The glory of mine eyes.

Jenna Kantor (American recent)

Over the last few months I've noticed an interest among critics in the works great artists generated as, or just before, they died.  There was this New York Times 'Science' section feature, a wrenching look at the geriatric Impressionists whose collective zeitgeist for dappling color resonance turned out to know no tougher a mortal adversary than cataracts and the poor state of surgery in the early 20th century.  Then there was Roberta Smith's survey of the final act Picasso exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery--it's a weirdly human coda to a career that often buoyed on fantastic stylisms and extraterrestrial concepts of basic things. Looking at the pictures (Times Online offers an audio tour narrated by Ms. Smith ) the viewer is left with a reverent sense for an artist who arrived at his own naked humanity in the eleventh hour.  The myriad devices which defined Picasso's career meet with suggestions of failing senses, spiritual fatigue--even doubt, and an overarching technical approach that just looks less constrained by gravitational pesterings.   

I've always enjoyed this final sobriety in peak works: Mahler's 9th Symphony, Kafka's aphorisms from Zurich--even his never-to-be-completed The Castle, Nick Drake's Pink Moon, Sebald's careening pseudo-memoir novel, a few short years out from his demise, Austerlitz; we like to think we're seeing more of the artist as he nears the end.  I suspect it's not that we see anything else than normal, nor is the artist's labor any different.  The subject is now just more provocative.  It's more vital, and entirely inclusive.  If only momentarily everyone lives with that fraught set of concerns.  I tell you, as largely indifferent as I've grown to Picasso, there were connections I formed, looking at the Times article, that made me not just reevaluate his labors, they made me reconsider my own.  

 If there is decency of expression, one could say,  and possibility in every response then why refrain any longer?  How shit-biting sad it must be to arrive and then think 

I wasn't always a desperate person with just sheets to fill.

David Berman, a poet and musician whose sentiments I've tacked up here frequently over the years--he's the Silver Jews guy, wrote a poem about Isaac Asimov's death.  There is a lot of sympathy and in it--mostly devoted to a guy whose only public faults were that he dreamed of different worlds and that he was abnormally prolific.  One line in particular resonates:

Perhaps my last words will be random.

No center

Piet Mondrian-Broadway Boogie Woogie (Dutch 1942)

I have long held that The New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle is nothing but a Thursday puzzle on juice. All water weight, it lacks the treachery and sophisticated wordplay of a Friday or Saturday. With their monosyllabic clues and answers that run from horizon to horizon those Friday and Saturday puzzles are diabolical, and carry the engagement of strongly crafted poetry. So I see no reason that anyone should waste a perfectly good Sunday morning prostrating himself before that thing. But folks do. I suppose it beats the shit out of church, where as a child I would draw pencil-in timecharts--which come to think of it resembled the handless clocks of dreams, to mark off the five minute increments til those liberating words, "God go with you" or "God be with you"...or whatever.

The Sunday puzzle is a keystone in the awkward maze of the paper. I never cared for Sundays, and I certainly never felt the secular peace liberal intellectuals describe in connection with the day and its enormous newspaper. I prefer drinking coffee while pacing a floor, puzzles standing up, like labyrinths, and croissants almost never.

That said, there is some convenience to 'The Way We Eat' appearing adjacent to the puzzle in the Sunday Magazine. Oh, and you usually get an article length real estate advertisment for Qatar or the Phillipines, replete with testimonials from investment bankers and the vice president.  These countries figure if you like food, and if you like puzzles you're a shoe-in to like them.  What utter desperation.

How did all of this start? Oh yeah, I was looking at a picture of Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie and was sort of startled by the ingenuity of it. Mondrian is one of those artists who, I think, always worked better on a conceptual level. His paintings aren't really about apparent beauty, are they. It reminded me of something the novelist and ardent Christian, C.S. Lewis once said about atheists, that their world is like a maze without a center. No hope of achievement. But isn't the point of a maze the pure folly? Unless you're a mouse and there's cheese at the center there really is no point. Even then hunger compels you to the center, and what compels you out?  The feeling of being had, of being a fool for cheese!  You get to the center and you are, geographically speaking, as fucked as you could possibly be. So it goes with the world, and puzzles. 

I feel better already.

Grey and Purple Blues

"Mooseburger"

There is a trending among the lefty op-eders at The New York Times, a kind of energized indignation that, I feel, wasn't always there. Or perhaps it was always there, but many readers had no confidence in believing the rants might bear out in reality. I think that has changed.

Years ago I remember sitting on my couch with a steaming purple and green glass bong full of water the color of shit on my lap, giggling, watching John Stewart, thinking, with the cracked strand of an operational brain I was given, that John Kerry would lose the 2004 election, and the complacence born of "indignation entertainment" would be somewhat, if not largely responsible. We were substituting political humor for activism. This was before Rachel Maddow.

The course change of our collective political heart has made indignation entertainment palatable in a way I never thought possible. Hell, it's downright rejuvenating. You can read Maureen Dowd and feel unashamed of the books (without pictures) you've read. Even Dick Cavett, who is a largely self-sentimentalizing industry at this point--a terrific one, I must add--barbs his work with anti-Bush-McCain observations. Again, was this always the case? I'm sincerely asking.

There is a collective sense that the era of right wing anti-intellectualism is dying. It cannot happen quickly enough.

Roger Cohen preaches to the choir in today's piece, which should come as little surprise. It's a sharp piece nonetheless, and better than any I've read in a good long while. Cohen epitomizes the surge of positive intellectualism, employing refined, if slightly purple, thought, and actual--hold your fucking horses, poetry! Apparently thinking is no longer a disease. Cohen righteously dismantles Sarah Palin's wince-inducing language and the hollow-ringing cliche of being a simple American.

It's not the kind of writing that wins elections, nor should it have to be. But it does restore dignity. I remember now.