Monk's durability

Here is an avid jazz listener's proof of Thelonious Sphere Monk's (1917-1982) genius as a composer. First, nobody questions a collection of Monk interpretations, and how many other composers in the idiom receive as much attention for single-album concepts? Second, the inclusion of a Monk tune on a mixed program is usually a solid choice because his tunes attract listener interest naturally. Third, any single Monk tune usually survives a wide variety of interpretations and treatments.

I'm not a player nor do I have more than a dangerous knowledge of jazz theory, but it seems to me Monk's maxim, that the inside of tune makes the outside sound good, speaks to why his melodies are so attractive to players and listeners alike. "Monk's Mood" is a personal favorite, of which there are more than 50 versions currently available on iTunes, and Terry Adams has recently released a version on Talk Thelonious.

Camera Lucida, Part One

Having just completed a close reading of Roland Barthes' landmark, Camera Lucida (1980), I offer here several questions from my notes on Part One. Camera Lucida is divided symmetrically into two parts of 24 short sections each; the first part is a meditative, often digressive speculation on the nature of photography.

Is Barthes truly able to overcome his habits of intellectual construct and of reductive theoretical system? As Michael Fried has noted, what authority does Barthes have if Barthes' own proposal makes every viewer's interpretation of a photograph equivalent to every other viewer's? Are we to be persuaded by force of Barthes' ego, his pedigree as a leading theorist, even in a domain where he is fond of calling himself a child and primitive? How does the reader understand Barthes' use of "absolute subjectivity" and "affective consciousness," apart from Barthes' body of work?

Certainly, there are beginnings—what Geoff Dyer calls "setting-forths"—in Part One that are flawed.

St. Sebastian Parish Church

Yesterday I took students in my design class to St. Sebastian in Milwaukee (Hawley and 54th.) We spent about an hour, outside and inside, trying to absorb its richness as an example of design's functional and expressive potential. The parish church was built in 1930 (renovated in 2000) as the Washington Heights neighborhood was developed around it. The structure quickly became a visual landmark and source of community pride.
My guess is that it is an example of American neo-Romanesque style, being solid and squat on its corner site. My opinion is that it is a good example of the style, being unified in all aspects of its design. My students enjoyed the pleasing, visual intelligence of design decisions, from the articulation of structural elements to the unity-and-variety of ornamental details.

Another great paragraph

From Willa Cather's A Lost Lady (1923); the writing is expansive, the paragraph self-contained:

"After Ivy had gone on into the smoker, Niel sat looking out at the windings of the Sweet Water and playing with his idea. The Old West had been settled by dreamers, great-hearted adventurers who were unpractical to the point of magnificence; a courteous brotherhood, strong in attack but weak in defense, who could conquer but could not hold. Now all the vast territory they had won was to be at the mercy of men like Ivy Peters, who had never dared anything, never risked anything. They would drink up the mirage, dispel the morning freshness, root out the great brooding spirit of freedom, the generous, easy life of the great land-holders. The space, the colour, the princely carelessness of the pioneer they would destroy and cut up into profitable bits, as the match factory splinters the primeval forest. All the way from the Missouri to the mountains this generation of shrewd young men, trained to petty economies by hard times, would do exactly what Ivy Peters had done when he drained the Forrester marsh."

Favorite passage

Among favorite Bible passages, this from 1 Kings 6:7.
"The stones used in the construction of the Temple were prefinished at the quarry, so the entire structure was built without the sound of hammer, ax, or any other iron tool at the building site." (New Living Translation, 1996)
This unusual verse is the subject of much speculation, by way of commentary, and its true meaning is probably best deferred to mystery.

These are the things I like about this account: 1. God's nature is careful and good and not arbitrary, 2. The verse suggests a number of senses—hearing, touch, and smell—as a reminder of our physical experience of life, and 3. Everyone involved in this work was keenly aware of its extraordinary meaning.

What are applications of the verse to my life? I prefer to simply marvel at its inclusion in a very special history.

Hipper, hip and not hip

Trying to find an illustration textbook for college students is difficult. In the textbook I am using, the author has an unfortunate approach to the history of illustration: two pages of personal choices leading to six pages of "outsider art." In his selection, the primitive gets highest value, for its enduring appeal to expressive types.

As in histories (skewed to modernist) of other creative disciplines, being hip is a big deal—it is the currency in trade. The avant-garde (hipper) favors the aberrant, which is picked up by the clever and voracious mainstream (hip), which soon becomes academic (not hip.) That which is unconventional quickly becomes conventional.

This pattern was first demonstrated to me when I worked in marketing. Back in the mid 90s we were tracking California skateboard culture for its unconventional fashion. Soon that fashion dominated the racks of conventional discounters such as Kohl's and JCPenney.

