NOTES:

1. My friend Nico visited me in Sewanee recently & in the midst of divorce stories & love stories & stories of glorious fauna & fauna in distress, reminded me that: a) though elephant midwives may or may not have professional rituals outside what is directly relevant the extraction of baby pachyderms from their mothers, and b) regardless of whether or not the art world is truffled with rampant self-serious silliness, c) the three marks of existence remain: impermanence, nonself, and suffering.

2. For more on the Oxherding pictures in the Tibetan tradition of Trungpa Rimpoche, see the Shambala website. For more on Zen versions of the Oxherding pictures, see the International Research Institute for Zen Buddhism & this handy site.

3. On this topic, see Thierry de Duve's brilliant 1994 essay, "When Art Has Become Attitude- and Beyond," in Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1985 (NY, Blackwell, 2004), in which he discusses contemporary difficulties in teaching art. Having abandoned traditional guild-based métier teaching, as well as high modern formalist teaching, somehow the remaining postmodern solution is to teach attitude, a flimsy construct, especially in collision with some students' pre-existing notions about art as expression, therapy, or mimesis.

4. Art Issues Press, LA, 1993. Out of print. At $293.95 on Amazon for a 64-page book, it makes Inter-Library Loan seem like a better idea all the time.

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