Phoenix.

A ventral view of the bird between two trees, with wings out stretched and head to one side, beating its wingsd and looking for the sun.

A ventral view of the bird between two trees, with wings out stretched and head to one side, beating its wings and looking for the sun.

The phoenix turns to face the sun, beats its wings to fan the flames and is consumed. The image may equally show the bird rising from its own ashes, a symbol of the resurrection.

The phoenix turns to face the sun, beats its wings to fan the flames and is consumed. The image may equally show the bird rising from its own ashes, a symbol of the resurrection.

Text Translation:

[Of the phoenix] The phoenix is a bird of Arabia, so called either because its colouring is Phoenician purple, , or because there is only one of its kind in the whole world. It lives for upwards of five hundred years, and when it observes that it has grown old, it erects a funeral pyre for itself from small branches of aromatic plants, and having turned to face the rays of the sun, beating its wings, it deliberately fans the flames for itself and is consumed in the fire. But on the ninth day after that, the bird rises from its own ashes.

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Anti-Clericalism in Medieval Persian Poetry.

Standford Lecture Handouts.

The above reads:

Better be a beggar than king, better practice vice

And perfidy than be a bigoted, pious puritan;

Better make love with many mistresses in the street

Than make piety and abstinence in public show.

– Amīr Khusraw Dihlavī (d. 725/1325)

I couldn’t agree more.

The dominant attitude of the anti-clerical rhetoric in Persian poetry is permeated by criticism of judges, lawyers, aesthetics, spiritual advisors, and authority figures of that nature. This is one of the reasons that makes this poetry still relevant. A lot of people today can’t read Milton, because anti-clericalism is no longer part of the normal vocabulary. In the West, we live mostly in a secular society, so the conflict between clerics and anti-clerics does not exist. But that is not the case in the Middle East at all, which makes this conflict very relevant.

Dr. Leonard Lewisohn is Senior Lecturer in Persian and Iran Heritage Foundation Fellow at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies of the University of Exeter where he teaches Islamic Studies, Sufism, history of Iran, as well as courses on Persian texts and Persian poetry in translation. He specializes in translation of Persian Sufi poetic and prose texts.

This is fascinating, and I learned a great deal. The lecture is below, and the Stanford Lecture Handouts for Anti-Clericalism in Medieval Persian Poetry are here.

Via Medievalists.

Sunday Facepalm: Trump Is NOT An Artist.

Ground views of different Border Wall Prototypes as they take shape during the Wall Prototype Construction Project near the Otay Mesa Port of Entry (photo by Mani Albrecht via US Customs and Border Protection/Flickr).

Ground views of different Border Wall Prototypes as they take shape during the Wall Prototype Construction Project near the Otay Mesa Port of Entry (photo by Mani Albrecht via US Customs and Border Protection/Flickr).

Jesus Fucking Christ, some people…

…The paper [NYT] published Michael Walker’s “Is Donald Trump, Wall-Builder-in-Chief, a Conceptual Artist?,” a clickbait headline for a piece about Swiss-Icelandic conceptual artist Christoph Büchel’s “nonprofit” MAGA which has created an online petition to have the prototypes for Trump’s border wall declared National Monuments. This aligns with a broader effort by Büchel/MAGA to frame the models as Land Art: since December 2018 they’ve been offering onsite tours of the prototypes, which a press release claimed “have significant cultural value.”  Value, of course, is not the same as meaning. The broad-strokes inferences of a facile transference of historical meaning into cultural value are obviously both political and artistic; in both contexts their implications are pretty toxic.

Politically, with its arch tone and conceptual trappings, Büchel’s project normalizes and sanitizes the man stoking tensions about nuclear war via Twitter (it’s reminiscent of Jimmy Fallon petting his hair) and actively threatening the livelihoods and futures of DACA recipients while undermining the US’s longstanding diplomatic relationship with Mexico (also: undermining all Mexicans as human beings). Artistically, it does a disservice to the real work of serious artists by promoting what, evaluated on the merits, is the worst kind of incoherent conceptual art — flawed in both concept and execution.

Per the Times, Büchel “is adamant he has no creative stake in the project” (which seems an odd way for an artist to establish integrity). He claims that “This is a collective sculpture; people elected the artist.” For Büchel, writes Walker, “Americans, by electing Mr. Trump, allowed his obsessions to be given form that qualifies as an artistic statement.” This kind of convoluted philosophizing to legitimate a flimsy artistic premise wishes to align itself with, or at least to appropriate, the Duchampian honesty that claims “It’s art because I say so.” Büchel seems to be doing something more insidious: using art-speaky language to prop up something I suspect he must know is pretty empty as a conceptual artwork (even if the prototypes themselves are visually imposing), while contributing to, and deriving press coverage from, a dangerously violent political context.

Not all Americans elected the Tiny Tyrant, Mr. Büchel. Actually, the majority of them voted against him. Büchel typifies the exact type of shallow, pretentious asshole, who, with nothing else to market, jumps on something they think is trendily controversial, coated with enough bullshit to engage the fleeting attention span of the ‘art world’, the one inhabited by people with less depth than a puddle. The most one could say about the wall prototypes is that they are a monument to unthinking bigotry and hatred; that they glorify isolation and dehumanisation. In the current time, when people have finally decided, rightly, that monuments to slavery and those who defended it are not appropriate, why in the fuck would these monstrosities be considered to have any value? This is a disgusting, infuriating story, and I’m going to go help myself to more tea and go feed the birds instead of risking a blown artery. You can read the whole thing, with all relevant links at Hyperallergic.

Coot.

The coot has a similar pose to the halcyon, f.54v, with its head turned back, biting its wing. It is shown correctly with clawed feet.

Text Translation:

[Of the] coot.  It is a winged creature, fairly clever and very wise; it does not feed on corpses and it does not fly or wander aimlessly but stays in one place until it dies, finding both food and rest there.

Let every one of the faithful, therefore, maintain himself and live like that; let them not scurry around, straying this way and that, down different paths, as heretics do; let them not be enticed by the desires and pleasures of this world; but let them stay in one place, finding peace in in the catholic Church, where the Lord provides a dwelling-place for those who are spiritually in harmony, and there let them subsist daily on the bread of immortality, drinking the precious blood of Christ, refreshing themselves on the most sweet words of the Lord, ‘sweeter than honey and the honeycomb’ (Psalms, 19:10)

Folio 55r – the halcyon, continued. [De] fulica]; Of the coot. [De fenice]; Of the phoenix.

Ganda the Rhinoceros.

Albrecht Dürer, The Rhinoceros, 1515.

Ganda the Rhinoceros was going to be the Pope’s rhinoceros, that is Leo X, but Ganda drowned in 1515. Ganda was immortalized by Dürer, and so remains the most famous European animal of the renaissance. And I don’t blame the elephant for running away. I’d run too. There’s a short video below, but you can read all about Ganda at Medievalists.