January 24, 2019 Arts & Culture When Diderot Met Voltaire By Andrew S. Curran François-Marie Arouet, a.k.a Voltaire, and Denis Diderot. In mid-December 1776, the eighty-three-year-old Voltaire pulled out a piece of paper and dashed off a note to Diderot. Having been exiled from Paris for more than twenty-five years, the now wizened and virtually toothless philosophe lamented the fact that the two men had never laid eyes on each other: “I am heartbroken to die without having met you … I would gladly come and spend my last fifteen minutes in Paris in order to have the solace of hearing your voice.” Fifteen months later, Voltaire rolled into the capital in his blue, star-spangled coach. Quite ill with prostate cancer, the famous humanitarian, essayist, and playwright nonetheless organized a feverish schedule for himself. In addition to finishing work on a five-act tragedy—he lived long enough to attend the premiere—Voltaire spent most of his days holding court in a friend’s hôtel particulier on the corner of the rue de Beaune and the quai des Théatins. Here, for hours at a time, Voltaire received visits from a long list of adoring friends and dignitaries, among them Benjamin Franklin and his son. Sometime during Voltaire’s three-month stay, Diderot also came to pay his respects. Journalists who wrote about the meeting hinted that some relationships are best conducted solely by correspondence. Diderot and Voltaire had first exchanged letters in 1749 when the “prince of the philosophes” had invited the then up-and-coming Diderot to dinner. In addition to hoping to get to know the clever author of the Letter on the Blind, Voltaire had presumably hoped to help the newly appointed editor of the Encyclopédie rethink his atheism. Diderot decided to dodge both the invitation and the sermon. One might wonder what kind of young writer turns down lunch with the most famous public intellectual ever to live. The answer, in 1749, was pretty clear: a proud and unremorseful unbeliever who had no interest in having his philosophy questioned by an unbending deist. Read More
January 23, 2019 Arts & Culture The Poet with Many Names—and Many Deaths By Ha Jin Collage. Li Bai painting: public domain via Wikimedia Commons, a painting in Gu Lang Yu museum, Xiamen, Fujian, China. Moon photo: Luc Viatour (CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)) / https://Lucnix.be. He has many names. In the West, people call him Li Po, as most of his poems translated into English bear that name. Sometimes it is also spelled Li Bo. But in China, he is known as Li Bai. During his lifetime (A.D. 701–62), he had other names—Li Taibai, Green Lotus Scholar, Li Twelve. The last one is a kind of familial term of endearment, as Bai was twelfth among his brothers and male cousins on the paternal side. It was often used by his friends and fellow poets when they addressed him—some even dedicated poems to him titled “For Li Twelve.” By the time of his death, he had become known as a great poet and was called zhexian, or Banished Immortal, by his admirers. Such a moniker implies that he had been sent down to earth as punishment for his misbehavior in heaven. Over the twelve centuries since his death, he has been revered as shixian, Poet Immortal. Because he was an excessive drinker, he was also called jiuxian, Wine Immortal. Today it is still common for devotees of his poetry to trek hundreds of miles, following some of the routes of his wanderings as a kind of pilgrimage. Numerous liquors and wines bear his name. Indeed, his name is a ubiquitous brand, flaunted by hotels, restaurants, temples, and even factories. In English, in addition to “Li Po,” he once had another pair of names, Li T’ai Po and Rihaku. The first is a phonetic transcription of his original Chinese name, Li Taibai, the name his parents gave him. And Ezra Pound, in his Cathay—his collected translations of classical Chinese poetry—called Li Bai “Rihaku” because Pound had translated those poems from the notes left by the American scholar Ernest Fenollosa, who had originally studied Li Bai’s poetry in Japanese when he was in Japan. Pound’s loose translation of Li Bai’s “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” has been included in many textbooks and anthologies as a masterpiece of modern poetry. It is also one of Pound’s signature poems—arguably his best known. For the sake of consistency and clarity, let us stay with the name Li Bai. He also has several deaths ascribed to him. For hundreds of years, some people even maintained that he had never died at all, claiming to encounter him now and then. In truth, we are uncertain about the exact date and cause of his death. In January 764, the newly enthroned emperor Daizong issued a decree summoning Li Bai to serve as a counselor at court. It was a post without actual power, in spite of its high-sounding title. Yet to any man of learning and ambition, such an appointment was a great favor, a demonstration of the emperor’s benevolence and magnanimity—and, in Li Bai’s case, a partial restoration of the high status he had once held in the court. When the royal decree reached Dangtu County, Anhui, where Li Bai was supposed to be located, the local officials were thrown into confusion and could not find him. Soon it was discovered that he had died more than a year before. Of what cause and on what day, no one could tell. So we can say only that Li Bai, despite his renown, passed away in 762 without notice. Read More
