Why my old blog comments sucked

In the two and a half years during which I ran my public blog I did not receive -- I think this is fair to say -- one good comment. (There were various excellent comments on some of my posts, but they were all written by me under various guises). For a long time I attributed the lack of good comments on my blog to the scant regard it received from readers. Presumably they had better things to read, and, in particular, better blogs to comment on. Only with time did I realize that there were no other blogs with better comments: my commentators commented junk because junk is all they could produce. Quite literally, my commentators did not have anything to say.

I am starting to look like my father

I am now the age I best remember him: about the time I left home. He'd given up by then: he knew there were no more prospects in his professional life, yet he had to slog out with the job on account of wife and kids; he'd been sentenced to hard labor; there were twenty more years of that ahead of him; there would be no romance in his life anymore; worse, he'd stopped reading and thinking and gone into sleeping on the couch, in front of the TV. I think he must have been clinically depressed.

Looking in the mirror I see him: the same progressive broadening of the face, the same baldness. I can try to control my weight through diet; and exercise (a little, so as not to interfere with my reading time too much) to stay fit; but there is nothing I can do about the genetic inheritance: the package that continues to unfold. I am not happy about it. I am gradually assuming the looks of the person I least wish to see.

A special case of Reverse-Dorian-Grey syndrome.

On being culturally frustrated and how Hesse fails to cure the problem

I feel underserved by nearly all the contemporary cultural production I come across. It all seems to fall into one of three categories:

A. Escapist: typically on the “they killed him but he ran away” model. This is often entertaining, sometimes very well done, and certainly has its place in the lives of many people. But it usually fails to keep my interest for long. (I really couldn't care less who done it, and remember nothing whatever of Star Wars, only that my mind began to wonder half way through).

B. Engaged art: this sets out to publicize the plight of various disadvantaged. (Most Scandinavian film and drama falls in this category). It is often worthy and sometimes also well done but if one is not so disadvantaged himself, the whole business fails to speak to him personally. (Take The Elephantman, for instance: how tragic to suffer from elephantiasis! -- but what does it have to do with me?)

C. Dummy Realism: This “tells it like it is”, but it almost always takes as its topic the very ordinary – lower-middle-brain, to employ sociological terminology -- criminals, bakers, undertakers, working girls, frustrated suburban housewives, advertising canvassers walking aimlessly about Dublin while talking to themselves, etc. The reason for this is perhaps that writers are not, by and large, a brilliant lot (what possible incentive can there be for writing this stuff for hours and hours each day?); and it is impossible to write convincingly about people more intelligent than oneself. So writers, wisely, write "down". (As in "girls marry up, boys marry down"). And that's alright, but why do I have to read down?

This is why I enjoy reading Hesse: his heroes -- like Knecht of The Glass Bead Game -- are upper-middle brain and neither disadvantaged nor politically engaged; they are thus free to direct all of their considerable brain power to the pure task of cultivation of that brain power; which is a life-style anyone with a brain and the freedom to pursue it well might. It is, in other words, a life we all could live if we only could live it; perhaps even the life we will all live one day, all our disadvantages have been removed and all our brains powered-up by way of a special chip. The project is not without its problems -- but they are not explored in art; and that is too bad because, certainly, to me at least, such art would be a lot more interesting than A-C above.

But while I praise Hesse's gumption to go after a good topic, I praise his execution less enthusiastically. His description of the sculptor's creative process in Goldmund and Narcissus is a pious fabrication; his description of meditation in Glasperlenspiel, also. Perhaps Hesse, too, was too busy writing books to find out properly about the things he was writing about.

The old dictum regarding pornography comes to mind: the reason why it is so bad is because those doing it have no time to write it, and those writing it have never done it. Good literature has the odds stacked up against it.

Think about it

In a certain science fiction novel a space ship is described which is powered by an engine based on a technology which no one can understand. Only its creator could but - he is dead.

