to address the glut of 'janes'. i am attempting to rechristen la irish 'camellia.' she hates it, but i am getting leverage by insisting that if it's not that, it's going to be 'freddie.'
whatever it may look like, i just want to assure you that this thing between frederick and myself is definitely not sexual. we too old for that shit, son!
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more views of mount latimore: "the inexhaustible." now more thoroughly cleaned and still wet.
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i am going to show you some images of an unbelievable stone i just glanced at and pried out of the creek bank in my nearest woods while i was looking for tray material. no number of images can do justice to this thing. all color variations are intrinsic to the stone, not dirt or algae, etc. 9" wide x 7" tall in the first view.
principles of latimore suiseki, all intended to maximize a wabi-sabi aesthetic effect and a zen/taoist spiritual practice. i love the ways the classic japanese stones are treated, and the trays of incomparable craft in which they are displayed. but i think they are incompatible with wabi-sabi aesthetics, or in tension, anyway.
(1) local stone
(2) no treatment of any sort except washing
(3) local, found supports/trays
(4) no stone is permanently installed in any display. many of these stones rest as mountains on several different faces; all must be available.
(5) typically displayed in multi-stone arrangements intended to encapsulate ranges or landscapes.
(6) arrangements should be done quickly and improvisationally, but are revisable at will by anyone who may be around.
(7) to fully appreciate the display, the stones must be handled.
(8) should be displayed outdoors and allowed to continue weathering.
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when i was working on the wabi-sabi chapter of six names of beauty, i became obsessed with the art of suiseki. i was trying to at least sample all the arts i was writing about, but i wanted this one more than any other. my son sam (12, perhaps) and i had been taking 'nature walks' since he was little; he got excited too and we searched day after day for stones, perhaps came up with a couple of decent ones. i live about 40 miles away from there now, and i suddenly realized: every damn stone in latimore township is a suiseki. jane irish and i were at an abandoned 18th-century quarry yesterday and gathered 40 great stones of all carryable sizes in as many minutes, including wild fossiles and big chunks of petrified wood. but really, a characteristic rock of this region is rounded, glittering quartz in all colors, not geodes exactly but honeycombed with crystal caves. i cannot believe it, really.
i have always wanted to have some visual practice, and i have never been as attracted to any one as much as this. so, i am just beginning. but i am going to explore a latimore-style suiseki thing, with local stone and found trays. here is a very first effort, using some of the most humble stones, only washed, arranged in a minute or two. a foot wide or so.
here are some of the smaller stones.
lake on about a 9" stone:
5" quartz mountain, wet but otherwise untreated:
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It's entirely too spring like in the high desert of California, damn it. I know I wanted nothing more ten years ago than to get out of Western Washington and the rain, but it's El Nino time and we're getting robbed here? I know the East Coast is getting slammed, and the midwest is getting slammed but...why are there no flash floods here? Where are the mudslides in LA? God is a real clown, isn't he?
Good, what an amazing morning! The two favorites in the New Hampshire primary both won big...what does it mean? I don't know, maybe Karl Rove is a lousy pollster and if you know what you're doing in a small market, you should probably be able to at least figure out 1st Place?
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You know who Crusader AXE of the Lost Causes really misses right now? Hunter Thompson? Well, yeah. Molly Ivins. Well, yeah, of course. But another voice we no longer hear commenting is Warren Zevon. Waddy Wachtel, the great session guitarist and lead player was a close friend of Zevon and related troubled geniuses, and did an interview for a European rock magazine about Zevon's first album, saying that Jackson Browne who produced it, didn't know what the fuck he was doing.
Wachtel got a call from Browne soon after that, and while wishing he hadn't said that, head Browne say that "You're exactly right. I had no clue how to handle him," followed by a offer to have him co-produce the second album, something about werewolves in London and something about lawyers.. The rest is history.
Anyway, things get a bit strange at times. We do have equivalent voices, I suppose, but I still miss the old gang. You have to wonder how Ivins would have reacted to the Bengazi nonsense or how HST would have responded to the Democrats anti-Democratic campaign in 2014. Somehow, I think Zevon's still pretty relevant.
Anyway, a Stephen Pastis cartoon, a botched raid in Yemen, and some aching from a memory in my right calf led me to think about this. I get to link absinthe, Dan George, war, Stephen Pastis in one article in a way that kind of make sense. As Steve Goodman wrote the perfect country and western song with "You Don't Have to Call Me," I have produced the perfect blog post for the 21st century. Sort of. Kinda. But this coda is needed...so here's the coda...
