Musings on the Book, Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the Arts, and Audio Interviews pertaining to same by a writer, broadcaster, bibliophile. In short, a commonplace book blog: A place to quote, abridge, and commonplace passages of rhetorical, dialectic and factual interest, mix them with comment and reflection, and index them to facilitate retrieval and use, notably in the composition of my own prose.
Here’s an immediate, not entirely considered — yes, exactly what bloggers are excoriated for by haughty traditional media types — gutteral response to last night’s MacBeth by the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre…(one that may be re-visited):
It knows only one emotion. Every character on stage spits and seethes with anger. When news that fathers and wives and children and kings are murdered, when daggers and the dead appear, when forests move, wives die and witches meow…anger is the only response. The result is one of the worst presentations of this play I’ve ever attended.
I can only assume, because of the uniformly uni-dimensional acting performances, that director Barbara Gains ordered her toupe to attack the text with only one thing in mind: hostility. It guts the play of all subtly. Murders its humanity. Renders it unaffecting. MacBeth is a decent man who gradually descends into hell on earth. He’s torn, conflicted…as with most of Shakespeare’s important characters he changes. Ben Carlson’s MacBeth doesn’t change. From the moment he steps onto the stage a victorious general, to when he leaves it with a dagger in his gut, his MacBeth is the same man. We feel no sympathy for his awful ordeal. No loss. It signifies nothing.
This, despite some clever conceits. Gains has her Witches play paparrazzi and strippers. False unreliable prophets, frequented by de centered, hollow men. those unloved. Motivated by cheap sex and celebrity worship. MacBeth is in constant need of affirmation and external validation. Lacking center he is insecure about his manhood. Goaded into action because of a fragile sense of self, he loses his soul. His behavior contradicts his morals.
There are some good ideas here. Some good visuals too. Karen Aldridge’s dead, Marat-like,
Lady MacBeth in a bath tub of diluted blood is particularly striking.
Here’s Rodney Pybus on my vote for the best novel of 2008:
The only really new book I’m listing this year is The Lazarus Project, a novel by Sarajevo-born Aleksandar Hemon. He has lived in Chicago for some years now — enough to write fiction in English. A new Conrad? Who knows, but he’s very good (though I have yet to read his earlier short stories). The novel runs two parallel narratives: the ‘author’ protagonist looks into the true story of an earlier immigrant, Lazarus Averbuch, who escaped the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 in Moldova/Bessarabia as a child, and at the age of 19 is killed by the Chicago chief of police, and he himself, Brik, travels back to eastern Europe with a photographer friend, in search of Averbuch’s birthplace. The photographs that fill the book, both historical and contemporary, add to the narrative rather than detract or distract. And Hemon’s voice is very much a voice of our times, eagerly American and knowingly European, serious and elegant, funny intelligent and edgy, the emigre/immigrant story.
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Not sure that Hemon is ‘eagerly’ American…more like ‘tentatively’…although, now that Obama is in, his attachment is no doubt slightly more solid.
I’m heading out for Minneapolis shortly, returning via Chicago and Detroit, so please stay tuned for documentation of visits to bookstores en route and conversations with mind melting bibliophiles.
A poster of Salvador Dali’s Swans reflecting Elephants, a black and white photo of Marilyn Monroe leaning, like a feline up against a door frame,
and a swim-suited, cleavage-baring Farrah Fawcett
all, among other delights, graced the walls of my teenage bedroom. So did J.M. W. Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire. And, though devoid of sexual content, this work’s passion and fire left an indelible mark on me.
So it was with some disappointment that I failed to find this and another favourite Rain, Steam and Speed with its famed rabbit in the foreground, among the paintings displayed in the J.W.M Turner recent retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum in New York
This said there was no shortage of the sublime. UlyssesDeriding Polyphemus
for example, contains a sky which critic and early Turner champion John Ruskin called “beyond comparison the finest which exists in Turner’s oil-paintings.” From seascapes and mountain tops to naval battles, historical Greek settings and wild imaginative abstractions this exhibition authoritatively traces the evolution of John Mallord William Turner’s varying style and choice of subject matter with representative sampling from a truly herculean output over a career that lasted more than sixty years. Much in this exhibit is literally brilliant. These paintings effortlessly captivate spectators, moth-like, within their orb.
