Houses of Games (Con men, forgers, artists)

I was delighted when I came across a reference to one of my favorite movies in James Surowiecki's column on Bernard Madoff in the January 12, 2009, issue of The New Yorker:

In David Mamet’s movie “House of Games,” the grifter played by Joe Mantegna explains to a former mark, “It’s called a confidence game. Why? Because you give me your confidence? No. Because I give you mine.”

This description of the scene is not quite right, but that's not a problem. I've always liked the overtones of "House of Games" that have to do with the relationship between artists and audiences: there's a great deal of trust and confidence involved on both sides.

Compare Peter Schjeldahl on art forgers (specifically, on the Dutch forger Han van Meegeren; the article is a review of two biographies of the forger) in The New Yorker from October 27, 2008 (this is the last paragraph; it is on page four of the on-line version):

Art forgery is among the least despised of crimes, except by its victims—the identity of those victims being more than exculpatory, for many people. Art is unique among universally esteemed creative fields in its aloofness from a public audience. Its economic base is a club of the wealthy, who share power to impose or repress value with professional and academic élites. Lopez’s muckraking of van Meegeren scants a fact that Dolnick merrily exploits: the forger gratifies class resentment precisely because he is a pariah. Unlike the subversive gestures of a Marcel Duchamp, say, his outrages will not become educational boilerplate in museums and universities. They are impeccably destructive, tarring not only pretensions to taste but the credibility of taste in general. The spectre of forgery chills the receptiveness—the will to believe—without which the experience of art cannot occur. Faith in authorship matters. We read the qualities of a work as the forthright decisions of a particular mind, wanting to let it commandeer our own minds, and we are disappointed when it doesn’t. If we are disappointed enough, when the named artist is familiar, we get suspicious. But we can never be certain in every case that someone—a veiled mind—isn’t playing us for suckers. Art lovers are people who brave that possible chagrin.

Satires and Epistles of Horace Imitated

I was struck by the three lines from Pope's "Essay on Criticism" that have become proverbial, and one thing I noted in "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot," the first of his "Satires and Epistles of Horace Imitated," was the appearance of the phrase "Damn with faint praise"; later, a line appears that reminded me of a web site I have occasionally followed links to: "Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?" (The web site is called "Butterflies and Wheels.")

Describing his childhood, Pope produces this couplet, in which "numbers" means "metrical verses":

As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame,
I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.

So verses began coming to him even as a child, and never stopped doing so. But at least they stop while he sleeps, as he points out that he "can sleep without a poem in my head." I like that puzzling image, not because I agree with it, but because sometimes I wish I could "sleep without a song in my head," when a song heard during the day haunts my dreams all night, and even the dreamless periods seem to follow the same chords.

Still, in the "First Satire of the Second Book of Horace," a dialogue between P and F (Pope and Fortescue, to whom the poem is dedicated, Pope responds to F's suggestion that he ought to stop writing:

... Not write? But then I think,
And for my soul I cannot sleep a wink.

All poets know that feeling: if you don't get up and write something down, you're not going back to sleep. And sometimes, to paraphrase David Mamet, only writing can stop the thinking, all that terrible noise in there.

*

I won't write a separate post on The Dunciad, which I found rather slow going, but I did find a few things worth noting, first and foremost "The Cave of Poverty and Poetry," to which all poets always fear being banished. I was also amused to find the line "something betwixt a Heidegger and an owl," which I would anachronistically read as a reference to a German philosopher and to Athena, but it turns out that this Heidegger was a famously ugly man who was "master of revels" for George II.

The Sensation of Writing

George Szirtes has some interesting thoughts on the "sensation of writing" (partly in response to Don Paterson's essay on "the lyric principle" in the latest Poetry Review). At the end of his post, GS writes:

"I would like to open this line of thought to others and invite any poets reading this to send me their account of the sensation of writing. Keep it honest, keep it simple. As simple as it will go, at any rate."

So I thought I'd spread the word on GS's interesting call for ideas.

Here's my take on it, at least today's. It involves three quotations:

1. In a profile in the New Yorker back in the 1990s, David Mamet said something like this: "Writing is the only thing that stops the thinking, you know. It's the only way to turn off all that dreadful noise in there." I've always loved that line, as it perfectly captures one sensation I have when writing: that it fully occupies my otherwise utterly restless mind, turning off even the almost endless musical soundtrack that plays in the back of my head (picking up on whatever I happen to have heard most recently, whether it be the music of a commercial, the theme song to a children's program I watched with my kids, or Thelonious Monk). [If anybody who reads this has the complete New Yorker in electronic form, can you try to find that profile of Mamet for me and check his precise words?)

2. One of my touchstones for a long time has been Jorge Luis Borges's "Borges and I": "I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar." I recognize myself less in my own writing than in the writing of others (as all these quotations suggest), but in the act of writing, there is even a third person present: not the one who will later have written, and not the name that attaches itself to what that one will later have written, but the one who is writing. The one whose mind is quiet?

3. In Anna Karenina, Levin mows: "The longer Levin mowed, the oftener he experienced those moments of oblivion when it was not his arms which swung the scythe but the scythe which seemed to mow of itself, a body full of life and consciousness of its own, as though by magic, without a thought being given to it, the work did itself regularly and carefully. Those were the most blessed moments." The "most blessed moments" in creative work are those moments when the mind is quiet, the self disappears, and the work does itself, "regularly and carefully."

Okay, I did not "keep it simple," George, but it is honest! :-)

Addendum:

And then there is the sensation of not-writing, or between-writing:

AFTERMATH

Another journey underway,
the painter on the foredeck of
the overloaded ferryboat
sees, past the sea wall and out
over the straits, the aftermath
of sunlight from behind the clouds,
a brighter form of rain. The harbor
opposite moves from blur into focus
as the ferry moves, its wake
first spray in the painter's face.
Light and cloud and mist: what is
to be captured on canvas. He'll hold
the brush in the air the way the ship,
sailing without a sail, hangs
before it falls again down on
the waves. Behind him, every stroke
he's ever painted; the unpainted
before him, this passage from one harbor
to another, the ferry rolling,
with every breaker, deeper down
in what is, what will have been.

(The Reader 16; Cabinet d'Amateur)