Piano Player

In the cleared space in the middle of the room, a tired-looking man in a worn tuxedo was beating the life out of an exhausted grand piano. All of the furniture, including the piano, was enameled a garish orange. A sequence of orange-haired nudes romped and languished along the walls under a glaze of grime.

The pianist could have passed for a corpse in any mortuary if he had only stayed still, instead of tossing his fingers in bunches at the suffering keyboard. His batting average in hitting the notes was about .333, which would have been good enough for a Coast League ball-player. He was white and loaded to the gills, it was hard to tell with what.

The Way Some People Die. Ross Macdonald. Page 149 (Chapter 27), Library of America edition.

Keats on the Intellect of Places

We afterwards moved away a space, and saw the whole (waterfall) more mild, streaming silverly through the trees. What astonished me more than any thing is the tone, the coloring, the slate, the stone, the moss, the rock-weed; or, if I may so say, the intellect, the countenance of such places. The space, the magnitude of mountains and waterfalls are well imagined before one sees them; but this countenance or intellectual tone must surpass every imagination and defy any remembrance. I shall learn poetry here and shall henceforth write more than ever, for the abstract endeavor of being able to add a mite to that mass of beauty which is harvested from these grand materials, by the finest spirits, and put into ethereal existence for the relish of one’s fellows. — Letter from John Keats to Tom Keats in June, 1818, about a tour or hike through Lancashire. Emphasis mine.

Avant Garde & the Widowed Image

What’s left of the avant-garde–there isn’t much because anything can be packaged and made mainstream in this county–continues to insist on the (highly problematical) concepts of innovation and marginality. The old is relegated to the dustbin of history, and the new is briefly given its moment, usually by an outsider. This set of ideas replicates the production, use, and waste model of industrial consumption and capitalism. It also claims to be an attack on the bourgeoisie, but it uses a commodity model from free enterprise capitalism, and it packages itself with outrage. Outrage sells. Commercially successful commodified outrage is dubious but by no means unknown category in American culture. One branch of the avant-garde has always thrived on throwing things out. To make it new, you have to haul the garbage away, and, in this particular ideology, there’s a lot of garbage. Against this model of aesthetic clear-cutting one could propose a kind of ecology aesthetics, opposed to the obsession with innovation and waste.

-Burning Down the House. Charles Baxter. Page 30.

…I want to cite an idea from the notebooks of Gerard Manley Hopkins concerning the nature of the obsessive image, the “widowed” image, the image that sticks in the memory as if glued there…Hopkins appeared to believe that images became memorable  when some crucial part of their meaning had been stripped from them…Hopkins describes these obsessive images of objects as things for which he has not “found the law.” They are unfulfilled in meaning, but they take up a lot of room in the memory as if in compensation. They seem both gratuitous and inexplicably necessary.

Charles Baxter. Page 30