Time's rush and the imagination

In an essay on the imagination, "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words," Wallace Stevens makes the argument that especially in our modernist era the imagination must make extraordinary effort to press back against the pressure of reality. In a sense, his essay is about our understanding of time. Imagination is a matter of long-view time, measured in continuous threads over thousands of years. Reality is short-view time, measured in discrete fragments experienced in the here and now. Stevens proposes that nobility is characteristic of the imagination; nobility is "a thing out of time." He notes that nobility is conspicuously absent in contemporary poetry, in part because we are unable to imagine ourselves in a continuity of time.

He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. Ecclesiastes 3:11

A splendid paragraph

I have just begun a delicious read of Patricia Hampl's Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime (2006.) The writer and I have an experience in common: being stopped by Woman before an Aquarium, by Matisse, in the Chicago Art Institute.
This post copies out a paragraph from Blue Arabesque that also has stopped me. I am deeply interested in its subject of time, but even more I admire Hampl's writing. (The tricky business of analogy is managed nicely.)

"But just when did time, that diaphanous material, fray into rush? The way I imagined it, woolly minutes streamed across an eternity of spun-silk nanoseconds, piling up into hours that wove themselves into the voluminous yard goods of days that, in turn, got stitched into weeks and months. Wasn't that how it once was—the heavily embroidered yesteryears folded away in the scented armoires of the seasons, and consigned to the vast linen closet of the ages where the first tensile thread of our story on the planet emerged from the bobbin of history? But just when in all this warping and woofing—or maybe how—did time cease to be a treasure and turn, instead, into the fret of the drive time commute?"

Bringing it all

This scan is from Conrad Richter's Over the Blue Mountain, 1967; the illustrator is Herbert Danska. There is much to enjoy in his art; this example has a thoroughly modern sensibility, even while it depicts a historical, naturalistic subject matter. At first glance, the composition is allover, or field,  built on a woven structure of horizontal bands and vertical stripes. Finally, the episode is revealed in the top middle where the heroes chat with the village baker. The viewer is invited to slow down and search the variety of marks and tones, and the invitation delivers a seemingly effortless play of textures and light.

Herbert Danska, from Richter's Over the Blue Mountain, 1967.

A morning well spent

What are the ingredients of a good morning? A lawn chair in the shade of a large tree; a pencil, pencil sharpener, eraser and sturdy sketchbook; ideal weather conditions with enough breeze to knock down the bugs; a quiet location; and three noble friends also sketching nearby. This single sketch occupied me for almost three hours. Maybe it's not much, but it means a lot to somebody—me. 

2015 Burmeister Burlington sketch

Whose Work Is This—Man?

One popular philosophy or theory about man, rooted in serious, so-called enlightened concepts and watered down in subsequent applications, holds that humans have made themselves in their own image. Humans have become something more than animals by virtue of their exertion to withdraw from the material, outer world and to construct their inner, conceptual worlds of the self. This theory holds that is it possible, little by little, for man to improve his lot in life by forcing, as a protagonist, the world to more and more become subject to his campaigns of imagination.

There are streaks of idealism and progressivism in such a view: idealism because man is regarded as being basically good, and progressivism because man has the capability to increase his successes.

This view of man is antithetical to the Christian concept of man, which is a slow and inconvenient concept. Christian doctrine agrees with the worldly theory that man is more than animal, and Christian doctrine asserts he is essentially more than animal—he has had this status conferred upon him at Creation, when he was made in the image of his Creator. (And then man fell into sin and the image of God was corrupted in him.) The other theory of man holds that nothing essential was conferred upon him; instead, man has become human through his own super-animal effort.

The Christian concept of man finds man a fallen being who has been rescued from slavery to sin by a loving God who redeemed him. In the other view, man redeems himself by a correcting enterprise that can overcome his animal baseness; man can imagine a course of action that is beneficial to himself and others.

In the Christian concept, man can be transformed and restored only by the grace of God. In the Christian concept, man’s relationship with the world is understood as God’s work to preserve all people during their times of grace. Man’s role in the world is to fear God and to love people. In the other concept, man is liberated by his ideas, and his freedom obligates him to making (or re-making) the world a better place for those not yet free or those being freed.

Becoming vulnerable

So the operational relationship between grace and purity may be stated: as the desire for purity in an operation increases, the opportunity for grace decreases. We observe that grace can grow and persist when an operation does not consciously insist on exclusive (and reductive) triumph or purity. Gracefulness is achieved by becoming vulnerable.

(applied from an 1988 essay by Wendell Berry on the writer's style)

Borges, "The Congress" (1975)

I'll let others judge the ranked value of this story, found in the short story collection The Book of Sand. Borges himself placed a high value on this story within his oeuvre. "The Congress" is dense with autobiography, clever asides and pet Argentine references. But it also includes wonderful prose and a masterful paragraph on page 38 of the Giovanni translation (E. P. Dutton, 1977.) Beginning with, "I still hold my two images of the ranch . . ." and ending with, ". . . I surprised Irala being watched by an ostrich." this paragraph combines the author's darting, intellectual feints with his economically descriptive observations.

Also, the story suggests to me a resignation: Time wins, memories fade and nostalgia is forbidden.

