BLDGBlog, a blog focused on design and architecture, has a good interview with Erik Davis, the writer who, along with photographer Michael Rauner, captured many of the spiritual or mystic places in California. I've been tempted by the book in the past, just because of the photos of the area surrounding the Salton Sea, but this goes a long way to justify that temptation.
Link: BLDGBLOG: The Visionary State: An Interview with Erik Davis.
'Chicago was big on gab in the twenties and thirties, and under the influence of gab you came to feel yourself an insider. Verbal swagger was a limited art cultivated in the Hearst papers by contributors like O. O. McIntyre and Ted Cook. On a higher level was H. L. Mencken, of The American Mercury. Mencken comically expressed the dissatisfaction of intellectuals with the philistinism and comical bourgeois provinciality of the “booboisie” American in the years of prosperity that followed the First World War. He found his largest public among schoolboys like me or village atheists and campus radicals. It seemed to me that he didn’t expect his prejudices to be taken very seriously.'
Well who the hell does?
Soylent Content, Giving Yourself Permission to Remember (Apr. 21,2005), quoting Philip Roth, "I Got a Scheme!" The Words of Saul Bellow, The New Yorker (Apr. 25, 2005) (found here).
Soylent Content's Proustian look at the Chicago writers pointed toward the notion of "verbal swagger" as a key element of said writers' style - the sly boisterousness of Bellow, the smirk of Mencken's writer-as-matador pose, the knife in the gut of Dreiser's sincerity (the sort of sincerity that I now think of when I watch Lars Von Trier's Breaking the Waves or Dancer in the Dark) - all point to the swagger of that city's literary world. It's so fitting, I think, that the article is told from the point of view of Philip Roth, one of the many greats of the New York Metropolitan Area literary world (it's not just Manhattan that occupies this world, as Roth, himself, is a product of Newark, NJ, and other members - John Cheever, William Carlos Williams, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Paul Auster - were residents of Long Island, NY, Paterson, NJ, Hoboken, NJ, New Brunswick, NJ, and Brooklyn, NY, respectively).
It's fitting that Roth tells this tale because Roth embodies one of the two major emotional qualities of the NYC school of writing: the sweet seduction of melancholia, as embodied by Cheever, Williams, and Auster, etc., and the energizing self-deconstruction of fear and anxiety, as embodied by Ginsberg, Roth, and Woody Allen. It's what inspires me about writers like Roth. He gets the sense of ennui that seems to possess the denizens of this region when we drive alone at night or stand alone in the corner of a pulsing night club.
Roth also mentions Sherwood Anderson, author of a favorite of mine, Winesburg, Ohio as being tied to that Chicago style. Actually, Roth mentions that Bellow mentions that... and I do not feel comfortable with that idea. Anderson's writing style is so graceful and compassionate that he never seemed tied into that whole "Big Shoulders" mythos that gets raised by the brutality of Dreiser. For obvious reasons, Anderson can be tied to Thornton Wilder (as both understood community so very, very well), the Wisconsin-born writer who lived in Connecticut. But their soft delivery also seems tied to Carson McCullers or Wallace Stegner, authors who lived in the South (Alabama for McCullers) and the West (California, the Canadian Rockies, and Arizona for Stegner). It's as though that humane sense of tragedy and hope that is particular to American writers - one would never mistake a work by Steinbeck or even the more recent Michael Chabon for the cold intellectual sophistry of Gunter Grass or J.M. Coetzee - exists in spite of the local character of New York or Chicago writing.
These authors - all of them - have that common sense that become the American vernacular. In the regionalization of them, though, something that really seems absent in writing elsewhere, they lay down the foundation for the twang and drawl of Southern writers or the flat clipped tones of the Midwest and New England. All of this leads me to the question of how Norman Maclean developed his flowing poeticism from the rough jagged life of Montana that so greatly influenced him.
Law Library
_______________, New Jersey
Canon EOS Elan 7ne, ISO 1600
I spent last night at a wake, so I was not able to develop my film from NYC. I'm getting there (hopefully this afternoon).
Over at Instapundit, there's a discussion of alternative history novels - the genre where the South wins the Civil War, Kennedy isn't assassinated, etc. - of which people are fond. Surprisingly, no one's pointed out the recent and brilliant Phillip Roth novel, The Plot Against America. The novel depicts America during World War II; more specifically, it depicts an America that is run by Charles Lindbergh, who unseats FDR prior to his third term and then drags the U.S. into anti-semitic fascism.
The novel's fascinating. It has such a strong, clear sense of history (especially about Newark in the 40's, a pleasant surprise for someone who, like me, works in that city quite often) and of the psychology of fear. Very clever. The absence of this book from the Instapundit discussion is a little disappointing, I think.
Yes, yes, I know Picture Envy is a day late. But, well, I was busy as can be yesterday - actually, all last week - and didn't have a chance to get to it. Lots o' cases. Lots o' conferences. Lots o' typing.
