Cross Between an Egg and a Bloodhound

By special request.

*sigh*

Philip Larkin is so … gloomy. I’m probably biased because I know too much about him, having read Andrew Motion’s biography of the poet. But we must strive to keep Dr. C happy and/or enraged. The first poem is untitled (or it uses its first line as title):

Coming at last to night’s most thankful springs,
I meet a runner’s image, sharply kept
Ambered in memory from mythology;
A man who never turned aside and slept,
Nor put on masks of love; to whom all things
Were shadowlike against the news he bore,
Pale as the sky: one who for certainty
Had not my hesitations, lest he see
The loud and precious scroll of sounding shields
Not worth the carrying, when held before
The full moon travelling through her shepherdless fields.

[March 1945]

Compare that to Ashbery’s At North Farm. (Not you, Dr. C!)

Here is the second (and last) verse of Larkin’s poem, A Writer:

He lived for years and never was surprised:
A member of his foolish, lying race
Explained away their vices: realised
It was a gift that he possessed alone:
To look the world directly in the face;
The face he did not see to be his own.

He was not always without humor. Here are bits from a May 2008 article in The Guardian about his interactions with photographer Fay Godwin when she did his portrait:

Many of us hate looking at photographs of ourselves, but Philip Larkin seems to have particularly disliked the process. He variously described portraits of himself as looking like “the late Stan Laurel”, “CS Lewis on a drugs charge”, or displaying “as much expression as a lump of sugar”.

On other occasions he complained he looked like “a cross between an egg and a bloodhound” and “an egg sculpted in lard, with goggles on”.

… Larkin and Godwin obviously got on but there was a road bump in 1983 when Larkin said he was horrified to learn that a photograph he hated was to be published. He called it the “Boston Strangler” picture. Godwin too was horrified, blaming Faber, and insisting she had always acted honourably. They made up and another shoot was scheduled. “I now have three conditions … I am not bald, I have only one chin, my waist is concave,” Larkin wrote.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

 

Incarcerated

This is from the essay, Post-Photography in the book of essays, Each Wild Idea by Geoffrey Batchen (2002):

… Over the past two decades, the boundary between photography and other media like painting, sculpture, or performance has become increasingly porous. It would seem that each medium has absorbed the other, leaving the photographic residing everywhere, but nowhere in particular.

… The suggestion is that a diminution of our collective faith in the photograph’s indexical relationship to the real will inevitably lead to the death of photography as an autonomous medium. The irony of this scenario is that photography as a separate entity might well be on the verge of disappearing forever, even as the photographic as a rich vocabulary of conventions and references lives on in ever-expanding splendor.

That’s in his introductory paragraph. I am going to skip to deep within the essay, to one of his examples that I find particularly interesting, even though it may not seem directly related to the previous:

… Equally ubiquitous [as the use of photography incorporated within built structures] has been the practice of constructing tableaux and then photographing them. What should we make of this? What should we make of a photography that induces the production of things? In one recent case, the things in question are simulations of various kinds of prison architecture, constructed and photographed by New York artist James Casebere. Two sets of things, the, models and photographs of models, each produced by the demands of the other.

[ ... ]

… some of Casebere’s interiors are eerily reminiscent of the inside of a camera, as if we are looking from the inside out, as if the architecture we are viewing is that of the photographic apparatus. Reminiscent of Talbot’s negative images of the windows of his country home, these cameras, these rooms, are all illuminated by a single blinding source of light. As viewers, we appear to be looking from the back wall of the space, standing in for (perhaps even becoming) the photographic image being projected there. This lighting modulates the stark whiteness of the surfaces and desultory objects that comprise these otherwise empty interiors. Actually, the whiteness of these rooms is something of an assumption on our part, for Casebere’s prints come tinted with a gray-blue pallor. Prisoners have this pallor, but so do monks confined to their cells (and photographers who spend too much time in the darkroom or computer lab). It is the color of incarcerated skin, of confession and repentance. This ecclesiastical aura adds to the impression of silence (some types of photograph are noisy, but certainly not these). Moreover, the selective lighting, minimal furnishings, and sepulchral tone of these images call to mind not only prisons and monasteries, but also art galleries — the very spaces where one might reasonably expect to encounter these photos in the flesh. It is as if cell, camera, and gallery (viewer, viewing apparatus and view) can do no more than endlessly reproduce one another. We are faced with the prospect of a photographic architecture that is continually in the process of turning itself inside out, with a photography building and demolishing its own parameters with equal fervor.

