radfrac_archive: (dresden files)
On Beauty and Being Just is a little book, short enough to have been delivered as a Tanner Lecture on Human Values. I'd imagined an enormous text, comprehensive, large enough to contain all of Beauty itself somehow. No. It is wee. Beauty, as Elaine Scarry says, is in the particular.

I gather there was a debate in the humanities about the Value of Beauty which I completely missed. I think I'm relieved.

What I like most in a book is when an author identifies an experience I have had, but not fully examined. )

That is excellent, especially for those of us who feel like the sort of beauty that is often confidently repudiated. (Sorry, sorry, I read Hermia's lines last night and am still feeling a little residual self-pity.)

I carried the book about with me all day. It's small enough to disappear in my satchel and be pleasantly rediscovered.

This has been just the right sort of day. )

{rf}

*Technically this is a Love Icon, but I love beauty, and besides, it's new.
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One wants, of course, to play Puck or Oberon, but I have not the figure for either. You'll forgive me, though, if I believe that I would make a pretty fair Bottom.

I did find the textbook today. It was shelved under the editor's, rather than the author's, name. It is a comprehensive, well-annotated and supremely ugly book. It most resembles one of the vanity publications at That Place -- 8-1/2 x 11, monstrously thick, type showing through the paper, and a chunk of colour plates inserted partway through. The cover is slightly better (coated without the tendency to curl), but it is (off)white, with a big picture of Will in the middle and a serif title centred underneath it. It's serviceable, without any beauty, and damned expensive. I'm half-thinking I ought to have got the Norton instead, although it isn't his preferred text.

Maybe I can make something of it with collage.

On Beauty and Being Just has come up for me at the library! I am feeling guilty in all directions because now that class has started, I should be focusing my reading on Shakespeare and his immediate galactic cluster, rather than all this contemporary fiction. If I were really decent, I'd release all my holds and start over with books about Will. I'm going to take On Beauty and Being Just, though, because it sounded eccentric and fascinating, and made Zadie Smith write a novel. I am also going to try to finish The Yiddish Policemen's Union.

If I have any theory books of yours, I might beg to keep them to read over the winter break, so I can prepare for Theory in the spring.

{rf}

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