Atanas Ourkouzounov's Prélude retrouvé hommage à Debussy w read-along score

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGxwMgPQr2c

heard on a school bus ca. 1988 one drizzly Oregon morning

You're all a bunch of 
posers!  I liked White Lion
before they were cool!

***

The statement was unforgettable and the rejoinder was the same, "White Lion still sucks!"

Only decades later did I realize the lines about White Lion so easily lent themselves to being presented as a haiku

You can't fix a cracked window by staring at it through a mirror--a riff on metaphors used to describe the arts and criticism by way of windows, mirrors and lamps

 I am about to hyper-extend and torture a few metaphors here.  Debates and conversations about what the arts are and what they are expected to do have been going on for a couple of centuries. I have been reading books on theologies aesthetics, music theory and formal analysis, and a bit of critical race theory in the last year. I have been finding that a couple of meta-metaphors keep cropping up, such as the idea of the arts as a mirror and the idea of the arts as a lamp. I have also come across ideas that the arts, particularly music, can be a kind of window. Of course I have also read debates back and forth that, to stretch these metaphors in advance, ask whether the lamp has burned out, whether the window even opens up to anything, and whether the mirror distorts everything you might think you see through it.  

Take literary criticism, is it really even an art or is it a science? A science?  Who would even regard literary criticism as even potentially being scientific in any way?  If the scientific methods allow you to observe something, propose a hypothesis about it and then conduct experiments to prove or disprove the viability of the hypothesis how has literary criticism ever been a science?  There have been, obviously, those who have contended literary criticism is/was a science and yet that fad (however recurring) is part of the reception history of literary criticism as a discipline.  If the arts “are” mirrors then criticism may as well be the mirror through which you look at other mirrors.  Or is that stretching the metaphor too far already?

 

The metaphors will stretch a lot further as we move along.

links for the weekend, riffs on celibacy at Mere Orthodoxy, Freddie deBoer on the mania for the sexual orientation of cartoon characters as a wrong kind of entitlement, Alastair Roberts on the probably not-helpful nature of Aaron Renn's `negative world' taxonomy

A bit unusually for a weekend of posting I decided to retroactively make this the penultimate post of the night rather than the formal close.  I just felt that what I wrote in "You can't fix a cracked window by staring at it through a mirror" is more what I wanted to close the weekend with in publication order even if I 'technically' wrote this links for the weekend later.  That's how choosing a publication time can work.

There's variations on a theme for this one, though in the new iteration of Mere Orthodoxy you might not even be able to read the first link by the time you see this.  Stuff is now visible for a week and if you didn't catch it the week of you have to be a subscriber to read older entries.  Such is not the case with the materials in the chain.