16.4.15
16.3.15
Rediscovering Raymond Williams
Geoff Dyer on 'one of the left's great thinkers'
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| Raymond Williams |
“I come from Pandy . . .” The first words spoken by Raymond Williams in Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review (1979) may not have quite the rolling loquacity of the opening line of Saul Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March – “I am an American, Chicago born . . .” – but in their brisk way they bespeak a similar confidence.
Bellow’s narrator immediately situates his experience in the heart of America; Williams announced one of his main concerns in the title of his first novel, Border Country (1960). Borders – how they are constructed and recognised, how they impede and are crossed – are central to his thought. In contrast to March’s unequivocal belief (“I am an American”), Williams, whose work concentrated on the English literary and cultural tradition, came to identify himself as “a Welsh European”, emphasising what lay either side of a presumed centre, both locally and within an international context.
“It happened that in a predominantly urban and industrial Britain I was born in a remote village, in a very old settled countryside, on the border between England and Wales.” This is the account Williams gives of his origins in The Country and the City (1973), the simple facts of the matter beginning to unfurl and expand in the recognisable style of his analytical writing: an authority that draws power from a suggested hesitancy; the unhurried accumulation of material and argument; a continual elaboration and deepening of meaning. While Williams was proudly conscious of the convolutions of his own method and mode – “all my usual famous qualifying and complicating, my insistence on depths and ambiguities” – a former student, Terry Eagleton, remembers his lecturing style as that of “somebody who was talking in a human voice”.
Eagleton was struck also by the way that although Williams’s background might, by Cambridge standards, have been regarded as humble, it was also sufficiently “privileged” to give him “a sort of stability, a rootedness and self-assurance, and almost magisterial authority”. It gave him the confidence, while still an undergraduate – albeit an undergraduate who had served in the war – to stand up and insist, after a talk in which L C Knights claimed that a corrupt and mechanical civilisation could no longer understand neighbourliness, that he knew “perfectly well, from Wales, what neighbour meant”.
Confidence counts for little unless it is allied with determination. Combining this with an Orwellian sense “of the enormous injustice” of the world, Williams had the resources to develop his early critical and theoretical project – one that stressed the importance of shared experience and common meanings – in comparative isolation. In the process of becoming articulate in the language of a new and expansive kind of cultural history he also, in Raphael Samuel’s words, “constructed a conceptual vocabulary of his own”. The vocabulary was the cerebral expression of a temperament shaped by a particular geography and history. In Border Country Harry Price is “waiting for terms he could feel”. You could almost say he is waiting for the author to coin his most famous term, “structure of feeling”. Where Williams came from was inextricably linked with what he came to say.
If Orwell’s sense of the injustice of the world was fed by a disposition to dwell on its misery, then the “privileged” background of the signalman’s son made the idea of defeat almost entirely alien. It also meant, according to his critics, that the political positions of his later years, with Thatcherism in full swing and the miners having suffered a catastrophic defeat, were nostalgic, even sentimental. Either way, the key thing is that his writing always carried an enormous freight of autobiography. “I learned the saturating power of the structures of feeling of a given society as much from my own mind and my own experience as from observing the lives of others,” Williams wrote.
This double combination – complexity of thought and clarity of expression, with a depth and intensity of personal feeling – made Williams an inspirational figure for the generation of students who came of age in 1968 and looked to him for political and moral as well as intellectual guidance. A representative of the next generation (ten in 1968), I set eyes on him precisely twice.
The first time was when he came to give a lecture at Oxford, where I was an undergraduate, in about 1978. Our tutor encouraged us to go, so we went. I had no idea who Williams was or what he was droning on about. Then, in the mid-1980s, I went to see him in conversation with Michael Ignatieff at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. I’m guessing that the occasion was the publication of his novel Loyalties – though if it was, how come I didn’t get my copy signed? I can only assume I was too intimidated because by then the old bloke who’d waffled on at Oxford had entirely reshaped my sense of life and literature and the way they were related. [Read More]
12.3.15
Andy Goldsworthy: In the Studio
TateShots explores how Goldsworthy uses materials to explore our connection with nature
If you like this, take a look at Rivers and Tides, a documentary about Andy Goldsworthy and his work.
11.3.15
Overbeck on Editing Samuel Beckett's Letters
Stefano Rosignoli asks Lois M. Overbeck about the ongoing four-volume edition
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| Samuel Beckett. Photograph: John Minihan |
At the end of a summer rich in events on Samuel Beckett, scattered largely between Dublin, Belfast and Enniskillen, academic research was encouraged in October with the publication by Cambridge University Press of the third volume of the writer’s correspondence. As in the previous volumes, Beckett’s statements about his own work, as well as the many intertextual references expanded on in the dense notes appended by the editors, demonstrate the scholarly value of the publication, which will become a primary resource especially for young researchers with no opportunity to explore public archives and private collections on both sides of the Atlantic. It is Beckett’s mocking depiction of intellectual life, however, rather than the crowded web of literary and artistic influences, that strikes the general reader and ensures that the letters are an enjoyable, rather than purely informative reading experience: “On m’a demandé un livret d’opéra bouffe! J’ai écrit une ligne – ‘J’ai pas envie de chanter ce soir’ – puis j’ai renoncé.” (“I have been asked for a libretto for a comic opera! I wrote one line: ‘I don’t feel like singing tonight’. Then I gave up.” SB to Jacoba Van Velde, 12.04.1958; in LSB III, 130-131). This trenchant tongue doesn’t appear to spare Beckett himself. In the same letter he declares, exhausted: “Il y a deux moments qui valent la peine, dans le travail, celui de la mise en route et celui de la mise en corbeille” (“There are two worthwhile moments in my work: the opening up and the basketing”; ibid.). This is just one of the many accounts of Beckett’s distress when facing the creation of new work, something that continues to spring at the author from the white page itself even during the years of his belated success.
I met Lois M. Overbeck, research associate at Emory University and general editor of The Letters of Samuel Beckett, to discuss the series, which is now approaching its conclusion. The interview took place just a few days after a public lecture given in Reading by Dan Gunn, professor at the American University of Paris and editor of the Cambridge collection, and before a reception at the Irish Embassy in London, which hosted a reading of the letters given by Barry McGovern.
Samuel Beckett was particularly reluctant to acknowledge that archival material could shed light upon his published works. In his later years, he authorised the publication only of those letters “having bearing upon my work” (LSB III, xviii), which became the principle guiding the selection and annotation of his vast correspondence. How would you summarise the editors’ interpretation of Beckett’s guidelines?
