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Lapham's Quarterly: Arts & Letters
Both the ancient street poet and the New York beat poet knew the artistic life lies somewhere between making art, getting paid, and satisfying the muse.
Among the contributors: John Ruskin, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louis Armstrong, Vincent Van Gogh, Yang Wanli, Glenn Gould, Frédéric Chopin, Marianne Moore, Vasily Kandinsky, Michelangelo, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Salman Rushdie, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Richard Wagner.
Among the contributors: John Ruskin, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louis Armstrong, Vincent Van Gogh, Yang Wanli, Glenn Gould, Frédéric Chopin, Marianne Moore, Vasily Kandinsky, Michelangelo, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Salman Rushdie, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Richard Wagner.
221 pages
First published March 1, 2010
3 people are currently reading
38 people want to read
About the author
Lewis H. Lapham
181 books134 followersLewis Henry Lapham was the editor of Harper's Magazine from 1976 until 1981, and again from 1983 until 2006. He is the founder and current editor of Lapham's Quarterly, featuring a wide range of famous authors devoted to a single topic in each issue. Lapham has also written numerous books on politics and current affairs.
Lapham's Quarterly
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/
Lapham's Quarterly
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 25, 2016
L.Q. is not one to shy from broad topics such as Time, Youth, Death, The Sea, and The Future. Arts and Letters still seems like a lot to pursue in a single issue.
As it currently notes on its About page:
“Lapham’s Quarterly embodies the belief that history is the root of all education, scientific and literary as well as political and economic. Each issue addresses a topic of current interest and concern—war, religion, money, medicine, nature, crime—by bringing up to the microphone of the present the advice and counsel of the past. ”
Who will be good this issue? Possibly Tolstoy, Richard Wagner, Nabokov, Plato, Virginia Woolf, Louis Armstrong, Faulkner, James Baldwin (I like his writing despite his constant disillusionment), Van Gogh, Orwell, Aristotle, Michelangelo, or John Ruskin, to name but a very few of the 96 authors in this issue.
The two-page graphic by the inimitable Haisam Hussein (google) is noteworthy. It gives the evolution of 4 stories: Pygmalion, Oedipus, Faust, and Leviathan. It is available free at LaphamsQuarterly.org.
In reading the 'Letters' of Lewis Lapham's preamble perhaps I should follow the advice of 19th-century lecturer John Ruskin:
"And therefore, first of all, I tell you, earnestly and authoritatively (I know I am right in this,) you must get into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable - nay, letter by letter. For though it is only by reason of the opposition of letters in the function of signs, to sounds in the function of signs, that the study of books is called "literature," and that a man versed in it is called, by the consent of nations, a man of letters instead of a man of books, or of words, you may yet connect with that accidental nomenclature this real fact: - that you might read all the books in the British Museum (if you could live long enough) and remain an utterly "illiterate," uneducated person; but that if you read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter, - that is to say, with real accuracy, - you are forevermore in some measure an educated person." [Emphases mine-JH]
One of my favorite quotes conferred on me by a good friend and mentor, this is from Sesames and Lilies: Lecture I: Of Kings and Treasuries. It is NOT part of Ruskin's extract in this issue but it is a wise admonishment for any reading.
The Preamble: Lady In A Veil and Lewis are as cryptic to me as ever, but I am the eternal novitiate in my quest for truth, justice, and the American Way. The words didn't come together the first few times. I think I'm beginning to decipher.
The Lady In A Veil is Art. Beethoven's quote says "Art... ...this great goddess". After Lapham tells us he could once play a few of Beethoven's sonatas (he's always a bit autobiographical) "in the listening to most of which I discover the enlarged sense and state of being that is the presence of the great goddess" he says:
"The liftings of her veil in this issue of Lapham’s Quarterly concern the uses of art as a medium of exchange, the gift in the hand of its creator alive in the mind of its beholder, converting the private to a public good and thereby adding it to the common store of human energy and hope." (p. 13)
A medium of exchange. A gift to the mind of the beholder, private to public good, the common store of human energy. These seem like lofty ideals. Do artists create for the greater good? To me art and letters are an expression, something the artist wants to say, a message to convey. This is a lofty ideal of my own perhaps. Is the expression for sale?Perhaps nearly always. One must provide for one's self. I'm sure artists throughout the ages have hungered for bread as much as expression.
