SAFFRON GIRLS

Tosca's Birthday, from 3QD, 3/08/2008

TOSCA'S BIRTHDAY

Elatia Harris

I’m due for a significant birthday this week, the one that most women associate with the butt-end of their child-bearing potential. But I shall observe it in the same way I have observed all my birthdays back to the age of 18: I shall spend the day naked in front of a full-length mirror, drawing myself. I plan to do this every year for as long as I live, and I welcome even the most grotesque changes in my appearance for the interest they add to the birthday portraits. It is for these inquiries into the action of time and character on form that my biographers will especially thank me.

Oh, not that they’re at my heels yet, those biographers. I’m too far ahead of them, and in my lifetime shall remain so.  I can just about prove it, too. Get this. Every year, there’s a big drawing show in my city, curated by someone fancy.  It overlaps my birthday, and I always enter the self-portraits from the year before. Not once have I been juried into this show, or into any show, anywhere, that would establish me as an artist of merit. Since my eyes are trained on the future, this doesn’t bother me like you'd think. I even attend the drawing show openings to find out what's working for the current darlings, safe as I am from imitating them.

I run into quite a few people I know by sight at these events, though I can’t imagine who they think I am. I don’t carry on like an artist. If there’s such a thing as a proofreader personality, then I must have a touch of it. That’s what I do all night – proofread for a law firm downtown, purging significant errors. When the lawyers return to their desks in the morning, they’ve got all this creamy copy. You can’t really have a conversation about it. Nevertheless, by now I’m a fixture at the big annual opening, where I’m usually thrown a few crumbs.

You’re looking at that awfully hard, you know.

That’s the basic remark that gets made to me. Yes, I know – I’m feeding my hungry eyes, I don’t say. I never know what to say. That used to be all right when I was younger – no one finds fault with slender, speechless girls. In those days I could think my own thoughts with people chatting around me, and it was almost like being among friends. It’s harder now. I’m old enough that I should be asking others about themselves, drawing out younger people and fostering their well-being – and I don’t know how to do any of that. Nor do I care to. I live for art.

So did Tosca, of course. And I get lonely, so I talk to her sometimes. You’ve heard the aria – I have lived for art, I have lived for love… Sure, Tosca feels cosmically shafted because she’s put all her eggs in one basket. But that’s not it at all, I keep telling her. To have lived for art and love both – it’s too much to do, not too little. You can’t live for love if you live for art, because you can’t mess up your life that way. If you live for art, you must sedulously avoid the whole ghastly dance of family and love. It’s a very good idea not even to have had a mother.

And, children? Now there’s a giant schuck. Who says they have to be good, beautiful, smart, healthy and self-supporting?

You think it won’t happen, but they could even be developmentally delayed – nice way to put it. A few years back, I lived across the street from a big, ugly house with a cyclone-fenced yard where they ran a program for young adults with developmental delays. An absolute torment to me! How could I know for certain that one of those kids was not the child I gave birth to twenty-odd years ago? I know nothing of it, I wouldn’t even look at it before they took it away, but there I was, possibly domiciled not a stone’s throw from it.

Worse, the inmates were no end of friendly. They’d wave and smile and try to start conversations with me when I was on my way to the market. They’d poke two or three digits through the diamonds in the cyclone fencing, fingering my air supply. It was just too much, whoever gave birth to them. And I had an almost ideal space on that street – big windows, no cockroaches, and a corner under the eaves for my futon – with hopes of hanging in for years and years.  It was so cheap! But my sensitivities were such that I had to move as soon as I could save enough money to rent a truck.

Tosca is very far from a bad person to run these thoughts by. As an artist, she understands sacrifice. But Tosca, I tell her, I am talking about tremendous sacrifices. Would you have been up to them had they not brought you fame? If they had brought you - instead of fame - simplicity?

I have always felt favored by fortune that that my body of work evolves independently of such questions as money, the approval rating of others and trendiness. I don’t ask that anyone buy it, like it, or even acknowledge it. And I require just about as little in the way of an audience as a person practicing meditation. Oh, not to suggest that drawing is for me entirely experiential. If it were, I’d be happy to destroy my work at the end of a studio day; instead, I catalog and store everything like a conservator. I’ve got a little museum of myself – a futon, a big mirror, and a little museum. A life of devastating simplicity.

Tosca knows I was not always so wise. In art school, one had to submit to critiques, and relying on others for a sense of reality was a hard habit to shake. Art students who don’t imagine they’re in the fast lane to fame suppose instead that the world will be hostile to their art, glamorously reviling it. That people who matter will get worked up enough to hate it. As if. I, no more than any student, figured on a world with an endless capacity to be underwhelmed by the very best I knew how to do. But I soon discovered powerful knowledge – that indifference is only killing if it's what you get while seeking something else. Don’t seek that other thing, and an Everest of indifference cannot bury you.

Still, I do seek entrance to that big drawing show every year. But only because my biographers will turn up my more than twenty rejection letters from its discerning curators, interleaved with acid-free papers, so they’ll jump out at them, fresh and bright and stinging. They will never infer from the extraordinary care with which my work has been preserved how overlooked it shall have been. Oh, the linen-lined portfolios, the fitted boxes, the meticulously cross-referenced inventories… It’s as if each drawing had a genealogy, a christening dress and a cradle.

Tosca, I’ll be happy to take a hard look at my naked self later this week, in the unsparing light of my day-long annual ritual. Radiant to record whatever I see, hanging like a lover over every little difference for the worse. Rembrandt knew better than to give himself the aging diva treatment, with every passing year a more elaborate headdress, increased gaudiness, cagier fat-concealment – and I know better too. Rembrandt and I are not mocked by corsetry or jewelry, and nobody pays us to make ourselves appear grander or younger or better pleased than we are. It’s just our mirrors, our materials, time and the truth – if we can catch it.

Could you live this way, Tosca? Could you labor all night at a job so self-effacing that ideally no one even knows you’ve done it? Could you sing all day in the shower, taking care to do those exercises that will allow your voice to grow both richer and more shimmering, so that you could go on to sing even better – in the shower? And what about singing in front of a big mirror in your birthday suit? Good way to lose your audience, huh? Good way to get indisposed!

Well, a birthday is a natural opportunity to wonder why you have such a low-impact life. For this reason, it’s key to be doing something you can’t dispute the significance of on that day.  I’ve read that getting your hair done and dressing with extra care in a new garment can be good for birthday morale, but that translates directly into less money for premium art supplies and conservation materials. You want to know how I visualize morale? It looks a lot like a six-foot stack of hand-torn Fabbriano drawing paper. That’s what security would look like too. And probably even love. Yes, I would rather have a six-foot stack of Fabbriano paper in my life than anything else Italian of that height. Tosca, you would not be able to approach that purity of vision – not with a tenor like a puppy and the Roman Chief of Police hot on your tail. How much finer to revel in personal simplicity, aspiring to an ever more transparent life. A life like a pane of glass. Look at me, Tosca – I shed personal belongings as naturally as others acquire them, I spurn the entanglements they seek, would quickly be surfeited by the sensations they crave. I keep going week after week on apples and mashed chick-peas, and this is no austerity but alchemy resulting in that which is most precious – daylight, and time.

Without fanfare, Tosca, I roam the city, without having lingered to make sure that my diva-cloak and my genius-hat are fetchingly adjusted. And look at you – you fight it so, with your retinue, your feathers and your long winding train. Why not go about in public as naked as the cold allows, accepting that you are but the custodian of your gift, that it is your gift that matters and not your high-waisted, low-necked gowns. And certainly not your crimes. Yes, go about naked, and see what happens. I can tell you, no one will be making up to you then.

Do you think, Tosca, that you are the only woman ever to have to dispatch the heavy in her life? Well, you carry on like you thought so. Ooh, the candelabra, the crucifix! I came relatively late to proofreading, little suspecting till recently that I had a natural affinity for tweaking the kind of unclear sentences that give rise to legal misunderstandings. An enlightened lawyer, whom I’ve since retained for other reasons, saw that it would be the perfect gig for me, but for many years I did the kind of odd jobs that cause one to rub shoulders with the public, including of course the police. I was a hostess at De Medici’s down on Ninth Avenue, and that’s a cop joint – oh, you know how turfy they are, especially when they’re obsessed. Like you, I was stalked by a crafty cop whose head was full of ideas, intent on following me from that life into my real life in art. I did what I had to do – my art gave me the strength for it. But you? You did what you had to do, and then you leapt off the Castel Sant’Angelo. Sheer grandiosity, Tosca – you needed only the right lawyer.

But you will say you died for love. Aww! Love, men and babies! You can’t go near any of it if you want a proper studio day and the materials and peace of mind to care for your work, to kit it out for the Silent Land like a Middle Kingdom princeling guiding his gorgeous barque through the Sea of Reeds. Yes, my work is headed for the future, cunningly wrapped and accurately aimed. Oh, look, they’ll say in the future, she didn’t use a camera for that, she just…did it! Oh, man – no one even knows how to draw like that anymore. Nunh-uh, I don’t need to be there to know what they’ll be saying when the lid of the sarcophagus comes off.

I intend to keep on drawing throughout my brief incarceration. And my lawyer – also my employer – has promised that the rent on my studio shall be paid, my archives untouched, my job restored to me. I’ll be no trouble to the criminal justice system, which will hardly know I’ve passed through it, since a simpler, clearer offender would be impossible to find. Why, I’m virtually invisible: a guitar string for a digestive tract, a thickening of the air at the cortex, vertebrae like motel ice, and sinews but the shimmer off hot pavements. I don’t know, exactly, how this has come to be, but you can follow its evolution in the birthday drawings, where there’s no escaping the truth. For the last several years, really, I’ve just been drawing the mirror, because that’s exactly what I see.

This is what happens, Tosca, when you have truly lived for art.

Posted by Elatia Harris at 12:43 AM | Permalink

COMMENTS

Thank you 3QD, for providing a venue for excellent short fiction. This one from Elatia Harris is a stunner!

Posted by: Kathleen | Mar 10, 2008 1:26:43 AM

I agree!!!
I am am touched, elevated and blown away in the same time, there seems to be no limit in astonishing surprises!!!!!

Posted by: mica hubertus mick | Mar 10, 2008 6:56:46 AM

Mica and Katheleen cannot be bettered on their appreciation of this contribution.

That's the Ponto Vecchio over the Arno river. But, to the left, is that the Excelsior Hotel?

Who painted this beautiful canvas?

I used to stay summers in Sovicille not far from this incredible place.

Keep up the great works!

Posted by: Felix E. F. Larocca MD | Mar 10, 2008 7:27:08 AM

Elatia, thank you. That was magnificent.

