"My answer – Matisse’s answer – is that it opens onto black. It is a way of showing sensuality – sensuous experience – becoming something thought or manufactured, as opposed to felt. Denis’s ‘artificiality’ points this way. Or D.H. Lawrence’s ‘consciousness’. Here, for example, is the odious Rupert Birkin in Women in Love, rounding on Hermione:

‘Spontaneous!’ he cried. ‘You and spontaneity! You, the most deliberate thing that ever walked or crawled! … Because you want to have everything in your own volition, your deliberate voluntary consciousness … If one cracked your skull perhaps one might get a spontaneous, passionate woman out of you, with real sensuality. As it is, what you want is pornography – looking at yourself in mirrors, watching your naked animal actions in mirrors, so that you can have it all in your consciousness, make it all mental.’

I realise that this makes Proust, by comparison, seem a real lover of women. And Birkin, to be fair to Lawrence, is meant to be a violent and dangerous prig. (A portrait of the author.) Nothing could be further from Matisse’s tone. But tone is not everything: sometimes excess turns out to be a way to get difficult issues in focus; and I believe that Matisse’s and Lawrence’s proposals about modernity are closely linked.

Could we imagine something like Birkin’s words, minus the nasty self-righteousness, spoken gently – spoken out of love? For Spurling is right: love is at stake here. And of course the words in question (transposed into an ironic, puzzled, even admiring register) are addressed by Matisse not just to Amélie but to himself – to his own anxious sensibility. I think that Woman with a Hat is all about getting sensuality ‘in the head’, to use another of Birkin’s insults – making it discursive and reflexive. It is about having the immediate and passionate – having colour, in other words – become a matter of mind."

So, step by step, you reach the Place de l'Opéra. It is here that Paris makes one of its grandest impressions. You have before you the façade of the Théâtre, enormous and bold, resplendent with colossal lamps between the elegant columns, before which open rue Auber and rue Halévy; to the right, the great furnace of the Boulevard des Italiens; to the left, the flaming Boulevard des Capucines, which stretches out between the two burning walls of the Boulevard Madeleine, and turning around, you see three great diverging streets which dazzle you like so many luminous abysses: rue de la Paix, all gleaming with gold and jewels, at the end of which the black Colonne Vendôme rises against the starry sky; the Avenue de l'Opéra inundated with electric light; rue Quatre Septembre shining with its thousand gas jets, and seven continuous lines of carriages issuing from the two Boulevards and five streets, crossing each other rapidly on the square, and a crowd coming and going under a shower of rosy and whitest light diffused from the great ground-glass globes, which produce the effect of wreaths and garlands of full moons, colouring the trees, high buildings and the multitude with the weird and mysterious reflections of the final scene of a fancy ballet. Here one experiences for the moment the sensations produced by Hasheesh. That mass of gleaming streets which lead to the Théâtre Français, to the Tuileries, to the Concorde and Champs-Elysées, each one of which brings you a voice of the great Paris festival, calling and attracting you on seven sides, like the stately entrances of seven enchanted palaces, and kindling in your brain and veins the madness of pleasure.

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But modern art in its first manifestations—in the painting of Manet above all—did not accept the boulevards as charming. It was more impressed with the queerness of those who used them—the prostitutes, the street singers, the men of the world leaning out of their windows, the beggars, the types with binoculars. It wanted to paint Haussmann's Paris as a place of pleasure, particularly for the eye, but in such a way as to suggest that the pleasures of seeing involved some sort of lack—a repression, or alternatively a brazenness. The prostitute was seemingly an ideal figure for things of this kind, for she concentrated them in her person; and Manet like others took her to represent the truth of the city Haussmann had built.

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*This last page or so of descriptions is not meant, incidentally, to amount to a judgment of the relative merit  of the pictures passed in review (still less to insinuate such a judgment without daring to state it out loud). The Calliebotte, for example, is in my view a lesser painting than the Degas, however much I may sympathize with its thoughtfulness. The requisite clichés are brought on stage a bit less glibly, but that does not save the picture from having the look of a rehearsal as opposed to a real performance. The value of a work of art cannot ultimately turn on the more or less of its subservience to ideology; for painting can be grandly subservient to the half-truths of the moment, doggedly servile, and yet be no less intense. How that last fact affects the general business of criticism is not clear. But one thing that does not follow from it, as far as I can see, is that viewers of paintings should ignore or deny the subservience, in the hope of thereby attaining to the "aesthetic." It matters what the materials of a pictorial order are, even if the order is something different from the materials, and in the end more important than they are.