"The supposition that art is a gift as opposed to a collectible, something that doesn’t try to sell you anything, runs counter to our contemporary notions of what constitutes a meaningful exchange. " (p. 13) This I think is the crux of his dissertation. Is art more a commodity now and less an expression?
He doesn't seem to think much of modern art or letters:
"Introduced to the modernist doctrines of alienation and despair, I took the notes but didn’t learn the lesson. The Bauhaus architecture I thought better suited for a barracks or a penitentiary; in the paintings of Mondrian and Kandinsky I could recognize little else except the surface of a decorative design." (p. 16)
"Novels that in the 1950s set out to discover how it is with man in the company of other men gave way in the 1980s to the writing of memoirs intent upon discovering that when one really had a chance to think about it, the world and all its troubles were really all about me." (p. 18)
I see his point and can't say I disagree. Modern art totally escapes me. I've always been a fan of Impressionist painting, the world viewed post-realism but pre-abstractionism through a haze of Monet fog, Van Gogh's thick brush strokes, Signac/Seurat's pointillism. However the more I view the exactness of depiction during the previous four or five centuries such as displayed at the fabulous Ringling Museum of Art the more I admire the precision required. I recently viewed a similar precision present in the paintings of Andrew and Jamie Wyeth. The individual hairs in a beard, the near-infinite lines in the bark of a tree, ruddy realistic complexions produced somehow from a blending of reds, greens, and yellows when you look closely. I am forever in child-like awe of creators of great works. That is all the commodity exchange I need.
Here are a few more of the many tidbits I noted:
"Both at home and at school in the 1940s, I kept company with authors in whose writing I could hear the music in the words, in the novels of Joseph Conrad, Edward Gibbon’s history of the Roman Empire, the poems of Coleridge and Kipling." (p. 14)
"Regarding myself as neither art historian nor literary critic...". (p. 15) Really Lewis? You the founder of L.Q. Sooooo modest.
"Under the aegis of the Congress of Cultural Freedom, the CIA was deploying American art as a Cold War weapon of mass instruction." (p. 15)
"By the time President Ronald Reagan danced onto the White House stage in 1981, politics was fashion, news was entertainment, celebrity was art, literature a regional dialect spoken only in the universities. " (p. 17)
The Preamble is available free online.
Following John Ruskin's advice in the first part of this review of "looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable, nay, letter by letter" I jumped to his extract on p. 172: 1853, Venice, Everlasting Laws.
His conclusion: "Accept this then for an universal law, that neither architecture nor any other noble work of man can be good unless it be imperfect, and let us be prepared for the otherwise strange fact that the first cause of the fall of the arts of Europe was a relentless requirement of perfection…".
Hmm. The fall of the arts, if indeed it has fallen in 1853, due to the requirement of perfection. We don't have the rest of this essay at hand to find what he doesn't like about the state of the arts at that time.
His premises: "...no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect...". "For since the architect, whom we will suppose capable of doing all in perfection ['suppose'? supposition, unfounded assertion, OBJECTION your honor! (Overruled.) -JH], cannot execute the whole with his own hands, he must either make slaves of his workmen in the old Greek and present English fashion [a not so subtle jab at England there -JH] and level his work to a slave's capacities--which is to degrade it--or else he must take his workmen as he finds them, and let them show their weakness together with their strengths, which will involve the Gothic imperfection, but render the whole work as noble as the intellect of the age can make it.”
The person capable of perfection cannot find men able to execute his work perfectly. Don't get me started on work crews repairing or remodeling my home. There is certainly an element of truth there in my mundane world.
"...Accurately speaking, no good work whatever can be perfect and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.
This is for two reasons, both based on everlasting laws. The first, that no great man ever stops working till he has reached his point of failure, that is to say, his mind is always far in advance of his powers of execution..."
"...Therefore, if we are to have great men working at all, or less men doing their best, the work will be imperfect, however beautiful.”
