"For a while now, I’ve been talking about art objects as 'machines for thinking': Our job as viewers is..."

"... to switch them on, and it’s almost impossible to do that when all you’re getting is a glimpse through the gaps in a crowd." 

Writes Blake Gopnik in "Experiencing Museums as They Should Be: Gloriously Empty/A critic discovers the joy of visiting Covid-restricted art collections, which lets him commune with van Gogh and the gang" (NYT).

This essay belongs in the transgressive literary genre, The Blessings of Covid. 

Have you spent much time gazing at museum art, anticipating lofty thoughts and emotional transport? It's hard to experience the contemplative level of awareness needed when there are always other people shifting around you, taking too little time, shattering your meditation with pointless little comments. Like reading the title of the painting out loud. Ever notice how many museum-goers do that? Or flatly stating the same factoid about the artist — the cut-off ear, the penchant for young girls...? They'll take a gander and pronounce the artist good at details. They'll opine on the looks of the person in the portrait as if it were a TikTok makeup video. The word "gorgeous" will recur so much that your meditation shifts to predicting the next time someone will say "gorgeous." And God forbid that painting you wanted as your own personal thinking machine is the next target of the wandering docent....

"Living in a state of enquiry, neutrality and uncertainty, beyond dogma and grand conviction, is good for the business of songwriting, and for my life in general."

"This is the reason I tend to become uncomfortable around all ideologies that brand themselves as 'the truth' or 'the way.'... This not only includes most religions, but also atheism, radical bi-partisan politics or any system of thought, including 'woke' culture, that finds its energy in self-righteous belief and the suppression of contrary systems of thought. Regardless of the virtuous intentions of many woke issues, it is its lack of humility and the paternalistic and doctrinal sureness of its claims that repel me.... [M]y duty as a songwriter is not to try to save the world, but rather to save the soul of the world. This requires me to live my life on the other side of truth, beyond conviction and within uncertainty, where things make less sense, absurdity is a virtue and art rages and burns; where dogma is anathema, discourse is essential, doubt is an energy, magical thinking is not a crime and where possibility and potentiality rule."

So said the songwriter Nick Cave, responding to a fan who wanted to know if he thinks of himself as "woke" (reported at Consequence of Sound).

ADDED: That phrase! "where... absurdity is a virtue and art rages and burns." I saw it in 1993 in Amsterdam, when I traveled with a fountain pen and a notebook:



That's a detail from this larger page:

"Even though we have sung China’s praises on this blog and social media, and saw some of the most incredible landscapes imaginable, the truth is we struggled there."

"China turned us into bad people. The pushing, the shoving, the pollution, the spitting, the lack of respect toward the environment and their fellow human beings, the oily food, the wasteful attitude that is now ingrained in their psyche, we could go on. This is not to say we didn’t have great experiences and meet wonderful people, because we definitely did. But those moments were far less common for us. We hate being negative, and it may sound arrogant or pathetic, but that is the truth.... We would snap at each other over small things, and these minor arguments would turn into all-day affairs. Alesha would get angry at me over trivial matters, and I would retaliate. In the end I stopped being the caring partner that I should be. I neglected Alesha’s feelings and she would attack me for neglecting her. I continued to neglect her because I couldn’t stand being attacked. It was a vicious cycle. Alesha started to resent travel, and I grew numb to it. Nothing excited us anymore. Just like you can lose your passion for a hobby when it becomes a job, we’re starting to become jaded with travel...."

From "This Couple Traveled The World Together And Admits It Strained Their Relationship/Social media makes traveling as a couple look like a honeymoon every day. One couple admits that that’s not always the case."

So part of this was that they made travel their job, but at least they were making money, not hemorrhaging money.

I'm delighted when I have an existing tag for something very specific that comes up in a new post.

In the case of that last post, it was: worms.

I have 31 posts with the tag "worms." Isn't that wonderful — the wonderful world of blog worms? For example, back in July 2013, I was (for some reason) interested in the question whether the word "hello" appears in the Bible, and I found:

Job 17:14 Then I could greet the grave as my father and say to the worms, “Hello, mother and sisters!”

There was the line from the "Ode to Joy": "even to the worm ecstasy is given."

And "Paragordius obamai — a parasitic worm" (named to honor Obama).

And the Jack Handey deep thought: "The other day I got out my can opener and was opening a can of worms when I thought, 'What am I doing?!'"

