What? No Shakespeare! Inconceivable! And yes, that’s another movie reference.
This just sounds awesome. How can I get myself invited to one of these ‘Little Salons?’
Nothing short of genius will do. Genius… and no sex. Wait… what?
Jesus was a carpenter, but don’t read about him making anything in Gospels. In fact, he is always calling people away from work. And think about the early desert fathers, especially the Stylites, perched up high. They specifically removed themselves from traditional labor and work to revere the Lord.
Thoreau, in Walden, writes about the pleasure he takes from hoeing his rows of beans in the morning, but that to do it all day would be ‘dissapation.’ Work can be dissapated. Overwork or being a ‘workaholic’ is the opposite of work, in this formulation. Being a workaholic is, in fact, slothful. It is an avoidance of spiritual and more necessities.
His Holiness and his predecessors have been outspoken in support of trade unions. Unions, as the bumper sticker proclaims, are one of the originators of modern leisure, which allows one to avoid the slothfulness of overwork. I am, of course, referring to the bumper that states: Unions: The folks that brought you the weekend
Speaking specifically of artistic and, in particular, poetic work, John Ashberry once said that a ‘wasted time’ is absolutely critical. And, he emphasized, it must be well and truly wasted. Not structured for value in the guise of wasted time. The creative process dependent upon specifically ‘unused’ and unstructured time. Creative work, or creation or generation. In other words, ‘making things.’
Happy May Day, everybody!
It’s also the feast of Saint Joseph the Worker. Yes, that Saint Joseph. He has two feast days: one in honor of his role at the (adoptive) father of Jesus and another as Saint Joseph the Worker.
Jesus answered him, I spake openly to the world; I ever taught in the synagogue, and in the temple, whither the Jews always resort; and in secret have I said nothing. Why askest thou me? ask them which heard me, what I have said unto them: behold, they know what I said.
John 18:20-21
‘In secret have I said nothing.’ To modern ears, that is the phrasing of a question: In secret, have I said nothing?
It’s not a question, but what if it is? Did secret words pass between Jesus and his Father?
The esoteric tradition has deep roots in Christian tradition. Is what he said aloud and which can be repeated by the listening, madding crowd also a kind of secret, because there is a secret meaning that is not shared widely?
And his priests are instructed to carry all of our most terrible secrets – carry our secrets to their graves. In a sense, all secrets are shared only with God, so a priest is an eavesdropper burdened with secrets between the sinner and God.
Through the combination of social and economic change, trade union organizations experience greater difficulty in carrying out their task of representing the interests of workers… The repeated calls issued within the Church’s social doctrine, beginning with Rerum Novarum, for the promotion of workers’ associations that can defend their rights must therefore be honoured today even more than in the past…
The Albertine Workout is really more of a chapbook than a traditional book, a saddle stapled booklet.
Some sort of official description calls it:
The Albertine Workout contains fifty-nine paragraphs, with appendices, summarizing Anne Carson s research on Albertine, the principal love interest of Marcel in Proust s A la recherche du temps perdu.
I actually read it as a sort of poem. Or rather, like much of Carson’s work, a mixture of sui generis and something else. The way her The Economy of the Unlost is an academic work on the poets Simonides and Paul Celan, yet is also sui generis, to me, The Albertine Workout is poetry/sui generis.
There. I just used ‘sui generis’ more times in a single, short paragraph than I did in the entirety of the year of our Lord, two thousand and fourteen.
But it is fifty-nine paragraphs of about Albertine. Her sexuality (lesbian? bisexual?), her unattainability, her lack of desirability after attainment, her presence only being felt when her presence is an absence. The paragraphs are numbered and it leads my mind to Wittgenstein’s ordered of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which, insofar as I understood it, which is not much, is also about a certain unattainability and unknowability.
And yes, damn it, it is poetry. At least, if you have half a mind to read it that way, it is. And I read just assuming it was poetry. So, there it is – a classic case study of reader expectations and reader subjectivity. We’ll discuss author intentionality some other time.
the coffee philosopher 