I find striving for perfection admirable, attaining perfection impossible, except for inspiring characters in fictional novels perhaps. It's part of the human dichotomy perhaps. We dream of the very best yet are unable to fully attain it, thus setting ourselves up for cycles of disappointment and dissatisfaction. That's why we invented psychologists isn't it? ;)
"The second reason is that imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life.”
"To banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality.”
Perfection and imperfection. Strive and accept, strive and accept.
With Ruskin in mind and contemplating groupthink and doublethink in light of free speech/microagression on college campuses and our current presidential campaigns I next jumped to George Orwell's extract on p. 91: 1946, London, ...On Bad Writing.
Orwell cuts to the chase very quickly: "A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." (p. 91)
Bingo. Ding ding ding! We have a winnah! 'Yammo gon talk anyway I pleez cause I'm my own purrson an kin dowhadIwan.'
Foolishness of thought indeed, or no thought at all. We don't need structure! (Don't get me started on principles.) Structure is conformity and I'm an individual! ….[Edit: Speaking of exactness in language something bothers me about this paragraph. It seems sloppy and sophomoric, no offense to the many good sophomore writers. I’m leaving it because many have read it by now. I’ll do better next time. –JH]
Orwell then gives a variety of examples of dead metaphors, verbal false limbs, pretentious diction, and meaningless words.
"When one critic writes, "The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living quality," while another writes, "The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is its peculiar deadness," the reader accepts this as a simple difference of opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way." (p. 93)
Orwell would have loved the furniture design show I was watching on tv just a few days ago. "That piece isn't lyrical" one of the judges criticized. Lyrical. A piece of furniture. Don't you often wish people would just speak english?
The three main sections of this issue are Inspiration (with 27 extracts), Creation (29), and Exhibition (36). There are 4 extended essays in the Further Remarks section at the end.
I found the Inspiration section generally, uh, uninspiring. It is about what inspired artists not what inspired me. Of the 27 extracts I thought 9 were noteworthy. Two others piqued my interest if not my agreement. At least 4 others left me mystified.
I will give exception to Annie Dillard:
"Do you think I could be a writer?" "Well," the writer said, "I don't know ... Do you like sentences?" (p. 22)
""It makes more sense to write one big book... ...than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn." ... "It is no less difficult to write sentences in a recipe than sentences in Moby-Dick. So you might as well write Moby-Dick." (p. 22)
Kandinsky muses. "I could never bring myself to use a form which developed out of the application of logic--not purely from feeling within me." (p. 23)
"Each work originates just as does the cosmos--through catastrophes which out of the chaotic din of instruments ultimately create a symphony, the music of the spheres. The creation of works of art is the creation of the world." (p. 24)
Tolstoy communes. "...through the word a man conveys his thoughts to another, while through art people convey their feelings to each other." (p. 26)
There are a lot of Italians, not the there is anything wrong with that. Filippo Marinetti at least gets my attention with his misguided fascist fanaticism:
"Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer's stride, the mortal leap, the punch, and the slap."
"It is from Italy that we launch through the world this violently upsetting incendiary manifesto of ours. With it, today, we establish Futurism, because we want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists, ciceroni [guides, docents -JH], and antiquarians. For too long has Italy been a dealer in secondhand clothes. We mean to free her from the numberless museums that cover her like so many graveyards." (p. 51)
Well! What does he really think?!
Dillard, Lu Ji, Bolano, Illica & Giacosa, Vitruvius, Hugo, Zweig, Woolf, and Armstrong (Louis) were my favorites.
Someday I must track and report my Wikipedia reading of L.Q. authors with whom I'm not familiar. Such reading is extensive every issue.
The Creation section I actually found very inspiring. Only 3 of the first 15 of 29 do not get my coveted '*' notation as being noteworthy. Three of those 12 get my rare '**' notation as being exceptional. They are Vonnegut, Hamsun (where's my Wiki), and Orwell. In all 19 of 29 were '*' or better.
