Category: language

a scruple of compassion

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The Mercy Supermarket, Campbell McGrath; from newyorker May 23, 2022 Issue

pollen from the burst-open, canoe-shaped pods
of the royal palms caught in the first
imperious shafts of sunlight
rising from the sea.
One flower resembles a puff of red lint,
another resembles a pig’s ear,
every petal, in this light, painted with deep lucid
particularity.

[…]

Who else is in the market for a pint
of papaya juice, a scruple of compassion?
Would it help if we could itemize
every lost or misbegotten soul,

[…]

the slightest of clerical errors,
one skewed letter in an ever-cascading text,
so how useful
can any catalogue of particulars be?
Why do we even have them—
hands, thumbs,
a heart,
this jawbone I hear click
as the rusty joints
swing open and closed,

Be afraid, if only a little

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The Witch hadn’t wanted any money and she looked at the two hundred pesos that Chabela put on the table with such disgust that Norma was sure she would burn it the moment they left the house, which they did immediately after the Witch handed them the potion, to Norma’s great relief. But once outside, on the dirt track that led back to Chabela’s, they heard the Witch calling after them from the kitchen door in that strange voice of hers, somehow both gruff and high-pitched at once, and Norma spun around and understood that the Witch was calling her, even though she’d already pulled her veil back down over her face: You have to drink it all! she shouted. You’ll retch but you have to drink it all! It’ll feel like your insides are being torn out, but hang in there . . . ! Don’t be afraid! You just push and push until . . . ! And then bury it!

Hurricane Season, Fernanda Melchor

Related : Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade

On Dave Hickey

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This passage epitomizes Hickey’s unusual relationship to literature and his uncanny ability to draw forward an aspect of a poem or novel to explicate an artwork without reducing either to mere illustration. Instead he sets off a chain reaction of implications at the level of feeling. While he does not shy away from Gober’s homosexuality, in evoking Great Expectations Hickey conjures a painful outsiderness, the plane where the artist and writer meet, all the while resisting any speculation on individual biography. It’s an extraordinarily sophisticated maneuver, one that doesn’t ascribe intention based on personal information but rather allows the art to express its deeper content.

A Proliferation of Beauties, Jarrett Earnest.

From nybooks on Hickey (1938 – 2021; artnet obituary), Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art by Daniel Oppenheimer, 2021; The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty, Revised and Expanded, 2009; Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy by Dave Hickey, 1997.

… a finer point on his argument for “beauty,” “not what it is but what it does—its rhetorical function in our discourse with images,” leveling a critique against what we would now call the rise of the “professional managerial class” of art-world gatekeepers—the curators, critics, and academics who have disenfranchised audiences from the validity of their own experiences, judgments, and tastes. Hickey was not interested in “beauty” as an aesthetic or philosophical category, but rather in a “proliferation of beauties,” around which communities of desire congregate.

…

Air Guitar embodies an attitude toward being alive in the world, one that abolishes distinctions between “high” and “low” cultures and aligns objects based on the quality of the response they elicit. 

…

Moving beyond the personal psychology or biography of an artist, the artwork extends an unlikely communion with other alienated people who have found that by making and thinking about something beautiful, they invoke a gentler, more exciting, and more livable society.

Reap futurity in gardens

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“Gardens are also places in which the inseparability of life and death is apparent in innumerable ways…a garden is always a place of becoming, to make and tend one is a gesture of hope…It’s an activity deeply invested in the future.”

Solnit, Orwell’s Roses