There was my favorite page from my old "Amsterdam Notebooks," page 21, with a worm in the apple:


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There was that time back in 2005 when I was blogging and: "As I write this, the little kid across the street is screaming: 'A worm! A worm! A worm! Oh! Ah! A worm! A worm! A worm! Oh! Ah!'"

And that's me now, when something so specifically taggable comes up:  A worm! A worm! A worm! Oh! Ah! A worm! A worm! A worm! Oh! Ah! 

Or... there are so many exquisite little tags... I'm always exclaiming...  

Nostrils/nipples/nuance/nuns/neckties! Nostrils/nipples/nuance/nuns/neckties! Oh! Ah! Nothing/nostrils/nipples/nuance/nuns/neckties! Nostrils/nipples/nuance/nunsneckties! Nostrils/nipples/nuance/nuns/neckties! Oh! Ah!

Maybe girls will buy it if it's pink...

That's Penguin's new cover for the Roald Dahl classic "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," as seen at "The five worst book covers ever." The other 4 are so much less bad that it's scarcely worth pretending this is a real listicle (even if writing a listicle were something worth aspiring to).

The worst book covers I ever saw were on display at the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam, where I traveled in 1993. This was in the days before digital photography when I traveled without a camera in what I consider my "Get Me a Table Without Flies, Harry" period. On page 33 of what I call my "Amsterdam Notebooks" — at the bottom of the second image — I wrote and sketched about the various copies of the diary, translated into many different languages, with the Spanish version — "Cuentos" — featuring a smiling blonde girl and the French version reproducing an 1877 Renoir portrait of a rosy-skinned blonde woman in the most absurdly comfortable, cossetted circumstances imaginable:

100 years ago today, a suffragette attacked this Velázquez painting with a meat cleaver.

"I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs. Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history," said Mary Richardson, after hacking 7 deep cuts into  the "Rokeby Venus" — AKA "The Toilet of Venus," "Venus at her Mirror," "Venus and Cupid," or "La Venus del espejo."



The suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst had been arrested the previous day. Richardson got a 6-month sentence (the most that could be given for vandalizing artwork. In a much later interview — in 1952 — she said she didn't like "the way men visitors gaped at [the painting] all day long."

Contemporary reports of the incident reveal that the picture was not widely seen as mere artwork. Journalists tended to assess the attack in terms of a murder (Richardson was nicknamed "Slasher Mary"), and used words that conjured wounds inflicted on an actual female body, rather than on a pictorial representation of a female body. The Times, in an article that contained factual inaccuracies as to the painting's provenance, described a "cruel wound in the neck", as well as incisions to the shoulders and back.

Here's how it looked:

Roger Ebert has died.

"On Tuesday, Mr. Ebert blogged that he had suffered a recurrence of cancer following a hip fracture suffered in December, and would be taking 'a leave of presence.' In the blog essay, marking his 46th anniversary of becoming the Sun-Times film critic, Ebert wrote 'I am not going away. My intent is to continue to write selected reviews but to leave the rest to a talented team of writers hand-picked and greatly admired by me.'"

Working on something he loved right up to the last minute, despite all adversity....

I'm sorry to see him go. I met him once at a bookstore event. I was with my son Chris — a big movie-lover — who was young and excited about meeting Ebert, so I waited in line. For some reason, the book we had in hand for signing was "Two Weeks In Midday Sun : A Cannes Notebook," which has not just writing by Ebert, but drawings — line drawings. As Chris was interacting with him, I said that I loved the drawings.

I was, at the time, immensely interested in travel sketchbooks, most notably Bill Griffith's "Get Me a Table Without Flies, Harry." I, myself, traveled with a sketchbook and a fountain pen (and no camera) and made my trips all about drawings. So I was sincere in my enthusiasm for his drawing, and he immediately said that the drawings were very bad.

Oh, no, I love them, I said. They're very charming! Afterwards, I realized that it was absurd for me to encourage his drawings and baby him about their charm. Look at how he joyfully brutalized the bad films, even collecting the meanest reviews in books with titles like "I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie." He was a critic, and I was being uncritical.

I must have sounded like a kindergarten teacher to him. I didn't have the time to talk about the Griffith tradition and my own adventures in Amsterdam. It was just a book signing encounter. Move along. No connection made.

There are many, many Roger Ebert books of course.

Any expressions of violence at the Tea Party today?

