I tell you what. Look up John Hughes in Thomson's Biographical Dictionary Of Film. It's not *outstanding*, no, it's not even that good - but DT is a hero to one or two of us for his ability to be so regularly, briefly, casually interesting, maybe right, about things he doesn't even care about. I have just heard the Go-Betweens compared to Dire Straits. THE OCEAN Julie - never mind Sylvia, Who Is Julie? Her posts remind me of the first line of Strindberg's, um, Seminal, Live play of, oh, 1888: - Miss Julie's crazy tonight! She asked why the DDR wasn't featuring in her life! It's finished, Julie. Gone with history's Southerly winds. Kaput, as they say in Monaco. JUST LIKE THE SNOW Youn said
She's probably working on a story called "Chocolate Snow".
Oh. So is Ally96, in his spare time at the golf club. No, not really. He just plays golf. With a golf club. Can you believe that I added those 'greater than' signs myself? THREE STEP
I don't see the point of comparing the Magnetic Fields to Belle and Sebastian.
Me either, as we say in Stockwell.
Maybe I would if I read Alistair's piece, but I don't want to see it.
Before, he wrote a great piece on driving and
Nor do I. Especially not after reading that silly, ungracious demolition of it the other week. listening to music and how the kind of music he brought for a road trip in the US was all wrong: it wasn't BIG enough, or something like that. OK, point taken. But have you read Edna Welthorpe's piece on how THE REAL RAMONA finally made sense on the freeways? *That*'s a good piece on music and driving. You should post it to the list, Edna. Edna? I'VE BEEN LONELY
Seymour Glass is my top literary crush. (Even in books they're taken!)
'Taken'? Taken by 'the Reaper', you mean? HUEFFER SAYS THAT (2) JAMES BELAUDS BALZAC (p.308)
Who is the person who said something like the response to a work of art should be a work of art?
Many have said things like this. Some of them have been 'artists'.
What were his exact words?
And the correspondence between words and things in
Here's Ezra Pound in sunny June 1922: The best criticism of any work, to my mind the only criticism of any work of art that is of permanent or even moderately durable value, comes from the creative writer or artist who does the next job; and *not*, not ever from the young gentlemen who make generalities about the creator. Laforgue's Salom� is the real criticism of Salammbo; Joyce and perhaps Henry James are critics of Flaubert. (Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T.S. Eliot; London: Faber, 1960, p.406.) AUSTIN ALLEGRO the world is imperfect. That depends on what kind of thing you think words are, and what kind of work you think they do, and who (human beings vs god, for instance) put them to that work. In a sense my view on this is: there is no extra-linguistic way of knowing about the shortcomings of words in 'corresponding' to things; so to talk about imperfect correspondence may be a wrong turn. Believe it or not, I once tried to stick something on this issue on the 'internet'. But the correspondence between my intentions and the effects of the electronic world was most imperfect.
It would be useful to talk about something on its own terms, but what are these terms?
I think that's a relevant question. 'Conversation' is a helpful image again: a dialogue between the terms that we take an object to provide, and the terms we (unavoidably) bring to it. We can try, maybe, to keep the conversation polite and respectful, and hope that the two sets of terms will learn from each other; although in some cases (avant-garde art; political criticism) that may not be the point. Many folk could help us out here. What about Papercuts' hero Roland Barthes? COFFEE IN DONCASTER
And what are non-artists to do?
On the other hand, Richard Dalloway could not say
I seem to recall that Henri Bergson once said: 'If reality could immediately reach our senses and our consciousness, if we could come into direct contact with things and with each other, probably art would be useless, or rather we should all be artists...' (Actually this is from the canonical essay 'Laughter', from around 1899.) THAT GIRL? SHE COUNTS THE HOURS those words when he gave Mrs. Dalloway flowers. Doing things with words. Did he do them with flowers, either? Words might have helped. I think that we're meant to be feel BOTH moved by what he manages, ineptly, to 'say', AND saddened by the failure quite to 'say' it. VW was, I think, interested in the imperfections and ambiguities of these matters. I seem to recall that Michael Cunningham's The Hours (1998), a book that I like perhaps even more than Mrs D itself, (unsurprisingly) replays this incident somehow or other. CRITICAL (YOU'RE SO)
Sometimes criticism seems top-heavy.
Anthony Powell: 'Books do furnish a room'. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail - only $35 a year! http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +-+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+