Posted by: D | Mar 10, 2008 7:34:14 AM

So beautiful and so disturbing. Maybe Tosca didn't jump. Maybe she was pushed. Elatia, what a wonderful writer you are!

Posted by: Harriet | Mar 10, 2008 11:11:13 AM

Elatia, I covet your beautiful phraseology. "Fingering my air supply" is devastating, and "It’s a very good idea not even to have had a mother" is close behind.

Posted by: Chris Schoen | Mar 10, 2008 3:24:47 PM

Good going, Elatia!

Posted by: Abbas Raza | Mar 10, 2008 3:29:30 PM

Ah, Elatia, you make me forget God!

Beautiful piece. Hold on to that Fabbriano paper. Soon we will be unable to afford it.

But I have a source in the Marche where....

Michael

Posted by: Michael Blim | Mar 10, 2008 3:45:15 PM

This is my favourite story I've read from you.

Posted by: alh | Mar 10, 2008 4:38:00 PM

Elatia, I hear the music in my ears as I read your prose. John

Posted by: john altobello | Mar 10, 2008 8:03:25 PM

Elatia: You write so well that you make this ritual of self portraits on birthdays quite interesting. Otherwise I often say to my friends that for me being old became clear when even I was embarassed by my own reflection in the morror. Or as Steve Pinker wrote that clothes were invented so one would always imagine a perfect body behind them. Thanks for being a contributor to 3QD.

Posted by: Tasnim | Mar 10, 2008 9:18:45 PM

Wow, Elatia!

Let me just add that a low impact life is way underrated.

Posted by: Ruchira | Mar 10, 2008 11:40:12 PM

"six-foot stack of Fabbriano"

Ahh, yes.

For me it was always Crisbrook Cold Pressed's Siren call, but I feel you.

Posted by: Carlos | Mar 11, 2008 12:21:06 AM

Bellissima!

"Quale occhio al mondo
può star di paro
all'ardente occhio tuo nero?
È qui che l'esser mio s'affisa intero.
Occhio all'amor soave, all'ira fiero!
Qual altro al mondo può star di paro
all'occhio tuo nero!"

-or words to that effect.

For the record I was also done in by the riff about the "six foot stack of Fabbriano".

Thanks Elatia

Posted by: Pete Chapman | Mar 11, 2008 4:00:14 AM

There are so few interior testaments from female artists, which was one of the reasons that Mary Gordon's haunting novel Spending garnered so much attention. There is a madness here, the kind that exists from speaking the truth without clothing (love the quote from Steven Pinker BTW, thank you Tasnim). More, more! from she who knows the depths we dive, visually and verbally.

Posted by: Deborah Barlow | Mar 11, 2008 10:47:09 AM

Bravo!
Thanks Elatia

Posted by: Dave Ranning | Mar 11, 2008 5:12:59 PM

Elatia,
Your elegant writing style is not from practice - you are wired differently. Some of us (translation: me)will have to be reborn with more evolved neural synapses even to imitate you. 
Great post!!
shiban

Posted by: shiban ganju | Mar 11, 2008 8:56:51 PM

Ps. but only with incredible insight and live experience can somebody write like this. I am still amazed !!! Thank you !! XOX

Posted by: mica hubertus mick | Mar 12, 2008 3:36:58 AM

Don’t we always want to know where the artist who makes the world visible truly dwells? Where the lining between these two manifestations rubs and chafes?

Stunning piece, Elatia, dark, scary and funny. I am charmed by your painterly detail, as when the artist gives her artwork the demarcations of the life she deliberately chose not to live: 
“Oh, the linen-lined portfolios, the fitted boxes, the meticulously cross-referenced inventories… It’s as if each drawing had a genealogy, a christening dress and a cradle.”

More fiction, please!

Posted by: Judith | Mar 12, 2008 6:35:46 AM

An onrushing, scary stream-of-consciousness on art and life...
Very well done.

Posted by: T | Mar 12, 2008 1:54:08 PM

Devastatingly funny, Elatia, yet it goes down so very smoothly.

Posted by: cathy c | Mar 12, 2008 8:03:34 PM

My dear Elatia,
this is simply glorious. I love the disturbing madness, the eloquence and the gorgeously textured language. The whole piece felt like a mad, rich tapestry.
Very moving.
Thank you.

Sughra

Posted by: Sughra | Mar 12, 2008 10:17:18 PM

This is fabulous and intricately layered. The grandiosity of the artist, the freedom and loneliness and more than occasional self-pity, the dizzying flares of inspiration followed by the dead-end of self-regard. And even there and through it all: beauty is found and made.

Posted by: OT | Mar 12, 2008 11:25:19 PM

"Simplicity... a transparent life... A life like a pane of glass." what awesome homage to the void. Meet you there -- h

Posted by: holly alderman | Mar 15, 2008 7:46:25 AM

As usual, I chuckled at Elatia's use of irony, marveled at her estoteric knowledge, envied her free-wheeling, sassy attitude, and wanted to stop reading her column and copy some of her imagery and satiric references down on a post-it. But, as usual, I couldn't find my post-it pad, which is always next to my laptop except when I need it...and then I thought I'd use the back of an envelope for scrap paper and write on that, but I noticed that on the front was stamped "Second Notice," so I had to open the envelope, which contained a bill for a subscription to a magazine that notifies me every other month that "It's time to renew,...now at a special rate only...". I then went through my billing system as ruthlessly as Sherman marching through Georgia, and learned that I've paid through 2010, and the latest renewal could take me to 2013. Having settled that little bit of bother by mailing the deliquent bill, I allowed myself to relax briefly, knowing that I'll be getting The New Yorker delivered to this address for the next 15 years FREE...but then the thought of 15 years provoked other questions: Where will I be? What will I be doing? Will the magazine still be around? More important, will I?

Thus, I returned to Elatia's musings on Tosca and her topic this month (or to put it crassly,art as a jealous master) with a less jaundiced eye towards my own slackabout approach to my "art," fiction writing. I wish love did get in the way of my writing, but it's the quotidian details of modern life that have derailed me from my chosen craft, as I deduced from my mini adventure with the post-its. I once hired a personal secretary when I was living and working out of state while my house was undergoing renovation in Massachusetts, but she was messier, more disorganized than I, and cost me just about the same amount of money per hour as I was getting to teach at an elite university. So maybe it's Martha Stewart I really need to keep my life simple and free to pursue my loftier goals. I feel less guilty now--and we haven't even begun to discuss what's in my closets ( I have four closets just for my clothes) or in the attic or garage or basement stroe rooms (Steven King territory for sure).

I have to confess, Elatia, I have always disliked the beautiful and whiney (yes!) Tosca. It wasn't her dedication to her music or whatever nonsense she spouted in that aria ( which I also loathe, and I adore just about everything else Puccini wrote), it was that she came off like one of those sexy up-to-no-good girls in 1940's B movies--a stupid Veronica Lake, if you life--and worse,self-important and self righeous. I'm sure she had no close girl friends either,having no use for competition of any kind since Tosca seemed to me to be the kind of gal who put herself up on her own pedestal--whether for art or her own beauty and admire her own reflection (and voice). Shallow, shallow...

However, two good things I can thank Tosca for: 1)I attended a performance of "Tosca" at the Metropolitan Opera which was Pavarotti's final time singing on the stage of the Met, and it was one of the most glorious examples of someone who has achieved perfection of his chosen art and also achieved almost universal public recognition; and 2) Elatia's writing this endlessly fascinating riff on Tosca and posting it on the web so I could read it.

Write on, write on--with or without clothes....
Ulle

Posted by: Ulle | Mar 15, 2008 2:50:17 PM

Even though it's there in front of me in black and white, I swear I don't know how you did that.

Posted by: chris | Mar 16, 2008 6:12:43 PM

Elise & Me: A Tale of Extreme Optical Seduction, 3 Quarks Daily, 5/12/2008

ELISE & ME: A TALE OF EXTREME OPTICAL SEDUCTION

 

Elatia Harris

The year I was 9, I made every effort to turn Japanese.  I padded around the house in tabi and a kimono, elongated my eyes with my mother’s make-up – she wasn’t using it  – and did up my long dark hair in what I regarded as geisha poufs anchored with chopsticks. I even packed a small bag with tissue-wrapped favorite possessions, in case the opportunity to leave permanently for Japan came all of a sudden – as I had faith it would. Beneath the dress-up, however, and the very strong signal that I was not best pleased by life as a child in the West, was the real ardor I felt for the art of Japan. It looked so right to me, it just was right. Why was that? What was the secret?  

My mother knew what there was to know about how to look at Western painting, and together we looked at hundreds of paintings on the walls of museums and galleries and inside books. Though I might wait weeks for her to find an hour to page through a certain art book with me, I never pushed ahead without her until I began turning Japanese. She experienced the japonesque as chic, a deft touch in any environment, but the true family aesthetic was one in which Jules Verne duked it out with Henri Matisse. I will not forget what it was to be profoundly attracted to something my brilliant mother didn't particularly get -- it was a real rite of passage. From this distance, I see how kind she was to encourage me on my way away from her.  In the photo to the left, however, I appear a bit resentful. She had asked me to look up from what I was doing -- assuredly not my homework -- and I didn't like my concentration to be broken. If at this age I was found drawing, then I was drawing something that looked -- to me at least -- Japanese. But I needed a guide to that universe of art and taste that drew me in, and it could not be my mother.

Enter Elise Grilli – a woman whom I suppose I never knew, although it does not feel that way.  I first encountered her name on the cover of one of my most beloved childhood books, Golden Screen Paintings of Japan. You can see the scan of my personal copy below left – it’s dog-eared the way a book gets if you sleep with it for many years. On the upper right corner, there is ink I spilled from copying something inside it. Akiyama Teruzawa’s big book from Skira, Japanese Painting, was similarly pored over by me, and is now obviously distressed, like the Modern Library edition of The Tale of Genji, written by the world's first novelist, Lady Murasaki, and translated by Arthur Waley. Nobody in this bunch wrote for children, but in fact they all wrote for me. Especially Elise Grilli.

