There’s Our Bernhard, and Other News

A still from Thomas Bernhard: Three Days, 1970.

Anne Carson prizes brevity, which means, in the abstract, that she should be perfectly suited to these distracted times of ours. And maybe she is, even if she seems permanently ill at ease. In a new interview to support her collection Float, her answers sometimes suggest—and I mean this as a compliment—that she could find lucrative work as a copywriter for Hot Topic T-shirts: “I feel perfectly at home underwater.” “I do not believe in art as therapy.” “Volcanoes are dead easy to paint.” “I never liked Mona Lisa.”

But then, every writer, even the real assholes, must call a truce with the great ugly publicity machine. How else to explain why Thomas Bernhard, king of the assholes, consented to make a documentary about himself back in 1970? His books, as Andrew Katzenstein writes, are teeming with curmudgeons who heap vitriol on “hacks—artists who seem more interested in fame and accolades than in the creation of meaningful work.” But he worked productively (kind of) with the Austrian director Ferry Radax: “After Bernhard began to have doubts about the project and threatened to withdraw his participation, he and Radax eventually compromised on strict terms: over the course of three days, Radax would film Bernhard sitting on a park bench as he discussed how he became a writer and his views on writing … Bernhard offers grim assessments of the writing life, suggesting the fanaticism with which he approached his work. A book is ‘nothing but a malignant ulcer, a cancerous tumor’ that has already metastasized and infected the body before it is removed. Writing only intensifies the isolation that all humans suffer, and authors he admires are ‘opponents, or enemies’ who need to be subdued, not inspirations to be emulated.”

If you have a Google Alert set up for “Van Gogh’s ear,” you know that 2016 has been action-packed. This summer saw a heated debate about how much of the ear he’d managed to cut off, exactly. And the ear news shows no signs of slowing. New evidence suggests that Van Gogh’s psychotic episode was brought on by news of his beloved brother’s engagement: “Scholars have been puzzling over the details of Van Gogh’s time in Arles, in Provence, for the 126 years since the artist’s death, because while he was living there from February 1888 to May 1889, he experienced both the peak of his artistic career and the beginning of his mental decline … Just a half day before Van Gogh cut off his ear, he received a letter from Paris that may have contained the news that Theo was engaged to Johanna Bonger, known as Jo … Ms. Bonger received a telegram of congratulations on Dec. 23 from her older brother Henry—which confirmed that Henry had received the news of the engagement—shortly after receiving the announcement letter from Ms. Bonger.”

Rivka Galchen sat down with Yoko Tawada, whose 2014 novel, Memoirs of a Polar Bear, is soon to arrive in English translation, and it does, yes, star a polar bear: “Tawada has written most often about foreigners and outsiders, but also about people who metamorphose into animals (‘The Bath’) or have intimate relations with people suspected to be animals (‘The Bridegroom Was a Dog’). An elementary-school teacher who tells her students to wipe with used Kleenex feels, in Tawada’s portrayal of her, as familiar and alien as a household pet. In Memoirs, when a polar bear walks into a bookstore or a grocery store, there are no troubles stemming from a lack of opposable thumbs. As with Kafka’s animal characters, we are freed to dislike them in the special way we usually reserve only for ourselves.”

The irony of virtual reality in its current, nascent form is that we’re using it mainly to simulate “real” reality—as if we haven’t seen plenty enough of that already. Simon Parkin writes of three new games whose mission “runs contrary to the prevailing narrative, which holds that realistic re-creations of our world are where the emerging medium’s power lies. Undoubtedly, part of V.R.’s appeal is its capacity to enable us to visit places too remote, too dangerous, or too expensive to otherwise reach. Documentarians have already begun using V.R. to allow us to experience life through the eyes of another and even to become witnesses to current events from the perspective of a participant rather than a bystander. Thumper, Rez Infinite, and SuperHyperCube offer the counterargument—that V.R.’s most alluring promise is found in the imagined, the intangible, and the unrecognizable places to which it transports us.”

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