httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYmhOhnUoLc

Isaac Disraeli: "Enthusiasm is that secret and harmonious spirit which hovers over the production of genius."

Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.”

Doesn’t hurt either that management acquired Sergei Fedorov in February 2008, the move that I think explains why Washington is where it’s at.

Two worthwhile videos here from C-SPAN:

A look at the creation of the website that provides easy access to information about almost everything here.

and Hitchens and host look back over the past 25 years:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPn4GfKnOZs

The Alcuin Society announced the winners of its 27th annual Awards for Excellence in Book Design in Canada recently. Here’s who walked away with first place prizes:

National Gallery of Canada.

PICTORIAL
First prize: GEORGE VAITKUNAS, designer of Utopia/Dystopia : Geoffrey James, by Lori Pauli (National Gallery of Canada and Douglas & McIntyre)

PROSE NON-FICTION ILLUSTRATED First prize: ROBERT BRINGHURST, designer of The Surface of Meaning : Books and Book Design in Canada, by Robert Bringhurst (CCSP Press / Simon Fraser University) [see my take here. And watch this site for an upcoming interview with Robert].

LIMITED EDITIONS
First prize: SUSAN COLBERG, designer of Darkfire, by Jonathan Hart (Sean Caulfield, Susan Colberg, Jonathan Hart/University of Alberta)

POETRY
First prize: ANDREW STEEVES, designer of The House That Stands, by Stefan A. Rose (Anchorage Press)

PROSE FICTION
First prize: JESSICA SULLIVAN, designer of Revenant, by Tristan Hughes (Douglas & McIntyre)

CHILDREN
First prize: TERESA BUBELA & VLADYANA KRYKORKA, designers of The Littlest Sled Dog, by Michael Kusugak (Orca Book Publishers)

Check out the rest of the winners here. ‘Winning books will be shown across Canada and exhibited at the Tokyo International Book Fair in Japan, and the Frankfurt and Leipzig International Book Fairs. They will compete in the biggest annual book-design competition in the world, in Leipzig, Germany, in February 2010.’

Saw a lot

of scooters

when I

was

in Cape Town. But nowhere near as many of them as these

seen

in

Amster

dam.

There was however, this

standing outside the Sex Museum, which seemed, on reflection, most appropriate.

Lauren Elkin’s exquisite description of the blog post (instancing as she does Wyatt Mason on Beckett’s Letters):

there’s something about a blog post that print book reviews and essays can’t touch.  The sketch-like quality, the half-formed thought, the gesture toward one’s interlocutor to further the idea… it’s valuable not only for the blogger but for the reader.

…brings to mind the 8×10 boards that Tom Thompson and members of the Group of Seven painted on – plein air – capturing telescoped images of the colours and shapes they found in nature.

Algonquin Art Centre

And I second her lament. Wyatt Mason will apparently no longer be blogging for Harper’s. His posts will be missed. This passage from a Beckett letter he quotes:

It is indeed getting more and more difficult, even pointless, for me to write in formal English. And more and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it. Grammar and style! To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Biedermeier bathing suit or the imperturbability of a gentleman. A mask. It is to be hoped the time will come, thank God, in some circles it already has, when language is best used when most efficiently abused. Since we cannot dismiss it all at once, at least we do not want to leave anything undone that may contribute to its disrepute. To drill one hole after another into it until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping though–I cannot imagine a higher goal for today’s writer.

…reminds me of an image Deirdre Bair sketches in her biography of the game young Samuel used to play diving fearlessly from the tops of tall trees, crashing through branches to the ground.

James Wood on Ian McEwan’s final secret, and Briony’s invention of happiness in Atonement:

"Plenty of readers are irritated by this conjuring trick. But if Briony made it all up, so did we. If the desperation of both her guilt and her wish fulfilment stirs us, it is because, by way of McEwan’s delayed revelation, by way of his narrative secret, we have ourselves conspired in Briony’s wish fulfilment, not just content but eager to believe, until the very last moment, that Cecilia and Robbie did not actually die. We wanted them to be alive, and the knowledge that we too wanted a ‘happy ending’ brings on a kind of atonement for the banality of our own literary impulses. Which is why the ending provokes interestingly divergent responses: it alienates some conventional readers, who dislike what they feel to be a trick, but it alienates some sophisticated readers, who also dislike what they feel to be a trick; and I suspect that the estrangement of both camps has to do with their guilt at having been moved by the novel’s conventional romantic power. It shouldn’t be possible, but Atonement wants to have it both ways, and succeeds in having it both ways. It is Ian McEwan’s best book because it successfully prosecutes and defends – as inevitable – the very impulses that make McEwan such a compellingly manipulative novelist; and because it makes us willing, guilty, and finally self-conscious co-conspirators in that machinery of manipulation."

Read my review of Noel Carroll’s On Criticism over at Rain Taxi. Here’s the opening salvo:

"This book is best read by the light of another, John Carey’s What Good are the Arts? (Oxford University Press, 2006), a witty, truculent, masterful polemic which argues that a “work of art is anything that anyone has ever considered a work of art, though it may be a work of art only for that one person; and the reason for considering anything a work of art will be as various as the variety of human beings.”

