@ sixes & sevens

Another sit upright quotation

Innumerable books and dissertations have naturally ventured explanations of such incantatory texts ...; these analyses have uncovered the disguised presence of a lover or some erotic motif, but as with the analyses of Cubist pictures, finding a pipe or a smokestack or a cigar only goes so far in explaining the deeper meaning of the art.

This sit-upright quotation comes from, of all things, a Michael Kimmelman review of Janet Malcolm's recent biography of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. It appears in the Oct. 25, 2007 issue of The New York Review of Books. It follows a selection from Stein's cryptic poem "Sweet Tail (Gypsies)".

Sentences that make you sit up

Shirtless, I lie on short grass. Its texture tickles my back. My companion, swimming, leaves me to my lonely thinking. (Once we shared summer ruminations. At times our silences run parallel. At others we're like strangers who don't meet.)

"Nine Postcards from Sanlucar de Barrameda," from Insomnia, by Aamer Hussein. (italics supplied)

More sit-up sentences

I've been struck lately by the colorful writing of New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl. A passage in a recent review of the Martin Ramírez show the the Folk Art Museum came very close to inclusion in these posts:

Ramírez is one of the Big Three of twentieth-century outsiders [with Adolf Wölfli and Henry Darger] ... He has in common with them an extravagant giftedness. All would have been stars in any art school, had they attended one. That they eluded contact with institutions of fine art owes something to personal disarray and something to chance, in a ratio impossible to gauge. It's a small thing, which makes them hard cases, exceptions proving the existence of a rule--that art, to be recognized as such, requires grounding in both individual biography and common culture. (my emphasis)

Then he did a gripping review (Issue of 2007-02-12, Posted 2007-02-05) of the Tintoretto show at the Prado. This abbreviated paragraph stopped me in my tracks:

In “Tarquin and Lucretia,” the naked, lividly fleshy protagonists struggle at the edge of a bed, toppling a sculpture and breaking a necklace that rains pearls. The woman’s right hand seems to extend from the canvas, as if to be grasped by a rescuing viewer. ... “The Martyrdom of St. Lawrence” is a sketchy and fierce nightmare of death by roasting, with an anticipatory whiff of Goya. (my emphasis)

I'm starting to get a sense of what it is that makes me sit up, but I'm reserving comment until I'm sure.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that Schjeldahl is also an accomplished poet. A compilation of Schjeldahl's prose writings has been published in The Hydrogen Jukebox (University of California Press, 1991). I should put that in my reading queue. It reminds me that a copy of Michael Kimmelman's The Accidental Masterpiece has been gathering dust in the living room since I bought it last July.