 

From the post-war years through the 1960's, curiosity about the art and culture of Japan was likely to lead a reader of any age to a kind of book that would today be hard to find -- one that unabashedly played up the otherness, not to say quaintness, of things Japanese. Asia was called the Orient then, and the modifier for anything east of Vienna was "Oriental" not "Asian." (Well, I exaggerate -- but not by much.) The Allied Occupation of Japan did not end until late in 1951, and even by the time I began studying the subject that would fill so much of my childhood, Japan was still Other. It was certainly the antithesis of the maroon sides of beef slathered in barbecue sauce, the morgue-temperature air-conditioning, and the fevered visual excess I considered to surround me, and that alone would have gotten it my childish attention -- but perhaps not for long. And we are talking about long years of being absorbed in a subject, so that when in school I could pick my topics and write to please myself, I would write about Japanese gardens, Japanese creation myths, Japanese tea ceremonies, or some aspect of Japanese art. A teacher in the 6th grade made fun of me for this -- gently. And even after years of child-time, it was not that I had learned so much, but that I had looked so much. For this was all about extreme optical seduction, the ideas and feelings it can give rise to.

It happened through books -- tiny books, at that. In the late 50's, Elise Grilli wrote two 7" x 7" soft cover companion books for Crown, Golden Screen Paintings of Japan and Japanese Picture Scrolls. Each is one-quarter of an inch thick, with about 30 pages of text and 36 plates, mostly color. They belonged to the "Art of the East Library" series, and they cost $1.25 each. My mother must have bought them for me at the local museum book store -- I don't remember wheedling her, but I wouldn't have been above it. There was also the Kodansha "Library of Japanese Art," brought to Western readers by an arrangement between Kodansha, an old Japanese publishing house, and the Charles E. Tuttle Company. These were amply illustrated soft cover monographs on leading Japanese artists, from Sesshu to Taikan. I see that the 7 volumes -- about the height and width of paperback mysteries, but perhaps 30% of the thickness -- I have owned since the age of 8 were marked down from $1.25 each to 75 cents. Of the Kodansha books I owned, Elise Grilli wrote or co-wrote the texts on Sesshu, Sotatsu and Hokusai. I've read them all many, many times. Her name became very familiar to me, as did her words, her beautifully chosen words.

             

The image under the title is a four-panel screen from the Room of Maples and Flowers, painted in the late 16th century by Hasegawa Tohaku and now in the Chishaku-in, a temple complex in Kyoto. Each gold foil panel is a bit under 6 feet in height. I first became aware of this work of art readingGolden Screen Paintings of Japan, my $1.25 book by Elise Grilli, and it was the most gorgeous thing I had ever seen, period. Paging through the book late at night, I would have to sneak up to it, because it was almost too much, and because the ravishing pleasures of anticipation were not to be disdained. The same artist, Tohaku, painted the monkey panels, above. These are ink paintings on paper, incorporating a gold wash, now in the Kyoto National Museum. Oh, their fur, their presence.

Unfathomably, it was the same Tohaku who painted the pair of six-paneled screens below, Trees in Fog, now in the National Museum, Tokyo. These are slightly over 5 feet high, just sumi on paper. No gold. If you imagined them side by side you would set the right edge of the topmost at a slight distance from the left edge of the bottom screen.  So that, considering the twelve panels as a whole, there would be two -- almost three -- largely empty panels in the middle.  Before I got a look atTrees in Fog, I didn't know there were compositions of this kind. I knew it was bad composition to put something smack in the center of your drawing, but I did not know you could put so much nothing there.

Might you not be better off doing as Tohaku did in the Room of Maples and Flowers, and drawing a tree that reached diagonally across the center of your composition, while truly inhabiting areas just to either side of it? Trying to find the right way to draw things, I was instinctively attracted to an individualistic painter of vast and wide-ranging genius. My first sensations of wonder and bewilderment have stayed with me. They remain the correct response to the daring and naturalism I saw, that I was too young to know I could not as an artist aspire to.

Thanks to Elise Grilli, I was beginning to understand there were two long traditions in Japanese painting that occasionally inter-penetrated but were also separate. Very roughly, there was a tradition that overwhelmingly reflected the civilization-changing influence of China and Buddhism, and one that was Japan's unique contribution to world art, with each flaring into greater vitality at different times over almost 1500 years. Another distinction to look out for was that between art of a private, contemplative nature -- a scroll that is unfolded slowly in the hands, a poem card -- and art best understood as a large element in an entire surround, like the screens above. In the West, the same distinction might attach to the difference between drawing and painting, the former usually done by artists for themselves, the latter having a necessarily public intention. In the West, too, the same artist might excel -- that is, live equally -- in both drawing and painting, but in Japan, with staggering though very few exceptions, art that was contemplative would not issue from the mind or hands of a great decorator-painter.

That was a matter of different trainings, temperaments and positions in society, I learned from Elise Grilli. Reading about Sesshu, the priest-painter who in 1467 had gone to China to study, returning to Japan to found an academy, I saw that for some kinds of painting, you needed to be a philosopher.  Oh, perhaps even an aristocrat. Not like Tohaku, whose birth as a dyer's son conferred outsider status on him, making it anything but a sure thing he would gain a toe-hold as a screen painter in an elite studio -- as indeed he did not. As a Buddhist priest born to a samurai clan, Sesshu occupied a troubling position too, however -- he was both a master of ink painting, a suibokuga, and one in a long tradition of adepts whose first allegiance could not be to to anything in the samsaric world, not even to brushes and paper. And yet, this detachment was essential to his art -- something that made no sense at all to me, until I was able to see that that was the point.

The painting above, left, Sesshu's Winter Landscape, in the National Museum, Tokyo, to me sums up kara-e -- Chinese-style painting as it is done in Japan. Because of a book that cost 75 of my mother's cents when I was 8, I have had decades to think about Sesshu -- not a task you can fully accomplish in a lifetime. A child of the mid-century, I could not look at the central area of the background of this landscape and fail to wonder how a priest in Japan the 1400's had found his way to abstraction -- which of course belonged to my own era. To painting an idea of winter and ice on rock, and not its appearance. I showed my mother, who knew everything about modern art. Her mind boggled, too, that the crowning achievement of the painting of our time -- radically to simplify, to search for essences, to suggest -- could have been thus anticipated. Much later as a college girl, I would learn from another wonderful teacher, Katherine Caldwell, how through the centuries Chinese painting veered towards an appearance of abstraction. For the time being, however, my mind was on a handful of long-dead Japanese painters. Among the very great benefits of turning childish attention upon the long ago and far away is a world view that, even if it is inaccurate, is thrillingly grand, that will impart the habit of looking for connections.  Sometimes, after all, they're there.

That which was uniquely or at least especially Japanese in painting -- yamato-e -- stirred me beyond anything. Not always -- occasionally yamato-e could look phoned in or precious, and, developing an eye for this stuff, I could see that something was amiss. Too much has been written on the differences between yamato-e and kara-e; whenever you think you've pinned it down, you can, yourself, produce an exception. Greatly to simplify, kara-e is line to which color or modeling is added, yamato-e the juxtaposition of flat areas of color. Looking again at Tohaku's screen from the Room of Maples and Flowers (under the title), you see a blue curving shape in the panel second from left that you know to be a body of water receding into the distance -- a winding stream. The gold ground stands equally for riverbed and sky -- you sense this without needing more. That'syamato-e, which could not and did not happen in China. Looking at Sesshu's Winter Landscape, the primacy of line is apparent -- it is specific, suggestive and expressive, and it is through the weight of the line, from dark and bold to faint and attenuated, that you apprehend the recession of objects in space. I am not so sure that, in the 502 years since he died, any painter has taken kara-e further than Sesshu. Or shall ever do.

But where do these distinctions leave us when we look at Tohaku's Trees in Fog?  This shattering masterpiece, almost 24 feet long, and according to a 2001 poll, Japan's best loved painting, is neither juxtaposed areas of color nor line in the sense of contour-line.  Using enormous brushes, Tohaku made a brush stroke the very shape of a trunk, a bough, a clump of pine needles. So that line is never exactly descriptive, in that you can't separate it from form. The radiant fog here is what establishes distance, some trees standing before us, roots to crown, others veiled.  You know the forest is dense, for you can see trees that are pushed aslant by the upright growth of others, yet a shimmering bright fog is everywhere moving in and out. The painting itself has almost an aural quality -- of deep hush. You can tell that if it were not for Chinese civilization, which changes everything it impinges on, and has always done, this work would not have come into being, but it's transcendantly yamato-e.

Has yamato-e reached such an apotheosis with color? Oh, I have long thought so so. On the cover of Elise Grilli's 1959 book, Masterworks of Japanese Painting, 15th -- 19th Centuries, there is a close-up photo of an iris from Ogata Korin's pair of six-paneled screens, Kakitsubata, below, painted in about 1705, now in the Nezu Art Museum, Tokyo. The screens refer to a wistful verse in a 10th century romance, the Ise Monogatori -- everyone who looked at them would have known it. Unusually for an art historian, Elise Grilli writes about the in-and-out aspect of a folding screen -- abyobu -- which, standing on its own before you, would give an experience that cannot really be simulated in 2-D space. The irises would take on a different presence, with your seeing them as if from both above and below -- a manipulation of your "felt axis" that would gently and pleasurably disembody you, putting you in iris-space the way Monet would place you among waterlilies, looking impossibly up at the high horizon of the pond. This is a perspective that Western painting discourages, and that you can enter through tiny portals -- books only twice the size of a deck of cards.

  

  

                                              

I still have and read Elise Grilli's books, although I no longer sleep with them.  In writing about their place in my childhood, I haven't wanted to quote from them.  I'm turfy about her -- she's mine.  And anyway, what if readers found her less entrancing than I did, and do?  Hers is the voice of a charming, educated mid-century writer who gently impels you to see and to love what you see, who has the gift of creating interest before she imparts information. I don't know if she was thought of as a formidable scholar -- so many formidable scholars of the era are no longer consulted, yet, in preparing to write this post, I learned that her book on Sharaku, written in the 50's, was just last year re-issued. For the most part, her books can be found on the secondary market, where they cost a lot more than $1.25.

Who was Elise Grilli, really?  I never knew in any detail until a few weeks ago. She lived in Japan from the late 40's through the mid-60's, and raised her children there. She spoke, read and wrote Japanese, and wrote articles on art for The Japan Times, for which her husband was a music critic. That figures -- she was fond of using musical and also literary analogies to illuminate art that was still very foreign, comparing and contrasting what readers might know with what they probably did not, the better to facilitate optical seduction. It's a habit I see I've caught -- although my mother did it too. Her biggest book, The Art of the Japanese Screen, Weatherhill, 1970 -- and you will never know a better treatment of the subject -- I did not as a child get my hands on.  It was published posthumously. She died in 1969, at work at that time on a book about calligraphy in China and Japan. She was not much older than my mother -- something I'd always sensed.

That's a bad loss, that she did not complete and publish the work-in-progress. I only just found out, and I am passionately sorry, and sorry for her children too, who would have then been young adults.

