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Category Archives: Revisited

February 21, 2019
Revisited

Revisited: Watson and the Shark

By Elizabeth McCracken

John Singleton Copley, Watson and the Shark, 1778

We were brought to the museum, as children often are, to look at ancient things from Egypt. Elsewhere in the galleries were ancient things from Rome and China and Greece, but only in the Egyptian collection was there the threat of seeing a dead body. The promise. We were ten. Of course we wanted to see one, even if it was the teachers’ idea. Perhaps they thought: if you satisfy the bloodthirstiness of children in an art museum they will be less likely to stab each other with compasses during math class.

This was 1975, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. It was the era of disaster movies: ships upside down, towering infernos, earthquakes. I liked disasters. The year before, in fourth grade, I had written a paper on the immolation of the Hindenburg. Mummies weren’t a disaster: so many dead, so little interest in how they died.

On the way to the mummies we happened upon Watson and the Shark.

It’s an odd painting, awful and hilarious, charged, inexplicable, literal. A disaster movie, an eighteenth-century one. There’s Watson, a naked figure fallen into a city harbor, hair streaming behind him. There’s the shark, rising up with its awful mouth, getting ready to bite off the swimmer’s head.

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July 18, 2018
Revisited

Glenn Gould Is Always on Fast-Forward

By Katharine Kilalea
Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Katharine Kilalea revisits Glenn Gould playing Bach’s Partita No. 1 in B-Flat Major.

Glenn Gould in the studio in 1978.

Driving home from the swimming pool one day, I listened to famous people on the radio describing themselves as either happy or unhappy. They preferred, on the whole, to say, “I choose to be happy,” which irritated me, so I switched to another station, which was playing Bach’s Partita No. 1 in B-Flat Major. The partita’s gigue—meaning jig—had a kinetic energy about it. I danced with my head. It seemed, while listening to it, that everything was dancing. A cricket match was on in the local park and the Bach infected the game with its rhythm, giving the throwing and catching of the ball, the umpire’s gestures, and the batting an elegance and coordination.

My fingers drummed along on the steering wheel, or tried to, because Gould was playing, and Gould is always on fast-forward, his hands skipping so quickly over each other it was hard to say which was which. The outlines of the sounds were unclear, also, because despite having poured olive oil into my ears for several days, I had swimmer’s ear, which gave even the smallest noise an unrefined booming quality. Perhaps I could play this myself, I thought. Perhaps I could order the sheet music off Amazon. The piano would appreciate the company. It hadn’t been touched since New Year’s Eve when a friend’s new boyfriend—who would commit suicide shortly after—subjected us to a performance of Rachmaninoff. It was odd, most people play Rachmaninoff with feeling—because Rachmaninoff is full of feelings—but he just played it very loud and very fast. Impressively fast, really, but hard on the ear. Read More
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February 20, 2018
Revisited

Displacing the Displacement Novel: V. S. Naipaul’s In a Free State

By Neel Mukherjee
Various covers for V. S. Naipaul’s In a Free State

Ethics today means not being at home in one’s house. —Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

There appears to have been some contestation in the published form In a Free State was to assume. Subtitled A Novel with Two Supporting Narratives, V. S. Naipaul’s 1971 masterpiece features the eponymous novel, two stories which he calls “supporting narratives,” and the bookends of a prologue and an epilogue, taken from his own journal during his travels. It is, therefore, more accurately, a novel with four supporting narratives. I mentioned “contestation” because Naipaul and his editor at Andre Deutsch, the formidable Diana Athill, amicably disagreed over the final form: it was Athill’s opinion that the (short) novel bearing the title In a Free State should be published as a stand-alone book. Though Naipaul refused the suggestion at the time, he came round to her point of view nearly four decades later, in 2008, when he issued only the novel, shorn of all the “supporting narratives,” with a short introduction explaining his decision. I am of the view that Naipaul’s earlier decision was the correct one: it had resulted in a formally original and dazzling book, over and above being a remarkable, clear-eyed, truthful and brutal meditation on exile and displacement. Because form seems to have historically been considered—and is still seen as—a white guy’s thing, and because Naipaul never strayed from the realist mode, In a Free State was never acknowledged for the ways it pushed the boundaries. It seems too late in the day, especially after historians such as Hayden White, to talk of form and content separately, but there’s no way to think about a disease without naming it first. Contiguity is a form of continuity, too, and brings with it new sets of meaning. Realism has always troubled its practitioners: In what sense does a novel represent the world in a lifelike manner? Surely by artifice? What is real, or realistic, about the extreme selection process that is plot, the progression of a life’s events that make it on to the page? If we could do away with all the elements that are normally considered crucial to coherence in the realist novel, such as plot, character, and continuity, could we still have something that could answer to the name of novel? If all the connective tissue were taken out, could a narrative still cohere through, say, metaphorical underpinnings, or meaning? Could discrete parts make a sum without the simple method of scalar addition?

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November 6, 2017
Revisited

Watership Down

By Emily Ruskovich
Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Emily Ruskovich revisits Richard Adams’s Watership Down.

