Comments on: Beauty, I’m Your Dog

By: Amy Bebeme

Amy Bebeme — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 23:29:39 +0000

Now this discussion has got me feel/hearing Wallace Stevens, especially pertaining to the idea of alive (v. lifeless) beauty)

‘Clothe me entire in the final filament
So that I tremble with such love so known
And myself am precious for your perfecting’

From Notes to a Supreme Fiction

By: Amy Bebeme

Amy Bebeme — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 22:37:21 +0000

William Burroughs once wrote “no one owns life, but anyone who picks up a frying pan owns death.” Somehow this sentence illuminates what I’m trying to say above – but only tangentially.

By: Amy Bebeme

Amy Bebeme — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 03:45:39 +0000

There’s the beauty we try to own and control, as women perhaps to possess it ourselves, or to possess another who has it or determine – in obsessive definition, whether another has it. There’s pain and anguish in it. It doesn’t nourish – it’s like cutting the moon out of the night with a razor and it bleeds warm and red, and then maybe if we find this beauty we’re trying to define we can put the moon back again. This beauty can be part of a social hypnosis or not. It’s a moving target but to me it’s not alive.

Then there’s beauty that’s more about the life force – or that is kindled through love or through some kind of endurance and survival. This beauty moves around too, like the river from the Chinese proverb that’s never the same. Sometimes we feel it within us and we can will it to our surface and give it to people – but when we do this we don’t own it. I think part of the reason young people seem so beautiful to those who are older is that there’s something heartbreaking about the vulnerability of someone young – you want to protect them somehow, from fate and cruelty and share in the collective triumph of them actually MAKING IT through.

Just like when you love someone your eye keeps finding their beauty continually – you can taste it in the air like meringue.

When life has completely emptied you for whatever horrible reason, what fills you back up is often so exquisitely sweet tender and beautiful. After a forest fire the new growth is so amazing. It’s an intense state of being, but the way you experience this new beauty is stamped to you, and you take it with you through the rest of your life. Pasternak called it the poet’s last year, and a ’strange inhuman youth.’

Thank you all for getting me to think about this. I wish you every beauty. May you feel it against your eyes and hands

By: Mary Gaitskill

Mary Gaitskill — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 05:08:39 +0000

This is supposedly a superficial topic–beauty, and by defintion, if you are talking about physical beauty, it is literally superficial–but it obviously cuts deep, has been the most commented on thing here.

By: Jowita Bydlowska

Jowita Bydlowska — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 20:49:36 +0000

Oh stop it. I’m sorry if this offends you and I apologize for my earlier comment about clichés. Thank you for your input — it is appreciated.

By: Lynette

Lynette — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 06:31:36 +0000

That’s because you are a total cliche. OH I’m SO PRETTY. Are you sure about that?

By: Jowita Bydlowska

Jowita Bydlowska — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 20:04:12 +0000

All I get is clichés: “superficial and empty,” “navel gazing,” “pity the fool,” “beauty is only skin deep”.

By: Lynette

Lynette — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 18:30:27 +0000

All I get is superficial and empty, not pretty. Not in the slightest. Just navel gazing nothing more. I pity the fool who thinks beauty is only skin deep.

By: Sheila Heti

Sheila Heti — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 06:26:58 +0000

I find it strange how none of them have rhythm; strange and sort of telling — telling of the lack of talent, or something. Beauty without talent sort of reveals beauty as utterly not a talent, but beauty with talent makes beauty seems like it is a talent and something a person can take credit for. Without talent, it’s like you threw something on them and it stuck.

By: Jowita Bydlowska

Jowita Bydlowska — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 05:02:34 +0000

I find the man in the video really insignificant. In fact, I have a hard time lasting till his “part” in it. I just like the girls and the tapping and the song and how pretty it all is. Not political at all (for me — I was too drunk in uni to pay attention at that time).

By: Sheila Heti

Sheila Heti — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 04:46:28 +0000

(that’s “note” not “not” in the comment above)

By: Sheila Heti

Sheila Heti — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 04:45:21 +0000

I should not that the man doing the casting does not qualify as the kind of man I’m talking about. He is simply doing a casting call. I’m talking about being a book editor or something.