What a silly book! An aging museum Director has another murder near his museum grounds, but this time he is a suspect for the detectives on the case, while his prime suspect had an affair with the woman that he will sleep with, which his wife accepts because she slept with the murder victim! And there is a signing monkey whose life narrative is interespersed as the Director reads the memoir that the Chimpanzee signs to a typist.
A lovely send up of academic and museum bureaucracies, mid-life crises, old men with women barely half their age as wives and lovers, and our bizarre and entirely unexplainable self-satisfaction as a species. This is a series written by the former director of travel at Harvard's Museum of Natural History, so Alcorn's hilarious dialogue among academic bureaucrats about various theorretical fads, and the pretensions of those who take them seriously, his descriptions of the endless complexities of museum paperwork, and the characters who believe their cubicle defines the universe (or at least university). A perfect read when you need a reminder that it's only life after all.
The Great Trouble with Art in This Country
The great trouble with art in this country at present, and apparently in France also, is that there is no spirit of revolt–no new ideas appears among younger artists. They are following along the paths beaten out by their predecessors, trying to do better what their predecessors have already done.So spoke Marcel Duchamp in an interview with James Johnson Sweeney in 1946. I can imagine him rolling his eyes now to see so many mimicking what he did well, and definitively. There is plenty of art out there that takes "something from an earlier period [to] adapt it to your own work" and produces a creative approach. Most commonly now "following along the paths beaten out" by Duchamp.
Newness was only a rallying cry because of the academic rules surrounding art. How is it that the rule has now become new, new, new. What does that even mean?
The Museum of Modern Art currently has an exhibit on post-temporal art (The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World) based on the curator's idea that progression is meaningless when artists now have access to works and ideas from around the world instantaneously. Art was only about progress when art was understood as art history, bound by chronology and the Enlightenment's ideal of progress. Linking as we do across the internet no longer seeks to move forward but to produce connections, more like the rhizomatic web of Deleuze and Guattari than a ladder ever upward and outward.
Now is populated by what has been and what will be and new is no better than old, when there is so much more in it all. The 20th century wanted new, but that might not be as important for the 21st. New is often wasteful, ignorant, and blithe.
The MoMA show does a stupendous job of presenting art that is not worried about being new, creating progress, but content to use the materials and ideas that support the work, from wherever and whenever. I didn't like all the works, but the display was invigorating. If a museum, that receptacle for art history, can begin to reject the steel jaw of chronology then we might actually be looking at a new age for art, though not of art. And, wouldn't that satisfy all those who want something new?
No?
Oh well.
Book Review: The Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin
This brief book is a strange and uncomfortable tale of Christ's crucifixion from the point of view of his mother, who is not the peaceful, accepting figure of iconography. This Mary finds her son and his friends strange, self-important, and grand-standing. She is angry at herself and others for letting this happen to her son. She has run away to protect herself and is alternately ashamed and careful to keep her identity secret.
The novella is told in the first person by Mary, her internal monologue as she must patiently accept the visits of two men who want a story she refuses to describe as they desire (we are to assume they are apostles), as she retells the years of his preaching, wishing she could stop him, had stopped him, but could not, both out of weakness and because his followers had become adamant. A mother's anger at the influence her child's friends seem to have, encouraging him towards an end that all can tell will be a confrontation with law and order, is authentic and, if her voice were not so full of spite the reader might be able to feel sympathy, but instead we can only approach as close as to feel her horror and resentment at the world.
Her retelling of the raising of Lazarus is just one example of how Toibin retells the story to consider how on earth, the family might have dealt with the return of the dead, how the village might have reacted. In the Bible, the story is a miracle of Christ, but in life...what would it have been? Toibin reminds us that miracles are not simply glorious but also deeply upsetting re-orderings of the laws of nature, of reason, of what we believe we know to be real. For the family and friends of Lazarus, life is never the same. For those who just happened to be with Christ that day, and will never see Lazarus again, of course, it is a testament to the power of their leader. But, they do not consider the cost...
As many have turned to Mary, throughout history, for a sense of peace, for her grace, so did she need something similar, something ancient to embrace her. She leaves the Jewish faith of men and fathers to seek the feminine, a goddess from another culture. She will die not in the faith of her son, whose followers cleverly encompassed her tale in theirs, but seeking what many seek in her.
