A Gleaner's Frame: or what's the what of art in humanity
After Agnes Varda
It was not totally without relish that Harold Bloom recalled his teenage years—years spent in a cocktail of exclusion and solitude, which are not always the same.
And it was during those years that he recognized his gift for reading with the strangeness others would soon see it, turning pages to memory with flicks of the wrist. A gift that then filled his days, incorporating a new range of motions that too deepened his awareness of the abyss that was the peculiarity of the human condition.
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Cognition cannot proceed without memory, and the Canon is the true art of memory, the authentic foundation of cultural thinking. Most simply, the Canon is Plato and Shakespeare; it is the image of the individual thinking, whether it be Socrates thinking through dying, or Hamlet contemplating that undiscovered country.
—Harold Bloom, The Western Canon
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Storytelling, art places us. It finds us in a story, offers a meaning, and imagines an order, even if that order extends no further than the tip of our noses.
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One breaks into the canon only by aesthetic strength, which is constituted primarily of an amalgam: mastery of figurative language, originality, cognitive power, knowledge, exuberance of diction.
—Harold Bloom, The Western Canon
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Every work that isn’t a masterpiece is, in a sense, a part of a vast camouflage. […] Every book that isn’t a masterpiece is cannon fodder, a slogging foot soldier, a piece to be sacrificed, since in multiple ways it mimics the design of the masterpiece.
—Roberto Bolaño, 2666
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If the right chord can be struck just so, to roll out that rhythm, sweetly, softly, the author’s words will seduce the readers’ consciousness into other worlds, and with enough finesse illumination.
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Indeed, it is one of the great and wonderful characteristics of good books (which will give us to see the role at once essential yet limited that reading may play in our spiritual lives) that for the author they may be called “Conclusions” but for the reader “Incitements.”
—Marcel Proust, Days of Reading
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Art as field of thought
Art as thinking
Art as friction
Art as incitement
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I write this quickly, not to expel it from my body and mind but to recognize, confront, and bask in the pains & pleasures of the past, of what is present, my fixations, complexes, infatuations. Not to resurrect them, instead as a passionate embrace, a nod to experience’s proffered light, a light whose insights reveal something here while its shadows obscure over there.
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What is information? Or more precisely, what are information? What are its various forms? What conceptions of intelligence, wisdom and learning does it each form insist upon? What conceptions does each form neglect or mock? What are the main psychic effects of each form? What is the kind of information that best facilitates thinking? Is there a moral bias to each form? What does it mean to say that there is too much information? How would one know? What redefinitions of important cultural meanings do new sources, speeds, contexts and forms of information require?
Does television, for example, give a new meaning to “piety,” to “patriotism,” to “privacy”? Does television give a new meaning to “judgment” or to “understanding”? How do different forms of information persuade? Is a newspaper’s “public” different from television’s “public”? How do different information forms dictate the type of content that is expressed?
—Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
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How then to unmask the technique, the pattern to differentiate the schmaltz from the substance?
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By reading closely, reading critically, I am not swept away in the wave of first impressions with a brain that teeters between accomplice & victim to the onslaught of stimuli: on the one hand, seeking refuge in what is comfortable, the familiar that reinforces patterns and ideas already understood, while the other, tracking what is distorted, inconsistent, and irreconcilable with the whole.
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Literature is not merely language; it is also the will to figuration, the motive for metaphor that Nietzsche once defined as the desire to be different, the desire to be elsewhere. This partly means to be different from oneself, but primarily, I think, to be different from the metaphors and images of the contingent works that are one’s heritage: the desire to write greatly is the desire to be elsewhere, in a time and place of one’s own, in an originality that must compound with inheritance, with the anxiety of influence.
—Harold Bloom, The Western Canon
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Metaphors are the means by which the oneness of the world is poetically brought about.
—Hannah Arendt
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. . . language is pre-individual; it is the historical-natural language shared by all speakers of a certain community. Language belongs to everybody and to nobody. Also in the case of language, there is not an individual “I” but a “one”: “one” speaks. The use of the spoken word is at first something “inter-psychic,” social, public. A “private language” does not exist—in any individual case, and even less in the case of an infant. In this respect one comprehends the full extent of the concept of “public intellect” or “general intellect.” Language, however, unlike sensory perception, is a pre-individual sphere within which is rooted the process of individuation. [. . .] The progressive clarification of the relation between “faculty” (or capacity) for speaking and the particular act of “parole”: this is what enables us to surpass the pre-individual character of historical-natural language, pressing for the individuation of the speaker. In fact, while language belongs to everybody and to nobody, the passage from the pure and
simple ability to say something to particular contingent utterance determines the space of an individual’s notion of “my own.”
—Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude
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Art in choice
Art in form
Art in language
Art in words
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. . . more and more readers for whom a literary work continues to be not just an aesthetic event sufficient unto itself, but also one that is felt as an effluence of strengths, tensions, and situations that make it what it is and not something else. Readers such as these—who are more and more common in our countries—enjoy as much as anybody else the literary contents of a short story or a novel, but at the same time they come to this content with a questioning attitude. For these readers, the books we write are always literature, but they are also sui generis reflections of history, they are like
flowers of a plant that can no longer be ignored because the plant is called land, nation, people, raison d’être, and destiny.
—Julio Cortázar, Literature Class, Berkeley 1980
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. . . the point where the story builds beyond the isolated incident, apparently random, imagined and independent, sterile aesthetic, into something belonging to the whole, sharing or inventing perspectives that implicate or absolve, empathize with our condition, criticize our willful ignorance, or expose our naivety.
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Our legions who have deserted represent a strand in our traditions that has always been in flight from the aesthetic: Platonic moralism and Aristotelian social science. The attack on poetry either exiles it for being destructive of social well-being or allows it sufferance if it will assume the work of social catharsis under the banners of the new multiculturalism.
—Harold Bloom, The Western Canon
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If art reveals something in us, our desires, secrets, reflections of the mundane, uncomfortable, forbidden, or any of the rest that make up our lives, then it must be uniquely equipped to gauge something, something, something.
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The cinema has always been his “gauge,” his “means of measurement—even for politics
. . . We were for Mao,” he said, “but when we saw the films he was making, they were bad. So we understood that of necessity there was something wrong with what he was saying
. . . Even today, there are lots of people protesting globalization or things like that, but when I read their texts or their books, I find them bad, or when I see their films, I say to myself ‘They’re no good either.’ It’s not good if what they do is bad. The cinema has always been a touchstone . . . a reference of moral and artistic measure.”
—Richard Brody, Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard
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. . . having a message, when it’s ideological or political, can be much better communicated in a pamphlet, an essay, or a news report. That’s not what literature is good for. Literature has other ways of conveying those messages and can maybe even convey them with a lot more force than an article, but to do that, to have more force, it has to be great, it has to be elevated. This what many young short-story writers and novelists are finding out now, after a period in which the excitement of taking part in the struggle—especially after the Cuban Revolution, which was the great “sprinkler of ideological dust” across the entire continent—led many people without any maturity as writers to think that if they were literate and had read a little, then they could convey their message in a story or a novel with enormous strength. This turned out not to be the case, but rather that bad literature and mediocre literature can’t convey anything efficiently.
—Julio Cortázar, Literature Class, Berkeley 1980
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Dominant Culture Persecution Complex is not exclusive to the mainstream press and has reached epidemic levels in the art world, where critics continue to treat whiteness as a “neutral” position and imagine themselves above and outside of systemic oppression, rather than implicated in it, while supporting an art world that operates according to the logic of white supremacy.
—Eunsong Kim and Maya Mackrandilal, “The Freedom to Oppress”
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The healthy root of “identity politics” is not in representation-for-its-own-sake but about developing more rigorous, nuanced positions and knocking down the two-dimensional, stereotypes, tokens, and seeing (through) exoticization.
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The freedom to apprehend aesthetic value may rise from class conflict, but the value is not identical with the freedom, even if it cannot be achieved without that apprehension. Aesthetic value is by definition engendered by an interaction between artists, an influencing that is always an interpretation. The freedom to be an artist, or a critic, necessarily rises out of social conflict. But the source or origin of the freedom to perceive, while hardly irrelevant to aesthetic value, is not identical with it. There is always guilt in achieved individuality it is a version of the guilt of being a survivor and is not productive of aesthetic value.
—Harold Bloom, The Western Canon
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Gangster rap neither merely reflects pre-existing social conditions, as many of its advocates claim, nor does it simply cause those conditions, as its critics argue—rather the circuit whereby hip hop and late capitalist social field feed into each other is one of the means by which capitalist realism transforms itself into a kind of anti-mythical myth. The affinity between hip hop and gangster movies such as Scarface, The Godfather films, Reservoir Dogs, Goodfellas and Pulp Fiction arises from their common claim to have stripped the world of sentimental illusions and seen it for “what it really is”: a generalized criminality. In hip hop, Reynolds writes, “To ‘get real’ is to confront a state-of-nature where dog eats dog, where you’re either a winner or a loser, and where most will be losers.”
