Which means it really shouldn’t be that difficult to make an avant-garde. Here are some of the pieties that it might undertake to profane. That people are basically good. That freedom is the chief ingredient of happiness. That we control our fates. That society is slowly getting better. That we are more virtuous than those who came before us. That the universe coheres in a mystical whole. That it all works out in the end. In short, the whole gospel of self-improvement, progressive politics, ethical hygiene, and pantheistic spirituality. The upper middle brow is as committed to the happy ending as is Hollywood. Tragedy is inadmissible: the recognition that loss is loss and cannot be recuperated, that most people’s lives end in failure and emptiness, that the world is never going to be a happy place, that the universe doesn’t love us.
A new avant-garde would be not only experimental, but difficult. The upper middle brow is always inventive, but it is never difficult. Difficulty tells us there is something that we do not know, something that evades our mental structures. Instead of cutting the world to our measure — rendering it manageable, comfortable, and familiar, as the upper middle brow is meant to do — difficulty makes us recognize the narrowness of our experience, here on our little island of middle-class American normalcy. It starts with the truth and seeks to bring us to it, not the other way around. It isn’t fun, it isn’t soothing, and it isn’t marketable. It is only art.
~ William Deresiewicz
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bwrw – to rain
glawio – raining
dafnu – spotting
pigo – spotting
glaw mân – drizzle
gwlithlaw – drizzle
brasfrwrw – big spaced drops
sgrympian – short sharp shower
cawodi – showering
arllwys – pouring
tollti – pouring
dymchwel – pulling down
brylymu – pouring very quickly
llifo – flooding
towlud – throwing
taflu – throwing
hegar law – fierce rain
lluwchlaw – sheets of rain
chwipio bwrw – whiplash rain
pistyllio – fountain rain
piso – pissing down
curlaw – beating rain
tywallt – absolutely bucketing
stido – thrashing down
tresio – maximum intensity
Mae hi’n brwr hen wragedd a ffyn – It’s raining old women and sticks
From Sue Clifford and Angela King (ed.), Local Distinctiveness: Place, Particularity and Identity (London: Common Ground, 1993), p. 19.
via Joe Moran’s Blog