For some more information on early photography in China see here. To see 215 early Chinese photographs see here.

Hope you enjoyed these. Anyone with further knowledge of Chin-san Long is encouraged to contact me.

Art Anniversary

By Robert Musil

If, as is the case from time to time, you happen to reencounter a play or a novel which twenty years ago grabbed hold of your soul, along with the souls of many others, you experience something which has actually never been explained, since apparently everyone takes it for granted: the sparkle is gone, the importance has disappeared, dust and moths fly off at your touch. But why this aging must take place, and what exactly is altered in the process, this no one knows. The comedy of all art anniversaries consists of the old admirers making solemn, uneasy faces, as if their collar-button had slipped down behind their shirt front.

It is not the same as reencountering a flame of your youth who has not grown any prettier over the years. For in the latter case you no longer even comprehend what once made you stutter, although at least it has something to do with the touching transitory nature of all earthly pursuits and the notoriously fickle nature of love. But a work of literature that you reencounter is like an old sweetheart who for twenty years has been embalmed in alcohol: not a hair is different, and not a fleck of her rosy epidermis has changed. A shiver rolls down your spine! Now you are supposed to be once-again who you were: one semblance demands another. It is a stretching torture, in the course of which the soles have remained in place but the rest of the body has been twisted a thousand times around the revolving world!

Reliving a former art experience is also different from meeting the other ghosts of old arousals and infatuations: enemies, friends, wild nights, passions endured and surmounted. All this and the conditions that surround it sink into oblivion as soon as the fling is over: It has fulfilled some purpose and was absorbed by the fulfillment; it was a denial in one’s life or a stage in the development of your personality. But bygone art served nothing; its former effect has disappeared unnoticed, lost itself along the way; it is a stage for no one. For do you really feel yourself to be standing on a higher plateau when looking down upon a once-admired work? You stand no higher, just elsewhere! Indeed, to tell the truth, even if, while standing before an old painting, you realize with a comfortable, hardly suppressed yawn that you no longer need be enthusiastic about it, you are still far from being enthused by the fact that there are new paintings to be admired. You simply feel yourself to have slipped from one timely compulsion to another, which by no means excludes the fact that you went about it perfectly voluntarily and actively; voluntary and involuntary behavior are not after all direct opposites, they also blend in equal parts, so that ultimately, you involuntarily overindulge in voluntary behavior, or voluntarily the involuntary, as is often the case in life.

Still, in this elsewhere you will find a remarkable dose of transcendence. It is, we realize if appearances do not deceive, related to fashion. Fashion, after all, is not only marked by the one characteristic, namely that you find it ridiculous in retrospect, but also by the other, that as long as a fashion lasts, you can hardly imagine taking seriously the opinions of a man who is not dressed from head to toe just as ridiculously as you yourself are. I would not know what in our admiration of antiquity could shield a budding philosopher from suicide, if not the fact that Plato and Aristotle wore no pants; pants have contributed far more than you might think to the intellectual development of Europe, for without them, Europeans would most likely never have gotten over their classical-humanistic inferiority complex vis-a-vis the antique. Thus we hold our time’s most profound feeling - that we would not barter with anyone who wasn’t dressed in contemporary clothing. And even of art we only feel for that same reason a sense of progress with each new year; although it may simply be a coincidence that art exhibits, like the latest fashion, appear in the spring and fall. This sense of progress is not pleasant. It reminds you, in the most extreme way, of a dream in which you are seated on a horse and cannot get off, because the horse never stands still. You would gladly take pleasure in progress, if only it took a pause. If only we could stop for a moment on our high horse, look back, and say to the past: Look where I am now! But already the uncanny process continues, and after experiencing it several times, you begin to feel queasy in the stomach with those four strange legs trotting beneath you, constantly carrying you forward.

But what conclusions may we draw from the fact that it is just as ridiculously unpleasant to look at old fashions (so long as they have not yet become costumes), as it is ridiculously unpleasant to look at old pictures, or the outmoded facades of old-style houses, and to read yesterday’s books? Clearly, there is no other conclusion except that we become unpleasant to ourselves the moment we gain some distance from what we were. This stretch of self-loathing begins several years before now and ends approximately with our grandparents, that is, the time to which we begin to be indifferent. It is only then that what was is no longer outdated, but begins to be old; it is our past, and no longer that which passed away from us. But what we ourselves did and were lies almost completely in the realm of self-loathing. It would indeed be intolerable to be reminded of everything that we once considered most important, and the great majority of people would remain surprisingly little moved if, at an advanced age, you were to show them again, in the form of a movie, their grandest gestures and once most stirring scenes.

How are we to make sense of this? Apparently inherent to the nature of temporal matters is a certain degree of exaggeration, a “superplus” and superabundance. Even a slap in the face requires more rage than you can be accountable for. This enthusiasm of “now” burns up, and as soon as it has become superfluous, it is extinguished by forgetting, a very productive and fertile activity by means of which we only really first become - and are ever and anew reconstituted as - that easygoing, pleasant, and consequent person for whose sake we excuse everything on earth.

Art rocks the boat in this regard. Nothing emanates from it that could endure without enthusiasm. It is, as it were, nothing but enthusiasm without bones and ashes, pure enthusiasm that burns for no reason and nonetheless is stuck in a frame or in between the covers of a book, as though nothing had happened. It never becomes our past, but always remains that which has passed from us. It is understandable then that we should look back at it every ten or twenty-five years with an uneasy eye!

Only great art, that indeed which alone, strictly speaking, merits being called art, constitutes an exception. But the latter has never really fit that well in the society of the living.

