Esther & Stencil

[alice wellintown]

On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 1:21 AM, Michael Bailey
<michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
>  alice wellintown  wrote:
>
>> utilizing her intuition, protected the society from man-caused
>> disaster. In his Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1904) and Education
>> of Henry Adams (1905), \ Adams established woman, particularly the
>> European woman of the twelfth century, as a symbol of natural force and
>> instinct.
>
>
> does (should) a feminist automatically bristle at being praised in such terms?

One reason I encourage the youngins to read Henry Adams is that they
too were born at fin de siecle (chapter 2 0f Alfred Kazin's On Native
Ground BTW). For the youngins today the impact of modernism and
late-modernism or postmodernism is as confusing as the post Civil War
period was for Henry Adams, and to make matters even more confusing,
they have to deal with the communications revolution (not a
technological or digital revolution) that, in a semantic epoc--we have
been living in a semantic as opposed to an ontological (when questions
of Being or Existence dominate and one tries to use reason and
intuition to prove, for example, that God is not dead or that because
I think I therefore exist) or epistemological (when questions of
Knowing dominate and obe tries to take account of what can be known,
how do we know, and how we can we know that we know... )
epoch--compounds all the questions Henry raises, including, of course,
the question: what is the value in an excellent traditional education
in world where Richard McKeon is strapped to a broken motorcycle and
dragged by a mad Zen master down the information super highway? The
language revolution, as many an exhausted postmodernist professor
discovered when her students protested the culture wars and opted to
study finance and computers, while apparentlya revolution taking place
in English, could not decide what the meaning of the word "word" was
and could not lower the cost of tuition. The new wave of feminism is
as fractured as the new wave of every other ripple in the lake of
post-civil rights modernism. Who or what is a feminist? I'm a black
native american masculine heterosexual jew from brasil who happens to
be a feminst and I voted for Lula. And, who cares? Too many choices as
Dave matthews sez. To much information bout nothin Too much educated
rap as Dylan sez. But, Esther. Yeah, Esther is an artist and a woman.
She's no Radio Lady Gaga with her Madonna breasts shooting rockets red
glare and spilling the scent of distant fireworks in a broken world.
No, she aint that. She ain't no Indian Princess, naked breasts of the
green world for Dutch Salor's Eyes (see final page of Gatsby).
see Our Town and see  Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see (Wilder and Eliot).

see Crash test Dummy, see Androgyne

see Walt Whitman

for the English see A Room of One's Own

To the Light House Finland Station (Wilson Woolf)



The Breasts of Tiresias (French: Les mamelles de Tirésias) is a
surrealist play by Guillaume Apollinaire. Written in 1903, the play
received its first production in a revised version in 1917.[In his
preface to the play, the poet invented the word "surrealism" to
describe his new style of drama.[2]

The artist must be female? Esther is published under a female pen name.

Esther is a member of the sick crew. A sick Jew.

Young P was an anti-semite like his mother.



All this was to American thought as though it had never existed. The
true American knew something of the facts, but nothing of the
feelings; he read the letter, but he never felt the law. Before this
historical chasm, a mind like that of Adams felt itself helpless; he
turned from the Virgin to the Dynamo as though he were a Branly
coherer. On one side, at the Louvre and at Chartres, as he knew by the
record of work actually done and still before his eyes, was the
highest energy ever known to man, the creator four-fifths of his
noblest art, exercising vastly more attraction over the human mind
than all the steam-engines and dynamos ever dreamed of; and yet this
energy was unknown to the American mind. An American Virgin would
never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist.   10
  The question, which to any plain American of the nineteenth century
seemed as remote as it did to Adams, drew him almost violently to
study, once it was posed; and on this point Langleys were as useless
as though they were Herbert Spencers or dynamos. The idea survived
only as art. There one turned as naturally as though the artist were
himself a woman. Adams began to ponder, asking himself whether he knew
of any American artist who had ever insisted on the power of sex, as
every classic had always done; but he could think only of Walt
Whitman;




>
> I mean, ok, it was a different time frame, and feminist readers today
> should be expected to put on their
> Adams-appreciator hats and refrain from criticism on those grounds
> when discussing the merits of all other aspects of Mr Adams's work,
> right?
>
> but when it comes to that specific aspect, the notion of "feminine
> intuition" as a thing one can count on encountering in a woman's
> thought process
> and one which is substantially different from logic...
>
> a) is this unique to Adams (I suspect not)?
> b) has the propagation of this meme slowed up with the advent of
> feminism? (I think so)
> c) is there anything replacing it in popular or scholarly thought?
>
> there's an Asimov story where the hero gives credit to "feminine
> intuition" for his lady friend solving some problem (the location of a
> star or something)
> and the narrator notes, something like, "actually, she had done
> exhaustive research and proceeded using logic to find the answer"...
>
>
> oh, and,
> d) is there any trace of this in V. - I guess already asked and
> answered, as the V. ladies are 20th century types and in the
> decky-dance are estranged from the intuition...
>
> In my rather limited experience, women's thought processes are
> different, and palpably superior (although I'm not into that whole
> competitive, hierarchical thing, of course)
>