Born in London in 1775, Turner spent his early childhood in Covent Garden, where his father had a barber shop. At an early age he showed talent for sketching and worked for a time as an architect’s draftsman. At fourteen he enrolled in London’s Royal Academy of Arts Schools. In 1802 he became the youngest artist to be elected as a full Academician. Encouraged to study the techniques of the Old Masters Turner chose to emulate the idealized landscapes of Claude Lorrain (c.1604/5-82). These were to serve as a touchstone throughout his lifetime.
In addition to dominating landscape art during the first half of the 19th century, Turner with his technical innovations in watercolor, had a profound impact on artistic development around the world, particularly in France, where painters such as Degas, Monet, Pissarro and Renoir pointedly credited him for influencing their work, notably with his depictions of the reality of form in movement and the fugitive phenomena of light.
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Dazzled by a wall-filling image of Venice, from the porch of Madonna della Salute, I was awed by this show before even stepping into its exhibition space. A clamour of eager, gate-crowding patrons milled around and filled, like Time Square, the entrance area, a testament to the excitement stirred by this impressive exhibit. Though the painting’s watery foreground was obscured by an ocean of people, Turner’s sky and buildings remain radiantly visible, proof that they easily match his much vaunted seas and waterscapes, of which Ruskin once said: "The surface of quiet water with other painters becomes fixed. With Turner it looks as if a fairy’s breath would stir it, but the fairy’s breath is not there."
Many of the works Turner exhibited at the Royal Academy – those which established his reputation and ensured immortality, are on display here — Fishermen at Sea (1796, Tate), for example, and the luminous Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16 October 1834 (1835, Philadelphia Museum of Art) and Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight (1835, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C).
So are his“color beginnings” studies for subsequent paintings, and his finished watercolors.
The exhibition is organized thematically and chronologically, beginning with early Sublime and historical landscapes and ending with late seascapes and blinding, abstract and very modern unfinished works. Early on you can see his skilled draftsmanship at play in an exquisite water colour depiction of Tintern Abbey in South Wales. Also his penchant for clouds and majestic settings are displayed, for example,
in The Devil’s Bridge, Saint Gotthard, painted in the Swiss Alps (and owned I might add, with surging pride, by a private collector in Canada). These have an almost Blakean feel to them, and evidence an attempt at what Burke called ‘the sublime’: the conveying of ‘astonishment and terror, or the strongest emotion of which the mind is capable of feeling.’
Perhaps because of its greater capacity to convey drama and depth, and its higher prestige, Turner soon moved to painting in oil. The first of these to be exhibited at the Royal Academy was
Fisherman at Sea. It contained elements which would fill his canvases for the next half century. The way his moonlight hits the ocean is truly wondrous. His waves in particular in this and other seascapes of the same period are highly reminiscent of Gustave Courbet’s paintings of the same, just miles away across the Channel — muscular and alive.
Also in the exhibit were depictions of historical landscapes and important contemporary events, such as the Battle of Waterloo, and the blazing Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, a painting worth sitting in front of for hours.
With Turner’s visit to Italy there is a marked shift in palette. We see softer and warmer colours and brush strokes. There are fewer clouds too. His strengths remain: breathtaking skies, sun sets and light, in weather fair and foul, reflected in water. These fill the senses to a point where the odd sail out of sync, a disproportionately small boat, or a pale background just doesn’t matter. Nor does the fact that people, though inconsequential in most paintings, at times appear sketchy, underdrawn, grotesque, in the way Pieter Bruegel painted them. Given Turner’s prodigious output it is easy to see why critics would have accused his work of being unfinished, even coarse. The pleasant irony here is, as we get to the end of the exhibit and his so-called ‘unfinished’ work,
we are treated to what is possibly the most completely sublime experience of the afternoon.
