The Ramblr

"If I can’t drink my bowl of coffee three times daily, then in my torment, I will shrivel up..."

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 20:49:47 -0500

“If I can’t drink my bowl of coffee three times daily, then in my torment, I will shrivel up like a piece of roast goat.”

- Lieschen, from J. S. Bach’s Coffee Cantata

Dark Knighthood

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:44:00 -0500

Dark quests for redemption, whether religious or secular, abound in contemporary culture. As [Christopher] Nolan’s films indicate, these quest films owe a great debt to classic film noir. Classic noir takes aim at some of the treasured assumptions and promises of modernity. In noir, the modern world, embodied in an urban setting, is hardly the world of light, happiness, and peace that utopian thinkers of the Enlightenment foretold. Modernity is about human beings exercising control over nature and thus taking control of their destinies; in our modern technological project, knowledge and power are one. The postmodern turn in noir is about the loss of control, the absence of intelligibility, and the threat of powerlessness. But the quest has something pre-modern about it—a sense of human limitations, of the dependence of human beings on one another and on events not in their control. In this world, the outcome of the quest is tenuous and uncertain.

The title of the Nolan’s latest Batman film calls to mind medieval chivalry in a postmodern key. The dark knight embraces extraordinary tasks and fights against enormous odds; his quest is to restore what has been corrupted and to recover what has been lost. In so doing, he takes upon himself a suffering and loneliness that isolate him from his fellow citizens and inevitably court their misunderstanding and scorn. He is a dark knight, in part, because the world he inhabits is nearly void of hope and virtue, and, in part, because some of the darkness resides within him, in his internal conflicts between the good he aspires to restore and the means he deploys to fend off evil. Of the many filmmakers designing dark tales of quests for redemption, Christopher Nolan is currently making a serious claim to being the master craftsman.

[Thomas Hibbs]

Attention, Residents of Aberystwyth: Your Wait is Nearly Over

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 22:52:00 -0500

Attention, Residents of Aberystwyth: Your Wait is Nearly Over: It was worth it, trust me.

Vilhelm Hammershøi, Interior with Young Man Reading (1898). ...

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 10:17:19 -0500

Vilhelm Hammershøi, Interior with Young Man Reading (1898). [wikipedia]

1915 British National War Savings Committee poster [Vintagraph]

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 13:58:56 -0500

1915 British National War Savings Committee poster [Vintagraph]

Subjective messiahs

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 09:33:32 -0500

What happens now in professional criticism is that you start where you like, write about the object under study in any order and at any depth you fancy, and perhaps don’t even give a single material fact about it. In other words, the idea of the critic today is not more modest but more arrogant - almost messianic - in its freewheeling claim to subjective authority. No wonder people don’t like us! We’re just loudmouths giving our opinions, at least unless we escape this arid play of free critical expression.

[Jonathan Jones]

"May God blast anyone who writes a biography of me."

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 11:14:38 -0500

“May God blast anyone who writes a biography of me.”

- J. M. Barrie

Fear of the Dragon; or, Why the Oracles Cease to Give Answers

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 15:07:00 -0500

In the next-to-last decade of the seventeenth century a certain priest of the Diocese of Ely, Robert Midgley by name, translated the celebrated Morals of the Greek biographer and philosopher Plutarch. The fourth and final volume bears a dedication to his Bishop, one Francis Turner, soon to be “removed.” This volume has for its opening chapter one of Plutarch’s most intriguing essays. It is entitled “Why the Oracles Cease to Give Answers.” Briefly, the conclusion of the ancient author is, in the first instance, that it is because people stopped asking the oracle honest questions. Some grew impatient when the oracle did not respond as they wished; still others would not stay for an answer. Eventually, he suggests, people thus conflicted in their motives came to forget about the oracles altogether; their priests were either sustained nor replaced, the sanctuary became desolate, and at last it was inhabited by a fearsome dragon. To explain the demise of the institution it was generally said simply that “the oracles had ceased to give answers.” The last excuse of the last faithful worshipers for not coming was fear of the dragon. “Yet,” says Plutarch, “those that have written this did not well comprehend the occasion of the oracles ceasing; for the dragon did not make the place solitary, but rather, the solitude of the place occasioned the dragon to repair hither.”

