The Borders of Things

On The Things We Love

I know this is always a hot topic among many of us, but I'm not trying to rehash the old arguments. Just some thoughts.

I've had a long day. I spent the late afternoon talking about Marcel Duchamp, that most singular avant-gardiste. who is very difficult to read and excessively playful at the same time. The mantra repeated by a lot of the predecessors of Duchamp, like Eliot and Pound, talked all the time about the necessity for difficult art.

And generally I agree with them.

Marcel Duchamp is a difficult artist. John Cage is a difficult musician. Ezra Pound is a difficult poet. They draw me back, because difficult things do.

But tonight I wanted a different kind of difficult. I wanted to listen to one of my new favorite Iron and Wine songs, The Trapeze Swinger. I keep coming back to it because I love it. And I don't know how it makes me better, although I KNOW it.

I don't know if Duchamp makes me better. I know he makes me smarter. I know he is actually addressing "Aesthetic Questions" and that that is important and worth something.

I also know that Sam Beam makes me happy and live in a way that's just . . . better. Not that art's ultimate virtue is making us better.

And I know that the way Sufjan Steven's sings about John Wayne Gacy, Jr. makes me feel like crying in a way that I scares me.

Will Duchamp, or Pound for that matter, ever make me cry? I doubt it.

Eliot can come close.

So can George Oppen.

Does this make me some sort of sentamentalist, the worst kind of ciritc out there?

Generally, I don't know.

Posted by pjaussen at November 21, 2005 09:32 PM | TrackBack