… we find Casebere broaching the very architectonics of photography. This time it is the traditional orders of sign and referent that are threatened, that is, the separation of real and representation on which the presumed veracity of the photograph has for so long been founded. In Casebere’s Prison Series, there is a constant referencing from one to the other, but no longer any originary outside source, no absolute ground. Real and representation, presence and absence, thing and photograph, are instead seen to share the sort of promiscuous complicity that calls all identity into question. Like Talbot, Casebere leaves us with that most troubling of apparitions: photography’s architecture as a site of deconstruction.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

 

Feelings

This post on the Wired Science blog brought back some lovely memories from my childhood. My father kept a few broodmares (nothing fancy, just good riding horses) which were bred every year (more or less).  Horses are examined via the same route as cows both before breeding (to check the state of the follicle) and after to check … whatever needed checking.

Our horse veterinarian, Dr. Flynn (a Dr. of Irish descent ! … [*said with a knowing look and much wiggling of the eyebrows*]), would put on a clear plastic glove that went all the way to his shoulder and then go about his business. I was always both entranced and astonished by the necessary first step of manual extraction of large quantities of manure from the mare, by repeatedly inserting the arm all the way to the shoulder.

The exam is then done by feel.

At that time (I was a little kid), nobody explained to me exactly why the vet was doing this, which led to some confusion about the reproductive process of horses. And it made me wonder about gynecologists.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

 

Residual Effect

All of this is from the essay, Taking and Making in the book of essays, Each Wild Idea by Geoffrey Batchen (2002):

When is a photograph made? At what points in its production should we locate its creative and temporal boundaries? Is it when the photographer depresses the camera shutter, submitting a chosen scene to the stasis of framed exposure? Is it when the photographer singles out this exposure for printing, thereby investing a latent image with the personal significance of selection, labor, and, most crucial of all, visibility? Or is it when that image is first exposed to the public gaze, the moment when, if only by adding itself to a culture’s collective visual archive, the photograph could be said to enact some sort of residual effect? These questions are of more than academic interest; already a number of exhibitions have been organized that include photographic works never seen by those who are supposed to have “made” them.[for example, Garry Winogrand, as he points out in a footnote] So my questions immediately impinge on prevailing notions of intention, authorship, and value. But perhaps more important is the way such questions force us to consider how the making of photographs is always caught up in the complex entanglements of their own history.

Take Alfred Stieglitz’s Paula, for instance. … [Beaumont] Newhall describes the image as one in which “Stieglitz records a new, personal vision.”

[click for larger]

… Diana Emery Hulick calls Paula ”perhaps the photographer’s best known early work”: “Its technical virtuosity and modernist sensibility have earned it a well-deserved place in the history of art.” … “Paula is a turning pont in the history of the medium and in the artist’s oeuvre … It encapsulates the artist’s development from narrative to modernist and self-referential photography.” … “the image also appears to presage Stieglitz’s late work.”

Strange then that Stieglitz did not repeat this “new personal vision” or “modernist sensibility” in other work from this period.

… in the same year Stieglitz took Paula, he submitted an entirely naturalistic portrait of a young boy, very much in the spirit of Peter Henry Emerson’s aesthetic preferences, to Der Amateur Photograph, where it was published in 1890. Work made in subsequent years continued to stress atmospheric effects (as in Winter on Fifth Avenue, 1893) or poignant genre scenes caught in differential focus (The Net Mender, 1894, which Stieglitz published as “My favorite picture” in the first, 1899 issue of Photograhic Life). Although he exhibited many other photographs from this period in his Camera Club Exhibition of 1899, he did not think to include Paula. He also failed to include it in his 1913 one-person exhibition at 291 Gallery. Despite ample opportunities, he again neglected to publish Paula in either of the magazines under his control, Camera Notes or Camera Work. Nor did he publish any other examples of the hard-edged modernist sensibility that had apparently become his personal vision in 1889 — until, that is, the October 1911 issue of Camera Work which reproduced The Steerage [but not Paula] for the first time.