Vonnegut expounds on story device and logic. From “Here is a lesson in creative writing”, he is funny, inspiring, creative, and thoughtful. He ends: "And if I die--God forbid--I would like to go to heaven to ask somebody in charge up there, "Hey, what was the good news and what was the bad news?"" (p. 76) OK, you have to read the whole thing. It's available on the LQ website if you search for Vonnegut and pick the right one.
Hamsun shares his writers block with us and Orwell I discussed in the first part of this review.
James Baldwin, at least a thrice contributor to L.Q., is as insightful as ever. His extract, fictional Wikipedia tells me, is about a nightclub jazz performance. What caught my eye was his descriptions of black people in the story:
"...an enormous black man"
"...a coal-black, cheerful-looking man"
"...the little black man"
"...very bright-skinned brown man"
"...The dry, low black man”
Suetonius, Van Gogh, a poem from Michelangelo, Raymond Chandler on the lowly screenwriter. The list goes on. Marcel Proust is superbly descriptive of the paintings of Elstir:
"...on the other side of the promontory on which the town was built the roofs were overtopped (as they might have been by chimneys or steeples) by masts which had the effect of making the vessels to which they belonged appear town bred, built on land, an impression reinforced by other boats moored along the jetty but in such serried ranks that you could see men talking across from one deck to another without being able to distinguish the dividing line...". (p. 97-98)
Wiki informs me that the painter and paintings are fictional, made up by Proust. Beautifully done.
Shakespeare from A Midsummer Night's Dream, to no surprise, escapes me as usual. No '*' for him, but the dreaded '?'. All I can say is 'what purpose this, prithee?' I must read Shakespeare for Dummies sometime. I see there is one.
Aristophanes, even in English, drives me to my other frequent reference book, the dictionary:
strophe - first of a pair of stanzas
rutilant - bright red
flavescent - turning yellow
monodies - an ode for one voice or actor
bedizened - dressed in a showy or gaudy manner
actinic - a property of radiation
cuirass - breast and back armor
sonant - a voiced speech sound
Whew! I feel like I'm writing a book again and I haven't done section three or the extended essays yet.
21 of 36 items in the Exhibition section gain the notable '*' annotation. The Chinese conflict on the importance of music. Mozi, who lived not long after the death of Confucius, says c. 430BC "...making music is wrong!" (p. 143) The Book of Rites c. 50BC, which '...exemplifies the Confucian emphasis on moral training and education', says "Where there is music there is joy." (p. 169) I recently saw the GuGu Drum Group from Shanghai. (Outstanding, see them if you can.) I think The Book of Rites won the argument.
Hitler is noteworthy if only for his facile naïveté. "Cubism, Dadaism, Futurism, Impressionism, etc., have nothing to do with our German people: for these concepts are neither old nor modern, but are only the artifactitious stammerings of men to whom God has denied the grace of a truly artistic talent, and in its place has awarded them the gift of jabbering or deception." (p. 142)
Wikipedia tells me Michel de Montaigne is 'known for popularizing the essay as a literary genre'. His extract on books is superb.
"Associations with friends and women are accidental and dependent on others." ... "Association with books is much more certain and more our own." ... "It is at my side throughout my course and accompanies me everywhere." "It consoles me in old age and in solitude. It relieves me of the weight of a tedious idleness and releases me at any time from disagreeable company." (p. 167)
Henry David Thoreau has a notable side quote on the Montaigne page:
"Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience." (p. 168)
In the Further Remarks extended essays Salmon Rushdie enlightens us with the similarities between East and West in literary adventure themes. He dwells on Amir Hamza, whose tales thereof have graced the pages of L.Q. in other issues, and the 1400 paintings and text manuscript Hamzanama commissioned by Mughal Emperor Akbar. (Thank you Wiki.)
A biography of Ezra Pound is next, a poet of whom I've heard but with whom I'm not familiar. I am likely to remain that way.
The third essay expounds on the focus of beauty in art on the female form until it reaches the avant-garde modern art period and how said form becomes more prominent in popular media at the same time. A bit cerebral for me.
Finally a Muslim women discusses the use of Arabic script in Muslim art in place of iconic images. She refers to the Danish cartoon images of Mohammed in 2005 but this essay is published in spring 2010 before the Charlie Hebdo cartoons in 2011 or the cartoon offices massacre in January 2015. Noteworthy.
