Examination Question: Section A

[riff]

Deconstrustion is one of my very favorite things. It is itself an artform. So where have we been lead? I am curious about your long unread response.

Let me find it and I'll see about giving you the title and some exerpts.

To say this at least for now, I wrote an anti-essay as a response to an anti-novel and attempted to deconstruct the entire Teacher-Student construct, all the while, deeply engaged in the text of the book.

It was one of my graduate school crowning acheivements from a professor I worshipped. (I punish myself for not finishing that particular endeavor- school- still). I need to re-read it.

 

[GreenEyedGirl]

Excellent! deconstruction of anti-novels! Now we're talking.
I am also curious what brought on this most excellent of questions. And what section B is going to hold for us?
(Once a Sagitarian's curiosity is roused, look out!)
I am almost wishing for a blue book! And pencils, lots of sharpened pencils.

 

[freescorfr]

Re: The Question

Here is the question:

Consider the relationship between Art and Life suggested by any two of the following statements or situations.

a) "The day before yesterday, in the woods near Touques, at a charming spot near a spring, I came across some cigar butts and some bits of pate'. There'd been a picnic there! I'd described exactly that in Novembre eleven years ago! It was purely imagined, and the other day it was experienced. Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry... My poor Bovary is without a doubt suffering and weeping even now in twenty villages of France."
-Letter to Louise Colet, 14 August 1853

b) In Paris, Flaubert used a closed cab to avoid detection, and presumably seduction, by Louise Colet. In Rouen, Leon uses a closed cab for the seduction of Emma Bovary. In Hamburg, within a year of the publication of Madame Bovary, cabs could be hired for sexual purposes; they were known as Bovarys.

c) (as his sister Caroline lay dying) "My own eyes are as dry as marble. It's strange how sorrows in fiction make me open up and overflow with feeling, whereas real sorrows remain hard and bitter in my heart, turning to crystal as soon as they arise."
-Letter to Maxime Du Camp, 15 March 1846

d) "You tell me that I seriously loved that woman [Mme. Schlesinger]. I didn't; it isn't true. Only when I was writing to her, with that capacity I possess for producing feelings within myself by means of the pen, did I take my subject seriously: but only when I was writing. Many things which leave me cold when I see or hear about them none the less move me to enthusiasm or irritation or pain if I talk about them myself or --particularly-- if I write about them. This is one of the effects of my mountebank nature."
-Letter to Louise Colet, 8 October 1846

e) Giuseppe Marco Fieschi (1790 - 1836) attained notoriety for his part in the plot on the life of Louis Philippe. He took his lodgings in the boulevard du Temple and constructed, with the help of two members of the Society des Driots de l'Homme, and 'infernal machine', consisting of twenty gun barrels which could be discharged simultaneously. On 28 July 1835, as Louis Philippe was riding past with his three sons and numerous staff, Fieschi fired his broadside against established society.
Some years later, Flaubert moved into a house built on the same site in the boulevard du Temple.

f) "Yes, indeed! The period [of Napoleon III's reign] will furnish material for some capital books. Perhaps after all, in the universal harmony of all things, the coup d' etat and all its results were only intended to provide a dew able penmen with some attractive scenes."
-Flaubert reported in Du Camp, Souvenirs litteraires

Again, Riff, I find it hard to separate the concept of Time from any consideration of Art and Life - it is the medium in which Art which meets Life's undulating lanscapes, like tangents meet a circle. It is an essential element in sychronicity.
The cab, the boulevard du Temple, are like the threads in Brighton Rock - they run through each of our lives and run through Life.

In Art we feel the touch of these threads in our lifes - often like a shot of electricity - sometimes by setting eyes on a great painting, sometimes by music - a poem, - the triggers for the "peak experience".

Consiousness, making conscious and keeping in consciousness, also seem to be intrinsic to giving birth to art. Uniting the left and right sides of the brain.

The internet, for me, is a paradigm shift in consciouness - from the individual to collective. It is good to be here at its birth. I was not present at the birth of any of my children, being too scared.


Can I have one mark, at least, for fancying green-eyed girl? - I've sharpened my pencil for her.

 

[GreenEyedGirl]

Re: Re: The Question

Can I have one mark, at least, for fancying green-eyed girl? - I've sharpened my pencil for her.

*blush*


Something about a man sharpening pencils for me..... *shiver*

 

[freescorfr]

Re: Re: Re: The Question

*blush*


Something about a man sharpening pencils for me..... *shiver*

Well the fucking examiner's not been sharpening his. He puts up this question, we all do the work, I even go to the trouble of cheating, realise I've miss-read the question, give an answer half a century out of date, quickly beef up on Rorty, Derrida and Lacan, with a surrepitious bit of Paul De Man and a retrospective glance at Mircea Eliade, because the examiner suggested it.

