Victoria had a great idea for her final project.  It involves the fourth topic, about coordination on mimetic content.  Her idea is: artists coordinate their work to create mimetic content on which viewers coordinate.  There are two sense of “coordinate” here.  The first sense, the artist’s coordination, is a sort of mechanical or organizational notion.  For example, a picture of a fictional character’s sad face is just a picture of a sad face; a picture of a dead body is just a picture of a dead body; but a picture that juxtaposes a sad face and a dead body indicates a causal element: the owner of the sad face is sad because of the death of whose body we see.  A painter coordinates his figures, or a film editor coordinates his raw footage, or a novelist coordinates his words (“coordinates” = roughly “arranges”) in such a way that mimetic content is generated.  Viewers or readers may then coordinate, in a second sense, on this mimetic content: discuss its relevance, its message, its implications, and so forth.  Finally, from this we may arrive at a notion of meta-coordination, which would be the process by which artistic experiences (or “events” or some such thing) result from the artist’s “mechanical” coordination and the audience’s coordination on the ensuing mimetic content.  

A couple weeks ago I went to a baseball game (Angels versus Indians [Cleveland pride!]).

Two questions: can an athletic event (“event” broadly construed: play, hit, shot, round, inning, game, etc.) be beautiful (e.g.: www.wimp.com/ichirosuzuki)?  Are athletic events mimetic?

A few things to notice.  First is that it was natural for me to ask whether athletic events can be beautiful but in contrast whether they are or are not mimetic.  Is this difference telling?  Can some athletic events be mimetic, others fail to be mimetic?  A second thing to notice is that it does not seem kosher to ask whether athletic events in general are or are not beautiful, but whether a particular event is beautiful (see Kant’s Third Critique re the singularity of judgments of taste; I forget just where it comes up).  Ex: that game was beautiful, that shot was beautiful.  Yet on first pass it does seem OK to ask whether athletic events in general are or are not mimetic.  Exs: is baseball mimetic?  Is synchronized swimming mimetic?  And unnatural to ask: was that game, shot, play mimetic?

What about games that need not in principle involve motion, such as chess? 

What would Walton have to say about sports?  (I actually read something he wrote on sports, but too far back to remember well; I think I even talked to him about sports (I met him last year), but alas, I do not remember the details of that either.)  Are athletes, bats, balls, etc. props we use in games of make-believe?

This post is long overdue.  I want to bring up a thought that may relate to Aristotle’s contention that pleasure attaches to inferences on mimetic forms (that’s rough) and Halliwell’s (similar) idea that a reader who is familiar with a described setting (e.g. the NYC subway) “gets more out of it” than the reader who is not so familiar.

What comes to mind when I think about this pair is Harold Bloom’s idea that great authors always misread their predecessors.  I’ll be lazy and quote from Wikipedia: 

“Bloom attempted to trace the psychological process by which a poet broke free from his precursors to achieve his own poetic vision. He drew a sharp distinction between “strong poets” who perform “strong misreadings” of their precursors, and “weak poets” who simply repeat the ideas of their precursors as though following a kind of doctrine.
[…]
Bloom’s theory of poetic influence regards the development of Western literature as a process of borrowing and misreading. Writers find their creative inspiration in previous writers and begin by imitating those writers; in order to develop a poetic voice of their own, however, they must make their own work different from that of their precursors. As a result, Bloom argues, authors of real power must inevitably “misread” their precursors’ works in order to make room for fresh imaginings.”

What, if anything, does this have to do with Aristotle and/or Halliwell?  I have my own ideas, but I’m more interested in hearing the ideas of others.  Chime in!

Aristotle writes of drama in the Poetics: “the greater the length, the more beautiful will the piece be by reason of its size, provided that the whole be perspicuous” (VII).

