{"id":107000,"date":"2017-01-24T08:50:06","date_gmt":"2017-01-24T13:50:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=107000"},"modified":"2017-01-24T10:29:55","modified_gmt":"2017-01-24T15:29:55","slug":"the-majesty-of-the-potato-and-other-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/01\/24\/the-majesty-of-the-potato-and-other-news\/","title":{"rendered":"The Majesty of the Potato, and Other News"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_107001\" style=\"width: 810px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/jonespotatomajestic.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-107001\" class=\"wp-image-107001\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/jonespotatomajestic.jpg\" width=\"800\" height=\"628\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/jonespotatomajestic.jpg 585w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/jonespotatomajestic-300x235.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-107001\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Charles Jones, <i>Potato Majestic<\/i>, nineteenth century.\u00a0Image via the Clark Institute<\/p><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Oh, to own one of the first cameras\u2014to approach photography without any preconception of what a photograph could or should do. To take the first portrait, the first landscape, the first dick pic\u2014what a rollicking time that would be. Louis Menand, writing on the Clark Art Institute\u2019s new exhibition \u201cPhotography and Discovery,\u201d conjures the bumptious energy of the medium\u2019s earliest days\u2014and the unlikely corners into which the first cameras looked: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/culture\/cultural-comment\/the-majesty-of-early-photography?intcid=mod-latest\" target=\"_blank\">The albumen print, the collotype, the cyanotype, the daguerreotype, the Woodburytype, gelatin silver prints, gum dichromate prints, platinum prints, salt prints, halftones, photogravure: all these reproductive technologies are represented in the show, and each yields a different visual texture. The effects can be stunning<\/a> \u2026 My favorite in the show is a picture of potatoes. The label explains that the photographer, Charles Jones, was a gardener who worked on major estates in nineteenth-century Britain, and who had a practice of making photographs of things he grew, arranged as still lifes. His photographs were discovered in 1981 in a suitcase in an antiques market. And there they are, six potatoes on a plate\u2014nature\u2019s most plebeian foodstuff looking as pleased with itself as any duke. And the best thing about the piece, in case you miss the point, is the title, <em>Potato Majestic<\/em>.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Jorie Graham, talking to Sarah Howe, elaborates on the difficulty of facing the blank page in times like these: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.praccrit.com\/poems\/cryo\/\" target=\"_blank\">Increasingly now, it\u2019s a matter of using poetry to try to find a way to keep the proportions right, to not be overwhelmed by grief, horror, fear, shame, rage<\/a>; to use this precious medium I trust to guide me to find at least a way to ask the right questions, a way to hold \u2018reality and justice in one thought\u2019\u2014as Yeats admonished me to do when I was a young poet \u2026 Our enemies\u00a0<em>are\u00a0<\/em>despicably small, but their actions are capable of destroying the earth now, not just civilization. So, like every poet writing today, what I ask of my poetic tools now feels more urgent than ever, what I ask of the blank page. Not just urgent, but baffling. I have never written so slowly\u2014each poem an attempt both to try to understand how to reenter the current of existence with some understanding of\u00a0<em>what will suffice<\/em>\u2014what will permit one to go on as if there\u00a0<em>were<\/em>\u00a0a purpose\u2014and to try to understand what poetry is\u00a0<em>for<\/em>\u00a0under these conditions.