That’s a big question. It occupied us greatly, because it is different for each volume. In the first one, we had a very difficult time drawing a line between life and work. Especially in this volume, all of Beckett’s writing in his letters is also his work. And because he was generating unfinished work, his letters – especially those to Thomas MacGreevy – are directions toward finished writing, or comments on the writing he was struggling to do. But, as time goes on, the difficulty doesn’t come from the distinction between life and work, but from the large number of letters about the work. So the questions are: how are we going to choose the ones that are most useful to readers but also the most representative of the body of the letters that we cannot include? There are hundreds of invitations for a coffee at the PLM [the Petit Café PLM at the Hôtel Saint-Jacques on Boulevard Saint-Jacques, Paris]. Which of these do we use? You know, they are virtually the same letter, or card. But this is not a decision related to work and life. We realised that all we could publish was a sample. We wanted this to be as good, representative, and literary as possible. But that doesn’t close the door to all the other letters. We do say where all the letters are, so that people will know where they can go for more. I think we have judged it right.
The Cambridge University Press edition has published so far “60 percent of the total corpus for the years 1929-1940, […] 40 percent for 1941-1956”, and “a little over 20 percent” for 1957-1965” (LSB III, xvii). What has been considered irrelevant to Beckett’s work and consequently left out?
In the third volume, it’s pretty clear what the major correspondences are. Of course we don’t impose a narrative, but rather try to discover the narrative that Beckett’s own creative cycles establish. Our job is to think of: where was he at this point? Who were the key people? What letters will tell the stories of his work? Several important narrative patterns are given by the alternation of language, for example. It’s pretty clear, in volume three, that his plays were begun in English, but that he translated them fairly quickly afterwards. If you look at the chronology, you realise that he was working in some way with his plays in every language, every year. And this is also because he not only wrote a play, but he directed it or helped to direct it. Part of that was due to his worldwide exposure, and his worldwide audience. He might have been writing primarily in English, but Comment c’est, for example, was clearly a struggle in French, and French was the language of greatest discipline for him. So the bifurcation may be dramatic versus fictional, meaning that he found one language more suitable for the kind of very precise control that he desired in his prose. The stage instead gave him a sense of freedom – though he managed this freedom tightly, in terms of the rigours of the theatre. He loved the three-dimensional aspect of the stage; the absorption he had for the visual is critical to see in the drama. You will see in volume four, particularly as he interacted with other playwrights (and especially Pinter), how central the visual and the stage performance was to him. What he found in the work for the stage was a kind of three-dimensional sculpture, made up of light, sound and movement.
Several letters reveal Beckett’s recurrent concern with his own body, most of all when health issues are involved. What kind of self-portrait emerges from the author’s correspondence in the period covered by the third volume, and how does it differ from earlier or later stages of his life?
In 1957, Beckett was fifty-one years old, so he started creaking at the joints as we all do… but I think he was much more accepting of that. He complained, of course! He did have serious issues, such as the anticipation of cataract surgery, then more of an ordeal than it is today. His brother died of lung cancer, so whenever he got a bronchial infection… it worried him. He had an area in his jaw that was very badly infected, and of course that was on his mind. And people die, all through this volume. He mourned, but there is a matter-of-factness about death in the letters. I think he was growing more mature about these elements in life. It really depends to whom Beckett was writing. He wrote very personally about his health to his family in Ireland, where there were people who wanted to know about his health. He always wrote to the person. As readers we are outside of this correspondence, and we only know what we read, and perhaps what the footnotes suggest is also happening. It depends on the recipient, how much Beckett needed or wanted to express about something, including his health.
The involvement of Samuel Beckett, of several authors at Les Éditions de Minuit and of the publisher himself, Jérôme Lindon, with contemporary history resurfaces in more than one passage. How would you describe Beckett’s response to the Algerian struggle for independence and to the following turmoil in France?
Well, he was there. He was in the middle of it. In the letters, he wrote that he was listening, anxiously, to the radio, that there were explosions and rioting in the streets, etc. He was physically there at the time this was all occurring. Suzanne, of course, was also very involved, in terms of her strong sense of what was right or wrong in any of these political struggles. Beckett didn’t feel, for instance, that he could sign a petition on behalf of Jérôme Lindon, who was accused for his publications and for his political positions. But this was because he was not a French citizen, and not because he lacked passion about injustice. Indeed, he circulated a petition among his English friends and literary affiliates, and encouraged them to address the situation, to create an international response to the political problem. So, he was not a-political, but you’re not seeing it written about in letters as much as that he was living through it. It was part of the fabric of what was happening. We have these wonderful rose-coloured glasses of time, but he didn’t have them. I mean, he was aware of what was happening, but one doesn’t take a longer view of history in the middle of it. We cannot sense the ultimate shape of history until after it has been experienced. Sometimes our expectations as readers are not realistic or fair.
Many passages in Beckett’s letters refer to convivial gatherings with friends and colleagues, including Avigdor Arikha and Patrick Magee, and to a few trips abroad, such as the 1958 trip to Yugoslavia, also motivated by the need to spend his royalties locally. To what extent did Beckett’s quality of life improve during these years and how did this affect his writing?
He was always generous, and liked to be able to take people to dinner. Hospitality was part of his rapport with people, and he enjoyed doing that. So I don’t think that the trip to Yugoslavia is particularly a benchmark about lifestyle. He and Suzanne regularly took holidays, and they gravitated toward warm, dry climates, because Beckett needed, physically, to get out of Paris. All along, Suzanne tried to make sure that he got into a place where he could relax, without his energies being completely absorbed by people wanting to see him. You can see that very clearly in volume two as well, but in the period covered by volume three, it is more possible to afford regular travel. Beckett used the Nobel Prize funds to help others rather than enrich his lifestyle, as you will see in volume four. When he moved to the apartment over Rue Saint-Jacques in 1960, he was just around the corner from where the Arikhas lived, so he could walk over and have a drink, or listen to music with them… their apartment was a kind of second living room, in a way. With other people, of course, it was different. He liked and enjoyed the company of all his publishers: John Calder was a very congenial person, Barney Rosset was much the same but out of a different milieu completely. Both of them came to their full bearing in the Sixties, and they naturally gravitated to the radical fringe. Challenging censorship was at the core of their publishing values and ventures. He was very close to his Irish friends as well: Pat Magee was a wonderful person, full of stories… and very strong. Jack MacGowran, on the other hand, was talented and delightful but more fragile.
The large number of letters to contemporary writers testifies to Beckett’s growing international fame. This is also proven by the enthusiasm aroused in the younger generation, represented in volume three primarily by Harold Pinter and Aidan Higgins. Among his followers, the closest might have been Robert Pinget: how would you describe their friendship, leading to the adaptation of La Manivelle into English (The Old Tune)?
