Radio!

Posted by onetwothree on February 13, 2007, 07:10 PM | #

Offtopic:

1941-2007

http://profiles.numbersusa.com/improfile.php3?DistSend=GA&VIPID=225

Posted by Fred Scrooby on February 14, 2007, 12:48 AM | #

I thought it was an excellent informal program, especially the more serious part, the latter two-thirds.

From the “My Two Cents” department:  forgive me but I disagree with the notion of “creativity” the way it’s commonly discussed.  I once heard a woman tell her girlfriend, “When a man goes on about how much love he has to give some lucky woman, run in the opposite direction because that man not only has no love whatsoever to give a woman but will suck up all the woman’s love like a sponge without requiting any of it and leave her emotionally starved and wasted.”  Well, in like manner, the people who prattle most about “creativity” are precisely the ones without ability to do art, literature, or science of value.  Men and women who make great contributions to culture don’t traffic in the notion of “creativity,” don’t fret about “being creative,” but very simply go about making — go about bringing into existence — what they find beautiful because they find it beautiful.  I suspect the people who go on about “creativity” are people who have no taste, are therefore unable to distinguish good culture from bad, and haven’t a clue as to how to make good art, literature, or science.  Can anyone imagine Homer, Plato, Praxiteles, St. Paul, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Sir Isaac Newton, van Beethoven, Emily Brontë, van Gogh, or Nietzsche going on about “being creative”?  Can anybody imagine a single one of them going on about that?  No, it’s outright impossible:  concerns about “being creative” never entered a single one of their brains, or ever could.  What they were doing was bringing into existence what they loved:  in each case they imagined it then brought it into existence.  There was no “creativity” about it, just the making of beauty by individuals with taste.

Posted by Retew on February 14, 2007, 05:16 AM | #

I think I agree. The late Alistair Cooke once said hat charm is an attribute of those who don’t know they’ve got it; maybe the same is true of creativity as well.

The point of creativity is to light up the world in the eyes of others, and whether or not that happens can only be determined by those others, not by the artist himself. I remember from reading rock mags that musicians always thought their latest album was their best ever, but reviews and the opinions of those who bought the album often told a very different story.

Posted by Guessedworker on February 14, 2007, 05:58 AM | #

Creativity is not only artistic imagination, or even the generation of “Eureka moments” (or its modern concomitant, given the paucity of low-bearing scientific fruit, progress on the cutting-edge of research).  Creativity is not always simply noumenal, not simply about new thoughts.  It is also the ability to do ... the god-like capacity to breathe movement into the materials of life and the world (the end product of which, obviously, may not be phenomenological!).  Such creativity is very rare since it requires a certain freedom of action that is not given to those of us held too much in the general thrall.

As a result, such creativity is not necessarily defined in retrospect as “human actors who have changed the course of history”.  Gavrilo Princip changed the course of history.  The question is: how much were they free to act, how much were they dependent upon or under the influence of the law of accident?

Posted by Søren Renner on February 14, 2007, 11:53 AM | #

Neither Mr. Scrooby nor Mr. Guessedworker is familiar with Hans Eysenck’s theory of creativity. Nor, at a guess, do they have any interest in learning about it. So it is in bad taste to study creativity, to try to measure it, to have a theory of “genius”? If Mr. Retew thinks that charming people are really self-abnegating and oblivious, there are a number of business opportunities that he may wish to avail himself of, possibly in his spam box.

Posted by Søren Renner on February 14, 2007, 11:55 AM | #

And about FN, Mr. Scrooby: he wrote an essay titled “On Why I Write Such GOOD Books.” Such modesty! Such self-effacement!

Posted by Andy Wooster on February 14, 2007, 12:06 PM | #

And about FN, Mr. Scrooby: he wrote an essay titled “On Why I Write Such GOOD Books.” Such modesty! Such self-effacement!