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the wild roses are extraordinarily successful around here: they grow up over trees and buildings.
the wild rose is the third most-dominant organism in latimore township, after poison ivy (indeed the bower of roses above is next to a scenic poison oak grove) and the stink bug. after that comes round-up and then humans (and after that, water, and then groundhogs). all of these, it might be noted, have their spiky side, and i could see getting fouled in a patch of wild rose briars and dying of starvation or blood loss. and yet they all contribute to the vicious, ravishing imbalance of nature.
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out here in adams county, it is an awfully good year for the wild roses, which are everywhere. here's the the blush pink version, though they are mostly white.
p.s. there are no non-invasive species.
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i was surprised to find out that there's a new spanish translation of six names of beauty. it's a super-cute little object, too. i look back with mortification on some moments of my writing history, but i'm happy and proud that i wrote that book.
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Beauty on the Comeback Trail
By Crispin Sartwell
Like monarchs, angels, and comedians, concepts fall, and rarely has a concept taken a more tragic or comical tumble than beauty. Once, it inhabited the sphere of ultimate value, glittering in the empyrean along with truth, goodness, and justice (all of which were considered by Plato or the romantic poets to be the same thing). Long about 1910, it got kicked downstairs to the department of hairstyling. From eternal essence it got demoted to superficial appearance.
Beauty’s pratfall was registered both in the arts and in philosophy. Picasso or De Kooning didn’t paint to make beautiful things; they painted to transform the world. And probably the last great treatments of the topic in philosophy – at least until recently – were Santayana’s Sense of Beauty (1895) and Benedetto Croce’s Aesthetic (1902).
The reasons for the indignities heaped on beauty are complex. One of them is that, beginning in the eighteenth century (for example in Hume and Kant), beauty was conceived more and more as a subjective matter, and as conceptually connected to pleasure. By the time Santayana wrote his dissertation, he could argue that beauty was actually a kind of mistake: the person who experiences beauty attributes his own subjective pleasure to the object that causes it. If beauty is entirely subjective or in the eye of the beholder, then not only is it not an eternal concept, it is not a concept at all: ‘beauty’ means whatever anyone thinks it means, and hence it means nothing.
In Romanticism and Modernism, the artist – think Beethoven, Van Gogh, Giacometti – was conceived as a genius, his works emerging inexplicably from his superhuman-but-ill skull to re-make human experience. The idea that someone like that was working to bring people pleasure would have seemed in the era an intolerable trivialization of art; we could leave that task to the entertainment or cosmetics industry. So beauty, conceived as a source or even a variety of pleasure, came to seem an unworthy goal.
And it came to be associated with what we would now call right-wing politics: with the architecture and visual expressions of the Catholic Church, with the French monarchy and its rococo kitsch, with capitalism and its robber-baron art patrons, with the Third Reich (for example in Leni Riefenstahl’s undeniably beautiful film Olympia). The left turned against beauty as a whole, and in the realm of concepts beauty was pitted against justice, luxurious ornament or conspicuous consumption against subsistence for the poor and education for the masses.
Indeed, the association of beauty and pleasure with fascism is one of the darkest episodes in the history of human consciousness. Arthur Danto, in The Abuse of Beauty, one of several important recent philosophical treatments of the topic, quotes Max Ernst, recalling the dadaists after World War I: “We had experienced the collapse into ridicule and shame of everything represented to us as just, true, and beautiful. My works of that period were not meant to attract, but to make people scream.”
Yet even after the fall, beauty has never ceased to be a fundamental human experience or even one of the reasons life is worth living. And if the beauty of a rose or a sunset seems exhausted or clichéd as a subject of art, poetry, or philosophy, we have never ceased to experience such things as beautiful, perhaps with as much purity as ever, with as much of a sense of a renewal of commitment to life and to the world.
And though such a venerable dimension of human experience and of the arts could never be entirely neglected, beauty seems to be in revival both in art and in philosophy. The first steps in making beauty viable would be to detach it conceptually from pleasure and to treat it as more than merely subjective.
Indeed, to hold that when I find a flower or a song beautiful, I am delectating my own internal states, is a horrendous solipsistic distortion. If I say that the night sky is beautiful, I want to celebrate it, not myself, and though I may be registering pleasure (though also perhaps, many other things: awe, love, freedom, fear), I am talking about the night sky, not me, or else the point of the thing is completely lost. Indeed, the idea that I am fundamentally pursuing my own pleasure in seeking out or making beautiful things is, I would say, not only obviously false, but sad: love of things outside myself is not the same as love of myself, or else it is essentially meaningless.
