Thursday, October 6, 2005
A few good reads and linksAs usual, a few good reads out there in the blogosphere these days: 9:35:29 PM | Phila at Bouphonia lays out a pandemic flu scenario that is the stuff of nightmare. Sadly, he's probably not far off from what will happen should the avian flu spread and evolve to grotesque proportions. As if there weren't enough to worry about these days! Yikes. If you missed poet Sharon Olds' letter to Laura Bush, read it here. She was invited to come to the White House and she refused. Diane at DED Space points to another Katrina-related loss, the death of chef Austin Leslie. I shook his hand a few years ago at Jacques-Imo's. His fried chicken really was the very best. I bought his cookbook and S attempted the gumbo. First time he burned the roux, the second time didn't cook it enough. It's just a matter of time, though, before S masters it. I wonder how many were lost in the days after Katrina, killed indirectly by the stress and horrors of the storm. Leslie was rescued from his roof, taken to the Superdome, and finally evacuated out of Louisiana. It was clearly, sadly, too much. Doc, marooned on the broken blog isle Sam has on her site, takes a cue from my master's thesis and improves on it: The Spiro site is now a State Park and closes before sunset, but I'd like to lie on my back on top of a mound on a clear night, to see their stars, and the spaces between their stars, the stars the long dead people mapped their myths on. Surely, some of our stars are the same, and some of our dark spaces, too. I feel honored to be honored by him. Our president is now counting plots we've supposedly stopped, trying to distract us, again, from the reality all around us, as another soldier died in Iraq, making the total now 1945. I'm becoming so pessimistic these days, as the number goes up and our country continues to be governed by one incompetent party. Daedalus at Washington Rox talks about surrealism and corporatism in an excellent post about the abstraction of war. S and I talked a bit about abstraction last week, though not in the political sense. He bought a copy of Claude Levi-Strauss' Myth and Meaning, a collection of addresses the structural anthropologist gave in the 1970s. I read it one afternoon and was struck by his dualist approach to myth and culture, and how he made no mention of the abstract nature of myth. I started thinking about myth as abstraction and how abstraction can be closer to "truth" than strict representations of "reality." Writers often talk about the truth of fiction, how it is through story that the heart is revealed. The same is true of abstract art, I think. A realistic painting of a bridge over the River Seine, say at twilight, shows the bridge and river as they appeared, but may not show the truth of the bridge and the river: the lovers who have crossed it; the blood that has spilled into it during the revolution, during everyday crimes; the salty tears that have added to its flowing waters; the joys and conversations and awkward silences that have happened in houseboats along the river's edges or on cruising boats as they passed under the changing light; all that has happened under the bridge, the scrapping up of foodstuffs by those who are sleeping there, the sharing of half-burned cigarette butts, or a stack of newspapers held down by a chipped-edged coffee cup. Through abstraction of color and shape, some of these truths can be revealed to us, even as they aren't shown representationally. To me, myth is no different than this. The most moving myths touch us in ways straightforward recantations cannot. Myths often have only a loose basis in "reality" but they often demonstrate more clearly the contradictions in life, the emotional renderings that are harder to show in strict historical accounts. I'm not sure how this relates to the wars and the hurricane and our crooked leadership, but perhaps that is because right now we are in the documentation phase of history, too busy trying to record what is happening around us as it comes at us at this flushed, information-age pace. In the coming years we'll be translating it all through abstraction, revealing the truth hidden beneath the facts. 
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Last update: 11/1/05; 5:27:55 PM .