Biographer, critic, broadcaster and novelist Victoria Glendinning was born in Sheffield, and educated at Somerville College, Oxford, where she read Modern Languages. She worked as a teacher and social worker before becoming an editorial assistant for the Times Literary Supplement in 1974.
President of English PEN, she was awarded a CBE in 1998. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and holds honorary doctorates from the universities of Southampton, Ulster, Dublin and York. Her biographies include Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a Writer, 1977; Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among Lions (1981), which won both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for biography) and the Duff Cooper Prize; and Rebecca West: A Life (1987), and Vita: The Life of V. Sackville-West (1983) and Trollope (1992) both of which won the Whitbread Biography Award.
We talk here ostensibly about her latest book, Love’s Civil War: Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie: Letters and Diaries 1941- 1973 but in fact, mostly about the nature of biography,the difference between editing letters and writing lives, fabricating dialogue, compiling data, selecting facts; the importance of place, material and familial limitations, life over art, Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville West, Sissinghurst, and text versus context.
I attended a Rufus Wainwright concert four or five years ago at a nightclub (damned if I can remember its name) at the corner of Rideau Street and Cumberland in Ottawa. What I remember is how startled I was at how campy…and gay…Rufus was. Startled not because I objected, far from it. No. Simply because I’d assumed, naively I suppose, that he was straight. It took a bit of reorienting, after which I settled into an awed appreciation of this man’s wonderfully powerful, tireless vocal chords, and the charm and ease with which he held his audience. He must’ve sung for two hours straight, at least. Just belting it out, full throttle. It was one of the best concerts I’d ever been to. His sister Martha joined him on stage for several numbers.
Last weekend I took in the final gig on her latest tour. Her voice, like her brother’s, is premium, high octane. A Ferrari that lives to be gunned and driven hard, to the limit, for the distance. Impossible to red line, power to spare whenever she needs to pass. Horsepower, delivered with deep, heartfelt emotion,
makes for stage domination. She purred and pumped out her lyrics. Moused with and delighted her audience. Joked about dildos with her band members. A formidable presence, not just because of her voice; but because of her lithe, sensual chassis; presented as it was with a faux ditziness. A taller, thinner Marilyn. A kitten in tight blue jeans and high heels, wriggling and bending, pelvising, leggily, lanky. A magnet for male, and female eyes. Just like Rufus, she gave ‘er. And her mom Kate showed up too.
Reminded me of how great that Love over and Over album is. Funny how it calls up memories of driving along howling, snow strewn highways outside of Humbolt, Saskatchewan. Last weekend’s evening highlighted by the two singing in French. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, Martha seemed more fluid and at ease in it than in English.
compiled a list of books New Yorker critic James Wood ‘has written about approvingly at one time or another.’ Given that tis the season to put out ‘best of’ book lists, I re-post it here:
Don Quixote - Miguel Cervantes Loving - Henry Green Living - Henry Green Party Going - Henry Green Zeno’s Conscience - Italo Svevo Tristram Shandy - Laurence Sterne A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark Hunger - Knut Hamsun Short Stories - Anton Chekhov Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky The Charterhouse of Parma - Stendahl The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum - Heinrich Boll To The Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf Herzog - Saul Bellow Humboldt’s Gift - Saul Bellow Collected Stories - Saul Bellow Dead Souls - Nikolai Gogol The Radetzky March - Joseph Roth
I’ve read the bolded titles (half of Humbolt’s Gift, plus one or two of Bellow’s short stories), and plan to take a shot at those remaining, in 2009. Odd that none of my three favourites — War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov and Le Rouge et le Noir — appear. Have recently been reading and delighting in Roth’s short journalistic pieces on France, written between the Wars. Boll’s The Clown failed, as I recall, to amuse at time of reading. Given how often French’s biography has been top-tenned this month, it really is time I read Naipaul’s Biswas. I think The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is over rated, and suspect, given an early struggle with Humbolt’s Gift, that the same might be the case with Bellow. Then again, Martin Amis is also a fan, so another concerted effort is definitely required. My hope is that Green warrants the praise. V.S. Pritchett writes appreciatively of him as well, so I’m looking forward to the reads. Am pleased to say I own Hogarth First Editions of Nothing and Concluding.
