eye of the storm

lake champlain, 20 august 2009, by joan brown.

profound yet half-assed observations on the future of beauty (and sex).

saw the year's first hummingbird at my feeder today. seems very early!

i'm kinda broke. but were i obscenely flush i'd go our and buy eakinses, deacquired by the hirschorn.

you might check this out: a panel including me, on beauty, circa 2006.

last in the beauty series: the decline of beauty: politics and art.

fourth in beauty series: subjectivity and pleasure: hume, kant, santyana.

third in the video series on beauty: classical conceptions.

second in the beauty series: idealist theories (plato, plotinus, hegel).

a bit underoccupied on my break, i'm doing a series of youtube vids on the nature, history, and politics of beauty.

so my mother and i were driving through the mountains of southern west virginia, and we decided to drive up off the two-lane highway into one of the hollows. (now: isn't this problematic? we were actually doing poverty tourism.) there were some shacks, dead cars etc, but also beautifully kept little homes. and we got to the end of the road and there was this house with hummingbird feeders and hummingbird-loved flowers all over. and there were dozens and dozens of hummingbirds, buzzing and swarming like bees, one of the wildest of most beautiful sights i've ever seen. it was a kind of work of installation art made by collaboration with the manufacturers of hummingbird feeders and the situation of being embedded in that particular environment. and of course someone's eccentric sensibility and constant care.

well, now! i believe that i just saw a coyote near my house. i live near the towns of new freedom and shrewsbury, pa, but right around here it's very rural; since the trees leafed out i can't see another house, and there are miles of alternating farm fields and pretty old-growth woods behind me. i had heard rumors of coyotes around here, but didn't take them real seriously. sucker was bigger than i would have thought, as well. grey/red/brown, with more tail than any domestic dog, and definitely moving in a way you'd never see a dog move: mad hops over a briar barrier.

as y'all know, i'm at work on the american radical abolitionist nathaniel peabody rogers. here's a passage from his 1842 review of cobbett's american gardener.

    This work on gardening is a modest, unpretending book, like all sterling productions. It is written in a style as beautiful as the subject, and as natural as a garden ought to be. It is worth buying for the style of it, aside from the information it contains. Every body can understand it at a glance, without a dictionary. And the book that can't be, ought never to be read. These books that abound in dictionary words, are learned nonsense and imposition. Cobbett's Gardener is full of short, every day words, which the people can understand, as readily as they can tell an onion stalk, or a cabbage plant. It is like Pierpont's poetry in that - abounding in monosyllabled words. You will find whole lines of them uninterrupted, every one as full of meaning, as it can hold - the beautiful, strong, old Saxon - the talk-words - words for use, and not for show. Every young man and woman, who has been injured in their talk and writing by going to school, ought to buy Cobbett's Gardener, or some other of his works. A young collegian should read it twice a day, till he gets well of his pedantry. Cobbett will cure him if any body can.
     "Do you teach your sons Latin, Mr. Cobbett?" asked a gentleman. "No," said the common-sense sage - "but I learn them to shave with cold water!" A bit of learning worth more to a man with a beard, than all the Latin the Monkery ever preserved from the ruins of Rome.
   You can understand the "Gardener" with once reading, just as readily as you could talk of a sensible gardener himself - and those who have followed it, say it turns out to be true - contrary to the fact of most agricultural books, which are mere speculations and theorizing, which no body can afford to practise. The subject of this book is a beautiful one to read of and talk of, if you have not any ground to work it out  on. Gardening - nothing is more interesting or profiting. We associate Paradise always with the idea of it. The great Lord Bacon (by the way not half the man that Cobbett was) said "Gardening was the purest of human pleasures." One of his famous "Essays" was "Of Gardening," if I remember the title.  But he wrote of a garden for kings and princes, - Cobbett's gardens are for men - for families - and that speaks of the difference between the two authors . Bacon was a worshipper and slave of kings, - Cobbett a friend of man. The learned world call the one "The great Sir Francis Bacon," and the other Cobbett or Bill Cobbett.
    A glorious garden, whether small or large, is a sort of Eden, and it is a fine idea, whether it was a literal fact, or an allegory merely, to show God's kindness to the man and woman He had made, that He put them, at their beginning, into a garden, "to dress it and to keep it." We fancy Eden was every thing a garden could be; but I dare say it would not have hurt Adam and Eve to have put into their hands a copy of Cobbett, written in the primeval language of humanity, which, whatever it was, they spoke, no doubt, in the same style Cobbett writes.

