Well, happy Global Warming to you all. Try to look on the bright side, will you? Look at me, I'm aging like a good steak, mold and all. And do I complain? Well..., if you wouldn't mind....
I bit off more than I could chew. I just spent a month working on a post that was the equivalent of a master's thesis. For whom you ask? Well, I suppose in my Lancanian mode I would say The Other. Do I know what the fuck I'm talking about? Well, I knew, today, enough to delete the whole mess.
You might have noticed that my posts, maybe the last two or three were getting more longish, which, is fine, for me I guess, but uh, (duh), I tried to take on a subject that was way too broad for me and about which I had to learn as I wrote. I gave up. Do you want to know what the topic was? Well, no, I won't tell. Mum's the word. I may confess at sometime in the future, but I'll say this: It was a month of research that was at times enjoyable, but I'm sort of proud of myself for seeing that it was too much.
While I take the summer off from thinking, my plan is to involve myself with The Modernist Journal Project, something the late Robert Scholes and others put together. I'm on a book ban, (again,) this time at the behest of my wife, so it's more serious. And the subject of magazines is one I've had on the back burner for awhile. (Years.) I actually wrote a nice paper in college about a magazine.., which was the start of my thinking along those lines.....
I will leave you, as together we broil to death in the too hot sun, with two clippings that I plan to use as sources of contemplation.
Henri Bergson married Louise Neuberger, a cousin of Marcel Proust, in 1891. (The novelist served as best man at Bergson's wedding.) Henri and Louise Bergson had a daughter, Jeanne, born deaf in 1896. Bergson's sister, Mina Bergson (also known as Moina Mathers), married the English occult author Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, a founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and the couple later relocated to Paris.
Wikipedia
And the following, part of an essay by Gary Lachman;
"The best book I know for making clear exactly how much modern art owes the occult is The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890—1985
by Maurice Tuchman, a massive catalogue from an exhaustive exhibition I
had the good fortune to see many years ago. While recently re-reading
some of the catalogue's articles, I came upon a few names with
considerable frequency. Certainly, the history of the occult's influence
on art is filled with many illustrious figures, including Jacob Boehme,
Swedenborg, Paracelsus, and Eliphas Levi, for example. The roll call of
artists so influenced reads like a who's who of the cutting edge:
Marcel Duchamp, Piet Mondrian, Kasimir Malevich, Frantisek Kupka, and
Joseph Beuys, to name a few. However, as I said, certain names kept
turning up, especially in the period preceding the birth of abstract
art. These were the Theosophists Annie Besant, C. W. Leadbeater, and
Rudolf Steiner.
The artist upon whom these leading Theosophists
made the strongest imprint was the one most associated with creating
non-representational art, Wassily Kandinsky. Just when the first
abstract painting was made is still a matter of debate. Some say it was
Kandinsky's First Abstract Water Colour in 1910; others give
the honor to the Czech Frantisek Kupka. But Kandinsky is the name most
associated with the new approach to painting."
From the Theosophical Society webpage; by Gary Lachman.
