What are you Reading?
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foxthegoldrushfox
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Work Well with Other by Ross McCammon. Now that you are reminded by asking, I shall continue reading , hoping to finish it soon
Hermes2020
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I am halfway through reading The Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent in His World, which is Paul Fisher's fascinating and revealing biography of John Singer Sargent. I can recommend it to anyone who loves Sargent's art and who is interested to explore the contrasts between his public persona and his private life.
stlukesguild
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I've just begun to peruse the poetry of Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste, comte de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (now there's a mouthful! 
).
Once again, Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste was a late 19th century French "symbolist" poet from within the circle of Nerval, Gautier, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Stéphane Mallarmé, etc...
).Once again, Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste was a late 19th century French "symbolist" poet from within the circle of Nerval, Gautier, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Stéphane Mallarmé, etc...
MrBungle
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i have had issues with procrastination a lot lately. Especially after Hurricane Ian destroyed everything outside I owned.
here’s the audio version of this book I didn’t know about. Highly recomend This book if you can. It’s helped a lot and about to go through it again with the Audio
here’s the audio version of this book I didn’t know about. Highly recomend This book if you can. It’s helped a lot and about to go through it again with the Audio
Artyczar
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You might like Art & Fear. I can recommend a few others, but will have to remember the titles later after I make my way through catching up on the site since I haven't been here in a while.
stlukesguild
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Just re-read Alain Robbe-Grillet's "story", The Secret Room. I put the word "story" in quotes because this work breaks many of the expectations of a short story. One might almost deem it to be a prose poem (a popular form with French writers including Baudelaire and Rimbaud) or a series of almost cinematic vignettes in reverse order chronologically. In the final paragraph, Robbe-Grillet describes the scene... an exotic sex-murder suggestive of Baudelaire among others... as a "canvas". Is it perhaps even the description of a painting... or a series of paintings? I am currently exploring ideas leading toward a number of suites of paintings inspired by late 19th-century "symbolist:" authors including Poe, Baudelaire, Gautier, etc... and this tale/prose poem certainly fits the mold.
stlukesguild
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As I've been re-exploring symbolist poets... especially the French... I recently turned to the enfant terrible: Arthur Rimbaud. As all my Rimbaud books are still in storage, I turned to Amazon and ordered new copies of the two marvelous books: Illuminations and The Season in Hell (which includes The Drunken Boat) both in the great translations by Louise Varèse, the wife of the composer Edgard Varèse. Beyond her brilliant translations of Rimbaud, Louise was a possible candidate for the "female friend" behind Duchamp's Fountain. He mentions her in a letter to his sister: "Une de mes amies sous un pseudonyme masculin, Richard Mutt, avait envoyé une pissotière en porcelaine comme sculpture" ("One of my female friends under a masculine pseudonym, Richard Mutt, sent in a porcelain urinal as a sculpture.") At the same time, I picked up a copy of John Ashbery's translation of Illuminations as well. The American poet, Ashbery was profoundly influenced by French Symbolism and Surrealism and so I thought I'd check out his translation as well.
stlukesguild
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Having dug up a slew of books out of storage, I put the French Symbolists on a temporary pause and started reading a couple Elizabethan "faerie tales" in verse: Michael Drayton's Nimphidia and Edmund Spenser's Muiopotmos; or The Fate of the Butterflie. Both of these early English faerie tales remind me of the atmosphere of Shakespeare's Mid-Summer Night's Dream... and both can be easily read in a single sitting... something that Edgar Allan Poe argued in favor of. Like Shakespeare's works, both of these poems make delicious use of language.
brianvds
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Got hold of an anthology of science fiction stories. The blurb says they are mostly from around the 1930s to 1950s, and include stories by some big guns, so I just dove in. The first one is titled A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, by one James de Mille, whom I had never heard of before.
It's a strange but very readable account of a sailor's wild adventure in Antarctica, which in the story is something of tropical paradise! The sheer weirdness of this made me go look up the author, and to my surprise it turns out he was a 19th century Canadian. I say to my surprise, because (at least thus far) the story is so readable. I find a great deal of 19th century literature to be the literary equivalent of trying to swim through an ocean of thick treacle, and for the most part, I can't stand it.
