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Planetary Motions, published by Giant Steps Press, is now available on Amazon for $14.95.



Spoor of Desire: Selected Poems is available for $16.00 from FootHills Publishing, P.O. Box 68, Kanona NY 14856 or see www.foothillspublishing.com.

Tourist Snapshots was available from Randy Fingland's CC Marimbo, P.O. Box 933, Berkeley CA. CC Marimbo has, unfortunately ceased publishing, though I still have a few copies to spare.

Dada Poetry: An Introduction was published by Nirala Publications. It may be ordered on Amazon.com for $29.99 plus shipping. American buyers may order a copy from me for $23 including shipping.

Each book is available from the author William Seaton. Write seaton@frontiernet.net.


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Wednesday, May 1, 2024

Index

The index has grown to the point of becoming unwieldy, leading me to offer first a brief sketch of its contents.

For the most part the site contains literary criticism with topics ranging around the globe and through the centuries. There are also other essays, translations, travel stories, a few memoirs, a few political comments. With rare exceptions (mostly early) I do not post my poetry here.

In the literary essays I am willing to discuss virtually anything. This site is strong on literary theory, the idea of the avant-garde, ancient Greek, medieval European, and Asian literatures, and includes a series of treatments of blues songs as poetry.

Some of the essays are technical and include academic jargon, probably indigestible to a lay reader. Others are directed toward a general audience. Perhaps the most accessible are those in the Every Reader’s Poets series (section 5G below) which assume no background knowledge. 


The index now features hypertext connections. Simply click on any title below to read it.

Though this listing serves, I think, a clear purpose, not every posting falls easily into the categories. One essay might equally be placed under literary theory or medieval texts while another might fit under memoir, politics, or travel. Translations with comment might be either criticism or translation. Poke around a bit.

The categories are:

1. speculative, familiar, performance pieces, and other essays

2. literary theory

3. Greek texts (and a few Latin)

4. medieval European texts

5. other criticism
A. 16th-19th century
B. 20th century to the present 
C. Asian texts
D. songs
E. Notes on Recent Reading
F. Rereading the Classics
G. Every Reader's Poets

6. translation

7. poetry

8. politics

9. memoirs

10. travel


1. Speculative, familiar, performance pieces, and other essays
Agnostic Credo and Vita (October 2015)
Confidence Games (August 2022)
Contronyms (March 2019)
Cookbooks (April 2014)
Dead Reckoning (February 2011)
Deer (December 2012)
Documents of the first Surreal Cabaret (March 2012)
Documents of the second Surreal Cabaret (June 2012)
Documents of the third Surreal Cabaret (October 2013)
Documents of the fourth Surreal Cabaret (July 2014)
Documents of the fifth Surreal Cabaret (February 2015)
Notes on Pan (June 2014)
Oedipus and the Meaning of Polysemy (July 2011)
The Subversive Wit of Jerry Leiber (December 2022)
"The Three Ravens" (August 2013)
Trinidadian Smut (April 2016)
Truckin' (November 2014)
The Verbal Dance of the Blues (September 2020) 
“Walkin’ Blues” [Son House] (December 2011)