Done at last. I expect my Spring 2016 issue to arrive shortly. I'm late, I'm late, for a very important date.
As it currently notes on its About page:
“Lapham’s Quarterly embodies the belief that history is the root of all education, scientific and literary as well as political and economic. Each issue addresses a topic of current interest and concern—war, religion, money, medicine, nature, crime—by bringing up to the microphone of the present the advice and counsel of the past. ”
Who will be good this issue? Possibly Tolstoy, Richard Wagner, Nabokov, Plato, Virginia Woolf, Louis Armstrong, Faulkner, James Baldwin (I like his writing despite his constant disillusionment), Van Gogh, Orwell, Aristotle, Michelangelo, or John Ruskin, to name but a very few of the 96 authors in this issue.
The two-page graphic by the inimitable Haisam Hussein (google) is noteworthy. It gives the evolution of 4 stories: Pygmalion, Oedipus, Faust, and Leviathan. It is available free at LaphamsQuarterly.org.
In reading the 'Letters' of Lewis Lapham's preamble perhaps I should follow the advice of 19th-century lecturer John Ruskin:
"And therefore, first of all, I tell you, earnestly and authoritatively (I know I am right in this,) you must get into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable - nay, letter by letter. For though it is only by reason of the opposition of letters in the function of signs, to sounds in the function of signs, that the study of books is called "literature," and that a man versed in it is called, by the consent of nations, a man of letters instead of a man of books, or of words, you may yet connect with that accidental nomenclature this real fact: - that you might read all the books in the British Museum (if you could live long enough) and remain an utterly "illiterate," uneducated person; but that if you read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter, - that is to say, with real accuracy, - you are forevermore in some measure an educated person." [Emphases mine-JH]
One of my favorite quotes conferred on me by a good friend and mentor, this is from Sesames and Lilies: Lecture I: Of Kings and Treasuries. It is NOT part of Ruskin's extract in this issue but it is a wise admonishment for any reading.
The Preamble: Lady In A Veil and Lewis are as cryptic to me as ever, but I am the eternal novitiate in my quest for truth, justice, and the American Way. The words didn't come together the first few times. I think I'm beginning to decipher.
The Lady In A Veil is Art. Beethoven's quote says "Art... ...this great goddess". After Lapham tells us he could once play a few of Beethoven's sonatas (he's always a bit autobiographical) "in the listening to most of which I discover the enlarged sense and state of being that is the presence of the great goddess" he says:
"The liftings of her veil in this issue of Lapham’s Quarterly concern the uses of art as a medium of exchange, the gift in the hand of its creator alive in the mind of its beholder, converting the private to a public good and thereby adding it to the common store of human energy and hope." (p. 13)
A medium of exchange. A gift to the mind of the beholder, private to public good, the common store of human energy. These seem like lofty ideals. Do artists create for the greater good? To me art and letters are an expression, something the artist wants to say, a message to convey. This is a lofty ideal of my own perhaps. Is the expression for sale?Perhaps nearly always. One must provide for one's self. I'm sure artists throughout the ages have hungered for bread as much as expression.
"The supposition that art is a gift as opposed to a collectible, something that doesn’t try to sell you anything, runs counter to our contemporary notions of what constitutes a meaningful exchange. " (p. 13) This I think is the crux of his dissertation. Is art more a commodity now and less an expression?
He doesn't seem to think much of modern art or letters:
"Introduced to the modernist doctrines of alienation and despair, I took the notes but didn’t learn the lesson. The Bauhaus architecture I thought better suited for a barracks or a penitentiary; in the paintings of Mondrian and Kandinsky I could recognize little else except the surface of a decorative design." (p. 16)
"Novels that in the 1950s set out to discover how it is with man in the company of other men gave way in the 1980s to the writing of memoirs intent upon discovering that when one really had a chance to think about it, the world and all its troubles were really all about me." (p. 18)
I see his point and can't say I disagree. Modern art totally escapes me. I've always been a fan of Impressionist painting, the world viewed post-realism but pre-abstractionism through a haze of Monet fog, Van Gogh's thick brush strokes, Signac/Seurat's pointillism. However the more I view the exactness of depiction during the previous four or five centuries such as displayed at the fabulous Ringling Museum of Art the more I admire the precision required. I recently viewed a similar precision present in the paintings of Andrew and Jamie Wyeth. The individual hairs in a beard, the near-infinite lines in the bark of a tree, ruddy realistic complexions produced somehow from a blending of reds, greens, and yellows when you look closely. I am forever in child-like awe of creators of great works. That is all the commodity exchange I need.