What a work of art isn’t, says Carey, is what many people who spend their lives working in the field say it is. It isn’t, for example, what Arthur Danto claims; according to Carey, Danto—a critic for The Nation—believes with Immanuel Kant that art is special, that there is a kind of “trans-historical essence in art, everywhere and always the same.” To see something as art requires an “atmosphere” of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art. Only those who possess this are qualified to comment on a work of art because they are privy to its background and intention; success of the work is thus determined by the extent to which it achieves this intent. What results, says Carey, is a transcendental knowledge that automatically overrides personal, subjective opinion, an authority whose verdict cannot be questioned.

Loaded with dazzling, pugilistic rhetoric, Carey’s arguments demolish this Kantian scaffolding, but in so doing, they leave us stranded unhappily in an anarchic quagmire of subjective relativism, where the intentions of artists are unknowable and the opinions of those who haven’t, for example, read any 20th-century fiction are deemed just as valid as those of critics who have read them all.

On Criticism methodically hardens and recaptures this ground, constructing a foundation upon which criticism—objective, evaluative criticism—can reasonably operate. As a starting point…

read the rest at Rain Taxi here. 

.

Incoming search terms:

• noel carroll on criticism
• on criticism noel carroll chapter summary

You wouldn’t believe the number of photographs I took hopping around the Bushveld trying to shoot something that resembled this:

Here are but

two.

Despite what Ian Hamilton may have said about the position: "Maybe poets want to be Laureates because they secretly fear that  they’ve already made the most of whatever gifts they started out with. Since nobody expects a PL to be any good, why not accept the job and let it take the blame for your next book?"

Or David Solway: "…now that we have elected a laureate, we can proceed to forget about poetry even more thoroughly than we already have since perhaps the most important function of the laureateship, at any rate from the perspective of its secular lobbyists, is to appease the national conscience as well as their own for the apathy and neglect with which they receive the art."

I don’t begrudge Carol Ann Duffy or Ted Hughes before her, a little lying back; a little state-funded recognition. Here’s her

TEA

I like pouring your tea, lifting
the heavy pot, and tipping it up,
so the fragrant liquid streams in your china cup.

Or when you’re away, or at work,
I like to think of your cupped hands as you sip,
as you sip, of the faint half-smile of your lips.

I like the questions – sugar? – milk? –
and the answers I don’t know by heart, yet,
for I see your soul in your eyes, and I forget.

Jasmine, Gunpowder, Assam, Earl Grey, Ceylon,
I love tea’s names. Which tea would you like? I say
but it’s any tea for you, please, any time of day,

as the women harvest the slopes
for the sweetest leaves, on Mount Wu-Yi,
and I am your lover, smitten, straining your tea.

This simple, poetic post from Mark Thwaite at ReadysteadyBook:

My friend the poet and publisher Micheal Schmidt once told me that he liked poetry that was made up of simple words. "Sex, love, food… the vital things are simple words," he said to me (or something like that). I took his point, and certainly agree that it isn’t obscure vocabulary that makes e.g. the late Beckett such a vital (and challenging) read. But should we always eschew the arcane? And is it arcane to write "arcane" when I could have written "difficult"? Wrong to have written "eschew" when I could have said "avoid"? It surely isn’t always sesquipedelian ostentation to use the multisyllabic when the monosyllabic would have fitted almost as well – is it? (Surely only a sesquipedelian ever invokes the term sesquipedelian.) Isn’t the abstruse sometimes the more accurate? The recondite might not be as recognisable, but it might be the more rigorous; simple might simplify to the point of becoming wrong, complex might be confounding but absolutely correct (now, is "absolutely correct" a pleonasm? Oh, bother!) Isn’t the move from "fitted almost as well" to "fitted exactly" the move from a basic to more a complex vocabulary? Well, not always, for sure…

Beckett’s Proust was written in 1931, when he was 25 years old, and exhibits the sort of language use one might expect from a precociously gifted academic rather than a poet. The poetry of the later work, when Beckett showed us impotence, futility, loss, has shorn its lexicon of flash, academic jargon: Worstward Ho is far, far from simple, but its difficulty doesn’t arise from tricky terminology. His prose, now, is exactly as Michael would like it: simple words directing us towards vital things (and non-things, of course: to the unsayable). Still, between the baby-language of the modern media and the blistering, elementary severity and clarity of Beckett, there does lie a place where being wordy is surely just about ok. I’d guess that even Michael would want me to know the difference between disinterested and uninterested, whilst expecting me to be neither with regard to sex, love, food… and poetry.

Speaking of disinterested, I’d say it’s pretty difficult to come up with any word that isn’t laden with socio-political implication. The Norman invasion of England in 1066 brought with it imposition of language spoken by the French aristocracy. A vulgar Anglo-Saxon population (they pissed, the French urinated) was herded into a two-tiered social order where the French rulers spoke a Latinate language and the miserable peasants spoke native English. Regardless of how hard we may strive for neutrality, the words we choose will always be freighted with extra-literary value.