I went to see the Dale Chihuly glass at Kew Gardens today. Which was pretty fab. This Flickr slideshow gives you some idea. It finishes 15th January, so if you haven’t seen it and you’re in London, go and have a look.
Category: Culture
Someone took a hammer to Fountain by Marcel Duchamp. Which is the famous sculpture made from a urinal. I just found the BBC’s phrasing annoying:
A 77-year-old Frenchman has spent a night in custody in Paris after attacking a plain porcelain urinal considered to be a major artwork.
‘considered’ to be a major artwork? It’s one of the iconic artworks of the 20th century! I can’t believe that 88 years after the event, the BBC still feels the need to prevaricate about it. Not the Daily Mail or the Sun, but the BBC, a serious news organisation and a major cultural broadcaster to boot. Fuckwits. What kind of philistinic culture do we live in?
I don’t insist people should like Fountain, and if you wanted, you could argue it’s a kind of work which has been a rather uninteresting experiment and should be relegated to a footnote in art history. Or whatever. But the idea that we have to have the same stupid, boring, pointless argument about whether it’s art, over and over again – aargh!
Categories
po-heritage
One of the things that seems odd to me about Ron Silliman’s legendary (post)Avant/SoQ dichotomy is that trying to claim ownership of a country’s cultural heritage, trying to shape a national canon, feels like an essentially conservative impulse. The idea of a national tradition of radical poetics seems self-contradictory, like the Maoist idea of continuous revolution. I don’t think there’s actually a logical contradiction, but there does seem to be some conceptual tension.
I was going to use this observation as the starting point for a whole post about America’s relationship with its cultural heritage, but on balance I think that’s an exercise best left to the reader.
Julie, in the comments a couple of posts down the page, said:
Harry,
I’ve gotten emails from people who’ve checked out the wiki and think it’s a neat idea, though none of them are playing. Yet? I hope so.
I think one reason that The Poetry Wiki didn’t take off in its previous incarnation is that, psychologically, it’s quite intimidating. It’s not quite like anything you’d normally do with poetry, and it’s hard to know how to approach it or where to start. Are you rewriting the poem drastically? Tweaking it? Trying to respect the original intention? Bouncing off it in some other way? Cutting? Adding?
Julie’s idea of posting one of Spenser’s poems as a starting point gets rid of one psychological block, because you don’t have to worry about how the original writer will react.
I might post a similarly unthreatening piece to play with later, although the best thing to do would just be to dive in and edit.
Or, to be more accurate, back in the face of overwhelming public apathy except from Julie.
Since I’ve got the spare bandwidth and everything, I’ve started a new wiki to replace The Poetry Wiki. I’ve called it ‘The Poetry Wiki‘. Original, I know. It just makes more sense to have everything in the same place.
I’ve used the Mediawiki software – i.e. the same used for Wikipedia – both because I know lots of people are somewhat familiar with it, and because Wikipedia has a lot of helpful stuff about how to use the software. You could start with the Wikipedia Help Page, for example.
At the moment it’s a blank canvas, so get in at the beginning. Have a go. Tell your friends. Jump in and make suggestions about how the site should work. Try out the editing syntax. Post some poetry.
I recently read Mutants by Armand Marie Leroi, which is a book that uses mutation as a way of understanding the development of the body. It’s interesting but quite medical; I have a pretty high tolerance for stuff about chemical pathways, gene mutations, hormones and so on, but I still found all the polysyllabic chemical names tended to make my eyes glaze over.
Lots of interesting snippets along the way, though. For example, the chapter about growth mutations had to distinguish them from ‘normal’ variation, whether racial or environmental. Apparently, young Dutch men now have an *average* height of six foot – which makes them taller than famously genetically tall people like the Masai and the Dinka. Almost more strikingly, in Holland there is no longer any correlation between young people’s social class and their height. That is certainly not true in the UK, and I find it an incredibly impressive advertisment for Dutch social policy.