Sot-Weed

[Henry M]

Great quote!  Here's the whole:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/06/21/specials/barth-minimalism.html

On 2/5/12, barbie gaze <barbiegaze at gmail.com> wrote:
> Rekated to this notion of Grace, to less and more, to Bakhtin and
> Scatalogicals:
>
> A FEW WORDS ABOUT MINIMALISM
>
> Barth, in NY Times Books, Dec. 1986
>
> The medieval Roman Catholic Church recognized two opposite roads to grace:
> the via negativa of the monk's cell and the hermit's cave, and the via
> affirmativa of immersion in human affairs, of being n the world whether o
> not one is of it. Critics have aptly borrowed those terms to characterize
> the difference between Mr. Beckett, for example, and his erstwhile master
> James Joyce, himself a maximalist except in his early works. Other than
> bone-deep disposition, which is no doubt the great determinant, what
> inclines a writer - sometimes almost a cultural generation of writers - to
> the Negational Path?
>
> For if there is much to admire in artistic austerity, its opposite is not
> without merits and joys as well. There are the minimalist pleasures of
> Emily Dickinson - ''Zero at the Bone'' - and the maximalist ones of Walt
> Whitman; the low-fat rewards of Samuel Beckett's ''Texts for Nothing'' adn
> the high-calorie delights of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's ''One Hundred Years
> of Solitude.'' There truly are more ways than one to heaven. As between
> minimalism and its opposite, I pity the reader - or the writer, or the age
> - too addicted to either to savor the other.
>


-- 

AsB4,
٩(●̮̮̃•̃)۶
Henry Mu
http://astore.amazon.com/tdcoccamsaxe-20