Follow her train of thought...

Sunday, January 21, 2007

2:56 PM

on mozarello and other artists

So at 3 a.m. the other day, as I was being lulled to sleep by Pound's Cantos (we had to read cantos I-LI for one class, roughly 207 pages of dense, fragmented, highly allusive stuff), one fragment jumped out at me -- about the inelegant death of Mozarello, a 16th century Mantuan poet who was murdered by villagers:

"...Mozarello
Takes the Calabrian roadway, and for ending
Is smothered beneath a mule, a poet's ending,
Down a stale well-hole, oh a poet's ending."

If only there were more moments of levity in the Cantos, between the sections of heavy-handed preaching and historicizing that sometimes feels like an extended exercise in alienating the reader. We had a good discussion in our Limits of Attention class, though -- about why many political poets are accused of being anti-lyrical; about our era's obsession with internal moods as opposed to passions that have a stronger capacity to effect ethical change; about the quality of difficulty in poetry; about how Pound compels attention by accumulating details and trusting the reader to make connections between stories and Cantos. Ah ewan. Basta I'm not a fan of Pound; and can now say I've actually read him. On to the Pisan Cantos next week...

* * *

Despite the antisocial tendencies, I'm starting to enjoy talking to strangers who turn out to be interesting, creative people. Last night, at Laura's birthday party, I met Hamutal, who's taking her Ph.D in Philosophy and has the saddest eyes I've ever seen on a woman, and her childhood friend Arieh, a photographer and blogger. Here's his shot of a typical Toronto subway car with red seats, empty as Morpheus' dream train.

* * *

The other night, I watched Lars von Trier's Five Obstructions with Richard, and was both amused and blown away. The premise is simple, if a bit sadistic (yes, coming from the director who made Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, and Dogville -- probably the most disturbing and "thoughtfully disgusting" film I've ever seen): von Trier asks his film idol and teacher, Jorgen Leth, to remake a short film, Perfect Human, Leth made in 1967. The catch is that he has to remake it five times using restrictions von Trier formulates (ex. remake it as a cartoon, or using just 12 frames per edit, or set in "the most wretched place on Earth" -- which, to Leth, is the red light district in Bombay, shown here in the picture behind a transparent screen). It's a wonderful film about creativity blossoming under restrictions, about amorphous mentor-student relations, about an artist's need to risk failure. The fifth "remake," written by von Trier from Leth's point of view and spoken by Leth but making fun of von Trier, is a deliciously layered exercise in perspective, and a moving reflection on art. At the end, I found myself wishing someone would push and impose those sort of restrictions on me, to jolt me out of this complacency.

* * *

Great late night music: Yo La Tengo's The Sounds of the Sounds of Science, -- eight tracks the band composed to accompany underwater documentaries by Jean Painleve. Dreamy, textured, ambient layers of music with such titles as "How Some Jellyfish are Born" and "The Love Life of the Octopus" make me want to dive under the duvet and sink deeper into the calm ocean of sleep.

Labels: books, movies, music, photographs, school

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