Scrabble Art Quotes

...art is weaker than life - in the end I have a bag of letters to scrabble into order - rune tiles to cast my fate...

Short lives, bouncing harmlessly as a cloth doll on grandma’s lap. Small helpless states, pretentiousness garbed in the unintelligible, makers of disposable art, the zeal to make a scoop unstoppable, pacified by fresh news, of scrabbling sexy movements.

The boy was tied up under the table, scrabbling his way through an empty packet of biscuits, licking his fingers to gather the crumbs.The kitchen was freezing; Tina could see the warmth of her breath in the air. It got like that sometimes in winter. The cold got trapped inside.Her first glance had made the boy a dog, just a mongrel tied up to the table leg, but a second glance told the truth. People saw what they wanted to see. Tina hadn’t wanted to see the boy. She thought she had perfected the art of tunnel vision. There were a lot of things she didn’t want to see.But she saw everything in the kitchen, everything.She felt it too. The despair in the air had a familiar feel. Hopeless defeat. It came off the boy in waves and she had to hold on tight to prevent it knocking her over.

Total available Calories divided by Population equals Artistic-Technological Style. When the ratio Calories-to-Population is large—say, five thousand or more, five thousand daily calories for every living person—then the Artistic-Technological Style is big. People carve Mount Rushmore; they build great foundries; they manufacture enormous automobiles to carry one housewife half a mile for the purchase of one lipstick. Life is coarse and rich where C:P is large. At the other extreme, where C:P is too small, life does not exist at all. It has starved out. Experimentally, add little increments to C:P and it will be some time before the right-hand side of the equation becomes significant. But at last, in the 1,000 to 1,500 calorie range, Artistic-Technological Style firmly appears in self-perpetuating form. C:P in that range produces the small arts, the appreciations, the peaceful arrangements of necessities into subtle relationships of traditionally agreed-upon virtue. Think of Japan, locked into its Shogunate prison, with a hungry population scrabbling food out of mountainsides and beauty out of arrangements of lichens. The small, inexpensive sub-sub-arts are characteristic of the 1,000 to 1,500 calorie range.

To understand Bashō’s place in Japanese poetry, it’s useful to have some sense of the literary culture he entered. The practice of the fine arts had been central to Japanese life from at least the seventh century, and virtually all educated people painted, played musical instruments, and wrote poems. In 17th century Japan, linked-verse writing was as widespread and popular as card games or Scrabble in mid-20th-century America. A certain amount of rice wine was often involved, and so another useful comparison might be made to playing pool or darts at a local bar. The closest analogy, though, can be found in certain areas of online life today. As with Dungeons and Dragons a few years ago, or Worlds of War and Second Life today, linked verse brought its practitioners into an interactive community that was continually and rapidly evolving. Hovering somewhere between art-form and competition, renga writing provided both a party and a playing field in which intelligence, knowledge, and ingenuity might be put to the test. Add to this mix some of street rap’s boundary-pushing language, and, finally, the video images of You-Tube. Now imagine the possibility that a “high art” form of very brief films might emerge from You-Tube, primarily out of one extraordinarily talented young film-maker’s creations and influence. In the realm of 17th-century Japanese haiku, that person was Basho.

If you must be a slave to something, make it Scrabble or knitting or casserole cookery. Anything but fashion, where you must be the mistress of your fate.