There are, of course, a number of possible applications for this story. Here is but one of them: Sometimes the denials we make of truth are really a product of our long absence from its oracle. Having learned to placate our consciences with a substitute for going there—a study of old reports, perhaps—then later becoming content with someone else’s analysis and perhaps some reinterpretation of those old reports, we come at length to the point where it suffices for us to say that we, too, once visited the oracle in our youth. Now, of course, we have moved on to more immediate preoccupations. We put our current questions, self-serving as they are, to almost any other source. Even if the oracle should suddenly and miraculously proclaim truth loudly in our ear, or write it on the walls of our chamber, we would not recognize its proclamation as truth, but only, perhaps, as an unwelcome disturbance in the midst of our festivals. Then suddenly, one day, judgment stands at the door.

[David Lyle Jeffrey, The House of the Interpreter (Baylor UP, 2003) 227-28. Midgely’s translation of Plutarch is online at Google Books.]

"If men had made no more progress in the common arts of life than they have in education, we should..."

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:58:09 -0500

“If men had made no more progress in the common arts of life than they have in education, we should at this moment be dividing our food with our fingers, and drinking out of the palms of our hands.”

- Sydney Smith (called to mind by Joseph Epstein, “A Literary Education” in The New Criterion, June 2008)

Recentalgia

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 22:26:00 -0500

Recentalgia

Damien Jurado, “Where Lies My Tarp?” (download this...

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 21:38:00 -0500

Damien Jurado, “Where Lies My Tarp?” (download this and two others at Stereogum)

stumblng: more is expected of American lawyers than Australian...

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 21:35:33 -0500

stumblng:

more is expected of American lawyers than Australian ones, obviously

the image above from here via this shows US lawyer David Remes, who represents 16 Yemeni prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay; he’s shown taking his pants off during a press conference in Sanaa, Yemen, in order to demonstrate the mistreatment he says was suffered by his clients

the Stumblng Tumblr takes his ~~hat~~ pants off to Mr Remes for his devotion to his clients’ interests

——

"Breviary" (2), Zbigniew Herbert

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 12:32:52 -0500

portraitoftheartistasayoungman:

Lord,
grant me the ability to compose a long sentence, whose line, customarily
from breath to breath, is a line spanned like a suspension bridge like a
rainbow the alpha and omega of the ocean.

Lord, grant me the strength and agility of those who build sentences
long and expansive as a spreading oak tree, like a great valley; may they
contain worlds, shadows of worlds, and worlds of dreams

may the main clause rule confidently over dependent clauses, control
their course, a circuitous but expressive basso continuo, endure unmoved
above the elements in motion, draw them to itself like a nucleus draws
electrons by unseen laws of gravitation

I pray then for a long sentence, sculptured by the sweat of my brow,
extending so far that in each there might be reflected the mirror image
of a cathedral, a great oratorio, a tryptych,

and also animals mighty and minuscule, train stations, the heart
brimming with sorrow, rocky cliffs, and the furrow of fate in the hand

[The prayer of Henry James, minus the third stanza]

Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, Act 1

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 21:38:10 -0500

Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, Act 1

"I won’t go into greater detail. I wouldn’t want to “spoil” this movie for you. But I must say, the..."

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 17:53:29 -0500

“I won’t go into greater detail. I wouldn’t want to “spoil” this movie for you. But I must say, the surest way to “spoil” this experience would be for you to experience this experience.”

- Reihan Salam on Hellboy II

Vladimir: Moron!

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 13:47:49 -0500

Vladimir: Moron!
Estragon: Vermin!
Vladimir: Abortion!
Estragon: Morpion!
Vladimir: Sewer-rat!
Estragon: Curate!
Vladimir: Cretin!
Estragon (with finality): Critic!
Vladimir: Oh!

Lord Save Us From Your Followers

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 13:32:30 -0500

Lord Save Us From Your Followers

Liam Clancy, “Whiskey, You’re the Devil”

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 09:24:38 -0500

Liam Clancy, “Whiskey, You’re the Devil”

"Clarity begins at home. Knowledge puffeth up, but clarity edifieth. Clarity suffereth long. It..."

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 08:25:54 -0500

“Clarity begins at home. Knowledge puffeth up, but clarity edifieth. Clarity suffereth long. It should stay at home.”

- D. J. Enright (NYT)

Good Country People

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 08:00:43 -0500

Good Country People