Pinget had difficulty with his publisher and so he moved to Les Éditions de Minuit. Beckett encouraged him, having him commissioned with the translation of Embers for the Italia prize, for example, and suggesting he write for the BBC. Beckett knew how important it was to be known to an English-speaking audience. Barbara Bray was instrumental in getting Pinget’s connection with the BBC worked through: she was very gifted both as a translator and as an adapter. She worked closely with Beckett on the translation of Pinget’s La Manivelle; although he did not always accept a suggestion, it freed him to know that he had a partnership going. Beckett and Aidan Higgins met through John Beckett. When Higgins asked Samuel Beckett for advice, Beckett suggested, rather, that he consult Arland Ussher “for wisdom”. There are wonderful letters at Trinity College Dublin, between Higgins and Ussher, both of them interested in Beckett’s work. Higgins for a time was in London, and so was John Beckett; they saw the plays and wrote to each other about them. Their corollary correspondence is very interesting, and very helpful. Sam’s friends were also friends with other friends, so if you did the sociological mapping, you would find a lot of interlocking circles, and that’s crucial to understand. As Martha Fehsenfeld and I began our research, we found a different kind of community in Dublin than in Paris and London. In Ireland, particularly, the circles were very tight. Beckett was willing to help Higgins, and arranged for the French translation of Langrishe, Go Down. Is it a coincidence that Harold Pinter decided to write the screenplay for Langrishe? Beckett suggested that Higgins work with Calder to publish his work in English [Felo de Se, issued by Grove Press in the US as Killachter Meadow; LSB II, 705]. Beckett was a mentor. I think the word “influence” is always a difficult word for writers: they don’t like to admit being influenced, but how can you help but be? [Read More]
Also at A Piece of Monologue:
Dan Gunn on Finding Time for Literature
Writers and translator Lydia Davis talks to Dann Gunn about Beckett and The Emperor of Ice-Cream
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| Photograph: Dan Gunn |
A very orderly Greek friend visited me recently, and on stepping into my office and seeing the state of my desk, cried out “Dan! What is that?” He was genuinely shocked, perturbed even, at the sight of the books, papers, unopened envelopes, and assorted debris that flows from several piles over my desk, threatening at any moment to spill off the edges (as it regularly does) and onto the floor. My response was not, I hope, unduly defensive: “It’s a sign that I’m being productive.” Indeed, my desk is clear and tidy only ever for a brief moment after some task has just been completed (or at moments when I remember some unopened bill that needs to be paid). I do like to observe something organized emerging from the apparent chaos; and when that chaos threatens to become a liability, I turn to photos of the studios of artists I admire, of Francis Bacon or Alberto Giacometti, and protest: Now their mess really was a mess.
When I was seventeen, I chose to leave Edinburgh, where I was raised, for the University of Sussex, not least because I had read a book by Gabriel Josipovici entitled The World and the Book; it said on the cover that he was teaching there. What I admired (and still admire) about this wonderful critical work was that it dealt openly and freely with different periods and authors, from different cultures and languages, from Dante to Proust to Saul Bellow. Also mentioned on the cover was that Gabriel Josipovici wrote fiction as well as criticism. In some quiet place within me I seized hold of this as a model: a critic who also writes fiction; a novelist who also writes criticism. I had eight fantastic years at Sussex, taught in an ideal setting by the best teachers imaginable. As it happens, on my very first day I was introduced to my “personal tutor” (what in America would be called my “academic advisor”): Gabriel Josipovici. We quickly got to know each other and have remained friends ever since. The Sussex of those days confirmed for me that one did not have to be (only) a specialist, that one could draw inspiration from many sources, refusing to be boxed in to a single discipline or period or language. I still find that the criticism emerging from this openness suits me best. I have recently been rereading with delight Tony Nuttall’s Shakespeare the Thinker—a book by a former Sussex professor that emerges out of precisely what I’d call the “Sussex spirit.”
By multiplying my directions and intellectual investments—this is as true for me of sporting activity (of which I have done a lot)—I tend not to disperse but rather to gain energy. I avoid what I most dread, being bored. I spent a lot of time as a child being bored in classes in which I had absolutely no interest or flair; I vowed to attempt to lead a life in which I would never be bored again. I can honestly say that I’ve virtually achieved that, but only because I’m constantly varying the sort of word-activity I’m doing. Another relevant analogy might be language-learning. There are ways in which learning a new language can interfere with the language(s) one already knows, but in general I’ve found—and I’m surely not the only one—that learning a new language, even if it requires time and energy, pays back doubly, opening a space in the head/brain/sprit that feels and feeds very much like freedom. I am currently learning Bulgarian, and doing this somehow makes the other languages I know vibrate and hum in echo, as if the words of the new language were watering the words grown dry in the languages less practised.
Of course, there are only so many hours in the day, and several of the activities in which I’m involved, such as editing the Cahiers Series or the Letters of Samuel Beckett, are seriously time-consuming. But more important than the time spent is concentration available; and I can only really concentrate when I am excited by what I am doing. Perhaps I am lucky too, in that before I was reading Gabriel Josipovici, my childhood provided earlier models: my mother was always a voracious reader, and though she worked full time (my father having died when I was six years old) and had to raise me and my two older brothers, she would go to the municipal library every week and take out four or five novels; novels which I would then watch her consume. (She is now eighty-six years old, but retains that capacity for concentration that allows her to read a novel in a day.) And though in some ways I loathed my schooling, which was unnecessarily severe, punitive, and even sadistic (I was of the last generation to suffer the full rigours of the British “public school” system, in which being beaten was an everyday reality), it’s blindingly obvious to me, especially since I myself am a teacher, that I learned how to learn at a very young age. The school I attended was intensely academic, and it regularly strikes me how my students are struggling to learn patterns (such as grammar or essay structure) in their early twenties that were being driven into me when I was barely ten years old.
