Friday, January 03, 2003

 
Berman's language carries you along, his style akin to his theory of modernism as the sweeping current along which "all that is solid melts into air." For him, in modernism and modernity, we MUST give up satisfaction for infinite self-development and constant revolution. Despite his enthusiasm for the possibilities of modernism and the potentials that change unleashes (as a famous Buddhist monk says, because things change, all is possible), his very optimism becomes oppressive. Heavy to bear, heavier to live under--a force in which individuals contribute to movements and only movements carry people into the future.


His chapter on the "underdevelopment" of Saint Petersburg resonates most with me. A dream of modernity that the real city and its citizens invoke and imagine, a floating city throwing a long shadow over the grounded one. Berman speaks of the dreaming of modernity as even more modern than that of the normative modern experience of Baulairean Paris. In tracing the movement of underground men writing themselves into equality to that of the intelligentsia coming out into the streets to shout for equality, Berman gives a turbulent political history romance for me. A seductive idea of modernism and modernity opening writers and streets.


From his bibliography, a wish list reading list:

1. F.T. Marinetti's War, the World's Only Hygiene, 1911-1915, in R. Flint's Marinetti: Selected Writings (90-91).

2. Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension

3. "Modernist Painting," 1961, in The New Art, ed. G. Battock (100-110).
4. Bell, Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (note: beware of its contradictions)
5. G. Lichtheim, Origins of Socialism, 1969
6. T. Zeldin, France, 1848-1945:
7. G. Stent, Coming of the Golden Age: A View of the End of Progress, 1969
8. Small is Beautiful
9. Octavio Paz, Alternating Current
10. P. Hulten, Modernolatry
11. Zamyatin, We
12. Biely, Petersburg as trans. by Maguire
13. Russian Modernism: Culture and the Avant-Garde, 1890-1930, 1976
14. Artists in Revolution: Portraits of the Russian Avant-Garde, 1905-1925, 1977
15. Osip Mandelstam, Selected Poems
posted by Open Mouth 1:45 AM

Monday, December 30, 2002

 
Ug. Spent about 20 min drafting notes for Marshall Berman's "All that is solid melts into air: the experience of modernity," only to have blogger mess up in that computer way.
posted by Open Mouth 1:41 AM