Natasha’s Dance
“It’s a dance,
for goodness’ sake.”
– Scott Houston
For the lyrics, see Sinatra.
Month: March 2009
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Cover Art:
The Rest of the Picture
Lenin at Smolny, c. 1925,
by Isaak Israilevich Brodsky –
A copy of this picture, with
left and right reversed, appears
on the front and back covers
of the Feb. 2006 MIT Press
book The Parallax View,
by Slavoj Zizek.(See previous entry.)
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Hollywood Politics:
Happy Birthday,
Warren Beatty
Viewpoint A:
Blue –
Viewpoint B:
Red –
MIT Press:
The Parallax View
Slavoj Zizek
Published on
February 17, 2006
Table of Contents and Sample ChaptersThe Parallax View is Slavoj Zizek’s most substantial theoretical work to appear in many years; Zizek himself describes it as his magnum opus. Parallax can be defined as the apparent displacement of an object, caused by a change in observational position. Zizek is interested in the “parallax gap” separating two points between which no synthesis or mediation is possible, linked by an “impossible short circuit” of levels that can never meet. From this consideration of parallax, Zizek begins a rehabilitation of dialectical materialism.
“If you liked Badiou,
you’ll love ‘Zizek!’.” -
Comparative Literature:
Getting All
the Meaning InWebpage heading for the
2009 meeting of the
American Comparative
Literature Association:
The mysterious symbols on
the above map suggest the
following reflections:
From A Cure of the Mind: The Poetics of Wallace Stevens, by Theodore Sampson, published by Black Rose Books Ltd., 2000–Page x:
“… if what he calls ‘the spirit’s alchemicana’ (CP [Collected Poems] 471) addresses itself to the irrational element in poetry, to what extent is such an element dominant in his theory and practice of poetry, and therefore in what way is Stevens’ intricate verbal music dependent on his irrational use of language– a ‘pure rhetoric of a language without words?’ (CP 374)?”
Related material:From “‘When Novelists Become Cubists:’ The Prose Ideograms of Guy Davenport,” by Andre Furlani: Laurence Zachar argues that Davenport’s writing is situated “aux frontieres intergeneriques” where manifold modes are brought into concord: “L’etonnant chez Davenport est la facon don’t ce materiau qui parait l’incarnation meme du chaos– hermetique, enigmatique, obscur, avec son tropplein de references– se revele en fait etre construit, ordonne, structure. Plus l’on s’y plonge, et plus l’on distingue de cohesion dans le texte.” ‘What astonishes in Davenport is the way in which material that seems the very incarnation of chaos– hermetic, enigmatic, obscure, with its proliferation of allusions– in fact reveals itself to be constructed, organized, structured. The more one immerses oneself in them the more one discerns the texts’ cohesion.’ (62).
Davenport also works along the intergeneric border between text and graphic, for he illustrates many of his texts. (1) “The prime use of words is for imagery: my writing is drawing,” he states in an interview (Hoeppfner 123). Visual imagery is not subordinated to writing in Davenport, who draws on the assemblage practice of superimposing image and writing. “I trust the image; my business is to get it onto the page,” he writes in the essay “Ernst Machs Max Ernst.” “A page, which I think of as a picture, is essentially a texture of images. [...] The text of a story is therefore a continuous graph, kin to the imagist poem, to a collage (Ernst, Willi Baumeister, El Lissitzky), a page of Pound, a Brakhage film” (Geography 374-75).
Note:
(1.) Davenport is an illustrator of books (such as Hugh Kenner’s The Stoic Comedians and The Counterfeiters) and journals (such as The Kenyon Review, Parnassus, and Paideuma). His art is the subject of Erik Anderson Reece’s monograph, A Balance of Quinces, which reveals the inseparable relationship between Davenport’s literary and pictorial work.
References:
Davenport, Guy. The Geography of the Imagination. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981. Rpt. New York: Pantheon, 1992.
Hoepffner, Bernard. “Pleasant Hill: An Interview with Guy Davenport.” Conjunctions 24 (1995): 118-24.
Reece, Erik Anderson. A Balance of Quinces: The Paintings and Drawings of Guy Davenport. New York: New Directions, 1996.
Zachar, Laurence. “Guy Davenport: Une Mosaique du genres.” Recherches Anglaises et Nord-Americaines 21 (1994): 51-63.
“… when novelists become Cubists; that is, when they see the possibilities of making a hieroglyph, a coherent symbol, an ideogram of the total work. A symbol comes into being when an artist sees that it is the only way to get all the meaning in.”
– Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination
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Today’s Sermon:
Auerbach, Purdy;
Purdy, AuerbachThe 4-day annual meeting
of the American Comparative
Literature Association
concludes today.
This year the the meeting
is held at Harvard University.
(Program– pdf, 256 pp.)
“But the spirit of rhetoric– a spirit which classified subjects in genera and invested every subject with a specific form of style as one garment becoming it in virtue of its nature [i.e. lower classes with the farcical low-style, upper classes with the tragic, the historic and the sublime elevated-style]– could not extend its dominion to them [the Bible writers] for the simple reason that their subject would not fit into any of the known genres.”– Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton edition of 1953, p. 45, as quoted at Wikipedia)
The Washington Post on its literary columnist Michael Dirda: “… he holds a PhD in comparative literature from Cornell….”
Dirda on author James Purdy (April 5, 2000):
QUESTION: “What do you make of Purdy and his place in 20th century American fiction?”
“A small sidetrack in American literature– a camp novelist, something of a cult figure. Will probably be forgotten in a generation. Malcolm is probably his best bet for survival, but a lot will depend on his readers and whether they can keep his name and fiction before the public. So far they haven’t been doing much of a job. Personally, I think Purdy is a funny, brilliant writer, but that doesn’t assure immortality.”Steven H. Cullinane on Purdy,
“Radical Emptiness,”
Friday, March 13th, 2009 –“See you in the
funny papers, Purdy.” -
Lottery Hermeneutics, continued:
The Rest
of the StoryToday’s previous entry discussed the hermeneutics of the midday NY and PA lottery numbers.
The Revelation Game
(continued from 7/26, 2008)Lotteries
on Reba’s
birthday,
2009Pennsylvania
(No revelation)New York
(Revelation)Mid-day
(No belief)No belief,
no revelation
726Revelation
without belief
378Evening
(Belief)Belief without
revelation
006Belief and
revelation
091Interpretations of the evening numbers–
The PA evening number, 006, may be viewed as a followup to the PA midday 726 (or 7/26, the birthday of Kate Beckinsale and Carl Jung). Here 006 is the prestigious “00″ number assigned to Beckinsale.
Will: Do you like apples?
Clark: Yeah.
Will: Well, I got her number.
How do you like them apples?
The NY evening number, 091, may be viewed as a followup to the NY midday 378 (the number of pages in The Innermost Kernel by Suzanne Gieser, published by Springer, 2005)–
Page 91: The entire page is devoted to the title of the book’s Part 3– “The Copenhagen School and Psychology”–
The next page begins: “With the crisis of physics, interest in epistemological and psychological questions grew among many theoretical physicists. This interest was particularly marked in the circle around Niels Bohr.”
A particularly
marked circle
from March 15:
The circle above is
marked with a version of
the classic Chinese symbol
adopted as a personal emblem
by Danish physicist Niels Bohr,
leader of the Copenhagen School.
"Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined
On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come."
-- Wallace Stevens,
"Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,"
Canto IV of "It Must Change"
The square above is marked
with a graphic design
related to the four-diamond
figure of Jung's Aion. -
Annals of Philosophy –
The Dance
of ChanceToday’s midday
lotteries:NY 378
PA 726Interpretation:
The 378 pages of
a book on Pauli and Jung,
“The Innermost Kernel“The date, 7/26, of
birth for Jung and for
Kate Beckinsale,
star of
“Serendipity“See also today’s previous entry
and “Bright Star and Dark Lady”
from 7/26, 2003. -
Annals of Religion –
In memory of
film producer
Steven Bach:
“Time: the moving
image of eternity.”
– PlatoHappy birthday,
Reba McEntire -
Annals of Art History, Part II
The Child Trap
See E! Online, March 18 — Lindsay Lohan Remembers Parent Trap MumSee also
For those who like such things, an excellent Marxist analysis of Watchmen from another fan:
Whitson, Roger. “Panelling Parallax: The Fearful Symmetry of Alan Moore and William Blake.” ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies Vol. 3 No. 2 (2007). Dept. of English, University of Florida.
Whitson’s subject, Alan Moore, is the author of the Watchmen graphic novel. Moore’s style seems less suited to the Forth family pictured above than to Lindsay Lohan fans– who may also enjoy another graphic novel by Moore, Lost Girls.
More Lohan material related to her role in “Georgia Rule“–
Damnation Morning Continued (March 16).Further background:
“The film realizes that if people actually fought crime, they’d most likely be crazy. Take The Comedian for an example. He fights crime, sure. He’s also a raging alcoholic.” –”‘Watchmen’ a flawed masterpiece,” by Ryan Michaels
See also the following expanded version of a link from Sunday morning, March 22:
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