Reviews and News:
A speculative reading of Shakespeare’s sonnets: “As well as writing about pain, democracy, representation, and the law, Elaine Scarry has previously spent time investigating the possible role of electromagnetic interference in the crash of TWA Flight 800. In other words, she’s a sleuth as well as a thinker—and operates as one in Naming Thy Name, the most literary of her books to date. Not literary in the sense of providing close readings or subtle appreciations of texts (her critical lexis is narrow and vague: ‘beautiful,’ ‘searing,’ ‘heartbreaking,’ and so on), but in its concern with one of poetry’s most enduring mysteries: the identity of Shakespeare’s same-sex beloved in the sonnets. Like several others before her, and no doubt several more still to come, she thinks she has the answer. Or rather, she thinks she thinks she has the answer, and she invites us to read her book in a spirit of sympathetic collusion. That’s to say: she tells us in the introduction that she ‘believes’ her story to be true but ‘does not know it to be true’ because that ‘would require more evidence than has so far been assembled.’ It’s a welcome admission in some ways (because it’s honest)…”
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More changes to troubled Eisenhower Memorial: “The Eisenhower Memorial Commission voted late last week to approve another round of modifications to the trouble-plagued design submitted by architect Frank Gehry.”
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Eugene O’Neill’s tempestuous life: “In By Women Possessed we find O’Neill bedeviled by his morphine-riddled mother, Ella, and bedeviling his own wives and lovers as a maudlin and violent drunk. In this narrative of the years O’Neill was married to Agnes Boulton and then to Monterey, the Gelbs provide a steady, unflinching examination of the influence the women in his life had on his work.”
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The greatest painting in Paris is not the Mona Lisa.
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A history of the Hebrides: “Madeleine Bunting’s rich, precise book addresses questions of history, religion, politics, culture, language and emotion as they affect the islands themselves and their residents, living or gone before, as well as the outsider’s understanding of them. The Hebrides lie between the narrow seas and the great ocean; they are places in literature and in the self-understanding of the nation, at once at its heart and ‘other’; they are located, too, in the oft-treacherous main of Romance.”
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Essay of the Day:
In The New Criterion, Philippe de Montebello examines the ephemerality of works of art, which are, “by their very nature…ineluctably on an entropic path of deterioration and ultimately disappearance”:
“Take the example of Caravaggio’s Saint Matthew and the Angel, once in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin. The sweetest of angels who guides the hand of a totally bemused Matthew with the tips of his fingers, expressing ineffable tenderness, is one of those unforgettable genial inventions that stays with one forever, in this instance, only in our mind’s eye, or through a black and white photograph. This is because the painting, along with some 450 other masterpieces from the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, renamed the Bode in 1956, was destroyed during the allied bombing of Berlin in 1945.
“I want to underscore today not only how vulnerable are works of art, but also how fragmentary is so much of the art that we see in museums, at least of the past. Not only because, as in the case of many antiquities, it is often broken pieces that have survived, and not the whole, but also because fragments—and this time not only ancient—are what result from dismemberment or displacement: dismemberment as of altarpieces with their predella panels scattered among collections and museums the world over, or palace decorations displaced and in effect neutralized when subtracted from their original programmatic or architectural setting.
“In the case of ancient art, ironically, it is the exhibited fragment that is enduring, and it is the whole, either lost or forgotten, that is ephemeral. Fragments then are not so much ars brevis as ars longa, precisely because they survive as the only tangible vestiges of lost civilizations, especially in the case of those without writing.
“The more one studies works of art (and museums as well), the more one is struck that, more often than not, it is change that is the norm. The canon is continually shifting. One example would be the Parthenon marbles, in the early nineteenth century, displacing the Apollo Belvedere as the ne plus ultra of ancient art. Such shifts in taste suggest that attitudes toward art—and its meaning as well as affect—are as contingent as they are inherent.”
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Image of the Day: Verbier
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Poem: David Mason, “First Christmas in the Village”
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