Daily Poetics

The most marvelous is not/the beauty, deep as that is, but teh classic attempt/at beauty at the swamp's center: the / dead-end highway, abandoned when the new bridge went in finally. -william carlos williams "the hard core of beauty"

Link: Ahtisaari: Slow Art - 6 The hard core of beauty.

Slow Art - 6 The hard core of beauty

"Elongation, augmentation or the stretching of time: these are a way of getting at what architect Peter Zumthor has called the hard core of beauty. A way of directing the audience’s perception to the world as it is.In a passage on the poet William Carlos Williams, Zumthor observes:    [

The] purpose of his art was to direct his sensory perception to the world of things in order to make them his own…[This] appeals to me: not to wish to stir up emotions with buildings, I think to myself, but to allow emotions to emerge, to be. And: to remain close to the thing itself, close to the essence of the thing I have to shape, confident that if the building is conceived accurately enough for its place and its function, it will develop its strength, it will develop its own strength, with no need for artistic additions.

The hard core of beauty: concentrated substance. In Music as a Gradual Process composer Steve Reich writes of the extremely gradual processes in his early work. In Piano Phase (1967) and Violin Phase (1967)a single pattern on two or more identical instruments slowly slides out of phase with itself forming a complex gradually changing whole.    

Listening to an extremely gradual musical process opens my ears to it, but it always extends farther than I can hear, and that makes it interesting to listen to that musical process again. That area of every gradual (completely controlled) musical process, where one hears the details of the sound moving out away from intentions, occurring for their own acoustic reasons, is it.

Reich might well have called it the hard core of beauty, the sound itself away from intentions, the sound that allows emotions to emerge."

Link: Martin Venezky Speaks Up.

To make a long story short ...

Link: Wired 14.11: Very Short Stories.

Very Short Stories
33 writers. 5 designers.
6-word science fiction.

"We'll be brief: Hemingway once wrote a story in just six words ("For sale: baby shoes, never worn.") and is said to have called it his best work. So we asked sci-fi, fantasy, and horror writers from the realms of books, TV, movies, and games to take a shot themselves.

Dozens of our favorite auteurs put their words to paper, and five master graphic designers took them to the drawing board. Sure, Arthur C. Clarke refused to trim his ("God said, 'Cancel Program GENESIS.' The universe ceased to exist."), but the rest are concise masterpieces."

Longed for him. Got him. Shit.
- Margaret Atwood

It cost too much, staying human.
- Bruce Sterling

We kissed. She melted. Mop please!
- James Patrick Kelly

I’m your future, child. Don’t cry.
- Stephen Baxter

Rained, rained, rained, and never stopped.
- Howard Waldrop

Easy. Just touch the match to
-Ursula K. Le Guin

Heaven falls. Details at eleven. - Robert Jordan

Bush told the truth. Hell froze. - William Gibson

Nevertheless, he tried a third time. - James P. Blaylock

Thought I was right. I wasn't.
- Graeme Gibson

Lost, then found. Too bad.
- Graeme Gibson

Dinosaurs return. Want their oil back.
- David Brin

Metrosexuals notwithstanding, quiche still lacks something.
- David Brin

Sum of all fears: AND patented.
- Charles Stross

Ships fire; princess weeps, between stars.
- Charles Stross

Will this do (lazy writer asked)?
- Ken MacLeod

Cryonics: Disney thawed. Mickey gnawed. Omigawd.
- Eileen Gunn

Dorothy: "Fuck it, I'll stay here."
- Steven Meretzky

Link: Agnes Bugera Gallery, Inc. - Canadian Contemporary & Modern Art.

"For the past twenty-five years oil paint and wax have been a constant in my studio practice. Layers of wax and oil paint are applied in succession; opaque and transparent paint surfaces become suspended in the wax, which is alternately poured and brushed, torched and melted. The inherent capacity of wax to change under certain conditions has always been of paramount import to the underlying concepts being considered.

Since moving to the west coast over ten years ago, the influence of nature has combined with my desire to examine the effect of memory on the psychological experience of seeing. As my work is created over long periods of time; marks, images and surface conditions come and go, leaving fragments of visual experience behind. I liken these remaining fragments to patches of meaning, sensory experiences that have been transformed by time, circumstance and resultant memories. Memory, like nature, is in a continual state of flux: birth, growth, death and re-birth are constants. The work is therefore rooted in the exploration of how memory, in this case visual memory, is built upon a sense of impermanence and change. The images are meant to trace visual memory devoid of or refusing mimetic form, hovering on the verge of disclosure. As a participating viewer, one is left to muse over a mixture of possibilities … possibilities created in part by one's own history and point of view."

The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites. -Eli Siegel

Link: Aesthetic Realism Foundation International Periodical.

Aesthetic Realism is based on these principles, stated by Eli Siegel:

1.  The deepest desire of every person is to like the world on an honest or accurate basis.

2.  The greatest danger for a person is to have contempt for the world and what is in it .... Contempt can be defined as the lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it.

3.  All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.

Link: Resurgence issue 212 - SEEING GREEN by Jean Hardy.

Escape When we get out of the glass bottles of our own ego, and when we escape like squirrels from turning in the cages of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright but things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves...

You know my method. It is founded on the observance of trifles. -Arthur Conan Doyle

Link: icon | 038 | icon of the month: bubblegum.words: Justin McGuirk

Bubblegum is proof that man is a fundamentally creative animal.

Mere chewing gum, which relies on an act of mindless repetition, was chemically reprogrammed specifically to encourage an act of creation. Blowing bubbles may not be painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling, but then neither is spraying graffiti or building sand castles or any of the other impulsive things that humans do to satisfy their urge simply to make something.

It’s 100 years since that tiny evolutionary leap. People have chewed gum for millennia: the Mayans chewed on the sap of sapota trees (called chicle, hence the Chiclets brand) and Native Americans chewed the resin from spruce trees. Commercial chewing gum became available in America in 1848, but it wasn’t until 1906 that Frank Fleer, of the Frank H Fleer Company, tried to formulate a gum for blowing bubbles. As pioneers often do, he failed, and Blibber-Blubber was never marketed.

However, in 1928 an employee of the Frank H Fleer Company had another go and this time succeeded with Dubble Bubble. There is some debate about who this was – history records it as the company’s accountant, Walter Diemer, while revisionists argue that it was the company president, Gilbert Mustin – but Dubble Bubble set the mould that most bubblegum still follows. It was pink (apparently the only food colouring Diemer/Mustin had) and it was fruity... (con't)

Our territory, our possibilities, should be so ravishing...

ARCADE.

The documents that follow, hewn from the collusion of territory and utopia, record the transit of bodies through space, built and otherwise (focus not restricted to things as they are). They suggest that utopia is not a future ideal, but a current practice: “a searing, futuristic retinal trope that oddly offered an intelligibility to the present” (Office for Soft Architecture). “We saw,” the Office writes, “that we could lift it and use it like a lens.” Here we find buildings that never were, unreliable memories, impossible hopes, exaggerated fears, false promises—real things. I believe this research is straightforward and useful, also beautiful. But what else? What frame, if any? Rich Jensen phoned from the train as it pulled into Tacoma and suggested “heterodoxy.” I had told him I was having trouble with the first paragraph of this introduction and he called to say the bridges and textures of Tacoma made him think of heterodoxy. I was in the swimming pool and could not answer. Then Lisa Robertson e-mailed a passage from Paul Celan: “Topos research? By all means! But in light of what’s to be explored: in light of U-topia. And human beings? And creatures. In this light.” And so, in this light we present research by all means. Heterodoxy. A hodge-podge: fiction, photos, poetry, catalogs, historical facts, a cartoon—the narrowly objective hard by the expansively subjective. The plurality of genres pleased me. Any account of our territory bereft of, say, facts, poetry, projections, wild speculation, polemics, or sketchy memory, would seem to me to be fatally compromised. As the Office for Soft Architecture puts it in their Fourth Walk: “[We] painted the place in the polis of the sour heat and the pulse beneath our coats, the specific entry of our exhalations and words into the atmosphere…Our method was patience. We would slowly absorb each image until we were what we had deliberately chosen to become. Of course then we ourselves were the documents; we acquired a fragility. Hello my Delicate we would repeat when we met by chance in the streets under the rows of posters Hello my Delicate...

...As the Office for Soft Architecture concludes in their Fourth Walk: “The trees of the park became mystical, and we permitted ourselves to use this shabby word because we were slightly fatigued from our exercises and our amusements and because against the deepening sky we watched the blue-green green-gold golden black-gold silver-green green-white iron-green scarlet tipped foliage turn black. No birds now; just the soft motors stroking the night. Stillness. We went to our tree. It was time for the study of the paradox called lust. Our chests burst hugely upwards to alight in the branches, instrumental and lovely, normal and new. It was time for the lyric fallen back into teeming branches or against the solid trunk gasping…” Our territory, our possibilities, should be so ravishing."

Matthew Stadler

Our life is frittered away by detail...Simplify, simplify. -Thoreau

Link: The Laws of Simplicity » About.

"This site is devoted to my ongoing thought processes regarding the topic of simplicity. I wrote and designed a book entitled The Laws of Simplicity to let the ideas take root. Here online, I continue to develop the thoughts that surround the paradoxically complex topic of simplicity.

I have had many suggestions over the recent months with respect to what kind of resources I should gather here. With each request, I am humbled by the scale of the need for simplicity across many lines of work and life.

As for the grand challenge of the modern simplicity movement, it is to not become overzealous about the need to simplify. Thus the Fifth Law (differences) extolls the need for balance: Simplicity and complexity need each other.

I look forward to the many questions to be questioned together on this site."

Link: TEDTalks (audio, video).

"Each year, TED hosts some of the world's most fascinating people: Trusted voices and convention-breaking mavericks, icons and geniuses. The talks they deliver have had had such a great impact, we thought they deserved a wider audience. So now - with our sponsor BMW and production partner WNYC/New York Public Radio we're sharing some of the most remarkable TED talks with the world at large. Each week, we'll release a new talk, in audio and video, to download or watch online. For best effect, plan to listen to at least three, start to finish. They have a cumulative effect..". -ted talks

These are ideas. I could say that they just came to me, but it would be more accurate to say that I went to them. Ideas - and new connections between ideas - lead you away from commonly held perceptions of reality. Ideas lead you out here. Ideas lead you into the darkness. -Dave Sim