According to the card stuck to the wall in a London museum next to a 1926 photograph by André Kertész, which you can see here. The white paint — we were told by some curator — was "to banish entirely any recollection of the green he found so intolerable."
I copied those words down in my notebook in 2002 — the last time I was in London — along with a sort of diagram of the composition of the photograph:
That scan comes from a notebook I found, a notebook that — back in 2013 — I had talked about losing:
I have a notebook of drawings/writings done at a big Paul Klee show, done in London in about 2003, just before starting this blog. I'd like to copy the pages and blog it. I was analyzing/riffing on the... ideas that he used.
Wonder where I put that.
Back then, betamax3000 had said: "NOW you are teasing me. I want that post." Okay, I will get around to that. I have 9 pages of notes, which, if I remember correctly from 12 years ago, were intended to be the code-broken instructions for how to draw/paint like Paul Klee. But for now, you'll have to consider the womanlessness of Piet Mondrian.
Here's our discussion of Rollins's first piece, which was called "Fuck Suicide." My focus was on the effect of an artist's suicide on our perception of the work he has left behind, but there was also material taking the position that it is morally wrong for anyone with children to commit suicide. ("[I]t should be your utmost goal not to traumatize your kids.")
The new piece is headed "An Apology." First, let me reveal that when I wrote the previous paragraph, on proofreading, I was surprised to see that instead of "Fuck Suicide," I had written "Fuck Apology." Is Rollins really sorry and, more importantly, what is he sorry for?
For the last 9+ hours, I have been answering letters from people from all over the world. The anger is off the scale and in my opinion, well placed.
The article I wrote in the LA Weekly about suicide caused a lot of hurt. This is perhaps one of the bigger understatements of all time. I read all the letters. Some of them were very long and the disappointment, resentment and ringing clarity was jarring.
He acknowledges the "anger" and the "hurt" he caused, and he wants those who are enraged to see that he's taken quite a bit of time to read everything and to undertake to write back to everyone. Acknowledging that your words have hurt doesn't concede that you now see that what you've expressed is wrong.
That I hurt anyone by what I said, and I did hurt many, disgusts me. It was not at all my intent but it most certainly was the result.
Even this does not take the words back or express regret. He could be invoking the principle of double effect, which explains why it is ethical to do something that has a harmful effect when your intent was to do good, to produce a good effect, even when you know the bad effect will also follow. You don't like that bad effect, but you did go ahead and do what caused it.
Next, Rollins — puts himself within the circle of victims of depression:
I have had a life of depression. Some days are excruciating.
I'm sure many of the letter-writers accused him of not understanding what it is like to be depressed. If you only knew how it feels, you would not say such ignorant things. Those letter-writers are so very wrong.
Knowing what I know and having been through what I have, I should have known better but I obviously did not.
Known better than... what? To predict how very angry people would get? Is he feeling sorry for himself for attracting all that hate mail?
I get so mad when I hear that someone has died this way. Not mad at them, mad at whatever got them there and that no one magically appeared to somehow save them.
Here he's backing away from a demand for personal responsibility and adopting the belief that the motivation toward suicide is a separate entity beyond the mind of the person: the "whatever," the absence of magical saviors.
I am not asking for a break from the caning, take me to the woodshed as much as you see fit. If what I said has caused you to be done with me, I get it.
This sounds as though he feels sorry for himself, because so many people got mad at him. He's presenting himself as the victim, visualizing the criticism as physical violence, a caning. And, as noted above, he himself suffers from depression, so he's doubly the victim. The "whatever" torments him and the people who hated his "Fuck Suicide" are beating him up.
We finally reach the apology:
I am deeply sorry. Down to my marrow.
For what? Is this a nonapology?
I can’t think that means anything to you, but I am. Completely sorry. It is not of my interest to hurt anyone but I know I did.
I say nonapology. He's sorry that what he said hurt, and he knows that being perceived as hurting others is against his interests. He's sorry for himself! And he's determined to flip the narrative: If we're supposed to empathize with the depressed and not criticize, we need to empathize with him, one of the legions of the depressed.
IN THE COMMENTS: betamax3000 said:
Rollins prides himself on being the angry Truth-teller. This works when you are telling the kids what they want to hear. In this instance he misjudged the expected reaction of agreement to his Truth, which calls attention to the importance of his audience in such events. He probably needs to go back to talking tough against Straw Men.
