ALCOHOL, DRUGS, BIPOLAR DISORDER: A BAD COMBINATION
(Headline in Psychology Today.)
… looks at the much-discussed, recently-released Ted Hughes poem, written just after Sylvia Plath killed herself, in the cold clear light of reality.
Robert Klose on the eccentric professor.
Rupert Vallentine, an Australian professor of engineering, dies.
At war he discovered teaching – ad hoc talks to troops and chess to Japanese POWs… At home, he listened to music, smoked from a stubby white cigarette holder and developed from first principles a way of cleaning the pool by swimming with one leg straight which drew leaves into the centre by centrifugal force. He sang his children to sleep with a mouth organ and when they were asked at school to nominate a religion he suggested: “Theodolite”. It worked.
… a large typical owl, hoots its eight hoots late at night from the back of our woods. Over and over, the barred bard makes its haunted sounds.
When I think of the way it looks, this invisible owl, things feel more haunted still. Its flat black predator eyes set in a medieval cowl. Cold and watchful in the dark, my barred owl, with a gray wintry coat and carved talons.
When the owl is silent… That’s when it whirls down from the black oak and picks a rabbit off the ground. Sometimes I hear animals shrieking as they’re taken.
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I spent hours yesterday afternoon lopping and hatcheting out a small secret garden halfway up our hill. I raked grape vines and honeysuckle branches and then carried thick garlands of them into the woods. Who placed these stones just this way? I never saw them before, not under the ivies and ferns. Was it Munro Leaf? Did he write in this garden I’ve let get so overgrown?
As I knelt to pull a few last bits of ivy, an enormous buck appeared a few feet away, wondering what the fuck someone was doing in his woods.
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Early autumn, when the days are mild, Garrett Parkers come out of their houses and clear their gardens of summer growth. The clarity of the air makes us want to clarify what’s going on in our muddled forests.
But mainly we just want to be outside, because this is earthly perfection: Cool sunlight over bronzing dogwood leaves.
Before I started on my garden, I joined my neighbor, Dick Pratt, as he cleared what he called the king’s highway part of his woods, which lie adjacent to ours. He mentioned that the town’s tree expert told him to take down his Norway maples, and I said I’d been told the same thing, and had already begun girdling some of them.
“We girdled a tree a few years ago,” said Dick. “It didn’t care! It grew a new bark.”
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I left a canopy of honeysuckle over the hollow. My garret, furnished with a black wrought iron table and chair, can’t be seen from the house or street. Who knows if I’ll actually write here, hidden from the world, hearing the Brunswick train hoot, and indignant deer stamp their hooves?
I suppose it’s a garden blind too, a place unseen from which to watch unwary hawks and foxes … A blind? A baffle? I’ve looked and I can’t find the name for this. What’s it called? What have I built?
And if, with a little lantern on the table and plenty of repellent on my face, I sit here at night?
It’s too late in the year for fireflies. But the owls are out.
… has died.
Libera Me, from Verdi’s Requiem, 1967, with Georg Solti and the Vienna Philharmonic.
From Anthony Tommasini’s obituary:
Ms. Sutherland was a plain-spoken and ordinary person, who enjoyed needlepoint and playing with her grandchildren. Though she knew who she was, she was quick to poke fun at her prima donna persona.
“I love all those demented old dames of the old operas,” she said in a 1961 Times profile. “All right, so they’re loony. The music’s wonderful.”
Tried to find a YouTube of her singing some Purcell, but expected nothing and found nothing. Not really her thing. Here’s something vaguely Purcellian, three baroque arias.
Later this month, scientists, aesthetic theorists, and artists will convene at Johns Hopkins University to talk about the biochemical bases of aesthetic experiences. UD‘s thinking of attending. If she does, she’ll cover it, of course, on this blog.
The meeting’s venue, the American Visionary Art Museum, exhibits a painting by UD‘s old friend, Paul Laffoley. So she could visit one of Paul’s pieces, and listen to interesting things about aesthetics.
In blocking Diamond’s nomination, Shelby said:
“I do not believe he’s ready to be a member of the Federal Reserve Board,” Shelby said in August. “I do not believe that the current environment of uncertainty would benefit from monetary policy decisions made by board members who are learning on the job.”
Not many days later, Diamond gets the Nobel Prize for economics. (Dale Mortensen and Christopher Pissarides also won.)
Talk about a fast learner! I guess Shelby’s diss really made Diamond hit the books.
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UD hears Shelby’s working with consultants from the Chinese government to figure out how to respond to Diamond’s award.
University of Chicago professor Robert B. Pippin, in the New York Times:
… [T]here is no particular reason to think that every aspect of the teaching of literature or film or art or all significant writing about the subject should be either an exemplification of how … a [particular] theory works or an introduction to what needs to be known in order to become a professor of such an enterprise.
… [L]iterature and the arts have a dimension unique in the academy, not shared by the objects studied, or “researched” by our scientific brethren. They invite or invoke, at a kind of “first level,” an aesthetic experience that is by its nature resistant to restatement in more formalized, theoretical or generalizing language. This response can certainly be enriched by knowledge of context and history, but the objects express a first-person or subjective view of human concerns that is falsified if wholly transposed to a more “sideways on” or third person view. Indeed that is in a way the whole point of having the “arts.”
[S]uch works also can directly deliver a kind of practical knowledge and self-understanding not available from a third person or more general formulation of such knowledge. There is no reason to think that such knowledge — exemplified in what Aristotle said about the practically wise man (the phronimos) or in what Pascal meant by the difference between l’espirit géometrique and l’espirit de finesse — is any less knowledge because it cannot be so formalized or even taught as such. Call this a plea for a place for “naïve” reading, teaching and writing — an appreciation and discussion not mediated by a theoretical research question recognizable as such by the modern academy…
Last week, UD taught Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” in her aesthetics course; and readers familiar with that 1964 essay will recognize exactly the same argument, though the theories Sontag cites mid-century (Marxism, Freudianism) are different from those Pippin cites today (structuralism, deconstruction, post-colonialism, new historicism).
She’s quite precise about the sort of ‘naive’ intellectual work we need.
What is needed, first, is more attention to form in art. If excessive stress on content provokes the arrogance of interpretation, more extended and more thorough descriptions of form would silence. What is needed is a vocabulary – a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, vocabulary – for forms. The best criticism, and it is uncommon, is of this sort that dissolves considerations of content into those of form. On film, drama, and painting respectively, I can think of Erwin Panofsky’s essay, “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures,” Northrop Frye’s essay “A Conspectus of Dramatic Genres,” Pierre Francastel’s essay “The Destruction of a Plastic Space.” Roland Barthes’ book On Racine and his two essays on Robbe-Grillet are examples of formal analysis applied to the work of a single author. (The best essays in Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, like “The Scar of Odysseus,” are also of this type.) An example of formal analysis applied simultaneously to genre and author is Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Story Teller: Reflections on the Works of Nicolai Leskov.”
Equally valuable would be acts of criticism which would supply a really accurate, sharp, loving description of the appearance of a work of art. This seems even harder to do than formal analysis. Some of Manny Farber’s film criticism, Dorothy Van Ghent’s essay “The Dickens World: A View from Todgers’,” Randall Jarrell’s essay on Walt Whitman are among the rare examples of what I mean. These are essays which reveal the sensuous surface of art without mucking about in it.
…. Not an interview. A conversation.
Saul Bellow’s collected letters — a very big book — will appear later this month, and in anticipation of them, his widow, an English professor at Tufts, talks to the Guardian writer Rachel Cooke.
(UD, a University of Chicago grad, had a long talk with Bellow one afternoon in his high, turreted office. She will never forget it.)
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Excerpts:
He wasn’t really a bad boy. He was a serial marrier, but it had to do with a strange desire on his part to be intimate, to have love at the centre of his life. That was part of the daring I saw in him. He was audacious! What would it take to start over again [at that time in your life]? He was hungry in his soul.
… He was very correct and cordial, but not a particularly pleasant human being.
… An immediate intimacy developed after [our] first physical intimacy. I was overly studious. I loved nature. But suddenly it felt like every single part of my life came together with his. It was a very beautiful time: [for him] a rebirth, and an unexpected one. He had a way of being that was total openness, or nothing: you give yourself madly, or why bother? He opened himself up. He had that capacity: to be loved, and to be in love.
… People used to joke: ‘You’re lucky – you didn’t have some mean book written about you; you would if you’d come earlier.’ [Saul, it is generally agreed, made nasty characters of his ex-wives] I’m not going to deny that. I’m much luckier. We met at the right time. If I’d been earlier in the line-up… I don’t think I could have been with a man who was unfaithful to me. The pain of it.
[UD loves the way she refers to the line-up.]
… He was a writer, you see, not a husband, or a father; [looking back] you see a pattern of him not being able to put in time. When a child comes along, it displaces you, if you need to be at the centre, and obviously Saul did.
He had huge needs. The writing life needed to be supported. He was aware of this; I’m not saying anything disrespectful. He failed his children; he left them, and it was a wound he carried around. He knew the cruelty of this.
… [He was] the kind of person you’re so glad to be embracing at the end of the day. In bed. You want to be close to this human being. He [was] so full of excitement, and energy…
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A podcast with Janis Bellow.
Montana State University’s president explains how they’re financing the thing.
… Asked what would happen if ticket sales weren’t enough to cover MSU’s debt, Cruzado said MSU was taking every precaution in its financial plan, but the details are still being worked out…
Asked what would happen if private fundraising fell short, she said, “Failure is not an option.”…
In a story over-invested with irony, a new financial research center at the University of Chicago which studies how to “measure, price, and hedge risk” may have disastrously failed in its own founding act of risk assessment.
Its donor, University of Chicago trustee Steven Stevanovich, allegedly made some of his immense fortune rather in the way Ezra Merkin made his — feeding funds to someone who turned out to be a Ponzi schemer. He’s being sued for 3.2 billion in clawback litigation arising from the Tom Petters scandal.
Stevanovich can’t be reached, and the University of Chicago is making no comment.
… the hicky controversy.
UD doesn’t watch tv… Do all American political tv ads have the music from Halloween playing in the background?
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Update: A reader, Crimson05er, sends UD this parody of political ads. UD and Mr UD loved it.
… the oft-unheard of Garrett Park.
The restaurant, as veteran readers know, is a half-block from UD‘s house.
