"At a moment when the creation of art at such a scale feels impossible without a corporate sponsor, when most visual stunts are shallow cries for publicity..."

"... the preservation of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s legacy feels urgent. And a crucial part of their oeuvre is that the inception of their grand, internationally known works happened humbly, in an unglamorous, gritty industrial building.... At first, only Christo was recognized as the artist behind the pieces, but in the mid ’90s, he started sharing equal credit for outdoor works with Jeanne-Claude. She also acted as his publicist and began hosting dinner parties, inviting influential dealers and gallerists. 'She was notorious for being a terrible cook.... They had no money at all, so she would cook flank steak and canned potatoes. That was it.' ... [T]he dealer Ivan Karp described one of the gatherings as 'a disastrous, bleak evening with some of the worst food served in a private home, ever!' Still, some people returned — two frequent dinner guests were Marcel Duchamp and his wife, Teeny.'"

From "Where Christo and Jeanne-Claude Cast Their Spells/The couple’s lives are preserved in a SoHo building where for decades they plotted their monumental projects" (NYT)(free-access link).

Lots of cool pictures of the Christo real estate, so go check them out at that link, but I want to show you this picture of Teeny, by Henri Matisse (who was her father-in-law during her first marriage):

Duchamp was her second husband. He said: "Everything important that I have done can be put into a little suitcase." Christo went colossal, but Duchamp went small. And he was married to a woman named Teeny.

Is there some idea that you should either go very big or very small? What springs to mind is the related idea of hot or cold: "I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth." File that under: Things Jesus Said In Someone Else's Dream.

Looking for quotes that credit the very small and shun the medium-sized:

"You’re not actually finished until you do read poetry on the weekends for fun."

Someone says in response to someone who said "I vividly remember discovering Dylan’s whole catalogue in college and consequently falling entirely out of touch with everything else music-related for a solid year, I also grew my curls out and you best believe I was wearing scarves and dressing like someone who liked to read poetry on weekends for fun."

All of that was in an r/bobdylan discussion of this new clip of Timothée Chalamet, getting (too far?) into his impersonation of Bob Dylan:

Welcome to the Church of Bob, Timmy. 🙏🏻🎶❤️
pic.twitter.com/g7N7S9DfBk

— Melanie Young 🔧 (@FreewheelinMY) December 18, 2024

What poetry does Bob read?

"When I was a small child of, I think, about five or six, I staged a competition in my head, a contest to decide the greatest poem in the world."

"There were two finalists: Blake’s 'The Little Black Boy' and Stephen Foster’s 'Swanee River.' I paced up and down the second bedroom in my grandmother’s house in Cedarhurst, a village on the south shore of Long Island, reciting, in my head as I preferred, not from my mouth, Blake’s unforgettable poem, and singing, also in my head, the haunting, desolate Foster song. How I came to have read Blake is a mystery. I think there were a few poetry anthologies in my parents’ house among the more common books on politics and history and the many novels. But I associate Blake with my grandmother’s house. My grandmother was not a bookish woman. But there was Blake, The Songs of Innocence and of Experience, and also a tiny book of the songs from Shakespeare’s plays, many of which I memorized. I particularly loved the song from Cymbeline, understanding probably not a word but hearing the tone, the cadences, the ringing imperatives, thrilling to a very timid, fearful child. 'And renownèd be thy grave.' I hoped so."

That is the first paragraph of the Nobel Prize acceptance lecture given by Louise Glück, which I am reading this morning because I'm seeing the obituary for her in the NYT.

"The final phase of criticism’s arc began with the rise of a figure that Roger Kimball memorably described as the 'tenured radical'..."

"... and which we might think of as the Scholar-Activist. For her [sic], the proper task of criticism was to participate in social transformations occurring outside the university. The battle against exploitation, she claimed, could be waged by writing about racism, sexism, homophobia, and colonialism, using an increasingly refined language of historical context, identity, and power. Literary artifacts (poems, novels, and other playthings of the élite) could be replaced as objects of study by pop-culture ones (Taylor Swift, selfies, and other playthings of the masses)...." 

Writes Merve Emre, in "Has Academia Ruined Literary Criticism? Literature departments seem to provide a haven for studying books, but they may have painted themselves into a corner," (The New Yorker).

"The sun is rising, trumpets are playing, all signifying redemption."

How happy I was to find only that when I searched for "trump" on the page "How Can We Bear This Much Loss?/In William Blake’s engravings for the Book of Job I found a powerful lesson about grief and attachment" by Amitha Kalaichandran (NYT).

In Blake’s penultimate illustration in this series Job is pictured with his daughters.... The sun is rising, trumpets are playing, all signifying redemption. Job became a fundamentally changed man after being tested to his core. He has accepted that life is unpredictable and loss is inevitable. Everything is temporary and the only constant, paradoxically, is this state of change.

"'Poppy Apocalypse': Small California city overrun by thousands of tourists declares 'public safety crisis.'"

WaPo reports.

Officials in Lake Elsinore, Calif., located just over an hour southeast of Los Angeles, announced Sunday that they had closed off access to their famed California golden poppy fields after “Disneyland size crowds” inundated the city of about 66,000 over the weekend, straining resources and creating a “public safety crisis.”

"This weekend has been unbearable,” the city said in Sunday’s announcement, which was shared across social media platforms. “We will evaluate all options next week including ways to shut this down. . . . We know it has been miserable and has caused unnecessary hardships for our entire community.”