De Mille demonstrates that being a 19th century writer did not in fact compel anyone to write florid sentences that stretch over three pages, and that the poor reader has to read twenty times to parse any meaning out of them. For some reason I can only guess at, they mostly just chose to write that way. Not James de Mille: I have not yet needed a dictionary even once. The story is fast paced and gives one an interesting peek into a time when Antarctica was virtually completely unknown. I can only surmise that some scientists seriously thought its unexplored interior might have a pleasant climate.
We may laugh, but I well remember that when I was a kid, some people still held out hope that Mars might have a pleasant climate and possibly some indigenous life, and not long before that, many researchers had similar hopes for Venus. Well, Mars turned out to be a freezer, and Venus an oven, and so now we look towards the distant stars in the hopes of finding Earth #2.
Anyway, it's been ages since I have read much in the way of SF, so thus far I'm having fun.
It's a strange but very readable account of a sailor's wild adventure in Antarctica, which in the story is something of tropical paradise! The sheer weirdness of this made me go look up the author, and to my surprise it turns out he was a 19th century Canadian. I say to my surprise, because (at least thus far) the story is so readable. I find a great deal of 19th century literature to be the literary equivalent of trying to swim through an ocean of thick treacle, and for the most part, I can't stand it.
De Mille demonstrates that being a 19th century writer did not in fact compel anyone to write florid sentences that stretch over three pages, and that the poor reader has to read twenty times to parse any meaning out of them. For some reason I can only guess at, they mostly just chose to write that way. Not James de Mille: I have not yet needed a dictionary even once. The story is fast paced and gives one an interesting peek into a time when Antarctica was virtually completely unknown. I can only surmise that some scientists seriously thought its unexplored interior might have a pleasant climate.
We may laugh, but I well remember that when I was a kid, some people still held out hope that Mars might have a pleasant climate and possibly some indigenous life, and not long before that, many researchers had similar hopes for Venus. Well, Mars turned out to be a freezer, and Venus an oven, and so now we look towards the distant stars in the hopes of finding Earth #2.
Anyway, it's been ages since I have read much in the way of SF, so thus far I'm having fun.
stlukesguild
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Brian, the 19th-century authors aren't the only ones famous for their florid, tangled, convoluted prose. Most of them could not hold a candle to James Joyce or Proust (the champion of endless sentences and paragraphs)... both of whom were 20th-century masters. And of course, there are any number of authors who were masters of complex and complicated language from the 18th and 17th centuries. But then, I have always got the feeling you are into writing that simply and clearly gets to the point. But what is "the point?" It seems to me... and a good many other lovers of literature... that the "point" of literature isn't getting to the point or some ultimate "meaning". Unfortunately, this is how literature is often taught at the lower grade-school level. Rather, think of literature in the same way as you think of music. It is the experience... the journey... that is to be enjoyed. Well-written "florid" language is something to be enjoyed as much as the lush orchestration of Mahler or Wagner. This is even more true of poetry... where the form... the structure... is as important as the language. 20th-century poetry... T.S. Eliot, Eugenio Montale, Geoffrey Hill, Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Pessoa, etc... can be far more dense and challenging than anything by Dickens, the Brontës, Jane Austin, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Victor Hugo, etc... Perhaps... in some way... the appreciation of many works of literature... many works of any art... is something of an acquired taste... like developing a liking and discernment for fine wines, whiskey, tequila, or coffee.
Having said that, I'm back reading Rimbaud's Illuminations. I don't know that I would call Rimbaud's language "florid". In many ways it's rather minimalist... or crystalline... but certainly poetic.
Most of them could not hold a candle to James Joyce or Proust (the champion of endless sentences and paragraphs)... both of whom were 20th-century masters. And of course, there are any number of authors who were masters of complex and complicated language from the 18th and 17th centuries. But then, I have always got the feeling you are into writing that simply and clearly gets to the point. But what is "the point?" It seems to me... and a good many other lovers of literature... that the "point" of literature isn't getting to the point or some ultimate "meaning". Unfortunately, this is how literature is often taught at the lower grade-school level. Rather, think of literature in the same way as you think of music. It is the experience... the journey... that is to be enjoyed. Well-written "florid" language is something to be enjoyed as much as the lush orchestration of Mahler or Wagner. This is even more true of poetry... where the form... the structure... is as important as the language. 20th-century poetry... T.S. Eliot, Eugenio Montale, Geoffrey Hill, Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Pessoa, etc... can be far more dense and challenging than anything by Dickens, the Brontës, Jane Austin, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Victor Hugo, etc... Perhaps... in some way... the appreciation of many works of literature... many works of any art... is something of an acquired taste... like developing a liking and discernment for fine wines, whiskey, tequila, or coffee.Having said that, I'm back reading Rimbaud's Illuminations. I don't know that I would call Rimbaud's language "florid". In many ways it's rather minimalist... or crystalline... but certainly poetic.
brianvds
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Brian, the 19th-century authors aren't the only ones famous for their florid, tangled, convoluted prose.