Creed and challenge

Professors who hold to a creed and teach in a religious institution live in tension from the external and / or internal pressures to manage a balance between teaching and scholarship that are secular and teaching and scholarship that foreground their creed. This tension cannot be resolved by choosing to be anti-intellectual. Wendell Berry has proposed that people who find themselves at the crossroads of science and creed must navigate the conflicting commitments.
 
While the Christian professor dare not renounce his creed, he is an impostor or counterfeit if his response to secular challenges becomes an anti-intellectual retreat or withdrawal. Then it is time for the Christian professor to find another vocation or to become acquainted with an intellectual defense genuinely grounded in mystery and paradox; this defense simply requires that reason ultimately yield to what God has and hasn't fully revealed to man. G. K. Chesterton, David Skeel and Berry are on the side of this option. Chesterton argues for "welcome and wonder," Skeel submits to incomplete explanations of mysteries and Berry allows for vulnerability to "cosmic mystery."

Asymmetry is for

As many smart people have noted, we are not as truly symmetrical as we appear, neither in structure nor function. Every yoga instructor reminds participants that one of side of their bodies is not the same as the other.
While Beauty may require balance, it does not require symmetry. And yet, should we prefer or respect symmetry, and should asymmetry derive its value from an embodied recall of symmetry?

Here's another way for the designer or composer to think about asymmetry's use. Is symmetry an operational ideal? Can the designer ever create a successful asymmetrical solution without acknowledging the force of symmetry?

Alive and making art

At end of editor Jerry Weiss' master class on Cezanne's Boy in a Red Waistcoat, he makes this statement: "The idea that revelation can be found in supplication to art is the stuff of romantic novels. Neither the dogma of schools nor independent research leads an artist to transcendence. I know something I did not as a young man: that art alone may not be a means to enlightenment, but it is a profound symbol of the spiritual journey." (Artists Magazine, December 2014)
In the last two days I've talked with artist friends who are at mature stages of their career, and we've reflected on the things Weiss writes about—art and its role in revelation, transcendence and spiritual journey. My guess is that most mature artists, looking back over their careers of searching and making, looking back at the celebrations and struggles and acquisitions and doubts, come to a place where they realize that art alone is not the truth and transcendent meaning of their lives. They manage the reality that art resides within or very close to the center of the whole that is truth and meaningfulness.

The model of Borges fiction

An ars poetica can be broadly understood as a statement defining the ultimate values—what is good and desired—for the form of a thing. In her very helpful volume on the writing of Jorge Luis Borges (Verso, 2006), critic Beatriz Sarlo describes Borges' ars poetica as including the construction of perfect plots. She notes that Borges equated a well-constructed plot with a kind of moral imperative—that a plot be pleasurable, have formal elegance and possess or demonstrate an unworldly order.

I find this model to be operational or aspirational to my own imperfect efforts at making art. That my images or artifacts aim at a viewer experience that is pleasurable, intimate and embodied—this is my ars poetica?

Helping is so appealing, and why?

Writer Garret Keizer's book on help (2004) explores the question: what makes helping so appealing to the helper. Here are the possible reasons—the reasons are not virtuous because they are common or inevitable to the do-gooder who has been burned in the helping transaction:

The helper can exercise power.

The helper can resolve his / her guilty conscience.

The helper can go against best judgment or conventional wisdom of others.

The helper views the helped person like a little child.

The helper gets manipulated, usually to a degree that is knowing.

The helper is attracted to (and participates in) a good story.

The helper can discover the self or soul of another person.

This list of reasons is pulled from pages 106-11, Help: The Original Human Dilemma, in which Keizer recounts Norman Mailer's infamous help for Jack Abbott.

Help: having it our way?

Garret Keizer's book on help (2004) does a good job of poking around at our assumptions about helping others. While we all know that helping others is virtuous, things get complicated when we start to sort out how we should help. Correct beliefs and virtuous convictions are no substitute for compassionate actions and human responses. Do we help from gratitude or from a desire for gratitude? Do we frame our help as an exchange—our compassion in exchange for another's righteousness? Do we say, "I want to help," and then say, "And here's what I want that help to look like"?
Keizer, an acclaimed essayist who has also taught high school and served as an Episcopal priest, is wise to propose that the central question is, "What will you do?" The helper must make choices, and humility must be an essential aspect because helping usually requires that the helper sacrifice something and suffer.

Cosmas and vocation

Pierre de Calan, a career banker (French), penned Cosmas or the Love of God, his only novel, late in life. I recommend this book to readers who are interested in the values of a quiet, reflective life and in a unique perspective on vocation. De Calan poses several very important questions about vocation and calling.
In Cosmas, the Novice Master holds the flawed Novice close to his heart, even closer than he thinks he should. Question: Does the Spirit entrust us with gifts and situations wherein he does not give us clarity or wisdom in all matters of love in action? Is it true that we hold unclearly and unwisely to certain things that will never be right, because we are compelled to love them?

(review on Goodreads.com)

(This brings to mind the often-cited practice of "tough love," which means love that is tough or hard on the receiver. In my experience, most love is tough—tough for the giver too.)