We ought to re-connect beauty to the experience not of pleasure, but of love and longing, which has been traditional since the Greeks. Plato made that connection in the Symposium, and Sappho famously said that the most beautiful thing is what one loves. But love and longing are ways of reaching out into the world: ways of devoting oneself to things and people. In love or longing, one moves toward what one loves or longs for, not into oneself, or else the love is a delusion. In the words of the Everly Brothers’ beautiful song, love hurts, and to account for love merely in terms of pleasure is extremely wrong.
Though pleasure seems fairly straightforward, human beings have dark and twisted longings, and much of the art of the twentieth century might even be beautiful in a dark or twisted way.
Alexander Nehamas makes some of these points in his book Only a Promise of Happiness. And Elaine Scarry, in Of Beauty and Being Just, tries to answer the political objections: the Greeks conceived justice as a harmonious or symmetrical arrangement of elements or forces, which is also the way Aristotle or the architect of the Parthenon conceived beauty.
In short, beauty is being re-enriched as a concept, and insofar as we still long and still love, we still seek beautiful things. Perhaps beauty is not eternal. But it appears to have picked itself up from its pratfall, bruised but ready for more.
Crispin Sartwell teaches at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. He is the author of Six Names of Beauty (Routledge 2006).
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i have to say that the olympics track and field competition is, among other things, an amazing celebration of black womanhood. lord that field for the 100 metres: what a magnificent group of african warrior princesses, with incredible fire in the eyes (as well as unbelievable acceleration, of course). also i'll pay tribute to the rather shocking virginity of 29-year-old lolo jones. let's just say that she's running against the tendency of the culture. that is sexy.
allyson felix:
tianna madison:
shelly-ann fraser-pryce (the world's fastest woman):
carmelita jeter:
murielle ahoure:
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07 When The Golden Leaves Begin To Fall
that's my current candidate for the world's most beautiful song. it's an old bill monroe thing, sung here by the bluegrass supergroup longview, dudley connell (johnson mountain boys) on lead vocal.
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Crispin used to be a rock and roll critic. So he can relate to this. If you read Crispin, you can probably relate to this. If not, why are you reading this?
Anyway, since only Robots read the Defeatists, I felt that this bit of aesthetic information needed to reach a wider audience. And, he made the mistake of giving me the keys to Storm a half dozen years ago, and I occasionally have to take it out for a spin.
Steve Simmels over at Powerpop has nailed it again, and I feel compelled to acknowledge our alien overlords. David Alan Coe wrote the ultimate Country Song in "You never called me by my name" and everything since has paled...He said once that "Nobody says nothin' that Hank Williams didn't sing." Well, now we know that the soft rock equivalent of Hank Williams is...Journey.
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Crispin has now got a great burden, as the sole remaining articulate, anarchist philosopher cum 3 card monte dealer in the world of...blogs, the articulate, the anarchists, the philosophers since IOZ has probably announced either his apotheosis or his retirement from this stuff. Me, I'm studying to be a homeless street musician. Anway, an occasional visit, and in this case to help a bit with Crispin's hard work, and turn on readers of this blog to a really marvelous resource.
From the Internet Archive, a live recent performance of Alejandro Escovedo and band. Escovedo is a fascinating artist, who has done lots of gigs in places like Austin, Huntsville State Prison, various places like CBGBs and the Democratic National Convention that nominated our current president. The Internet Archive is a marvelous tool for musicians, researchers, and people who just want to noodle around in books, live music, early 78s, speeches and whatever else they've managed to throw up there.
Enjoy!
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well, i'm not down with the violence, but i like the sovereign citizens' approach of revolution through paperwork: bringing resistance to where the bureaucracy lives. and they sure are good lookin.
meanwhile, i'm indexing my book on josiah warren, whose central concept was the sovereignty of the individual. perhaps he didn't quite grasp the richness and beauty of the applications.
thanks, adam!
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well what the hell, let's blog about scandals. this is a nice piece about why the mistress/groupie/bimbo always looks the same: spitzer, tiger etc: the girl is invariably a
anyway, in six names of beauty i defined beauty as "the object of longing." and beauty since plato or perhaps long before has been connected to love. but if you are a married governor or a golf superstar having an affair, you don't want to long for someone. you want to have sex. that's why you want the girl to be sexy, but definitely not beautiful. the last thing you want is to fall in love. so you're looking for the girl whose looks are about sex and not about love, and who is neither lovely nor interesting enough to have you thinking about her all the time or wanting her to have your babies etc., but who is sexy enough in a nice cliched way to get you...going. you want to have intense sex, then roll off and forget about the whole thing. best if she doesn't even look distinctive, or if you might confuse her with all the others.
it's perhaps not surprising that i can see what the dude is trying to accomplish. what puzzles me is what the girl is trying to accomplish: how she sees herself, what she wants to be.
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