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Okay, news from yesterday. After getting my blog entry for the day posted, and writing the one I later lost, I didn't do much till evening when I suddenly wrote my second blog entry for Schoolwide. It came quickly, but I'd had it in my mind for a while, and it was short. It needs a little further work that I hope to get to eventually today if my computer lets me. I also finished the last volume of Robert Jordan's series that he wrote before he died. Finally most of the plot lines have ended happily. The series conclusion is pretty clear, but will be fun to read--assuming it's written, as I've heard it will be. I'm not longer hooked on Jordan, so will not soon start reading the three or four volumes in the series I've not yet read. Instead, I started one of the Rex Stouts I now have on hand thanks to an Amazon purchase that arrived a week or so ago.
As for news about today, it seems the prednisone is working remarkably well. I had just a few twinges in the night and feel more or less normal today. An occasional fleeting bit of knee pain is it. Otherwise, a near-zero for the day so far--just the effort to get a nothing blog entry posted.
May 10: Today, a little of my standard crankery:
"Anything is art if an artist says it is."
--Marcel Duchamp
"No one is an artist unless Bob Grumman says so."
--Bob Grumman
And: who gets to say what is not art? Nullinguists love Duchamp's nihilism (politically incorrect question: do more homosexual than heterosexual intellectuals go for nihilism as a defense against being negatively defined?) but I consider it moronic. Except that, yes, it should give one pause, make one perhaps more reflectively consider just what art is (answer: not untilitry).
I think it unlikely too many people will allow me to be the final arbiter on who is, who not, an artist, but my claim should also give pause, make on perhaps more reflectively sonsider just who should get to define terms? My pal Geof thinks it should just be left up to the lowest common denominator. I don't think it really is most of the time, though it is too often. Mostly, I think trades coin and define names for their tools and products--leading members of them coming up with different names that their colleagues eventually, informally, vote on. Then there are commentators on trades, especially the high-culture trades like poetry, who make up terms that the people in the trades then vote on the same way. Ditto mass-audience commentators, who are responsible for the most egregiously stupid terminology, which is also the most popular.
But, Anny (who in a New-Poetry thread had written irately about how many of her high school students plagiarize), what is formal education except compulsory plagiarism? The teacher says ABC, and the pupil writes ABC. Or, in the few best classes, applies ABC.
My attitude is pretty horrible. It is that if you have the . . . wrong genes, like I do, you--well, compose mathematical poems, after going your own failing way through school. If you don't, then you produce ABCs all your life.
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