E. Notes on Recent Reading
Notes on Recent Reading [Melville, Greene, and Whalen] (September 2011)
Notes on Recent Reading 2 [Crane, The Crowning of Louis, Thornlyre] (October 2011)
Notes on Recent Reading 3 [Kipling, San Francisco Mime Troupe, Lynn’s Tao-te-ching] (November 2011)
Notes on Recent Reading 4 [Sarah Scott, de La Fayette, Wharton] (January 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 5 [The Deeds of God in Rddhipur, Burney, Cooper] (January 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 6 [Jewett, Addison, Crabbe] (February 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 7 [Nabokov, Austen, Grettis Saga] (April 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 8 [Bakhtin, Lewis, Brown] (May 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 9 [Plutarch, Tacitus, Williams](June 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 10 [Voltaire, France, Dryden](July 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 11 [Wright, Kerouac & Burroughs, Gilbert] (August 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 12 [Huxley, Norris, Dōgen](September 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 13 [Mirabai, Wood, Trocchi] (November 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 14 [Algren, Hauptmann, Rolle] (January 2013)
Notes on Recent Reading 15 [Hemingway, Orwell, Gaskell]{February 2013}
Notes on Recent Reading 16 [Howells, Ford, Mann] (April 2013)
Notes on Recent Reading 17 [McCarthy, Chang, Snorri](July 2013)
Notes on Recent Reading 18 [Radcliffe, Stendhal, Erasmus](October 2013)
Notes on Recent Reading 19 [Powers, Zhang Ji, Vietnamese folk song] (February 2014)
Notes on Recent Reading 20 [Rowe, Stevenson, Issa] (May 2014)
Notes on Recent Reading 21 [Fussell, Mahfouz, Watts] (August 2014)
Notes on Recent Reading 22 [Waugh, Belloc, Okakura] (October 2014)
Notes on Recent Reading 23 [Naipaul, Dinesen, Spillane] (January 2015)
Notes on Recent Reading 24 [Fielding; Izumo , Shōraku, and Senryū; Plath] (June 2015)
Notes on Recent Reading 25 [Baskervill, Gissing, Capote] (July 2015)
Notes on Recent Reading 26 [Tuchman, Premchand, Cocteau] (November 2015)
Notes on Recent Reading 27 [Forster, Sackville-West, Capote] (January 2016)
Notes on Recent Reading 28 [Verne, Waley, Hurston] (March 2016)
Notes on Recent Reading 29 [Achebe, Jewett, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam] (October 2016)
Notes on Recent Reading 30 [Bradford, Scott, Marquand] (April 2017)
Notes on Recent Reading 31 [Marlowe, Trollope, p'Bitek] (August 2017)
Notes on Recent Reading 32 [Morrison, Cary, Kawabata] (October 2017)
Notes on Recent Reading 33 [Tourneur, Peacock, Greene] (December 2017)
Notes on Recent Reading 34 [Hawthorne, Huncke, Bentley] (January 2018)
Notes on Recent Reading 35 [Scott, Norris, Jacobs] (August 2018)
Notes on Recent Reading 36 [Norris, Rexroth and Laughlin, Sand] (November 2018)
Notes on Recent Reading 37 [Waley, Wharton, London] (January 2019)
Notes on Recent Reading 38 [London, Vonnegut, Cather] (June 2019)
Notes on Recent Reading 39 [Aristophanes, Machiavelli, Braddon] (September 2019)
Notes on Recent Reading 40 [Saunders, Adichie, Radhakrishnan] (January 2020)
Notes on Recent Reading 41 [McCarthy, Priestley, Ehirim] (July 2020)
Notes on Recent Reading 42 [Bulgakov, Tedlock, Wlliams] (October 2020) 
Notes on Recent Reading 48 [Huxley, Cossery, de Maupassant] (November 2023)

Menus (August 2021)
My Most Politically Active Year (February 2011)
Nova Academy (March 2011)
Pestering Allen [Ginsberg] (March 2012)
Poetry on the Loose (September 2011)
A Scholar's Debut (October 2012)
Sherman Paul (August 2016)
Suburbanite in the City (November 2010)
Tim West (March 2013)
Vignettes of the Sixties (October 2019)
VISTA Trains Me (June 2011)

10. Travel 
Arrival in Nigeria (August 2015)
Acadiana [Lafayette, Louisiana] (May 2010)
An Armenian Family in Bordeaux (December 2014)
Carnival [Portugal] (May 2012)
Cookie Man [Morocco] (October 2011)
Creel (October 2010)
Dame Fortuna in Portugal (May 2012)
Dinner with Mrs. Pea [Thailand] (April 2013)
Election Day in Chichicastenango (January 2012)
An Evening in Urubamba (July 2011)
Favored Places (July 2019)
Festival in Ogwa [Nigeria](January 2011)
Fictional Destinations (April 2020)
On the Ganges' Shore (August 2013)
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Para-aesthetic Experiences

 toward a definition of art

 

     The definition of art has always been unstable and conflicted.  To some the label implies excellence, excluding doggerel of poetasters or the films of Ed Wood and Herschel Lewis.  Yet, apart from the fact that aesthetic value cannot be proven, it cannot be part of the definition or the expression “good art” would be redundant.  For much of the past many critics used a nearly class-based standard, admitting works of “high art,” while excluding folk art, popular, and mass forms.  Since the Romantics discovered folksong, however, this notion has withered, until now public media and such once august organs as the New York Times devote a good deal of their coverage to topics like Taylor Swift and new series from Netflix. 

     One way to approach a definition is to distinguish art from similar phenomena occupying neighboring semantic territory, what might be termed “para-aesthetic phenomena.”  Surveying all the arts, through the centuries and around the globe, the qualities that are generally considered to contribute to the definition of art often include the following.