It is indeed so that the 20th century can be even worse in terms of weirdness and obscurantism. What I find peculiar about the 19th century is that even their popular literature was often written that way. Imagine someone like Dan Brown writing that way - he'd promptly lose all his readers.
As I have noted before, it's not that I'm completely allergic to any form of "difficult literature." My question is always whether it is worth it. As student I plowed through some rather thick and difficult textbooks. Hard work all the way, but at least to me, very much worth it because of insights I gained into the very workings of nature.
I had no similar sense of meaningful experience when I finally got to the last page of Oliver Twist.
It seems to me... and a good many other lovers of literature... that the "point" of literature isn't getting to the point or some ultimate "meaning". Unfortunately, this is how literature is often taught at the lower grade-school level. Rather, think of literature in the same way as you think of music. It is the experience... the journey... that is to be enjoyed. Well-written "florid" language is something to be enjoyed as much as the lush orchestration of Mahler or Wagner.
Actually saw an interesting video on YouTube the other day that made that exact point about poetry: that it isn't some riddle to be solved; one should, instead of trying to "get" poetry, simply read it. With poetry I can still deal with that, but it's a bit much to "simply read" through some thick brick of a book, and by the end, if someone asked me what it was all about, being unable to tell them.
Speaking of those, I very much enjoyed RLS's Treasure Island, and managed to get through Dracula, perhaps simply because I rather like that sort of dark tale. Stoker was also a bit long-winded to my taste, but at least it was a tale about a quite exotic monster rather than boring middle class people.
As for modern poets, some of them are going to find themselves challenged by AI, I think.
I do enjoy some by Yeats, mind you, thanks once again to YouTube randomly suggesting videos, which introduced me to this lovely setting of a quite ravishing early poem by Yeats:
I have no doubt that this is the case, and that it is an ongoing process. As I recall, my brother's taste in literature started with Wilbur Smith; in his teens he devoured most of what the bloke wrote. Nowadays his tastes are probably quite similar to yours: he loves Dickens, Hemingway, and more contemporary writers like Cormac McCarthy. Me, I never got very far beyond Wilbur Smith.
At times this bothered me. I had this sense of missing out on something. But every time I tried to read more sophisticated literature, it turned into grimly plowing through thick tomes, alternating between battling to understand and battling to stay awake.
So it goes. My brother's taste in literature is highly sophisticated; his tastes in music, not so much. And thus, I feel he's missing out on all manner of great stuff. I have long felt that way about music in a general sort of way: an almost missionary sort of zeal to try to convert people to Bach - they're after all horribly missing out!
And then I got older and wiser, and realized that there's no converting anyone to anything. Most people are never going to get my tastes in music, any more than I will ever get their tastes in literature. I will miss out on whatever it is people get out of Dickens, and they will never experience the almost religious ecstasy that I do when listening to some pieces of music.
I wouldn't know - I'd have to learn French first.
Hey, I did get al sophisticated some time ago, when I tried out some stories by Lovecraft. I after all like horror and science fiction. My verdict thus far has been that his stories are so-so, readable, but don't really blow me away, though I can see why he's highly regarded as a pioneer of that sort of thing.
OliveOyl
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I read the John Ashbery translation of Illuminations but I don’t remember why. It’s not my usual kind of book but I DO remember that I liked it. It WAS sort of fun, like taking a little word journey and at the end you think…whew…where did I just go? Maybe you have to let the logical/practical, side of your mind go and just feel whatever bits and pieces make their way in beneath the skin. That’s hard for me to do but sometimes I can manage it, but only when the writer is very good.
Artyczar
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Actually saw an interesting video on YouTube the other day that made that exact point about poetry: that it isn't some riddle to be solved; one should, instead of trying to "get" poetry, simply read it. With poetry I can still deal with that, but it's a bit much to "simply read" through some thick brick of a book, and by the end, if someone asked me what it was all about, being unable to tell them.
stlukesguild
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As I have noted before, it's not that I'm completely allergic to any form of "difficult literature." My question is always whether it is worth it. As student I plowed through some rather thick and difficult textbooks. Hard work all the way, but at least to me, very much worth it because of insights I gained into the very workings of nature.
