On Tuesday I
finished typing Monday’s lecture notes. I re-read Percy Shelley’s “Hymn to
Intellectual Beauty” and wrote a comparison between it and the scene of the
vision pf Astarte in Lord Byron’s "Manfred".
I finished skimming through all the appendixes in the back of my edition
of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
I finished Umberto Ecco’s On
Ugliness, which has an interesting chapter on Romanticism. I started
organizing some of the notes I have made for my essay:
The sublime
imposed a radical change in the way people saw ugliness. The aesthetic of the
sublime came just before the gothic novel along with a new sensibility towards
ruins. That which can frighten but not actually harm us produces delight.
In his System
of Aesthetics (1839), Weiss saw ugliness as an integral part of beauty.
Hugo puts beauty
in coincidence with ugliness. “Beauty has only one type. Ugliness has
thousands. Contact with the deformed has conferred the sublime upon its
portrayal in art. What we call ugly is a detail from a great whole that eludes
us.”
Frankenstein’s
monster was perhaps the first unhappy ugly man of Romanticism followed by
Quasimodo. It is interesting that the producers of the first and many
subsequent film productions of Frankenstein gave Victor Frankenstein a
Quasimodolike assistant in his experiments.
Godwin Political
Justice: The bitterest torment is uninterrupted solitude.
Wollstonecraft
Vindication: “If the hideous monster burst suddenly on our sight, fear and
disgust rendering us more severe than man ought to be … We cannot read the
heart.”
Clement Greenberg
said of Jackson Pollock that all profoundly original art looks ugly at first.
Aristotle in
Poetics talks of creating beauty through the masterful imitation of the
repulsive.
Arthur Shopenhauer
on the Object of Art: “The feeling of the sublime arises from the fact that,
something entirely unfavourable to the will becomes the object of pure
contemplation, so that such contemplation can only be maintained by turning
away from the will.” Beautiful images whet the appetite rather than invite
contemplation.
Beauty is distant.
Ugliness is too close. (Me). It could be that the very fact of improved health
and longevity has exposed us to forms of deterioration that early death
sheltered us from. In defence of our sanity we must accept diversity and alter
our understanding of beauty.
The members of the
upper classes have always seen the tastes of the lower classes as disagreeable
or ridiculous.
A stranger told
Socrates that he was a monster and that it could be seen in his body. Socrates
replied, “You know me!”
I had two potatoes and some
asparagus with gravy for dinner and a banana with raspberries and honey for
dessert and watched The Rifleman.
This story was mostly comical but
with some dramatic elements. A young lady named Rebecca arrives in North Fork
on the stage. Mark McCain is so stricken with how pretty she is that he goes
into the depot to talk with her. It turns out that she has been away but she’s
from North Fork. Mark goes to bring his father to meet her and it becomes
obvious that he is looking for a new mother. Lucas later explains to Mark that
Rebecca is closer to the boy’s age than she is to his. Meanwhile a few men have
been asking questions about Lucas. Two of them turn out to be Rebecca’s
brothers who think that Lucas has designs on their sister. The other man is a
gunman named Battle who’s been asking where Lucas lives. Rebecca’s brothers
don’t believe that Lucas isn’t after their sister. The misunderstanding leads
to a contest of fisticuffs that Lucas wins. Meanwhile Battle hooks up with two
other men, Roy Thursday and a henchman. It turns out that Lucas was responsible
for Roy going to prison and so the three are out to kill him. There is a
gunfight at the McCain ranch. Lucas has taken out two of the men but the third
has the drop on him. Just then there is a shot and the man drops. Rebecca’s
brothers have saved Lucas. Rebecca had overheard from the stage that Battle had
planned on killing someone and didn’t know who it was until she saw them follow
Lucas out if town.
Rebecca was played by Sherry
Jackson, who played Danny Thomas’s daughter on Make Room for Daddy.
Her brother Pete was played by Dan
Blocker, who played Hoss Cartwright on Bonanza.
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