Oh conventional, well-adjusted American students of art, thwart your attraction to Gauguin, don't sign up for a Pacific troop transport and fight World War II for the wrong (namely, aesthetic) reasons. There can be only one right, well-adjusted reason to fight in the Pacific circa 1944. Aesthetic obsession ain't it. To me, this is the gist of Raditzer, Peter Matthiessen's third novel (1961). Click here to go to my 1960 blog, and read a bit more about the American named Stark who drift inexorably into his aesthetic heart of darkness.
Showing posts with label aesthetic ideology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label aesthetic ideology. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
beware the art student at war for wrong reasons
Oh conventional, well-adjusted American students of art, thwart your attraction to Gauguin, don't sign up for a Pacific troop transport and fight World War II for the wrong (namely, aesthetic) reasons. There can be only one right, well-adjusted reason to fight in the Pacific circa 1944. Aesthetic obsession ain't it. To me, this is the gist of Raditzer, Peter Matthiessen's third novel (1961). Click here to go to my 1960 blog, and read a bit more about the American named Stark who drift inexorably into his aesthetic heart of darkness.
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
poetry at the end of ideology, version 12/07
Charles Bernstein tells us of the December 22 announcement made by Darien Credenza, head of the Amalgamated Writing Programs: a Morally Repugnant Poets-and-Theorists Exhibit will be held at the organization’s annual congress in New York. “Yes we have no ideology. We only have craft."
“It’s up to Amalgamated to determine what the correct meaning of approved works are,” Credenza said. “Anything else would lead to anarchy. Good poems have no hidden agendas. Good poems are neither for or against capitalism, patriarchy, or religion unless they clearly state that they are in the first stanza of the poem and logically develop the thesis through a combination of lucid images and narrative development.”
“‘A few theorists and poets would have you believe that just raising such questions makes you an anti-intellectual meathead in complicity with the powers of postcolonial oppression. It’s an age-old game of partisan politics to pretend that your party has a monopoly on virtue,’” said Credenza. “Only an organization such as Amalgamated Writing Programs, which is above the fray, and rejects demagoguery, has an authentic claim to virtue.”
You can listen to the entire news story here. It's the voice of Alex, Apple's new best-yet text-recognition guy. He does fairly well, although his pronunciation of Lacan leaves a little to be (as it were) desired.
“It’s up to Amalgamated to determine what the correct meaning of approved works are,” Credenza said. “Anything else would lead to anarchy. Good poems have no hidden agendas. Good poems are neither for or against capitalism, patriarchy, or religion unless they clearly state that they are in the first stanza of the poem and logically develop the thesis through a combination of lucid images and narrative development.”“‘A few theorists and poets would have you believe that just raising such questions makes you an anti-intellectual meathead in complicity with the powers of postcolonial oppression. It’s an age-old game of partisan politics to pretend that your party has a monopoly on virtue,’” said Credenza. “Only an organization such as Amalgamated Writing Programs, which is above the fray, and rejects demagoguery, has an authentic claim to virtue.”
You can listen to the entire news story here. It's the voice of Alex, Apple's new best-yet text-recognition guy. He does fairly well, although his pronunciation of Lacan leaves a little to be (as it were) desired.
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"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
