Jarrett Moran

In 1996, Robert Adams sends a letter to the New York Times Magazine. “I have simpler advice than that offered by the decorators who were asked (in “Style,” June 16) how to use Damien Hirst’s ‘sculpture’ consisting of a real pig sliced in half: don’t buy it, don’t go to see it, and don’t write about it.” The letter is not published.

-Quoted in Robert Adams: The Place We Live

Robert Adams, Old-growth stump, Coos County, Oregon, 1999–2003. Courtesy Yale University Art Gallery.

Yes, I was horrified to wake up to the coordinated police crackdowns on OWS. But I also think Bloomberg released the movement from a trap last night. The long-term occupation of Zuccotti made OWS what it is while becoming a liability, a weak spot vulnerable to distractions like a splinter faction of drummers, vagrants from Rikers dropped off by the police, the police themselves. Why get sucked into a legal battle for Zuccotti? Why not consolidate the movement’s achievements and move on? In more than a few articles by OWS protesters, I’ve noticed hints of a desire to escape the day-to-day logistical drain of the park. This city contains more possibilites for protest and occupation than Zuccotti. The winter in New York and the national solidarity around OWS call for new experiments.

Design just a little dated will interest any artist. Design current is always terrible. Anyone who has tried to find a good contemporary lamp or clock will know what I mean.

-Walker Evans, “Collectors Items,” Mademoiselle, May 1963. 

“When the end draws near,” wrote Cartaphilus, “there no longer remain any remembered images; only words remain.” Words, displaced and mutilated words, words of others, were the poor pittance left him by the hours and the centuries.

-Borges, “The Immortals”

Reading the postscript of Borges’ “The Immortals,” which suggests the entire story is a collage of other texts, I remembered how it felt to reach the end of Jonathan Lethem’s “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism” in Harper’s (back in 2007) and realize the entire essay is composed of quotations, including one from Harry Truman. But Lethem’s essay is a polemic, and perhaps one that gives in to its ecstasy. Abstract critiques of originality (my favorite is probably Adorno’s “Gold Assay” aphorism in Minima Moralia) don’t translate 1:1 into political policy. For that, I got around to Caleb Crain’s essay on intellectual piracy today, a more sober take on how intellectual property is circumstantially eked out, from one technology to the next.

Guy Davenport’s 1978 essay on literary anecdote, “Seeing Shelley Plain,” draws from Davenport’s extensive knowledge of the genre and his own contributions to it - for example, the time he assisted in extinguishing Sartre’s jacket pocket (“Monsieur, vous brûlez”). Rereading the essay last week, I ground to a halt, laughed disbelievingly, and texted Nozlee in all caps about the presence of a poet not mentioned in the essay or in any writing I’m aware of by Davenport.

On the difficulty of prying insight into a poem from the prosaic life of the poet, Davenport remarks, “Talk about pitching mercury with a fork!” He is remembering Richard Brautigan’s poem “Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork”:

Loading mercury with a pitchfork

your truck is almost full. The neighbors

take a certain pride in you. They

     stand around watching.

Even for as omnivorous a reader as Davenport, the knowing allusion to Brautigan seems out of place. Would Davenport have expected his reader to pick up on the reference? Is he really throwing this implicit homage to Brautigan amongst anecdotes about Eliot, Frost, and Pound? I’m reading from the collection The Geography of Imagination, in which Louis Zukofsky, Marianne Moore, and Ezra Pound appear as (at the time) living paragons of American poetry, alongside various associates of Black Mountain College.

Brautigan is decidedly more Haight-Ashbury than Black Mountain, a side of twentieth century letters Davenport refers to with disdain in a list of “jaded old fools” from his short story “The Bicycle Rider”: “Aldous Huxley, a giggling British neurotic, moral idiots like Burroughs and the poet Ginsberg, and the shit-for-brains Timothy Leary.” By the seventies, Brautigan already sounded dated, though the collection Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork wasn’t published until 1976. All of this makes the poem an unlikely echo to hear in “Seeing Shelley Plain.” Then again, revising received opinions about poets is a theme of Davenport’s essay, and it sent me looking for my high school copy of Brautigan.