At around the same time, I was beginning to learn about calligraphy, about the syllabary that Lady Murasaki used to write the Genji Monogatori, in the Heian Period, when men at Court wrote bad poetry in Chinese and, in Japanese, women wrote good novels. Chinese calligraphy looked to me then like ideas, Japanese like a language to record utterances. I went further back than the Heian Period, to the 9th century, to the time the Japanese, who did not write at all before contact with China and the extreme alterations that it wrought, began to develop a written language that diverged from the grafted-on Chinese, that was more suitable to their own spoken language. A calligrapher-monk, Kukai, may have been instrumental in this process. He had been to China, returning to found the Shingon Buddhist sect, headquartered at Koyasan. There, beyond the darkly forested Okuno-in, for centuries the cemetery of choice for Japanese Buddhists, beyond the Lantern Hall where two lanterns have burned for 900 years, in an underground chamber of Mt. Koya, Kukai had not died, but had entered eternal samadhi -- deeply concentrated meditation -- to await Maitreya, the Buddha of the Future.

I was a big girl now, and I was off.

Posted by Elatia Harris at 04:32 AM | Permalink

COMMENTS

A wonderful sojourn into a most beautiful childhood reverie.

Thanks to a wonderful and gifted narrator for sharing with us her moving metamorphosis.

Kudos! --- as always

Posted by: Felix E F Larocca MD | May 12, 2008 7:29:00 AM

Dear Elatia,
This is such a beautiful piece, and of course, as all your writing is, so full of incredibly interesting information. I am fascinated by what you have written about Japanese art, thanks so much. Also love your picture as a little girl! Keep up your superb writing!
Azra.

Posted by: Azra Raza | May 12, 2008 7:35:16 AM

Dear Elatia,

Thank you for that transcendant piece, for the time and care you took in composing it and for reminding us of what the 'Interwebs' can do for learning and sharing.

Posted by: ArtieD | May 12, 2008 7:52:54 AM

Your writing always has a warm effortlessness and comfort to it.

Posted by: beajerry | May 12, 2008 10:12:29 AM

Utterly mesmerizing, this latest foray into yet another deep cleft of your knowledge. The visuals and the words came together to make time stop, as it were...thank you for such an extraordinary piece.

Posted by: Deborah Barlow | May 12, 2008 12:28:28 PM

Elatia, As always when I read something you write, I find myself transported into a world beyond my reach. I experience the thrill of discovery and the privilege of reading your beautiful writing. Thank you for sharing not just a lovely peek into your child-life, but also a primer on Japanese painting! You are a gem -Lakshmi

Posted by: Lakshmi Bloom | May 12, 2008 12:39:21 PM

Thank you, Elatia, for this wonderfully written piece and for the exquisite images that accompany it. John

Posted by: John Altobello | May 12, 2008 1:21:41 PM

Another gem, Elatia. I add my appreciation to that of the others.

Our memories are monuments to many people who have no way to know how deeply they have affected us. As I read your story of Elise Grilli I racalled a novel by Lin Yutang, Moment in Peking(1939), that I came across in a second-hand book store years ago. I had never heard of him but was attracted by a descriptive list of characters in the front pages. It is a story of Byzantine complexity with all the sweep of a Chinese Gone With the Wind and I swallowed it whole, enjoying every page. I later found out the writer was a well-known scholar who later produced a modern Chinese-English discionary in 1972.

It never occurred to me that multiple wives were anything but odd, but for cultures in which polygamy is practiced there is nothing remarkable about it. That book changed my whole attitude about that and a few other cultural differences between East and West.

Having spent a tour of duty in Korea also helped, but when The Joy Luck Club came along I was primed and ready to love it, too. (I think it is among the best stories/movies of our time.)

As you see, it takes very little to transport me to an Asian fantasy. Well done, indeed!

Posted by: John Ballard | May 12, 2008 2:02:47 PM

Plenty of my friends and relations feel the same kind fascination with the products of Japanese culture, whether poetry or bubblegum, so I presume that this cultural exchange continues in earnest, though some might find the process lacking in symmetry. A fine post

Posted by: matt lavallee | May 12, 2008 2:18:38 PM

I often feel as I scroll down to see the vivid images and read your wonderful text,that I am in fact, to use your words, reading "a scroll that is unfolded slowly in the hands". Thank you for another beautiful and enchanting article or perhaps poem card.

Posted by: Harriet | May 12, 2008 4:23:46 PM

A captivating, beautiful memoir. Somehow in this virtual space you manage to recreate the pure magic of being fully engaged in reading a book.

Posted by: Jean | May 12, 2008 5:23:50 PM

It's one of those once-in-a-lifetime-of-a-lifetime posts!

Posted by: meika | May 12, 2008 6:02:38 PM

<<<<<<>>>>>>
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Thank you.

Posted by: Kate Vrijmoet | May 12, 2008 7:04:22 PM

Elatia! Opening up your link from now on, will also fill me "with the ravishing pleasure of anticipation",for the next treasure you reveal to our senses, and I will allow myself to surrender to the option of seduction away from.......
Thank you again 
mica

Posted by: mica hubertus mick | May 12, 2008 11:53:56 PM

What a wonderful piece! Thanks for writing...

Posted by: PD Smith | May 13, 2008 3:55:47 AM

Elatia;
Anytime you feel like revisiting Chez Harris (where Jules Verne dukes it out with Henri Matisse)know that you've got a ready audience. 
The Sessu is amazing, my first thought was,"Did Cezanne ever see this?". The Tohaku monkeys are delightful and the trees are...some word that hasn't been invented yet; the one that will replace poor, misused and tired old "awesome".
This strikes me as a day after Mother's Day piece. An acknowledgement of those other women that form what we become. The clarity with which you write about art got a very good and early start.
Thanks Elatia and please, please, please write something that needs a dust jacket. I know of a great photograph of the author.

Posted by: Pete Chapman | May 13, 2008 7:36:40 AM

Elatia, thank you for a ravishing experience, the amazing images (including your mother's charming photo of you) and your sensitive, passionate explication of them. The piece is a marvelous portrait of the artist as a preternaturally gifted young girl. Not to mention an education in Japanese art in miniature. Brava!

Posted by: Pamela | May 14, 2008 10:48:14 AM

This is a beautiful and informative piece, full of a brilliant child's fascination and longing. 
Thank you.

Thalassa

Posted by: Thalassa | May 14, 2008 12:19:22 PM

Thanks for a wonderful account of a child's aesthetic development and the books that guided her. We all recognize the value to adults of children's books; Eliata reminds us of the importance to children of treasured adult books and of the wisdom of innocence in experiencing art.

Posted by: Charlotte | May 14, 2008 4:40:20 PM

Wonderful thanks. I love love love the monkeys! I wonder too if the stylised appearance is secondary to technique or vice versa. 
I shall also be adding turfy to my lexicon!

Posted by: peacay | May 14, 2008 8:29:00 PM

As always, Elatia gives me new ways to see and to understand. What a teacher. What a writer.

Posted by: Kate | May 15, 2008 12:24:24 PM

Dear Elatia, this one may be my favorite among your unfailingly wonderful writings on 3QD. It could be that I particularly love this piece because of my own fascination with Japan or your uncanny ability to recreate the thrill and artistic awakening of your nine year old self for us with such animation. You are definitely a lover of art and as Kate says above, also a very good teacher.

Posted by: Ruchira | May 16, 2008 11:27:24 AM

I was transfixed by your essay on Elise Grilli and your life-long enchantment with Japanese art. As a historian, I too have been fascinated by the "Orient" and the "invention" and impact of "Orientalism" on the Western imagination; my dissertation examined how Diaghilev's Ballets Russes appropriated orientalism for their cultural enterprise in Western Europe, and projected themselves in their "oriental" ballets as being "the erotic, exotic, sexual, dangerous, seductive, Asian other." Of course,this was only one of many, many occasions in the past few centuries when Western artists, writers, musicians, travelers fell under the spell of a mythic or imagined East and then transformed these "imagined" qualities into their own aesthetic visions.

My first love of the "orient" did not have the East Asian roots of China or Japan, but instead, I was seduced by the music of Rimsky- Korsakov's "Scheherazade," and its Central Asian lyrical motifs. (Many years later I traced the historical connection between the flamenco music of Spain and that of some late 19th century/early 20th century Russian composers.)

Anyway, as you can see I can go on and on when it comes to "orientalia." By the time I graduated from college, I became interested in Chinese literature--in translation of course; then Chinese history;then I went on to Chinese film. Although it began a decade later, my fascination with Japan took a similar trajectory. Unlike you, my interest in Chinese and Japanese art only came after I immersed myself in literature, history, film, and is still at the stage of taking baby steps. Two years ago I went to China and Japan and spent a few days before flying across the Pacific in the fabulous Asian Museum of San Francisco, brushing up (pun unintended)on Chinese and Japanese art and artifacts. What a marvelous experience and I wish you were there with me to be my guide.

I was also thrilled to see that photgraph of you in this essay. What an intriguing childhood you had! And what a mother! Your family must have turned barbecue-loving, cowboy-booted, chauvinistic Texan society upside down.

Thank you for this essay. AS usual, I enjoyed your prose, your intellectual slant, your analysis, and the peek into your past. FABULOUS!
Ulle Holt

Posted by: Ulle V. Holt | May 16, 2008 7:22:06 PM

I've saved the experience of reading this post for the wonderful freedom and peace of mind of a Saturday morning, sipping coffee. All week I've been looking forward to it and I was not to be disappointed. Doing things backwards, I only discovered Chinese painting when I was living in China, intrigued by the cheap tourist paintings that are sold on the streets. Fast forward, or backward, to a many years' later visit to the National Museum in Taipei. I had enough knowledge by then to appreciate fully enough the magnificience of what I was seeing. I never wanted to leave. I felt my insides shift. I experienced something similar, vicariously, today reading Elatia's post. How wonderful it must have been to be her at that age, with her brilliant mind and eye and talent, her mother's influence. I feel as though I know her, slightly. I definitely want to know more about her and to learn more more more from the powerful teacher she became. Thank you.

Posted by: OT | May 16, 2008 11:29:00 PM

Achingly beautiful glimpses into different worlds simultaneously.

Posted by: chris | May 17, 2008 7:42:23 AM

Dear Elatia,

As always, I saved your post for a moment when I could actually find a quiet moment to sit down and savor it. This was a beautiful piece, both in what you described and showed and in your lovely style of writing. Also, the picture of you as a girl is beautiful. Thank you for this wonderful post.