 

1.  Art is a form of play involving manipulated symbols arranged and generally preserved for repeated consumption. 

2.  Art is beautiful.  Qua art, it has no other function, though it may be incidentally susceptible to other uses. 

3.  In part the beauty of art is achieved through formal or structural patterns.

4.  Art refracts lived reality, intentionally shaping the raw material of experience into significant fictions.

 

     Among the non-aesthetic forms of play are sports and games, as well as child’s play and make-believe.  Yet the footballer or the broad-jumper are dealing in physical challenges and not symbols, and the child, whether solitary or in a group, plays for the moment without a thought of preserving the fantasy for later visits.  The chief distinguishing characteristic of our species is the ability to manipulate symbols, and humans enjoy exercising this skill just as the lion relishes the pounce.  Verbal repartee may be artful, but, if not transcribed, would not be art.  The player of video games is constantly making decisions simply for the fun  of it, but the drama vanishes as soon as the play ends.  The maker of such a game game would have a stronger claim on the title of artist, though most critics would find such work too trivial to allow the maker entrance to Parnassus.  Certain works, such as true “happenings” or the sand paintings made by both Navajos and Tibetans, are likewise ephemeral, but in such cases the violation of the usual convention calls perhaps even greater attention to it.  A more precise formulation of the nature of art is required to define the frontiers of the aesthetic, but one may begin by thinking of objets d’art as artifacts of preserved play.

     Art is universally, though only in part, defined by the quality of beauty.  For a definition of beauty, Santayana’s formulation will do: beauty is “pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing.”  Yet many things can give us pleasure.  Good news, a gourmet meal, or a fulfilling sexual encounter may bring considerable pleasure and yet would not usually be considered art.  Still, some non-aesthetic pleasures include characteristics of art.  Cuisine is often considered a sort of minor art as the cook must make many decisions based on taste and the whole meal is presented to the diner as a coherent progression, an experience to some extent unified.  Sexual activity likewise may well present a series of actions, a sort of play, designed to make a designed effect, but they are scarcely designed for the consumption of anyone other than the participants.  Other attributes of art must be taken into account to sharpen the focus more tightly. 

     Much of the beauty of art is based of structural or formal patterns.  The simplest and most commonly invoked are unity and symmetry, but disunity and asymmetry may find an equally important place in certain circumstances.  Formal qualities are always present, but they are most obvious in genres like music and abstract visual art.  A fugue by Bach or a Rothko canvas derive their power largely from their consumers’ apprehension of such abstract patterns.  Yet abstraction is virtually never absolute.  The mind strives to make sense of written lines and visual forms like a child looking for shapes in the clouds.  Even a totally random arrangement will be read as having meaning.  In addition this formal standard is not unique to works of art.  People also judge how pleasant it is to gaze at non-aesthetic objects, the faces of others, for instance, based on similar criteria.  While formal beauty may be found in a variety of phenomena where its presence is a matter of chance, it is intentionally created by artistic design 

     Art typically conveys a theme, that is, it suggests certain aspects of lived experience.  Vulgarly, this is the familiar “moral of the story,” often the focus of classroom investigations through secondary school and beyond.  Though technically the work of art asserts no more than the proposition that “at one time the world may have some seemed like this to someone,” such themes are often (sometimes doubtless with justice) taken to represent the opinions of the author.  In contrast to the ancient trope claiming that art “imitates” reality, most contemporary critics would prefer to acknowledge that art always alters the raw material of which it is made, making such terms as “transforming” or “refracting” more accurate.  Of course, dreams, news stories and familiar letters also relate versions of lived experience without pretensions to artistic value. 

     Since each of the defining characteristics of art present in non-aesthetic experiences as well, the judgement of whether a given object is or is not art becomes probabilistic, likelier as the evidence mounts.  A further complication arises since art may be used in non-aesthetic ways.  For instance, a philologist may in the texts of Homer find evidence for linguistic development or a historian data for the study of ancient religion, but such researches are incidental and unrelated to the artistic value of the Iliad.  Likewise, non-art may be received as though it were aesthetic experience by the appreciator of photographs from the Webb telescope or of fractal patterns.

     Art does not exist without humans; it is socially constructed, not natural.  The very concept of art has not existed in  all cultures.  For those who recognize the category, there will always remain disputed boundaries.  While most work that pretends to the status of art must probably be admitted, regardless of value, most of the questions pertain to semi-art knocking on the door from outside.  An essay on flowers or fiddlesticks will scarcely be questioned by the gatekeepers of the club of art, while an essay about that essay will be relegated to mere criticism, though it may be as beautifully written, as indeed in theory might an essay on electrical engineering.  If one admits Maxfield Parrish and Normal Rockwell to museum status, is all illustration art?  Do the journalistic war reports of Hemingway and Ernie Pyle hold aesthetic value?  How about A. J. Liebling and Red Smith’s sports stories?  Style in dress may sometimes suggest a refraction of reality.   Journal entries and sketchbook improvisations are not usually intended to outlast the day of their creation, yet, once preserved, may, like the jottings of Pepys and Picasso, be highly valued.  Religious myth and liturgy, while clearly composed of narrative and drama, claim other primary uses.  Art’s definition is worth pursuing even if it cannot be precisely and finally formulated.  Art is, as well, dynamic, and will evolve even under study. 

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