God is not in the earthquake nor in the fire, but in the still, small voice. They are but the blunt and the low faculties of our nature, which can only be addressed through lamp-black and lightning. It is in quiet and subdued passages of unobtrusive majesty, the deep and the calm, and the perpetual; that which must be sought ere it is seen, and loved ere it is understood; things which the angels work out for us daily, and yet vary eternally: which are never wanting, and never repeated; which are to be found always, yet each found but once; it is through these that the lesson of devotion is chiefly taught, and the blessing of beauty given. These are what the artist of highest aim must study; it is these, by the combination of which his ideal is to be created; these, of which so little notice is ordinarily taken by common observers, that I fully believe, little as people in general are concerned with art, more of their ideas of sky are derived from pictures than from reality; and that if we could examine the conception formed in the minds of the most educated persons when we talk of clouds, it would frequently be found composed of fragments of blue and white reminiscences of the old masters.

-John Ruskin, “Of Truth of Skies,” Modern Painters

In many orders of beauty, particularly those of the finer arts, it is requisite to employ much reasoning in order to feel the proper sentiment; and a false relish may frequently be corrected by argument and reflection. There are just grounds to conclude, that moral beauty partakes much of this latter species.

-David Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals

For a long time I was reporter to a journal, of no very wide circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got only my labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their own reward.

For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow storms and rain storms, and did my duty faithfully; surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths and all across-lot routes, keeping them open, and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel had testified to their utility.

I have looked after the wild stock of the town, which give a faithful herdsman a good deal of trouble by leaping fences and I have had an eye to the unfrequented nooks and corners of the farm; though I did not always know whether Jonas or Solomon worked in a particular field to-day; that was none of my business. I have watered the red huckleberry, the sand cherry and the nettle tree, the red pine and the black ash, the white grape and the yellow violet, which might have withered else in dry seasons.

In short, I went on thus for a long time, I may say it without boasting, faithfully minding my business, till it became more and more evident that my townsmen would not after all admit me into the list of town officers, nor make my place a sinecure with a moderate allowance. My accounts, which I can swear to have kept faithfully, I have, indeed, never got audited, still less accepted, still less paid and settled. However, I have not set my heart on that.

-Thoreau, Walden

I was reading E.B. White’s One Man’s Meat recently and stopped at something strange in White’s voice. It took me a moment to realize that I was hearing Thoreau. It was like recognizing a close friend’s mannerisms in a mutual acquaintance.

Lately I’ve run into quite a few polemics about the current plight of the artist, writer, etc. They seem to imply that artists deserve, as if by natural right, compensation for their work. They also present the current state of affairs (the internet) as having undermined this natural right.

Such guarantees have never existed, and I’m not sure how to make sense of them. But these polemics have been around for a while. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, as increasing literacy led to an overproduction of trashy novels, writers penned similar lamentations. Cf. Martha Woodmansee’s The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics.

I love to write, and not speak, and when I write it’s by hand, not on a typewriter. Several factors contribute to this choice. First there is a refusal: my body refuses to speak out loud to … nobody. Unless I’m certain that another body is listening to me, my voice gets stuck, I can’t get it out. If, in a conversation, I notice that that somebody isn’t listening to me, I stop speaking, and it is simply beyond my power to leave a message on an answering machine (I don’t think I’m alone in this). Voices are made to reach out to the other; to speak alone, with a tape recorder, strikes me as terribly frustrating. My voice is literally cut off (castrated). There is nothing to be done, it is impossible for me to be on the receiving end of my own voice, which is the only thing the tape recorder has to offer me. My writing, meanwhile, is immediately destined for everybody. Its slow pace protects me: I have the time to dangle the wrong word from the tip of my pen, the word that “spontaneity” never ceases to generate. There is a great distance between my head and my hand and I take advantage of it in order to avoid saying the first thing that comes to me. Finally, and this is probably the real reason, the challenge of tracing words on paper has a truly sculptural jouissance [une véritable jouissance plastique]. If my voice brings me pleasure, that is only out of narcissism. Writing comes from my muscles. I abandon [jouis] myselfto a kind of manual labor. I combine two “arts”: the textual and the graphic.

-Roland Barthes, “Une sorte de travail manuel,” quoted in “From the Desk of Roland Barthes” by Ben Kafka.