Most films these days fall somewhere in the ninety to one hundred fifty minute range.  Film epics are a rarity.  Supposing Aristotle is right, why don’t we see more epics?  The easy answer is: economics: a two-hour film can be screened twice as many times per day than can be a four-hour film.  But this can’t be right: in the art world, films are often much shorter than feature length.  This holds true even of artists who, say, in virtue of having established themselves (read: who have found economic stability), need not please galleries or potential buyers.

Another easy answer is: today’s world is so fast-paced that people don’t have the patience for longer filmic or dramatic works.  But I think this is wrong too, or, at least, not the whole story.  I want to suggest that Aristotle was wrong: beauty does not increase with length: what matters is that a complete story is told and told well.  (I won’t consider here whether fragments or otherwise incomplete works can be beautiful, though I think they can, as my previous post on opacity begins to suggest.)

So I want to find some evidence for the hypothesis that a complete story can be told and told well in a short space.  There’s Hemingway’s famous six-word short story: “For sale: baby shoes, never used.”  It has a beginning, a middle, and an end.  There’s also more microfiction (online, in journals) than you can put your arms around.  But these observations can’t knock Aristotle.  Literature is static, in a way, whereas Aristotle’s principle applies to drama (where “drama” comes from the Greek for “to perform” or “act” or “do”).  

I wish I knew about micro-drama (e.g. one-act plays) or about micro-film (microfilm? micro-film) to offer some examples of very short works that are just as beautiful as even the most beautiful long work.  (It might be unfair to stack up short works against, say, King Lear, but probably not against something like O’Neill’s Strange Interlude.)

But there is www.5secondfilms.com.  Here’s the supposed top twenty (careful: some are offensive and/or very unfunny):

I think it’s telling that all twenty are humorous (or supposed to be). Some of the films illustrate the fact that a complete story can be told in a short span, but they don’t help us decide whether non-comedic drama be short while aesthetically valuable.  One possible helpful example is Paris, je t’aime, a 2006 collection of shorts, some of which are quite good.  (Please comment on this post if you have your own examples! (Or counter-examples.))

I want to end by noting that very short songs can often tell a complete and completely rewarding story.  Such songs might make a better case against Aristotle than microfiction, since there’s a performative or “doing” aspect to music that’s absent from literature.

So, some great examples of great songs that tell a story in under 2 minutes:

Max Richter - “Written on the Sky”


Bach - “Partita #5 in G”
(All of the seven parts of the collection are under (about) two minutes in length.  Some more than others, I think, tell a whole story.  It’s fun to think here about the relationship of the parts, some of which seem to tell a standalone story, to the whole, which presumably does the same.  In a similar way it’s fun to think about the relationship between an album and its songs or its singles.)   

The Vivian Girls - “No”

Pavement - “Zurich is Stained”

No Age - “My Life’s Alright Without You” (I can’t find a good copy of this online.  Support the artists and buy it!)

Casiotone for the Painfully Alone - “Twinkle Echo”
(I recommend checking out the album of the same name as the song.  It’s amazing how well this final, wordless song both tops off and encapsulates what comes before.)

I spoke today in class about obscurity and opaqueness.  For the former I talked about McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, for the latter, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Maps.”  After some thought, it occurred to me that there’s nothing too great about obscurity.  Parsing a sentence from Blood Meridian can be a rewarding chore, but there’s no artistic merit to it.  Though I find Aristotle’s right in maintaining there’s pleasure to be had in the inference involved in engaging with mimetic forms, I don’t think such pleasure is specifically aesthetic.  What does give purely aesthetic pleasure, at least for me, is not knowing—because of opacity, because of ambiguity, etc.

I want to share some examples of aesthetic “not knowing.” 

1. Blood Meridian

 There’s opacity here, not just obscurity.  In the final pages of the book, the protagonist (once “the kid,” but now, after many years, “the man”) comes across the judge, the strangely inhuman quasi-antagonist.  (Re “strange”: the judge is a seven-foot-tall, albino, hairless genius.  When he first enters the marauding gang, whose actions the novel follows, every member of the gang claims to have seen him before.  Spooky.)  After seeing the judge,

“[The kid/man] went down the walkboard toward the jakes.  He stood outside listening to the voices fading away and he looked again at the silent tracks of the stars where they died over the darkened hills.  Then he opened up the rough board door of the jakes and stepped in…The judge was seated upon the closet.  He was naked and he rose up smiling and gathered him in his arms against his immense and terrible flesh and shot the wooden barlatch home behind him.”