Today, however, made up for it. I hadn't been taking pictures lately. I wasn't inspired, and I wasn't leaving the office until well after sunset, so there wasn't much to shoot. However, today, I went up to NYC in the Suburban Assault Vehicle (which I am growing to love more and more each day) to visit the Met with I.Y., my lobbyist friend. IY was kind enough to accompany me to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the special exhibit on Walker Evans, street photography, and photography books. Entitled Few are Chosen: Street Photography and the Book 1936-1966, the exhibit showcases a small collection of Walker Evans' work for the photography book Many Are Called, along with samples from:
As special exhibits go, I think that this one was way too small. The Met has enough space to house an Egyptian Temple - and it does, in fact - along with an Abyssinian temple, a room designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, a Greek statuary, two beautiful Medieval chapels and nearly an entire floor of schlocky Impressionistic paintings (i loathe - loathe! - impressionism; impressionism is to painting what friggin' Yanni is to classical music. It's "art lite."). This place is (I think) about 10 blocks long, and only shows a small portion of its collection (Thank you, Messrs. Morgan, Rockefeller, and Annenberg). Still, Few Are Chosen only took up two ten-by-ten rooms, showing no more than forty shots or so. I would have preferred a larger exhibit.
Nevertheless, you should visit the Met. If, like me, you're lucky enough to go during quite possibly the most absurd protest in American history - the "Pale Male" protest, a battle betwen largely inane bird watchers with largely idiotic co-op owners - and get to take pictures of New Yorkers behaving stupidly (for a city that prides itself on being street smart, somewhat cynical, and sophisticated: may I remind you that you had 100 people protesting in the street today because someone doesn't like having a raptor nest near their apartment? Let me put it another way: this is the best protest you could come up with?!), then enter the Met and take pictures of utterly beautiful antiquities from Greece, Cyprus, Abyssinia, Babylon, and Rome, and then get to realize that there are almost no restaurants in the Upper East Side.
And then - and this is my favorite part about Manhattan - I get to leave.
Mm... Home. Home to my new book (I just finished Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, and am now reading Robert Kaplan's Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos. Both books are recommended.) And, as I wrap up this little travelogue, I also note with pleasure that I took pictures today for the first time in weeks (ah yes, the point I started with before this tangent). Two-and-a-half rolls. You'll need a photographer's pass to shoot in the Met if they think your camera looks professional (I'm not sure why security gave me one, but they did), and you'll need at least ISO 800 film, as no flash photography is allowed (I used ISO 1600 at f 125 and f 90; hopefully, this will give me enough light and shadow to make my statue shots work). Still, as I re-learned today, it's great inspiration to shoot in New York. Sometimes, when you lack inspiration, it's precisely what is needed. (This means I really owe IY a serious round of drinks. I'm talking bombay-and-tonic-and-make-it-a-double.)
All right. On to the belated Picture Envy.
First up: Chromasia's Tide Down, a shot of what David J. Nightingale, who runs Chromasia, refers to as some sort of mooring point near St. Anne's, England (well, I assume it's England; better to just say that it is somewhere in the United Kingdom). I like the structural symmetry of the "mooring point," which looks more like some sort of large-scale sculpture than a practical object (such as a place to tie up a boat; besides, it looks to be metal, and therefore it would destroy any boat that was washed into it). I also like the somewhat barren quality to the shot. It makes me think of the sculptures used to represent a sort of futuristic style in the film Gattaca.
Second: Not really a photoblog post, but rather a selection of essays about, and photos by, the recently deceased photojournalist, Eddie Adams. Adams is the photojournalist responsible for the famous shot of a North Vietnamese irregular being executed by a South Vietnamese Brig. General. Interestingly, even though Adams won the Pulitzer for that shot (or because he won the Pulitzer, perhaps), he regretted ever taking it. Apparently, Adams thought Vietnam was a good cause. Anyway, Adams also took this lush, foreboding shot that was used for the film Unforgiven. Adams knew how to portray Clint Eastwood as the sort of man that would "kill just about anything that walked or crawled at one time."
Adams died of Lou Gherig's Disease this year, and The Digital Journalist created this Nikon-sponsored page, A Tribute to Eddie Adams. While the gallery of Adams' pictures are amazing, I ended up finding the essays even more compelling. Adams seemed like the sort of guy I would have gotten along with just fine....
Last selection for Picture Envy (are you happy, Kristen? Picture Envy's back, and this time with lots o' words): Sam Javanrouh's very... orange, I suppose... shot of Toronto, Orange Clouds. I love the inorganic quality of this shot, as it makes the city alien and somewhat evil-looking (which is all-together strange considering that Canadians, if you'll permit this generalization, are pretty much non-evil, all things considered).
Next week, I'll shoot for timeliness. Right now, I'm just trying to keep up with the Joneses.
