“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Thursday, March 31, 2011

Peggy McCracken Talk on Flower Girls, Mesh and Strange Strangers


This is an enchanting, information dense talk that starts to explore flowers in Medieval culture. Not simply as symbols for other things, but also as—flowers...Very haunting use of strange strangers...

For me all poems about flowers are also about poetry, because a “flower” is a trope (hence the term “anthology” from the Greek anthos, flower. Hence “flowery language.”

But flowers and tropes share a deeper similarity, because they are both plots of algorithms, as I describe in this talk.

Here's Dudley Moore playing a Liberace-style Beethoven introducing Wordsoworth (Peter Cook) reciting “Daffodils,” with some flower girls...


2 comments:

allwhitelegos said...

'Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.' — van Gogh

Is a painting also the plot of an algorithm?

Bill Benzon said...

Does she say anything about flowers in the Unicorn Tapestries, which are strewn with them?

And then there's what W C Williams did with those in Patterson V, with his imagery of the killing of the unicorn = defloration of a virgin.

Hence the flowers.

And then there's Hamlet's Ophelia floating in a bed of flowers strewn on the water.

Here's some flowers for OOO.