Posted by: Daisy | May 20, 2008 8:22:49 PM

Alix & Fuel: A Conversation About Crime, 3 Quarks Daily, 5/26/2008

ALIX & FUEL: A CONVERSATION ABOUT CRIME

Elatia Harris

Ever since she married and divorced four times within six months and entered into a state-sanctioned civil union with a woman in Hungary – all of it for art’s sake, but all of it legal and binding – Alix Lambert has had my attention. In the photo below by Dan Monick, we see her in finest film noir fettle -- as she should be, apropos her newest book, Crime (FUEL Publishing, 2008) -- but in her weddings photos, she can look awfully sweet and unsuspecting. And, recently on David Milch's Deadwood, for which she also wrote a filmed script, she appeared as a prostitute both imperious and wistful. 

While Alix Lambert may not be the most often-married artist one can name, she is the one who got me thinking what a work of art a marriage was anyway, and what kind of marriage might best be understood as a work of art. That was back in the early 90's -- her ex-wife has had two babies meanwhile -- and a number of artists have since staged weddings as culturally freighted yet instant artifacts. When they do this it does tend to make a point -- but it's not the same, is it?  Susan Sontag remarked that, of the things wrong with marriage, only one was that, without necessarily knowing or questioning it, we tended to think of a marriage as existing quite apart from ourselves, the people who were in it. Alix may have entered her marriages knowing that very well, and not questioning the idea as much as sounding it. When I learned that Crime had just been published by FUEL -- the London-based design group that last year brought out theBibliOdyssey book, whose author I interviewed in this space -- I thought it was time for a look at both the genre-crossing artist and her publishers, themselves no strangers to managing parallel careers that, convention suggests, do not particularly reconcile.

If you don't already know all about Alix Lambert, then you might know her best from her 73-minute Russian language, English-subtitled film of 2000, The Mark of Cain, about prisoners in Russia, prisoners whose elaborate, full body tattoos tell of their rank and history in the prison system in a pictorial code not understood by their guards. Research for Eastern Promises, his 2007 film, brought Viggo Mortensen to The Mark of Cain, and showed him how he should look in the scene where he strips to reveal tattoos just about everywhere. (Stars tattooed on the knee-caps mean, incidentally, that you will never kneel down before authority.)

It was Russia -- Russian prison tattoos in particular, about which Damon Murray and Stephen Sorrell, the principals of FUEL, have published two acclaimed books -- that brought Alix Lambert and FUEL together forCrime. "Russia is the new Wild West," Damon Murray told me. Even so,Crime brings something new to exploring that Wild West within -- the criminal imagination, and how it is accessed by writers, actors, directors, the police, private investigators, victims of crime and criminals. There's crime, there's representation of crime, and then there's Crime -- the book that sets up a conversation about it all, amply illustrated by Alix's own photos ranging from luscious to perfectly horrifying. In preparing for the book, Alix was cautioned by David Mamet, "You won't get answers." And that was okay -- she wasn't looking for them. What she got was questions -- many questions -- and a sense of possibilities. The cumulative effect of Crime is best experienced by reading it through. But only if you want to think thoughts you shall not have had before.

For Damon Murray and Stephen Sorrell, to the left as painted by Gordon Murray, the route to Crime and to Russian tattoos may have started with a four-letter word: USSR. In 1992, they were design students at the Royal College of Art in London, and already partners in publishing. FUEL magazine was then themed around four-letter words, and they thought in light of recent events that "USSR" would do nicely. And, that a trip was in order.  "Boris Yeltsin had just declared, 'Everything, everywhere is for sale,' " Damon told me, "and it was fascinating to experience at first hand Russia's initial interpretation of capitalism. There was an aesthetic of deep melancholy and integrity that we sensed then, and found an affinity for. It's resonated with us ever since."

In focusing on prison tattoos -- far afield from the avant-garde graphics influencing designers since the Russian Revolution -- was FUEL doing a form of visual anthropology?  Damon said there was indeed urgency to document social traditions that were rapidly falling by the wayside, post-Soviet tendencies throughout the 90's having been to forget the past and mimic Western culture. "The tattoo has been devalued to mere fashion in the West, and our aim with the tattoo books was to show that this wasn't always so, that they once had so much value that they were a matter of life or death."

Is there a type of book that can be called a FUEL book?  Damon almost hopes not, but supposes there is. He and Stephen Sorrell are not only the publishers but also the designers of every book.  Six FUEL covers are below, and a full list of titles at the end of this post.  "The interesting thing for us," Damon says, "is applying our aesthetic to subjects that people might not consider 'right' – such as Crime. It’s actually difficult to say what would make us reject an idea."

          

 

                                      

The bibliography on Alix Lambert is already extensive. Like Damon and Stephen, she first went to Russia in the early 90's -- to exhibit her photography. "I was hooked," she told me. To film The Mark of Cain some years later, she reports starting off for Russia a bit underfunded -- with $1.67 -- an instance of the "do it anyway" spirit that she has long relied on to get her where she needs to go. She and I have been in recent contact mainly about Crime, but there was time also to revisit the marriages. I've obtained permission to use four photos from Crime, throughout the interview below.  I thought, however that I'd start with the marriages. Mastering the Melon, a book about her various art projects, shows one of the weddings photos.

Elatia Harris: You're the only one I know who has gone through with multiple, legally real marriages as art. I'd love to hear how you framed the project -- and how you survived it.

Alix Lambert: I felt like it was important to actually legally get married. In part because I was interested in showing the paper work. These pieces of paper mark places in our lives and shape how we think of ourselves and how others relate to us. Also I feel that the process I chose shows in the photographs -- there are inevitably details that you might not think of when staging something. The drive-thru wedding chapel in Vegas -- especially Charlotte the Wedding Queen of The West -- is something that I might not have made up, like the same guy at City Hall who married me twice in the span of a couple of months and of course didn’t recognize me…

EH:  Did you -- kind of -- know what would happen?

AL: I don’t think I have ever done a project that was particularly mapped out from the start. With the wedding project I was in Vegas and I noticed that the place to start divorce proceedings was right next to a wedding chapel.  I wondered how many times you could run back and forth in one day getting married and divorced.  As I learned more, I wanted to address the historical, social, political, and formal aspects of the institution of marriage. As far as surviving it – my work is very much intertwined with my life. Eventually I will not survive it. 

EH: What was the most surprising thing about working with FUEL?

AL: That they care so much about the book as visual artifact was why I was interested in working with them -- that, and that their interests were so aligned with mine. The process of making this book was extremely collaborative. Damon and Stephen were involved from the very beginning. They are incredible talents.

Undercover Police Detective, and Family, below. Photo by  Alix Lambert

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

EH: If one of the jobs of the artist is to transgress, then art can't be just lovely, can it? It must take the viewer aback a bit -- do you agree?  There are artists who are not shy about entering the dark, not knowing what will happen. Who's one who has come back with something we need to see?

AL: I think art canjust be lovely – but not all art, all the time. I do try to “enter the dark” as you put it and tend to be attracted to the work of people who do as well. I was introduced to the work of Chris Burden when I was 14 and it opened up my entire understanding of what art could be. 
  
EH: To a conservative reading, Crime might seem to posit a two-way street between crimes that are performed by criminals and how criminals are portrayed in art, especially film. Is this portrayal merely commentary, or do you think that, in a society where everything is mediated, portrayal ever feeds into crime?  As it may into vigilantism, for instance -- assuming that's not also crime.

AL: I definitely think that portrayal feeds into real life crime, and many of the real life criminals I talked with supported that.  Bank robbers acknowledged posturing coming from films. I think the “overlap” that we refer to in the press for the book was of more interest to me than the “gap.”

EH: As well as criminals and survivors of crime, to prepare for writing, you talked with writers and filmmakers – David Mamet, Samantha Morton, Mark Salzman, Nick Flynn, David Cronenberg, to cite a few. Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, told you of contemplating crime as a very young child. “I knew I shouldn’t do it until I was ready,” he said to you.  Well, that’s forthcoming.  Lots of people really spoke from the heart for Crime, didn’t they?

AL: I think they did. I am pleased if they did. Many of these people are people I had some sort of connection to, so perhaps they felt more open.

EH: But it was almost as if they couldn't wait to talk about it.  Even with some of the people you didn't know, it was as if you'd found them in a confiding mood and asked them to talk to you about high school... 

Samantha Morton, below. Photo by Alix Lambert

 

AL: I think the people I didn’t know did open up just as much – sometimes more. For the most part people want to be heard and listened to. I only wanted to include in the book, and in my documentary -- and in any subsequent projects -- people who truly wanted to talk with me. Some were extremely enthusiastic and said it was something they thought about all the time in their life or in their work.  Others were less so, but still interested enough to engage in a conversation. I like what you say about high school – with some of the interviews it was quite like that.

EH: Your own childhood brought you very close to victims of crime. Maybe everyone’s did.  In the late 1950’s, my mother’s oldest friend hired the mother of Lee Harvey Oswald to look after his children for about a year -- who knew?  But your experiences came closer than that. How did this help to make it your material?

AL: As I talked to people I found that everyone has a tangential relationship to crime. If not a direct one. And that was part of my interest in making the book. Those experiences shape us and how we think and who we become, and I was interested in exploring that.  Of course, many non-crime related things in our lives shape us as well – but you start with one thread that you notice and keep going.

EH: You open Crime with an interview with Joe Loya, a man who writes in a very undefended, regular guy tone who’s done time for bank robbery and is now an author and playwright. You close with a letter from Jimmy Wu, who will in a few years be released from lock-up after doing 15 years for home invasion. He was in Mark Salzman’s workshop for juvenile criminals, and one has to hope he keeps writing.

AL: I wanted to open with Joe because aside from being a good friend of mine he is also someone who is able to speak to many points of view of this subject – as a criminal, as an artist. He has an amazing story to tell and is articulate in telling it. I closed the book with Jimmy -- and I want to credit Damon and Stephen for being very involved in the order we ended up placing the interviews in -- because Jimmy’s story has hope in it.  For me, this book is very emotional if read straight through, and I wanted to end on a story that one felt empathy toward. 

EH: Joe and Jimmy both recall scenes of brutal humiliation as a child, and, actually, so do many artists and writers.  Throughout reading Crime, I kept thinking of Graham Greene’s famous remark that you needed a sliver of ice in your heart to be a writer. I always thought that meant, among other things, that a writer was by nature someone who stood a little apart. Can that same sliver of ice get you -- first -- to crime?

Tom Kalin, screenwriter, director, producer and gay rights activist. Photo by Alix Lambert

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

AL:I don’t know about that sliver of ice – but I do think that artists in general are in the curious position of being set apart from society and also being able to communicate universal ideas to society. 

