Posts Tagged ‘illuminismo’
NOTES TOWARD A NORTON LECTURE
In the new departing friend’s studio full at his facture of charcoal and bodies and blinking streaking green otherworldly light made grainy by lack in the archive machine.
ET Ἀρκαδία IN ACADEMIA OR ARCADIA, ERGO EGO
Just in time for the Poussin exhibit and a much-planned chilled coffee at the expensively bucolic Caffé Greco, the antique dealer’s daughter’s dealt a last-minute invitation to the Enlightenment-era academy of Arcadians you could tumble into down this hill were it not for the security cameras: where one isn’t sure what’s Rome and what reproduction, [...]
CONTROL
Thomas and the bronze flap of raw skin surging back into memory unbidden from the niche materializing, not rendering itself legible discursively, but as groping eager dawnagain girlish steps toward the water to Orsanmichele, named for a monastic kitchen garden that the present 14th-century grain market displaced: Verrocchio’s sculpting gesture of vulgar control, virtuosic as [...]
HERETIC COME BACK
That energy and courage of invention (oui, inventio, what heresy to the epoch of tied wrists) should infuse architectonic and ideological space as well on a cloudy 400th anniversary: after the coining of the “telescopio,” these studios hopeful, explosive: Galileo, Corey Brennan, brilliant comrades bearing keyboards, violias, keycards for piano, windchimes, and plan-B umbrellas, thanks. [...]
IL CONVIVIO
For days the phrases of musical compositions in the making ever more frequently arriving to punctuate my battling with paragraphs, through the thick walls and open windows of this 19th-century tavern on the highest hill of Rome: the same foundations of montorio having turned from the villa of Monsignor Innocenza Malvasio who had Galileo demonstrate [...]
UNTIMELY
“I do not know what meaning classical studies could have for our time if they were not untimely – that is to say, acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come.” —Nietzsche, Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen Betrachtungen=observation: consideration: speculation. As to translation [...]
“ANGELE; QUOD”
And the invention of punctuation, from an edition of Pietro Bembo’s “De Aetna” (“Of Etna”). Hasn’t anybody been bold enough in her tongue over the past half-millennium to invent breakages like the semicolon as Aldus & Griffo did? In any case out in Belgrade they’re inventing new saints to go alongside new cathedrals, tender, macaronic. [...]
ENORMITY AT IMPOSSIBLE OBJECT, PART 2
Joe Milutis’s question: see the interview here for my response. [Image courtesy of Jeremy Mende's Anxious Futurism.] Milutis: Given this poetry requires a lot of research, is there a sense of regret that such a signature is not enough, and that your filtration process leaves out material that could be used to educate or elucidate? [...]
THE EVER-HOODED, TRAGIC-GESTURED SEA
Why the idea of order, like the idea of progress, is just and tragically that: an idea, abundant in keener sounds, in rage, and more than occasionally in futility. She sang beyond the genius of the sea. The water never formed to mind or voice, Like a body wholly body, fluttering Its empty sleeves; and [...]
JUICED-UP BLOSSOMS,
white cherries, and shadows write with better clarity than any ii at a certain hour over the Aurelian wall—to emerge from the rustic house & let them do it, as Ruskin did, casting agency with bliss into light unelectric.
FAT TUESDAY IS WOMEN’S DAY
And in celebration of the coincidence of holidays, a feasting on the fact that the object of the gaze, ever an object of ambivalent worship, can shift or itself deflect, wield puissance.
MYSTERIES OF THE SERVICE ECONOMY
That the Roman cobblestones should have been brimming with confetti since at least Christmas: all a pastel prologue to Lenten-eve explosion? Or some tactic devised by the tourism board to convince the outside that it really is carnival every day in this country, as it was in Venice’s eighteenth century? Bring me your bored, your [...]
ANXIOUS FUTURISM
Punctuating the approach to the grocery store, for example: An uncanny capacity to provoke as well as document the anxiety of a postutopian future become our heritage in scraps and sprawling damage: Jeremy Mende‘s installation now hitting the viali and vicoli of Rome, offering nothing, in spite of exquisite design skills, as spectacle and nothing [...]
THE CARNIVALESQUE
Where does it lie, nella vita attuale, nowadays: in the performers, or their onlookers & ubiquitous multiform recorders?
“GARBAGE AND CHOLERA”
And one of the many gems many appear to have overlooked in Naples from the standpoint of an “inflexible, cold, and passionate service”: local singer/percussionist Marzouk Mejri for two euros’ cover off Spaccanapoli; singing “Illettughat–To Tyrants” in honor of Tunisian poet Abulkasem Escebbi (1909-1934): “Don’t let the spring and light of dawn fool you: in [...]
NOIVIVI
An hour and a half on a brilliant weekend afternoon through subterranean Naples, its voids the city’s own tufa quarries 30 meters profound to stack the ground shared by Vesuvius as so many mirroring shafts dizzyingly narrow and tall and tough: through sixteenth-century cisterns manned by climbing wellworkers, lowest on the social spectrum yet keepers [...]
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY,
poor impugned precursor to ours, beckons from the papal South to be reconsidered vis-a-vis its stuccoes. Here Pietro da Cortona’s monochrome Church of Saints Luca and Martina, still standing amidst the earlier, later better prized, Forum chunks, with its reembellished cupola of Roman Enlightenment, wowing the unpious and historically jolted before the remains of Martina, [...]
POET-LAUREL-CAPITAL
Ugo Foscolo: poet and hopeful patriot becoming laurel becoming memorial becoming architecture, Ionian, becoming mundane or magic electric in dusk: patron non-saint of an archive of the vernacular. PER LA SENTENZA CAPITALE PROPOSTA NEL GRAN CONSIGLIO CISALPINO CONTRO LA LINGUA LATINA Te nudrice alle Muse, ospite e Dea Le barbariche genti che ti han doma [...]
BLOOD ORANGE
In defiance of classical epistemology: “German dulness, and English affectation, have of late much multiplied among us the use of two of the most objectionable words that were ever coined by the troublesomeness of metaphysicians — namely, ‘Objective’ and’ Subjective.’” —”Of the Pathetic Fallacy,” John Ruskin, Modern Painters, Vol. III
ANACHRONISM
“Mi porti qualcosa di antico.” Unconsciously and not through appearance, but through the voice? Lidia, in conversation to the soundtrack of noxious tremors in an out-of-order Vespa on the tram avenue, following Jeremy Mende‘s “Anxious Futurism,” a study in negation (of the beautiful, the image, the individual, the sponsored, and the futurist, of anything but [...]
FESTINA LENTE
“Hurry up slowly”—motto of Aldus Manutius, Venetian typographer, grammarian and humanist, turn of the sixteenth century. “City of Aldus”: it’s this figure that’s cited by the puerile author of A Lume Spento who wants to boast about where he’s self-published his first 72 pages of verse.