The Hunting Carpet of Pius XI

I do not know know why the Hunting Carpet of Pius XI bears the name it does. Its recorded history starts with the last queen of Italy discovering, in the early years of last century, seven fragments of a signed and dated 16th century carpet and ordering some weavers to reconstruct the whole thing; it continues with someone buying a fragment of a carpet in a Christie's auction in the 1980's and discovering that it represented a previously unknown piece of the border of the same carpet, upon which it has now been sewn on. The fragment's pattern is more detailed and more precise and its colors still more vivid than the 20th century Italian restoration.

That Europeans turn stupid after midnight

Mezzo can be quite ambitious; last night for example Prokof P3 (Janis, RTF), Shostak S6 (Berstein, Vienna), and Prokof P3 again (Rabinowitz, Israel) -- wham-bam-bam -- one damn thing after another. And, cool. The P3 repeat is the really nice touch here: it's a measure of the hardness of the programming's core -- about 9.5 on my sclerometer -- we don't get bored with this stuff, eh?

But then, hit 12 AM, cinderellas turn into pumpkins and Mezzo audience -- stupid. And not just Mezzo. All Europe does. The universal rule of European cultural programming is -- Sundays we pray; and at night we mellow with

Jazzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

(Geeeeeeeeeeeeeez).

Who makes this a rule? Is it - Biblical or something?

You've read Tschaikovsky?

Nahedeh expresses her helplessness at conversation with me by guessing (correctly) the sort of cutting remarks I might make about her recent cultural adventures (which are really quite alright as far as intelectual adventures go: Travels with Charlie, Moll Flanders, even if I might indeed make cutting remarks about them).

Nahdeh's problem ("you might not like what I am reading") reminds me of an old Russian joke about a sexual education course in which men are encouraged to talk to their wives first. Vanya is much impressed. He returns home and says to Natasha: You read Pushkin? Yes, she answers. Nu ladno, he continues. And you heard Tschaikovski? Yes, she answers. Nu, tak rozdyevaysa, he says. ("Well, in that case, strip").

Nahedeh imagines that I judge her intellectual achievement by the sort of stuff she consumes; while the point is not what she consumes but what she has to say about it from herself. One reads something, then digests it, then uses it as a spring-board for his own ideas. Conversation about the life of the mind cannot be just a recitation of what we are reading; or its contents; it must be about how we respond to these things. Is it possible that Nahedeh, having read Moll Flanders, can only say "I like it" or "I don't like it"? Is saying "I have read Moll Flanders lately", then perhaps adding quickly, "but I have not liked it moralizing tone" all she can manage?

No wonder she feels helpless trying to converse with me. She knows she doesn't measure up, but does not realize how or why. (It is a terrible feeling; I often have it when playing bridge).

I tried to explain to her that I do not feel lonely. That I can perfectly well dumb down my talk to the level of my interlocutors, and be liked for it, but that this does nothing to assuage the great hunger of for a challenging intellectual companionship. I do not think I have managed to get the idea across to her.

I should add than Nahedeh is not stupid. She speaks five languages indifferently and holds an advanced degree in engineering. Yet, her conversation skills are near zero; and, quite possibly the underlying apparatus necessary for an interesting conversation is lacking. The ability to master five languages is not in any way related to the skills necessary to think independently and to dress the said thoughts in interesting garb.

Regarding Classics

Somewhere in his Lapidaria Kapuscinski describes dropping in on an airport bookstore and finding in it not a single classic; all the books in it were by contemporary authors, authors he has never heard of; they were, he felt, all flash-in-the-pan: here today, gone tomorrow; destined to be pulped at the end of the season and replaced by another crop of identical perfectly forgettable annuals. Kapuscinski’s reaction to this was a species of disbelief: the endless cycle of writing, publishing, pulping, forgetting and writing something else again (only to be soon pulped and forgotten again) seemed to him preposterous.

Somehow, Kapuscinski’s reaction resonates strongly with me; but I cannot say why. When I stop to think about it, my emotional reaction appears to me illogical. To Kapuscinski’s mind, I suppose, one either writes for eternity; or one writes for nothing: a kind of non-omnis moriar. But this cannot be true: though it may not seem to him this way at the moment of writing, once an author dies he becomes wholly indifferent as to whether anyone still reads his work.