Mmm. Yes. Consider this one:



And this one — from the Tea Party opposition:



All of these people seemed pretty friendly to me. The cheesehead guy joked that he hoped I got his good side. And the man with the "Open Season" sign let me know that somebody had ribbed him about misspelling "RINO," and I laughed and said "Oh, yes, you know they're putting all those misspelled Tea Party signs up on Flickr." Wouldn't it be funny if the smart alecks mocking misspelling made their own mistakes? Then Meade pointed out that some people would be critical because of the crosshairs drawn on the animals' faces and the idea of "open season." They had a long talk and the idea seemed to be that, yeah, the humor was a little edgy and the crosshairs were not on a human being's face. Hmmm.

And how about the edgy humor in "Cut off my reproductive rights and I'll cut off yours." You know what that means. Reminds me of a poster I saw and sketched long ago:



It's all in good fun. Or is it?

We were talking about khat, and Kev said...

"I thought khat-blogging had kind of gone out of style lately."

I thought I'd do a post with a LOLcat, saying something on this theme, so I went to Flickr to find a picture of a cat, and I got pleasantly distracted by this comment on the photograph that I blogged yesterday. Screen grab:



See? The commenter — jjmadison — has a cat face avatar and his comment — "wow, all that on two packs of Splenda??" — continues the drug theme. Ah! My drug of choice is synchronicity. I'm high on it now. I'm even singing: Oh! Oh! Oh!

Not really, but I do have to shout above the din of my Rice Krispies.

Now, somewhat giddy, I do still want to make that LOLcat, and I search my Flickr photographs for "cat." But I haven't been good about labels over there, and the collection of "cat"-labeled photos seems a bit absurd. There's a latte with a foam cat face. A picture of a poster that says "Don't Shoot the Cat." There's the very young me with a cat and my same-age son with a cat:



[ADDED: Yes, Chris is holding a "Hilter cat" and we were just talking about Facebook groups like "G-D BLESS HITLER," but stay away from the Nazi synchronicity. The brown-shirt acid that is circulating around us is not specifically too good.]

There are the pages from my Amsterdam sketchbook about the Cat Museum — the Katten Kabinet. There are some bat orts.

Most absurd, there is a set of LOLcats, made from photos taken of paused — pawsed — frames from the movie "La Dolce Vita."

What was that all about? Don't you remember back on August 11, 2007, when TRex said "Every time I look in over [at Althouse], something so weird is going on that I feel like I just bumbled on to the set of a Fellini film," and I was all:

"Im in ur hair/Lickin ur i"
"Im ur soul/gettin outta heer"
"Ur head/my roller coaster"
"Im ur/windsheeled wipurrz"

But these Rice Krispies were enough, and I don't want an egg at this hour. So I look to you, dear readers, to pick up Kev's khat-blogging theme and make some LOLcats. You can make them here, and you can email them to me at annalthouse (at) gmail (dot) com.

I'd love to pass out some of the Althouse blog drugs: frontpaging and tags.

And I'm hoping TRex will bumble over here and see that something weird is going on. And also that something crawls from the slime at the bottom of a dark Scottish lake.

UPDATE: From Lem:



AND: From Zachary Paul Sire:



AND: From Palladian:



From Kev (who started all this):

Solitude and the lake.

I took my walk to work yesterday down by the lake -- Lake Mendota. That makes the walk a few blocks longer, but the lake has its mystic pull for the solitary individual, as I was and often am on my walks around Madison.

My camera took note of the other solitary figures.

The woman with a computer:



The man with a skateboard. He's feeding the ducks, which you are not supposed to do:



The man with headphones...



... and the man with a book and his foot up on the railing, the man tying his shoe, the seagull on the lamppost....

Are they -- are we -- lonely?

I think about 2 of my favorite Thoreau quotes, which I wrote down long ago on this page of my "Amsterdam Notebooks":

"A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will."

"Why should I be lonely? Is not our planet in the Milky Way?"

UPDATE, April 4, 2013: To think that less than a year later, I would be married! How strange. I hope all the lonely people — where do they all come from? — have, since this time in September 2008, found someone to love, as I found my own dear sweet Meade.

Castrate rapists? Bobby Jindal is on the same page as radical feminists.

