Ballast Quarterly Review, V20n2, Winter 2004-2005
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University of Northern Iowa UNI ScholarWorks Ballast Quarterly Review Winter 2004 Ballast Quarterly Review, v20n2, Winter 2004-2005 Roy R. Behrens University of Northern Iowa, [email protected] Let us know how access to this document benefits ouy Copyright ©2005 Roy R. Behrens Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.uni.edu/ballast Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation Behrens, Roy R., "Ballast Quarterly Review, v20n2, Winter 2004-2005" (2004). Ballast Quarterly Review. 77. https://scholarworks.uni.edu/ballast/77 This Periodical is brought to you for free and open access by UNI ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Ballast Quarterly Review by an authorized administrator of UNI ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. + I • / II .B A L L A S T Q U A R --I Ballast Quarterly Review Vol ume 20 Nu mber 2 . Winter 2004-2005. Copyright © 2005 by Roy R. Behrens, editor, publisher a,nd art director. · ISSN l 093-5789-.'E-mail <[email protected]>. ROB ERT BALLAST is an acronym for B'o.oks Art Language DOUG L A-S- Logic Ambiguity Science and Teacliing ,'as 'N ell f A I RH U RST as a distant allusion to Blast, the short-lived - ("Melting Away") publ ic~tion foumled during World War I by (The act of writing] Wyndham Lewis, the Vorticist'artist and .w riter. is always partial: it BALLAST is mainly a pasti che of astonishing 1fn volves the choice passages from books, magazines, diaries and of so'me words rather other writings. Put differently, it is-a journal than others, and· devoted to wit, the rnntents of which are choice requires rejec intended to be insightful, amusing or thought tion: As Henry James provoking . obse rv,ed, '"Stopping, The purposes-of BALLAST are educational , that's art": the writer apolitical and noncommercial. It does not carry . must know what to advertisements, nor is it supposed to be , shut out, when to ~ purchased or sold. It is pub lished approximate shut up. • ' ly every three months, begi~ning in the fall (more or less) and ending in the summer. '"\ RALPH WALDO - To.subscribe to BALLAST or to or'der a gift EMERSOf'I subscription, simply send in a mailing address ' - No man should travel and five first class U.S. postage stamps for each · untif he has learned · single issue desired . In other words, to receive . the languag e of the BALLAST for on·e year ( four issues), we ask , > ' country he visits. thateach reader cbntr.i bute a total of tVy enty Otherwise he volun- . genuine unused postage stamps. Do no,tsend ' t arily ni al<es him self postage meter slips, nor do we accept,Orders by into a great baby-so phone or.e-mail. When subscribing , self-adh e si ve stamps a re·preferred. Short of that, send , helpless and so good-looking, antique or unusual stamps. In ridi culous·. • general we do.i:ig_t accept requests from outside the U.S. MURIEL SPARK (MomentoMori)The real ri ~eofd~mocracyinthe British Isles occurred in Scotland by means of Queen Victoria 's [weak ness of the] bladder. .. When she went to stay at Bal moral in her latter years a ·number of privie~ were caus ed to be built a·t the baci(, of little cottages whi ch had not previously possess ~d privies. This was to enable the Qu'een to go on her morriing drive round the countryside in comfort, and to descend from her carriage from time to time, ostensibly to visit the hu ..mble cottagers in their dwellings. Eventuall y, word went round that Queen Victo.ria was exceedingly democratic. Of course it was all · ·due to her little wea'knes s. But everyone copied the Queen· ~nd the idea spread, and, now you see·we have ·a great democracy. • ELIZABETH SMART (By Grand Centra l Station I Sat Down and Wept) I am over-run, CO V ER jungled in my bed, I am infested with a' · DANIEL WEISS menagerie of desires: my h.eart is eaten like a Wh ite Coo t (2004) dove, a cat scrambles in the cave of my sex, Wood, paint, na ils 25.75h x 14w x 2.Sd in hounds in my head obey a whipmaster who _ cries nothing but havoc as the hours test my endurance with an accumulation of tortures. Who, ifcl cried, would hear me among the .angelic orders? • · - T E R L Y REVIEW II LEF T ._ DANIEL WEISS Fa rmington Pain ting (2004) Wood, pain t, nails 14h x 11w x 1.2Sd in .. • • HEATHER McHUGH (in Poets Teaching Poets) [Heressay "Moving Means, Meaning Moves: Notes on Lyric Destination"] first