The Wicked Fairy at the Manger - UA Fanthorpe

My gift for the child:

No wife, kids, home;

No money sense. Unemployable.

Friends, yes. But the wrong sort –

The workshy, women, wogs,

Petty infringers of the law, persons

With notifiable diseases,

Poll tax collectors, tarts;

The bottom rung.

His end?

I think we'll make it

Public, prolonged, painful.

Right, said the baby. That was roughly

What we had in mind.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3813257/Christmas-Poems-by-UA-Fanthorpe.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/books-obituaries/5252820/UA-Fanthorpe.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/u-a-fanthorpe-poet-who-championed-the-underdog-and-whose-work-was-rooted-in-english-history-1677685.html

 http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/may/02/obituary-u-a-ua-fanthorpe

"You need to find the dance"

Les Murray
"You need to find the dance. It might take a few weeks, it might take 20 years. The poem will say to you, you're not right for me yet. The poem has to dance as well as think and dream. And you have to get the dance right."

poetic language

"For Kristeva, the semiotic expresses that original libidinal multiplicity within the very terms of culture, more precisely, within poetic language in which multiple meanings and semantic non-closure prevail. In effect, poetic language is the recovery of the maternal body within the terms of language, one that has the potential to disrupt, subvert, and displace the paternal law."
p. 102

" ... Kristeva describes the maternal body as bearing a set of meanings that are prior to culture itself."
p. 103 

"... this libidinal source of subversion cannot be maintained within the terms of culture, ... its sustained presence within culture leads to psychosis and to the breakdown of cultural life itself ... "
p. 103

from Gender Trouble, Judith Butler 1999, Routledge  NY.

'Down Underworld'

"One of the miracles of good writing is that it can take something a reader would just as soon steer clear of in real life, and transform it into something he can attend to with sympathetic, even affectionate, interest."

p. 132 The Atlantic, October 2011
B. R. Myers

Practice makes perfect?

"We instinctively think of talent as something you're born with, as a gift, some divine spark that you have in your genes but that's not how the talent hotbeds treat it, they treat it as an act of construction."

"It flows from the scientific finding that when you operate from the edge of your ability, on the very uncomfortable razor edge of your ability your learning goes up and it doesn't go up just a little it increases quite a lot."

"... whatever task you're trying to do, reaching, failing and reaching again."

"We normally think of that sort of a struggle as being unproductive, we normally think of it as being a verdict on our ability, we can't do it ..." 
 

"There's a lot of fascinating science out there that shows how when you affect someone's identity, when the action of their sport, or their passion or their art becomes linked to their identity you can tap into all kinds of energy that they can put into practice, that they can put into building that skill."

ABC Radio National
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/practice-makes-perfect/3611212

Daniel Coyle, 2009, The Talent Code,  Arrow Books
http://thetalentcode.com/author/ 

the function of art

"Allowing that the function of art is to transmute what in reality is almost unbearable, what in life is so moving because it is so beautiful or so frightening that we can hardly face it straight for ourselves, then the attitude of an artist who takes such experiences apart for us and puts them together again in a manner that we can look at them is ... idealistic ... creating a work of art is (an act) of faith in man's ability to construct as well as destroy ... the artist's optimism is to be shared; all good work is a celebration of affection."

from Picasso by Keith Sutton, published by Paul Hamlyn, London, 1962.

Alain de Botton on Montaigne

from The consolations of philosophy,  Penguin, 2000.

p. 158 "... being incomprehensible offers unparalleled protection against having nothing to say."


p. 159 "But writing with simplicity requires courage, for there is a danger that one will be overlooked, dismissed as simpleminded ... Montaigne wondered whether the majority of university scholars would have appreciated Socrates, a man they professed to revere above all others, if he had approached them in their own towns, devoid of the prestige of Plato's dialogues, in his dirty cloak, speaking in plain language ... "


p. 160 "It (Montaigne's essay) is a plea ... to refrain from considering ourselves as fools if, because of a hole in our budget or our education, our cloaks are simple and our vocabulary no larger than that of a stallholder in Les Halles."


http://www.alaindebotton.com/philosophy.asp

Picasso

"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once one grows up."

Foucault on being an author.

from The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, Penguin, 1984.

p. 119

"I think that, as our society changes, at the very moment when it is in the process of changing, the author function will disappear ...


All discourses, whatever their status, form, value, and whatever the treatment to which they will be subjected, would then develop in the anonymity of a murmur. 

We would no longer hear the questions that have been rehashed for so long: Who really spoke? Is it really he and not someone else? With what authenticity or originality? And what part of his deepest self did he express in his discourse? 

Instead, there would be other questions, like these: What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself? What are the places in it where there is room for possible subjects? Who can assume these various subject functions? 