  And that is one of the greatest essay titles of all time, along with Nietzsche’s other gems, “Why I am So Wise” and “Why I am So Clever”.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on February 14, 2007, 12:24 PM | #

Lest my comment above seem as if I was blaming the host and two guests on the Majority Radio program for discussing “creativity,” I wasn’t at all.  The ones I find fault with are people like Eysenck, whom the host brought up in the discussion, who make academic disciplines out of “creativity,” as if it’s something that exists apart from simple good taste combined with aptitude.  It isn’t.  If it were, laughable artistic non-entities like Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollack, and Andy Wahrhol become, potentially, “highly-creative artists” rather than what they were, annoying charlatans and artistic nothings.  And notice it’s precisely the same types who are always on about making “creativity” an academic subject of inquiry (“creativity,” not “taste” or “aptitude”) who call frauds like Picasso and Pollack “great artists,” while the people who see through Picasso and Pollack aren’t always on about “creativity,” concerning themselves merely with what’s esthetically good, mediocre, and bad.   

I do find GW’s further comments in the thread above highly interesting, and lots of discussions could branch off from them. 

I don’t think there’s such a thing as “creativity” separate from taste together with a degree of aptitude/intelligence, whatever you want to call it.  I think great cultural works result from people with taste and aptitude imagining what they love and making it because they love it, love to see it, love to have it, love to make it, or people with intelligence and mathematical or mechanical talent who love to figure things out figuring them out as Henri Poincaré did in coming up with the Special Theory of Relativity (and Einstein did after him, coming up with the exact same theory).  Jane Austen wrote “Pride and Prejudice” because she loved imagining it as a story.  Spencer, Shelley, Byron, Kipling, Robert Frost, Sir John Betjeman wrote poems because they loved making and having them.  One person loves doing crossword puzzles, another writing poems, a third figuring out, as Hendrik Lorentz loved doing, the implications of the Michelson-Morley experiment.  All are doing what they love, and making what they love to see and love to have.  What they produce makes the culture; what some of them produce goes into the making of high culture.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on February 14, 2007, 01:11 PM | #

Incidentally, I thought the Norman Lowell interview absolutely outstanding:  enjoyed it immensely (as I did the three previous interviews).  I mention it now because I don’t think I got around to commenting at the time I listened to it.  And I’ll just throw in if I may that I found both Soren’s rap and PF’s Homeric rap excellent — tremendous fun hearing/reading them both.

Posted by Svyatoslav Igorevich on February 14, 2007, 04:47 PM | #

I once heard a woman tell her girlfriend, “When a man goes on about how much love he has to give some lucky woman, run in the opposite direction because that man not only has no love whatsoever to give a woman but will suck up all the woman’s love like a sponge without requiting any of it and leave her emotionally starved and wasted.”

I think she was paraphrasing Ellen Degeneres (may have the wrong comedienne).  I think Ellen used the term “emotional black hole” or somesuch. 

Posted by Svyatoslav Igorevich on February 14, 2007, 04:54 PM | #

I haven’t heard the audio yet, but to dip my toe into the water on the subject anyway, in my experience people who make a living at art, and people who pursue it as a hobby, are generally much more utilitarian about it than people who do not.  If you walked in on a discussion between people who do it, you’d feel more like you were listening in on a conversation between mechanics than philosophers.

Posted by Guessedworker on February 14, 2007, 05:48 PM | #

Svi,

Yes, there is clearly a division between art as work and art as the search for a sublime truth.  Once they are successful, of course, most mechanics pull mightily at their bootstraps to appear something they never were.  Modern art - the proof that a canvass is flat, to somewhat misquote the sturdy Fred Ross of the ARC - is “performed” by hopelessly unintellectual donkeys, albeit donkeys lauded to the high heavens by the usual money interests.

It is worth remembering, when we reflect a la demographica, that our artists went belly up early, post-Manet.  They were the most sensitive of us all to the manifold intellectual currents of the 18th and 19th centuries, and like good little women followed the strongest to their own destruction.  Pit canaries, really.  We should have known then what was in store for the rest of us.

Good to see you back, Svi.  Hope you’ll find time to do some posting on political Americana.  I miss it.

Posted by Svyatoslav Igorevich on February 14, 2007, 07:23 PM | #

Sorry I’ve been absent lately.  Unfortunately I’m likely to have little time for MR for a while.  I am tempted to post about some recent media skullduggery though (coverup of Utah shooter’s Bosnian Muslim identity, zero media interest in recent black-on-white rape accusation in Durham, N.C. college).