Here are a few more of the many tidbits I noted:
"Both at home and at school in the 1940s, I kept company with authors in whose writing I could hear the music in the words, in the novels of Joseph Conrad, Edward Gibbon’s history of the Roman Empire, the poems of Coleridge and Kipling." (p. 14)
"Regarding myself as neither art historian nor literary critic...". (p. 15) Really Lewis? You the founder of L.Q. Sooooo modest.
"Under the aegis of the Congress of Cultural Freedom, the CIA was deploying American art as a Cold War weapon of mass instruction." (p. 15)
"By the time President Ronald Reagan danced onto the White House stage in 1981, politics was fashion, news was entertainment, celebrity was art, literature a regional dialect spoken only in the universities. " (p. 17)
The Preamble is available free online.
Following John Ruskin's advice in the first part of this review of "looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable, nay, letter by letter" I jumped to his extract on p. 172: 1853, Venice, Everlasting Laws.
His conclusion: "Accept this then for an universal law, that neither architecture nor any other noble work of man can be good unless it be imperfect, and let us be prepared for the otherwise strange fact that the first cause of the fall of the arts of Europe was a relentless requirement of perfection…".
Hmm. The fall of the arts, if indeed it has fallen in 1853, due to the requirement of perfection. We don't have the rest of this essay at hand to find what he doesn't like about the state of the arts at that time.
His premises: "...no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect...". "For since the architect, whom we will suppose capable of doing all in perfection ['suppose'? supposition, unfounded assertion, OBJECTION your honor! (Overruled.) -JH], cannot execute the whole with his own hands, he must either make slaves of his workmen in the old Greek and present English fashion [a not so subtle jab at England there -JH] and level his work to a slave's capacities--which is to degrade it--or else he must take his workmen as he finds them, and let them show their weakness together with their strengths, which will involve the Gothic imperfection, but render the whole work as noble as the intellect of the age can make it.”
The person capable of perfection cannot find men able to execute his work perfectly. Don't get me started on work crews repairing or remodeling my home. There is certainly an element of truth there in my mundane world.
"...Accurately speaking, no good work whatever can be perfect and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.
This is for two reasons, both based on everlasting laws. The first, that no great man ever stops working till he has reached his point of failure, that is to say, his mind is always far in advance of his powers of execution..."
"...Therefore, if we are to have great men working at all, or less men doing their best, the work will be imperfect, however beautiful.”
I find striving for perfection admirable, attaining perfection impossible, except for inspiring characters in fictional novels perhaps. It's part of the human dichotomy perhaps. We dream of the very best yet are unable to fully attain it, thus setting ourselves up for cycles of disappointment and dissatisfaction. That's why we invented psychologists isn't it? ;)
"The second reason is that imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life.”
"To banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality.”
Perfection and imperfection. Strive and accept, strive and accept.
With Ruskin in mind and contemplating groupthink and doublethink in light of free speech/microagression on college campuses and our current presidential campaigns I next jumped to George Orwell's extract on p. 91: 1946, London, ...On Bad Writing.
Orwell cuts to the chase very quickly: "A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." (p. 91)
Bingo. Ding ding ding! We have a winnah! 'Yammo gon talk anyway I pleez cause I'm my own purrson an kin dowhadIwan.'
Foolishness of thought indeed, or no thought at all. We don't need structure! (Don't get me started on principles.) Structure is conformity and I'm an individual! ….[Edit: Speaking of exactness in language something bothers me about this paragraph. It seems sloppy and sophomoric, no offense to the many good sophomore writers. I’m leaving it because many have read it by now. I’ll do better next time. –JH]
Orwell then gives a variety of examples of dead metaphors, verbal false limbs, pretentious diction, and meaningless words.