Also the Picador triple paperback pack of Nothing, Doting and Blindness; none of the ones on the list of course. I’ll be looking for them, along with copies of Bernhard’s The Loser, and anything by Blanchot during my big bookstore hunting trip, set to commence at noon this Christmas Day (more anon).
I note that from my new StatPress tool, that people searching Ron Mueck seem to be landing on this site with fair frequency. So, just as I have brazenly utilized "Obama’ in hopes of attracting a few additional readers, here goes with another take on Ron: There’s definitely a connection here between literary and sculptural realism…Ron Mueck’s people fascinate us because while we know they aren’t human (as we know too that words on the page don’t produce real people, rather via descriptives, monologue and dialogue, they mesh with our imaginations to create lifelike characters…larger and smaller than life) they so closely resemble the real thing that we puzzle over them; marvel at their verisimilitude, strain over the tension between likeness and difference. The familiar and the strange. The task of getting our heads around how something can resemble life so, and yet at the same time, be so obviously removed from it. This is captivating stuff. This is why realism in literature is so potent: close proximity to the actual stimulates real, genuine emotion and feelings. Physical responses even. I made a point of observing attendees at a Mueck exhibition when it came to the National Gallery of Canada several years ago. They sighed, laughed, shivered and shook their heads, pondered, felt…and connected…in ways that I’ve rarely, as a certified people watcher, ever seen before or since.
The word Progymnasmata is Greek for "preliminary exercises."These exercises were taught in ancient Greece and Rome to educate young men in rhetoric, effective and persuasive public speaking and writing.
First, students would master the fourteen progymnasmata by analyzing and imitating the great speeches and literature of that day. Later, they would use this knowledge to write their own compositions. Finally, they would use these skills in the public arena in politics and in court. Training in virtue was part of this process. The content of the students’ writing and speeches was just as important as the style and persuasive skills they displayed.
Virtuous, clear, and persuasive communication is critical to all civilization. The fourteen writing exercises of the progymnasmata provide the structure within which students learn to use proper grammatical construction and figures of speech, to arrange their ideas and arguments in a logical and clear way, and to present their thoughts in the manner best suited to their audience and the purpose of the occasion.
Here is a list of the fourteen progymnasmata with a short definition and the text which covers it.
argue for or against a legislative proposal in general terms
The progymnasmata supposedly prevent much of the frustration and writer’s block which is ’so common in students taught by modern, unstructured, "creative" methods.’ It begins with the simple retelling of fables and short narrative stories, followed by exercises in simple exposition and persuasion. The more advanced exercises combine elements of the earlier exercises to create increasingly complex, effective compositions. The progymnasmata consist of wisely crafted outlines as an aid to invention (developing content) and arrangement (organizing the content) and style. Applying chosen progymnasmata to a specific subject involves consideration from every possible angle: virtue, morality, expediency, legality, personal circumstances, physical possibilities, motivational probabilities, and so forth. For more information on this approach to writing, visit:
Speaking of Auden and images, this, again, from Viz.com:
Although there are plenty of examples of ekphrasis in classical literature, the earliest extant instructions on how to compose one and what its functions are appear in the Hellenistic composition handbooks known as progymnasmata (here is an example, by Aphthonius). These handbooks were designed to train young people in public speaking, and they taught that an ekphrasis was not meant to be composed for its own sake, but it should rather be a part of a longer oration. In this context, the ekphrasis served to evoke a vivid picture in the mind of the audience so as to sway its members’ emotions and prepare them for the subsequent analytical and/or narrative exposition of the issue at hand. An ekphrasis could be composed in any style; it could be used as an introduction (proemium), substituted in the place of a narrative, or inserted as a pointed digression. When inscribed around an image, such as an icon, the ekphrasis functioned to provide commentary and/or guide the viewer’s interpretation of the patron’s intent. Occasionally—and this is especially true for the late antique and Byzantine period—an entire oration could be comprised of an ekphrasis, which functioned allegorically to illustrate either vice or virtue, creation or destruction, wisdom or folly, temperance or intemperance—but always with a rhetorical goal, embedded in a specific historical context.