I still haven’t really answered your question, however, about how I allot the time to my various projects. I’m not sure I can do so adequately since this is rather instinctual. Teaching has to come first, since I find it humiliating to teach a class for which I don’t feel thoroughly prepared or to hand back a student’s essay that I have not marked up as completely as I judge to be helpful. (And could it perhaps be that I feel the need, in some barely reachable part of myself, to prove to the ghosts of my own schoolmasters that it is possible to teach in a demanding and informative way without becoming punitive or worse?) After teaching, the other activities somehow find their space and time—though not always simply I must admit. One example: two years ago I was asked by the TLS to review the first two volumes of Marguerite Duras’s Oeuvres complètes which had just come out in the Pléiade edition. I confidently took this on, only to lug these two volumes around with me wherever I went for the following two years, failing completely to get on with the reading, not to speak of the review. I was lucky enough to have an indulgent editor who ceded to my request made earlier this year, to add the final two volumes of the complete works, making up nearly eight thousand pages in total. For some reason this extra load made the task easier for me, and I managed to write my review while we are still in the centenary year of Duras’s birth. I often invoke the wisdom in a remark once made by Muriel Spark, one of my very favourite twentieth-century writers, when in a BBC interview she was asked if she ever had trouble with writer’s block. She said she never did, that she was always delighted to be writing. Her interviewer (John Tusa, I believe) persisted rather incredulously, asking if she really never found herself in trouble when writing her novels. Spark hesitated a moment before admitting that she did occasionally find that her plots became too complex and that as a result she could not find a way forward. “And what do you do then?” asked the interviewer. “Make them more complex.”
At the risk of going on far too long, I have to admit that there is a hierarchy in the writing and editing projects I undertake: not a hierarchy of importance but of difficulty. Here the sporting analogy may be apposite again. For someone who does not train, a run round the block is a challenge, where for one who trains, it is as easy as a stroll. For me, writing fiction is the hardest thing: nobody can indicate how long a story or novel should be, nobody can tell me in what accent or with what tone the characters should speak, nobody can tell me when I’ve written (or edited) enough, and in any case nobody is demanding the novel of me in the first place. Writing fiction is the toughest sort of training. But alongside that, keeping up with Samuel Beckett offers an arduous workout too, for he is surely one of the most intelligent and learned writers, and even to begin to do him justice requires very serious intellectual training, retraining, expansion, investment. If one spends one’s morning trying to write fiction, and one’s afternoon trying to say something about a writer as difficult and important as Beckett, then if one has a few minutes left over in the evening to attend to words in other contexts, one may indeed feel a little like a trained sprinter taking a jog round the block. [Read More]
Also at A Piece of Monologue:
27.2.15
Beckett’s Bodies: Affect, Disability, Performance
SAMLA 85: Durham, NC Nov 13-15, 2015
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| Samuel Beckett rehearsing with the San Quentin Drama Workshop |
Conference of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA)
Chair/contact: Michelle Rada, Brown University
Beckett’s Bodies: Affect, Disability, Performance
This panel seeks to explore the ways in which bodies are figured and disfigured in Beckett’s work. On their own constituting an expansive “body of work,” Beckett’s prose texts, poems, plays, radio, television, and film works posit human, non-human, and inhuman bodies in different and often surprising forms. What kinds of bodies are incorporated, disembodied, or stripped bare in Beckett’s work? How can we trace the life, vulnerability, and survival of the body in single texts and across works? Are Beckettian physical and textual bodies susceptible to or immune from affect? Which bodies, metaphorical or otherwise, are excluded from consideration and care in a quite prolific archive of Beckett criticism? How does the body function and dysfunction across genre and media, prose and performance? The purpose of this panel is to provide a multidisciplinary platform for thinking about the body in Beckett’s work through emerging reading practices, which could engender new connections and ideas for such an extensively critiqued range of texts. In keeping with SAMLA’s theme for the 2015 conference, “In Concert: Literature and the Other Arts,” emphasis placed on thinking across genre, media, and theoretical approaches is encouraged, and will be a significant part of our conversation at this panel.
Possible approaches and topics may include, but are not limited to:
Queer bodies in Beckett’s work
Beckett and disability studies
Bodily capacity and its limits in performance
Affect and its embodied forms
Gendered bodies and feminist approaches to Beckett
Abject and aging bodies, dead bodies, and animal bodies
Material bodies and the life of the object
Beckett’s body of work and its sustained life in/through/as Beckett criticism
The precarious body, vulnerability, and the pains of survival
Ill-sensing: perception and the phenomenological body in Beckett
Food studies, consuming bodies, oral fixations, sucking stones
Sex and reproduction in Beckett
Adaptations of Beckett and the political, gendered, and racialized body
Dance, stage directions, choreography, and demands on the performing body
Please send a 250-300 word abstract, a brief bio, and any questions to: michelle_rada@brown.edu by 1 June 2015.
Also at A Piece of Monologue:
25.2.15
What David Foster Wallace Taught Paul Thomas Anderson
The Paris Review transcribes a recent interview
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| Paul Thomas Anderson |
When I was at Emerson for that year, David Foster Wallace, who was a great writer who was not known then, was my teacher—he was my English teacher … It was the first teacher I fell in love with. I’d never found anybody else like that at any of the other schools I’d been to. Which makes me really reticent to talk shit about schools or anything else, because it’s just like anyplace—if you could find a good teacher, man, I’m sure school would be great.
[...]
I called him once. He was very generous with his phone number. He said “Call me if you got any questions,” and I called him a couple times ... I ran a few ideas by him about this paper that I was writing. I was writing a paper on Don DeLillo’s White Noise … I’d come up with a couple crazy ideas, and I don’t remember the conversation well, but I just remember him being real generous at like, you know, midnight the night before it was due … I’d love to go back and read [White Noise] again. [Read More]
Also at A Piece of Monologue:
The Silence And Awe Of Arvo Pärt
An interview broadcast by NPR
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| Arvo Pärt |
Arvo Pärt is one of the few living composers to find popularity beyond the borders of classical music. R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe and Bjork are big fans. Although the 78-year-old musician usually shies away from acclaim and the media, he is currently attending a festival of his music in New York and Washington, and he made time to talk about his music, bike riding and bells.
Pärt is a major composer, and I was a little nervous meeting him. So I brought along a bell for good luck. I set it on the table between us and gave it a little tinkle. Estonian composer Arvo Pärt's music is celebrated at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a performance of his choral work Kanon Pokajanen at the Temple of Dendur.
"Oh, this is a good beginning, thank you," he said in his heavily accented English.
Pärt likes bells, literally and figuratively in his music. He also likes space and silence. Fans tend to use words like "timeless" to describe his contemplative music. But for Pärt, time has deep meaning. In conversation, as in his music, he takes his time to unclutter his thoughts. They come out like poems.
"Time for us, is like the time of our own lives," he says. "It is temporary. What is timeless is the time of eternal life. That is eternal. These are all high words, and so, like the sun, we cannot really look at them directly, but my intuition tells me that the human soul is connected to both of them — time and eternity." [Read More]
Also at A Piece of Monologue:
27.12.14
Gerhard Richter's Desk
A still taken from Corinna Belz's documentary
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Find Gerhard Richter Painting on Amazon: US | UK
Also at A Piece of Monologue:
27.10.14
Asymptote: October 2014 Issue
25.9.14
Susan Bernofsky on Robert Walser
An online podcast
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| Robert Walser |
In 1993 when Susan Bernofsky published her first book-length translation of Robert Walser, the author was little-known in English and virtually unread in the United States. By 2009, when Bernofsky’s translation of The Tanners signified that all of Walser’s novels were available in English for the first time, the release of that book was greeted with praise from publications as diverse as BookForum, Time Out New York, and the Los Angeles Times.