… From the tangle of evidence, it seems likely that Paula was taken in 1889 (although even this seems to be uncertain in Stieglitz’s own mind) but not printed until 1916, and was exhibited for the first time only in 1921.

… Much has been written about the history of The Steerage within this context, recounting how Stieglitz exposed the image in 1907 but failed to recognize its significance until 1910 (when it was rediscovered by friends), after which he published it in a 1911 issue of Camera Work and exhibited it in his one-person show of 1913. Thirty-five years later, in 1942, Stieglitz projected his theory of revelation back onto the production of this now-famous image, remembering not this inconvenient lag between its taking and making but an immediate and spontaneous vision of “shapes and underlying that a feeling I had about life.” His reminiscence stresses that he had seen the image complete in his mind’s eye before he even had his camera in his hand.

… in presenting Paula as an image prescient of his later career, Stieglitz once again claims for himself the eye of the seer; apparently he recognized significant form back in 1889, even when he was not conscious of it (even when he could not be conscious of it).

Batchen goes on to do a similar analysis of the several photographs by Australian photographer Max Dupain. Skipping to near the end of the essay:

… The point is to raise questions about the kind of history that accepts such retrospective re-creations without comment, a history that is content simply to reproduce The sunbaker [a Dupain photo] and date it 1937 and to present Paula as a work of 1889. Such histories thereby privilege the moment of taking over that of making, the private moment over the public, the origin over the journey, the aesthetic decisions over the social. At the same time, these histories deny their own role in the making of photographs (and photographers), in the establishment of certain meanings and values and the exclusion of others.

…. What this method represses, apart from the complications of actual historical evidence, is the schizophrenic identity of all photographs. As a system of representation dependent on reproduction, the photograph is capable of having many distinct physical manifestations. It is simply not appropriate for historians to treat photographs as if they are unique objects like paintings or sculptures. …

I would strongly disagree with two parts of this essay — both of which are key to its conclusion. First, he says, that Stieglitz “recognized significant form back in 1889, even when he was not conscious of it (even when he could not be conscious of it).” Stieglitz took the picture. Therefore, by definition, he was conscious of it. Photographers (and, presumably all artists) respond in many ways to the world, often not in ways that they are sure about themselves. I know I do. I experiment all the time even if I don’t use it or make it my main pursuit. It would be nuts for me to refuse to be open to different or new stimulus or new ways of seeing. Change or development of my eye takes time; it’s not instantaneous and it’s evolving constantly.

The other part that I disagree with is the suggestion that paintings and sculptures are somehow more outside of history than photographs. I don’t think that the possible taking/making gap peculiar to photography makes that true.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

 

The Shell in the Ghost

The two sources that I am going to quote from below are not obviously related. However, I find them more interesting when considered one after the other.

First, from a review in Aperture 160 (Summer 2000) of a show, The Ghost in the Shell: Photography and the Human Soul, 1850-2000,” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The review is by Max Kozloff:

… Many nineteenth- and twentieth-century photographers were actually not hostile to the face; they merely isolated the facial sign by treating it as a mask. Medical, criminal, and ethnographic portraits; Adolphe-Eugéne Disderi, the creator of cartes-de-visite; Lászó Moholy-Nagy, Robert Mapplethorpe, idealists of light or muscle; Annie Leibovitz’s celebrity shots; Nancy Burson and Keith Cottingham virtuosi of face-altering computer manipulation: stylistically, these have little enough in common. Yet conceptually, they exhibit a weird solidarity. For time and again, they determine the role of the face while characteristically disregarding its owner. A certain absence brings them together, an absence of inquisitiveness about the one before the camera. The light was on in their house of physiognomy, but no one was there.

[ ... ]

“The Ghost in the Shell” hits its stride in discussing the etiology of post-Modern manias and multiple personalities. A line runs from Dr. Charcot’s photos of hysterics to Bruce Nauman’s screaming clowns, who throw fits but have no passion. Where once Modernists had emptied the face of keen and singular response, now it appears to swoon with a capricious rapture or look bewitched, as if possessed by foreign bodies. Sometimes, too, the visage is savagely treated: it’s missing a nose or mouth, as in the computer-manipulated work of Aziz + Cucher.