Modern art - the proof that a canvass is flat.

Haha, nice.  I’ve always instinctively hated most modern art.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on February 14, 2007, 08:55 PM | #

Someone e-mailed me he’d never heard of Sir John Betjeman.  Well ... he’s gentle, sturdy, warm, rich in imagery, old-school, middle-class/small-town/countryside/seaside, thoroughly English, good-hearted, quietly joyful, maybe a tiny bit shy.

Look him up.  Here’s one by him:

Verses Turned…

Across the wet November night
The church is bright with candlelight
And waiting Evensong.
A single bell with plaintive strokes
Pleads louder than the stirring oaks
The leafless lanes along.

It calls the choirboys from their tea
And villagers, the two or three,
Damp down the kitchen fire,
Let out the cat, and up the lane
Go paddling through the gentle rain
Of misty Oxfordshire.

How warm the many candles shine
Of Samuel Dowbiggin’s design
For this interior neat,
These high box pews of Georgian days
Which screen us from the public gaze
When we make answer meet;

How gracefully their shadow falls
On bold pilasters down the walls
And on the pulpit high.
The chandeliers would twinkle gold
As pre-Tractarian sermons roll’d
Doctrinal, sound and dry.

From that west gallery no doubt
The viol and serpent tooted out
The Tallis tune to Ken,
And firmly at the end of prayers
The clerk below the pulpit stairs
Would thunder out “Amen.”

But every wand’ring thought will cease
Before the noble altarpiece
With carven swags array’d,
For there in letters all may read
The Lord’s Commandments, Prayer and Creed,
And decently display’d.

On country mornings sharp and clear
The penitent in faith draw near
And kneeling here below
Partake the heavenly banquet spread
Of sacramental Wine and Bread
And Jesus’ presence know.

And must that plaintive bell in vain
Plead loud along the dripping lane?
And must the building fall?
Not while we love the church and live
And of our charity will give
Our much, our more, our all.

Posted by Al Ross on February 14, 2007, 10:03 PM | #

JB is so quintessentially English that his work is probably not taught in English schools, the mattoids in charge preferring anti-racist and feminist ‘new writing’ from non-White hacks like Toni Morrision and Zadie Smith.

As an atheist, though, I prefer this poem, The Churchyard, by another English knight, Sir William Watson :

I wandered far in the wold,
And after the heat and glare,
I came at eve to a churchyard old:
The yew trees seemed at prayer

And around me was dust in dust;
And the fleeting light; and Repose;
And the infinite pathos of human trust
In a God whom no man knows.

Posted by Guessedworker on February 15, 2007, 07:14 AM | #

In the clerical poetic spirit, and with particular genuflection towards the content if not the form of Soren’s rap, I offer the following unction from Huxley’s Arch-Songster in BNW:-

Ford, we are twelve; oh make us one,
Like drops within the Social River;
Oh, make us now together run
As swiftly as thy shining Flivver.
Come, Greater Being, Social Friend,
Annihilating Twelve-in-One!
We long to die, for when we end,
Our larger life has but begun.
Orgy-porgy.

Chapter 5, Part 2, page 81.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on February 15, 2007, 12:41 PM | #

The chap who e-mailed me did it mainly to correct my misspelling of Edmund Spenser’s name (I put Spencer).  Below is an excerpt from his epic poem, “The Faerie Queene.”  In those days they were apt to interchange U’s and V’s, and I’s and J’s, use old spellings and some old words, old forms of past participles and such, and some French forms (such as “in they entered are,” the last words in the excerpt below, which is how a Frenchman would say it, “ils [y] sont entrés”) but don’t worry about that if it’s new to you:  you’ll get used to it right away and besides, Chaucer and Wycliffe are even worse and you don’t want to go through life unable to read them with ease do you?  No.  So this will even give you a little practice.
______

A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine,
  Y cladd in mightie armes and siluer shielde,
  Wherein old dints of deepe wounds did remaine,
  The cruell markes of many’ a bloudy fielde;
  Yet armes till that time did he neuer wield:
  His angry steede did chide his foming bitt,
  As much disdayning to the curbe to yield:
  Full iolly knight he seemd, and faire did sitt,
As one for knightly giusts and fierce encounters fitt.