The rise of Walser in translation over the past two decades has been nothing short of stunning, and it is thanks in no small part to a group of fine translators, of whom Bernofsky has played a leading roll. Since her first publication of Walser in 1993 she has published two other books by him, with two more on the way, as well as a critical biography of the author. No less a reader than the Nobel-winning novelist and critic J.M. Coetzee—one of Walser’s great contemporary admirers—has praised Bernofsky’s translations for their “ingenuity” and “resourcefulness” in dealing with his wide vocabulary and highly precise prose.
Walser lived from 1878 to 1956, although it is widely believed that he gave up writing after 1933 when he committed himself to a sanatorium. In his time his writing received praise from the likes of Kafka, Musil, and Walter Benjamin, but after his death he fell into obscurity in Europe, and it was only in the 1960s and ‘70s that he began to be known again on that continent. Susan Sontag took up the cause of Walser in the U.S. in the 1980s, but wasn’t until the late ‘90s and the ‘00s, with the translation of a number of his major works, that he began to become known here.
Bernofsky has described Walser’s prose as walking “a fine line between the maudlin and the trivially playful,” going on to say that he “always manages to stay right in the middle, in that sweet spot where he achieves a sort of guileless profundity that takes the reader by surprise again and again.” The translation of such writing is difficult to say the least, and we are fortunate that Bernofsky has proven herself up to the challenge time and time again.
In addition to Walser, Bernofsky has translated German-language works from the renowned Japanese author Yoko Tawada, as well as Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse for The Modern Library, and others. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including ones from the PEN Translation Fund, the NEA, and the Lannan Foundation. [Read More]
Find Robert Walser on Amazon: US | UK
Also at A Piece of Monologue:
21.9.14
Adorno, Benjamin and Pop Culture
From Alex Ross (New Yorker)
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| Illustration: Patrick Bremer |
In Jonathan Franzen’s 2001 novel, “The Corrections,” a disgraced academic named Chip Lambert, who has abandoned Marxist theory in favor of screenwriting, goes to the Strand Bookstore, in downtown Manhattan, to sell off his library of dialectical tomes. The works of Theodor W. Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, Fredric Jameson, and various others cost Chip nearly four thousand dollars to acquire; their resale value is sixty-five. “He turned away from their reproachful spines, remembering how each of them had called out in a bookstore with a promise of a radical critique of late-capitalist society,” Franzen writes. After several more book-selling expeditions, Chip enters a high-end grocery store and walks out with an overpriced filet of wild Norwegian salmon.
Anyone who underwent a liberal-arts education in recent decades probably encountered the thorny theorists associated with the Institute for Social Research, better known as the Frankfurt School. Their minatory titles, filled with dark talk of “Negative Dialectics” and “One-Dimensional Man,” were once proudly displayed on college-dorm shelves, as markers of seriousness; now they are probably consigned to taped-up boxes in garages, if they have not been discarded altogether. Once in a while, the present-day Web designer or business editor may open the books and see in the margins the excited queries of a younger self, next to pronouncements on the order of “There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (Walter Benjamin) or “The whole is the false” (Adorno).
In the nineteen-nineties, the period in which “The Corrections” is set, such dire sentiments were unfashionable. With the fall of the Soviet Union, free-market capitalism had triumphed, and no one seemed badly hurt. In light of recent events, however, it may be time to unpack those texts again. Economic and environmental crisis, terrorism and counterterrorism, deepening inequality, unchecked tech and media monopolies, a withering away of intellectual institutions, an ostensibly liberating Internet culture in which we are constantly checking to see if we are being watched: none of this would have surprised the prophets of Frankfurt, who, upon reaching America, failed to experience the sensation of entering Paradise. Watching newsreels of the Second World War, Adorno wrote, “Men are reduced to walk-on parts in a monster documentary film which has no spectators, since the least of them has his bit to do on the screen.” He would not revise his remarks now.
The philosophers, sociologists, and critics in the Frankfurt School orbit, who are often gathered under the broader label of Critical Theory, are, indeed, having a modest resurgence. They are cited in brainy magazines like n+1, The Jacobin, and the latest iteration of The Baffler. Evgeny Morozov, in his critiques of Internet boosterism, has quoted Adorno’s early mentor Siegfried Kracauer, who registered the information and entertainment overload of the nineteen-twenties. The novelist Benjamin Kunkel, in his recent essay collection “Utopia or Bust,” extolls the criticism of Jameson, who has taught Marxist literary theory at Duke University for decades. (Kunkel also mentions “The Corrections,” noting that Chip gets his salmon at a shop winkingly named the Nightmare of Consumption.) The critic Astra Taylor, in “The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age,” argues that Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in their 1944 book “Dialectic of Enlightenment,” gave early warnings about corporations “drowning out democracy in pursuit of profit.” And Walter Benjamin, whose dizzyingly varied career skirted the edges of the Frankfurt collective, receives the grand treatment in “Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life” (Harvard), by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, who earlier edited Harvard’s four-volume edition of Benjamin’s writings.
The Frankfurt School, which arose in the early nineteen-twenties, never presented a united front; it was, after all, a gaggle of intellectuals. One zone in which they clashed was that of mass culture. Benjamin saw the popular arena as a potential site of resistance, from which left-leaning artists like Charlie Chaplin could transmit subversive signals. Adorno and Horkheimer, by contrast, viewed pop culture as an instrument of economic and political control, enforcing conformity behind a permissive screen. The “culture industry,” as they called it, offered the “freedom to choose what is always the same.” A similar split appeared in attitudes toward traditional forms of culture: classical music, painting, literature. Adorno tended to be protective of them, even as he exposed their ideological underpinnings. Benjamin, in his resonant sentence linking culture and barbarism, saw the treasures of bourgeois Europe as spoils in a victory procession, each work blemished by the suffering of nameless millions.
