Belletrist Coterie: New Contributors, New Delight

Thrilled to receive new contributions from Icelandic photographer Þorvaldur Kristmundsson for Belletrist Coterie's first issue! The pics come from the Vanishing Communities project, which captures life in a disappearing farming community nestled in the isolation of West Iceland.

Belletrist Coterie

I am now Senior Editor for Belletrist Coterie, the emerging arts and culture magazine founded by Kimberly Lojewski in Amherst, Mass. This is a project dedicated to spotlighting the spirit and ebullience of storytelling in its many forms. It is a revival of a tradition as old and intricate as humanity itself. It is a revival that shivers across your skin.

Belletrist Coterie's inaugural issue is scheduled for release in early 2012, and will feature contributions from Jane Yolen, Frank Turner, Old Man Luedecke, Richard Kostelanetz, Baby Gramps, and James Brock, among others.

Please follow us throughout our journey to publication at belletristcoterie.com, belletristcoterie.wordpress.com, and on Facebook.

Speaks for Itself: C & H

On Hold: The Price of Screwing Up

The Savannah series will have to take a backseat for a while. I knew our time there was special but personal crisis has a certain ability to snap moments into stunning clarity and context. There are no words to express our time together, no images to capture the way the city unfolded before us and lay suspended like a tableaux vivant, breathing into us ever so deliberately the inspiration of humanity and history and marking our passage as allies through this strange arrangement of roots, cement, liquid lights, horses, hooves, drooping canopies of Spanish moss stalactites that both reminded us of gravity and stooped down as though offering a leg up, and a way out. Strangely enough, it was in that moment that I think we both felt, for the first time, that our place was within.

Savannah, GA

I'll be expanding on this post or turning it into a series that recounts the many wonderful adventures we had in Savannah last week. For now, I'll start with our favorite gastronomic encounter: Jazz'd

Exceptional and creative food, fantastic service (although our waitress doubted we would be able to finish six plates...half an hour later we were licking our fingers with six empty plates in front of us while the entire serving staff shook their heads in disbelief). 

Savannah's vibe is complex, beautiful, simultaneously hip and haunted by its twisted past. You can feel it almost everywhere you go.

More to Come!

Recent Discovery: Nordau vs. Nietzsche

Thanks of course to Dr. Kim Jackson for presenting this startling juxtaposition of "fin de siecle" aesthetic philosophies. Nordau's vision of "degeneration" and its characteristics is so akin to Nietzsche's vision of amoral, aesthetic, and symbolic brinkmanship that I originally thought the two thinkers shared the same philosophic objectives. It was only after rereading the Nordau piece that I realized he was wholeheartedly decrying the break with traditional forms, rationality, and stale classicism that Nietzsche came to exalt in The Birth of Tragedy and would continue to encourage and historicize in "Truth and Lies," The Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I was not alone in my misunderstanding; several of my more "unconventional" peers also believed Nordau to be "digging" his catalogue of fin de siecle characters and scenarios - those somewhat humorous imaginings of the rebellious, the non-traditional, the irreverent and revisionist. But it is precisely this revising with which Nordau took issue and Nietzsche championed.

While we in the liberal arts tend to declare Nietzsche the clear victor over Nordau's near-fearful conservatism, I can't say that I disagree with Nordau's presentation of "change" within the modern human institutions of fashion and vogue. Even Nietzsche hated the idea of "the fashionable," but he envisioned a type of symbolic or aesthetic genius that occupies the realm just beyond the fashionable, one step ahead, carving a path into untrodden territory while the rest of the world struggles to catch up, whereas Nordau would have us stay on the other side, never buying into "thedailywhat" or worrying about how to most fashionably and hiply revise or break with traditional and/or existing forms. Nordau would have us all self-fashion as stoic Greeks, but Nietzsche even shattered that idyllic (mis)representation of Attican perfection in The Birth of Tragedy, leaving us with what I believe to be a more honest and relevant system with which we can interact with, make sense of, and perhaps find our own meaning within the ever-quickening heartbeat of the modern cultural and existential aesthetic.

The Crisis of Representation