November 15, 2016 Our Correspondents Meeting One’s Madness By Megan Mayhew Bergman Our newest correspondent is Megan Mayhew Bergman, who will be writing about naturalism. For her first piece she considers the writer Alan Watts and the “age of environmental anxiety.” Eric Ravilious, Wet Afternoon, 1928, watercolor. For the others, like me, there is only the flashOf negative knowledge, the night when, drunk, oneStaggers to the bathroom and stares in the glassTo meet one’s madness —W. H. Auden, “The Age of Anxiety” Living in rural Vermont, I enjoy proximity to wilderness, though I observe its sickness at close range. In spring, my family marks the return of swallows and red-winged blackbirds on the barn door. But the migrations are off, and the frosts are late, the harvests erratic, and the thaws early. Though the landscape looks bucolic, and the foliage bright, industrial perfluorooctanioic acid poisons our wells and the herons in town fish from polluted ponds. This year, the maple season started three weeks earlier than ever recorded, and some ski resorts saw only a few days of snow. In the last decade, as I’ve followed the harrowing environmental data, I’ve experienced sharp pangs of human guilt and fear of the future. Fortunately, I’m able to turn to books like medicine in times of crisis. Recently, on an eighty-five degree October day, my crimson dahlias unusually fat and healthy outside, I felt my anxiety bloom and looked to Alan Watts’s The Wisdom of Insecurity, A Message for an Age of Anxiety. Read More
November 15, 2016 On History A Bed for Fifty People? By Brendan White Jan Gossaert, Portrait of Hendrik III, Count of Nassau-Breda, ca. 1516–1517. I was minding my own business, reading the letters in the London Review of Books, when I saw this, from a response by Marta Uminska to an article about Hieronymus Bosch: The triptych known to us as The Garden of Earthly Delights is first documented in 1517, one year after Bosch’s death, as being in the possession of Count Hendrik III of Nassau, in his palace in Brussels. Depending on the date of the triptych (scholarly opinion varies between roughly 1490 and 1505), it would have been commissioned either by Hendrik himself or by his uncle and predecessor Engelbert II: that is, by rich, erudite aristocrats from the inner circle of the Burgundian court, who collected works of art, read widely, held extravagant parties (in the same palace where the Garden hung there was also a bed large enough for fifty guests), and could afford to flirt with heretical or otherwise fringe ideas. Emphasis mine. T.J. Clark would later write in to quibble with Uminska’s account of the triptych’s origin, which was all very interesting, but I couldn’t get past the bed for fifty people. Read More
November 15, 2016 On the Shelf Get This Wine Bottle Away from My Short Story, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Image via Web Urbanist What can writers and intellectuals do to stem the rise of fascism in America? Well, we should look to history, of course, where theorists stand time and again with quivers of poison-tipped arrows, their bows pointed at the eyes of tyranny. Take the Frankfurt School, for instance. In the twentieth century, facing seemingly insurmountable adversity, they steeled themselves and—oh … wait … “As the 1930s progressed, a number of the Frankfurt School idealists ‘lost faith … in the power of critical thinking to transform society.’ What role could the left-leaning intellectual have in a time when the socialist revolution was failing and fascism seemed set to conquer Europe? Max Horkheimer was one of those who despaired of the struggle, fearing that the ‘commodity economy’ would bring a period of progress so that ‘after an enormous extension of human control over nature, it finally hinders further development and drives humanity into a new barbarism.’ ” Still struggling to understand Donald “I Love the Poorly Educated” Trump? Maybe it’s your Facebook bubble. Or maybe, as Pankaj Mishra writes, you haven’t read enough Rousseau lately: “Beginning with his first major publication, in 1751, Rousseau, too, defended unlettered folk and their simple ways. Significantly, he did so just as the world’s first well-educated, networked élite—the Enlightenment philosophers—came into being, advocating a far-reaching program of progress through the use of science, reason, and international commerce. Rousseau’s more radical move was to position himself against the project that we now call modernity; he practically invented the category of ‘the people.’ ” Read More
November 14, 2016 Look Classic Attitude By Dan Piepenbring “Classic Attitude,” an exhibition of Helen Lundeberg’s sixties-era abstract paintings, is at Cristin Tierney Gallery through December 17. Lundeberg, who died in 1999, was a pivotal figure in the West Coast abstract circle. “By classicism I mean, not traditionalism of any sort, but a highly conscious concern with aesthetic structure,” she wrote in a statement accompanying her show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1942. “My aim, realized or not, is to calculate, and reconsider, every element in a painting with regard to its function in the whole organization. That, I believe, is the classic attitude.” Helen Lundeberg, Sunny Corridor, 1959, oil on canvas, 20″ x 24″. © The Feitelson / Lundeberg Art Foundation Read More
