Dear Pilot of the Black Lion,
Hi, I just wanted to offer some advice. I’ve watched a lot of your battles and I’ve noticed a trend: literally, nothing but the Blazing Sword has ever worked.
In the future, instead of trying those other things for twenty-two and a half minutes, you should just go straight for the ace.
Respectfully,
the coffee philosopher
I just wanted to draw attention to this interview in order to highlight this quote:
Artists are not necessarily intellectuals. Intellectuals produce ideas. Artists produce beauty.
Obviously, I am taking this out of context, but even within the context, it doesn’t address the final sentence.
Do artists necessarily create beauty? Is there no great and compelling art which is not beautiful? Political art, art that comments on civilization’s failings. Are they then not the work of artists, at all, but of intellectuals trading in ideas disguised as art?
I don’t have the answer, but I firmly believe that if you limit the function of art to creating beauty, you are putting very unsettling limits upon it, indeed.
An ancient manuscript by the Greek mathematician Archimedes (the one who saw water spilling out of his bathtub and leaped out and ran naked through the streets, yelling eureka, having realized that he’d figured out that whole mass displacement thing) was decoded or deciphered or whatever you want to call it after years and years or work.
The original writing had been scraped off by a medieval monk who was short on paper, so the challenge was determining the writing beneath and generally putting together a jigsaw puzzle.
You can see it at the Walters Museum of Art in Baltimore.
This article touches on an issue I’ve been grappling with for some time.
We are used to our towering cultural figures being a–holes (does anyone seriously think that being Beethoven’s girlfriend was anything less than a living hell, for example?).
But we still struggle with when these figures support morally repellent political views.
And it is true that many figures of early twentieth modernism were seduced by fascism and anti-semitism.
Pound, of course, I have spoken about a great deal.
Nobel Prize winner Knut Hamsun is another.
At the article above focuses on Gertrude Stein.
And no, I still don’t have a pat answer to the dilemma.
Reading an article about T.S. Eliot in The Nation, the ostensible raison d’etre being the publication of his letters, reminded me of what an incredible, awe-inspiring thing it was the read him as a teenager.
Prufrock was in our 12th grade English textbook, but, of course, it was the copy of The Wasteland among my mother’s books that was most exciting.
The abstraction, the literary-mindedness of it all, affected me as much as the despairing, existential gut punch of it.
Poems didn’t have to be literal, visible, but could be densely allusive, creating all sorts of possibilities that I had never seen before.
The article has a telling line, speaking of Eliot’s The Hollow Men:
a confounding performance, at once viscerally immediate and yet strangely abstracted
Though, to put it in context, the article’s author does not ascribe that to most of his other famous works, it feels very right to me as a depiction of the act of reading Eliot for the first time. Viscerally immediate and simultaneously strangely abstracted. And strange meaning more than just “oddly” or “weirdly” but something more… French, shall we say. Strange as truly Other. And most especially, strange as estranged from something. From the world, from each other.
I forgot to note Antonin Dvorak’s birthday yesterday!
If you live in the DC, the Czech embassy is sponsoring some concerts celebrating his work.
the coffee philosopher 