Paddy O said:
His previous article is out of my analog world. I know it existed, yet it has nullified its existence
The coffee was not enough. I had to top it off with chocolate. And now more than an hour has passed since the first post of the day. I feel I should have served up some meaty political posts, delving into... oh, who knows?... some right-winger demanding that his crowd get heated up over the income tax in New York, which is causing him to abscond to Florida... or some left-winger assuring his flock that the John Doe investigation is really, really, probably going to get Scott Walker, just you wait. But I did not do that. My words did not go down on this blog. They evanesced. There is no archive, only vague memories of a conversation. What on earth did we talk about?
Ah! I remember. The conversation started with the observation that in blogging, there is always one post on top of the other, the new surmounting and obliterating the old. I'd been blogging about betamax3000's elaborate "Desolation Row" parody, about which he'd said, at last night's Bookshelf Café:
I Would Like to Think 'Internet meme Row' Will Inspire in Althouse a Sunday Morning Proustian Memory Flow, but - Alas - It Will probably Just be Swept Along With All of Yesterday's Other Pixels.
The Internet Paints Over Itself Each and Every Day.
And I was saying — to Meade, here in nonvirtual reality — that's a subject that bedeviled me in the early days of this blog. Like here, I'm chiding myself in 2005 for taking the trouble to update something written in 2004: "Don't I realize the old posts sink into oblivion? These old posts don't really exist at all." I visualized each new post physically weighing upon the posts underneath, pressing them endlessly into the murk.
Now, I tend to think — and this was the beginning of the hour-long conversation — that blogging is like life itself, with everything happening now, here in person, but better, because we can all talk at once, have the feeling of immediacy and spontaneity, and still be able to hear each other, almost in the present, and because of the archive, at any time, if we happen to care to listen to what has gone before.
I imagined a theater full of 2,000 people, with everyone talking out loud, expressing their thoughts at once. No one would hear what anyone was saying and it would just be an annoying variation of everyone sitting there silently and thinking. Blogging is the equivalent of having the superpower to go to everyone in that theater and close enough to hear that person and to repeat time, the same few seconds, over and over, until you'd gotten around to everyone and heard what each one had to say. No, it's even better than that, because you have a way to find the words you'd most like to hear, and to jump from one part of the theater to another at will.
You might think it would be better to write a book, that could exist and last and be read for 100 years, but perhaps in that 100 years, there would be no more readers than will read this blog post in the next 2 hours. And what of this conversation — this conversation from an hour ago, which I wasn't planning to blog about — this conversation that evanesced? There's no archive at all, unless I can pull it out of my memory and blog it now. There was all that and many more observations, including much talk of this panel discussion of 4 comedians where (at some point) they get to the topic of using what I will refer to as "the N-word"...
... and we talked about what it means to be "edgy," the subjectiveness of the edge with respect to comedy as opposed to the edge in slope snowboarding (and our own subjectiveness about what we were calling "the edge" as we nearly got into an argument), and how Michael Richards got into trouble by thinking he could be Lenny Bruce (and what was it Lenny Bruce did anyway? was it the same as the way Dustin Hoffman did it in "Lenny"? (NSFW)), and how comedians in a panel discussion are not the same as comedians doing standup, and panel discussions seem like they are supposed to be friendly conversation, but really involve a lot of competitive hostility, which maybe is what Chris Rock was doing to Louis CK in that part of the panel discussion that Meade described, but I still haven't watched, but I've been on plenty of academic panel discussions and I have a bit of a superpower to detect passive aggression, and that's why I like to do things in writing, from my remote outpost in Madison, Wisconsin, where the second post of the day, 2 hours after the first, is way overdue.
"One woman's refuse out the car window is another man's idea of making amends."
Okay... that's another approach to the end of comments, somehow creating another place where the same commenters can congregate and comment like they did back here in the old days when I had comments. Contrast that to Henry's approach — in the previous post.
ADDED: Meade comments at the first link, riffing on betamax who'd said: "Naked Bob Dylan Robot says: There is Eskimo Pain Deep in my Mid-Western Vowels, rumbles, gurgles: all the Pigeons Will Come to Me."
Vowels and bowels of angel hair
And Eskimo Pie hassles in the air
And pigeons pooping everywhere
I've looked at blogs that way
But now I'm simply paranoid
The spiders make me so annoyed
The many words I couldn't avoid
Blogs got in my way
I've looked at blogs from both sides now
From front and back, from kòu and tóu
It's blogs' intrusions I recall
I really don't like blogs at all
We've closed the door to comments... for a while at least, but there is still a backdoor, manned by Meade.
Will the comments section ever reopen, or is this a permanent vacation? I expect to reopen, well refreshed, and with some new ideas about how to make the ongoing experience rewarding for commenters of good faith.
