The Majesty of the Potato, and Other News

Charles Jones, Potato Majestic, nineteenth century. Image via the Clark Institute

Oh, to own one of the first cameras—to approach photography without any preconception of what a photograph could or should do. To take the first portrait, the first landscape, the first dick pic—what a rollicking time that would be. Louis Menand, writing on the Clark Art Institute’s new exhibition “Photography and Discovery,” conjures the bumptious energy of the medium’s earliest days—and the unlikely corners into which the first cameras looked: “The albumen print, the collotype, the cyanotype, the daguerreotype, the Woodburytype, gelatin silver prints, gum dichromate prints, platinum prints, salt prints, halftones, photogravure: all these reproductive technologies are represented in the show, and each yields a different visual texture. The effects can be stunning … My favorite in the show is a picture of potatoes. The label explains that the photographer, Charles Jones, was a gardener who worked on major estates in nineteenth-century Britain, and who had a practice of making photographs of things he grew, arranged as still lifes. His photographs were discovered in 1981 in a suitcase in an antiques market. And there they are, six potatoes on a plate—nature’s most plebeian foodstuff looking as pleased with itself as any duke. And the best thing about the piece, in case you miss the point, is the title, Potato Majestic.”

Jorie Graham, talking to Sarah Howe, elaborates on the difficulty of facing the blank page in times like these: “Increasingly now, it’s a matter of using poetry to try to find a way to keep the proportions right, to not be overwhelmed by grief, horror, fear, shame, rage; to use this precious medium I trust to guide me to find at least a way to ask the right questions, a way to hold ‘reality and justice in one thought’—as Yeats admonished me to do when I was a young poet … Our enemies are despicably small, but their actions are capable of destroying the earth now, not just civilization. So, like every poet writing today, what I ask of my poetic tools now feels more urgent than ever, what I ask of the blank page. Not just urgent, but baffling. I have never written so slowly—each poem an attempt both to try to understand how to reenter the current of existence with some understanding of what will suffice—what will permit one to go on as if there were a purpose—and to try to understand what poetry is for under these conditions.”

Alexander Briant is a lawyer for an oil company, meaning his job is harder than yours. He’s beckoned to various corners of the globe to investigate various allegations of fraud and corruption, an exercise so heavy with “alternative truth” that the West’s whole globalized house of cards threatens to collapse under its weight. Briant writes, “This is one of the paradoxes of globalization: multinational corporations are the cause of a lot of the dirt slewing around and at the same time set an example of due process in jurisdictions where there is none available in the domestic legal system. The attempts to influence employees’ behavior go well beyond the mere enforcement of rules. All companies worth their salt now speak of ethical ‘values’ as being essential and pay lip-service, at least, to a utopian approach to compliance in which eventually employees will internalize the requisite virtues so that procedures and policies will no longer be necessary. In the meantime, the fight against corruption and fraud continues in the oilfields, rigs and bases of Kazakhstan, Angola and Nigeria. And that is why, after a night in a Lagos hotel, I am on an internal flight to the Delta State town of Port Harcourt, which is home to many oil companies’ facilities.”

Seventy years after its publication in the Netherlands, Gerard Reve’s classic The Evenings is at last set to arrive in English—and as Nina Siegal writes, it’s right on time: “The Evenings (De Avonden) takes place over the last ten nights of 1946. It’s narrated by Frits van Egters, a twenty-three-year-old clerk in Amsterdam who still lives with his parents in a cramped apartment near the Amstel River. Frits is occupied during working hours, but in his free time he struggles with a sense of anxious aimlessness and isolation. Inwardly, he dissects the absurd banality of his life while he observes, with an acute sense of cynicism and occasional brutality, the slow decline of his doting middle-age parents … The story is … steeped in a sense of postwar gloom, and the dark humor that pervades the book underscores the difficulty of finding meaning in a world torn asunder.”

While we’re on translation—in a review of a new book on translating Paul Celan, Ottilie Mulzet drops in this illuminating bit about the late Imre Kertész: “Kertész’s language often stuns in its sheer ungainliness, its seemingly deliberate ugliness. In his books of essays Exiled Language, there is a definite unnaturalness to Kertész’s use of Hungarian, which mirrors the unnaturalness of the situation the boy narrator finds himself in (deported to Birkenau-Auschwitz during World War II). The fact that the boy himself continues to find these events to be perfectly ‘natural’ merely reinforces the reader’s unease. The boy’s psychological integration of the unassimilable is mirrored in the language in which he narrates the book, a language comprised of seemingly incompatible registers of Hungarian: his own boyish thoughts and speculations running alongside the bureaucratic language of the regime—a bureaucratese which disappears the objects of its murderous intent well before the deportations begin. This is not unlike some of Celan’s disconcerting compound formulations. In this sense, Kertész was clearly one of Celan’s most assiduous students, truly a practitioner of writing ‘according to Auschwitz.’ ”

Advertisement