Baudelaire Discussion 9/24/15---#nofilter#nutstonature

(Dear Julie, please forgive any typos. I was typing furiously) 

Class begins in Café Aion

Stephanie requests we talk at least a little bit about Wilde.

She summarizes the text and we have a brief discussion about the play of the claims he makes.

Switch to Baudelaire:

Sam: Half the essay is about why you should be an artist if you are an artist.

Hector: Points to where he starts talking about Monsieur G. introduction: “Man of the whole world, man who understands…”

“Monsieur G. doesn’t like to be called an artist. His interest is in the whole world….to the spiritual citizen of the universe.”

Hector: That’s pretty f***** up.

Rushi: Please explain, Hector.

(Waiter comes over and Sarah orders a ginger limeade, Jessica a small coffee with almond milk, Sara T. orders…. Etc. etc.)

Hector: Looking at the claims that if you are in this part of Europe you obviously don’t know about this other part of Europe. Cottage intellect is an interesting formulation.

Jessica: This is a disconnection from social/political concerns rather than connecting poetry and common man.

Sam: Way he sees modernity is so diffused that you have to go to several different places to experience it.

Hector: Julie compared this to Keats’ camelion poet. (reads question)

Jessica: Not answering political aspect. But comparing the two, lush, intoxicating quality of Baudelaire’s artist’s engagement in the world, while Keats’ poet is more one of disappearing rather than fully living in it. Keats is never drunk like a kid anywhere.

Stephanie: Maybe ties into Mill’s distinction between…nevermind.

Sam: Eloquence is Baudelaire’s conception of craftsman’s art.

Jessica: Baudelaire more in common with Shelley. Baudelaire less narcissistic than Keats. Baudelaire’s dandy has more self-abnegation, and views the world from more distance than Keats.

Jessica: Disagree with dandyism as jiving with Baudelaire’s idea of artist. Baudelaire didn’t love all aspects of dandyism.

Rushi: I didn’t conflate the artist and dandy too much.

Sam: Dandy isn’t ideal artist, but there is an artistic role for the Dandy and he laments it dying.

Hector: Formulation of the man of the crowd and how that relates to Poe.

Sarah J: I also want to talk about quote on page 8 about inspiration’s relation to convulsion.

(Drinks arrive

Sam offers his frittata to us.)

Sarah: Reads passage of inspiration’s relation to convulsion. Ending with “with the other’s sensibility is the whole being.” What about this relationship between reason and sensibility?

Rushi: Man-child can use reason to induce the “sensibility” state where as a child has no reason and is overwhelmed due to sensibility.

Sarah: Wondering more about the “violent” nature of the convulsion.

Sam: Don’t think it’s necessarily violent.

Sarah: More wondering what this does to the body?

Jessica: The body goes much more than just the mind.

Sam: Embodied consciousness---motions that influence thought when you are overwhelmed with poetry so that your body and emotions get recruited to try to express this feeling.

Jessica: Parts of brain activated by spice are pain sensors but we take pleasure in it. So this violent value in art is semi-orgasmic in some way.

Stephanie: Indirectly this can tie back to Kant’s sublime (can’t remember which one, Sam says dynamic). You experience pleasure from something negative because you aren’t actually in danger. Watching train crash for example.

Jessica: Example of feeling emotional pain in art in a pleasurable way. Uses Claire Danes example of wanting to be called beautiful---relates to Jared Leto example.

Stephanie: Jared Leto is a dick.

Rushi: Violent convulsion reminds me of meditation experience.

Sam: Get different experience from life-altering situations.

Jessica: Very physical, hurtful reactions, to really good music and painting.

Sam: Everything in this essay, or maybe Mallarme, was everything is trying to get close to music.

Stephanie: A little bit of dying=a good bit of pleasure.

Sam: Children can be sado-masochistic.

Stephanie and Jessica: Well sometimes kids don’t crush bugs they save them.

Sam: Both.

Rushi: What about his ideas of nature (from cosmetic ideas) compared to his idealization of the child in man-child seeing everything in newness. I thought they were a little contradictory.

Sam: Nature is mechanics, rational philosophy and things learned. Child abstracts directly from images to imagination.

Jessica: What being focused on in child is not so much relationship to nature but development of imagination and automatic use of imagination in the child which isn’t used in adults.

Sam: I use things from my childhood in writing today...

Hector: In praise of cosmetics passage speaks on in page 32 the child’s relationship to nature. “Refer simply to the facts….nature teaches us nothing…compels man to sleep…incites man to murder…nature counsels nothing but…philosophy and religion command us to look after parents…everything beautiful is from reason and calculation….”

Jessica: Has anyone had the misfortune of reading the introduction to Sexual Persone---she’s a serial rape apologist who wants to praise men for creating a society that keeps them from raping everybody.

Sam: Baudelaire’s observations are contrary to evolutionary biology today, though at the time that is what Darwin says. Today we see that altruism drives a lot of evolution.

Stephanie and Jessica: Mini discussion of Sexual Persone.

Jessica: She says that men have right to their place in society because they pee standing up.

Hector: Sets up stakes for Baudelaire for why art should not imitate nature.

Matthew: “Crime….Taste of mother’s womb is natural by origin” Bothers me to say that is natural in the womb.

Sam: Means sin when he says crime.

Hector: Putting the cart before the horse in a weird way by saying patricide as natural states. Weird ideas about nature.

Jessica: What is he saying art is doing?

Hector: Suggestion is that art keeps us from nature.

Stephanie: Assertion that we are better than nature. The whole bit about women to make themselves better than nature. Even if it’s fallacious thing it doesn’t matter because woman is captivating.

Hector: Reads passage of woman’s duty to appear supernatural. Ending in “…approximates human being to statue…divine…the mysterious passion of the priestess.”

Stephanie: I actually like parts of this like window opening to the infinite.

Sam: This would be great text for fashion design. Cushing the natural body in these confections to make it like a painting. And feminist response is that women exist to inspire men and their art.

Stephanie: Women need to aspire to this statuesque figure.

Jessica: Goth friends and others don’t look at it to elevate above nature but to access the real in a similar way to art creating the good.

Sam: Questioning Baudelaire’s natural and what belongs in it in relation to the soul.

Jessica: with...

Hector: This idea of one-uping nature

Matthew: Weird inversion of the natural here. The line “Successfully design to cover up blemishes nature has strewn there.” Nature is an invading force like a disease or mutation.

Jessica: Idea of how a woman should look.

Sam: Links nature to original sin at one point.

Jessica: Where was makeup when luxuriated in veins and such…

Stephanie: What is he saying our reality should be? Clearly with makeup he wants to alter the body to uncover some reality that is already there?

Jessica: Complex ideas of when we should and shouldn’t use nature.

Sam: Real for him is not person but the fashions around the world of how the body is disguised.

Hector: Good time to talk about what he says about the modern.

Stephanie and Jessica: Netflix discussion as we change subjects. The aesthetic value of doing something that allows us to not engage intellectually i.e. videos on YouTube. Watching cracked.com videos Jessica says. Check out the one about ninja turtles comparing them to the four humours.  An episode when London menstruates once a month and everyone must go underground with giant tampons to clean up the city.

Sam: A lot of good feminist criticism of Poe and others in some other online episodes.

Jessica: Irish poems comparing bodies of women to landscape so women walk around with Map on their back. Speaking of modernity.

Hector: Reads passage on page 12-14. Doesn’t read yet.

Matthew: Interested in dressing and garb from the past and how that relates to today. Huge retro trend even in music similar to retro trends in fashion. Baudelaire is basically saying that if you do not try to unite elements of now then it is somehow deficient.

Hector: Reads passage actually this time.  “Extracts from fashion….distill eternal from the transitory…there is this difference…painters of today thought working with subjects of today…still dress subjects in garments of the past…whose other have is the immutable and eternal.”

Sam: Nice emphasis on distilling. Reminds of historical chic.

Sam: Back to Sam. When David did Rome it’s the dream of what Rome is supposed to be. HBO’s Rome doesn’t look anything like Renaissance Rome.

Stephanie: We have our beauty standards of now.

Jessica: What does he say in the text about eternal.

Sam: Modernity is the only place to find value in antiquity. The eternal is what they will talk about from our time in the future.

Hector: There are these two components to beauty for Baudelaire. The slippery ephemeral and then there is the more eternal, timelessness.

Jessica: Interested in eternal and immovable that is in partnership with something that is fluid and movable. Seeing something that is engaging with slippery that gives access to something that is more immovable. Thinking about it in terms of physics.

Sam: Physics make sense. Beauty as magnet with two poles (timeless/eternal and modern). Eternal is the basic principles. Need two poles for beauty.

Stephanie: This immutable thing or je ne sais quois.

Jessica: Somebody said je ne sais quois!

Rushi: How do you spell je ne sais quois?

Stephanie: Nature is flat and needs the lens of modernity to add something to it. Nature plus modern= yes maybe but I’m not sure. Because the fashion relating to colors that have positive signification in nature. Maybe I’m blowing smoke.

Crowd: No we agree.

Sam: Anything immutable, or established form needs disruption and re-ordering to say something valuable.

Stephanie: Even music, you have the heartbeat, naturally drawn to things we might have been drawn to 6000 years ago.

Jessica: I’m circling around transitory-immutable, and which aspect do artists have access to?

Stephanie: Does this have to do with the man of the world?

Hector: Shiftiness of modernity is good because Baudelaire is an able-bodied man who can move around and do stuff which allows him to invigorate the ideas of what is beautiful. These qualities of man of the world are needed to be an artist of modern value.

Stephanie: So man of the world can travel and encaspsulate?

Jessica: Or is it intuitive? Sorry I interrupted.

Stephanie: No it’s exciting.

Jessica: Ooo that’s the first time someone’s said its exciting in a while.

Sam: I am a fan of the low-hanging fruit and taking a joke when it is there.

Sam: Well the man of the world acquires a modern idea of the world and subconsciously imbibe the eternal/timeless. If you chase the timeless then you end up imitating Michelangelo or something.

Jessica: Asked something I missed.

Sam: Baudelaire believes to move around…

Hector: He talks about Egyptian and other “barbarous” art.

Rushi: But he was maybe trying to redefine barbarous in a more positive way in part V that was cut off.

Hector: Yes but there is still a negative connotation to it…..still catching up until hearing…. Ezra Pound is a motherfucker.

Chorus: Ezra Pound is a mother f*****

Sam: Ezra Pound is a mother fucker.

Jessica: I don’t have time to pursue this project but I want to do a project relating to Ezra Pound and hashtags (used to call them pound signs).

Hector: Yes I called them Ezra Hashtags.

Stephanie: Confusions related to Ezra Hashpounds.

Hector: Ephemeral and eternal. Has anyone read Bachtine?

Sam: Difference between epic vs. novel and monologue vs. dialogue.

(Hector exits for bathroom)

Sam and Jessica discuss Bachtine and Dostoyevsky.

Sam: We’ll wait for Hector’s return to tie Bachtine back to Baudelaire.

Hector: Sorry that was half-baked I’m not sure how Bachtine relates yet to Baudelaire. 

(Hector looks for Bachtine on his computer)

Sam: Here's how I think it relates. Every time you go to a modern bar you get a 1000 different ideas of modern aesthetic-Polyphonic truths. When you speak of antique it is a narrow-minded singular aesthetic which is less true as an aesthetic.

Hector: That is close to what I had in mind. Earlier on when he theorizes the novel he says theory and novel are not friendly. Quotes Bachtine…”rests outside historical documentation….life they have with which we are familiar…hardened and no longer flexible skeleton…novel gets on poorly with other genres because…different voices and collision of different experiences….other genres retain their value…everything works as long as there is no mention of the novel….”

Jessica: Interested how much literary theory has led to the novel being conquered a little more since then so what is the new form that we have to grapple with?

Hector: Hybrid?

Sam: Mixed-media art. Making bad art to show what their good art is.

Hector: Another quote from Bachtine: “….new zone designed by the novel…all its open-ended.” Maximal contact with presentàBaudelaire. Maybe Baudelaire is talking about novelists.

Sam: He liked Victor Hugo.

Hector: “….reality that was inconclusive…”

Sam: We’ve become accustomed to Newton so much that Newton is now a joke.

Hector: Appreciation for the artistic object is different….closed the epic gap of time…there’s a whole essay in there I don’t want to think about.

Sam: First Paper.

Jessica: What are people thinking about for their papers…

Rushi: Last Words from anyone?

Hector/Sam/Chorus: # is still a motherfucker. Bachtine is cool. Baudelaire is...

Jessica: This blogpost in its ephemerality attempts contact with the immovable. We know not if it will reach it.

#WemissyouJulie.