The debate reached its height in the wake of Benjamin’s 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” a masterpiece of contingent optimism that praises mass culture only insofar as mass culture advances radical politics. Many readers will sympathize with Benjamin, who managed to uphold a formidable critical tradition while opening himself to the modern world and writing in a sensuous voice. He furnishes a template for the pop-savvy intellectual, the preferred model in what remains of literary life. Yet Adorno, his dark-minded, infuriating brother, will not go away: his cross-examination of the “Work of Art” essay, his pinpointing of its moments of naïveté, strikes home. Between them, Adorno and Benjamin were pioneers in thinking critically about pop culture—in taking that culture seriously as an object of scrutiny, whether in tones of delight, dismay, or passionate ambivalence. [Read More]
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18.9.14
Why Walking Helps Us Think
Nabokov, Joyce, Woolf and the science of walking
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| Photograph: Nick Walton |
In Vogue’s 1969 Christmas issue, Vladimir Nabokov offered some advice for teaching James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: “Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom’s and Stephen’s intertwining itineraries clearly traced.” He drew a charming one himself. Several decades later, a Boston College English professor named Joseph Nugent and his colleagues put together an annotated Google map that shadows Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom step by step. The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, as well as students at the Georgia Institute of Technology, have similarly reconstructed the paths of the London amblers in “Mrs. Dalloway.”
Such maps clarify how much these novels depend on a curious link between mind and feet. Joyce and Woolf were writers who transformed the quicksilver of consciousness into paper and ink. To accomplish this, they sent characters on walks about town. As Mrs. Dalloway walks, she does not merely perceive the city around her. Rather, she dips in and out of her past, remolding London into a highly textured mental landscape, “making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh.”
Since at least the time of peripatetic Greek philosophers, many other writers have discovered a deep, intuitive connection between walking, thinking, and writing. (In fact, Adam Gopnik wrote about walking in The New Yorker just two weeks ago.) “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!” Henry David Thoreau penned in his journal. “Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.” Thomas DeQuincey has calculated that William Wordsworth—whose poetry is filled with tramps up mountains, through forests, and along public roads—walked as many as a hundred and eighty thousand miles in his lifetime, which comes to an average of six and a half miles a day starting from age five.
What is it about walking, in particular, that makes it so amenable to thinking and writing? The answer begins with changes to our chemistry. When we go for a walk, the heart pumps faster, circulating more blood and oxygen not just to the muscles but to all the organs—including the brain. Many experiments have shown that after or during exercise, even very mild exertion, people perform better on tests of memory and attention. Walking on a regular basis also promotes new connections between brain cells, staves off the usual withering of brain tissue that comes with age, increases the volume of the hippocampus (a brain region crucial for memory), and elevates levels of molecules that both stimulate the growth of new neurons and transmit messages between them. [Read More]
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17.9.14
I See Myself: David Lynch on Eraserhead
From interviews conducted by Chris Rodley
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| Working the night shift: Cast and crew members of David Lynch's Eraserhead |
Eraserhead took five years to complete. You must have been completely dedicated to the film to sustain both the project and your own enthusiasm over such an extended production period. What was it about the idea that you loved?
It was the world. In my mind, it was a world between a factory and a factory neighborhood. A little, unknown, twisted, almost silent lost spot where little details and little torments existed. And people were struggling in darkness. They’re living in those fringelands, and they’re the people I really love. Henry’s definitely one of those people. They kind of get lost in time. They’re either working in a factory or fiddling with something or other. It’s a world that’s neither here nor there. It came out of the air in Philadelphia. I always say it’s my Philadelphia Story. It just doesn’t have Jimmy Stewart in it!
I could be on the set at night, and I would imagine the whole world around it. I imagined walking out, and there were very few cars—there might be one far away, but in the shadows—and very few people. And the lights in the windows would be really dim, and there would be no movement in the window, and the coffee shop would be empty except for one person who didn’t speak properly. It was just like a mood. The life in that world . . . there was nothing like it. Things go so fast when you’re making a movie now that you’re not able to give the world enough—what it deserves. It wants to be lived in a little bit; it’s got so much to offer, and you’re going just a little too fast. It’s just sad.
When he reviewed Blue Velvet, novelist J. G. Ballard said that the film was “like The Wizard of Oz reshot with a script by Franz Kafka and decor by Francis Bacon.” Kafka certainly comes to mind in Eraserhead. Do you like his work?
Yeah. The one artist that I feel could be my brother—and I almost don’t like saying it, because the reaction is always, “Yeah, you and everybody else”—is Franz Kafka. I really dig him a lot. Some of his things are the most thrilling combos of words I have ever read. If Kafka wrote a crime picture, I’d be there. I’d like to direct that for sure.
In a way, Henry is akin to Josef K in Kafka’s The Trial—a man by turns bemused and alarmed by what is happening to him.
Henry is very sure that something is happening, but he doesn’t understand it at all. He watches things very, very carefully because he’s trying to figure them out. He might study the corner of that pie container just because it’s in his line of sight, and he might wonder why he sat where he did to have that be there like that. Everything is new. It might not be frightening to him, but it could be a key to something. Everything should be looked at. There could be clues in it.
There seems to be little differentiation between the outside and the inside in Eraserhead—something that becomes much more pronounced later in Twin Peaks. Views through windows are of brick walls, and although the sounds might be different, it’s mostly just as noisy inside Henry’s apartment block as it is in the world outside. The feeling is of no letting up. There’s a constant . . .
Pressure. Well, again, it’s industry and different things going on—a lot of it unseen but heard. But to me, even though there was plenty of ambiguous torment in Henry, his apartment—actually, his room—was, you know, fairly cozy. It was just this one little place he had to mull things over. The anxiety doesn’t let up, but it doesn’t really let up for anybody. Pressure is, you know, always building. In a way, I’d like to live in Henry’s apartment, and be around there. I love Hitchcock’s Rear Window because it has such a mood, and even though I know what’s going to happen, I love being in that room and feeling that time. It’s like I can smell it.
How did Eraserhead come about?
Well, fate stepped in again and was really smiling on me. The Center [the American Film Institute’s Center for Advanced Film Studies] was completely chaotic and disorganized, which was great. And you quickly learned that if you were going to get something done, you would have to do it yourself. They wanted to let people do their thing. If you could get it going, they would support it. They didn’t have any kind of real program. They ran films all day long, and you could look at them. And if there was something you wanted to see, or something somebody said you’d gotta see, you’d go up, and there it would be. It was an unbelievable screening room. Anything that was on film, they could show there. And people would get ahold of really rare prints. The chandelier would drift up into the ceiling and dim as it went. And they had the greatest projectionists!
My first year at the Center was spent rewriting a forty-five-page script I wrote called Gardenback. The whole thing unfolded from this painting I’d done. The script had a story, in my mind, and it had what some people could call a “monster” in it. When you look at a girl, something crosses from her to you. And in this story, that something is an insect.
