kittycarnage

ubu bubu pinup by *PattKelley on deviantART

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Literature and Identity Politics

“When the poet and mystic Rumi met his spiritual companion Shams-i Tabrizi, one of the first things the latter did was to toss Rumi’s books into water and watch the letters dissolve the Sufis(?) say: ‘knowledge that takes you not beyond yourself, is far worse than ignorance’” – Elif Shafak

Come, let us all be friends for once
Let us make life easy on us,
Let us be lovers and loved ones,
The earth shall be left to no one.

Excerpts from the Turkish scholar, Talat Halman's "Yunus Emre and His Mystical Poetry" (copied here)

over at ted.com and on this video, there were a lot of dramus, but this is not your ordinary youtube dramu.. These are 100-200 word dramus heavy on cerebral fuel and politics. Now that’s dramu. I just get dizzy going about it, but at least they seem to have quality control which is nice.

Anywhoo, Ms. Elif Shafak really did me a great favour by reminding me not to personalize fiction and not to find the author in it, not that I want to find the author in a piece of work (I usually ignore the artist’s history and all other things). When I usually look at an artwork whether it be a literary piece or not, I neither look at the artist’s history nor his/her personal take on the work. Yes, it means something, but are you sure it’ll mean the same thing to another? Should you leave it at that, or would you rather explain yourself?

I usually don’t explain my work until someone asks a question (then I’ll send a personal note to them), but as far as thinking about it: Can you really separate yourself from your work?

BRION GYSIN: I LOVE YOU

"But during a ferociously productive, wildly eclectic career in painting, writing and performance that lasted half a century, it often seemed as if Gysin, who died in poverty in 1986, had too great a facility for disappearance, at least as far as his reputation in the art world was concerned. Despite a longing for recognition, he was generally known less for his own work than for his associations with a prodigious number of more famous artists for whom he was, by turns, a teacher, friend and all-around guru: Burroughs, Paul Bowles, Max Ernst, Alice B. Toklas, Keith Haring, David Bowie and Iggy Pop, among others."

'Another probable reason for Gysin’s failure to achieve fame was the one he grudgingly acknowledged toward the end of his life, his restless zinging from one discipline to another, a disregard of boundaries that resonates strongly today with young “I’m in a band; I paint; I design clothes; I’m an actor” artists.'

'“This will be one version of him,” she said. “And maybe someday all the musicians he knew or all the people he slept with or all the people he has influenced so deeply will end up giving us their own Brion Gysins.”'

All quotes from "The Unknown Loved by the Knowns" by RANDY KENNEDY ( http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/arts/design/27gysin.html )

After reading about this man in the NYTimes I was kind of smitten at how he erases the lines between mediums of art and simplifying them. I don’t think we should destroy order within parachutes of ideas, but just don’t take them too seriously.