The Shepherds of Arcadia, by Nicolas Poussin. 1630s.
When a society is wealthy, it takes on new responsibilities. New possibilities and opportunities open up for it. It has the potential to increase its own wealth and well-being many times over, if it just thinks ahead of itself and its own instant gratification. If it just thinks ahead of itself and its desire for personal gratification. If it just thinks ahead of now.
If the people of this wealthy society unite in common cause, they can do things that are impossible alone. They can do things that are impossible for individuals alone. They can even do things that are impossible for large institutions alone, or groups of those institutions. If the entire society gathers, unites, and agrees to work together, it can do things that have never been done.
At the same time, if a society chooses not to…
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Pramoedya Ananta Toer
It’s not often that a great writer’s life is more interesting in some ways than his books. But that’s the case with Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Born on the island of Java in 1925, Toer lived through several revolutions and national rebellions, participated in a few himself, and was imprisoned both by the Dutch colonial government and then later by the Suharto regime.
While in jail during his first imprisonment in 1947-49, he wrote his first novel, The Fugitive. During his second imprisonment, this time by the Suharto regime in 1965, he accomplished something even more amazing. Denied pen and paper, he managed to construct a tetralogy, recite it to his fellow prisoners, and eventually get it down on paper and published after his release in 1979.
Toer said in an interview:
“Before I got permission, I had to do it behind their backs. For a…
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Untitled, by Mark Rothko. 1952
All art is paradox. But Rothko, perhaps more than any other modern painter, embraced the paradox and threw it profoundly in our faces.
The canvas is flat. You can’t enter it. You can’t go through it, if it’s hanging on the wall. At least without injury and perhaps a heavy bill from the gallery. But Rothko continuously tells the audience to do just that. Embrace the painting, enter it, walk into it, let it engulf you and torture you and shake you. Shake the core of you. He wants the painting to be a plane and an entrance way in the same bright moment. Flat and omnipresent. Pressed against the wall as it surrounds you. And he wants you to accept the paradox and reject it long enough to succumb.
“We favor the simple expression of complex thought. We are for the large…
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Filed in: Essays | 0 comments
Rumormongers have hypocritically insinuated that I make use of cheap irony. Nothing could be further from the truth.
I employ only the finest quality of irony, procured at great expense, its like not to be had discounted. In fact, I do not entrust supply to outside provisioners, but participate at every stage of manufacture, from the selection of raw material (unalloyed, never scrap) through its refinement—forged under sublime pressure, even tempered, under controlled heat, by a process of my own invention. Despite all due precaution, irony can become corrupted, so the results of all this effort may well never see the light of day. Only the most resilient irony, without discernable imperfection, is suitable to any proper craft.
Nor do I use it sparingly. To be effective, irony must be thickly applied, preferably in many layers, and meticulously worked in to its foundation so as to…
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Filed in: Philosophy | 0 comments
Friday, March 28th, 2008
Another way of saying “binary thinking” is “dualistic thinking.” It’s become something of a cliche in postmodernity to decry “western dualism,” so I’m going to avoid the phrase to stave off my own boredom and perhaps make a more trenchant point.
I’ve noticed that North Americans are terrible about seeing things in (cliche again) “black” and “white”, good or bad, this or that. To some extent, just to use ordinary conversational english you have to employ antonyms but that’s not what I’m talking about. Somehow for Northams (I’m not going to use the term Americans b/c of course that includes our friends in Canada and Latin America, and I’m not talking about them in this critique, mainly because I have little knowledge of whether they tend to see things the same way, but I suspect not. . . ) we hypostatize all…
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Filed in: Music | 0 comments
Fender Stratoscaster
Enumerations
I am sitting in a wooden upholstered chair built in the nineteen fifties (I know because the table it came with had the original sales receipt from 1957) at my computer desk listening to Jimi Hendrix performing with the Band of Gypsies on New Years 1970 at the Filmore East almost two years before I was born.
My cat Sibyl is sleeping behind me. She is almost 13. Hard to believe. She looks five and has the most beautiful black/orange tortoise-shell fur I have ever seen. She also has an incredibly sweet and talkative disposition. (I have known many cats and by far she is the most gregarious)
I am 36. Time is spinning a web around my head. I am thinking that the chronometric parsing of our small gasps of life may be the death of us, machinelike, or at least make our…
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Filed in: Art | 0 comments
When I stumbled on oil pastels several years ago after not having had any formal background or training in art, I surprisingly found myself enjoying working strictly in this medium. I am most intrigued not only by its texture, fluidity, and vibrancy of colour but also with the dimension and depth which can be readily achieved through simple hand and finger smudging. In this way, being so closely connected physically with the paper, I find myself able to become even more deeply immersed in the work.
Ingenue, by Desi Di Nardo
Several of my favourite artists include Leonardo da Vinci, Tamara de Lempicka, and the Group of Seven artists. My greatest influence, however, is Edgar Degas mainly because of his discerning eye for the human form and his masterful portrayal of movement in dance mode. After taking classical ballet at the National Ballet School of Canada…
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Filed in: More Poetry | 0 comments
A Deep Dark Line
I’m so excited about the wound
That stretches across the skin
Division under a toothed piece of glass
Opens to a field of circumspection-
Can’t we agree we can’t take back what’s lost
In the quiet now a pond settles our reflection
Sinuous strands motion for us under current
Rotten stumps of bark-a lonely plot of grass
The pig-headed calm before the blitz of rain
A deep dark line numbs the nipping tiny fish
Surface of the Moon
Now if someone would take the time to ask how you feel
Instead of making the same old small talk
You’d know just what to do with your pager
You might not even worry so much about the accent
Slinging your arm round to the backseat
Why you might even step over the line and ask me
Always with the same curiosity in the back of your mind
Could I be someone interested in a gloomy driver
I would catch you in…
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