And the corollary of the above, the claim that one either reads the eternal or one reads nothing, cannot be true, either. Having read much classics and a little contemporary fiction, I am not sure that the classics really are better. Is Madame Bovary, or Il Purgatorio, really better than, say, The Difference Engine? I can’t see how.

Or perhaps the preference for the lasting is a kind of longing to participate – read what others read as if that were more relevant somehow than reading what no one else seems to read?
Then there is the reverence for the past. Portugal is a good illustration. Camões begins the Canto Primeiro of his Lusiades:

As armas e os barões assinalados,
Que da ocidental praia Lusitana,
Por mares nunca de antes navegados,
Passaram ainda além da Taprobana,
Em perigos e guerras esforçados,
Mais do que prometia a força humana,
E entre gente remota edificaram
Novo Reino, que tanto sublimaram;

Joao V built an expensive (and useless) aqueduct to bring in freshwater from Monsanto. Libson’s rooftops bristle with Roman pine cones, urns and cypresses.

It was always so. When in 379 B.C. Theban plotters set out from Athens over the Kithairon to overthrown the pro-Spartan tyrannical regime, they noted that there were only six of them and, out of reverence for the past (and the great epic of Seven Against Thebes), added a seventh.

The past resonates with us and an artful appeal to it can add grand significance to the humdrum present. If we didn't have classics, what would we appeal to?

53 Stations of the Tokaido

This picture belongs to the instantly recognizable series of 53 Stations of the Tokaido, published in 1832, which made Hiroshige Ando famous (and, eventually, immortal). These woodcuts are horizontally oriented, dramatic landscapes with brief inscriptions, in the style of Chinese literati landscapes. Hiroshige apparently also made a vertical series, referred to as Upright Tokaido, (published in 1855). The style is the same:


The author of this website has set out to visit, sketch and woodcut all the 55 locations of the series as they appear now. (And to try soba noodles at each location while he is at it). The contrasts between now and then serves well to illustrates the postwar Japanese enthusiasm for reinforced concrete. It is quite sobering.

The website also contains very interesting discussion of each of Hiroshige's paintings (from the horizontal series) showing how Hiroshige intentionally misinterpreted the views in his pictures -- made some angles appear steeper, or some heights higher than they were in reality, in order to add drama to the resulting picture.

Eventually, many different editions of the 53 stations of the Tokaido were created, by many different authors. The woodcuts assembled at the Gulbenkian exposition in Lisbon (which you can view here), though the introduction ascribes them to Hiroshige, are an entirely different kettle of fish:

Look at this picture:


Name of the Station is given as "Akasaka" (No. 37, in Owari); the print's title is "The appearance of the goddess of water to the famous biwa player Fujiwara no Moronaga as a sign of appreciation of his genius".

This series is sometimes referred to in English as "The 53 Parallels for the Tokaido Road" and is reported as being mixed work of Kunisada, Kuniyoshi, and Hiroshige and published around 1845 by different printers (!). The prints are not landscapes. Instead, they bear resemblance to the modern American knowledge cards (e.g. baseball cards). At the upper right corner of each is the title of the series ("53 stations of the Tokaido"). To the left is the name of the particular stop and the particular local lore represented in the print. Below is an illustration of the story. The lore consists of various stories from mythology, history, and literature as well as information concerning famous local "products" (embroidery, courtesans, etc.) It represents a kind of encyclopedia, or dictionary, arranged not according to the order of the alphabet, but to the order of the places along the famous road.

It reminds me of Pausanias who described his travels across Greece in the second century A.D. and at each point stopped to tell the ancient lore of the place.

Modern Japanese don't seem to know any of the stories.

Polish nineteenth century propaganda at work

This is how Matejko presented King Jan Kazimierz.

This is basically in keeping with the Sienkiewicz image of the saintly wimp who helplessly flees his enemies and can at most manage a few whispers about the tormented motherland. The fact that he abdicated the throne helped to cement the loser picture. It also depends much on the King's image in French clothing: he is westernized, therefore spoiled, effeminate and over-gentle.