I had no similar sense of meaningful experience when I finally got to the last page of Oliver Twist.
There is an interesting essay on just this subject by Thomas De Quincey. He differentiates between the "literature" of knowledge and that of Art... and notes that while the "literature of knowledge" is often more to the point... it is also the most rapidly antiquated. No matter how brilliant a work on physics or biology or medicine is... it will be rapidly outdated by more recent research and discovery... or even by a book that puts the same knowledge into a better structure or language. This is not true of literature as Art.
Actually saw an interesting video on YouTube the other day that made that exact point about poetry: that it isn't some riddle to be solved; one should, instead of trying to "get" poetry, simply read it. With poetry I can still deal with that, but it's a bit much to "simply read" through some thick brick of a book, and by the end, if someone asked me what it was all about, being unable to tell them.
I remember my upper grade-school literature classes in which we approached books in just that manner: as riddles to be deciphered. We were tasked to uncover "What is the theme?" "What is the moral?" and "What is the meaning?" But ask yourself, "what is the 'meaning' of Mozart's Clarinet Quintet?" "What is the 'meaning' of this that makes it resonate over centuries:
"What is the 'meaning' of Life?" Again... it seems to me it is the experience and not some end definition that matters.
Stoker was also a bit long-winded to my taste, but at least it was a tale about a quite exotic monster rather than boring middle class people.
I might agree with you here. As I believe I have made clear more than once, I am not a "realist" by any means. When it comes to painting, I have little interest in rendering still-life paintings of the everyday crap laying around the house or landscapes of the crap outside my door. Ironically... you seem far more drawn to such things.
I am far more drawn to the fantastic myself.
I do enjoy some by Yeats, mind you, thanks once again to YouTube randomly suggesting videos, which introduced me to this lovely setting of a quite ravishing early poem by Yeats:
Once again, it seems ironic perhaps... that you are more attracted to the 19th century Yeats who was more of a Symbolist akin to Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, etc... than to the latter Modernist Yeats who was more akin to T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane, Ezra Pound, etc...
So it goes. My brother's taste in literature is highly sophisticated; his tastes in music, not so much. And thus, I feel he's missing out on all manner of great stuff. I have long felt that way about music in a general sort of way: an almost missionary sort of zeal to try to convert people to Bach - they're after all horribly missing out!
And then I got older and wiser, and realized that there's no converting anyone to anything. Most people are never going to get my tastes in music, any more than I will ever get their tastes in literature. I will miss out on whatever it is people get out of Dickens, and they will never experience the almost religious ecstasy that I do when listening to some pieces of music.
True... and yet it seems only natural that we wish to share our Artistic loves with others.
I had no similar sense of meaningful experience when I finally got to the last page of Oliver Twist.
There is an interesting essay on just this subject by Thomas De Quincey. He differentiates between the "literature" of knowledge and that of Art... and notes that while the "literature of knowledge" is often more to the point... it is also the most rapidly antiquated. No matter how brilliant a work on physics or biology or medicine is... it will be rapidly outdated by more recent research and discovery... or even by a book that puts the same knowledge into a better structure or language. This is not true of literature as Art.
Actually saw an interesting video on YouTube the other day that made that exact point about poetry: that it isn't some riddle to be solved; one should, instead of trying to "get" poetry, simply read it. With poetry I can still deal with that, but it's a bit much to "simply read" through some thick brick of a book, and by the end, if someone asked me what it was all about, being unable to tell them.
I remember my upper grade-school literature classes in which we approached books in just that manner: as riddles to be deciphered. We were tasked to uncover "What is the theme?" "What is the moral?" and "What is the meaning?" But ask yourself, "what is the 'meaning' of Mozart's Clarinet Quintet?" "What is the 'meaning' of this that makes it resonate over centuries:
"What is the 'meaning' of Life?" Again... it seems to me it is the experience and not some end definition that matters.
Stoker was also a bit long-winded to my taste, but at least it was a tale about a quite exotic monster rather than boring middle class people.
I might agree with you here. As I believe I have made clear more than once, I am not a "realist" by any means. When it comes to painting, I have little interest in rendering still-life paintings of the everyday crap laying around the house or landscapes of the crap outside my door. Ironically... you seem far more drawn to such things.
