What has praise and fame to do with poetry? What has seven editions (the book had already gone into no less) got to do with the value of it? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?

Ong could have used that quote as an epigraph to something. (From Orlando, which I just finished rereading. Harcourt 1956 edition, page 325)

Notice the telltale references to both faith and reason, to the distinction between the Declaration as a statement of truths and the Constitution as a means of protecting those truths (Lincoln’s apples of gold in pictures of silver), and to the question over the ultimate origin of rights.  Pure natural law argument.

Of course, the purest form of legal positivism these days comes from the conservatives and not from Obama or other moderates.  The legal positivism of Bork, Rehnquist, and Scalia, among others — the refusal to see our rights as emanating from anything greater than a majority’s sufferance — is partly a reaction to what those judges and justices understand to be a groundless Living Constitution.  For the average conservative jurist, discovering the Declaration’s truths in the Constitution seems just as touchy-feely as Living Constitution’s shifting, generational understanding.

This is why I believe moderates and liberals are closer to the Founders than the conservatives.  ”Verily I say unto you, that the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you.”  At least the Living Constitution has as its central premise that the Constitution has a heart.  And if moderates and liberals want to stop ceding the Constitution and the Founders to the states-rights conservatives, they may wish to examine natural law, perhaps starting with John Locke and Abraham Lincoln.  After all, few of Rick Santorum’s political views inexorably follow from natural law.

Art historians . . . write books full of praise and deep sentiments — about an art that yesterday was regarded as senseless.  By means of these books, they remove the hurdles over which art has long sine jumped, and set up new ones, which shti time are supposed to stay permanently and firmly in place. Engaged in this occupation, they fail to notice that they are building their barriers behind art rather than in front of it.  If they notice it tomorrow, then they will quickly write more books in order to remove their barriers one stage further.  And this occupation will continue unchanged until it is realized that the external principles of art can only be valid for the past and not for the future. . . . Theory is the lantern that illuminates the crystallize forms of yesterday and before. [On the Spiritual in Art, chapter 3]

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous, And say, If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets. [Matthew]

Speaking of which, Schjeldahl sounds like he would agree with Berger at least about Hals and photography:  “Hals showed them how candid technique could serve the direct registration of people and things as they really appear: art as an adept performance, in a streaming present tense.”

A parti is the central idea or concept of a building.  A parti [par-TEE] can be expressed several ways but is most often expressed by a diagram depicting the general floor plan organization of a building and, by implication, its experiential and aesthetic sensibility. . . .  [I]t is unlikely, if not impossible, to successfully carry a parti from an old project to a new project.  The design process is the struggle to create a uniquely appropriate parti for a project. [Emphasis original]

- Matthew Frederick, 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School, Thing #15

“The camera’s old as [bleep]; it looks like it’d steal your soul,” observes Allory Anderson, a hostess at Next Door, as Bob squeezes his way through the bar just after midnight. “But I’ve got two pictures of me on my fridge from him. I don’t have iPhone photos on my fridge.”

A physical photo, Bob says, is the presence of you in your absence. A photo is not for now or for Facebook. A photo is for later, when you’re gone. It is for finding in a shoe box.

Barthes would see this guy as the Grim Reaper, someone whose presence is explained by religion’s absence: “Photography may correspond to the intrusion, in our modern society, of an asymbolic Death, outside of religion, outside of ritual, a kind of abrupt dive into literal Death.  Life / Death: the paradigm is reduced to a simple click, the one separating the initial pose form the final print.”

I got more specific about ways to annotate.  Readers could find each of my eight means in the outline the original post linked to, but each means was described in the outline with little detail and with little reference to which purpose the means served.

Speaking of purposes of annotating, I went from three to four.  Instead of to establish territory, to create trails, and to learn to write, I’m doing to create trails, to interact with the author, to learn what the book teaches, and to learn to write (or at least learn how a book was written).  I included interaction with the author thanks to my reading of Ong, Calvino, and Rosenblatt. who redirected my thinking toward the author-reader relationship that was starving under my essentially New-Critical approach.

Of course, the best advice is ultimately that of Virginia Woolf, who, in her essay “How Should One Read a Book?” wrote:

The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.