Reads of the moment

Camille Paglia, Glittering Images: A Journey through Art from Egypt to Star Wars. (New York: Pantheon Books.) I read this aloud to my husband on our drive to my mother's house in western North Carolina in October and finished it up on the way back to our home in upstate New York. Some of her speculations are of the very sheerest, but it's a great read-aloud if you love art and don't care for the sterility and jargon of much arts criticism. Enthusiasm and respect for spiritual search inform the book. With the early works, the miracle of survival of ancient art and the admiration for the distinctive styles and crafts of shaping wielded by ancient, anonymous people are on Paglia's mind. And if you feel at all uncertain about the history of Modernism, she'll help you out in understanding how one sub-movement reacted to another. (And I must say that she managed to make me see Mondrian in an surprising new way--I had no real sense of what Mondrian thought that he was doing and found him surprisingly symbolic in his mode of conceiving and carrying out paintings.) I like and agree with her ideas of Warhol (or Mapplethorpe) as the dead-end of the avant garde, and I think those ideas translate well to what happened with poetry in the twentieth century, particularly when you look at how both painters pursuing realism and narrative and poets pursuing formal variety (including some ancient forms) and a widened subject matter are slowly gaining ground. Paglia insists (mightily!) on formulating her own thoughts without a whit of care for the winds and trends of culture in an era when academics tend to march together.

C. Day Lewis. The Poetic Image. 1946 Clark Lectures, Cambridge University. Still pertinent and well worth reading. Essays/lectures from someone who understands literary history and the Modernist place in it for good and for ill. "The Lyric Impulse" is a wonderful introductory piece. I thoroughly enjoyed the whole book, which is governed by the idea that human beings naturally seek to create and find harmony and orderliness in a world that is ever in flux, ever more various than we can compass. Highly recommended for those interested in song, ballad, and shapely poems.

Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim. I read again after many decades and was surprised to find how well I remembered it, particularly the episode of the burned bedclothes and the "Merrie England" talk. The apex of the drunken address still reminded me of Fink-Nottle's, and antihero Jim Dixon of a sharper, much less hapless and sweet Bertie Wooster. After a stint in the British army, Kingsley Amis must have been out to break all the campus rules.... Is Dixon sometimes roiling with class rage, spite, boredom, maliciousness, immaturity, self-contempt, and an Amisian-Larkinesque view of women? Sure. He's an antihero all the way down. Here's Dixon in the morning: "Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.” Now I feel like rereading some Wodehouse and maybe The Loved One.

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Here is the close of this post, written a day after Sayfullo Saipov, the man whose name means "Sword of Allah," mowed down bicyclists in Manhattan: "After hearing another New York round of generic responses and platitudes following the latest terrorist attack, I think we all need to send our politicians a well-written book or two. And maybe that should include a novel or two so they can begin to understand that not every human being thinks alike." But now that closing is already out of date, as we go on to the next massacre, alas.

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I practice imaginative eliminativism about the category of entities known as "politicians." This is always a problem on election day.

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Tonight I voted, and it was all so very Village of Cooperstown. First I walked with my husband to the Vets Club and had the traditional Rotary Club pancake dinner (with sausages from The Otesaga, mind you.) And I saw and chattered with all sorts of people I knew (including the former mayor, Carole) and was served by other people I knew (and the one I didn't know my husband knew and I promptly met.) Then we went a couple of blocks to the polling station, where I also saw lots of people I knew, voted for people I knew, hugged people I knew (especially Janet, whose birthday it was, and MaryAnne, who I hadn't seen in a long time), laughed with people I knew, received invitations from people I knew, and was asked if I was old enough to vote by somebody I knew (the sassy Rick, naturally.) So village-y. So lovely. So astonishingly NORMAN APPLE PIE AMERICA ROCKWELL! Okay, maybe not Norman Rockwell but pretty dear. Sometimes being a Southerner in Yankeedom is sweet. Yep.

And hey--it snowed. First flakes of the season. Pretty late, but I still resent it on principle. Southern principle.

What survives

Ramesses II

The only thing that ever survives from a culture is its arts. Political power is transient. Political power is nothing. It will vanish.  The most powerful man in the world is nobody. The only way we remember any of the powerful men of the world is the way they were captured by artists, often anonymous artists in ancient Egypt and Rome. The bequest of any civilization and the test of its quality is its arts. I feel that the left and the right, everyone across the political spectrum is guilty of offenses against the arts, and I hope that you will now go forth and be ambassadors for the arts. 

           --Camille Paglia, minus a few okays and may be a so or two

The echo chamber

On Camille Paglia, "How Capitalism Can Save Art"

While I don't agree that there are no interesting new works in visual arts, and I also don't agree that there are no influential painters or other artists, I did find much of this article relevant to both visual arts and writing.

As for artists, try looking for those who are not "of" the trendy, commercial art world. Look in unexpected places. (The same goes for writers. Think that too many writers who win awards and are lauded are the "expected" names and sometimes undeserving? Cast your net wider.)

As for influence makers, look to painters like Makoto Fujimura, who founded International Arts Movement and has been a great leader in realms of painting, the arts, and religion. Take a look at his biography here if you don't believe artists can be leaders on the national and world-wide level--presidential appointee to the National Council of Arts, founder of IAM and the Fujimura Institute, an artist with solo shows around the world, a speaker and culture maker.

I would like to see an energetic critic tackle the art world (and the writing world) we barely see and explore those who deliberately work outside the fashionable, the mainstream, and the academic. Past years of postmodernism and political correctness transformed and even now dictate what is acceptable in the eyes of art journalists.

A few clips that might make you want to read the whole thing:

Unfortunately, too many artists have lost touch with the general audience and have retreated to an airless echo chamber. The art world, like humanities faculties, suffers from a monolithic political orthodoxy—an upper-middle-class liberalism far from the fiery antiestablishment leftism of the 1960s.

Today's blasé liberal secularism also departs from the respectful exploration of world religions that characterized the 1960s. Artists can now win attention by imitating once-risky shock gestures of sexual exhibitionism or sacrilege.

This trend began over two decades ago with Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ," a photograph of a plastic crucifix in a jar of the artist's urine . . . However, museums and galleries would never tolerate equally satirical treatment of Judaism or Islam.

For the arts to revive in the U.S., young artists must be rescued from their sanitized middle-class backgrounds. We need a revalorization of the trades . . .

Creativity is in fact flourishing untrammeled in the applied arts, above all industrial design. . . . But there is no spiritual dimension to an iPhone, as there is to great works of art.

. . . a strange and contradictory culture, where the most talented college students are ideologically indoctrinated with contempt for the economic system that made their freedom, comforts and privileges possible.

In the realm of arts and letters, religion is dismissed as reactionary and unhip. The spiritual language even of major abstract artists like Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko is ignored or suppressed.