Image from here.

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• value of literary tourism
• Titian Venice images
• venice renaissance politics

 

Interesting to note that it’s not just about the authors.

D.G. Myers takes on Dan Green taking on Roger Scruton:

I don’t particularly like Scruton’s conception of art either, but the trouble with it is the same as the trouble with Green’s. It conceives art as a category of value, and serves then as a scepter for knighting some works for their great value in order to distinguish them from other works of lesser value or none. But to call something art is to say nothing unless it is immediately clear what standards of artistic acceptibility are being invoked. “Beauty” will not do, because it begs the question. Green’s four-part answer simply multiples the confusion.

The whole conception of art is of limited utility in the study of literature, but in as far as a conception is demanded, what needs to happen is a shift from conceiving art as works of value to thinking of it as a specific kind of mental activity, or what Oakeshott calls a mode of experience. Art is what invites contemplation, whether it is the Rothko Chapel

What’s Cool in Houston

here in Houston or a 1961 Jaguar E Type,

Jaguar Enthusiasts Club

and an offense against art is to do something other than contemplate it. If I use the Rothko Chapel to host my son’s bar mitsvah, I am treating it other than aesthetically, and if I drive a Jaguar to class in College Station, I may be using it for the purpose for which it was intended, but I am hardly driving a work of art."

If we try to measure the aesthetic experience of eating a rib eye steak against listening to Mozart’s Requem, we aren’t going to get too far. If, however, we comapare Middlemarch to War and Peace, the Rothko Chapel with Westminister Abbey, in terms of form and function, or the Jag against the Astin Martin…not with the intent of purchasing the ‘best’ car, or standing the best chance of getting into heaven, but with the goal of learning more about the work of art, about how and why it produces different experiences, about how successfully it accomplishes what its creators intended…then we’re cookin’ with gas.

Incoming search terms:

• 1961 jaguar
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A highly pleasing long weekend just spent in Vermont, interviewing three outstanding human beings, who just happen to be associated with the

book. Poet Galway Kinnell.

Master book maker Claire Van Vliet,

and fine printer/scholarly publisher Rocky Stinehour, founder of the Stinehour Press. 

Two handsome indigenous

creatures; and two of Vermont’s finest who helped a couple of Canadian travelers, whose motel room had been sold out from under them  on an evening when all within a week-long horse ride had been booked (rest assured concerned reader: a massive boycotting and reputation annihilation campaign is currently mere hours from being launched).

How did the State say good bye? Only this way:

A N/F N/F British First of Auden/Isherwood’s The Dog Beneath the Skin from The Country Bookshop, in Plainfield, at:

Doesn’t get much better in booksville. Sale continues for the next several weeks so get on in there.

A thought provoking, worthwhile watch, which raises concerns about identity, morality and mortality.