EH: The actor Matthew Maher, who has often been cast as a criminal, told you a woman he was seeing had been looking at an old passport photo, and said to him, “You look like someone who does bad things to children.” He all but likened acting and crime as resulting from a need to be someone you can’t be and do things that aren’t done. Is he onto something? 

AL: I talked to a number of people who felt acting allowed them to be someone they otherwise weren’t or to act in a way that they otherwise wouldn’t.  Role playing is at the root of much of mywork, too – and I have always been fascinated by the experiments where they make one group of people “prisoners” and the others “guards” and within days the guards are committing horrible abuses and the prisoners are having nervous breakdowns. Joe Loya and other prisoners I have talked to who have spent extended periods of time in solitary talk about hallucinating.  In Joe's case a boy would come and talk to him. 

EH: Apropos Do With Me What You Will, her sixth fiction that was part legal novel, part romantic triangle, Joyce Carol Oates said she’d like to write about love and the Law as it affected every single citizen. Could she take a look at your weddings, coming more than twenty years later, and find in you a kindred spirit -- of fascination with the Law?  Maybe there was a spirit of nolo contendere in the marriage project...  Or were you more in control than that?

AL: Oh dear, I am never in control. I certainly would be happy to believe that I was a kindred spirit with Joyce Carol Oates – I think she is wonderful and am looking at a copy of On Boxing, another shared interest between us, that I have been reading for a completely separate project.

EH: What’s next for you, Alix? Can you talk about it?

Steve Hodel, below, author of The Black Dahlia Avenger (2003). Photo by Alix Lambert

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

AL: I always have about 18 balls in the air with the hope that I might catch just one of them. Yesterday I spent the day talking with a wonderful artist named Harrison Haynes about a project we want to collaborate on that deals with surveillance. And tomorrow I will work on details for a round-table in Moscow around my book, The Silencing, that will be held in September. There is always something going on, but I never know what will rise to the surface.

EH: An artist! Do you have a strong favorite from the film noir era?

AL: No. I have lots of favorites – I was thinking about Scarlet Street the other day, with Edward G. Robinson, that’s a great one. I LOVE depictions of artists in films.

EH: I'll be trite now and ask you about the crow tattoo...

AL: That I have on my back? As far as what it means to me – I have to keep some things private, no?

On the 13th of June, Alix Lambert will sign 25 copies of Crime at The Mysterious Bookshop. 58 Warren Street, New York, NY 10007

SELECTED LINKS for ALIX LAMBERT

Her film, The Mark of Cain: http//www.markofcainfilm.com/

Her site: http://www.pinkghettoproductions.com/

The site of Perceval Press, owned by Viggo Mortensen:  http://www.percevalpress.com/

SELECTED LINKS for FUEL DESIGN

http://www.fuel-design.com/

http://www.designmuseum.org/design/fuel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FUEL_Design

http://www.designobserver.com/archives/030690.html

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1933181,00.html

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1933598,00.html

BOOKS published by FUEL PUBLISHING include:

Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia, Danzig Baldaev and Sergei Vasiliev (London: Steidl/FUEL, 2004)

Fleur. Plant Portraits by Fleur Olby (London: FUEL, 2005)

The Music Library, Jonny Trunk (London: FUEL, 2005)

Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia Volume II, Danzig Baldaev and Sergei Vasiliev (London: FUEL, 2006)

Home-Made. Contemporary Russian Folk Artifacts, Vladimir Arkhipov (London: FUEL, 2006)

Ideas Have Legs, Ian McMillan and Andy Martin (London: FUEL, 2006)

Match Day, Bob Stanley and Paul Kelly (London: FUEL, 2006)

BibliOdyssey, P.K. (London: FUEL, 2007)

Notes from Russia, Alexei Plutser-Sarno (London: FUEL, 2007)

Crime, Alix Lambert (London: FUEL, 2008)

Posted by Elatia Harris at 01:00 AM | Permalink

COMMENTS

I really enjoyed your article about this artist. I will definately begin to watch what she does next. Its quite interesting work.

Posted by: alh | May 26, 2008 10:49:19 AM

Elatia,

Thanks so much for this piece.

Posted by: Robin | May 26, 2008 11:09:50 AM

great piece, i had seen these books over the years but really welcome seeing the whole web of her life in one piece. you've done her a great service in addition to writing a fine article.

Posted by: ed rackley | May 26, 2008 11:43:19 AM

I have never heard of these books nor of the project, so, thanks for the introduction. Always good visuals, Elatia.

Posted by: raven | May 26, 2008 12:06:38 PM

Thanks, Elatia. Good stuff...

Posted by: Abbas Raza | May 26, 2008 12:16:53 PM

fascinating story about Alix. Thanks for posting. John

Posted by: john Altobello | May 26, 2008 12:23:56 PM

Interesting article!

Posted by: Sajia Kabir | May 26, 2008 3:59:04 PM

News to me, most of it, and as always, fascinating - art which demands context for completion. Thanks, E!

Posted by: Jane | May 26, 2008 8:23:44 PM

Elatia, marry me ... for art's sake.

Posted by: peacay | May 26, 2008 8:52:57 PM

Very interesting mix of themes.

Posted by: holly | May 26, 2008 9:37:02 PM

Another fascinating piece. You have so many interests and write about them so wonderfully. Thank you

Posted by: Harriet | May 27, 2008 12:19:51 PM

I am reminded of Sartre's Saint Genet, which I read long ago and had forgot. Also a great line from a friend who made reference to someone with "a whole string of succesful marriages." But your many references to writers, art, film and publishers make me know how out of the loop I have been for the last three decades. You know, being a workaholic is a bitch, especially when you start to go clean and realize how much of life you have missed.

Posted by: John Ballard | May 27, 2008 4:17:39 PM

Another piece that only you, in your staggeringly horizontal brilliance, could have written here. Excellent, as always.

Posted by: Deborah Barlow | May 27, 2008 5:23:38 PM

So much great stuff, so little time... Thanks Elatia for another window on the world.

Posted by: Vicki Baker | May 28, 2008 12:57:32 PM

Amazing. Clever, fascinating stuff most of us have never even heard of.
Do us all a favor, Elatia-- don't ever stop writing.

Posted by: Thalassa | May 28, 2008 10:38:07 PM

A kaleidoscopic exploration of the intimate relations between beauty and ugliness in artistic expression. As always, Elatia, you draw us into a sensous world; then you lead us to enjoy thinking as a part of the experience.

Posted by: Pamela | Jun 11, 2008 9:43:29 AM

Thank you so very much for such a wonderful review of Alix's book. It was a liberating and amazing experience helping provide her with a bit of insight with why some people commit their crimes. I know I am a few years too late to be commenting but it's always better late than never...

Posted by: Jimmy Wu | May 17, 2011 1:50:20 AM

Jimmy, thanks so much for reading and commenting! I know that readers of this interview are hoping you've kept on writing.

Posted by: Elatia Harris | May 17, 2011 10:47:21 AM

Chef of the North: An Interview with Karen Peters, 3 Quarks Daily, 7/28/2008

CHEF OF THE NORTH: AN INTERVIEW WITH KAREN PETERS

   

 Above, Basket of Wild Strawberries, 1761, private collection, and Still Life with Fish (detail),1769, J. Paul Getty Museum, by Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin

 All food photography below courtesy of Karen Peters. Use the titles to search her blog for the recipes.

 

Elatia Harris

Recently, I embarked on one of those side trips that committed foodies can be lucky enough to get an invitation to -- I became a designated taster for a line of organic blended spices created and distributed by Winnipeg chef Karen Peters. (Warning: Do not attempt to compete with me for this job! It is mine!)  

My first occasion to be useful came in June. Excitedly, I pried open a 250 mg tin of Karen's Ras el Hanout and sniffed in delighted reverie for several minutes, enjoying the synergy of more than two dozen spices - cardamom, cinnamon, coriander, peppercorns, among many others. Ras el Hanout is a discretionary blend, with ingredients and proportions varying from kitchen to kitchen.  Sometimes, it's nothing special; other times, its aroma carries with it a civilization.  My vendor of choice for the spices of the Eastern Mediterranean was Maison Hediard, in Paris. But Maison Hediard fell – that’s the only way to put it – and now that it’s been propped up, it’s all different. That was a big loss, for my own efforts to blend those spices - not only Ras el Hanout, but Baharat, Berbere, Mitmita and Za'atar - produced only tragic results. In one whiff, I ceased to worry about all that. Next to Ras el Hanout in my pantry now is Karen's Baharat - a Turkish rub for meats with cassia bark, cumin, black pepper, mint - and there's more to come. I am once again confident that when I prepare the dishes of this region, they will create for diners a civilizational encounter.

I could not help wanting to know more about any chef artful enough to get this stuff right. It's the equivalent of designing a truly great perfume - one that is definitive and characteristic and slots into your mind all the most precise and coveted associations - instead of one that is vaguely pleasant but will never generate a nanosecond's notice. Or, like being able to write - and not by accident - a melody that people will remember instead of one they will forget. All I really knew about Karen Peters when I became a designated taster for her product line was that we liked many of the same classic food movies, that she had four Russian grandparents and a Masters Degree in Philosophy from the University of Heidelberg. How did this add up to her taking the Mistress of Spices title?

By coincidence - this does tie in, so bear with me - I had been corresponding with 3QD columnistJustin Smith about the philosophical aspect of food. Justin had put up a new site, Opera Minora, for archiving his professional papers, and had just given a talk at Caltech, "How to Feed a Corporeal Substance: The Metaphysics of Nutrition from Fernel to Leibniz." In it, I found a line about the "transformation of world into self," and a fascinating reference to "the process of nutrition within the context of a corporeal-substance metaphysics." This resonated with my thinking on those immaterial-seeming fragrance molecules that carried with them a civilization - effecting the transformation of world into dish, perhaps - and I made haste to find out if philosophy came into play in Karen's kitchen.

Elatia Harris: Karen, you have an advanced degree in philosophy from the University of Heidelberg. While you are not the only cook I know highly trained to do something entirely other than cooking – there are lots of us - I want to know whether you believe cooking is a vacation from philosophy, or if philosophical ruminations in fact arise from it.

Karen Peters: I first went to Germany in 1989, after the program I had been planning to attend at the Beijing Teacher’s College was canceled. It was a phenomenal experience.  I had Hans-Georg Gadamer as a professor and was keen on studying the philosophy of language, especially examining the ideas of meaning presented by Kant and Wittgenstein. 

EH: What about Food World?  Not yet on your screen?

KP: I was also fortunate to apprentice in a restaurant in Mannheim during my studies.  I find cooking to be very calming, even in the rush of it all for business.  I think about the combinations of ingredients and the anticipated delight of the diner.  From my own philosophical experience, I try to be aware of the good, the true and the beautiful in all endeavors - including cooking.  A lot to ask from an item to be consumed but I hope that I’m paying attention.  I want to be aware of that first sip of good tea, coffee or wine and note that I should pay attention because this is good.  It likely seems like fuzzy philosophy but being open to the ineffable is being open to delight.  Or is that a tautology?  In any case, I don’t see cooking as a vacation from philosophy but the action can put me in a state of mind where thinking is clearer.  In some ways, having the mise en place kind of discipline is very Kantian in that there is a great deal of freedom arising through the discipline.  I can’t have chaos in the kitchen, and I clean as I go.  I hope that because of that discipline that I can make culinary ideological leaps as well.

EH: I should try it your way -- every now and then I feel like Mickey in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice." I am in control of my result, perhaps not so perfectly in control of my process.  The freedom I experience cooking is a freedom from the claims of the verbal imagination.

KP: Although there is great freedom offered in Nietzsche and great process can be learned from Kant, neither would likely be much good in a kitchen - not to trivialize.  It's somewhere between the chaos and the control.

EH: Are there systems within thinking about food that you subscribe to? 

KP: The Slow Food movement and Hundred Mile Diet tie in nicely with my other degree, a Masters in Environmental Studies.  I did my field work on small-scale fisheries in Kerala, India.  I was so lucky to have met and worked with so many amazing people.  A group of women took me in as their daughter.  I felt quite honored and humbled.  These women would go into the clean canals without fishing gear and catch shrimp just by sensing their vibrations with their hands.  It was absolutely fantastic.  They would later sell their catch in the local markets.  When we didn’t have a translator, we could communicate about food, family and living in simple terms.  Malayalam, by the way, is the hardest language that I’ve ever come across.

EH: That was the language they spoke in The God of Small Things. There was a Western character so put off by it that she said, "I would have thought you'd call this Keralese..."  At the time I remember thinking it must be awfully hard, if the word for the language was itself a palindrome.

KP: Malayalam is indeed the language of The God of Small Things.  The author, Arundhati Roy, is a Keralite.  She's very controversial in her home state as she demonstrates for human rights.  When I arrived in Cochin, I looked for a simple language book.  Not that easy to find.  I found one that didn't help me function in the market, but showed my how I could enroll a child into school and read essays on the importance of the elephant.

Meyer lemon and blood orange marmalade, grilled chicken rubbed with Baharat

    

EH: What will the M. Env. do for your life - in and out of the kitchen?

KP: My M. Env. means that I am trained to work with communities around their resources.  I have done a lot of work around food security issues not only in terms of GMOs vs. organic but in terms of charity and dependency models of food banks vs. self-sufficiency models of community kitchens, gardens and buying clubs.  I am hopeful to get out of the kitchen more and work with those ideas with communities or in policy work.

EH: You and your parents traveled a lot. People my parents knew were usually deterred from going off the beaten track by all the really unfamiliar food involved. But your family sounds different. How did traveling lead you to cooking? Or did it?

KP: All of my grandparents came to Canada from Russia in 1925.  My Dad’s parents were farmers and my Mom’s parents and uncles traveled due to work with immigrants and refugees.  My grandmother traveled extensively throughout her life, and her children and my cousins all seem to have wanderlust.  At one reunion, we discovered that in our family, there wasn’t a single country that hadn’t been visited or lived in.  The foods of those countries are part of the discovery, and a door to their cultures. 

In 1983, after I completed high school, my parents and I went to teach at Chongqing Medical College in Sichuan Province, China.   Sharing food, learning and cooking together was a great way to gain understanding.  When I came home from China in 1984, I tried to share some Sichuan foods with friends and family.  Family members all seemed to enjoy Hot Pot and other spicy foods -- but friends were quite a bit more than hesitant.

EH: Did that surprise you? I made a Tuscan rabbit dish for a friend I hadn't seen in decades, and she acted like it was some kind of a test.

KP: I was surprised -- I was not expecting people to be hesitant to try foods from another part of the world.

EH: Well, hm -- maybe it's about rabbit or very hot spices. Still, the principle holds -- you don't expect it when you think how diverse Canada and Canadian cuisine already are. That's something that can be a surprise to us "other" North Americans.

KP: Canadian cuisine has influences from all over the world.  I live in a medium-sized city but can access excellent world cuisines here.  Toronto and Vancouver have that to a much larger degree as well as the fusion of cultures.  Toronto Chef Susur Lee creates wonderfully inspiring food.  His cookbook is accessible and comprehensive.  Vancouver’s Tojo’s is listed in the book, Top 1000 Places to See Before You Die, and is a great experience. I love the Vietnamese restaurant across the river from where I live, Binh An, where I can get a huge portion of soothing sour soup for $10 with the tip.  The owner tells me with pride that the broth is cooked for over 14 hours.  While the food provides enjoyment and nourishment, a few questions and a little interaction provide warmth, insight and possible friendships.  I guess that you can be open or closed where ever you are.

EH: Canada is way ahead of the US in policy encouraging a multicultural society.

KP: Multiculturalism is a difficult concept in many respects.  I think that a Liberal notion of tolerance is not a desirable concept.  That is, if I’m told that I’ll be tolerated, I’d suggest not to bother.  Of course, there isn’t a war or violent situation going on here.  Also, I am Mennonite and would rather leave a situation than be part of violence. I hope that we are growing up when it comes to addressing “the other.”

Acorn squash soup with lemongrass

          

EH: You know so much about the food of South Asia -- did you learn all that in Kerala?

KP:  For a time, my parents were country reps of a relief and development organization in India based in Calcutta.  They lived there for over 4 years.  I traveled to visit with them for a while with my grandmother. They had a chef, Kasim, who had been a chef for a Maharajah’s family in Kashmir.  I had time to sit and learn from him.  I started to learn about cooking by the sense of smell.  I also learned about biryanis and other north Indian dishes.  I feel very lucky to have these exposures, and I think about the people and places when I cook some dishes.  I taught for a while in South Korea, and came to adore good Korean food.

EH: Then you had more material than most to sort through before deciding what you wanted to be when you grew up...

KP: I really don’t think that I ever knew what I would do when I finally grew up.  I think that I just knew that I would travel. Maybe our language is how we think but the food is how we love.

EH: I've heard of getting your chops as a cook in some very unlikely places. But you're the only one I know who did it on a Turkish boat. Please tell me about that.

KP: I had been home in Canada for a while, kind of floundering as to what to do next. A cousin who set up a thriving tourism business in Bodrum, Turkey, called to say that she needed a chef on her boat right away -- and could I come?  A couple of weeks later I was on a boat in the Aegean, learning Turkish and Turkish cuisine, how to be a sailor and a German-speaking tour guide.  Great learning curve, and just a gorgeous place to be.  I learned so much about eggplants, tea, spices, cheeses, lamb, etc.  I learned new cooking techniques as well as different healing properties of foods and herbs.  

EH: When you want to get inspired now, what do you do? 

KP: I read, of course. But I really love going to the different markets and trying out unknown ingredients.  We have wonderful fish markets as well as stores for Italian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Ethiopian, Halal, India and West Indies as well as local foods.  I often go to these markets to see what is new and what could be served in a new way.  I have hundreds of Chinese soup spoons, for example, and I look to how they can be used for delightful purposes.  For one-bite appetizers of cold soba noodles, stuffed pasta shells, sashimi with grilled udon squares, for example.  

EH: If someone wanted to go from being a restaurant habitué type of a foodie to being one who was also a confident cook, would there be a fast lane to that transition? 

KP: The economic argument is a great motivator.  I usually ask people what their favorite foods are, and if they would like to learn how to make those.  Then it's about going back to first principles, just breaking down a recipe to the how and the why with each step.  

I had the pleasure of being a guest chef twice for Les Marmitons, a fine group of gentlemen who gather with the mandate, Gastronomy through Friendship.  No one seems hesitant, and there is a whole range of skill levels. 

I don’t want people to get bound up by the recipes always.  I find a lot of grads of the culinary arts programs to be unable to adapt to situations outside of their recipes.  In that regard, the informal learner might have an advantage over the trained chef.  I have done a locally produced public access television cooking show. I want people to be excited about possibilities and not be intimidated by food.  I want people to be brave enough to enjoy making risotto instead of adding water to instant varieties.

EH: I have Heaven knows how many cookbooks, but just a few I really don't like to be separated from. What about you?

             
  

     

KP: There are some I even travel with. One book that I’ve enjoyed, and have taken with me isWorld of the East Vegetarian Cooking, by Madhur Jaffrey.  I found out in traveling just how authentic her recipes are.  They are also great recipes for learning the basics, step by step, such as making yoghurt or paneer. The Larousse Gastronomique offers a great base from which to work.  I use it as a springboard to what I might have locally or could have on hand -- wherever I am.  Other great books are Fields of Greens, by Annie Sommerville, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, by Deborah Madison, Amuse Bouche, by Rick Tramonto, and two books by Jeffrey Alford, Hot Sour Salty Sweet and Mangoes & Curry Leaves. One book of further inspiration that my husband, Desmond Burke - an architect - gave to me is The Architect, the Cook and Good Taste, edited by Petra Hodgson and Rolf Toyka.  It's a series of essays and photos around the idea of the two disciplines.

Stuffed bison tenderloin, elk moussaka

    

EH: I get from reading your blog that elk is good. When you're looking for local, organic provender in Winnipeg, what else is good?

KP: The gardens here provide so much great local vegetables in a very short season.  To start in early spring with fiddleheads and morels and then all what the garden grows through the season.  Local fish is amazing with sweet pickerel, Arctic char, Manitoba goldeye and golden caviar. Wild rice, blueberries, saskatoons, rhubarb, crabapples are all local products.  There is a growing organic meat production here with beef, bison, elk, lamb, goat, chickens and rabbits.  The Trappist monks make a wonderful local cheese and there is a small artisanal goat cheese producer nearby as well.  Raw milk cheeses face some regulations but I have found them relatively available.  You can find the raw cheeses more in Quebec than where I live.   

University of Manitoba student garden, where Environmental Studies and City Planning students practice permaculture agriculture

   

EH: You have an incredible Russian bread recipe. I love the photo of it that Desmond took.

KP: The Russian Easter bread is my grandmother's recipe, but it was my husband, Desmond, who baked it as well as photographed it.  He's a gifted amateur baker/pasta maker.  He even takes the Russian Easter bread out and puts it on feather pillows, as per my Großma's instructions.  Desmond isn't from my cultural background but he's really nailed this bread.