But on his brest a bloudie Crosse he bore,
  The deare remembrance of his dying Lord,
  For whose sweete sake that glorious badge he wore,
  And dead as liuing euer him ador’d:
  Vpon his shield the like was also scor’d,
  For soueraine hope, which in his helpe he had:
  Right faithfull true he was in deede and word,
  But of his cheere did seeme too solemne sad;
Yet nothing did he dread, but euer was ydrad.

Vpon a great aduenture he was bond,
  That greatest Gloriana to him gaue,
  That greatest Glorious Queene of Faerie lond,
  To winne him worship, and her grace to haue,
  Which of all earthly things he most did craue;
  And euer as he rode, his hart did earne
  To proue his puissance in battell braue
  Vpon his foe, and his new force to learne;
Vpon his foe, a Dragon horrible and stearne.

A louely Ladie rode him faire beside,
  Vpon a lowly Asse more white then snow,
  Yet she much whiter, but the same did hide
  Vnder a vele, that wimpled was full low,
  And ouer all a blacke stole she did throw,
  As one that inly mournd: so was she sad,
  And heauie sat vpon her palfrey slow:
  Seemed in heart some hidden care she had,
And by her in a line a milke white lambe she lad.

So pure and innocent, as that same lambe,
  She was in life and euery vertuous lore,
  And by descent from Royall lynage came
  Of ancient Kings and Queenes, that had of yore
  Their scepters stretcht from East to Westerne shore,
  And all the world in their subiection held;
  Till that infernall feend with foule vprore
  Forwasted all their land, and them expeld:
Whom to auenge, she had this Knight from far co[m]peld.

Behind her farre away a Dwarfe did lag,
  That lasie seemd in being euer last,
  Or wearied with bearing of her bag
  Of needments at his backe. Thus as they past,
  The day with cloudes was suddeine ouercast,
  And angry Ioue an hideous storme of raine
  Did poure into his Lemans lap so fast,
  That euery wight to shrowd it did constrain,
And this faire couple eke to shroud the[m]selues were fain.

Enforst to seeke some couert nigh at hand,
  A shadie groue not far away they spide,
  That promist ayde the tempest to withstand:
  Whose loftie trees yclad with sommers pride,
  Did spred so broad, that heauens light did hide,
  Not perceable with power of any starre:
  And all within were pathes and alleies wide,
  With footing worne, and leading inward farre:
Faire harbour that them seemes; so in they entred arre.
______

Here are Spenser’s Epithalamion and Prothalamion for your delight and enjoyment.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on February 15, 2007, 01:27 PM | #

Look, in Epithalamion, how Spenser describes the beauty, both outward and inward, of Northwestern European women:
______

Loe! where she comes along with portly pace,
Lyke Phoebe, from her chamber of the East,
Arysing forth to run her mighty race,
Clad all in white, that seemes a virgin best.
So well it her beseemes, that ye would weene
Some angell she had beene.
Her long loose yellow locks lyke golden wyre,
Sprinckled with perle, and perling flowres atweene,
Doe lyke a golden mantle her attyre;
And, being crowned with a girland greene,
Seeme lyke some mayden Queene.
Her modest eyes, abashed to behold
So many gazers as on her do stare,
Upon the lowly ground affixed are;
Ne dare lift up her countenance too bold,
But blush to heare her prayses sung so loud,
So farre from being proud.
Nathlesse doe ye still loud her prayses sing,
That all the woods may answer, and your eccho ring.

Tell me, ye merchants daughters, did ye see
So fayre a creature in your towne before;
So sweet, so lovely, and so mild as she,
Adornd with beautyes grace and vertues store?
Her goodly eyes lyke Saphyres( * ) shining bright,
Her forehead yvory white,
Her cheekes lyke apples which the sun hath rudded,
Her lips lyke cherryes charming men to byte,
Her brest like to a bowle of creame uncrudded,
Her paps lyke lyllies budded,
Her snowie necke lyke to a marble towre;
And all her body like a pallace fayre,
Ascending up, with many a stately stayre,
To honors seat and chastities sweet bowre.
Why stand ye still ye virgins in amaze,
Upon her so to gaze,
Whiles ye forget your former lay to sing,
To which the woods did answer, and your eccho ring?

