VLVL2 (1) "More is Less"�

[Dave Monroe]

Actually ...

"Have you wondered who originally said 'Less is more'?

 
"Both Mies van der Rohe and Buckminster Fuller adopted
it as a way of life--you can see it demonstrated in
Mies' buildings and Bucky's geodesic domes--but they
got it from a poem.

"It's said by the painter Andrea del Sarto (who was a
real person--1486-1531), in Robert Browning's 1855
poem by that name. You'll recognize another well-known
line a little later in the same poem....

           ...I could count twenty such ... 
Who strive ... 
To paint a little thing like that you smeared 
Carelessly passing with your robes afloat-- 
Yet do much less ... --so much less! 
Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged. 
There burns a truer light of God in them, 
In their vexed beating stuffed and stopped-up brain, 
Heart, or whate'er else, than goes on to prompt 
This low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand of mine. 
Their works drop groundward, but themselves, I know, 
Reach many a time a heaven that's shut to me, 
Enter and take their place there sure enough, 
Though they come back and cannot tell the world. 
           ... Somebody remarks 
Morello's outline there is wrongly traced, 
His hue mistaken; what of that? or else, 
Rightly traced and well ordered; what of that? 
Speak as they please, what does the mountain care? 
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, 
Or what's a heaven for? ...

http://www.abstractconcreteworks.com/essays/lessismore/ls_s_mor.html

But given Pynchon's longstanding interest in
romanticism, modernism and G. Orwell's 1984 (and I am
indeed counting that "slow learner" as a citation),
you are nonetheless BOTH correct, sirs, and then some.
 It's a floor wax AND a desert topping ...

--- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> on 15/7/03 5:45 AM, Tim Strzechowski at
> dedalus204 at comcast.net wrote:
> 
> >> 4.15 "More is Less"
> >> 
> >> Doublethink.  War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. &
> >> etc.
> 
> Isn't it a jokey play on the maxim of the Modernist
> architect Mies van der Rohe, "Less is more"?
> 
> It's a "discount store for larger-size women". The
> shop's name plays on the idea that they get more
> dress for less money. The connection to Orwell's
> "Doublethink" seems rather tenuous, in the context.

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