Victorian Primer

eblogger Enoch Soames of The Charlock’s Shade is running a series on sundry matters Victorian. Start here, and follow the links at page top for previous posts in the series.

Another Midget Squeaks

nother “hard”-science besotted idiot — another philosopher / intellectual, not a medical man, of course — savages Freud and psychoanalysis.

Don’t these envious midgets have better things to do than nibble away impotently at the ankles of giants?

(Thanks to the always indispensable Arts & Letters Daily for the link.)

Culture Of A Different Kind

eblogger Greg Hlatky of A Dog’s Life reports on Lovely Bride’s, his, and Borzoi bitch Lacey’s adventures at the venerable Westminster Dog Show, and the less well known (to the general public) Rocky Mountain Borzoi Club Specialty dog show. Report begins with this post (read subsequent posts of the report by clicking the left arrow at page top).

Warm congratulations to Lovely Bride, Greg, and Lacey!

The Music

n an article on the past, present, and future of classical music, Alex Ross, eloquent music critic for the New Yorker, opens with,

I hate “classical music”: not the thing but the name. It traps a tenaciously living art in a theme park of the past. It cancels out the possibility that music in the spirit of Beethoven could still be created today. It banishes into limbo the work of thousands of active composers who have to explain to otherwise well-informed people what it is they do for a living. The phrase is a masterpiece of negative publicity, a tour de force of anti-hype. I wish there were another name. I envy jazz people who speak simply of “the music.” Some jazz aficionados also call their art “America’s classical music,” and I propose a trade: they can have “classical,” I’ll take “the music.”

and closes by writing,

Two centuries ago, Beethoven bent over the manuscript of the “Eroica” and struck out Napoleon’s name. It is often said that he made himself the protagonist of the work instead. Indeed, he engendered an archetype-the rebel artist hero-that modern artists are still recycling. I wonder, though, if Beethoven’s gesture meant what people think it did. Perhaps he was freeing his music from a too specific interpretation, from his own preoccupations. He was setting his symphony adrift, as a message in a bottle. He could hardly have imagined it travelling two hundred years, through the dark heart of the twentieth century and into the pulverizing electronic age. But he knew it would go far, and he did not weigh it down. There was now a torn, blank space on the title page. The symphony became a fragmentary, unfinished thing, and unfinished it remains. It becomes whole again only in the mind and soul of someone listening for the first time, and listening again. The hero is you.

I here provide the above quotes, and the above link to the full article (which, though long, I urge you to read), without immediate comment.

Teachout Touches On Gould

rint journalist and weblogger Terry Teachout of About Last Night has some brief observations on Glenn Gould, and two brief questions as well, to which latter my brief answers are 1) Mostly not, and 2) Nope.

And as to Mr. Teachout’s comment on Gould’s literary preferences; viz.,

Eeuuww. The man behind that reading list sounds a perfect bore to me, and humorless to boot-just the sort of person who’d dislike Chopin, all French music, and most Mozart, as Gould did.

A “perfect bore” only to card-carrying members and fellow travelers of the, um, progressive New York cultural elite.

As to Gould’s dislike of Mozart’s music, much of that dislike was grounded in Gould’s dislike of the not strictly contrapuntal in all music (he was not overly fond of many of Bach’s preludes in The Forty Eight, for instance). And as to Gould’s dislike of Chopin and all French music, I can only remark that in that he exhibited discernment of the most exemplary sort.

Fencing Bears

eblogger George Hunka of Superfluities has some salient thoughts on puppetry and fencing bears in relation to the art of the theater.

Honest. I kid you not.

Too Precious

ads!, this is just too precious. And too precious as well is the irony of the, um, criminal’s name.

(Thanks to ArtsJournal for the link.)

Comments, ‘A Question Of Art’

Comments On “A Question Of Art”

eblogger and professional photographer Rick Coencas of Futurballa has most interesting comments to make on this archived article.

Mr. Coencas’s technical comments are right on the money, as I would expect them to be, and I find nothing in them to which to object. In answer to Mr. Coencas’s gentle demur that I made my case by limiting myself to the photography of natural landscape, I’d note only that the discussion was limited to that specialized venue as the central focus of the article was the color photographs of two natural landscape color photographers (Galen and Barbara Rowell) who photographed almost nothing but.

As to the two color photographers mentioned by Mr. Coencas, I’m somewhat familiar with the work of both, and the one, William Eggleston, can, to my knowledge, by no stretch be counted as a natural landscape photographer; and the other, Cole Weston, did natural landscape in color mostly in clear abstractions, which sort of treatment I explicitly exempted from my remarks as it was outside the subject treated. And the very few truly natural landscapes of Cole Weston with which I’m familiar are just as much kitsch as anything done by the Rowells.

My above remarks notwithstanding, Mr. Coencas’s post is well worth your time reading.

Totally Outrageous

h my. This is totally outrageous.

A Cosmic Tale

oody Allen has a solid, kick-ass handle on all things cosmic.

I awoke on Friday and because the universe is expanding it took me longer than usual to find my robe. This made me late leaving for work and, because the concept of up and down is relative, the elevator that I got into went to the roof, where it was very difficult to hail a taxi.

Read the whole sad story here.