Well, a couple of things happened. Caleb Deschanel read this script, and he called me up and said he loved it. He was a fellow at the Center and a director of photography. He said he wanted to shoot it. And that was really great with me. I’d worked with Caleb on a film he was shooting for a guy named Gil Dennis. They wanted a snake to crawl between the wall and the wallpaper in this thing, so I built this snake and this rig and did this thing for Gil. It didn’t work out real well, but it was okay. So Caleb was telling me about this producer over at Fox who was ready to do a series of low-budget horror films. This guy was a sort of friend of his, and he wanted my permission to show him Gardenback.
Frank Daniel—who was the dean of the Czechoslovakian film school—was by far the best teacher I ever had. Just a great, great teacher. Unbelievable! I never really liked teachers, but I liked Frank because he wasn’t a teacher, in a way. He just talked. And he loved cinema, and he knew everything about it. Frank was always trying to talk to me about Gardenback, but I wasn’t, you know, talking. So one day, Caleb and Frank and I went to see this guy at Fox. And this guy said, “Look, I want to give you fifty thousand dollars to make this movie. Caleb will shoot it, and it’ll be a labor of love—you’ll get everybody in there to do stuff for nothing.” But he said, “It’s only forty-five pages. You gotta make it 115 or 110 pages—it’s gotta be a feature script.” And this, like, hurt my head! “What does he mean?”
So Frank tried to explain to me. He said things like, “You have to have these scenes between the people. And they have to talk. You should think about some dialogue.” And I still didn’t know what he was really on about. “What are they gonna say?” I said. And so [laughs] we started having these weekly meetings that were like an experiment, because I really didn’t know what they were getting at. And I was curious to see what they were going to say to me. Eventually, a script got written. Gil Dennis was a writer and would come into the meetings. And Toni Vellani [codirector of the Center] would sit in on these meetings too. So they would all talk to me, and I’d go home and try to write these things.
What I wrote was pretty much worthless, but something happened inside me about structure, about scenes. And I don’t even know what it was, but it sort of percolated down and became part of me. But the script was pretty much worthless. I knew I’d just watered it down. It was way more normal to me. The bits I liked were there, but they were interspersed with all this other stuff. And now it was the end of the first year, and there I was with this thing.
On the first day of the second year, the old fellows came in and met the new fellows. And at the end of this meeting, they assigned different groups to different places to kick off the new year. And I was assigned to a first-year group. In my mind, this was a humiliating thing, and I didn’t understand it. So I got really, really upset. All this frustration came out, and I stormed up to Frank Daniel, and I screamed at him. I just barged in and told him, “I’m outta here. I quit.” I went and told Alan [Splet]. I said, “I’m outta here!” He says, “I’m going with you,” because he was fed up too, and we both stormed out of the place. We went down to Hamburger Hamlet and just sat there drinking coffee. It was over.
I finally went home, and Peggy [Lynch’s wife] said, “What the hell’s going on? They’ve been calling every ten minutes!” And I said, “I quit.” And she said, “Well, they want to see you.” So I calmed down, and the next day I went up, just basically to hear what they had to say. And Frank said, “We must be doing something wrong, because you’re one of our favorite people and you’re upset. What do you want to do?” And I said, “Well, I sure don’t wanna do this piece a shit Gardenback now—it’s wrecked!” And he said, “What do you want to do?” And I said, “I want to do Eraserhead.” And he said, “Okay, do Eraserhead then.”
So you already had the idea ready to go?
I had this twenty-one-page script. And they said, “It’s twenty-one pages,” and Toni or somebody said, “It’s a twenty-one-minute film.” And I said, “Well . . . er . . . I think it’s going to be longer than that.” So they elected it to be a forty-two-minute film. But the beautiful thing—because they were now feeling a little bit guilty—was that I was able to go to the equipment shed. My friend David Khasky was in charge of all the cameras and cables, lights, everything. And I had this Volkswagen with a four-by-eight wooden rack that held tons of stuff. Well, it was packed four or five feet tall with cables and lights. And the car was packed with camera equipment. And I’d drive down to these stables owned by the school, unload, and drive back up and get more.
The stables were down at the bottom of the mansion down Doheny Road. It was a little mansion in and of itself. It had a greenhouse and a garden shed, all made of brick, with these shingle roofs. But it was all getting old and funny. It had garages and a hayloft, a big L-shaped room above the garages. It had a maid’s quarters and places above for different people who worked for Doheny, kitchens, bathrooms, like a little hotel, with a lot of other stuff around. And I got four or five rooms and the hayloft and a couple of garages.
You just laid claim to them?
Yeah. No one wanted them anyway. They were empty. So we had a camera room, a greenroom, an editing room, rooms for sets, a food room, and a bathroom. We just sort of had the run of the place. I had those stables for many years.
They knew you were there, but they just left you alone?
Yes. They didn’t know I was living there—I got divorced in my second year, and I started living there. I also stayed at Jack Nance and Catherine Coulson’s house sometimes. And Al stayed at the stables a lot. That’s another thing I had: since Al was head of the sound department, I had access to the entire mixing room, the Nagras, microphones and cables, and all the rest. And the soundman. I had everything going for me. I was doing the thing I wanted to do most of all, making films. And I practically had my own little studio.
Did you get a grant to go to the Center, or did your parents have to pay?
You have to get there, and you have to take care of yourself. My father lent me money—me and Peggy and Jennifer [Lynch’s daughter]—and Peggy’s parents helped out too.
So how were you taking care of yourself during that time?
I can’t remember what year it was in Eraserhead, but I got this paper route, and I delivered the Wall Street Journal. That’s how I supported myself. We only shot at night, and my route was at night. So at a certain point, I’d have to stop the shoot and go do the route. But I had the route down so fast that I was only gone about an hour and eight minutes. Sometimes it would be fifty-nine minutes, but I was going flat out to make the hour.
Why were you only shooting at night?
Well, you know, because it was dark! And the park department was up there during the day, so it was noisy and there were people around. At night, no one was there. And it was a nighttime film. The mood was perfect, and that is critical.
Did you now regard yourself primarily as a filmmaker?
I didn’t really think about it; I was making this film. But I always felt there were these filmmakers out there, and I wasn’t part of that. I was separate from that. I never really considered myself in the system at all. [Read More]
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10.9.14
Robert Walser, Berlin Stories
A recent publication from the NYRB
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| Robert Walser, Berlin Stories |
Those of you compelled to take public transport might find some wisdom in this piece of advice on what to do if the journey goes past the half-hour mark, and is getting tedious: "You look straight ahead. To show by one's ways and gestures that one is finding things a bit tedious fills a person with quite peculiar pleasure. Now you return to studying the face of the conductor on duty, and now you content yourself once more with merely, vacantly staring straight ahead. Isn't that nice? One thing and then another? I must confess: I have achieved a certain technical mastery in the art of staring straight ahead."
You may wonder: is the writer of these words perhaps having us on? On the contrary: this is what he's like, pretty much all the time. I think it was Herman Hesse who said that if you can stomach Robert Walser's prose, you can't help but fall in love with it, and I fell in love with it pretty quickly. He's guileless but not stupid, an admiring observer of the inconsequential. "We don't need to see anything out of the ordinary," he once wrote, "we already see so much." Susan Sontag, in a brief but very worthwhile introduction to a collection of his stories published 30-odd years ago, noticed how easy it was to come up with points of comparison: "a Paul Klee in prose ... a cross between Stevie Smith and Beckett ... the missing link between Kleist and Kafka". In fact, as she points out, it was Kafka who was first compared to Walser, rather than the other way round (this is the humorous Kafka, who has disappeared in the contemporary imagination, to be replaced by the Kafka of bad dreams). [Read More]
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8.9.14
The Small Voice of Robert Walser
Benjamin Kunkel on the life and work of the Swiss writer
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In “Jakob von Gunten,” the 1909 novel by the German-speaking Swiss writer Robert Walser, the hero adopts the motto “To be small and to stay small.” The words apply just as well to Walser himself, whose life and work played out as a relentless diminuendo. The up-and-coming young novelist of the period before the First World War, capable of producing three novels in as many years, turned to shorter forms, and saw his audience and his income dwindle gradually through the war years and the nineteen-twenties. Once a fixture of smart Berlin society, Walser exchanged the world of salons for a series of tiny furnished rooms and, finally, in 1929, a mental institution. Even his handwriting diminished; he was able to squeeze a last novel—a short one, but still—onto just twenty-four sides of octavo-size paper. For years, some scholars believed that the script in which Walser composed this novel, “The Robber,” and many other later works was an uncrackable private code, and not until 1972, fifteen years after his death, did transcriptions from the so-called Bleistiftgebiet, or “pencil area,” begin to appear. The publication, starting in the eighties, of six volumes of painstakingly transcribed texts brought to light some of Walser’s most beautiful and haunting writing, and reinforced his posthumous reputation in German. The incredible shrinking writer is a major twentieth-century prose artist who, for all that the modern world seems to have passed him by, fulfills the modern criterion: he sounds like nobody else.
In Walser’s case, this means that he achieved a remarkable tone, in which perfect assurance and perfect ambiguity combine. His narrators are all ostensibly humble, courteous, and cheerful; the puzzle lies in deciding where they are speaking in earnest and where ironically. Three of Walser’s four surviving novels are now available in English, along with several collections of stories quarried by various translators—most notably Christopher Middleton and Susan Bernofsky—from the ten volumes of short prose that Walser published during his lifetime, and the deep trove of deciphered microscripts. The most recently translated novel, “The Assistant” (New Directions; translated by Bernofsky; $16.95), abounds in declarations like “How tasty the coffee was again today.” No irony there—and you can read a lot of Walser without finding a single mention of food, drink, weather, clothing, architecture, or cigars that is not entirely appreciative. Joseph, the assistant, also enjoys swimming on his days off: “What swimming person, provided he is not about to drown, can help being in excellent spirits?” The proviso about drowning introduces a dark flutter of ambiguity, but, generally speaking, Walser’s narrators claim to be in excellent spirits even when they are drowning: “Of course, I like sorrow very much as well, it’s very valuable, very.” Sometimes Walser seems a sort of saint of cosmic compliance. At other times, in his good-natured acceptance of all things, he appears to be mocking the very possibility of such an attitude: “I only know that all the poor people work in the factory, perhaps as a punishment for being so poor.” Indeed, the Walser tone, hovering between beatific quietism and a burlesque of conventionality, is detectable in the immortal reply he gave a man who visited him at an asylum and asked about his writing: “I am not here to write, but to be mad.” [Read More]
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Van Gogh and Mental Illness
Maria Popova looks at the painter's letters
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| Vincent Van Gogh, Self-Portrait (1887) |
Around the time that Tolstoy was tussling with depression and his spiritual crisis, on the other side of Europe another creative icon was struggling with the darkness of his own psychoemotional landscape. As he was painting some of the most celebrated and influential art of all time, Vincent Van Gogh was combating his anguishing mental illness — frequent episodes of depression, paralyzing anxiety and, according to some accounts, the symptoms of bipolar disorder — which would eventually claim his life in 1890, shortly after his 37th birthday.
Van Gogh’s most direct and honest account of his psychoemotional turmoil comes from the letters to his brother Theo, originally published in 1937 as the hefty tome Dear Theo: The Autobiography of Vincent van Gogh and later excerpted in My Life & Love Are One — the same wonderful 1976 gem that gave us his thoughts on love, tracing “the magic and melancholy of Vincent van Gogh.” The title comes from a specific letter written during one of the painter’s periods of respite from mental illness, in which he professes to his brother: “Life has become very dear to me, and I am very glad that I love. My life and my love are one.” [Read More]
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7.9.14
The Photography of Vivian Maier
An unknown artist who chronicled post-1945 America
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| Photograph: Vivian Maier |
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| Photograph: Vivian Maier |
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| Photograph: Vivian Maier |
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| Photograph: Vivian Maier |
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| Photograph: Vivian Maier |
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| Photograph: Vivian Maier |
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| Photograph: Vivian Maier |
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| Photograph: Vivian Maier |
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| Photograph: Vivian Maier |
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| Photograph: Vivian Maier |
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| Photograph: Vivian Maier |
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| Photograph: Vivian Maier |
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| Photograph: Vivian Maier |
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| Photograph: Vivian Maier |
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| Photograph: Vivian Maier |
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| Photograph: Vivian Maier |
"Honestly, my reaction when this process started was, oh, they're doing a movie on my crazy nanny who I never really liked," says Joe Matthews. The nanny's name was Vivian Maier, and she looked after Joe, his sister Sarah and brother Clark in the Chicago suburbs for three years in the 1980s.
The family knew that Maier was unusual and that she took a lot of photographs. Her attic bedroom was kept locked and packed full of boxes and newspapers. Joe's mother, Linda, says that she hired Maier, who was in her 50s, because she wanted someone she could respect as an equal: "I liked Viv because she spoke her mind so I knew what I was dealing with. We could disagree. I could say, 'No, I don't like doing things that way.' I thought she made a good partner."
But neither Linda Matthews nor any of the other families Maier worked for dreamed that soon after her death in 2009, their former nanny would be hailed as a key figure in 20th-century American photography. "The first time I saw her picture on television, I was stunned," says Linda. "I knew she was talented but it's astonishing what she made of it. Who could have imagined she could have left so much behind?" [Read More]
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