The same neo-noir worldview can be found in the comic books of Frank Miller and in the novels of James Ellroy. There is a kind of machismo of demythologization in Miller and Ellroy’s works. They pose as unflinching observers who refuse to prettify the world so that it can be fitted into the supposedly simple ethical binaries of the superhero comic and the traditional crime novel. The “realism” here is somehow underscored, rather than undercut, by their fixation on the luridly venal—even though the hyperbolic insistence on cruelty, betrayal and savagery in both writers quickly becomes pantomimic. “In his pitch blackness,” writes Mike Davis of Ellroy in 1992, “there is no light left to cast shadows and evil becomes forensic banality. The result feels very much like the actual moral texture of the Regan-Bush era: a supersaturation of corruption that fails any longer to outrage or even interest.” Yet this very desensitization serves a function for capitalist realism: Davis hypothesized that “the role of L.A. noir” may have been “to endorse the emergence of homo reganus.”
—Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism
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If only a single part of the body is regularly exercised, the body becomes misshapen, arms bigger than what a chest can fully utilize, or calves too big for ankles to support them, making the ankles all the more susceptible to injury.
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Overwhelmed at the thought of having God as an enemy, intoxicated with the solitude experienced by great criminals (“I alone against humanity”), Maldoror goes to war against creation and [humanity’s] author. The Songs exalt “the sanctity of crime,” announce an increasing series of “glorious crimes,” and stanza 20 of Song II even inaugurates a veritable pedagogy of crime and violence.” [. . .]
Lautremont makes us understand that rebellion is adolescent. Our most effective terrorists, whether they are armed with bombs or with poetry, hardly escape from infancy . . . their pathos lies precisely in the contradictions of a child’s mind ranged against creation and against itself . . . beating against the confines of the world, the poet chooses the apocalypse and destruction rather than accept the impossible principles that make him what he is in a world such as it is.
Conformity is one of the nihilistic temptations of rebellion which dominate a large part of intellectual history. It demonstrates how the rebel who takes to action is tempted to succumb, if he forgets his origins, to the most absolute conformity. And so explains the twentieth century. Lautremont, who is usually hailed as the bard of pure rebellion,
on the contrary proclaims the advent of the taste for intellectual servitude which flourishes in the contemporary world.
—Albert Camus, The Rebel
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Artist as reader
Artist as anthropologist
Artist as interpreter
Artist as framer
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The parallel positions of the poet & the scientist are not in competition but serving complementary roles in approaching the mysteries of the universe, trying to understand the human experience, and exploring limits
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We’ve always felt inferior to scientists because we’ve thought of literature as a kind of hybrid art, which includes fantasy, imagination, truth, lies, any proposition, any theory, any possible combination. We often run the risk of taking a wrong path, going in false directions, and scientists seem so calm, so confident and trustworthy.
Well, none of that has ever existed for me, but when I read about Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, I said to myself “Hey, they’re just like us! There comes a moment in their research, too, in their meditation—precisely the most elevated, the most arduous—when suddenly they start to lose their bearings and the ground starts to move under their feet, because there is no certainty, the only thing that’s valid is the principle of uncertainty!”
—Julio Cortázar, Literature Class, Berkeley 1980
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Most simply stated the Heisenberg principle says the more exactingly the position of something is determined to be, the less precisely its momentum can be measured.
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Or, the difference between a photograph and a story. The photo captures the physical expression on a person’s face more precisely but cannot describe the inner workings of a person’s mind or what exists beyond the corners of the photo with any certainty; meanwhile the story, unable to replicate the exactness of tone, shade, or other physical details of a photo, proffers a context that is not bound by a photo’s specific place and time.
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The same might be said for the difference between a monument and a history book. Though the jury is still out on which is more true.
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Dead men make such convenient heroes.
For they cannot rise to challenge the images
That we might fashion from their lives.
It is easier to build monuments
Than to build a better world.
—Carl Wendell Hines Jr.
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Every day that passes, it seems to me more logical and necessary that we approach literature—whether as authors or as readers—as one approaches the most essential encounters, as one approaches love and sometimes death, knowing that they form an indissoluble part of the whole. A book begins long before its first page and ends long after its last.
—Julio Cortázar, Literature Class, Berkeley 1980
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