My parents had known each other for only three weeks when my dad asked my mom to marry him. She was stunned by his proposal, and so she said, Let me think about it. And she sat there for a few minutes in silence, thinking, while my dad, in agony, sat there and watched her think.

After considering the question logically, my mom said yes, for five reasons. She laughs when she tells this story, though she assures me that it’s true. In those few minutes, she decided that even though she hardly knew my dad, she ought to marry him because:
1. He, like her, ate the entire apple, swallowed the core and all the seeds, so she knew he was not wasteful or pretentious.
2. He, like her, had always wanted to name a son the unusual name Rory, and that seemed an important, even wistful, thing to have in common.
3. My dad knew all the words to the Kenny Loggins song “House at Pooh Corner,” so she knew he was probably kind to children.
4. He, like her, was an Idaho Democrat.
5. Most importantly, while they were dating those three weeks, they read Watership Down.
That was the tipping point for my mom: if this strange and loud man could become so invested in the fates of rabbits as to have tears fill his eyes while he read, then he was, without question, a good man. They’ve been married now for thirty-three years.

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October 11, 2017
Revisited

Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring

By Vanessa Manko
Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Vanessa Manko revisits Pina Bausch’s, The Rite of Spring.

Pina Bausch, The Rite of Spring, 1984. Performance view, Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York, 2017. Photo: Stephanie Berger

“Dance, dance otherwise we are lost,” Pina Bausch, the German choreographer and artistic director of Tanztheater Wuppertal, famously said. I first saw—or rather, experienced—Pina Bausch when I was an undergraduate studying abroad in Paris. I had trained in dance since I was six years old, but I had recently left the ballet company I was dancing for, putting an end to what had been only the very beginning of a career. To say that I was lost because I was no longer dancing would be an understatement. I had fled to Paris to fill the gaping hole that ballet had left within me. I would learn French, study art and culture, travel, and take in all that Paris and Europe had to offer—but still, I had lost my way of expressing myself, and I had not yet found another artistic outlet. I had no way of dealing with the terrible grief and lassitude that followed me to Paris. “You take yourself with you,” my mother told me, wisely, before I left. All that fall and into a very cold winter, I tried to adjust to my new, chosen role as a student. But underneath all that, I was a brooding former ballet dancer, and I walked the boulevards of Paris trying to feel once again. I longed for the light and grace and beauty that had been, for so long, my existence. My identity had been built within ballet’s rigorous daily routines and the discipline of beginning each day in first position at the barre. Dancers are different creatures. They are cloistered in studios all day, rehearsing or performing late into the evenings, and they have a certain predilection for perfectionism. It’s a monastic life. I found myself in civilian life feeling as if I were one of the fallen, cast out of ballet’s mighty kingdom. “Why did you quit?” people asked. It was painful to hear that word, quit, the sound of it like an axe striking wood. “It just wasn’t working,” I’d say, as if it were a divorce. But I had stopped because I wanted to go to college, and I yearned for something more—life, knowledge, food, art, books. And so, Paris.

“You’re a dancer. Your approach to the world will always be through movement, through your body,” a therapist once told me. But I ran as far away as I could from dance. I took up swimming and running, and I ran straight into the life of the mind. What saved me were books and my first tentative attempts at writing. It was in Paris that I had the first inklings that I might become a writer. By the spring of that year abroad, I felt able to, at least, see dance performances again. I took advantage of the student rush tickets at the Palais Garnier. It was 1997 and Pina Bausch was restaging, on the Paris Opera Ballet, her 1975 masterpiece, Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring). Truth be told, I had not heard of Bausch. I was familiar with all kinds of dance genres and techniques—Graham, Cunningham, Balanchine, Cecchetti, Vaganova, Limón—but nothing could prepare me for Pina Bausch.

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September 22, 2017
Revisited

Merce Cunningham’s Legacy Plan

By Eugene Lim

Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Eugene Lim revisits the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s final performance.

Photo: © Daniel Arkham

CONAN: How do you obliterate space and time?

Mr. JONES: Well, you know, sometimes, when I’ve had one tequila too many and I’m lying on the floor, I feel pretty obliterated in space and time. No, but I don’t think that’s what [Merce] meant.

—Bill T. Jones remembering Merce Cunningham, on NPR.

On the few last nights of 2011, I saw a series of performances that so moved and changed me that I thought to myself, This is the greatest experience of art I’ve ever had!

And yet because I didn’t have the training or the critical terms to note the details of what I’d seen—and even if I’d had them I’m not sure the soft muscles of my memory would have retained them—I have only emotional and murky impressions. A dance performance I know I once felt was a pinnacle of experience I now can only vaguely hold in mind, like a summer in a foreign city where you carried out a painless and shimmering affair—that is, something idealized and maybe romantic but shrouded and perhaps no longer real.

These were the final dance performances of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, on the nights of December 29th, 30th, and 31st in 2011. Prior to his death, Merce Cunningham created a remarkably prescient and meticulous legacy plan which, after his passing, would send the company on a two-year world tour. It would culminate with final performances in New York. Then, the company would disband.

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