We hear nothing more except a “Good God almighty” from the next person to go into the john.  Whereas e.g. Hemingway, who Sam mentioned in class today, is obscure (see: “Hills Like White Elephants”), McCarthy here is opaque.  What did the judge do to the kid?  We don’t know.  I like it that way.



2. Speaking of McCarthy: the final scene of No Country for Old Men (the film, though the book has a nearly identical ending).

3.  “Maps.”  What the hell is Karen O. talking about?  I don’t know.  And I love it.  I imagine most people know the song, so here’s a fun take on it.  (Wait for it: 2m05s.  I’m going to dedicate a whole post to mashup at some point.)

I think music maybe best (or most frequently) exhibits opacity.  Maybe what’s strange about “pure” music is that it’s essentially opaque.  Try to explain to someone why Bach’s “Air on the G String” is great.  Or explain (without humming, gesturing) “what happens” in Rachmaninoff’s prelude in C sharp minor.  But there are also contemporary, more mainstream examples of opacity in music, though somewhat less “pure” than the two examples just mentioned.



4.  The Go! Team’s “Huddle Formation”

This song is compulsively listenable-to.  As a keen YouTube commenter related, “I raped the replay button.”  I’ve gotten die-hard Red Hot Chili Peppers fans and “Sorry, but Led Zeppelin is the best (the only!) band ever” folks to fall in love with this song.  What makes it so addictive, so alluring?  I think it’s because it’s opaque.  It has a rhythm, it has a mood.  The (unintelligible) lyrics give the “sorry, lyrics only” crowd an excuse.  But we have no idea what it’s about. 

5. Interpol’s “Leif Erikson,” from Turn on the Bright Lights (that clinical but ethereal modern masterpiece)

Eight words: “She says brief things, her love’s a pony.”  What?  I don’t know.  Wonderful.  (For newcomers: it takes about three dozen listens for the album to “click.”  For the aficionados: notice that here, in the last fifty-ish seconds of the album, is the first time either of the guitarists strays from simple, methodical chords.)

6. My Bloody Valentine’s “To Here Knows When.”  (For newcomers: turn off the lights, and listen to it loud.)

7. Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation

This is the only clip I could find where Bill’s final words aren’t revealed.  Apparently, you can turn up the volume really loud and hear what he says to Scarlett at the end.  I’ve never done this.  If you have, don’t spoil it.  As I’ve been saying, there’s pleasure in not knowing.

This post is getting out of control.  I’m going to devote another post to a neater form of opacity, ambiguity.  I’ll talk about Lost, The Sopranos, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, Inception, and maybe some stuff.  (Preview: to anyone who thinks the ending of Inception was straightforwardly ambiguous: incorrect.  Hint: download a PDF of the script and search “totem.”  Read what’s said.  Think about where Domm finds Mal’s (!) totem.  And think about Miles.)

Hi everyone.  My name’s Matt.  I’m a first-year graduate student in the philosophy department.

The arts I’m most interested in are prose fiction, improv/standup comedy, music, film, painting, sculpture, and installation art.

My initial reaction to the idea of art as mimesis is “no.”  My gut tells me that what makes something art is its expressive power, not its success in the imitation, representation, or symbolism of something else.  As a creative writing professor once told me, “Art is not algebra.”  But it will be fun to explore to what extent, if any, the notions of expressiveness and mimesis are in tension; and how, if at all, mimesis links up with representation and symbolism.

I’ll end with a provocative quote from Hemingway, writing about The Old Man and the Sea:

“Then there is the other secret. There isn’t any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The sharks are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.”