-

Hope you enjoyed.

Ne’er take a wife till thou hast a house (& a fire) to put her in.

Love well, whip well.

Hunger never saw bad bread.

Beware of the young Doctor & the old Barber.

The poor have little, beggars none, the rich too much, enough not one.

After 3 days men grow weary, of a wench, a guest, & weather rainy.

He that drinks fast, pays slow.

The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of a wise man is in his heart.

Men & Melons are hard to know.

He’s the best physician that knows the worthlessness of the most medicines.

Keep your mouth wet, feet dry.

Where bread is wanting, all’s to be sold.

Old Maids lead Apes there, where the old Batchelors are turn’d to Apes.

He that has neither fools, whores nor beggars among his kindred, is the son of a thunder-gust.

He that lives upon Hope, dies farting.

Never praise your Cyder, Horse, or Bedfellow.

Wealth is not his that has it, but his that enjoys it.

Let thy maidservant be faithful, strong, and homely.

Necessity never made a good bargain.

There’s many witty men whose brains can’t fill their bellies.

Pain wastes the Body, Pleasures the Understanding.

There’s more old Drunkards than old Doctors.

She that paints her Face, thinks of her Tail.

Poverty wants some things, Luxury many things, Avarice all things.

A Lie stands on 1 leg, Truth on 2.

Great wits jump (says the Poet) and hit his Head against the Post.

If you know how to spend less than you get, you have the Philosophers-Stone.

Why does the blind man’s wife paint herself?

Force shits upon Reason’s Back.

He that speaks much, is much mistaken.

He that would live in peace & at ease, Must not speak all he knows, nor judge all he sees.

Would you persuade, speak of Interest, not of Reason.

Teach your child to hold his tongue, he’ll learn fast enough to speak.

He that is rich need not live sparingly, and he that can live sparingly need not be rich.

He does not possess Wealth, it possesses him.

Onions can make ev’n Heirs and Widows weep.

A learned blockhead is a greater blockhead than an ignorant one.

The greatest monarch on the proudest throne, is oblig’d to sit upon his own arse.

Poor Dick, eats like a well man, and drinks like a sick.

Well done is better than well said.

He that pursues two Hares at once, does not catch one and lets t’other go.

Great talkers should be cropt, for they’ve no need of ears.

Who has deceiv’d thee so oft as thy self?

Write with the learned, pronounce with the vulgar.

Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.

Wish not so much to live long as to live well.

Reading makes a full Man, Meditation a profound Man, discourse a clear Man.

Thou can’st not joke an Enemy into a Friend; but thou may’st a Friend into an Enemy.

How few there are who have courage enough to own their faults, or resolution enough to mend them!

Tis a strange forest that has no rotten wood in’t.
And a strange Kindred that all are good in’t.

Observe all men; thy self most.

-Richard Suanders.

Some are pretty “corny” in this day and age I guess, (the seemingly simplistic and “preachy” form of the proverb, or aphorism, itself is inherently hard to swallow for we moderns I think, is anyone bothering to coin new ones?) but c’mon: “He that lives upon Hope, dies farting.” That’s pure gold.

If you are into nuggets such as these, and those above are not enough to slake your thirst for Poor Richard’s varied wisdom, see:

600 proverbs from 1734-1747 by Benjamin Franklin. (more here, here, here, and here.)

For more on the almanac see:

here, here, here, here, here, here,  and for some insight into Franklin’s use of “chiasmus” see here.

Before you go, let me leave you with this:

“An empty bag cannot stand upright.”

True indeed.

In that celebrities are a wide-spread and shared point of associative reference I wonder how much they color our perception of the strangers all around us? Take the example pictured in the thumbnail above: Paul Giamatti.

During the period when the movie Sideways was moving through our culture like wildfire did the common perception of him physically combine with attributes of his character intellectually and emotionally, to form a kind of reference point for short, balding, goateed men everywhere? Which is to say during that period did our minds involuntarily find that strangers around us, of similar physical proportion, were a bit more endearing? Perhaps even a bit more amusing or likable? Did short, balding, goateed strangers everywhere, unfounded though it might be, grow slightly more well rounded and “fleshed-out”  in in the eyes of we judges?

An obvious example might be Michael Jackson impersonators. I have to assume that since his trial on charges of pedophilia, and the resulting shift of public opinion,  their interactions with strangers must have become more complex and their business less lucrative. Agreed? So why shouldn’t it be the same for more subtle variations?

For example:

Did horse-faced women walking the streets suddenly become a bit more attractive during sarah Jessica Parker’s ballyhooed stint on Sex and the City?

Did obese tackily-dressed grease-balls in the office-place become somewhat less laughable and simultaneously more imposing after the cast of The Soprano’s became popular?

Did severe-looking suited shrews seem even more hideous and shrew-like after Ann Coulter’s ascendance?

Did poindexters with glasses and bowl-cuts seem suddenly more attractive to the devious among the opposite sex after Bill Gates became the single richest man on the planet?

Did vacuous, squinty-eyed, good-ol-boys and bald, permanently scowling, humorless suits suddenly seem even less affective and trustworthy after Bush and Cheney’s second term began?

I’m not sure, that’s why I ask. But it does seem likely, even leaving aside my poor examples here, that celebrities which occupy easily recognizable physical archetypes must inform our judgement when it comes to the strangers around us, and let’s face it, really, everyone is a stranger.

What say ye?

All of the images from the book are digitized and on display in large scale at the McGill Library Page: Il Bestario Barocco. Some further information is available here. Hope you enjoyed.