http://horsesandhorsesandhorses.blogspot.com/
Amy McDaniel helps run the Solar Anus reading series in Atlanta, where she was born and raised. By writing and teaching, she provides for herself and her dog, Annette. She co-edited From the Second Line, a collection of her students’ essays about Hurricane Katrina.
From “The Critic as Artist”:
To the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own, that need not bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it criticizes. The one characteristic of a beautiful form is that one can put into it whatever one wishes, and see in it whatever one chooses to see; and the Beauty, that gives to creation its universal and aesthetic element, makes the critic a creator in his turn, and whispers of a thousand different things which were not present in the mind of him who carved the statue or painted the panel or graved the gem.
A few months back, I talked to a painter and animator friend about craft, technique, and composition, with an ear toward what we could learn from each other’s genre. She had recently made a list of all the physical motifs that appear in her work, or in some cases her head and her life, and she read it to me. A motif, as I understand it, is different than a symbol, a metaphor, or a theme in that it simply refers to anything that recurs in a work. It doesn’t have to stand in for something else. It simply gains power and resonance through repetition, brings different parts of a composition into conversation, or provides a kind of unity to the whole.
Motifs can be physical or abstract, but I’m most interest in the tangible and sensory one–objects, landmarks, colors, sounds, and body parts. A writer or visual artist may or may not be conscious of and/or intentional in their use of motif. But my friend’s exercise, making a list of her own motifs, seems particularly exciting to me, in a way that making a list of one’s own metaphors or themes is decidedly not.
The marketing and mythologizing comment thread on the Moya essay recalled, for me, David Foster Wallace’s remarkable 2004 review of a Borges biography. Wallace talks about the intentional fallacy and, if my reading is correct, indicts the practice of literary biography in general. (The connection to the Moya essay is oblique, but the review is worth reading on any terms.)
What follows are excerpts from a kind of (scathing) review of a (scathing) review. WCW’s essay, called “A Point for American Criticism,” is directed at Rebecca West, who had published some comments on Ulysses that WCW found wanting in every respect. Sometimes he says “they,” presumably meaning West and her critical cohort. So, from his red wheelbarrow full of glorious vitriol:
Forward is the new. It will not be blamed. It will not force itself into what amounts to paralyzing restrictions. It cannot be correct. It hasn’t time. ….
Comment if you like on Joyce’s narcissism but what in the world has it to do with him as a writer? Of course it has, as far as prestige is concerned, but not as to writing….But the expedient is convenient if we want to gain a spurious (psychologic, not literary) advantage for temporal purposes.
What Joyce is saying is a literary thing. It is a literary value he is forwarding. He is a writer. Will this never be understood? ….
The thing is, they want to stay safe, they do not want to give up something, so they enlist psychology to save them. But under it they miss the clear, actually the miraculous, benefits of literature itself. A silent flower opening out of the dung they dote on. They miss Joyce blossoming pure white above their heads. ….
She speaks of transcendental tosh, of Freud, of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, of anything that comes into her head, but she has not yet learned–though she professes to know the difference between art and life–the sentimental and nonsentimental–that writing is made of words. ….
Here Joyce has so far outstripped the criticism of Rebecca West that she seems a pervert.
This just in: Collective nouns for supernatural beings. Truly beautiful. What’s your favorite?
This poem operates on my tenderest muscle tissues as harpoon and actual cautery, both. It functions as a critical emendation of T.E. Hulme’s somewhat shrill cry, “It is essential to prove that beauty may be in small, dry things.” Oh, the poem is certainly not roomy–and it is by no means damp, but it adds heat to what is small and dry.
The Difficult Farm is never glib, never chary, but these eleven pellucid couplets, in their radical recognition of this one talking man, especially forbid unseriousness, either on the level of form or affect. This quality of seriousness is not, never, to be confused with humorlessness: there is some certain revel here; Heather Christle isn’t coy or cute but she is canny (one example: she has identified this man among several while avoiding the mistake of identifying with him). But I dare you only to laugh at this talking man and not to feel deep shame of the kind you’d feel if you laughed, just laughed, at the foppery of your own grandfather. Or rather, Heather Christle dares you, I should think.
ONE OF SEVERAL TALKING MEN
Because my head is a magnet for bullets
I am spending the day indoors. First
I admired the topiary for several hours
and when my eyes began to ache I rang
for lunch. Lunch arrived with injunctions.
I considered my feet. I did not consider
my altitude. Because I stuffed myself
into the reliquary, I am finding movement
difficult. Luckily, I would not dream
of dancing in this outfit. You must be
a foreign exchange student. Allow me
to make an observation. We live beneath
a frugal moon, and only in her bad light
do our women seem consumptive.
Though what do I know. I am, moreover,
a senatorial moment, and if you don’t
forget me, I may do it myself. You could
conceivably think I’ve never known love,
but I suspect that in the war years, when nurses
bandaged my wounds with repetitive flair,
there existed between us if not affection,
at least a sense that the subject could arise.
See?
And for your Heather Christle Week Hump Day reminder: BUY now here; attempt to takeaway from the giveaways (+ find out when HC is reading near you) here.
From title essay of Against Interpretation:
What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.
Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.
The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art–and, by analogy–our own experience–more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.
In place of hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.
Orhan Pamuk has made a whole museum in Istanbul to accompany his latest novel, The Museum of Innocence. Coupons for entry can be found in the book. Pretty cool slide show of exhibits (and article) from NYT Magazine.
I’m not about to tell you, except for this: Justin Taylor is very dear to me, and I to him. He even dedicated his–wait for it–chapbook to me. No joke. Some days, we are engaged to be married. We’ll have an early-morning wedding, family only, with a luncheon of cold meats and fowls following. But you don’t know me too well, either, so none of that info should really affect what I’m soliciting from you.
Knowing Justin heaps better than any one of you, I always love to read all the inaccurate insults hurled at him by HTMLGiant peeps. But there haven’t been nearly enough this Mean Week, for my liking. I would like to provide one place, right here, to collect all the wild misconceptions, ad-hominem attacks, and elaborate speculations. I’m especially interested in the latter. It seems that people here have especially detailed mental images of who this man is. Please share, right here, at the end of Mean Week. Don’t hold back. It’ll be more fun than hating on Tao Lin (are they really roommates!?!?!), I promise, because Mr. Taylor is more truly our own.
This may be weak for mean week, but of late, after catching up with an old friend, I’ve been thinking about college majors and their relationship to what we write. Most people I meet now assume I was an English major, but I was history. Here’s the mildly mean part–I sometimes feel slightly, unjustifiably superior to writers who were English majors–it’s as if I mastered (or, I guess, bachelored) a whole nuther thing first, and they didn’t.
I know that college majors rarely relate directly to future career choice. But four years is a long time to think about something in a serious way. My history coursework was far more rigorous than my MFA work, and my history thesis was much more grueling as well. Somehow, knowing a lot about torture during the Algerian War must inform my writing. All of it does even more for my reading, probably. Context!
So, what did y’all major in? What relationship do you think it has to your writing, if any? If you were in English major, do you think that helps or hurts you, or neither?