One relatively recent example of ekphrasis is W. H. Auden’s poem “Musée des Beaux Arts.” The poem’s description of the plowman in Brueghel’sLandscape with the Fall of Icarus provides an interpretation of the poem and places the image in the context of Auden’s visit to the Brussels Museum and the other works of the “old masters” kept there. William Carlos Williams puts the image to a much different use in his poem “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” however, focusing only on an interpretation of the painting without any contextualization.
While these examples suggest that in practice ekphrasis is not limited to one specific use, contemporary attitudes toward the term have grown out of a definition of it that emphasizes literary (poetic) representation—with all the ambiguities, tensions, and contradictions the notion entails. Thus ekphrasis has been variously theorized as mimesis, as art criticism, as an intermediary between the visual and the verbal, as appropriation of the foreign and the “other,” as a vehicle of pleasure and of the politics of pleasure, and as an object of semiotic or Freudian analysis. Recently, however, there has been a return to a fuller appreciation of the rhetorical goals and functions of ekphrasis and to its re-integration into the rhetorical classroom.
I wonder what image, in what context, poet Elizabeth Alexander will paint for us with her words on January 20. What emotions she’ll choose to sway to prepare us for the narrative of Barrack Obama’s presidency. I wonder too, how he’ll use this concept in his speech to prepare Americans for his message of unity.
Just learned that I wont be able to interview Katie Dublinski, editorial director at Graywolf Press in Minneapolis during my upcoming trip, because she will be proofreading what Elizabeth Alexander professor of African-American studies at Yale University, will be reading at Barrack Obama’s inauguration.
Alexander was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2005 for her poetry collection "American Sublime." Her other books include "The Venus Hottentot," "Body of Life" and "Antebellum Dream Book." Last year, she won the $50,000 Jackson Poetry Prize. She is only the fourth poet to read at a presidential swearing in. Robert Frost read for President John F. Kennedy, Maya Angelou and Miller Williams read at President Clinton’s inaugurations. I read somewhere that Alexander has been brushing up on her Auden. So, with this in mind:
Musee des Beaux Arts by W.H. Auden, 1940.
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully
along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the plowman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. from Viz.com
Apropos of Richard Crary musing about limitations of the term ‘novel’, here’s Cynthia Ozick on the differences between novels, short stories and novellas, found in Ali Smith’s delightful commonplace book The Book Lover:
"Not length (though some say length is the only difference), but maturation. The novel is long because it commences green and ignorant. The novel is long because it is a process, like chewing the apple of the Tree of Knowledge - it takes the novel a while before it discovers its human nakedness. The short forms are short because they begin with completion - with knowledge of nakedness. If the novella is the most captivating short form of all, it is because there is nothing more interesting than beginning with the end, nothing more mysterious than heading out to seek your fortune with your destination securely in your pocket."
And my; now that we are in comparison mode, doesn’t Cynthia look like Jane Jacobs…
A squeaky escalation starts things off, an orchestra warming up; like in that famous Beatles song. An edgy, nails on the blackboard shift into helicopter blades. Slow building punching elevator doors repeatedly closing into a hollow cello tunnel where an aircraft starts up and stops. The sawing heartbeat of a panther morphs into a subway train sledge-hammering, smashing the ground, until it screeches to a morse code halt. The helicopter is muffled. There’s a slow Eastern awakening, cut into by another loud saw, shimmering and quivering. A spiritual tribal drumming and the shutting of metal, prison cell doors, echoing, loses ground to Miami Vice, then a slow dark, ominous return to the original Batman Begins; a re
