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By general design, my artworld posts are mostly only available at http://counterforces.blogspot.com but I think that some of the most recent ones are of interest to readers of joculum as well. I wish I could remember how to create automatic links on LJ; when I manage it, it is mostly a matter of dumb luck. (Blogspot seems not to create links whether one uses the full URL or not or encloses it in < > or not.)
Feb. 15th, 2009
from the notebooks of Pursewarden, in Durrell’s Clea [it is, yes, the received opinion of the published critics that these books are worthless; but we are, are we not, devoted to correcting and contradicting received opinion? Thus have we heard:]
“Item one [of what Pursewarden calls his “self-portrait”]: ‘Like all fat men I tend to be my own hero.’ Item two: ‘Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.’ Item three: ‘I always hoped to achieve the Elephant’s Eye view.’ Item four: ‘I realised that in order to become an artist one must shed the whole complex of egotisms which led to the choice of self-expression as the only means of growth! This because it is impossible I call The Whole Joke!’”
- - - - - - -
“These strange beliefs…you will find lurking under my mordant humours, which may be described simply as a technique of therapy. As Balthasar says, ‘A good doctor, and in a special sense the psychologist, makes it quite deliberately, slightly harder for the patient to recover too easily. You do this to see if his psyche has any real bounce in it, for the secret of healing is in the patient and not the doctor. The only measure is the reaction!’
“I was born under Jupiter, Hero of the Comic Mode! My poems, like soft music invading the encumbered senses of young lovers left alone at night. . . . What was I saying? Yes, the best thing to do with a great truth, as Rabelais discovered, is to bury it in a mountain of follies where it can comfortably wait for the picks and shovels of the elect.”
“Item one [of what Pursewarden calls his “self-portrait”]: ‘Like all fat men I tend to be my own hero.’ Item two: ‘Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.’ Item three: ‘I always hoped to achieve the Elephant’s Eye view.’ Item four: ‘I realised that in order to become an artist one must shed the whole complex of egotisms which led to the choice of self-expression as the only means of growth! This because it is impossible I call The Whole Joke!’”
- - - - - - -
“These strange beliefs…you will find lurking under my mordant humours, which may be described simply as a technique of therapy. As Balthasar says, ‘A good doctor, and in a special sense the psychologist, makes it quite deliberately, slightly harder for the patient to recover too easily. You do this to see if his psyche has any real bounce in it, for the secret of healing is in the patient and not the doctor. The only measure is the reaction!’
“I was born under Jupiter, Hero of the Comic Mode! My poems, like soft music invading the encumbered senses of young lovers left alone at night. . . . What was I saying? Yes, the best thing to do with a great truth, as Rabelais discovered, is to bury it in a mountain of follies where it can comfortably wait for the picks and shovels of the elect.”