February 15, 2017 On the Shelf The Stench of Orwell, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Illustration: Bernd Pohlenz If I had to lodge one complaint against the bulk of literary fiction, I’d say this: not enough smells. Too many writers neglect the olfactory. The fact is this world reeks, and I want to know about it in vivid detail. John Sutherland’s new book Orwell’s Nose makes it clear that the author of 1984—so on trend right now—was always writing with his nostrils. As David Trotter, reviewing the book, explains, “Odor is front and center in Orwell’s work, and Sutherland has provided some helpful ‘smell narratives’ that enable us to follow an oblique path through some of the best-known texts (fiction and documentary) from one hotspot of rankling secretions to another. Unsurprisingly, given the genres Orwell favored, bad smells predominate: ‘sour’ sweat and ‘sweetish’ (or ‘sickly’) excrement top the bill, but there’s an honorable mention, too, for machine-age effluvia such as petroleum vapor. Still, we’re not to suppose that extreme olfaction only ends in nausea. It’s crucial, for example, to the Orientalism of Burmese Days, animating as few other sensations could the embrace in which John Flory wraps his ‘house concubine’, Ma Hla May. ‘A mingled scent of sandalwood, garlic, coconut oil and the jasmine in her hair floated from her. It was a scent that always made his teeth tingle.’ Sutherland devotes considerable attention to the aphrodisiac effect on Orwell of sweet-smelling open spaces. Edenic lovemaking in a ‘golden countryside’ embellished with wild peppermint is George Bowling’s dream in Coming Up for Air; and Winston Smith’s, too, in Nineteen Eighty-Four.” Singapore reads, but it doesn’t read, you know what I mean? (I mean it has a literacy rate of 98 percent but only 40 percent of its citizens picked up a literary book last year.) Now Singaporean panjandrums hope to persuade more people to read by making tiny books. This will work. People love tiny things. I myself started flossing only when floss was produced in miniscule packages; I started voting only when the ballot shrank and I had to read it through a tiny municipal magnifying glass, which I thought was just the cutest thing. Amanda Erickson writes of Singapore, “Starting this month, public-transportation riders will be able to buy pocket-size tomes for about $10. The ‘ticket books’ are part of a broader campaign to get people reading again. Their launch will coincide with a weekend of book fairs, author meet-and-greets and literature seminars across the city-state … [Reading] will be a hard habit to instill … Student Ang Beng Heng, twenty-four, told Straits Times that he’d rather check his news apps and Facebook feeds in his free time. ‘Current affairs are more often used as a conversation topic,’ he said. ‘It is also more important and related to work and career.’ ” Read More
February 14, 2017 On History The Red of Painters By Michel Pastoureau Recipe books from the Middle Ages reveal the extreme methods with which artists achieved their reds. Boris Grigoriev, Entrez!, 1913. Moscow, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. ©FineArtImages/Leemage. For the most part, painters have always loved red, from the Paleolithic period to the most contemporary. Very early on, red’s palette came to offer a variety of shades and to favor more diverse and subtle chromatic play than any other color. In red, artists found a means to construct pictorial space, distinguish areas and planes, create accents, produce effects of rhythm and movement, and highlight one figure or another. On walls, canvas, wood, or parchment, the música of reds was always more pregnant, more cadenced, and more resonant than others. Moreover, painting treatises and manuals are not mistaken; it is always with regard to red that they are most long-winded and offer the greatest number of recipes. For a long time, it was also the chapter on reds that began the exposition on pigments useful to painters. That was already the case in Pliny’s Natural History, which had more to say on red than on any other color. And the same is true for the collections of the medieval recipes intended for illuminators and in the treatises on painting printed in Venice in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was not until the century of the Enlightenment that in certain works—most often written by art theoreticians and not painters themselves—the chapter on blues would precede the one on reds and offer a greater number of suggestions. Read More
February 14, 2017 Arts & Culture Crazy-Beautiful Heart By Thomas Lux Bill Knott’s primal poetry. Bill Knott, from the cover of I Am Flying Into Myself. I met Bill Knott in late 1968, or in early 1969, at William Corbett’s house, a gathering place for poets in Boston’s South End. I’d read Knott’s highly acclaimed first book, The Naomi Poems, from Big Table, in the spring of 1968. It was published under the pen name Saint Geraud (1940–1966). I was immediately struck, poleaxed, by the emotional power of the poems. Mostly short, intense lyrics, they were unlike anything I’d ever read and moved me to the bone. I felt, before I’d read Emily Dickinson’s famous comment, as if the top of my head was taken off. Many were love poems. Most were written in his early and mid twenties. There was urgency, a longing, a wild and plaintive high-note sound that was maybe particularly attractive to a twenty-two-year-old man. Forty-seven years later, as I stand on the terrible threshold of senescence, Knott’s poems still lift the hairs on the back of my neck. His anguished poems about the war in Vietnam were among the first I’d read on that subject, and I still believe them to be among the strongest. It is the war that my generation either can’t forget or refuses to remember (sometimes both). Read More