Too busy for porn as a result and what has the examiner being doing

spending his time as a porn poster .


Green eyed girl. What is the answer and what is an anti-novel?

 

[Hamletmaschine]

The passages in question all seem to suggest, to paraphrase Wilde, that life imitates art for more often than art imitates life. At the very least, I think we can say that the relations between the two are reciprocal, as several people have already said.

Art (in the broadest sense) gives us frameworks of intelligibility for our experiences. Without some kind of familiarity with aesthetic forms, life would be just one damned thing after another. How would we know whether something we experience is an experience worth having?

Barnes's novel is also about the relations between art and obsession and desire. Think of it this way: ordinarily, we might say that if you have feelings of love for some person, you will be driven to express that love in some way, driven to say "I love you."

But what if you are driven to say "I love you" without having any person or object to which you can express it? What if you want to experience love, but have no lover? Then you will be driven to create some fetish--animate or inanimate--to serve as the love object. This can take the form of neurosis (loving a shoe for instance) or art (creating an imaginary or virtual lover).

The line between art and neurosis is mighty thin, it seems.

I'm stating all this very crudely, but what the hell? I'm not getting paid.... And I've already got all the degrees I need.

Now, I'll go back to my fetish . . . err, art.

 

[riff]

A word to the candidates.

Please be patient. I would also like to contribute to this thread more directly, but am at present very busy. I have found my old paper I from which I would like to exerpt and also add fresh comment.

Today was another day of extremes for me. I have lost my car keys and had to have someone come pick me up and bring me to work. I know that the keys are here in my apartment, but I have sunk to an all-time-low on the slovenliness meter. I have become a pig. Now I am forced to clean the apartment this afternoon. It will take several hours. But hopefully I can find my keys in the process.

I have not abandoned the discussion.

 

[GreenEyedGirl]

Poor Riff, fallen into the male black hole of slovenliness! Please find your way towards the light! I am waiting with anticipation.... and it is not nice to keep a girl in that state for too long!

Hamlet - interesting - a fine line between art and neurosis. Perhaps this is why we accept eccentricity in artists, are in fact disappointed if there is not some idiosyncracy, some slight schizophenia to enhance their art. Art is to fetish as love is to neurosis.

And Free, if I knew the answer, I'd be visiting the porn only too! And an anti-novel, it is the best read you'll never have the pleasure of enjoying! (One of my old professor's favorite jokes)An anti-novel goes against every convention fiction sets out for the public, and yet it creates its own. Wonderful stuff, especially when you are exhausted enough to have your sense of reality suspended.

 

[freescorfr]

And an anti-novel, it is the best read you'll never have the pleasure of enjoying! (One of my old professor's favorite jokes)An anti-novel goes against every convention fiction sets out for the public, and yet it creates its own. Wonderful stuff, especially when you are exhausted enough to have your sense of reality suspended.

Thanks Green eyed Girl. many years ago one of my frieds, who was reading Englsih, kept asking questions about the novel - it was 1970. Does it have to have the structure it has, the form, narrative sequence, charcterisation etc.. It was the early days of those questions. They seemed drole, then.

Of course, I'd already bought a book titled "Chewsday" and along the outside margin of the pages which contained erotic passages was printed "Dirty Bits". So, in a sense, I was into deconstruction early on. So was every male I knew. Fuck the narrative, where's the fucking.

It was not till 1978/79 that structuralism became a scandalously dangerous area in academic life - can you believe it? A guy named McCabe lost his post at Cambridge because he was asking questions about the value of looking for the author's intentions...


Two years later Roger mCGough went on Radio 4 saying he'd been to a school in Liverpool where a teacher was teaching a class about what one of his poems meant, what he'd intended when he wrote it. "Just the words that came into my head," he said - He'd been bantering with octagons.

It's important to remember that in general people still believed in objective truth and the concept of the subconscious, outside of the not highly esteemed world of shrinks, was fairly alien in those days. Jung was a foreign wierdo.

I'm sorry the examiner has had such a bad time.

Hamletsmachine might well say that riff's slovenliness is an artistic expression of his missing his mum's nipple, and if he doesn't then I will.

I'm off today to taste the delights of Paris for three days so I hope he has found his work by then.


All posters to this thread are invited to a summer symposium in Normandy. Riff and I are then going to Oleron( to look up his ancestors and girls skirts), Lourdes, Flanders and Moscow.

 

[Hamletmaschine]

Riff, my man, take your time. I still recommend the 21-year-old Glenfarclas. It's good for whatever ails ye.