A quick read, the story is however unsettling. Its brevity was a clever tactic on Toibin's part to keep his reader from quitting before the end. This is not a beach read, as it were, but is a part of the tradition of myth and fairy-tale retellings. I am sure many will be horrified that Mary is depicted beyond the blue virgin, but many may find it comforting to recognize that she too might have felt the strong, complicated emotions of life.
The novella is told in the first person by Mary, her internal monologue as she must patiently accept the visits of two men who want a story she refuses to describe as they desire (we are to assume they are apostles), as she retells the years of his preaching, wishing she could stop him, had stopped him, but could not, both out of weakness and because his followers had become adamant. A mother's anger at the influence her child's friends seem to have, encouraging him towards an end that all can tell will be a confrontation with law and order, is authentic and, if her voice were not so full of spite the reader might be able to feel sympathy, but instead we can only approach as close as to feel her horror and resentment at the world.
Her retelling of the raising of Lazarus is just one example of how Toibin retells the story to consider how on earth, the family might have dealt with the return of the dead, how the village might have reacted. In the Bible, the story is a miracle of Christ, but in life...what would it have been? Toibin reminds us that miracles are not simply glorious but also deeply upsetting re-orderings of the laws of nature, of reason, of what we believe we know to be real. For the family and friends of Lazarus, life is never the same. For those who just happened to be with Christ that day, and will never see Lazarus again, of course, it is a testament to the power of their leader. But, they do not consider the cost...
As many have turned to Mary, throughout history, for a sense of peace, for her grace, so did she need something similar, something ancient to embrace her. She leaves the Jewish faith of men and fathers to seek the feminine, a goddess from another culture. She will die not in the faith of her son, whose followers cleverly encompassed her tale in theirs, but seeking what many seek in her.
A quick read, the story is however unsettling. Its brevity was a clever tactic on Toibin's part to keep his reader from quitting before the end. This is not a beach read, as it were, but is a part of the tradition of myth and fairy-tale retellings. I am sure many will be horrified that Mary is depicted beyond the blue virgin, but many may find it comforting to recognize that she too might have felt the strong, complicated emotions of life.
The Art of Reading
"There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered."
Thoreau, Walden "Reading" (102)
I've written before about how much I learned from books. How to recognize love. How to reflect on my own prejudices. I certainly date my life by books.
Black Beauty
Peter Pan
Gone With the Wind
Go Ask Alice
This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald and then the collection The Crack-Up
To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
Symposium, Plato
Purgatorio, Dante
Leviathan, Hobbes
Unless, Carol Shields (bringing me back also to Cynthia Voigt's A Solitary Blue, which broke my heart when I read it at 12)
Remembrance of Things Past, Proust
The Laugh of the Medusa, Helene Cixous
Americannah
Dime Store Alchemy, Charles Simic
The Sight of Death, T.J. Clark
Each of these books transformed the way I see the world, my friends and family, art and literature, machines and animals. They transformed the way I think, freed me from believing that I am dependent on being one way, encouraged me to take great risks. Each deserves to be written about, and shall be soon. Of course, in the meantime, I keep looking for the next.
And, what about art? Are there pictures/sculptures/images of any kind that have changed me?
Certainly.
That's for next time.
Thoreau, Walden "Reading" (102)
I've written before about how much I learned from books. How to recognize love. How to reflect on my own prejudices. I certainly date my life by books.
Black Beauty
Peter Pan
Gone With the Wind
Go Ask Alice
This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald and then the collection The Crack-Up
To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
Symposium, Plato
Purgatorio, Dante
Leviathan, Hobbes
Unless, Carol Shields (bringing me back also to Cynthia Voigt's A Solitary Blue, which broke my heart when I read it at 12)
Remembrance of Things Past, Proust
The Laugh of the Medusa, Helene Cixous
Americannah
Dime Store Alchemy, Charles Simic
The Sight of Death, T.J. Clark
Each of these books transformed the way I see the world, my friends and family, art and literature, machines and animals. They transformed the way I think, freed me from believing that I am dependent on being one way, encouraged me to take great risks. Each deserves to be written about, and shall be soon. Of course, in the meantime, I keep looking for the next.
And, what about art? Are there pictures/sculptures/images of any kind that have changed me?
Certainly.
That's for next time.
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