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Alexander Briant is a lawyer for an oil company, meaning his job is harder than yours. He\u2019s beckoned to various corners of the globe to investigate various allegations of fraud and corruption, an exercise so heavy with \u201calternative truth\u201d that the West\u2019s whole globalized house of cards threatens to collapse under its weight. Briant writes, \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.lrb.co.uk\/v39\/n02\/alexander-briant\/diary\" target=\"_blank\">This is one of the paradoxes of globalization: multinational corporations are the cause of a lot of the dirt slewing around and at the same time set an example of due process in jurisdictions where there is none available in the domestic legal system<\/a>. The attempts to influence employees\u2019 behavior go well beyond the mere enforcement of rules. All companies worth their salt now speak of ethical \u2018values\u2019 as being essential and pay lip-service, at least, to a utopian approach to compliance in which eventually employees will internalize the requisite virtues so that procedures and policies will no longer be necessary. In the meantime, the fight against corruption and fraud continues in the oilfields, rigs and bases of Kazakhstan, Angola and Nigeria. And that is why, after a night in a Lagos hotel, I am on an internal flight to the Delta State town of Port Harcourt, which is home to many oil companies\u2019 facilities.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Seventy years after its publication in the Netherlands, Gerard Reve\u2019s\u00a0classic <em>The Evenings<\/em> is at last set to arrive in English\u2014and as Nina Siegal writes, it\u2019s right on time: \u201c<em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/01\/22\/books\/the-evenings-a-dutch-classic-arrives-in-english-it-only-took-70-years.html?mtrref=getpocket.com&amp;gwh=01BEAFD7EBC015C1C322522684F4D411&amp;gwt=pay&amp;_r=0\">The Evenings (De Avonden) <\/a><\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/01\/22\/books\/the-evenings-a-dutch-classic-arrives-in-english-it-only-took-70-years.html?mtrref=getpocket.com&amp;gwh=01BEAFD7EBC015C1C322522684F4D411&amp;gwt=pay&amp;_r=0\" target=\"_blank\">takes place over the last ten nights of 1946<\/a>. It\u2019s narrated by Frits van Egters, a twenty-three-year-old clerk in Amsterdam who still lives with his parents in a cramped apartment near the Amstel River. Frits is occupied during working hours, but in his free time he struggles with a sense of anxious aimlessness and isolation. Inwardly, he dissects the absurd banality of his life while he observes, with an acute sense of cynicism and occasional brutality, the slow decline of his doting middle-age parents \u2026 The story is \u2026 steeped in a sense of postwar gloom, and the dark humor that pervades the book underscores the difficulty of finding meaning in a world torn asunder.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>While we\u2019re on translation\u2014in a review of a new book on translating Paul Celan, Ottilie Mulzet drops in this illuminating bit about the late Imre Kert\u00e9sz: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.asymptotejournal.com\/criticism\/evelyn-dueck-l-etranger-intime\/\" target=\"_blank\">Kert\u00e9sz\u2019s language often stuns in its sheer ungainliness, its seemingly deliberate ugliness. In his books of essays\u00a0<em>Exiled Language<\/em>, there is a definite unnaturalness to Kert\u00e9sz\u2019s use of Hungarian, which mirrors the unnaturalness of the situation the boy narrator finds himself in (deported to Birkenau-Auschwitz during World War II)<\/a>. The fact that the boy himself continues to find these events to be perfectly \u2018natural\u2019 merely reinforces the reader\u2019s unease. The boy\u2019s psychological integration of the unassimilable is mirrored in the language in which he narrates the book, a language comprised of seemingly incompatible registers of Hungarian: his own boyish thoughts and speculations running alongside the bureaucratic language of the regime\u2014a bureaucratese which disappears the objects of its murderous intent well before the deportations begin. This is not unlike some of Celan\u2019s disconcerting compound formulations. In this sense, Kert\u00e9sz was clearly one of Celan\u2019s most assiduous students, truly a practitioner of writing \u2018according to Auschwitz.\u2019 \u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In today\u2019s roundup: early photos at the Clark Art Institute, Jorie Graham on the role of poetry in hard times, and more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2512],"tags":[26866,26863,26869,11279,10968,1132,4277,13353,26867,14672,7879,3161,26864,26865,26868,530],"class_list":["post-107000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-the-shelf","tag-alexander-briant","tag-clark-art-institute","tag-gerald-reve","tag-globalization","tag-imre-kertesz","tag-interviews","tag-jorie-graham","tag-lawyers","tag-oil-companies","tag-ottilie-mulzet","tag-paul-celan","tag-photographs","tag-photography-and-discovery","tag-potatoes","tag-the-evenings","tag-translation"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>An Exhibition of Early Photographs Suggests an Unencumbered 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