"When one critic writes, "The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living quality," while another writes, "The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is its peculiar deadness," the reader accepts this as a simple difference of opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way." (p. 93)
Orwell would have loved the furniture design show I was watching on tv just a few days ago. "That piece isn't lyrical" one of the judges criticized. Lyrical. A piece of furniture. Don't you often wish people would just speak english?
The three main sections of this issue are Inspiration (with 27 extracts), Creation (29), and Exhibition (36). There are 4 extended essays in the Further Remarks section at the end.
I found the Inspiration section generally, uh, uninspiring. It is about what inspired artists not what inspired me. Of the 27 extracts I thought 9 were noteworthy. Two others piqued my interest if not my agreement. At least 4 others left me mystified.
I will give exception to Annie Dillard:
"Do you think I could be a writer?" "Well," the writer said, "I don't know ... Do you like sentences?" (p. 22)
""It makes more sense to write one big book... ...than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn." ... "It is no less difficult to write sentences in a recipe than sentences in Moby-Dick. So you might as well write Moby-Dick." (p. 22)
Kandinsky muses. "I could never bring myself to use a form which developed out of the application of logic--not purely from feeling within me." (p. 23)
"Each work originates just as does the cosmos--through catastrophes which out of the chaotic din of instruments ultimately create a symphony, the music of the spheres. The creation of works of art is the creation of the world." (p. 24)
Tolstoy communes. "...through the word a man conveys his thoughts to another, while through art people convey their feelings to each other." (p. 26)
There are a lot of Italians, not the there is anything wrong with that. Filippo Marinetti at least gets my attention with his misguided fascist fanaticism:
"Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer's stride, the mortal leap, the punch, and the slap."
"It is from Italy that we launch through the world this violently upsetting incendiary manifesto of ours. With it, today, we establish Futurism, because we want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists, ciceroni [guides, docents -JH], and antiquarians. For too long has Italy been a dealer in secondhand clothes. We mean to free her from the numberless museums that cover her like so many graveyards." (p. 51)
Well! What does he really think?!
Dillard, Lu Ji, Bolano, Illica & Giacosa, Vitruvius, Hugo, Zweig, Woolf, and Armstrong (Louis) were my favorites.
Someday I must track and report my Wikipedia reading of L.Q. authors with whom I'm not familiar. Such reading is extensive every issue.
The Creation section I actually found very inspiring. Only 3 of the first 15 of 29 do not get my coveted '*' notation as being noteworthy. Three of those 12 get my rare '**' notation as being exceptional. They are Vonnegut, Hamsun (where's my Wiki), and Orwell. In all 19 of 29 were '*' or better.
Vonnegut expounds on story device and logic. From “Here is a lesson in creative writing”, he is funny, inspiring, creative, and thoughtful. He ends: "And if I die--God forbid--I would like to go to heaven to ask somebody in charge up there, "Hey, what was the good news and what was the bad news?"" (p. 76) OK, you have to read the whole thing. It's available on the LQ website if you search for Vonnegut and pick the right one.
Hamsun shares his writers block with us and Orwell I discussed in the first part of this review.
James Baldwin, at least a thrice contributor to L.Q., is as insightful as ever. His extract, fictional Wikipedia tells me, is about a nightclub jazz performance. What caught my eye was his descriptions of black people in the story:
"...an enormous black man"
"...a coal-black, cheerful-looking man"
"...the little black man"
"...very bright-skinned brown man"
"...The dry, low black man”
Suetonius, Van Gogh, a poem from Michelangelo, Raymond Chandler on the lowly screenwriter. The list goes on. Marcel Proust is superbly descriptive of the paintings of Elstir:
"...on the other side of the promontory on which the town was built the roofs were overtopped (as they might have been by chimneys or steeples) by masts which had the effect of making the vessels to which they belonged appear town bred, built on land, an impression reinforced by other boats moored along the jetty but in such serried ranks that you could see men talking across from one deck to another without being able to distinguish the dividing line...". (p. 97-98)
Wiki informs me that the painter and paintings are fictional, made up by Proust. Beautifully done.