Free, have a good time in Paris. Last time I was there, I had to make a pilgrimage to rue Marie Stuart (2eme) just to soak up the vibes. Though I'm no Michael of Albany, the Auld Alliance still tugs at us Stuarts (especially, perhaps, the ones who've been over here in N.America for the last couple hundred years).

Perhaps when we all come to Normandy, we can take a trip up to Rouen and Ry and visit Flaubert's old stomping grounds.

And for what it's worth, Green-Eyed Girl, I don't believe in the psychological interpretation of art. Just another form of intentionalism, after all, isn't it? Though I've always had a fetish for green-eyed girls, especially ones who use words like "deconstruction" and "anti-novel." How do you feel about green-eyed boys?

 

[Guest]

~whacks the hormone crazed Hamletsmachine across the knuckles with a cane.

Save it for lunchtime, son. You'll have plenty of other opportunities!

 

[Hamletmaschine]

*dropping pants and bending over my desk*

Please, sir, can I have some more?

 

[GreenEyedGirl]

And for what it's worth, Green-Eyed Girl, I don't believe in the psychological interpretation of art. Just another form of intentionalism, after all, isn't it? Though I've always had a fetish for green-eyed girls, especially ones who use words like "deconstruction" and "anti-novel." How do you feel about green-eyed boys?

Psychological interpretation of art is not valid, hmmm? Interesting. Do you not believe that what we create is deeply tied to our pysches? Art from the id? From the ego?
As for fetishes for green eyed girls with an intellect and vocabulary, we are an acquired taste, but well worth the acquiring !
As for green eyed boys, never had one, might be an awful lot of fun though. Especially if deconstruction is discussed and experienced!

 

[Gnufi Poppets]

It is the understanding I am the having the most the very hard time the here with.

How it is being there is the difference that the people here are the thinking at all there is between the art and the life? It is that the life is the art is the life. Is it not that the way it should be? It is the being that I am the saying to the all of you the right here and the right now that it is this life that is the ultimate art. Yahs?

 

[riff]

As for fetishes for green eyed girls with an intellect and vocabulary, we are an acquired taste, but well worth the acquiring !

All I can say is that we are priviledged to have more than one on the planet.

Now, in so far as the examination is concerned....


heh.

 

[GreenEyedGirl]

All I can say is that we are priviledged to have more than one on the planet.

Now, in so far as the examination is concerned....


heh.

*LOL*

Yes, it is good that there are a few of us floating around. Keeps the planets aligned, the force in balance, and the gods out of humanity's hair.

Now, as far as this examination you keep promising..................



(heh yourself!)

 

[Gnufi Poppets]

*LOL*

Yes, it is good that there are a few of us floating around. Keeps the planets aligned, the force in balance, and the gods out of humanity's hair.

Now, as far as this examination you keep promising..................


(heh yourself!)

I am the knowing the exactly what it is that you are the meaning! I am waking up the each and every morning and I am the brushing the hair on my head and it is all these damn Gods are the constantly the falling out and making the mess on the floor!

 

[GreenEyedGirl]

I am the knowing the exactly what it is that you are the meaning! I am waking up the each and every morning and I am the brushing the hair on my head and it is all these damn Gods are the constantly the falling out and making the mess on the floor!

The you would be needing some help from a greeneyed babe. I promise, find one and keep her(or him) locked up somewhere and those damn gods will leave your hair alone!
It's a scientific fact.

 

[riff]

My now-curiosity concerns the following choices.

Choice A

and Choice C

and to some extent, C and D.

The paper I wrote, dated 22 April 1990 is far different, on the surface, at least.

 

[mayi]

send me in a directions...........just get me going one way

mayi

 

[Gnufi Poppets]

The you would be needing some help from a greeneyed babe. I promise, find one and keep her(or him) locked up somewhere and those damn gods will leave your hair alone!
It's a scientific fact.

Oh yahs... YAHS! It is the hot greeneyed babe who is the one I am wanting all the help from that it is you are the having to be the giving! Where is it being that the finding of such a one can be the happening the right of way!

It is the no more the fucking the Gods are the going to be doing with the hair of the Gnufi!

 

[riff]

send me in a directions...........just get me going one way

mayi

What are you babbling about?


The title is

"Cracked Kettles, Poker, The Super Bowl, Silly Putty, Flaubert's Parrot , & A Girl Named Angela"

and is followed by the following quote:

"Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity."
- Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

Following the cover of the paper and the epigraph, is a letter dated 22 April 1990: "Dear Angela, ...."

 

[Dillinger]

Actually - Language is a virus.

 

[Hamletmaschine]

Actually - Language is a virus.

. . . from outer space.

 

[riff]

You two, Hamlet and Rick Derringer, should be stood before the chalkboard and shot.