took form as a lecture given in Bergen, Norway (a place where, as no tourist agency likes to tell you, it rains 305 days a year; in some senses, every destina tion is unexpected). I was there Jor one academic quarter,_without the benefit of any knowledge of Norwegian, and it reminded me of the general truth that poets bear a naive or estranged relation to language. For example, it kept striking me as concretely evocative that the word for speak w~s snakker: "Snakker du engelsk7" smacked of "Do you eat English?" (not the fast food of choice, in America) . And every time I saw that perfectly innocent Norwegian phrase meaning "Very good, " I was subject to a su0den sense of titillating oxymoron : the Norwegian reads • bare bra and cannot help packing, in an American eye, considerable wallop. • ART SCHOOL catalogs from the turn of the century are filled with reproductions of stu- , dent paintings that look like slavish copies ROSE of John Singer Sargent or Henri Toulouse MACAULAY Lautrec, and exhibjtions catalogs from the (Cre we Train) 1950s show hundreds of students works that Love's a disease. emulate abstract expressionism. The lesson I But curable .. draw froln looking at older art school catalogs Did you ever and graduation exhibitions is that.fifty years · look through a from now even the most di verse-looking work microscope at a will begin to seem quite homogeneous. Works drop of pond wate~? that seemed n.ew or promising will fade into You see plenty of what they really are : average works, mediocre love there. All the attempts to emulate the styles of the day. amoebae.getting That's depressing , I know: but it's what history married . I presume tea ches us. • they think it very e: citing and impor JAME s EL Kl N s Why Art Cannot Be Taught tant. We don 't. • (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois • Press, 2001 ), p. 68. • . JOSH BILLINGS Love iz like the meazles; we kant have it bad but on st, and the latter in _life we hav it the tuffer it goes with us. • f II BALLAST Q U A R ' - LES COLEMAN The hangman's wife wore a rope neckless. • RIGHT • DANIEL WEISS Air and Architecture 2 (2003) Wood, paint, cardboard box, nails 21 h x 12.Sw x 2.25d in [IN 1947 OR 194~. George A. Wolf, Jr was a young physician in New York . One weekend he was asked to take the emergency calls of one of his professors, who was John Dewey's doctor. The American philoso pher, who was in his late eighties] had gone for a walk on Fifth Avenue, slipped and hurt his shoulder. I was called to see him which I di in his apartment. The old gentleman was literally quivering in pain and his new wife was most apprehensive ... ! am an internalist but I remembered from medical school orthopedics a maneuver, somewhat old fashioned, said to reduce such dislocations occasionally. The patient was in so much pai rtJthat I decided to try the maneuver. It consisted of taking off my shoe, sitting on the foot of Dr. Dewey's bed, placing my sock covered foot in Dr. Dewey's armpit, grasping his hand and forearm on the affected side and gently pulling ... Suddenly, there was a feeling that the bone had slipped back into place. My memory tells me that it was a loud satisfying crack but my biol , gical training tells me ttiat both Dr. Dewey and I were so relieved, he of his pain and I of my apprehension, that the event was really very quiet. He stopped shaking, looked at me gratefully, and smiled a little smile. He~ said the appropriate thank you's, as did his wife. The amusing part was that as I put ~ foot in the suffering gentle man's armpit (axilla), I said, "e,ci rdon me, Dr. Dewey." GEORGE A. WOLF, JR, quoted in Robert Bruce Williams, ed .,John Dewey, Recollections (Washington DC: University Press of America, , 1970), pp. 172-173 . • AMERICAN BOOK designer Merle Armitage, who married four or five times, was notori ous for hi s lustiness. His friend Robert Purcell wrote; in Merle Armitage Was Here!, "In the world of lust, [Jimmy] Carter was a peanut compared to Merle Armitage." • ... T E R L Y REVIEW II ELIZABETH JENKINS (The Tortoise and the Hare) If you take a woman fishing, it has to be a dull one. Anybody lively scares away the fish . There's a special type of woman, in faf t, who is chosen for fishing holidays. My uncle LES COLEMAN' had a friend, old .,~en era I Mather, wbo used to You can sure that it take a particular woman away with him twice it's in small print, it every year, simply to fis~ with.