What might the presence of all these unhinged, somnambulistic, or disfigured characters signify? Well, obviously, the portentous question asked by such images is not who’s there, at that moment, but what is the enduring human condition, as conceived in our time? The cultures reflected by such work are technical cultures above all involved with the study and control of bodily impulse, or prosthetic extensions of it. Faces tend therefore to act as vehicles for symbolic statement, reinforced by a dreamy and suffocating atmosphere.

Fascinating and, of course, dismal in equal measure, this symbolism needs to pump individuality right out of the creatures it visualizes. The torrent of affect in post-Modernist depictions of the face does imply a criticism of withdrawn demeanor in Modernist portraiture. Still, even though the one style is highly fictive and the other clinically factual, both are fixated by personal displacement. …

Next is from Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness by William Styron (1990):

… Since antiquity — in the tortured lament of Job, in the choruses of Sophocles and Aeschylus — chroniclers of the human spirit have been wrestling with a vocabulary that might give proper expression to the desolation of melancholia. Through the course of literature and art the theme of depression has run like a durable thread of woe — from Hamlet’s soliloquy to the verses of Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, from John Donne to Hawthorne and Dostoevski and Poe, Camus and Conrad and Virginia Woolf. In many of Albrecht Dürer’s engravings there are harrowing depictions of his own melancholia; the manic wheeling stars of Van Gogh ar the precursors of the artist’s plunge into dementia and the extinction of self. It is a suffering that often tinges the music of Beethoven, of Schumann and Mahler, and permeates the darker cantatas of Bach. The vast metaphor which most faithfully represents this fathomless ordeal, however, is that of Dante, and his all-too-familiar lines still arrest the imagination with their augury of the unknowable, the black struggle to come:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
Ché la diritta via era smarrita.

In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark wood,
For I had lost the right path.

Styron goes on, but that’s enough to get the gist of what I’m after. The feel, the intent of the artists listed by Styron seem to me to be completely different, and to my taste far better than that of the photographers of Kozloff’s review. Something to think about.

[Not included in the Kozloff quotes, but part of his review was a description of Duchenne's experiments with facial muscles that you may find interesting.]

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Stumped*

*see first comment to previous post

This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level.
Look at it talking to you. You look out a window
Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don’t have it.
You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other.

That (above) is the beginning of the poem, Paradoxes and Oxymorons by John Ashbery

No poet of our time has been more influential, and yet with this poet a counter-anthology of worst-loved poems could be printed. Whole Ashbery poems — his collage poem “Europe,” for example — became famous for being unreadable, or, worse, hostile to readers, or, worst of all, a big hoax. Ashbery occasionally addressed in his poems the disgust some people experience while reading him, as when he titles a poem “Not Him Again” or “Thank You for Not Cooperating,” …

The above and the following are from John Ashberry: ‘Look, Gesture, Hearsay’ by Dan Chiasson in The New York Review of Books (April 9, 2009):

… Losing, failing, falling behind, and straying — these are the states of mind that interest Ashbery the most. Like Whitman, Ashbery cannot bear the pathos of his readers’ failing to find him (“You will hardly know who I am or what I mean/But I shall be good health to you nevertheless” — Whitman, “Song of Myself”). The odd empathy that saturates these poems arises from Ashbery’s total identification with readers and acts of reading, his equal distribution of sentience between author and reader. Because he finds himself radically inscrutable, Ashbery is, more thoroughly than any other poet of our era, a reader of his own poems, a decipherer, often (like his readers) suspended in a state of anxious partial knowledge.

If you’re willing to try, here is some help; from Many Happy Returns: The Poetry of John Ashbery by Richard Jackson in Ploughshares (Nov 1986):

… The ultimate danger is boredom in that it signals stasis, and these poems explore the possibility that stasis comes not only from lack of movement, but from movement involving an other who is so general and large that the emotional evolution is hardly noticed  –

Who can say
What it means, or whether it protects? Yet it is clear
That history merely stretches today into one’s private guignol.
The violence dreams. You are half asleep at your instrument table.

[ ... ]

In A Wave this dialectic becomes more expansive. It is as if Ashbery heeded the warning of “Drunken Americans” where he realizes “all/Moments are like this: Thin, unsatisfactory/As gruel, worn away more each time you return to them” (ST 22). Unsatisfactory, that is, “Until one day you rip the canvas from its frame.” In the title poem of the book the canvas, torn from its frame, becomes itself a frame, another system:

By so many systems
As we are involved in, by just so many
Are we set free on an ocean of language that comes to be
Part of us, as though we could ever get away.