ADDED: A reader emails:
Just a note from the peanut gallery that's been around since at least the Bush/Kerry election and a non participant in the comments section (I think I've commented 3 times in the history of the blog.)
The Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat Represents the Stylish Repression of the Sexual Urges of the Hat-Wearing Woman -- the Hat is a "Pillbox", thus referencing both Birth Control and Containment --, and How those Urges Create a Corresponding Attraction in the Male, as the Leopard-Skin Pattern Stimulates Animal Urges. This Becomes More Obvious in the Following Lines, where the Titular Hat is Compared to A Mattress:
Yes, I just wanna see If it's really that expensive kind You know it balances on your head Just like a mattress balances On a bottle of wine Your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat
That the Mattress is Balanced On a Bottle of Wine Implies that the Man is Contemplating the Use of Alcohol to Achieve the Goal of "jump(ing) on it sometime."
However, this Desire Remains Unrequited, as Evidenced in the Following lines:
Well, if you wanna see the sun rise Honey, I know where We'll go out and see it sometime We'll both just sit there and stare Me with my belt Wrapped around my head And you just sittin' there In your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat
Notice that they Will "Sit and Stare": there is No Jumping Upon the "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat". Furthermore, The Man Now Has a Belt Wrapped Around His Head, Indicating Restraint of His Hat-Jumping Thoughts, and -- Possibly -- Implying a Restraint Around His Phallic Head. Meanwhile, the Woman is "just sittin' there" and there is no further mention of a Mattress.
• Twenty-Four Hours is A Long Period of Time When You Deny Yourself;
• the Baby Spiders are Real;
• I Love the Commenters: Read All the Posts, All Day, Tongue Bound, and Realized in Retrospect that -- Perhaps -- I Occasionally Suck Too Much Oxygen From the Room;
• Still Don't Quite Get Central Time;
• the Scientology "No Fear' Paradigm Crosses Neuropaths with Cruel Neutrality: when I get it Down to Four Paragraphs I Will Thrust it Sideways Into a Thread about Gabe Kaplan;
• it -- Technically -- is Not a Burning Sensation.
I think I can say tonight that we are in Betamax debt. From now on it will be possible to risk loosing wifi knowing that it is a survivable non-event thanks to the courage and determination of one man. and his name is Betamax.
And:
Still Don't Quite Get Central Time;
Its like Althouse politics, I think.
That's exactly right. And then betamax3000 said:
At the Metaphorical Althouse Denny's I want More hash Browns and Non-Dairy Creamer: I am building a Mountain.
And I say: This means something. This is important.
I Am Going to Try an Experiment to Determine the Depths of My Althouse Comment Addiction: I Will Not Post a Comment for the Next Twenty-Four Hours. God, Give Me Strength. And -- Please -- No Robot Posts.
And I said:
But I have a Google alert on "robot."
And as long as you're over there rooting around in the Koi Café, I'm seeing Titus's list of what's hot this summer in Ptown, which he says "will arrive in Jesusland, in approximately 9 months," which makes Inga say "I got the no bra and kale thing, woo hoo! I'm ahead of the game!" and Palladian says "Kale? Varvatos? LOL. Poor Titus, about 2 years behind the trends. What a drag it is getting old."
And Meade says "Ha ha. Cool woud be growing ornamental kale in an old pair of Varvatos boots you bought in SOHO a dozen years ago. Hot: Italian wedding soup." I extract the information that it was Varvatos boots that Meade acquired — on the advice of his Cincinnati-based style consultant — to look good enough for me the first time we met, in January 2009, which was 4 years ago.
"... Baby Spiders while you Sleep. Bowels full of half-digested Cheerios. Microscopic Creatures swarming In the Bathroom, Always, and You With your Pants Down. Sweat pressed into the Bed Sheets in which you will Cover Yourself Again. Drool on the Pillow. Cat Drool on the Pillow. Wash your Hands with the Same Bar of Soap That Someone has Used to Clean Horrible Things from Their Hands. Toothbrush unprotected in the same Room with the Toilet. The Plunger in the Corner, with Memories of What Has Been Plunged. Dry off from the Shower with the Towel from the Day Before, tiny flakes of Skin now Damp and Reapplied. Washcloth. Public restaurant with Sneezed Microbes Hanging in the Air, Settling on your Dinner Plate. Don't Even Think about the Horrors hiding in the Food on That Plate. A Solitary Hair from the Cook's Beard, the Second-Hand Steroids in the Beef. Not Every Employee Washes their Hands. The Guy in the Kitchen washing the Silverware in a Sink of oily brackish water, perhaps with the Faint Residue of the Drain Cleaner used to clear the Reoccurring Clogs. Band-Aid on the Finger loosening in Same Water. Table considered clean by a Quick Wipe with a Dish-Towel Wet From the Tables Wiped Before. Air Ducts lined with Dust and Daddy-Long Legs. More baby Spiders."
