The Critical Sphere

Ron Silliman on the sentimentalizing of poetry--even good poetry:

Poetry can be the linguistic equivalent of weight training – an experience of language in all its resistance, a world in which “more difficult” does in fact mean “better.” Or it can be hollowed out in service entirely to the referent, an almost weightless domain of “experience.” Whenever the latter happens, however, social institutions (including those that replicate themselves inside of us) institute an almost automatic hierarchy of such experiences & emotions. This is why it’s so easy for people to falsify memoirs of dark beginnings & upward striving. We want to believe. We want to think that poetry can heal the rift between mother & son, even in the light of a conflict started under false pretenses with no clear goal or end in sight. But no amount of poetry is going to solve the problems of Iraq.

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Mirkwood on Albert Camus' The Fall, the only one of Camus' books I myself haven't read:

I marveled at the economy of Camus, at his ability to chart in very few pages the erosion of a man’s conscience from the first glimpses of corruption to the full realization and acceptance that he is a monster through and through. The experience of following Jean-Baptiste Clamence and his mysterious acquaintance through the seedier parts of Amsterdam is not a pleasant one, but there is something very precise about it: Unlike any other author I can think off, Camus appears simultaneously to be dissecting his protagonist and to be peering into his reader’s soul with a magnifying glass and a question, “Aren’t you just like my Clamence?”

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I agree with Self-Styled Siren that the waning of Gene Kelly's career after the closing down of the MGM "Freed unit" prematurely ended an important career and that in the wake of It's Always Fair Weather Kelly "was poised to take the musical in even more varied and unexpected directions." The Kelly musicals of the 40s and 50s (as well as the Astaire musicals of the 30s) remain the only American musicals that stand up as great filmmaking. Nothing since has come close to them.

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One-Way Street succinctly sums up the legacy of Robert Rauschenberg:

The Rauschenberg canvas wasn't a screen upon which the artist projected his psyche, nor was it a window onto the world. Rather, it was a surface upon which the real leaves its traces and language drops its extraneous signs. In this sense Rauschenberg was the bridge between modernism and postmodernism.

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Scott Esposito insightfully identifies the flaws in the latest attempt to apply "science" to the study of literature:

More than it's futility, though, Gottschall's idea reminds me of nothing more than the fact that this has all been done before, and far more interestingly. Northrop Frye tried to create a scientific underpinning for literature--not by submitting a bunch of pseudo-literary maxims to scientific tests but by creating a theory of modes that, if it failed to place all of literary studies on a scientific basis, still created a very worthwhile structure for encountering and understanding the whole of Western literature. Similarly, Roland Barthes and the structuralists may have failed (inevitably . . .) at turning literature into science, but they did create another very useful framework for encountering a text. These, to me, are the worthwhile attempts to place art on a scientific footing. They are the products of singular genuises carving out a path somewhere between the two disciplines. They are not a simple transference of the scientific method to literature.

Comments

[Campaspe]

Thank you very much for the link, as always! I would respectfully submit that Astaire did some brilliant films in the 1950s, including the Minnelli-directed The Band Wagon. I also love Yolanda and the Thief but I am resigned to loneliness on that one. Have you seen Invitation to the Dance?

[Dan Green]

You're of course right that Astaire made some very good films in the 50s. I'm especially fond of Funny Face. I have seen all of Kelly's films, I believe. I agree with you that Invitation to the Dance is one of his most innovative.