V-2nd C4 The Search for Bridey Murphy

[Ian Livingston]

On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 5:33 AM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> One P-lister sez that Lit-crits and Art-crits don't get artists and
> generally write a bunch of BS. Well, I'm not gonna go there, but I
> would say that critics are pretty important and that w/o thses critics
> we would not know much great art. Melville is a fine example.

Of course, my point had nothing to do with whether or not critics are
important, it was to relate from the artist's perspective the accuracy
of the critics' insights. And I will even qualify that to say that I
think if all we saw in art was what the artist intended, we'd miss a
great deal of the virtue art infuses into society. In fact, I think
the artist is often the one who leads the way by subconsciously
synthesizing concepts to produce new ideas that eventually work their
way into academic reasoning. Then, of course, it seems prudent that I
state explicitly that I do not mean all art, nor do I mean all
synthetic ideas. Everything evolves on all fronts continually and
nothing is really new under the sun. But nothing ever stays the same,
either, so people get irritated by stasis and express their irritation
in artistic form, or in some kind of acting out, before they know the
real cause of their discontent. Thus P., among others, prefiguring
much of what was to come in the academies.

As to Freud, well, those who take him seriously deserve the confusion
they inherit. For some reason, he remains a stale part of the literary
canon. P. pokes grand fun at him, as do students of psychology. Even
so, I stand by the assertion that no one is smart enough to be wrong
all the time, so even Dr. Freud screwed up and got a couple of things
right where he borrowed from literature.

On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 5:33 AM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> One P-lister sez that Lit-crits and Art-crits don't get artists and
> generally write a bunch of BS. Well, I'm not gonna go there, but I
> would say that critics are pretty important and that w/o thses critics
> we would not know much great art. Melville is a fine example. This
> can, of course, cut the other way; critics ignore or dismiss works of
> genius or elevate works of non-genius, then swing round and cut back
> against the grain, rediscovering, revising, revisiting, re-writing and
> even reinventing or reconstructing the deconstructed. Some critics
> develop theories about the creative process. Harold Bloom, for example
> applies Freudian theory in his _Anxiety and Influence_. Sticking with
> Bloom, critics also have hobby-horses, Bloom's keen interest in the
> gnostic in literature, for example, informs his reading and his
> writing so that when he writes about P's GR, he discusses the gnostic
> in the text or in the mind (conscious and uncncious) of the author.
> Had Bloom applied his oedipal theory of anxiety and influence to P,
> Adams might serve as P's father in his early years and, later when P
> is older and the anxiety is lessened and the influence is acknowledged
> (in SL Intro P recognizes the father of his slow learner years), Bloom
> might have taken up Melville or Rilke. In any event, Lit-critics are
> what they are, some love them and some hate them.  But writers have
> another sort of critic. I;ve mentioned Edmund Wilson a few times. P
> notes that Wilson's _To the Finland Station_ is a book he got round to
> after his slow learnings and that the text had an impact. Wilson was a
> major dude in Lit-Crit and he is a lot of fun to read. I mentioned and
> alluded to several of his essays recently and to that wonderful
> Introduction by L. Menand. While it is known that Wilson took kafka to
> the woodshed, he slapped his good friend Fitzgerald with left handed
> compliments before kissing his Irish arse. He also punches Huxley in
> the balls. His essays on historical criticism and marxist criticism
> and bunch of other topics are lots of fun if Lit-crit turns on your
> love light. Anyway, Wilson knew that F. Scott got talent, rare Irish
> beauty with words, and he helped the guy out. This is not easy to do
> cause young writers, and those trying to write their first novel, a
> great american novel that will be compared with the books by the gods
> of the great american novel, are full to the brim with influence and
> anxiety is trying to keep a lid on it all and maybe pump in a little
> more to spruce up or cover up some roads more traveled by readers and
> certainly by critics, then by the young quick study. An honest
> evaluation of the influence and anxiety seems to expose some patches
> (Wilson berates Pound for his copy-catting, even of Eliot, and his
> patches) and palimpsests that, either get us wondering how excellent
> V. might be with a reload or re-dux or ducks tape and spackle and
> paint job or how wonderful young P was to have in a creative writing
> class. Stop writing like that! Find your own voice, listen to the
> world, close your books and write from ....well, that is another
> topic...I don't believe that we can teach critical thinking or
> creativity or creative writing. So, that Newsweek essay on the decine
> of creativity in America...well teach Jazz to Chinese player pianos.
> That is not PC, but as a black female trans-gender victim of dr. shoe
> and his maker, I got no guilt about that.
>



-- 
"liber enim librum aperit."