But this is how Jan Kazimierz liked to present himself:



Manly, brave, Turkish rather than French; the hero of the Thirty Years' War (in which he fought as a mercenary) and of the battle of Beresteczko where he personally led the charge.

In fact, there was altogether too much of fearless man of action about Jan Kazimierz. His military idea of virtue as attacking the enemy frontally and never yielding an inch did not lend itself well to management of a constitutional parliamentary monarchy. Unable to compromise, the king occasioned a series of constitutional crisis; until, in the end, the only way out of the last one was -- abdication.

He was defeated, yes. But he was not a wimp.

On odds, choose the past

Then again, statistically speaking, the production of the past is bound to look better than contemporary production; all ages probably produce plentiful dross, with, here and there, a masterpiece; but overtime the dross falls by the wayside and only the masterpieces remain; this creates the ocular illusion that the past was much more exciting than it really was; certainly much more exciting than the present. But, when over the centuries, thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of masterpieces have accumulated, the very richness of the offerings of the past, their number and quality, means that the modern consumer faced with a choice between a random masterpiece of the past and a random contemporary work on odds alone chooses the past.

We are then -- so to speak -- crushed by our cultural inheritance.

The end of art

The ever more furious search for new idiom, new artistic language, new style evident in art since the beginning of the nineteenth century reflects perhaps the fact that so much excellent art created in the past survives that it is ever harder to create works which are genuinely novel which yet match their predecessors in excellence. The audience, with their limited time, stand before a choice: should we listen to an entirely new opera by this new up-and-coming star, or should we listen to the old tried and true Incoronazzione di Poppea all over again? Somehow, increasingly, the answer seems the latter. Perhaps we have come to the end of art? Perhaps we have said everything that can be said? That is Hesse's suggestion in The Glass Bead Game: that we should stop trying to make new works and just juggle various pieces of the past.

Paris vaut bien une messe

Oh my god! Now it all makes sense - just look at his impish smirk! So the man was not being cynical, he was -- as they say in America -- being cute!

That music (and beauty) makes us stupid

Listening religiously to the BBC3 series of complete Handel operas (what a worthy project to play them all, what a worthy project to hear them all!) I have had the opportunity to hear more than several interviews with conductors and performers regarding Handel's music. More than several praised his psychology, his deep understanding of and realistic, convincing representations of human psyche in action.

Which only proves that music, good music anyway, makes us stupid.

Handel had nothing to do with the writing of his libretti; but they are are all invariably hilariously unrealistic, wonderfully nutty, and, above all, written to a the same pattern: love quadrangle + disguise + vendetta + happy end (i.e. the square is squared). The music Handel wrote to these libretti is of course magnificent (if sometimes repetitive, but, hey, anything which is good to hear once is surely good to hear seventeen times, no?).

Personally, I love it. Indeed, listening to Handel operas is one of my most preferred ways to waste time. But let us not get carried away here: for all its wonder and beauty, the greatness of the music does nothing to improve the silliness of the libretti. Indeed, it is precisely in this fact that its greatness is revealed: Handel operas are utterly silly, and yet -- they are wondeful. This is because, as Rossini observed, great music can be composed to any text, a laundry list if need be.

So why do all these people think Handel's psychology is great?

For the same reason, I suppose, for which high school girls think their beautiful boyfriends are also incredibly smart and scholars spend their lifetimes investigating the supposed deep meanings of Giorgione's Philosophers. Some miswiring in our brain makes it difficult for us to grasp that perfectly beautiful objects may be in every other way perfectly worthless.

In praise of cultural tourism

Philippe Jaroussky is not perhaps the most interesting singer of our time, but certainly has one of its most beautiful voices: he is a counter-tenor singing in soprano, a rare thing. But unless you listen to Radio France, you won't hear him much at all.

This recording by him is of Marc-André Dalbavie's Sonnets by Louise Labé. It is very beautiful. Dalbavie, my exact contemporary, composes in a thoroughly modern idiom, one close to Arvo Paart and Gorecki, more radical then either, but neither dull nor obscure. Radio France carried his piano concerto recently: it was really quite good.