well,  i wish i were the dad, but what ya gonna do? i take "kingston" to be a tribute to jamaican music. good idea.

fake

Beautiful Things: Fake Flowers
By Crispin Sartwell

"Fake flowers are better than real," my five-year-old daughter Jane told me recently in a restaurant bestrewn with artificial phlox, "because they don't get all messed up."
     I always thought of fake flowers as a signal failure of taste. Indeed, I think that even in a case where they look precisely the same, real flowers are beautiful and fake flowers are not.
     Beauty is connected with time. What is beautiful is fragile or elusive.  Experiencing something beautiful is poignant because it is a longing. The beautiful thing calls on us to long because it is already being lost.
    This is as true of persons as of flowers and despite the efforts of cosmetic companies and plastic surgeons, a lovely girl is also a cut flower. "To the virgins, to make much of time."
     The cut flower is, hence, not only beautiful, but a symbol of every beautiful thing - everything that blossoms, glows, and passes - which is why it accompanies the valentine, the wedding,  and the funeral. The cut flower is the central beautiful object in our culture.
     So even if they look the same, the real flower and the fake flower are antonyms: they mean oppositely.
     But the longing that a fragile beautiful thing calls forth motivates us to hold onto it, preserve it, depict it,  reproduce it. The movie starlet ages, but her image remains forever as a testimony to the moment of her bloom. Flowers themselves are one of the great subjects of painting, from Dutch painters such as Willem van Aelst who spent whole careers depicting them to Monet's water lilies.
    The fake flower represents the same impulse on an everyday level: the other day I saw a bucket of fake blue roses for sale at a gas station, with fake blue rose scent.
    Fake flowers are everywhere and they express something deep and common and sad and sweet: our inability to fully face losing what we love. Even in their ugliness, they capture and preserve our need for beauty.

weaponized aesthetics

so, i've been writing a series of mini-columns that are like little bits of "6 names of beauty." i'm still trying to find someone to sell them to, so don't tell anyone i'm putting them up on my blog.

Beautiful Things: Weapons
By Crispin Sartwell

A good weapon is a most beautiful thing.
There are few objects on which human beings have lavished more craft or ingenuity; there are few things which are as enshrouded in mystique or more redolent as symbols.
    From the enchanted object that can only be wielded by the true king; to the soul or self of the samurai; to the footsoldier's axe and pike; to the dagger, the dirk, the stiletto; to the merest shiv, lovingly sharpened: blades are objects of devotion and fantasy.
    The blade's relation to air is a figure of speed, purpose, effectiveness, an image of how, at best, we might move inside an environment.
     There is no more compact and perfect machine than a decent pistol, nothing better suited to the human hand. The Colt, the Barretta, the Glock: you can't say you're not getting riddled with symbols as well as projectiles.
    It's true that human beings are violent and destructive. But even our detractors can't say we are violent and destructive without art or without devotion or without pleasure.
    Indeed, of all the arts of our species, the art of weaponry is perhaps the furthest advanced. But it will never be perfect until it becomes capable of consuming or erasing the entire universe. The only reasonable conclusion from our devotion to the weapon is that The End is something for which we yearn.
    And though the apocalypse will be an occasion for wry, melancholy reflection, it will, of course, be beautiful, like a sunset or a supernova.