The post included a graphic with a prominent red X over a photo of the poppy fields and large text that read, “No more shuttles or Entrance" and “No Viewing or Visiting.” It also featured several pointed hashtags, such as “#PoppyShutdown,” “#PoppyNightmare” and “#IsItOver."

You go to see the flowers, which you imagine out there on a people-free landscape, but if you go, there will be people all over the scene. The authorities might as well close it, because it isn't even there, that scene you'd like to view in person. Your in-personhood is part of a superbloom of humanity, all those people who, like you, wanted an in-person experience of the superbloom of flowers.

This is the problem with traveling to the greatest sights. They can't be seen. Better to travel to lesser sights — some less scenic fields of wild flowers. Where are those places where you can find beauty in nature, where you're not one of the masses of travelers besetting other travelers? Instead of going to the obvious places and being part of the problem of ruining what made them worth a trip, enjoy the trip of looking for the nature that no one else is looking at.

ADDED: A tip from William Blake:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour...

A Harvard political theorist gives Hillary Clinton some ludicrous advice about how not to walk into Donald Trump's "trap."

This is in WaPo, by Danielle Allen. The "trap" is that Hillary has a problem with men.

The more that Clinton takes Trump’s bait around the issue of his denigration of women, the more powerfully this flaw in her own campaign will show itself.

By "around the issue of his denigration of women," Allen means Trump's criticism of Hillary for playing the "woman card." That's not denigration of women, whatever... Allen's point is Hillary needs to do something about her man problem.

Allen has 3 ideas:

First, she should let her surrogates do the work of responding to issues raised by Trump that would pull her off her core message. She should let her surrogates do the work of replacing his labels with her own. Personally, she should meet his insults with a cheery silence, or a lighthearted deflectionary joke. She needs to become Teflon — not to engage.

So... just continue with those knowing smiles and big horse laughs? That's a basic strategy, but it can get annoying, especially if we feel there's an issue of substance that she's avoiding. Allen is assuming that Trump's statements will be misogynistic insults, but that's underestimating the opponent.

Second, each week, Clinton needs a message powerful enough to rival the rhetorical force of Trump’s own messages. How many of us can say what Ted Cruz’s or John Kasich’s messages have been in the past eight weeks? But we can all say what Trump’s have been. “The Republican primary process is rigged.” “The person who gets the most votes should get the nomination,” and so on. Clinton needs weekly messages that meet the moment and drive the conversation.

All right, that's the second level strategy. The first level was no substance. The second level is: Substance! Okay, if you've got it. Your substance has to beat his substance.

Third, and most important, Clinton needs to force Trump to fight on the ground he has claimed as his own. No one has yet forced him to do that. She needs to challenge him on the terrain he is seeking to defend. Rather than simply fighting for women and children, Clinton needs to fight Trump for the votes of men. His slogan is, “Make America Great Again.” Hers should be, “Make America Fair Again.”

Can we be great without being fair? No we cannot.

Do women want fairness? Yes. Do men want fairness? Yes. Do African American, Latino and Muslim Americans want fairness? Yes. Do white Americans want fairness? Yes. Do religious Americans want fairness? Yes. Do gay, lesbian and transgender Americans want fairness? Yes.

Allen lapses into a rhapsody about fairness, replete with the saccharine lyrics of the 5th verse of "America, the Beautiful" ("Till souls wax fair as earth and air....").

I had to laugh. "Make America Fair Again" is not going to beat "Make America Great Again." It's a terrible response for Hillary. It may please some people who already support her (though that "again" points to the When was America fair? detour). But it's not going to win over the men (or women) who are drawn to Trump. They're going to hear "fair" to mean: You've had enough, time for other people to get their share.

My advice to Hillary Clinton would be: Stop listening to advice from people who consider Donald Trump patently loathsome. You must understand what is happening from the perspective of people who do not hear misogyny and xenophobia, but a positive message of America and greatness.

IN THE COMMENTS: Nurse Rooke said:

Presumably in the "America the Beautiful" lyrics, "souls wax fair" means "souls grow more beautiful" not more just.

Yes. You'd think the song title would clue that pretty strongly. I considered calling the line racist, with "fair" understood as in "fair-haired." The use of the word "soul" made me think in those terms. I thought of the William Blake poem, "The Little Black Boy" with the line: "And I am black, but O! my soul is white...."

"Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments..."

"... is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul. Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory—all these have served, in H. G. Wells’s phrase, as Doors in the Wall. And for private, for everyday use there have always been chemical intoxicants. All the vegetable sedatives and narcotics, all the euphorics that grow on trees, the hallucinogens that ripen in berries or can be squeezed from roots—all, without exception, have been known and systematically used by human beings from time immemorial. And to these natural modifiers of consciousness modern science has added its quota of synthetics—chloral, for example, and benzedrine, the bromides and the barbiturates. Most of these modifiers of consciousness cannot now be taken except under doctor’s orders, or else illegally and at considerable risk. For unrestricted use the West has permitted only alcohol and tobacco. All the other chemical Doors in the Wall are labeled Dope, and their unauthorized takers are Fiends."

Aldous Huxley, "The Doors of Perception." I'm thinking about that book this morning because, in a dream last night, I asked someone if she'd ever read that book and she said no, and I decided — extravagantly — that no one reads books anymore and no one talks about books. When you think of the title to Huxley's book — if you ever do — you remember — if you can remember — the epigraph that begins the book: "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite." That's from William Blake. Read it in context here. But there's also the H.G. Wells, which you can read in full at the first link.

Maurice Sendak says "Go to hell"...

... and a lot of other fascinating art-related things in a beautiful video shot in a beautiful room:



(Via Metafilter.)