January 22, 2019 Arts & Culture To All the Introductions I’ve Loved Before By Michael Chabon Konrad Kachelofen’s printing of Eclogue of Theodulus, 1492. Public domain. “I never read introductions,” says Rose, the younger of my two daughters. She thinks it over for a second, frowns; the statement doesn’t quite ring true. She amends it: “Well, I’ve read two,” she says. One turns out to be Jack Kerouac’s introduction to Robert Frank’s The Americans, required reading for a photography class: “But it was fine because I like his style.” The other is Sherman Alexie’s introduction to his own The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (a favorite book, and author, of Rose’s), because “it felt like it would be rude not to.” I suspect that my daughter’s antipathy toward introductions (we did not discuss postscripts) is fairly common among avid readers. People who never bother to read what is more properly styled as a foreword (in which one writer presents the work of another) or a preface (in which the writer herself, often retrospectively, reflects on her own work) are likely as numerous as people who don’t bother with user manuals before launching the software application or powering up the widget. You will not find me among either group; in the second instance out of hard experience but in the first out of love, pure love, from the time of my first encounter, circa 1979, with John Cheever’s all-too-brief preface to his Stories, which contains the following passage, in which I now detect a premonitory stirring, two decades ahead of schedule, of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay: “These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.” Certain forewords—Susan Sontag’s to A Barthes Reader, Walter Benjamin’s to Fables of Leskov—and prefaces—Raymond Chandler’s to The Simple Art of Murder, Robert Towne’s to the published script of Chinatown, Elmore Leonard’s to his Complete Western Stories—have become beloved, even crucial texts for me, to be regularly reread, as are Nabokov’s afterword to Lolita and Leigh Brackett’s to her Best of collection. Read More
January 16, 2019 Arts & Culture Is It Ever Okay to Depict Muhammad? By Michael Muhammad Knight The above image, portraying Muhammad as a boy, circulated widely in Iran throughout the later twentieth century and can read as a hadith in its own way. (Hadiths signify the sayings and actions of Muhammad or things said and done in his presence to which he did not object.) If you assumed that Muslims have always opposed the visual representation of living things and would absolutely never depict the prophet, and that the opposition to painting Muhammad represents an inescapably foundational Islamic value, this picture offers a lesson: claims made in always/never language rarely hold up to closer scrutiny, and no one within a tradition speaks for everyone else. Though debates over images of Muhammad refer to various sources, the Koran itself is silent on the matter of art. A number of hadiths portray Muhammad condemning visual representation of living things, but the diversity of Muslim interpretive traditions produces a multiplicity of views. No less an authority than Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979 and the head of state until his death ten years later, had reportedly named this portrait of a youthful Muhammad as his favorite visual representation of the Prophet. In Iran, iterations of the image became widely available at stores and in numerous products, including postcards, full-size posters, wall hangings, and key chains. It was only after a Danish newspaper’s publication of offensive Muhammad cartoons that Iranian authorities banned this popular image. As Christiane Gruber explains, the Danish cartoon controversy provoked an “inversion of tidal proportions” among global Muslims, in which “Muhammad had to be reclaimed rhetorically in Islamic spheres and, in Iran most especially, reinverted and reinvented at an iconographical level.” In the case of Iran, taboos against depicting Muhammad’s face were not merely representative of “traditional Islam” but just as much a modern response to a modern problem, emerging not in isolation from “the West” but in direct encounter with it. The question of drawing Muhammad’s face thus reveals the ways in which tradition often finds its definition while engaging forces from outside. Read More
January 15, 2019 Arts & Culture A Lost Piece of Trans History By Matthew H. Birkhold Images from The Third Sex “A final moment of reluctance overcame me,” Hans Hannah Berg wrote, “as I stepped across the threshold of the house.” Dressed in a custom black dress, white gloves, and fine pearls, Hans Hannah looked impeccable. She cut a fine figure walking down the street, announced by a hint of perfume and the gentle jangling of bangles. But Hans Hannah was anxious: this was her first outing as a woman. Hans Hannah wrote about the occasion for the inaugural issue of The Third Sex (Das 3. Geschlecht), likely the world’s first magazine devoted to trans issues. First published in Berlin in 1930, The Third Sex circulated in the final years of the Weimar Republic, Germany’s democratic experiment between the wars. After the Nazis seized power, they destroyed the publishing house, and the magazine was largely forgotten. As a result, most accounts today name fifties America as the birthplace of trans periodicals. The recent republication of The Third Sex by the Bibliothek rosa Winkel revives lost voices from Germany’s queer past and recovers a remarkable piece of trans history. Read More
January 14, 2019 Arts & Culture How Jean Toomer Rejected the Black-White Binary By Ismail Muhammad … to be a Negro is—is?— to be a Negro, is. To Be. —from “Toomer,” by Elizabeth Alexander Jean Toomer had a complex relationship to his first and only major publication, the 1923 book Cane. The “novel,” which Penguin Classics has recently reissued with an introduction by the literary scholar George Hutchinson and a foreword by the novelist Zinzi Clemmons, is a heterogeneous collection of short stories, prose vignettes, and poetry that became an unlikely landmark of Harlem Renaissance literature. Its searching fragments dramatize the disappearance of African-American folk culture as black people migrated out of the agrarian Jim Crow South and into Northern industrial cities. It is a haunting and haunted celebration of that culture as it was sacrificed to the machine of modernity. Toomer termed the book a “swan song” for the black folk past. The literary world was then (as it is now, perhaps) hungry for representative black voices; as Hutchinson writes, “Many stressed the ‘authenticity’ of Toomer’s African-Americans and the lyrical voice with which he conjured them into being.” This act of conjuring lured critics into reflexively accepting the book as a representation of the black South—and Toomer as the voice of that South. As his one-time friend Waldo Frank remarked in a forward to the book’s original edition, “This book is the South.” Cane transformed Toomer into a Negro literary star whose influence would filter down through African-American literary history: his interest in the folk tradition crystallized the Harlem Renaissance’s search for a useable Negro past, and would be instructive for later writers from Zora Neale Hurston to Ralph Ellison to Elizabeth Alexander. Read More