And behind all these questions, we would hear hardly anything but the stirring of an indifference: What does it matter who is speaking?"

https://monoskop.org/images/f/f6/Rabinow_Paul_ed_The_Foucault_Reader_1984.pdf

Seneca

Referring to the philosopher Seneca's use of hyperbole, Alain de Botton in The Consolations of Philosophy states:

"If most philosophers feel no need to write like this, it is because they trust that, so long as an argument is logical, the style in which it is presented to the reader will not determine its effectivenesss. 

Seneca believed in a different picture of the mind.

Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the mind's weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style. 

We need metaphors to derive a sense of what cannot be seen or touched, or else we will forget."

http://www.alaindebotton.com/ 

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/seneca/ 

Sister Wendy Beckett

"... if  I were quiet with my conscience I would never write. 

Perhaps because I am slothful I find it so difficult, you have to pull out from your heart these things you didn't even know you thought. 

So it's work for me, but of course its contemplative work. You can't find any work which isn't potentially prayer."


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pJsyXM0uVI

Van Gogh

"Everyone remembers that Van Gogh cut off his ear. Few know that he said: 'The cart one draws must be useful to people whom one does not know'; and that he dedicated his life to trying to make this true."

from John Berger 'Permanent Red' 1960 

http://www.formerwest.org/DocumentsConstellationsProspects/Contributions/FromPermanentRedtoIntoCosmos 

Cart with Black Ox - Vincent Van Gogh

Ai Weiwei

"An artwork unable to make people feel uncomfortable or to feel different is not one worth creating."

http://aiweiwei.com/ 

Rembrandt

'Rembrandt adopted this chiaroscuro technique early in his career, and for the rest of his life it was to be the main expressive vehicle of his work. He recognised in this shadowy light - in the deep well of a darkened interior or in a flickering mark of half-tones and reflections - the power of suggestion, of metaphor, the ability to create mood and to suggest realms of thought and feeling beyond the concrete surfaces of the material world. By cloaking his figures in a veil of shadows and half-lights, he created a shift of attention from the tangible world of perceived objects to the intangible one of spirit and feeling.'

from 'The History and Techniques of the Great Masters - Rembrandt' by Andrew Morrall, 1987, Chartwell Books.

from Robert Adamson, introduction to 'The Best Australian Poems 2009'. Black Inc.

' ... someone who has managed to come up with a voice that has a trace of the authentic about it. Not such an easy thing: it takes courage to be yourself, to write a poem about what you actually believe. This has to involve the ability to craft the language of the heart and soul into the right form.'

http://www.robertadamson.com/ 


https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/category/robert-adamson

Roland Barthes (translated by Richard Howard), 'The Semiotic Challenge', University of California Press, 1994

'The Kitchen of Meaning'

'A garment, an automobile, a dish of cooked food, a gesture, a film, a piece of music, an advertising image, a piece of furniture, a newspaper headline - these indeed appear to be heterogeneous objects.
     
What might they have in common? This at least: all are signs. When I walk down the streets - or through life - and encounter these objects, I apply to all of them, if need be without realising it, one and the same activity, which is that of a certain reading; modern man, urban man, spends his time reading. He reads, first of all and above all, images, gestures, behaviours ... Even with regard to written text, we are constantly given a second message to read between the lines of the first ...'

'To decipher the world's signs always means to struggle with a certain innocence of objects.' 

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/04/roland-barthes-myths-we-dont-outgrow.html 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/mar/26/roland-barthes-camera-lucida-rereading 

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/29/the-art-of-poetry-no-86-richard-howard 

Craig Powell, "Poetry on the Brain", Meanjin, December 2004

"In a paper called 'On Poetry and Weeping', I suggested that the child first forms a name for its mother when it begins to appreciate that the two of them have separate minds, different subjectivities. So that language itself arises from this sense of separateness and the loss of the primordial union. There is thus a basic sadness at the heart of words. Profound beauty can in itself bring us to tears. Music and poetry reach into that archaic level of experience between merger and separateness."

http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/powell-craig 

http://meanjin.com.au/ 

Clarissa Pinkola Estes, "Women Who Run With The Wolves", Rider UK 1992

"Creating one thing at a certain point in the river feeds those who come to the river, feeds creatures far downstream, and yet others in the deep. Creativity is not a solitary movement. That is its power. Whatever is touched by it, whoever hears it, sees it, senses it, knows it, is fed. That is why beholding someone else's creative word, image, idea, fills us up, inspires us to our own creative work. A single creative act has the potential to feed a continent. One creative act can cause a torrent to break through stone." 

http://www.clarissapinkolaestes.com/