colorful icing

A title that was cake decoration.

sign of the times

Passing the Crate & Barrel, I noticed in the window display there was a bookcase full of books but all the spines were turned to the inside, so you could read no titles. All you could see were the blank vertical edges of the bindings and pages facing outward. A decorative choice at end of the age of the physical book?

haunted importantly

I suppose there is something in my Scottish blood which distrusts the Baroque, feeling there is something vaguely dishonest in using structural devices for decorative purposes. But it is more importantly true that my reservations are because it is an approach that dotes on the surface—whereas my chief interest is focused on the interior of things. I enjoy surfaces, I delight in Italy, I find great pleasure in Veronese, but the Rembrandt self-portraits are far, far more important to me. As the Giotto Madonnas are more valuable than those of Raphael. I relish the physical surface of a woman, but I am importantly haunted by the ghost inside.

Jack Gilbert, “Real Nouns,” 19 American Poets of the Golden Gate (Harcourt Brace, 1984)

[Collected Poems of Jack Gilbert released this week.]

carpet paradigm

We can see the farthest development of Glasgow painting in the work of Edward Hornel, George Henry and David Gauld around 1889-90…In these canvases a fine line was trodden between decoration and narrative, and between a deep pictorial space and the shallow colour field. As one German critic noted, these works ‘approach the border where painting ends and the Persian carpet begins.

[….] we are concerned with a greater degree of abstraction and with the growing autonomy of pictorial elements and decorative motifs. This principle of convergence has been called the ‘carpet paradigm’. By the mid-1880s, for a painting to be likened to a carpet or tapestry was, in Post-Impressionist circles, a singular point of praise.

—David Brett, C. R. Mackintosh, The Poetics of Workmanship (Harvard Univ. Press, 1992)

enemy of decoration

Seferis quotes Cavafy’s critics…
“Cavafy's method is always to use the most frugal and anti-poetic phrase for the expression of his poetic ideas.” He is “the implacable enemy of any kind of decoration.”

Then Seferis says…
There is no doubt of the fact that “Cavafy stands at the boundary where poetry strips herself in order” (as I have said elsewhere) “to become prose.” No one has ever gone farther in this direction. He is the most anti-poetic (or a-poetic) poet I know…

—George Seferis, “Cavafy and Eliot—A Comparison,” On the Greek Style, translated by Rex Warner (Little Brown, 1966)