• How to be an elitist bastard.
• How to be one of the roughs.
• Some other third thing!

Stay tuned.

True believers can now follow all the latest breaking news in the only subject that matters: youtubed amateur renditions of “Mah na mah na.”

It’s your monthly Mah na mah na!

Grice and Strawson said it about philosophers, but it goes for critics, too:

On the whole, it seems that philosophers are prone to make too few distinctions rather than too many. It is their assimilations, rather than their distinctions, which tend to be spurious.

I get that you have to generalize to see the big picture, but if you can’t see a meaningful distinction between the elitist aesthetic of Pollock and that of Le Corbusier, well, your big picture is starting to look like a blank canvas, and, you know, I thought you weren’t into that kind of thing. Okay, so you think Pollock and “Corbu” are both ugly. That is to say, they make claims on beauty which translate to nonsense in your aesthetic, which, since you’re a regular kind of guy, is the aesthetic of “the people.” In other words, an aesthetic untainted by aesthetic theory can’t see their beauty.

But modern beauty’s illegibility to the people means something different depending on who the people are: Pollock’s special imprecision cannot be beautiful for those for whom design is of the essence of beauty. Le Corbusier on the other hand extolled engineering and the plan, and thought that it was the “styles” which ruined people’s native sensitivity to “primary forms” and therefore also made them blind to the new spirit which would animate the forms of the modern epoch:

A great epoch has begun.
There exists a new spirit.
There exists a mass of work conceived in the new spirit; it is to be met with particularly in industrial production.
Architecture is stifled by custom.
The “styles” are a lie.
Style is a unity of principle animating all the work of an epoch, the result of a state of mind which has its own special character.
Our own epoch is determining, day by day, its own style.
Our eyes, unhappily, are unable yet to discern it.

Two things you might hear muttered in the contemporary art wing of a museum:

• My four-year-old nephew could paint that.
• I just don’t get it. Why don’t these artists do something ordinary people can understand?

If you don’t see a paradox in the fact that these two utterances often closely follow one another out of the mouths of the same patrons, sometimes in front of the very same painting, perhaps you should consider whether you might ever be tempted to say that you don’t “get” a four-year-old’s artistic productions. On the other hand, it might be instructive to bring the four-year-old to a museum and see which pieces she likes.

Holy Moly!

I’m not exactly persuaded of Johnson’s “greatness” by Darymple’s article. The man is certainly formidable; but I find something very troubling about this British gentleman’s witty equanimity and (un?)intellectual conservatism (that may be reduction, but I don’t think it’s inaccurate).

Darymple quotes one of Johnson’s periods:

“Singularity, as it implies a contempt of the general practice, is a kind of defiance which justly provokes the hostility of ridicule; he, therefore, who indulges in peculiar traits, is worse than others, if he be not better.”

To me this is disturbing: first of all in his major assumption that singularity implies “contempt of the general practice.” What would he say of the playful, contemptless defiance of our Maria Wuz? or the singular eccentricity of Dostoyevsky’s “humble and indefinite hero” Alexei?

Secondly, his quite liberal moral generalizations—”he therefore … is worse than others, if he be not better”—seem unphilosophical, suggesting moreover that, having somehow risen above all that, one might well hold general practice in contempt. A distinction between indignation and contempt should be made. While the cry of just indignation can be the proper response to certain general practices, contempt implies a one-sided state of mind that rules out sympathy in judgment. What we want is to foster our understanding, even within our proper indignation, of the sway of “general practice” over human things, and over ourselves as well. One may, perhaps, hold a logical position in contempt, but no one rests himself entirely free from “general practice.” And to try and pretend to have done so is, well, pretentious.

Perhaps to harp so long on single period seems unjust; but I think this way of speaking in condensed, witty moralisms betrays an unwillingness to become at home with the dubious intellectual ground on which one stands. And it is this sort of suspicion I would recommend to anyone who’s reading Johnson.

It’s your monthly mah na mah na!

This is Grubby taking over for Samuel Beckett. He had a good run but his time has passed.

Dear readers, I want your thoughts on this little effort, please:

One can always ask the question as to why something happens in a poem in more than one sense. There is the question, “What makes someone perform some action?” Then there is the question which implies an answer to the former question, “What makes the poet make someone perform the action?” Given a choice between these two questions the one about the poet seems to have a certain priority, and the aesthetic motives are more important than the psychological. Yet, at the same time, a narrative poem does have the form of a history. In particular a poem whose principal theme is a drama of persuasion (the manner in which Achilles is drawn back onto the field of battle, as well as back into a humane relation to his enemy) repeatedly draws the reader back into a historical consideration of the causes of the action. It may be said that directing the reader away from the poet and his aesthetic motives towards characters and their historical motives is the main thing that a poet does. Thus, the two senses of the question turn over into each other. One does not properly know what the poet has done (and therefore cannot yet ask why he has done it) until one knows how he has traced the arcs of motive and action in his characters, so that as much as one wants to refer the question of the causes of actions to the question of the poet’s purposes, this reference to the aesthetic must make its way through the historical.

This difficulty of identifying the source of an action brings out the deeper difficulty of identifying in the first place what is done in a poem. For an action has the peculiarity that its source in some way accompanies it and counts as part of what defines it. The propulsion of a pointed shaft through a man’s jaw is a different action depending on what source it has. It may be a punishment, a triumph, an accident, a murder, a symbol, or perhaps (in the most unfortunate cases) a transparent consequence of the demand for narrative continuity. It must be something however, other than merely the bare “propulsion of a shaft,” etc. The question of why someone has done a thing has to come together with the question of what has been done, and this action is never simply a fact that appears blankly and in itself.

but the truth is that Samuel Beckett has been contributing to this blog every day for the past 7 days.