A comments contribution — from betamax3000 — in yesterday's "Healthing" post (which was about the delusional spraying of disinfectant all over the house).
El Pollo Raylan offers the Rod Serling reading here.
I said at the end of that post about how the government should pay people to stay home and cook "wholesome, healthy meals" in a program funded with a tax on "harmful foods." I'm starting a new post to highlight some of the great comments.
BDNYC said:
If your wife doesn't fuck you enough, there should be a government program, financed by taxing prostitutes and pronographers, which encourages marital sex by paying wives to have sex on a nightly basis. It will make marriages happier, which will help the economy. There will be a multiplier effect. Or something.
Mogget said:
How do you tell the government you have a headache when it wants to fuck you?
El Pollo Raylan said:
Government is a terrible husband because:
(a) He's a polygamist: e pluribus unions are the norm: he's not looking out for you but your neighbor as well.
(b) He's a terrible lover: his IRS has an anal fetish.
(c) He's a pedophile--unabashedly interested in your kids at ever earlier ages.
(d) He can't control his own urges which means that another government will ultimately have to control him.
(e) He is a gun nut, buying and hoarding ammunition like it's going out of style.
ADDED: betamax3000 has a series of comments about "Government Husband." Here are a few:
Government Husband says you Look Sexy Tonight: let's make Sweet, Sweet Taxes.
Government Husband will Tell you What you are Making For Dinner tonight.
Government Husband looks like Harry Reid, Naked. Give Government Husband a Little Sugar.
Government Husband didn't Mean It, baby. He just gets Angry at the Middle East.
On occasion Government Husband likes to have Anonymous Sex with Foreign Governments in the Public Restrooms at Parks. Do Not question Government Husband's Needs.
Government Husband thinks it is Cute when you and your little friends play 'Democracy.'
Indie auteur Jim Jarmusch, who cast Mead in a moving vignette that closed his 2003 film "Coffee and Cigarettes," considered Mead one of his heroes.
One of my favorite movies. Here's the movie that made me a big fan: Andy Warhol's "Lonesome Cowboys."
He was a familiar face on Manhattan's Lower East Side, where he wandered the streets with a notebook, read his poetry in coffeehouses – often against a background of a Charles Mingus recording – and fed feral cats in the predawn hours....
Born on the last day of 1924 in Grosse Pointe, Mich., Mead was the son of a wealthy businessman and his socialite wife who divorced before he was born. He floated through boarding schools and a number of colleges before his father found him a job in a brokerage house, which was not to his liking...
Here, you can watch the Taylor Mead segment of "Coffee and Cigarettes" on YouTube, but it will look a lot better — and the entire movie is recommended — on Amazon instant video or DVD.
Goodbye to Taylor Mead. Real tears shed for you here at Meadhouse.
ADDED: "Let's pretend this coffee is champagne... to celebrate life... like the rich, classy people do."
IN THE COMMENTS: betamax3000 said:
I was feeding apple slices to the baby alligators in the sewer through an open manhole cover when the headlights came upon me like two drunk angels. The police had beaten my dead horse before, and I sure was not going to stick around this time for another pony ride. Through the alley I went, past the passed-out vagrants and the virgin hookers and the baking-powder salesman who looked like Woodrow Wilson, then down the stairs to the jazz club in the basement below the Italian restaurant that served great Chinese if you asked right. I had my usual -- gin with an orange marmalade chaser -- when I heard someone call my name above the honk-and-skitter of the saxophone trio: it was Speedy Johnny, free from jail. The cops had busted him for contributing to the delinquency of minors with intent to double-park, and now he looked as pale as a night-school oyster.
Discussed — improperly, I think — at Metafilter, here.
IN THE COMMENTS: betamax3000:
The source of this:
I Buried Paul = Cranberry Sauce.
(look it up)
The Beatles saw the End of Rock and Roll in a Side-Dish Food Item. Paul Is Dead, and now Glass Onions and Savoy Truffles will Assume the Cultural High Position.
Yoko Ono had an art piece called "Grapefruit". It is All Connected.
Pop Music: ephemeral. Strawberry Post Tarts: Forever.
Yes, clearly. We had to have them all pulled out after the Savoy Truffles.
Said Meade. Acknowledging that I got the reference, I said, "But he didn't do it alone..."
