Autumn Arrives

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 19:50:08 -0700

Autumn Thoughts, Sent Far Away 
Po Chu-I, translated by David Hinton

We share all these disappointments of failing
autumn a thousand miles apart. This is where

autumn wind easily plunders courtyard trees,
but the sorrows of distance never scatter away.

Swallow shadows shake out homeward wings.
Orchid scents thin, drifting from old thickets.

These lovely seasons and fragrant years falling
lonely away—we share such emptiness here.

This poem is for Chris, in Bejing.

This entry is also about sharing websites with you. I found Po Chu-i’s lovely autumnal meditation on DharmaNet.org, one of my essential sites http://www.dharmanet.org/ From DharmaNet, one can branch in many directions, such as I did when I was directed to http://www.davidhinton.net/Pages/Po%20Chu-i%20Sample%203.html

The other site I want to share with you I found on the blog of the William Morris Society, News from Anywhere: http://www.morrissociety.org/. Its title, “News from Anywhere,” references Morris’s utopia, News from Nowhere. It was on their blog that I found Hilary Pfeifer and her homage to William Morris’s Strawberry Thief, an installation called The Beauty of Life. You can follow her daily adventures as she brings together hundreds if not thousands of Morris-inspired elements into an installation in Portland. I’ve put one of those elements--a strawberry thief--in the frame above. Here’s Hillary’s video announcing the project: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/13421114/the-beauty-of-life-an-installation-by-hilary-pfeif

Discovering the riches of the Internet is great fun, a joyful complement to the soulful season of Autumn, but, one finds the soulful season there as well.

Essential Reading: William Morris

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 19:17:53 -0700

I’ve been reading William Morris. Morris had an extraordinarily varied career as a textile designer, book artist, interior designer; initiator of the Arts and Crafts Movement; socialist, preservationist, author of utopian narratives, poet and painter. Morris was born just after Queen Victoria’s coronation and died as her reign came to a close. He is often considered the finest fiber artist England has produced, as well as responsible for almost single handedly elevating craft to art.
Morris was one of my favorites during the many years I had the privilege of teaching Victorian Literature. Of course, at that time, I had to bring in somewhat surreptitiously all the other excellences Morris possessed besides his literary ones, but my emphasis has changed in recent years—2008, for example, when I spent the better part of a week in Ruidoso, New Mexico, letting Morris’s wallpapers and textiles guide me to design Curt’s Cloudcroft Thistle wallpaper. The design has not yet reached production (well, it’s a thought!), but I did learn much about repeat pattern design from the exercise, and I certainly gained a sharper appreciation of Morris as a textile designer.
All this is preliminary to saying that I’m reading William Morris on Art and Socialism, a dandy little anthology of Morris’s lectures on the subject gathered together by that wonder of publishing, Dover. Unlike so many publishers nowadays, once a title is added to Dover’s list, it remains there. Morris has arrived!
Reading him again, I’m impressed at Morris’s relevance for today. Of course his politics is anathema to a large portion of today’s political spectrum, but that’s OK by me. I’m of the opinion that while free markets got us where we are, the free market advocates haven’t much clue how to move contemporary culture forward while leaving no one behind. As I read the daily news, neither side of the political fence talks much about where new jobs are to come from, this at the very time that the markets are moving as fast as possible to re-locate off our shores.
But I digress. Morris’s subject of his initial lecture, collected in Norman Kelvin’s edition, is “The Lesser Arts.” He has in mind “handicraft work” as he terms the work of artisans working and creating in what today would be termed the high-end crafts. “High-end” to distinguish the output of such craft extravaganzas as Art Unravelled from the work gathered in such collections as SOFA. Morris’s point, however, concerns these lesser arts’ under-appreciation, even non-appreciation in industrial/capitalist circles where money rather than practice of the craft has the greater value. Morris is a wonderful advocate for broadening our understanding of and our participation in the Arts, not just painting, sculpture, and architecture, but in all the activities we may denominate the home arts. And I wonder if it isn’t Morris above many others, who should receive credit for the uncounted number of practice communities among us today, happily creating, unnoticed by the commercial art market which is still more than a little dominated by painters, sculptors, and multimedia artists such as Damian Hurst, for instance.
Here is Morris on the future of “art for art’s sake,” a movement just coming into prominence at the end of Morris’s life: “It’s fore-doomed end must be, that art to last will seem too delicate a thing for even the hands of the initiated to touch, and the initiated must at last sit still and do nothing—to the grief of no one.” One hundred plus years has borne Morris out.
Finally, here is a sample to savor of Morris’s literary craftsmanship:
Now it is one of the chief uses of decoration, the chief part of its alliance with nature, that it has to sharpen our dulled senses in this matter [of indifference]: for this end are those intricate patterns interwoven, those strange forms invented, which men have so long delighted in: forms and intricacies that do not necessarily imitate nature, but in which the hand of the craftsman is guided to work in the way that she does, till the web, the cup, or the knife, look as natural, nay as lovely, as the green field, the river bank or the mountain flint.

What’s the New News?

Tue, 1 Jun 2010 17:11:58 -0700

Celia: Here comes Monsieur Le Beau
Rosalind: With his mouth full of news.
Celia: Which he will put on us as pigeons feed their young.
Rosalind: Then shall we be news-crammed.
Celia: All the better; we shall be the more marketable.

In Baldwin Maxwell’s Shakespeare class at the University of Iowa in the fifties, I first became aware that “news” wasn’t a universal. We were studying As You Like It and Professor Maxwell pointed to Oliver’s salutation in Act I: “Good Monsieur Charles, What’s the new news at the new court?” as an instance of something, well, new in the world: an appetite for and an interest in novel events, with the additional inference that what was old would be inferior to whatever it was that was new.
Shakespeare wrote As You Like It around the year 1600. Today “What’s New?” is ubiquitous, as Twitter keeps us breathlessly awaiting every tweet 24/7. The New is the very basis of modernist/contemporary culture. Marilynne Robinson has had enough of the myth of the new, and in “Absence of Mind” sets out to correct some major abuses of the question. The Myth of the New posits—incorrectly, she argues—that a turning point has occurred in the modern era: something that changes everything has come. The New—whatever it is—is worth our attention, respect, and/or belief, and is justified because it is not medieval or ancient.
The new is science; the old is religion. The new is popular, the old is boring. What is new has us by the balls (Robinson doesn’t put it that way!) and we are only too encouraged to get out from under old ways of living and favor the latest innovation or opinion from the latest expert.
The consequence, we are discovering to our dismay some four hundred ten years later, may well be stasis, everyone running as fast as they can, yet frozen in place because what is new now, incessantly and without let up, has replaced, replaces, or should replace what was new then. We demand accelerated solutions to accelerating problems, never with sufficient time or perspective to judge with the help of the best that has been known and thought, to take Matthew Arnold’s formulation of the mind formed on Humane Letters.
In the grip of the New, we see contemporary culture on fast forward and the fascination with what we see shatters our ability to stand aside until we can gain perspective. We demand action NOW and throw the bums out when ill-thought action proves just that, replacing them with those who promise us yet more immediate change.
After all, that is what new is, and we must believe in the new, for the old has been discredited for so long, we can’t resist asking yet again, “What’s the new news in the new court?” We’re betting our bankroll “we’ll be the more marketable for it.”