William Carlos Williams
Article
William Carlos Williams is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between September 23, 2021 and August 28, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “analogy to poetry (cf. The Fairie Queene vs. William Carlos Williams)”; “William Carlos Williams attributes the title to his friend/rival Ezra Pound”; “William Carlos Williams simply went to work in the morning”. It most often appears alongside Kora In Hell, 1587: A Year Of No Significance, 1917.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: September 23, 2021
- Last seen: August 28, 2022
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Kora In Hell (2 shared issues)
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- 1587: A Year Of No Significance (1 shared issues)
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- 1917 (1 shared issues)
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- ACX podcast team (1 shared issues)
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- aesthetics (1 shared issues)
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- American (1 shared issues)
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- Apple (1 shared issues)
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- Art Deco skyscrapers (1 shared issues)
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- Astral Codex Ten (1 shared issues)
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- Benedetto Croce (1 shared issues)
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- Brahma (1 shared issues)
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- Britain (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Older art tends to have bright colors, ornate details, realistic representations, technical skill, and be instantly visually appealing to the average person. Newer art tends to be more abstract, require less obvious skill, and have less direct appeal. Although it doesn't fit in meme format, I would carry the analogy to poetry (cf. The Fairie Queene vs. William Carlos Williams) and certain pieces of high status music (cf. Mozart vs. Philip Glass). Obviously these are broad generalizations vulnerable to cherry-picking; I'm mostly relying on your common sense here.
William Carlos Williams attributes the title to his friend/rival Ezra Pound, mythological references’ number one fanboy. Kora is a parallel figure to Persephone or Proserpina, the Spring captured and taken to Hades by Hades himself. Persephone as a plant goddess and her mother Demeter were the central figures of the Eleusinian Mysteries, which promised the initiated a groovy afterlife glimpsed at by psychedelic shrooms. And Kora means maiden. Ancient Greeks called her that either because she was like Voldemort, and you were apotropaically not supposed to say her true name because this is a Mystery Cult, damn it. Keeps some of the mystery. Or because she in a way represents all of the maidens, everywhere. So, in that sense, Kora in Hell alludes to the multitude of suffering young women Williams met while working as a doctor, assisting in 1917 style home labors, and, because WWI was going on at the time and doctors were extremely scarce, as a local police surgeon. Conditions were dire:
As its name implies, the Improvisations is not a meticulously planned book. It’s not a high concept type of thing where you literally move the Eleusinian Myth to New Jersey. William Carlos Williams simply went to work in the morning and when he returned home at night, no matter how late it was, before going to bed, he wrote something, anything, and at the end of the year he had a pile of texts in front of him which were now the rough precursor of a book. Those texts were loosely based on what had happened to him throughout that day, or on something he had seen or thought about. Williams wrote the book during 1917, when he was around 34 years old. That’s the age Dante had when he began the Divine Comedy: