Month: June 2013

I defer to David Simon’s take on the Snowden affair; Conor moved the debate along; and the term “media martyr” seemed more apropos than “whistle-blower”. Pissaro’s work (almost as magnificent as his beard) was given a second look (see Orchard in Bloom, Louveciennes above); and we toasted the poet, Marie Ponsot. Hound love here; Paul Wolfowitz as a velociraptor here.

The most popular post? Enter The Media Martyr. Second? This Is Bullshit. And the sectarian flames licked the Middle East some more.

See you in the morning.

Mona Simpson ponders why readers keep returning to Henry James’ Washington Square, a novel exploring “the terrible condition of being unable to love”:

We don’t read James for his stories. Despite their formal symmetries, they feel jerry-rigged. He borrows from melodrama, but lops off that genre’s gratifications, going realist on us at exactly the wrong moment. If Americans want a tragedy with a happy ending, Henry James delivers something more like a comedy with a haunting close.

We don’t return to James for his characters, either. It’s not quite possible to love them the way one may love Leopold Bloom or Mrs. Dalloway or even Lily Briscoe. They don’t feel real, exactly, though they’re the opposite of cardboard—a term suggesting characters made of appearances. James’s characters are all soul; they’re closer to ideas than to bodies. We know their sensibilities but not their details. …

We read James not for his stories or for his characters but for the one thing that can’t be adapted: his mind. We know it, in its arguments with itself, its endlessly refining discernment, its flickering shifts and glints of wisdom. We know those details the way we know Bloom’s love of organ meats and Mrs. Ramsay’s tendency to slough off her beauty with haphazard clothes.

No one else has given such fine attention to personal life as it’s thought, that wave and flutter in consciousness. Our stray wishes, our abiding hopes, our shame and constant fears—James attends to all the component parts of what we loosely call love, if only to show his characters coming up against their limitations.

(Illustration: From the 1543 book in the collection in National Institute of Medicine. Andreas Vesalius’ Fabrica, showing the Base Of The Brain, including the cerebellum, olfactory bulbs, and optic nerve.)

Virginia Postrel supports Detroit’s museum parting with some of its artworks:

[G]reat artworks shouldn’t be held hostage by a relatively unpopular museum in a declining region. The cause of art would be better served if they were sold to institutions in growing cities where museum attendance is more substantial and the visual arts are more appreciated than they’ve ever been in Detroit. Art lovers should stop equating the public good with the status quo.

Tyler Cowen adds:

We easily can imagine that more people would see those artworks if they were located in Los Angeles or other larger and growing cities.  Nonetheless I believe such a sale would set off alarm bells for conservatives, related to Arnold Kling’s “civilization vs. barbarism” axis.  Detroit would be sending a signal that it will never even try to go back to what it was, much as if a university spent down most of its endowment and relied on borrowing.  Still, perhaps that is where we are at with Detroit.

Ian Winstanley insists that “weeds are our most successful cultivated plants”:

[F]or those who are still unconvinced about their provenance, there is a story from wartime London. After the Blitz, bomb sites were colonised by an extraordinary array of weeds: 126 species in all, according to the then director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, Edward Salisbury. They included the now famous “bombweed”, rosebay willowherb; bracken carpeting the flooded nave of St James’s, Piccadilly; ragwort on London Wall; and nettles, docks, buttercups and daisies everywhere.

The fascinating thing is that 75 years earlier, a well had been dug in Tottenham Court Road to serve a new brewery, just a couple of miles from what would become the epicentre of the bomb damage. And from rock layers dating from 250,000 years ago, long before the invention of either war or gardening, botanists identified the remains of just the same weeds as flourished in London after the Blitz. These palaeolithic pests were doing their best to green over another broken landscape, shattered by glaciers and herds of rootling mammoths.

I find it oddly cheering that there should be a category of plants which undertake this essential repair role. We need to deal with weeds when they directly obstruct our human affairs. But that shouldn’t stop us respecting their role as nature’s catch-crop, part of its fabled abhorrence of a vacuum, components of a kind of vegetable immune system which does its best to repel the forces of entropy and development that create barrenness. And to do this they must be smart, nimble, adaptive and mobile. … To those who would truly prefer lifeless brown earth to these opportunist green settlers, I can only suggest they book tickets for the first passenger flight to Mars.

A photo gallery is here.

(Photo of “bombweed” by David Wright)

In her new book Our Aesthetic Categories, English professor Sianne Ngai finds that “the pleasure we take in cuteness contains more than a grain of sadism”:

“Cute” is a much more ambivalent description than social niceties will allow us to admit. When we snatch up something cute in an embrace, we pantomime the act of defending our protein-rich and defenseless little pal from an imaginary threat, but the rigid urgency of our embrace, and the concomitant ‘devouring-in-kisses’ suggests that what we’re protecting the cute thing from is ourselves. Consider how often the ejaculation of a phrase like “aren’t you cute!” is followed and intensified by “I could just eat you!”

Or, consider Ngai’s example of a bath sponge in the shape of a frog. Its cute big eyes, its cute blobby form, its winsomely wounded expression—everything about the bath-frog’s design culminates in a single purpose: for it to be held against the body and “squished in a way guaranteed to repeatedly crush and deform its already somewhat formless face.”

For the longest time, I was offended by being called “cute” in America. I was told that the word has a different connotation in the US than in England – where it is much more emasculating – and I should accept the compliment. It was hard nonetheless. Why am I called “cute” and not “hot,” I wondered? Because I was exactly that – cute as an object of affection and inspection rather than lust (which is obviously what I preferred). So if you’re wondering what deep psychological roots my beard obsession comes from … well, I worked through that a long time ago.

And doesn’t part of you want the above video not to end well? I confess that part of me does. Too cute.

In an interview about a new exhibit of Camille Pissarro’s paintings at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, Guillermo Solana explains the distinctive style of the frequently overshadowed Impressionist:

We are used to this image of Impressionism as linked to water. The surface of water is a perfect metaphor for that which an Impressionist painter wants to get onto the canvas. He wants to mimic that moving surface of broken colour reflections. Monet, Renoir, Sisley, all of them pretty much focused on the water. Water is everywhere in Monet’s painting, with the River Seine, the coast, the sea at Normandy, etc.

Pissarro is basically a painter of earth, of the hills, of the fields. That’s an aspect of Impressionism we were not aware of. Pissarro is a strange, almost a unique case, because he was not interested in water until his last years when he went to Normandy to paint harbour landscapes.

We are also used to identifying Impressionism with Monet’s personality. Monet was a painter focused on la vie parisienne, on bourgeois people, ladies and gentlemen walking around, strolling through the gardens and parks or the countryside. Pissarro on the other hand was a painter focused on the peasantry, the life of country people. He had this different approach to the country and to the landscape, not just as a leisure space but as a space for hard labour.

(Image: Pissarro’s “Landscape at Pontoise,” 1874, via Wikimedia Commons)