you in some vague wherever, and that my nostalgia for that...”
– Fernando Pessoa, from The Book of Disquiet
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December 2011
36 posts
ich fühle luft von anderem planeten
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Frau Stöhr wept with enthusiasm at the sight of what had once been Joachim. “A hero! A hero!” she cried several times and demanded that they play Beethoven’s Erotica at his graveside.
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WatchThe Brandt Brauer Frick Ensemble — Pretend
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Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, or
Untimely Meditations, or
Thoughts out of Season, or
Unmodern Observations, or
Inopportune Speculations, or
Essays in Sham-Smashing.
Literary Aesthetics: the Very Idea →
For years real, live, ink-stained, tear-stained artists were granted refuge in the university, but they have been replaced by a breed domesticated in master’s-of-fine-arts programs. Over in literature departments, what passes as scholarship has also become more scholastic. We’ve heard the many rants about how it is elitist, or politicized, or irrelevant, or abstruse, or too...