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I'm writing this from a cubicle. An acquaintance told me over a drink she encountered an entitled man pissing on her doorstep this morning, I said that was my afternoon meeting! I'm writing this from a cubicle. I have a friend who logs in every day and never looks at the front page. I wish the green tea were rose. I'm too lazy to correct that. The professor professes too much, a decade, two decades, twenty-four months to the day later. I'm supposed to go to a reception. I "stole" these headphones. I stole this cubicle. I spent so much time being careful.

David Brazil is working to convene a second labor and community-focused 'Poetic Labor Project' gathering for this Labor Day, 2011, and is looking for others to collaborate with him on organizing this event.  If you are interested in participating, please email David at plp.laborday2011@gmail.com.

Regular Monday Night Chatting

Dear All,

At risk of boring you To Death with yet another posting on this subject, I would anyway like to let you know that Steve Benson and I are committed now to giving "LiveChat" performance every Monday night, 6:30pm Pacific, 9:30pm Eastern, for the foreseeable future. The chats will last 30 minutes unless specified otherwise, and, if one of us can't make it any given Monday, the other will carry on regardless.


The place where all the chats reside is here. On that page, you can sign up for email reminders (from fifteen minutes to one day ahead) on each of the individual chats.


If you'd like a personal reminder from one of us on the evenings of, please send your email address to suzannestein AT mindspring DOT com with subject line LIVE CHAT. Or, leave your address in the comment box.


Thanks for attending! We hope to make it interesting for you.

Yours,


SS / SB

My new year's resolution for at least one month is to no longer book my social life by the rules of the Outlook calendar for business. I am not booked. I won't book anything at all. I won't plan after hours. I am always free to see you if you call me that day.

an ideological community can be defined as that set of discursive and institutional constraints which turns its members always away from the edges or inconsistencies of their practice

wow, sorry about the beach scene. invisible template.

SS/SB LiveChat 4

Steve Benson and I will give the fourth in our ongoing 'live chat performance' series this Monday, Memorial Day, at 6:30pm Pacific / 9:30pm Eastern. You can sign up for an email reminder in the little box above. We look forward to (not) seeing you then!

SS/SB Live Chat 3

busi

I already own that cat

SS/SB Live Chat 2

Thanks for stopping by! Our next 'live chat performance' will take place Monday, May 23, 6:30 Pacific/9:30 Eastern. Please join us!

You can find all posts related to our live chats here.

Last Sunday, Steve Benson and I gave a "live chat performance" on this blog. The record of that experiment is here. We thought we'd keep doing this for awhile.

======================================================

Steve Benson

Suzanne Stein

LIVE CHAT PERFORMANCE

Mondays

6:30pm Pacific

9:30pm Eastern

30 minutes

======================================================

announcement

LIVE CHAT PERFORMANCE

in this space/on this blog

STEVE BENSON

SUZANNE STEIN

SUNDAY, MAY 8

3pm Pacific

6pm Eastern

xtreme encounters with my own fragility lately. not just fallibility, which i've been slowly acclimating to less success in denial of. but feeling the real separation between the failing front and the self i'm trying to figure how to handle gingerly enough. I like the encounter, but it's strange. no doors

i might call, it is still before 8pm my time
but i was in meetings all day
then i drank wine
so i'm not lucid
i'm both exhausted from interlocution
and sort of drunk

surrounded always by the better-educated, i feel this XXXXX that i'm the XXXXX XXXXX in the middle. directing traffic, 'making things happen' but, uh, as the XXXXX (in all senses) XXXXX

I remember saying to my ex-husband, when we were divorcing--it was at the moment of the 2004 southeast asia tsunami--that divorce was the worst thing in the world. No, he said, the worst thing in the world is a big wave can come and wash it all away.