TPM has this:



This is one of those places where the right wing is on the same page as radical feminism. I immediately thought of a poster I saw years ago in Amsterdam. This was back in the days when I carried a sketchbook instead of a camera:



Click here to enlarge. Here's the relevant detail:



To be fair, Jindal would use chemicals instead of scissors. (And I know the scissors are lopping off the wrong body part.)

The Amsterdam Notebooks—Page 35, the final page.

It's the last day of this 35 day project. The full set is now available here.







With that, we close The Amsterdam Notebooks — and see a final litter square on the back cover, a detail from Page 1:



Once again, we wonder: Does it?

MORE: "A final litter square"? I meant little, but I'm going to accept the typo as a true Freudian slip.

The Amsterdam Notebooks—Page 34.

It's Day 34 of this 35 day project. Tomorrow's the last one. Here's the set thus far.

This page records my venture onto one of those tour boats that show you around the canals. After avoiding them through my entire trip, I yielded to the inevitable on my last day in the city. I loathed the experience.

The guide with the monotone voice had one theme:



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The Amsterdam Notebooks—Page 33.

It's Day 33 of this 35 day project. (The set thus far.)

I visit the Anne Frank House. The sign says no photography. I ask if it's okay to draw, and the woman selling the tickets doesn't quite understand what I'm saying. I realize that if they don't want people taking photographs, they would probably object even more to someone taking the time to stand there making a drawing. I say never mind. If someone tells me not to draw, I'll stop, I decide, but I'm not going to seek out a ban. There isn't a no drawing sign. I feel guilty and clandestine the whole time I'm there.

But, in fact, it's early in the morning, and it isn't crowded at all. I have a long time alone in Anne Frank's bedroom. I make this drawing of the pictures on her wall. She's a kid interested in pop culture — movies — Greta Garbo. "Ninotchka" is a new movie that she's excited about.



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I feel I'm doing something wrong, drawing these things, absorbed in one girl's interest in the pop culture of long ago— ephemera, preserved under plexiglas.

I find myself noticing everything that is incongruent with the suffering of the Holocaust: the ornate toilet, the Shelley Winters Oscar, the misconceived book covers. I collect a variety of things on one page:



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The Amsterdam Notebooks—Page 32.

It's Day 32 of this 35 day project. (The set thus far.)

Here are some observations about fashion:



And here's a running list I kept of names of stores and restaurants that amused me:

The Amsterdam Notebooks—Page 31.

It's Day 31 of this 35 day project. (The set thus far.) This is the page of the notebooks that has the least to do with Amsterdam. I was just watching TV, "Oprah," to be exact. Gail Sheehy was on, pushing her then-new book about menopause, "The Silent Passage." Looking back on this drawing, I notice it's lot like blogging. I copy out a (near) quote that happens to strike me and then make my own comment. Sheehy was strongly pushing hormone replacement therapy back then, and subsequent reports about that were very negative. I was struck by the fact that it was testosterone that women needed to preserve their sexual feelings.



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The Amsterdam Notebooks—Page 30.

It's Day 30 of this 35 day project. (The set thus far.) Not much happening on this page. Just walking around, hanging out in a café. I notice and draw a small building the purpose of which I don't understand. It has potted plants on top and a little door, but no windows. In the café, I jot down the first names of the Motown singers I hear them playing.

The Amsterdam Notebooks—Page 28.

It's Day 28 of this 35 day project. (The set thus far.) I'm still at the Stedelijkmuseum, where we saw that video installation yesterday. Today, I look at a huge collage by Henri Matisse and draw a tiny detail, and then I go on to the sort of thing that makes people think sculpture is just terrible:





This sculpture was room size and not made of any fine material like marble or wood. It was just a shoddy assemblage. And, yes, the devil is sitting on a toilet. The angels are holding it aloft. It's called "The Triumph of Love." Doesn't that give you a wonderful opportunity to think deeply about... what? How crappy your last relationship was?

The Amsterdam Notebooks—Page 27.

It's Day 27 of this 35 day project. (The set thus far.) Yesterday, I felt deprived of language. Today, at the Stedelijkmuseum, I suddenly encounter a way too much language. This is a video installation with two TVs playing simultaneously and continuously. I've written in the audio portion in comics fashion:



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The Amsterdam Notebooks—Page 26.

It's Day 26 of this 35 day project. (The set thus far.) I'm in the museum, but passing the time by reading. If you're following the series, you already know, the book I'm reading is "Walden." Why should I feel lonely?





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