Fine Art & Humanity as opposed to Sciences Hard & Soft

School Mode
(L. Schola: "leisure-time")

Anyway: I like the idea of
"school"
qualifying as a "theatron"--
maybe thinking that way helps
distinguish between what aids
Liberal Art and what doesn't.
Graham P__

Theatricality
Dramatizing the Dialectic
(Mission Impossible)




Aesthetic: to view, see
Anesthetic: not.

My role, could I choose to fake it
(hypocrite): to put Aunty Thesis
into play, antagonistic of course,
adversarial, diabolical & therefore
worthy opposition among the
symbolists in any court of law:
accusatory & satanic: clown, jester,
joker, trickster juggling BB Wolf
AND the 3 little pigs, Hermes
Mercurious & the Bi-Polarities.

Dirty work: fundamental. studies
and leadership programs.

Talking about In “School Mode”
of course: leisure-time where

Question Every Thing

is M.O. & not to be collapsed,
conflated, and confused with

“Church Mode”

Question No Thing & be
praising god crying out loud
or what’s a worship for or

“State Mode”

Question the other Team & pity the poor student who
can’t tell the differences &
relationships.

(Indoor Education: always
an internal challenge event.)

“School” on the one hand;.
“Church” & “State” on the other
& a box on both houses when
we’re in School Mode, yes?

Need we argue? How else
put IT in play? Play &
Be Played? School
& Be Schooled?

xxxooo, Sam

Theatre Was Religious: Seeing

Theater was religious,
originally, true?

Catharsis: the purgation
of fear AND pity--both,
so as to be able to see
without those 2 interferring
as they naturally do?

Purgatory: a purification.
Washed in the blood of the
spam.

The Play's the thing.

I agree with you: "coherence"
(and consistency) are words that
mean one think among logicians,
radically different and
incommensurate among artists.

And yet: the same words.

No wonder we confuse each other,
collapsing and conflating
realms of activity, yet using/
abusing the same words across
the curriculum.

Can't be helped. But maybe
seen--factored inn? Talked
about a lot so as to at least
be able to track the confusion?

Dramatize?

Best, Sam

more strange-making

Sam,

Got to be a sealed-off PLACE for this kind of activity,
thinking, converse- action and art-going-on.
 
Not in the marketplace. 
 
School qualifies, but even there: got to differentiate between
the  Get R Done  agenda and  the liberal art: between
scissors, paper, and rock.   

This morning as I was walking up on Sunset Mtn, I was thinking (for a moment) about the theatre as a place where it was safe to really see (theatron, right?), where we go to really attend to what is happening, because usually we have to filter out so much noise that we end up filtering out the important signals as well.  Also thinking about the notion of "coherence" in art and how that quality might aid in seeing (I don't think "coherence" in this case is quite the same as we might use it to describe, say, a logical system of thought--though, frankly, I'm not sure how to define "coherence" in art).

Anyway.

I like the idea of "school" qualifying as a "theatron"--maybe thinking that way helps to distinguish between what aids Liberal Art and what doesn't.

Graham

Room for Making the Strange familiar & versa vice?

ARTARTARTARTART
ARTARTARTARTART
ARTARTARTARTART

Dear Graham,

Be making the strange familiar,
the familiar strange.

I don’t know where Shelly said this.
It’s possible Wordsworth said it or
something like. It looks like Shlovsky
is saying it and Tolstoy too. The more
ways of saying it the better, maybe the
merrier depending on the context,
depending on the environment,
on the local food supply.

Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture,
one's wife, and the fear of war. "If the whole complex
lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such
lives are as if they had never been." And art exists that
one may recover the sensation of life

It’s an anti-habitat-for-for humanity kind of notion, true?

Ertia knocking on the doors of Inertia, aiming to blow the
house down, set this intellective (& affective) flame on fire.

Got to be a sealed-off PLACE for this kind of activity,
thinking, converse- action and art-going-on.

Not in the marketplace.

School qualifies, but even there: got to differentiate between
the Get R Done agenda and the liberal art: between
scissors, paper, and rock.

The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as
they are perceived and not as they are known. The
technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar,' to make
forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of
perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic
end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of
experiencing the artfulness of an object:
the object is not important.

(Schlovsky quoting Tolstoy .)

The object is not important. Some must beg to differ.
This kind of talk is an offense to the Social Scientist
and ludicrous to the Hard. Differences must be preserved:
turn them up. Put them in play.
The play’s the thing.

xxxooo, Sam

Speaking of "making strange..."

Hey, Sam--

P.B. Shelly suggests the challenge
in making strange familiar &
familiar strange.

