Abs and Keats

Here's an unlikely juxtaposition which works: Abs and Keats. Both packed a world of worthwhile aesthetic vision and knowledge into a small oeuvre. Abs is rather more extreme than Keats: Keats' major achievements, the "Odes," which redefined Romanticism and opened an eternal vista onto conceptions of art, artifice, and temporality in chiasmus with them, only fill up (depending on the volume) 10-20 pages. Yet, there's enough middle-weight and minor Keats material to fill up a small, if compact, volume, with introduction, scholarly critique, and endnotes. Abs' position is more precarious- she has JUST THE ODES, little else- no padding, no middle-weight or minor jive to fill things out. So, an Abby Heller-Burnham coffee table book, of the sort that museums like to sell with exhibitions, would seem to be an impossibility.

This syndrome, the JUST THE ODES syndrome, is what I have to work around, and it applies to Mary too, with even more stringency. I'll spend the next five-ten years working intermittently to overcome this obstacle, and continue to sneer, here and there, at who Pablo Picasso was, whose high-points, for me, are no higher than Marys and Abbys, but who diddled off so much treacle, kitsch, and other dross that coffee table book culture around the man is formidable, and profitable for those appealing to the faux-cultural and sort of art-consonant.