Is Courbet’s The Stone Breakers a unit of meaning? No is my answer. It is a potential universe of possibilities though. It is a whole within a greater assemblage, as is Bill Kluba’s Two Tables. On the poet and the poet’s language, Shelley writes: Their language is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before [...]
In this next Gallery Talk, John Timmons and I sit in the office and talk Courbet, realism, and reading process. It really gave us a chance to continue on some of the idea we roundabouted on the Saint Francis piece. In terms of the “Confluence” thesis, much of this is laying down ground work for [...]
The next Gallery Talk sessions took place over the course of last week, with John Timmons stepping into the office to cover Bonaventura Berlinghieri’s Byzantine altar piece on Saint Francis and Gustave Courbet’s work. We read, we talk, and follow where ever things lead. The first vidcast covers certain reading issues and relationships. “What do [...]
On Bonaventura Berlinghieri:
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On Newness and Subject:
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At Tunxis we typically fall into interesting conversations in the halls. We often regret not having the recorder ready. And so we’ve begun to walk around with devices. We have an idea for a series called Gallery Talks. The first talk is a fairly elaborate video/podcast of a conversation I had with William Kluba, Professor [...]
On Lust and Two Tables:
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Bill on Creation:
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John on Blood and Motif:
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I laughed when the waitress tells Harley she needs her hand. “God how I adore you,” Harley declared. The waitress flushed and parked the pitcher with a deliberate slosh into Harley’s lap. “I need this,” she protested, extracting her hand. See Victory Garden “Adoration.” It is significant that we learn that the waitress is Veronica [...]
This is a short clarifying post that extends my last essay Reading Hypertext: Developing Imperceptibility. In that essay I wrote: In the modern world, science trumps theology because the scope of science is more massive and more tangible. Hubble’s deep field photographs inspire the sublime just as Bub feels what a Cathredral means not with [...]
Dan Green writes: I’d have to say that the discipline of literary study has become more than unmoored and confused. I’m afraid that “the overt hostility to aesthetic questions in certain quarters,” as Jonathan puts it, has become the mainstream attitude among academic literary critics. Some writers might still be valued because they can be [...]
I wrote this in my second essay on Lust, Reading the Link II: Pablo Picasso illuminated the object by examining an object’s numerous surfaces, making the object strange, disorienting, beautiful in its strangeness and multi-surfaced orientation. In doing so, he presented the object in an almost imperceptible light. For Picasso, the object is not just [...]
Later tonight I must clarify and fix the idea of “making the object imperceptible.” It’s not right. There’s something else going on with this, a problem with two competing ideas: 1. Complexity: the object or action is made more complicated, thus illuminated. This needs further analysis. 2. Confluence: the context of complexity.
I saw an amazing image on the news tonight. There was a story on a building where swastikas had been painted on its walls. A blotter had been used in the video to “erase” the symbol from the field of view. What was the digital blotter supposed to be hiding? Something, apparently, too horrible to [...]
It’s time to do a little essaying, proposing an idea and a reading. In Lust, a woman (and others within the space of this hypertext) struggles with the powerful force of memory and recounting. She’s encouraged to “Try” but fails to remember a significant event. She remembers other details related to it but can never [...]
Mary-Kim Arnold in Lust writes of John and Jeffrey. John has “sand colored hair and eyes of sea” and Jeffrey “had a past. He wrapped it around him like a blanket to keep him warm, to keep him safe from harm.” But “she” the unnamed point of view of Lust “has no need for blankets” [...]
I’ve been writing swiftly through the first few essays on reading hypertext, and I have several beginnings on the next three issues on single readings, another diversion, and to the idea of character. But now I don’t know which one to run with first. I’d also like to go back and fix some stylistic issues [...]
Lots of people are worried about what to call the age we live in: is it post-post modern; the cyber age; the information age; the age of globalization; or is it just now, which doesn’t help? I have no idea. But I like to think about it. I disagree, number one, with periodization. The Age [...]
I started this Part Five on reading hypertext in exactly the wrong way: by beginning with a subject I’m really not interested in exploring at this moment: literary criticism. This is not a critique of criticism: I’m not really interesting in discounting an area of thought that for some may show evidence of appeal and [...]
That Night I Wandered on my Homeward Way (DrunkenBoat 10)
100 Days: 100 Poems, Summer 2008
