The Life Akratic

"Outside the youth center, between the liquor store and the police station, a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;”

[thegushery]

Oh, Gorecki, you beautiful mollymawk: As redemptive as the albatross swimming in the starchy Atlantic foam, as liberated as a trout flying against the drying rock, as searching as the dawn which finds a hen left scattered by a fox. And as tall as the ocean that will swallow them all!  What else can you listen to when the night won’t let you dream? "The name mollymawk was coined in the 17th century from the German rendering of the Dutch Mallemugge, which meant mal – foolish and mok – gull."

[akraticwolf]

The Panther - Rainer Maria Rilke

The Panther

His vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else. It seems to him there are a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world. As he paces in cramped circles, over and over, the movement of his powerful soft strides is like a ritual dance around a center in which a mighty will stands paralyzed. Only at times, the curtain of the pupils lifts, quietly--. An image enters in, rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles, plunges into the heart and is gone. 

[akraticwolf]

George Stubbs' "Tygers at Play" and Elizabeth Costello's Lives of Jaguars

The Wall Street Journal: 

A few weeks ago, Chinese collectors took home four of the priciest pieces in Sotheby's series of Old Master sales, including a $13.2 million George Stubbs painting of two leopard cubs, "Tygers at Play,"

I was reading JM Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello yesterday, "The Lives of Animals: The Poets and the Animals". Something struck me as familiar about that particular chapter in the book, and Sotheby's Julian Gascoigne's description of Stubbs' "Tygers at Play". I was sure that what I had read yesterday had something to do with the shift in the representational mode in Stubbs' painting (which breaks away from the European convention that was standard in the previous generation, of always depicting wild animals as ferocious beasts). In the chapter, Costello compares Rilke's panther poem to Hughes' two jaguar poems in a discussion of the animal as a poetic object. I thumbed back through the relevant paragraphs but found nothing like what I had cooked up in my head. I swore I had imagined the link until I glanced further up the page: 

"He delivers his mother to her hosts in the English Department, then goes to a meeting. The meeting drag on and on. It is two thirty before he can get to the seminar room in Stubbs Hall." 

So Stubbs was indeed there in Costello's chapter, just hiding in the name of a seminar room. Is this a clever trick on the behalf of Mr Coetzee, or am I inventing my own madness at every opportunity? ***

***

There is some intersection here with the academic buzzwords of empire, imperialism and modernity, which reminds me of something else Coetzee wrote in White Writing, which was a chapter on the tradition of landscape painting in Africa. There Coetzee spoke about how the unwieldy South African landscape was represented by settlers painting in the European traditions of romanticism and landscape painting. In the case of Stubbs, the situation is reversed. The creatures of the Empire, leopards and lions, a zebra, an Indian rhino and an Australian "Kongouro", are transported from their original homelands and painted as English subjects in a landscape invented in the imagination of the painter. Import versus export: 

Stubbs’ fascination with exotic animals was partly a symptom of the rise of menageries in mid-18th century London, stocked with wild beast brought back from Africa and India by men like Warren Hastings, and the contemporary fascination with exotic specimens from far off lands, which was fuelled by expeditionary voyages such as Captain Cook’s journey to the South Pacific in 1766, and his subsequent discovery of Australia in 1770. 

Art Daily 

[saltriverjordan]

‘Do not forget that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information.’

Wittgenstein, Zettel (via saltriverjordan)

[saltriverjordan]

One of the most eloquent denunciations of plagiarism is delivered by Tristram Shandy. ‘Shall we forever make new books, as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another?’ he asks. ‘Are we forever to be twisting and untwisting the same rope?’ It was not noticed until some time after Laurence Sterne’s death in 1768 that this passage was itself plagiarised from Robert Burton’s attack on literary imitators in his introduction to The Anatomy of Melancholy.

Mark Ford, “Love and Theft”  (via saltriverjordan)

[custardfudge]

There’s always been an anecdotal link between comedy and inner turmoil, but the empirical evidence has started to back it up. In the 1920s, the psychologist Lewis Terman found that children rated as having a good sense of humor by their parents and teachers died younger as adults. A longitudinal study of Finnish police officers found that the funniest among them were more likely to be obese and to smoke. And an analysis of New York Times obituaries found that performers died nearly eight years younger than members of the military did.

- Olga Khazan (via custardfudge)

[jacksondeforestkelley-archive-d]

[akraticwolf]

Ernest Hemingway, center, photographed for the Oak Park High School football team, November 1915

[psychanalystes]

Freud et Jung.

[saltriverjordan]

The Kingdom

animals are divided into:

• those that belong to the Emperor,

• embalmed ones,

• those that are trained,

• suckling pigs,

• mermaids,

• fabulous ones,

• stray dogs,

• those included in the present classification,

• those that tremble as if they were mad,

• innumerable ones,

• those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,

• others,

• those that have just broken a flower vase,

• those that from a long way off look like flies.

From the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge,

by Jorge Luis Borges

[screwballdame]

188

found eve waiting tables she’s got plenty of mouths to feed

found lilith under neon lights all calloused soles on six inch heels

found sarah old and quiet never speaking out against god again

found rahab avoiding red the color of a fallen city and of regret

found jael with her grin sharp hands stained bloody behind steel bars

found delilah cutting hair her dress worth 16 grams of silver

found bathsheba at a grave with hair still wet and eyes afraid

found jezebel and her scars disguised with paint and a curl of lip

found esther beautiful and replaced, barely ever shows her face

found mary missing the messiah forgetting the names of her other sons

found magdalene selling perfume she always sprays them on too strong

found the whore of babylon begging, and the sign beside her said

'the Word did our stories wrong.'

[r2--d2]

[composersdoingnormalshit]

Sergei Rachmaninoff cutting his birthday cake.

[akraticwolf]

He is the Dude. His rumpled look and relaxed manner suggest a man in whom casualness runs deep. 

[akraticwolf]

"I sought the relatedness of all things by isolating their relatedness, a man superbly alone with his sense of not having touched, and finally knowing in his last extremity that the love which had always been in the room unlocated was now found." - Arthur Miller on Death of a Salesman

[saltriverjordan]

Arthur Miller on the writing of his play, Death of a Salesman. 

"Above all, perhaps, the image of a need greater than hunger or sex or thirst, a need to leave a thumbprint somewhere on the world. A need for immortality, and by admitting it, the knowing that one has carefully inscribed one’s name on a cake of ice on a hot July day."

[nevver]

Gabriel García Márquez, RIP

[saltriverjordan]

James Baldwin on Sentimentality in 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'

"Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty."