Live to paint, paint to live, by Lee Siegel, The Atlantic
Pollock knitted painting into the fabric of daily existence. Samuel Butler once said that life is like learning how to play the violin and having to give concerts at the same time. That is how Pollock painted, as if living and painting were identical.
Idelber Avelar, 2003, Heavy Metal Music in Postdictatorial Brazil: Sepultura and the Coding of Nationality in Sound, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 12:3, p. 343
[I]t is to Sepultura’s credit that their journey into their nation’s sounds was never phrased in the tired vocabulary of authenticity. After the collaboration with the Xavante tribe on Roots, Igor Cavalera stated that ‘we did not do a world music record’. His insistence that ‘everything is mixed and distorted’ was not only an attempt to highlight the album’s heaviness but most importantly to set their collaboration with the Xavante tribe in terms irreducible to the Paul Simon or Peter Gabriel style ‘recoveries’ of indigenous musics, marked by an exoticizing that in practice denies those musics any coevalness with the artist doing the gathering. Stressing upfront the work of mixing, Igor removes the discussion from the terrain of preservation, authenticity, recovery, that is to say he removes it from the language of world music. Implicitly asked to become ‘boys’ of a ‘jungle’ they had never known, Sepultura indeed goes Amazonian but brings back not an ‘anthropological document’ but a politicized, electrified and polyrhythmic counterethnography.
But it's no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life.
What? says Alf.
Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.
In a crucial scene in Ulysses, when he’s assaulted by a rabidly anti-Semitic Dubliner, Bloom does retort, “Your God was a jew. Christ was a jew like me.” But later in the day, when he recounts this incident, Bloom admits that he was pretending to be Jewish—pretending to be what the nameless Dubliner assumed him to be—in order to stand up personally against the forces of prejudice: “So I without deviating from plain facts in the least told him his God, I mean Christ, was a jew too and all his family like me though in reality I’m not.”
Joyce spreads the evidence regarding Bloom’s relationship to Judaism far and wide, making it difficult to synthesize and allowing his readers to misread Bloom’s identity, just as the citizens of Dublin do. But Joyce is not playing games; Joyce is never merely playing games. He didn’t simply write a book about prejudice; he wrote a book that embodies in its language the ways in which prejudice is perpetuated, carried aloft by language, regardless of the facts. Language alters reality in Ulysses, conferring an identity on Bloom, an identity that in a moment of selfless nobility Bloom embraces as his own.
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