But if ye saw that which no eyes can see,
The inward beauty of her lively spright,
Garnisht with heavenly guifts of high degree,
Much more then would ye wonder at that sight,
And stand astonisht lyke to those which red
Medusaes mazeful hed.
There dwels sweet love, and constant chastity,
Unspotted fayth, and comely womanhood,
Regard of honour, and mild modesty;
There vertue raynes as Queene in royal throne,
And giveth lawes alone,
The which the base affections doe obay,
And yeeld theyr services unto her will;
Ne thought of thing uncomely ever may
Thereto approch to tempt her mind to ill.
Had ye once seene these her celestial threasures,
And unrevealed pleasures,
Then would ye wonder, and her prayses sing,
That al the woods should answer, and your echo ring.

Open the temple gates unto my love,
Open them wide that she may enter in,
And all the postes adorne as doth behove,
And all the pillours deck with girlands trim,
For to receyve this Saynt with honour dew,
That commeth in to you.
With trembling steps, and humble reverence,
She commeth in, before th’ Almighties view;
Of her ye virgins learne obedience,
When so ye come into those holy places,
To humble your proud faces:
Bring her up to th’ high altar, that she may
The sacred ceremonies there partake,
The which do endlesse matrimony make;
And let the roring Organs loudly play
The praises of the Lord in lively notes;
The whiles, with hollow throates,
The Choristers the joyous Antheme sing,
That al the woods may answere, and their eccho ring.

Behold, whiles she before the altar stands,
Hearing the holy priest that to her speakes,
And blesseth her with his two happy hands,
How the red roses flush up in her cheekes,
And the pure snow, with goodly vermill stayne
Like crimsin dyde in grayne:
That even th’ Angels, which continually
About the sacred Altare doe remaine,
Forget their service and about her fly,
Ofte peeping in her face, that seems more fayre,
The more they on it stare.
But her sad eyes, still fastened on the ground,
Are governed with goodly modesty,
That suffers not one looke to glaunce awry,
Which may let in a little thought unsownd.
Why blush ye, love, to give to me your hand,
The pledge of all our band!
Sing, ye sweet Angels, Alleluya sing,
That all the woods may answere, and your eccho ring.
______

( *  Scroob footnote:  This woman has blue eyes [saphires being blue] to go with her yellow locks, ivory-white skin, snowy neck, rosy cheeks like apples and red lips like cherries.  These are the women of the Northwestern European race, men!  Physical beauty like no other on earth!  And your race has it, you!  Don’t listen to the envious!  Don’t listen the the secretly jealous who want to destroy what they envy in you but don’t have!  And look how Spenser describes the modest feminine character of this woman!  Put that whole package together in your minds, men, the inward and the outward beauty, and you’ll know what reply to give the likes of Alon Ziv, never mind the “biology,” never mind the “genetics”!  You’ve read this poem and you’ve two eyes and that’s enough!  This man, Edmund Spenser, is your ancestor, not Ziv’s!  That ought to explain a few things right there ...  Do not ever forget who you are no matter what anyone says!  Teach this to your sons and daughters because the Zivs of this world, the jealous destructive hate-filled Iagos of this world, are out there teaching them something else!)

Posted by Fred Scrooby on February 28, 2007, 09:55 PM | #

“laughable artistic non-entities like Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollack, and Andy Wahrhol”  (—from a comment of mine above)

I’m not a big fan of the columnist who writes for the Asia Times Online signing as “Spengler,” but this piece by him on modern abstract art and atonal music is sorta nice.  (This recent piece of his, on the other hand, gives an idea of why he’s defo not my cup of tea:  look at the obnoxious, uncaring, shallow way in which he discusses this other column’s subject, national extinction.  You’d think you were reading Mark Steyn, that other glib “anti-left” pundit who, like “Spengler,” specializes in being obnoxious, uncaring, and shallow in his treatments of topics the “anti-left” world is actually supposed to care about, at least a little — such as, ... uhhh ... well, ... such as national extinction, for example ...)