I am far more drawn to the fantastic myself.I do enjoy some by Yeats, mind you, thanks once again to YouTube randomly suggesting videos, which introduced me to this lovely setting of a quite ravishing early poem by Yeats:
Once again, it seems ironic perhaps... that you are more attracted to the 19th century Yeats who was more of a Symbolist akin to Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, etc... than to the latter Modernist Yeats who was more akin to T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane, Ezra Pound, etc...
So it goes. My brother's taste in literature is highly sophisticated; his tastes in music, not so much. And thus, I feel he's missing out on all manner of great stuff. I have long felt that way about music in a general sort of way: an almost missionary sort of zeal to try to convert people to Bach - they're after all horribly missing out!
And then I got older and wiser, and realized that there's no converting anyone to anything. Most people are never going to get my tastes in music, any more than I will ever get their tastes in literature. I will miss out on whatever it is people get out of Dickens, and they will never experience the almost religious ecstasy that I do when listening to some pieces of music.
True... and yet it seems only natural that we wish to share our Artistic loves with others.
brianvds
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True, though the literature of knowledge is ultimately fundamentally about method rather than conclusion. It is of course true that at undergraduate level, a lot of emphasis is placed on basic facts. Also, there are such things as classics of the literature of knowledge, because knowledge has an element of beauty too. Euclid, Newton and Darwin's great insights are still enjoyed today - though it is noteworthy that few people read them in the original. Perhaps someone should translate Shakespeare and Dickens to English.
Another asymmetry: it seems to me literature and poetry have a greater tendency to also become antiquated, in a way visual art and music do not, because they are more dependent on knowledge of language and culture. Few of us could read what either Plato or Paul said without a team of translators as go-betweens, and any real understanding of them depends to at least some extent on understanding something of their culture. Not so much with art produced at the time.
But how do we grade experiences in a standardized test?
Stoker was also a bit long-winded to my taste, but at least it was a tale about a quite exotic monster rather than boring middle class people.
I might agree with you here. As I believe I have made clear more than once, I am not a "realist" by any means. When it comes to painting, I have little interest in rendering still-life paintings of the everyday crap laying around the house or landscapes of the crap outside my door. Ironically... you seem far more drawn to such things.
Yup, very true, and I have long ago given up on understanding either myself or my tastes. I do indeed often enjoy the most coldly precise art depicting the everyday. It may be simply because I have had such an endless battle achieving basic realism, so that I find it an endlessly interesting challenge. If I ever succeed, it might also begin to bore me.
Even as we speak I am once again engaged in trying to improve my basic drawing skills, and once again struggling, after thirty years at it, to master stuff that most students manage in six months. But this time round I feel I'm making real progress.
Indeed, and I have noticed this about myself too: when it comes to poetry, I find the 19th century far easier than the 20th, and indeed, there is a lot there that I much enjoy, even as I mostly cannot stand their literature! Whereas with novels, the more recently one was written, the more likely it is that I will be able to get something out of it, but I often find contemporary poetry utterly mystifying. Once again, I do not pretend to make sense of myself on this point.
Natural indeed, but an impulse I nowadays try to control. It has mostly been a waste of time.
stlukesguild
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Perhaps someone should translate Shakespeare and Dickens to English.
Honestly, Shakespeare's and certainly Dickens' language don't strike me as overly difficult... although Shakespeare's work can be quite dense or multilayered. Ezra Pound famously suggested that anyone unwilling to put forth the effort to master the vocabulary needed to read Chaucer in the original should be banned from ever reading good literature again. I can't say I disagree.
Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licóur
Of which vertú engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye,
So priketh hem Natúre in hir corages,
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially, from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.
it seems to me literature and poetry have a greater tendency to also become antiquated, in a way visual art and music do not, because they are more dependent on knowledge of language and culture. Few of us could read what either Plato or Paul said without a team of translators as go-betweens, and any real understanding of them depends to at least some extent on understanding something of their culture. Not so much with art produced at the time.