Where does Shelly say that?  Do you know Victor Shlovsky's "Art as Technique"?  In it, he says:

Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war. "If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been." And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar,' to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object: the object is not important. [This key statement has been translated different ways; Robert Scholes, for instance, renders it as: In art, it is our experience of the process of construction that counts, not the finished product.] 

(The note is from the editor of the website I stole this from; early in this excerpt, Shlovsky's quoting Tolstoy)

Or:   ARTARTARTARTARTARTARTARTARTARTARTARTARTARTARTART

Or call it The Ludic Mode, then

Seriously: the Play's the Thing


Dear Graham (again),

This summer’s heat is grotesque.
And drought. I’m an old dog
“barking at both ends.”
Prefer winter.

P.B. Shelly suggests the challenge
in making strange familiar &
familiar strange.

That performance where only 8
showed up to see has been on
my mind. (You: ushering)

Both crushingly pathetic
and wonderfully heroic.

A sand mandala: exquisite in
execution one moment & then
blowing in the wind. .

“making”
(poema)
uber
alles.

How to frame IT?

Turn up both Pathos &
Heroism to put them in
play—in a play where
neither never triumphs
but wrestle with the
Angel Art.

Agon & Agony

aa
ahh
ai
aiii

Imagine a PLAY
about a play where
only 8 show up.

(thea: aesthetes = viewers)

Characters in search of
characters in search of
audience & spectator
sports: howard cosells
when we need them.

So as to support the arts.

I can imagine, in my zero
gravity deck chair: me the
playwright and director,
leading man & supporting
cast, plus I am the audience
of 8 as well as the audience
in the play of the play of
The-Audience-of-8, plus
whatever Other Audience
arrives to validate my
theatrics—histrionics.

In my room: Image-I-nation.
I can immaculately conceive
of this production, what it
takes to put it on,
bring it off:

unilateral effort
necessary yet
insufficient &
cooperating to
stage & put
in play all the
indeterminate
gritty devilish
details emerging
to generate our
collaborative
genius—ludic
spirit of play &
un-postponed joy:
writing the script
about writing the
script directing
the directing of
ushering-in the
original 8 viewers
(aesthetes)
and so it goes
and goes writing
and writing-in
the opening night.

Priceless.

Kinds of Talk

Kinds of Talk

The kinds of talking that EngMajors
talk about is incommensurately different
from the kinds of talking that BioMajors
or Physics, Social Scientists & Psych
Majors talk about, or Administrators
and Institutional Infra-Structuralists:
the ways & ways they talk. Diversity.

Listen for the difference.
It makes a difference
that makes a difference.

Compare VOICE.

Voice is all people in writing &
MFA programs will declare
across the country..
Content’s galore.

Hear for your self.

EngMajors talk about
people who
talk this
way:

Service Project

Just as our Fathers
invented new ways
of service—each a
new service according
his own character:
one—the service of love
two—of stern justice
a third—of beauty,
so each one of us
in his own way should
devise something new
in the light of the
teaching of service,
and do what has not
yet been done.

Martin Buber, “The Ring of Service,”

Work Program (local food)

Reproached by a rich
Brahman Farmer for
begging alms as an idler,
Buddha replied that he
was engaged in even more
important forms of tillage
than that of the soil.

“Faith” is the seed
“Penance,” the rain
“Understanding”—my yoke and plough
“Modesty,” like the pole of the plough
“Thoughtfulness”: my ploughshare and goad.
“Exertion”—my beast of burden.

As a result of this spiritual
husbandry, he achieves the
fruit of immortality, everything
indeed hinging upon the quality
of one’s working, whether one
sets out to be a carpenter, king,
or saint or hedge fund manipulator.

Academics.

“It is only by remaining collected,
and refusing to lend himself to the
point of view of the practical man
that the critic can do the practical
man any service; and it is only by
the greatest sincerity in pursuing
his own course, and by at last
convincing even the practical man
of his sincerity, that he can escape
misunderstandings which perpetually
threaten him.
Matthew Arnold “Function of Criticism.”

“Where there is much desire to learn, there
of necessity will be much arguing, much
writing, many opinions; for opinion in
but knowledge in the making.

Under these fantastic terrors of sect
and schism—fear of dissent, differences
in viewpoint: we wrong the earnest
and zealous thirst after knowledge
and understanding which God hath
stirred up in this city.” Milton, “Areopagitica.”

Liberal Art kind of talk as opposed to (not
to be conflated, collapsed, confused with)
liberal arts.

Sure: any one can boil IT down
to claims, objections, &
assessment—collapse
the differences &
sum IT up in
a course:

Integrating the Triad
call it.



Make it all one: building a
stairway to paradise, another
way of talking--the more
the merrier.