February 14, 2017 Inside the Issue The Crying Cat By Matthew Gleeson Amparo Dávila’s translator discovers the truth behind her fiction. Amparo Dávila. The stories of the Mexican author Amparo Dávila intrude on “external reality” in unnerving ways. To illustrate, I’ll offer a personal tale: my brush with her story “Moses and Gaspar,” which appears in the Winter issue of The Paris Review. Last fall, when Audrey Harris and I were at work on the translation, I visited a friend who was moving house in Oaxaca. We’d packed some of her books into boxes and paused, at twilight, to sit down for dinner at a table in a large half-covered patio. My friend said that her two cats sensed the upcoming move and had become agitated. At that moment, we saw that one of them—a big marmalade cat, an intelligent and communicative fellow—was crouched at the far end of the tabletop. In the meager glow of the single bulb that lit the growing gloom, the cat began to cry soundlessly: tears filled his eyes and dripped onto the edge of the table and the floor below, while he stared into space. “See?” said my friend. “He knows we’re moving.” It was an uncanny, inexplicable scene. Cats are emotionally sensitive to changes, I know—I’ve heard cats cry, moan, yowl in distress—but never had I seen one mourn in a way that seemed so peculiarly, exclusively, jarringly human. I went home that night to find a new round of corrections on “Moses and Gaspar” in my inbox. Read More
February 14, 2017 On the Shelf He’s a Giant Gorilla, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Nicholas Monro’s King Kong, Manzoni Gardens, Birmingham, England, 1972. Photo: Arnolfini Archive at Bristol Record Office/Courtesy the artist, via NYRB. Growing up near Baltimore, I remember when, in 2004, a massive aluminum sculpture called Male/Female was installed outside the city’s beautiful Beaux Arts train station. Passions were inflamed. I recall a pair of women walking by the sculpture and one saying to the other, I hate that fuckin’ thing, and the other saying, Well, duh. What I’m trying to say is, it’s rough being a public sculpture. People shit on you. Birds shit on you. And it’s always been rough: looking back to the seventies, Jon Day has revisited England’s “City Sculpture Project,” in which sixteen sculptors received grant money to liven up the nation’s public space. One of the few surviving works is Michael Monro’s King Kong, which is, you guessed it, a massive fiberglass gorilla first installed outside a brutalist shopping mall in Birmingham. Day writes, “Monro thought obviousness was what the people wanted. ‘In this case they will like him won’t they?’ he said at the time. ‘Because they can understand it and appreciate it. He’s a giant gorilla’ … Though children enjoyed playing on King Kong, and a pair of disgruntled builders climbed it as part of a protest for better compensation and working conditions a few months after it was installed (placing a trowel in its hand and a hardhat on its head), the public didn’t seem to warm to it particularly. At the end of the six months there was a half-hearted campaign and public collection to keep King Kong in Birmingham, but only one person, a crossing guard named Nellie Shannon, gave any money to the cause. Her £1 donation was later returned.” Tim Parks got an e-mail from J. K. Rowling. Can you believe it? The J. K. Rowling! She was full of stirring words about the value of a free and open society, and she told him, “We will not go quietly and we are Louder Together!” But she’d sent that e-mail to thousands of people through PEN; it was a plea for donations. And for Parks, it’s the symptom of a confused culture, one that conflates the most honest art-making with the high dudgeon of political protest: “I have been drawn, almost against my will, to notice the intensifying politicization of the literary world and, hand in hand with that, a predilection for melodrama, for prose that stimulates extreme emotions—in good causes of course. The cause justifies the melodrama. The melodrama serves the cause … In the months ahead this debate will heat up. Both as readers and as writers, each of us will react in a way congenial to our temperament … My own position is this: Let us by all means defend our freedom of speech when and if it is threatened; but let us never confuse this engagement with our inspiration as writers or our inclination as readers. Above all, let us not get off on it.” Read More
February 13, 2017 Look Temple Tomb Fortress Ruin By Dan Piepenbring “Temple Tomb Fortress Ruin,” an exhibition of paintings by John Wellington, is at the Lodge Gallery through March 5. Wellington embraces the formal tactics of the old masters to depict a bleak, surreal, new world order—seemingly both ancient and modern, Eastern and Western—animated above all by a kind of perverted militarism. His work fixates, as his gallery writes, on “lost worlds, passing empires, false prophets, unlikely heroes, and the allure of idolatry.” John Wellington, You and Me, 2009, oil and copper leaf on aluminum, 68″ x 48″. Read More