Louise Labé was a French Renaissance poetess, a commoner, possibly a cross-dresser or a courtesan, or both: an interesting and mysterious figure in her own right. But then in 2006 Mireille Huchon, a French scholar, proposed that Louise had never really existed; that she had been merely an literary creation of a group of Lyonnais poets, an invention capitalizing on the period's literary fascination with the classical poet Sappho and on a publication, in 1533, of poems attributed to Petrarch's "Laura" (Laura de Sade; the poems were in fact the work of a descendant of Laura). In 1542 Clément Marot, she says, seeking a French equivalent of Petrarch's praise of "Laura", proposed to the Lyonnais circle that they "louer Louise" (praise Louise).

Here is how he praised her:

Estreines, à dame Louïze Labé

Louïze est tant gracieuse et tant belle,

Louïze à tout est tant bien avenante,

Louïze ha l'oeil de si vive estincelle,

Louïze ha face au corps tant convenante,

De si beau port, si belle et si luisante,

Louïze ha voix que la Musique avoue,

Louïze ha main qui tant bien au lut joue,

Louïze ha tant ce qu'en toutes on prise,

Que je ne puis que Louïze ne loue,

Et si ne puis assez louer Louïze.

And here is (supposedly or not) her own work from the same book:

Sonnet VIII

Je vis, je meurs; je me brûle et me noie ;
J'ai chaud extrême en endurant froidure :
La vie m'est et trop molle et trop dure.
J'ai grands ennuis entremêlés de joie.

Tout à un coup je ris et je larmoie,
Et en plaisir maint grief tourment j'endure ;
Mon bien s'en va, et à jamais il dure ;
Tout en un coup je sèche et je verdoie.

Ainsi Amour inconstamment me mène ;
Et, quand je pense avoir plus de douleur,
Sans y penser je me trouve hors de peine.

Puis, quand je crois ma joie être certaine,
Et être au haut de mon désiré heur,
Il me remet en mon premier malheur.

*

What a wonderful life this is. One discovery leads to another; there is no end in sight; there are too many facts for anyone to master in his lifetime. While this means that synthesis is impossible; which is to say that we will never be able to say anything definitive or final; yet it also means -- endless pleasure. History of culture is like a gigantic cake in which we can wallow day and night till our dying day without tiring, or boring, or exhausting the sustenance.

Look, barely have I done with this morning's adventure of tracking down Louise Labé, and, lo!, up pops this article on Qianlong's French etchings. Qianlong, says Melikian, was a cultural tourist: an expert connoisseur of Chinese art an culture, he was also a quintessential Manchu: proud of his hunting and military skills; and his intellectual and artistic interests extended to xiyangxue, which is to say us, Europeans. (He was altogether more broad-minded, it would seem, that Umberto Eco).

Here is to cultural tourism.

The objective part of beauty of man made artifacts

(Being another note on Mothersill's Beauty Restored).

Mothersill does have some very good ideas, though. For example, this one: that the principles of goodness of a particular art form are built into the technology its practice. With respect to tea-vessels this means two different things:

1. The practice of drinking tea: tea pots and tea cups must fulfill certain criteria, such as: be thin enough not to cause the tea to cool; yet strong enough to withstand a certain degree of rough handling; the size must satisfy the requirements of the occasion: a relatively small pot if there are only 2 drinkers; cups -- small enough, and shaped in a manner which both prevents the tea from cooling too quickly and affords an easy way to handle them without burning one's fingers; they must also be easy to drink from (they should not, for example, be either square or triangular as has lately been the fashion); their appearance and decoration must also match the occasion, whether formal or informal. Etc.

2. The practice of pottery: this means, first, how well the vessels fulfill the requirements of point 1 above given the limitations of the potting technique, and the mechanical properties of clay and glaze; and, second, that superior potters and decorators (who are sometimes one and the same) try to display their skills with that kind of virtuosity which undertakes to perform well precisely what is most difficult to achieve in the particular technique. For instance, crackling is notoriously difficult to control during firing; for this reason, the crackleware with regular crackling is the most valuable.