November 14, 2016 At Work The Invisibility Cloak: An Interview with Ge Fei By The Paris Review From the cover of The Invisibility Cloak. Ge Fei is one of China’s foremost experimental writers. He started his career in the eighties with “vanguard fiction”—self-reflexive works focusing on history, historical narrative, memory, and myth. Now, for the first time, one of his novels is available in English: 2012’s The Invisibility Cloak, translated by Canaan Morse. It’s the first in our monthly book club with New York Review Books. Set in cutthroat, consumer-driven Beijing, the novel follows Mr. Cui, a down-at-heel Everyman who lives with his sister in an apartment where the wind is always blowing through a crack in the wall. Cui designs and installs custom stereos for hyperrich audiophiles and intellectuals, for whom he has an unreserved contempt. Then he reels in a promising but shady client who demands the best sound system in the world: an assignment that takes Cui to an unexpectedly dark place. The Invisibility Cloak is a comic tour de force; Kirkus Reviews wrote that it “packs in wit, social commentary, and an emotional depth that will lift the reader’s spirits like few recent English-language books.” Last month, Ge Fei visited New York, where he appeared in conversation at Columbia University’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute. He was joined by Morse, his translator; and two moderators, Lydia H. Liu and Wun Tsun Tam. The exchange below is a condensed, edited version of their discussion, including some questions from the audience that day. INTERVIEWER How did you come up with the idea for the book? FEI What constitutes Chinese reality, particularly from the eighties onward, is always changing. With The Invisibility Cloak, I thought back to 1980, when I was an undergraduate in Shanghai and I felt that life for Chinese people was extremely spiritually rich. People didn’t care about material possessions so much, they didn’t care about clothes, what shoes you wore, what kind of watch you wore, they didn’t care if you knew rich people. In fact, wealth was held in contempt. Every weekend my friends would go to classical-music concerts—Bach, Beethoven, Haydn. Twenty-some years later, the change that’s occurred in this respect is unbelievable—from an incredibly rich spiritual life to a total lack of spiritual enrichment. Materialism is the word of the day. Money. Advancement. I wanted to add clarity to the meaning of classical music, what it meant to the people who lived through that earlier time. The writing and structure of this book have a deep connection to a question that’s chased me all my life. When everything is moving in one direction—toward money, advancement, and feeling insecure about it—are there people out there who intentionally go the other way? I discovered that in one of my circles of friends in Beijing, these hi-fi enthusiasts, there were a number of such people. It reminded me of a metaphor from a Japanese author I like. He talks about crickets living in a closed box, no sunlight, no windows. You have these singing insects in there, they lay their eggs, they hatch, they grow, they sing, they die. Are there people who are willing to make themselves invisible and keep away from the “sunlight” of contemporary society? The author also mentions seeds—when flowers turn to seed, some will float in the wind and fall into fertile soil, while others will fall into dark corners or on top of trees. I was interested to find that there are people in China who’ve resisted modernity, who have held onto their own value systems. The character I chose as an entry point for The Invisibility Cloak is modeled on one of the great eccentrics I know in Beijing, one of my hi-fi enthusiast friends. Read More
November 14, 2016 Letter from Our Southern Editor Morning-After Pill By John Jeremiah Sullivan I live in the southeastern part of North Carolina, in a county that went for Trump. I’m one of those people who shouldn’t have been surprised but was. I had to leave town the morning after the election and did not want to go. The night before, lying in bed, my wife had been crying. We had the TV on, and she burst into tears when it became clear what was happening. When I left the house the next morning, my eleven-year-old daughter—for whom Hillary Clinton’s candidacy had been one of the more exciting and life-enlarging things she’d experienced—was crying her eyes out. I’ve noticed that the crying thing has already become a meme (“Pictures of people crying about Trump!”), and then a discredited meme (“Quit crying, liberals!”), by which talk we somehow moved in twenty-four hours past the reality that a good percentage of the country was openly weeping at the result of the election. Because, you know, that couldn’t mean anything. Read More