(W 71)

The drama for the speaker here is to “get back to that raw state/Of feeling” (79), to return to an origin but not so as to “force” ideas “into meanings that don’t concern us/And so leave us behind” (71). It is a variation of the Romantic quest for feeling that must avoid the weight of a past that threatens to overdetermine our modes of feeling even as we return to that past — “So the voluminous past/Accepts, recycles our claims to present consideration/And the urban landscape is once again untroubled” (78). If we are not careful, “The past absconds/With our fortunes” (78). In this context the drama of ideas always questions itself as part of an ongoing dialogue —  ”a luminous backdrop to over-repeated/Features, having no life of their own, but only echoing/The suspicions of their possessor” (69). “So we are set free on an ocean of language that comes to be/Part of us” and in time becomes “a sculpture/Of moments, thoughts added on” (71). The search extends for newness, novelty  —  ”a new weather/Nobody can imagine” (74). Thus he asks — “is there something new to see, to speculate on?” Finally, then, the dialogue in Ashbery is with the future one sees projected from a past, an attempt to avoid the simple levellings of repeating the past. What “A Wave” fights against — and its dramatic, narrative power comes from its novelistic sense of triumphs and failures, hopes and despairs — is the simple repetition that has threatened his narrators from the beginning —  ”And then it all happens blendingly, over and over/In a continuous, vivid present that wasn’t there before” (84). He must avoid simple ends “Dreamed into their beginnings” (85).

The poem from the previous post (Milk) that stumped Dr. C makes perfect sense to me. I hesitate to explain how and why because that seems to somehow ruin the pleasure of it. (There are plenty of other poems that make no sense at all to me, so there you go … )

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Burnt Orange

… I prefer the cookbook to the actual meal. Feeling bores me. That’s why I write poetry. In poetry you just give the instructions to the reader and say, “Reader, you go on from here.” And what I like about poetry is its readers, because those are giving people. I mean, those are people you can trust to get the job done. They pull their own weight. If I had to have someone at my back in a dark alley, I’d want it to be a poetry reader. They’re not like some people, who maybe do it right if you tell them, “Put this foot down, and now put that one in front of the other, button your coat, wipe your nose.”

So, really, I do it for the readers who work hard and, I feel, deserve something better than they’re used to getting. I do it for the working stiff. And I write for people, like myself, who are just tired of the trickle-down theory where somebody spends pages and pages on some fat book where everything including the draperies, which happen to be burnt orange, are described, and, further, are some metaphor for something. And this whole boggy waste trickles down to the reader in the form of a little burp of feeling. God, I hate prose. I think the average reader likes ideas.

“A sentence, unlike a line, is not a station of the cross.” I said this to the poet Mark Strand. I said, “I could not stand to write prose; I could not stand to have to write things like ‘the draperies were burnt orange and the carpet was brown.’” And he said, “You could do it if that’s all you did, if that was the beginning and the end of your novel.” So please, don’t ask me for a little trail of bread crumbs to get from the smile to the bedroom, and from the bedroom to the death at the end, although you can ask me a lot about death. That’s all I like, the very beginning and the very end. I haven’t got the stomach for the rest of it. …

I can’t say that I agree with that, but it made me laugh out loud. It’s the middle of the prose poem, The Politics of Narrative — Why I Am a Poet by Lynn Emanuel.

Read the whole thing; it’s funny (and not very long). [ link ]

For more Emanuel, see this previous post.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

 

Consumed

Guess the answer:

What is this crab used for?

And this okra?

Answer is here, but don’t even think about looking until you have made at least one guess. [scroll way down the linked page to find the crab and the okra]

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

 

Milk

A poem about your better* self:

At North Farm
by John Ashbery

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you?

Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?

 

*of course, by “better” I mean your creative artistic transgressive sometimes fist-waving self

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

 

Lookalike

I don’t have a real photographer’s vest like Felix, but now that I’m wearing my blaze orange please-don’t-shoot-me size Men’s* Small (more like Elephant’s Small) orange vest (hunting season is on), I think the resemblance is striking:

Compare to this and this. Whaddayathink?

*I’ve never seen Women’s sizes in blaze orange attire. 

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/