Yes, for the vast amount of literature, we rely on an interpreter to go between the original text and us. I depend upon translators in order to read Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Goethe, Dante, etc... But we might say the same is true of all music before the innovation of sound recording. We listen to Karajan's or Furtwangler's or Murray Perahia's interpretations of Wagner, Beethoven, or Mozart. But I think we should be honest and admit that almost all Art demands that the audience invest a certain effort into understanding. A painting like this might be appreciated purely for what we see:
... it's a lovely landscape... beautifully painted... with all sorts of strange things going on. But a greater investment in studying the culture and history and iconography will open up the work to further levels of appreciation. Many artists employed imagery and iconography drawn from what was likely thought of as a "universal narrative". "Everyone" knew what these paintings were about:
... or did they? Certainly, the Biblical narratives were universally understood by the educated Europeans... but what of those living in the Middle East or Japan? The subject and narrative of a painting such as this was likely "universally" understood by the educated individuals in the Islamic World as the paintings above are to us in the West.
But how do we grade experiences in a standardized test?
And isn't that a large part of the problem? I'm not saying that we should see Art as nothing but a meaningless experience. I am saying that the audience brings their own "meanings" and "interpretations" to works of Art. The idea that there is a single correct "meaning" and "moral" and "feeling" to be had from a work of Art strikes me as wrong... but then the education administrators need these clear objective interpretations... an unquestionable right or wrong.
Even as we speak I am once again engaged in trying to improve my basic drawing skills, and once again struggling, after thirty years at it, to master stuff that most students manage in six months. But this time round I feel I'm making real progress.
I have drawn things since I was 6. All that I made before the age of 65 is not worth counting. At 73 I began to understand the true construction of animals, plants, trees, birds, fishes, and insects. At 90 I will enter into the secret of things. At 110, everything - every dot, every dash - will live. To all of you who are going to live as long as I do, I promise to keep my word. I am writing this in my old age, I used to call myself Hokusai, but today I sign myself 'The Old Man Mad About Drawing.'
If heaven gives me ten more years, or an extension of even five years, I shall surely become a true artist.
Honestly, Shakespeare's and certainly Dickens' language don't strike me as overly difficult... although Shakespeare's work can be quite dense or multilayered. Ezra Pound famously suggested that anyone unwilling to put forth the effort to master the vocabulary needed to read Chaucer in the original should be banned from ever reading good literature again.
I can't say I disagree.Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licóur
Of which vertú engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye,
So priketh hem Natúre in hir corages,
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially, from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.
it seems to me literature and poetry have a greater tendency to also become antiquated, in a way visual art and music do not, because they are more dependent on knowledge of language and culture. Few of us could read what either Plato or Paul said without a team of translators as go-betweens, and any real understanding of them depends to at least some extent on understanding something of their culture. Not so much with art produced at the time.
Yes, for the vast amount of literature, we rely on an interpreter to go between the original text and us. I depend upon translators in order to read Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Goethe, Dante, etc... But we might say the same is true of all music before the innovation of sound recording. We listen to Karajan's or Furtwangler's or Murray Perahia's interpretations of Wagner, Beethoven, or Mozart. But I think we should be honest and admit that almost all Art demands that the audience invest a certain effort into understanding. A painting like this might be appreciated purely for what we see:
... it's a lovely landscape... beautifully painted... with all sorts of strange things going on. But a greater investment in studying the culture and history and iconography will open up the work to further levels of appreciation. Many artists employed imagery and iconography drawn from what was likely thought of as a "universal narrative". "Everyone" knew what these paintings were about:
... or did they? Certainly, the Biblical narratives were universally understood by the educated Europeans... but what of those living in the Middle East or Japan? The subject and narrative of a painting such as this was likely "universally" understood by the educated individuals in the Islamic World as the paintings above are to us in the West.
But how do we grade experiences in a standardized test?
And isn't that a large part of the problem? I'm not saying that we should see Art as nothing but a meaningless experience. I am saying that the audience brings their own "meanings" and "interpretations" to works of Art. The idea that there is a single correct "meaning" and "moral" and "feeling" to be had from a work of Art strikes me as wrong... but then the education administrators need these clear objective interpretations... an unquestionable right or wrong.
Even as we speak I am once again engaged in trying to improve my basic drawing skills, and once again struggling, after thirty years at it, to master stuff that most students manage in six months. But this time round I feel I'm making real progress.
I have drawn things since I was 6. All that I made before the age of 65 is not worth counting. At 73 I began to understand the true construction of animals, plants, trees, birds, fishes, and insects. At 90 I will enter into the secret of things. At 110, everything - every dot, every dash - will live. To all of you who are going to live as long as I do, I promise to keep my word. I am writing this in my old age, I used to call myself Hokusai, but today I sign myself 'The Old Man Mad About Drawing.'
If heaven gives me ten more years, or an extension of even five years, I shall surely become a true artist.