For millions of people, June 16 is an extraordinary day. On that day in 1904, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom each took their epic journeys through Dublin in James Joyce's Ulysses, the world's most highly acclaimed modern novel. “Bloomsday”, as it is now known, has become a tradition for Joyce enthusiasts all over the world. From Tokyo to Sydney, San Francisco to Buffalo, Trieste to Paris, dozens of cities around the globe hold their own Bloomsday festivities. The celebrations usually include readings as well as staged re-enactments and street-side improvisations of scenes from the story. Nowhere is Bloomsday more rollicking and exuberant than Dublin, home of Molly and Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, Buck Mulligan, Gerty McDowell and James Joyce himself. Here, the art of Ulysses becomes the daily life of hundreds of Dubliners and the city’s visitors as they retrace the odyssey each year.
ReJoyce Dublin 2004 - The Official Bloomsday Centenary Festival Site
Sophocles' play has served modern man and his haunted sense of being caught in a trap not only as a base for a psychoanalytic theory which dooms the male infant to guilt and anxiety from his mother's breast, but also as the model for a modern drama that presents to us, using ancient figures, our own terror of the unknown future which we fear we cannot control – our deep fear that every step we take forward on what we think is the road of progress may really be a step toward a foreordained rendezvous with disaster.
Bernard Knox, in his introduction to Oedipus The King, in Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays, 133 (Fagles trans., 1984 ed.).
I've decided to go back and read Oedipus Rex. I can't recall how many times I have read the play, but I was struck by the way Oedipus really reflects the notion of a man's struggle against an imposition of identity upon him better than most other works have done (i.e., Steppenwolf, Richard II, Deconstructing Harry, etc.). Plus, it has been far too long since I've read the Greeks and Romans, and I'm beginning to miss them.
This particular translation is by Robert Fagles, who took a much less formal view to translation than Bernard Knox (who introduces Fagles) or Robert Fitzgerald (the three kings of Greek translation). When I picked up The Three Theban Plays, I had the pleasure of comparing all three translations.[1] Fagles' translation seems the most tied to how modern language works (which makes sense, as his translation appears to be more recent than Knox or Fitzgerald).
Footnotes
1. The three translations in question, can be found by following these links below:
According to new research commissioned by Penguin Books, men who are seen reading a book are more attractive to the opposite sex....
Guardian Unlimited Books | By genre | You couldn't make it up
Via Blog of a Bookslut.
Two years of literary rumours came to an end today with the announcement that there is to be a second Booker prize, open to all writers of fiction published in English, including Americans.The debate over the future of the Booker was opened in spring 2002 when, after a series of rumours that the prize - which is currently only open to Commonwealth writers - was going to be opened to American authors, the Man Booker advisory committee confirmed that a working party had been set up to look at possible extensions to the award.
The outcome of their deliberations is a biennial prize which will recognise one writer's achievement in fiction. It will be open to any living author who has published fiction in English or whose work is generally available in translation in the English language and will be worth L60,000.
Guardian Unlimited, Booker committee announces international prize (Jun. 2, 2004)
Last night I was out with Peterson, enjoying a few bottles of cheap beer (the Dublin House has betrayed me by getting rid of Bass Ale; the replacement, Smithwicks Ale (this, incidentally, is part of a damn conspiracy by the Guinness Corporation to screw with my head), just is not as enjoyable. We discussed - by which I mean yelled at each other the decline of the Academy Awards and the Pulitzer Prize. The one thing we did agree upon was that we appreciated the British awards far more: the BAFTAS and the Booker Prize in particular.
It's good to see the Guardian announcement that the Booker Prize is going to be focusing on all English-language books. I tend to find that the Pulitzer Prize goes to whichever "serious" book sells the most in a given year (case in point, Eugenides' Middlesex), so having something to focus on the critical side of English-language literature. Granted, it's a career-oriented award, but it's a good start.
Via Blog of a Bookslut.
All this past dark and soggy winter long, I nurtured fantasies of summer. Drinkable skies and an amber sun. Contagious color in the garden. Breezes through an open door, an open window. The dance of fireflies.
In my needy, scheming, romanticizing mind, darkness was giving way to light, work was giving way to play, and I was reading (at my leisure) whatever I happened to fancy. Reading in the earliest part of the day--before my son or husband stirred, before the glisten on the grass burned off, before anybody anywhere could suggest a different agenda. Reading outside on the old wood-en bench, or up on the slatted, sloping deck, or on my side of the bed, turned toward the breeze and the clean, pink, morning light.
Beth Kephart, Extended forecast, Chicago Tribune (May 23, 2004), cited in MonkeyMom, Summer Sherbet: Six Weeks to a Better Mind (May 24, 2004).
Short stories are often thought of as the amuse bouche of the literary world. Their brevity is considered a mark of an unserious nature. "How could anything weighty be said in a brief work? Look at Brothers Karamazov, at Swann's Way... important works are supposed to be tomes." The thing is, important works are pockets of gold, just like lengthy tomes, and we can take value from them if we can find these pockets.
Recent Comments