There are other considerations, of course. Some may arise out of the cultural context, such as: is the color-scheme pleasing to the eye, given what we are used to seeing? Others may rely on hard-wired perceptions, e.g. is the shape graceful? But the two sets of considerations described above form a great deal of that part of evaluation of the quality of pottery which is really objective. One learns it as one learns anything; wrong or mistaken judgments are obviously wrong and can be objectively criticized and corrected.

Pietrusinski on the Balkans

Jerzy Pietrusiński, a Polish professor of cultural history, speaks of the concept of Europe measuredly and learnedly on PR2. But when he proposes that the bloodbath of the break up of the Yugoslav Empire is somehow an outcome of Turkish (i.e. non-European) domination of the Balkans, does he forget the bloody "civil war" (as Haupt calls the Polish-Ukrainian conflict in Galicia and Wolhynia 1918-1945)? Or the equally bloody conflict in Upper Silesia between Poles and Germans? Or the conflict in Northern Ireland? (To name a few). Or did they all spring from un-European sources? (Whatever non-European source may mean).

In the matter of the inner beauty of Socrates

Further, Eco repeats in his lecture, as way of making a point about classical Greek perceptions of the relationship between ugliness and beauty, the impression, first reported by Plato, and widely agreed with since, that Socrates, while ugly on the outside, was beautiful on the inside.

I read and read and read and puzzle: I happen not to find the insides of Socrates beautiful. On the contrary, he reminds me, as he reminded Russell, of a certain kind of bad cleric. What do people find beautiful about him?

Far from disproving the unpleasant theory that ugly people are ugly on the inside, too, the story of Socrates appears to me to confirm it!

Regarding Voltaire's cultural relativism

Voltaire's claim regarding cultural relativism of values, expressed in his famous dictum that "what is in in Paris is right out in Peking", is best explained by reference to that famous French saying that he who comes from afar can say anything he wants. Since times immemorial it has been the famous trick of the relativist brigade to say that in China (Turkey, Patagonia) they do it completely differently. Here one fabricates something suitably ridiculous (such as "they grow children in clay pots like scallions, head down", etc.). Since no one has the expertise to deny us, presto, we have scored a point.

Except, of course, that at the time when Voltaire coined his famous dictum, Chinese pottery was all the rage in Europe, imported en masse and at huge cost, avidly collected and inexpertly copied in low quality reproductions in state-funded pirate factories set up for that purpose. In other words, right in front of Voltaire's prominent nose as he sipped his breakfast hot chocolate, there reposed clear proof that at least some things in in Peking were very much in in Paris.

He didn't notice it.

Regarding the amazing human capacity to associate dissociate ideas

The political conservatism of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound is perhaps best explained by reference to their love for the literary tradition. The connection goes something like Scruton's argument: because Handel wrote music unmatched by anything composed today, we must go on with the fox hunt (or child labor, disenfranchisement of women, the slave trade).

The human mind's capacity for associating disassociate ideas appears unfettered by any logical considerations.

On another note, I have always wondered why fascism (Pound) should be considered a conservative movement.

Whatshisname in Venice

From the author of Yoga for People Who Can't be Bothered now comes another wonderful title fruit-cake: Jeff in Venice.

Jeff in Venice! This really opens a whole new genre of literature, does it not? How about Magic Munchkins? Doktor Frustrate? Tonio Bugger? Or, or another line of attack: The Pass Gas Game, Sid Dirty, The Journey of the Yeast?

Had I run into Jeff in Venice at a bouquiniste's, I would have instantly bought it on the strength of the wonderful title alone.

Alas, I didn't run into it at a bouquiniste's. I heard about it on Night Waves and the interview cruelly deflated my burgeoning desire to read it (the book is about a contemporary artist losing interest in his work) when the author told us about "that wonderful church in Venice -- can't remember its name" -- (it's San Rocco) -- with all "those wonderful Renaissance paintings by Tintoretto".

Oh.

Never mind, then.