Meade has his computer screen open to Drudge, the right 2/3 of which looks like this right now:
It's all about smiles, as the dolphin in the lower right corner makes clear. Meade says, "Wow, George P. Bush looks like Nixon," and I say, "And Obama too... strangely." The Gore smile is waxen. For all I know the pic is of a wax depiction of the GoreBot, the ManBearPig we've come to dread.
Meanwhile, there's Leo, our new Gatsby, apparently "vibrantly alive." The word "vibrant" appears only once in "The Great Gatsby":
He felt their presence all about the house, pervading the air with the shades and echoes of still vibrant emotions.
I think you know what to do with that sentence. And if not, my belief in the harmony of the universe — or the mystical shades and echoes of pink dolphins or the reliability of the Althouse commentariat — tells me that betamax3000 will show you the way.
If you think the answer to that question is the genre is already there, it's called science fiction, then you are missing the key word literary.
The linked article talks about a new novel — "Odds Against Tomorrow" — and what "literary" means is conveyed by statements like this by the author Nathaniel Rich:
"I think we need a new type of novel to address a new type of reality.... which is that we're headed toward something terrifying and large and transformative. And it's the novelist's job to try to understand, what is that doing to us?"
And:
"I don't think that the novelist necessarily has the responsibility to write about global warming or geopolitics or economic despair.... But I do feel that novelists should write about what these things do to the human heart — write about the modern condition, essentially."
Rich says "the novelist," but he means the literary novelist. This superior individual is the one who understands that it is his job to understand deeply what is happening deep inside. Those sci-fi genre writers might describe what happens to the exterior world, but the literary writer describes what that world does to us... to the heart... the humanheart. What's the point of saying "human heart," by the way? Was it possible to to think we were talking about other beast's heart? Perhaps extra words seem literary.
"Odds Against Tomorrow" was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, which I just mentioned 3 days ago in a discussion about self-publishing that made a distinction between sci-fi and "high-end literary fiction." Sci-fi might do well self-published as an ebook...
But high-end literary fiction? Think you can attract the readers of that kind of material without a brand like Farrar Straus & Giroux attached? It's "high-end" and "literary" because high-end literary experts have done the filtering. Without that, all you have is pretension from an earnest soul who is self-publishing. How do you get that absurdly clunky vehicle going?
Speaking of extra words seeming literary, "high-end literary fiction" was not my phrase. It came from a literary agent. A high-end literary agent.
IN THE COMMENTS: betamax3000 has some great "Climate Change Fitzgerald" material, riffing on the old "Gatsby" project sentences. For example: "Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crêpe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty, but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering due to Climate Change."
This is a game we can all play. Here's mine, based on my favorite of all the old "Gatsby" sentences: "He went out of the room calling 'Ewing!' and returned in a few minutes accompanied by an embarrassed, extremely sweaty young man, with shell-rimmed glasses and scant hair scorched blond by the overbearing sun of Climate Change."
Quite aside from ssm, I'm very interested in the mental processes — the emotional metabolism — in forming opinions and making decisions. It's hard even to observe your own. You try or bumble into affecting the mental processes of others, but you don't really know how to do that. Imagine what would happen to us — politically and economically and personally — if others knew how to persuade us. Ah! It's impossible! There are so many politicians and salespersons and stalkers making their pitches. Even if the pitches were perfect, there'd be cacophony, ruining everything.
Persuasion is a mystery. But I will say that I have a superpower here — a strange superpower (which makes me a better lawprof than lawyer) — and that is that I don't feel any need to win. To me, the expression is complete in the writing. I blog for the intrinsic reward of writing and having readers. Thinking out loud — it's so thrilling and intimate and human! You give up the best part if you rework the expression in the hope of manipulating another human mind.
There's a place for writing as a means to an end, but it's not this place.
There. I've given you another sentence from "The Great Gatsby." I'm doing it now because over there in the "Whenever I think of Indianapolis" post, sydney said "Quick, do a Gatsby post so betamax has an outlet for his literary yearnings." If that makes sense to you, you must be a regular in these "Gatsby" project posts, and you know betamax3000 haunts the comments threads in his distinctly freaky style, which he's resorted to applying to the old "One Day at a Time" TV show in lieu of "The Great Gatsby."
Speaking of Indianapolis, I feel I need to infuse today's "Gatsby" sentence with a little meaning from the previous sentence. You should know that "it" refers to "New York on summer afternoons when every one’s away." That's New York City, of course, not the whole state. People in New York mean New York City when they say "New York." They call the state "New York State" if it's ever worth talking about. They probably never talk about Indianapolis (which probably means "Indiana City").
What kind of sensuous, overripe, funny fruits are falling into your hands... wherever you are when "every one's away"?
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