Shakespeare from A Midsummer Night's Dream, to no surprise, escapes me as usual. No '*' for him, but the dreaded '?'. All I can say is 'what purpose this, prithee?' I must read Shakespeare for Dummies sometime. I see there is one.
Aristophanes, even in English, drives me to my other frequent reference book, the dictionary:
strophe - first of a pair of stanzas
rutilant - bright red
flavescent - turning yellow
monodies - an ode for one voice or actor
bedizened - dressed in a showy or gaudy manner
actinic - a property of radiation
cuirass - breast and back armor
sonant - a voiced speech sound
Whew! I feel like I'm writing a book again and I haven't done section three or the extended essays yet.
21 of 36 items in the Exhibition section gain the notable '*' annotation. The Chinese conflict on the importance of music. Mozi, who lived not long after the death of Confucius, says c. 430BC "...making music is wrong!" (p. 143) The Book of Rites c. 50BC, which '...exemplifies the Confucian emphasis on moral training and education', says "Where there is music there is joy." (p. 169) I recently saw the GuGu Drum Group from Shanghai. (Outstanding, see them if you can.) I think The Book of Rites won the argument.
Hitler is noteworthy if only for his facile naïveté. "Cubism, Dadaism, Futurism, Impressionism, etc., have nothing to do with our German people: for these concepts are neither old nor modern, but are only the artifactitious stammerings of men to whom God has denied the grace of a truly artistic talent, and in its place has awarded them the gift of jabbering or deception." (p. 142)
Wikipedia tells me Michel de Montaigne is 'known for popularizing the essay as a literary genre'. His extract on books is superb.
"Associations with friends and women are accidental and dependent on others." ... "Association with books is much more certain and more our own." ... "It is at my side throughout my course and accompanies me everywhere." "It consoles me in old age and in solitude. It relieves me of the weight of a tedious idleness and releases me at any time from disagreeable company." (p. 167)
Henry David Thoreau has a notable side quote on the Montaigne page:
"Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience." (p. 168)
In the Further Remarks extended essays Salmon Rushdie enlightens us with the similarities between East and West in literary adventure themes. He dwells on Amir Hamza, whose tales thereof have graced the pages of L.Q. in other issues, and the 1400 paintings and text manuscript Hamzanama commissioned by Mughal Emperor Akbar. (Thank you Wiki.)
A biography of Ezra Pound is next, a poet of whom I've heard but with whom I'm not familiar. I am likely to remain that way.
The third essay expounds on the focus of beauty in art on the female form until it reaches the avant-garde modern art period and how said form becomes more prominent in popular media at the same time. A bit cerebral for me.
Finally a Muslim women discusses the use of Arabic script in Muslim art in place of iconic images. She refers to the Danish cartoon images of Mohammed in 2005 but this essay is published in spring 2010 before the Charlie Hebdo cartoons in 2011 or the cartoon offices massacre in January 2015. Noteworthy.
Done at last. I expect my Spring 2016 issue to arrive shortly. I'm late, I'm late, for a very important date.
April 4, 2021
The subject matter seems sprawling and unwieldy, but somehow the issue comes together as a beautiful whole.
Works by Vincent Van Gogh, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Richard Wagner, Kurt Vonnegut, Sutonius, Andy Warhol, Louis Armstrong, Henry James, Juvenal, Horace, Roberto Bolano. Knut Hamsun, Aleksandr Puchkin, Salman Rushdie, Wendy Steiner and many, many more.
Works by Vincent Van Gogh, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Richard Wagner, Kurt Vonnegut, Sutonius, Andy Warhol, Louis Armstrong, Henry James, Juvenal, Horace, Roberto Bolano. Knut Hamsun, Aleksandr Puchkin, Salman Rushdie, Wendy Steiner and many, many more.
November 24, 2010
This is an exciting review of the literature of Arts and Letters. A beautiful collection of artwork as well. I'd like to subscribe, but it is taking me more than a quarter to get through this one!
Read
November 2, 2013A broad approach to the art of art and the value society places on it over time.
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