1. There's a scene in Claude Lanzmann's 1985 Shoah where Lanzmann locates a former Nazi now working in a beer hall. He was formerly charged with transporting Jews to concentration camps, but, currently, he simply pours beer after beer after beer in succession, all day, this is his ordinary life. Only after asking his boss, does he decide to answer questions about holocaust. There is something about the pouring of those beers, something direct about that particular action that links the horror to the present. The killing of people was as ordinary as pouring beers: it was a job.
I've often wondered what those patterns are in America, those contemporary motions that bring the slaveholders and the frontier killers back. I am not saying that Tess Taylor finds such things here, but her article in the Oxford American is definitely a cause of such reflections:
http://www.oxfordamerican.org/item/673-the-confederates-in-our-attic
2. "Humanism was a particularized but unconfined concern with all the high-quality products of the creative impulse, which could be distinguished from the destructive one by its propensity to increase the variety of the created world rather than reduce it." Clive James
I can live with this definition of art, and it certainly makes me want to seek out James' Cultural Amnesia, where the quote can be found. I've read James for years, and he is a fine critic worth returning to over and over. Truthdig explores James' latest collection of essays here:
http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/latest_readings_20150904
3. I wish works of visual art had the second, third, and sometimes infinite lives that songs do. Perhaps they do, perhaps we paint the same paintings over and over and over again under different conditions and with different voices, and maybe paintings should be written about that way (great books, for instance, have been written about photography from this vantage point). Whatever the answer, I enjoyed Greil Marcus' book The History of Rock 'n" Roll in Ten Songs and it appears that I am not the only one. This essay seems to take Marcus' belief about the biography of songs seriously:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122674/whats-behind-music-isnt-nearly-important-song-itself
4. It is great to see someone giving extended attention to Dana Schutz:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122874/painter-our-absurd-age-pop-culture
5. I am not sure if Simon Critchley is actually intent on making a point in this article about his dissatisfaction with large theories in explaining away our lives or whether he simply needed an opportunity to tell us about a professor who was hero to him. Either way, this longish article is worth reading, though, for me, the text served merely as a way of conjuring the ghosts of old professors and teachers who I love:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/09/12/there-is-no-theory-of-everything/?_r=0
Poem for the week:
6. We lost C.K. Williams this weekend. You know C.K. Williams. He popped up with so much regularity in the New Yorker that you wondered if the New Yorker had much interest in the poems of other poets at all. Anyway, there was a reason for the extended coverage and why he was a perfect New Yorker poet: he was good accessible poet who offered events and concerns that the everyday person could easily recognize, and, at the same time, offered poems with a veiled, difficult pedigree, often using the long lines of Roman poetry. He walked that tough line between poetry and prose, and, at his best, that line matters greatly. In a good Williams poem, lyric achieves its separation from everyday speech and everyday life while always threatening to fall back into prose. Moments of transcendence are brief and untrustworthy and the gait and manner of the words themselves embody the struggle to keep those moments in our view.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/241560
One Click Deeper:
7. If C.K. Williams is of further interest to you, find his obituary here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/books/c-k-williams-poet-who-tackled-moral-issues-dies-at-78.html?_r=0