Room for Making the Strange familiar & versa vice?

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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