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8 May, 4 tweets, 2 min read
I've been spending Sundays posting old "Jugend" illustrations, often with a 'fantasy' quality, after Böcklin. Tomorrow, tomorrow. Today, a thing I've posted before, James Tissot, "The Challenge". I didn't know much about it. But today I googled one tidbit. 1/
Tissot was a society painter who was rubbished by Ruskin as a slickster fashionista. This hurt and "The Challenge" was his attempt to 'go serious'. This is funny to us because it just looks like, you know, fantasy art. Kinda light fetish-y. (No kink-shaming tho!) 2/
But there was this period, in Britain as well as on the continent - in Germany (although Böcklin was Swiss) - when fantasy seemed 'modernist'. I would like to know more about the moment 'when fantasy was modern', then rejected as unsuitable, in visual art. 3/
It's intuitive to us why this stuff doesn't fit with 'Modern art'. But I don't know the story of how this thought got thought through. Burnes-Jones is full of fantasy elements and fell out of favor after being fashionable. Alma-Tadema's stock fell spectacularly quite suddenly. 4/

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More from @jholbo1

John Holbo Profile picture
9 May
bostonreview.net/race-politics/… This is good. Scholar-activism - CRT folks and others - is going to mean sometimes scholarship takes a backseat to activism. That's not intolerable - not even bad - but it does mean stuff should get pushed pack on, in a scholarly sense. 1/
The 'ideal scholar' is some neutral, suspended mind, just weighing evidence - some Watcher figure on the moon. Sure, but that's not life. Scholarship involves advocacy and advocacy can be one-eyed and insistent, leading it to shade the truth, or sweep stuff under the rug. 2/
That's why you have other scholars. Scholar-activism is part of academic ecology. But it can go bad and get grifty, even. So, for its own good, and everyone else's it should get considerate pushback when it goes awry. All this is very obvious, in principle. 3/
Read 26 tweets
John Holbo Profile picture
7 May
Good literary criticism from @lionel_trolling! I proclaim myself the same. I, too, read Trilling on "Mansfield Park" but never the novel. I liked "The Liberal Imagination" so much it confused me into an untenable view of liberalism for years. 1/
It all started in college, loving Orwell's essays - not just the one on "Politics and the English Language" everyone reads. Orwell's novels? - meh. Later, one book that had an outsized influence on my own writing, maybe thinking style, is William Empson's "Argufying". 2/
Check it at the Internet Archive (but you have to check it out.) I'll snippet the opening from the title essay. This caused me to read Donne seriously but also to think about the liminal place of argument in various genres. 3/ archive.org/details/argufy… Image
Read 12 tweets
John Holbo Profile picture
20 Apr
Maybe I'll pile on this thread later, with the rest. For starters, I think we can agree Biden don't jive. The word is 'jibe'. But it's one of those words people get wrong. 1/
So I got curious. Whence 'jibe'? The odd thing is that this usage is opposite to other senses, seemingly. 'To jibe' is to sneer; or steer a boat in a way I wouldn't describe as 'harmonizing' with the wind. 2/ google.com/search?client=…
The OED says it's a mystery but the first instance, from 1813 - "it curricle-izes or gibes in but too well with the passing anecdotes of the day" - seems to suggest a clear solution and it isn't the phonetic connection to 'chime'. 3/
Read 13 tweets
John Holbo Profile picture
19 Apr
New OBZ! Some delicate color here - lest one think Nietzche feels only contempt for these derpy denizens of the town. Do not these spots of color indicate an earnest wish on Z's, hence N's, part that the organ grinder not merely have his organs ground? 1/ onbeyondzarathustra.com/copy-of-gdfd-p…
Speaking of which! There is no 'team' in 'intestinal', but there is an 'I' and a 'test'. We are really getting to "Ye have made your way from worm to man, and much within you is still worm ..." 2/
Look at the little guy's face? Is he not - we? As Alexander Pope writes:

"So morning insects that in muck begun,
Shine, buzz, and fly-blow in the setting sun."

[I'll bet those lines crossed your mind, too.]

3/
Read 6 tweets
John Holbo Profile picture
19 Apr
Done and DONE.
If this doesn't get 'likes' I'm complaining to the manager.
Incredible. Still only a few likes for a meme that has something for everyone: Neoliberals with a sense of detachment; anti-neoliberals; people who aren’t sure what ‘neoliberalism’ means.
Read 4 tweets
John Holbo Profile picture
19 Apr
Kerr BOTH thinks we should be talking about it as a thing that could be good AND that we are only permitted to use a word for it that implies it couldn't be good, 'court-packing'? C'mon, pick a lane. 1/
The D's need a philosophy of the judicial branch to counter 'originalist' argle-bargle from the right. 'Originalism' is a rhetoric not a philosophy (well, it's a bad philosophy, but so are most rhetorics.) But it's been hugely successful. 2/
D's need to counter that, undesirable as this is, the SC is now thoroughly politicized. Maybe it's all the fault of that darned Earl Warren, but, whatever, in recent decades the right has seen to it that its 6 R-appointed Justices are expected to be reliable partisans. 3/
Read 7 tweets

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