Ian B on the Weimar:
It might seem ironic that this era of urban sophistication and political violence should bear the name of a provincial town in Thuringia, whose main distinction, apart from some fine eighteenth-century architecture, is that Goethe and Schiller once ran a theater there for the Duke of Weimar. The German republic, lasting from 1919 to 1933, was named after Weimar because that is where the government was formed and the constitution written. The Weimar National Theater, where these matters were concluded, was thought to be a safer place to found a democracy than the center of unruly Berlin, to which the government was soon transferred. The setting was anything but grand.
Like the Italian Futurists and the Sovict Constructivists, he saw beauty in this. There was still an almost fetishistic hope in the benign qualities of speed, efficiency, and mass movement, a hope that was shared by many Communists and fascists alike. This rationalist idealism was particularly strong among the architects and , designers. Walter Gropius declared , that spending two days of World War I under the rubble of a house destroyed by an artillery shell had given him the ambition to build—not just beautiful . new buildings, but a new and better society, based on reason, efficient function, and collective well-being. Backed by the socialist government of Thuringia, Gropius became the first chairman of the Bauhaus. “The arts must be brought together under the ' wing of a great architecture,” he said, - and architects, sculptors, and painters “must all go back to the crafts.” If the angst and rage of the individ_ ual artist was one aspect of Weimar Republic culture, the image of the artist as craftsman working toward a better, socialist society was another. Although we now appreciate the expressionist visions of such painters as Kirchner or Beckmann, their influence at the time was marginal compared to the clean, rational lines of architects and designers, such as Marcel Breuer, Josef Albers, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Gropius himself. The main idea was to invest as much artistic effort in humble chairs or kitchen utensils as in great urban buildings. Stephen Spender suggested in these pages that the Weimar Republic’s motto might have been “Sermons in saucepans, communicating an “atmosphere of individual freedom for those who could be satisfied by useful objects in a setting of democratized humanism.” Spender pointed as well to the public housing projects designed during Weimar by well-known modern architects, including Le Corbusier, in Frankfurt and Stuttgart as well as Berlin. Generations of art school students all over | the world were taught to copy the formal models of Bauhaus design, and many eventually felt the urge to rebel against them. But there is still something moving about the hope for a better future based on science, technology, and human reason.
Most artists of the time were not utopian Futurists, however, or Bauhaus style idealists, but felt more ambivalent, if not hostile, toward the machine age. Grosz, for one, accepted that “line has become a photographic and not a personal fact.”° In some pictures by George Grosz, people are literally faceless, blank figures identified simply as the Boxer, or the Gymnast.
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The House the George Built:
I can verify that as late as 1950... Los Angeles still seemed like a cow town to eastern eyes, with a defiantly antiquated-looking trolley clanking its way from a vestigial downtown to a string of minimalist beaches without a dune or an honest-to-God wave to be seen. The water moved just enough to prove it wasn’t a lake, and it didn’t so much invite you in as put up with you when you got there —if, that is, you were one of those eastern nerve-cases keen on swimming. For everyone else, the beach was just another place to have one’s picture taken and to be discovered by a famous producer.
-Wilfrid Sheed
John Lahr on stage fright:
The paradox of acting is that like surfing it requires both relaxation and concentration. If there is concentration without relaxation or relaxation without concentration the performance doesn't work. Composure is repose Odets observed in his diary. What the public wants and what the performer sells is the illusion of control of never being at a loss. The actor is a model of perfect personality one who is not wounded or worried or maimed or endangered as Wilde described it. The performer's poise works as a defense against shame and social threats both signals security and creating it projecting confidence and neutralizing aggression. POISE according to the analyst Leo rangel is a way of recapturing the blissful state of the infant who developed strategies to ensure his mother's collaboration to prevent the agitation that would lead to his being put down or dropped. Poise is an expression of the desire to be wanted and loved ...a form of social security which is never at play in solitude, when there is no danger from without, no fear of ridicule. One is not at the moment being observed and judged.. Actors of course watch themselves like hawks some like Noah Coward turn poise into a philosophy of life their careers are perpetual performance of charm.
At 1 point in the 1989 show Dame Edna patrolled the edge of the stage looking for someone to do nude cartwheels on stage..."and now the mood has completely changed hasn't it" she said. "I don't know what you'd call it blind terror I think don't you? But don't be nervous please. Supposing I chose for argument sake you in the 3rd row. Hello have you done much cartwheel work? We found audiences prefer an amateur nude cartwheelist... they do. They have a way of falling over which is vulnerable and well strangely appealing. You will not know you're doing these cartwheels ...do you know why? You'll be in deep shock.
Wills on W James
Life among the Jameses was a perpetual tussle for control. Partly because there was so much unconventionality and gleeful disorder in the family, control was a strategy and a goal for most of the members.
His children were able, in time, to mock (mainly kindly) this Dickensian character, but not to break free of his influence. They had lived too long undef the Niagara Falls of his enthusiasms. Henry, the novelist, was drawn to séances, ghosts, clectrical shock treatment, and health fads. He devoted himself to “Fletcherizing,” the system that Horace Fletcher called Menticulture, which involved among other things masticating one’s food thirty-two times per swallow. When Henry developed health problems later on, he attributed them to this health cure. Henry Adams’s wife Marian (“Clover”) probably had Henry’s well-known Fletcherism in mind when she said that the trouble with his literary style was that “he chaws more than he bites off.”
William was even more adventurous than Henry in his experiments upon himself and his exploration of mediums and gurus. He added electrical shocks, injection with serums from bull or goat testicles, hypnotism, anaesthetic trance, mind cure, and consumption of various mood-altering chemicals (including mescal, chloral hydrate, amyl nitrate vernal and chloroform’). James would have felt quite at home in the psychedelic Sixties. He regularly attended séances, and became a strong supporter of and officeholder in the Society for Psychical Research. He sat outside the room of a psychic-researcher friend who was dying, hoping the friend would communicate something “from the other side.” He was a great fan of the borderline kook Gustav Fechner, who thought the earth is divine and should be prayed to, and the outright crank Benjamin Blood, who promoted anaesthetic trances and held that each letter of the alphabet has its own personality.
On the handsome reissues of Calvino
...plus three volumes of essays and lectures, and the problem begins to emerge: a completist’s book heaven can be a browser’s purgatory. ~ I speak as both a lifelong completist and a former bookstore clerk, one who watched and sometimes guided readers as they attempted to choose a book. Ennoble an author’s Italo shelf with too many uniformly enticing editions, and the problem becomes one of luck in the reader’s selection. This is hardly Calvino’s problem alone. Steerforth Press has made it as likely that a reader curious about Dawn Powell will come out of a bookstore clutching the glum early volumes set in Ohio or the misfiring ‘‘Happy Island’’ as latch onto the enchanting “‘Turn, Magic Wheel’ or ‘‘The Locusts Have No King.’’ Will that reader return? Vintage Books, meaning well, has set up a similar obstacle in the path of Philip K. Dick’s canonization — nearly two dozen flawed or even poor books, attractively presented, jostle beside the masterpieces.
And random words from the NYT
fideistic- believing that everything that can be known about God or divine things is known only or primarily by faith and never by reason alone
Foucauldian pertaining to the French phitlosopher Michel Foucault, who wrote on the relationship between knowledge and power
hermeneutics the art or science of the interpretation of literature
hybridities things having the nature of mixed parentage
Interlority pertaining to the inner nature of things
monovalent having a valence of one; related to the capacity of an element or radical to combine with another to form molecules
ontic- having the status of real and ultimate existence
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