EH: When I cook for Russians, I think "mushrooms," because I remember a scene in Speak, Memory where Nabokov's mother was made unreasonably happy by them.

KP: There really is something about mushrooms.  Unreasonably happy is quite apposite to how I feel about mushrooms.  I make a porcini mushroom consommé that is reduced and added to and reduced several times.  In the final service, it is a dark and clear mushroom broth with a few porcini slices topped with a drizzle of truffle oil.  I served it for a wonderful birthday party that I felt honored to cater.  When the soup course came out, the formerly boisterous room fell silent.  I asked what was wrong and they said that they were enjoying the soup too much to talk. 

Russian Easter bread, shitake mushroom bouches

    

EH: Ah, a moment that one lives for! Is the mushrooming pretty good where you are?

KP: I had gone mushroom hunting a few years prior to that event of the mushroom consommé.  We found Chicken of the Woods in autumn on the elm trees in certain neighborhoods.  I love mushroom hunting.  In early spring you can find local morels, later chanterelles and in the autumn, chicken of the woods.  To be invited to go mushroom hunting by regulars is something never to be turned down. With morels, you can get quite giddy in the hunt.  You can be looking directly at the mushroom and then have the experience that it has revealed itself to you.   

Salmon on a cedar plank

             


EH: We have some favorite movies in common. Mainly Babette's Feast, Big Night and Tampopo. Those are all between 15 and 20 years old by now - yet even people too young to have seen them first time out know them.

       

KP: I’ve always loved “food movies”.  There is so much delight and passion in them.  Babette’s Feast is very inspiring.  I’ve prepared formal dinners based on that inspiration and its been so enjoyable.

EH: I’ve read some of your menus – they’re spectacular. I don’t necessarily think of Babette as a cook, but as an artiste who has, after long exile, given everything to be reunited with her materials.

KP: I absolutely concur.  Babette is an artist.  There is such a celebration when she comes out of isolation from her materials.  

EH: There’s a strain of fanaticism in all these movies too.  The chef in Tampopo undergoes grueling muscle conditioning to be fit enough to make the best noodles.  When she finally succeeds, her lover/trainer leaves her, having boarded up her bedroom window. Well, that’s the price of perfection. Funny that these “food movies” that are so delightful are also quite dark.

KP: I understand – I tend to be a dark thinker but really need the delight and the "Aha" moments.  I had a whole semester with Gadamer just on "Ach so."  I am keen on the hermeneutical, that quickening moment of understanding, ach so.  Perhaps, then, I have more Romantic views of food and feeding the soul.  What the Romantic German poet, Novalis, gives us is that every thing, every item and construct is a communication and can be understood. 

I relate to the fanaticism of the chefs in these movies, too. I used to be much more fanatical with people when I cooked for them.  I wouldn't allow them to come to the kitchen to taste the food, as it was a pure offering that I was creating for them.  They really got offended, so I have to dance around that one a lot.

EH: I’ve learned to be a good sport about it. But I will never understand why, when I am orchestrating a superb experience for them, people would want to jump the gun to take a bite out of it – half-cooked, yet. 

No such interruptions blending spices, I should think.  What made you start your product line with Ras el Hanout?

KP: My cousin was in Morocco and brought me back a tajine and some Ras el Hanout.  When I ran out of the spice blend...I just had to have more.  I researched it and didn’t find much that matched my experience.  I also didn’t find anything commercially available.  So I had to make it myself. With a bit of trial and error, I came up with the blend of 28 spices with which I am happy.

EH: Oh, you should be happy with it. What future plans have you for your blended spices?

KP: At the moment, it’s a cottage industry.  The product is in demand, however. How to get bigger while retaining full creative control over ingredients is an intellectually worthy problem to be solving.

 

To inquire about blended spices, contact Karen via her site.

Posted by Elatia Harris at 12:18 AM | Permalink

COMMENTS

Elatia, I enjoyed this immensely, particularly liked your phrase "a melody that people will remember instead of one they will forget." Yours, John

Posted by: john Altobello | Jul 28, 2008 6:22:23 AM

This is delightful and not ineffable (you can't get much more "effable" than a interview). So, Ms. Peters really shouldn't worry too much about committing a tautology ( but you have to admire the kind of mind that catches that sort of thing in mid-stride).
It's Monday morning and I haven't had breakfast yet but here I am thinking about shitake bouches and whether the Pho joint around the corner has a good sour soup (I need to break out of my rut of compulsively ordering Pho Tai everytime I'm there). Thanks Elatia, Karen Peters is amazing.
P.S. How many languages does she speak?

Posted by: Pete Chapman | Jul 28, 2008 8:07:31 AM

Fabulous as usual Elatia!
I can't wait to sniff and taste Ras el Hanout and Baharat. Guess I should contact KP immediately, before 3QD readers innundate her with requests and the supplies run out.
Sughra

Posted by: Sughra | Jul 28, 2008 8:16:42 AM

You make me wish that I could cook or think. I'm not sure which. But, I know I'm hungry.

Posted by: Harriet | Jul 28, 2008 11:19:39 AM

How do you do this, Elatia-- how do you take the obscure and the high-flown and make them, well, fun?
Very few people have this gift...

Posted by: Thalassa | Jul 28, 2008 12:04:15 PM

Elatia--
All that talk about Elk and mushrooms, along with the wild berries, has my mouth watering and my mind wandering to the 1970's and Montana, where these things were a major part of my diet.
Great writing- thank you
The Big Night is one of my favorite films also.

Posted by: Dave Ranning | Jul 28, 2008 1:57:51 PM

Harriet;
I love your comment but I'd contest that "or". If I read Elatia and Karen correctly one can do both; it's one those "have cake, eat it too" propositions; rarely encountered but something to savor because it really can happen. They're hard core phenomenologists very much into the "thing-in-itself" in relation to the "self-in-itself" i.e. the tummy (the true seat of knowledge- the brain is such a drama queen).

Posted by: Pete Chapman | Jul 28, 2008 2:12:24 PM

Pete, Aye, there's the Baharat rub. Elatia and Karen can do both. But for me , to eat when I think is not the same thing as to think when I eat. Nonetheless thanks you for your encouragement. Perhaps if I improve my diet...all things will become less obscure.

Posted by: Harriet | Jul 28, 2008 3:04:39 PM

Elatia,
Great job on this interview. Karen Peters is an extremely interesting woman. It's amazing to me how intertwined food is with everything else -- you touched on so many other scintillating subjects as well. Now I am starved and the worst part is knowing if I want food like this, I'll have to make it myself. We're limited in my small town in Maine! Cheers!

Posted by: Jennifer comeau | Jul 28, 2008 3:50:39 PM

"Now I am starved and the worst part is knowing if I want food like this, I'll have to make it myself. "

Perhaps I can make you feel better - I'm starved and know that I CAN'T make any of that myself.

... and I don't even LIKE squash!

Posted by: reader | Jul 28, 2008 5:24:24 PM

Elatia:

Thanks for introducing us to Karen Peters! I really hope berbere is next on her "to do" list, I need a good source!
By the way, someone in Winnipeg getting advice from "grossma" on making Russian easter bread makes me think "Mennonite Brethren background." Oder?

Posted by: Vicki Baker | Jul 28, 2008 5:51:14 PM

I have hundreds of Chinese soup spoons, for example, and I look to how they can be used for delightful purposes. For one-bite appetizers of cold soba noodles, stuffed pasta shells, sashimi with grilled udon squares, for example.

Cool idea. Tell us Elatia, once we have all ordered our tins of Ras el Hanout from Karen, will you treat us to some nube level recipes for us to use it in?

Thanks for this. Once again, delicious!

Posted by: Carlos | Jul 28, 2008 7:50:17 PM

I wonder if Ms Peters does bison with saskatoons: I just returned to Australia from a holiday in Saskatchewan where traditional aboriginal fare has gone haute cuisine, that was a highlight and I would like to be able to do it in my own kitchen, though where I would find the ingredients in Australia might be an issue -- I mentioned and described saskatoons to a greengrocer when I was making do with blueberries and he thought they sounded disgusting so clearly my description (I said they were like blueberries with an almond flavour) was inadequate.

Robin Varghese can obviously amplify but there is, incidentally, one word of Malayalam that we all know: "copra," which means copra. My Solomon Islands acquaintance, who used to make it for sale to the Palmolive soap company, are very surprised: they assume it is Pidgin for coconut.

Posted by: Mac | Jul 28, 2008 8:31:05 PM

wonderful article.
savory writing.
inspiration for living.
many thanks!

Posted by: holly | Jul 28, 2008 9:49:38 PM

Very interesting and very well done. There is so much there to know and learn and you are always helping. Thanks.

Posted by: Tasnim | Jul 28, 2008 9:58:56 PM

Elatia is an amazing interviewer. Regarding the Mennonite Brethren question, our family grew up MB but for ideological reasons became General Conference. Stimmt.

I do make bison with saskatoons and the berries are in season right now. I'll make some bison rib eye or tenderloin this week and make a saskatoon pan sauce for it and put it in the blog. Saskatoons are so much fuller in flavour than blueberries. They are also exceptionally high in antioxidants.

Posted by: Karen Peters | Jul 28, 2008 10:00:32 PM

Entirely fascinating but equally disappointing that the web does not yet allow for scratch'N'sniff or print-tasting as yet. Tease!

Posted by: peacay | Jul 29, 2008 12:04:30 AM

That was great and wonderfully evocative reading, on a stormy, monsoon evening on the Konkan 
coast.

Ms. Elatia Harris is one of the real hidden treats of the Internet, I think. I would like a list of her favourite cookbooks. Soon, please.

Posted by: NYCtoGoa | Jul 29, 2008 12:06:52 AM

(Echoing Thalassa)

Elatia,

How do you do this? Tell a wonderful story, always?

Posted by: Ruchira | Jul 29, 2008 8:18:39 AM

This is just the sort of piece I adore--a mashup if you will of the disparate passions of our lives. In one story you combine so many threads--architecture, philosophy, environmental studies, cheffing, cooking, the calm meditative "chop wood, carry water" experience of being in flow...Brilliant! Thank you for once again feeding me in oh, so many ways.

Posted by: Deborah Barlow | Jul 29, 2008 10:20:23 AM

NYCtoGoa: Ms. Elatia Harris is one of the real hidden treats of the Internet, I think.

Fortunately, she is not a "hidden" from us. Thank goodness for 3QD and thanks to Elatia that we also got to meet the amazing Karen Peters.

Posted by: Ruchira | Jul 29, 2008 3:38:08 PM

I've always been fond of your interviews, Elatia - I often wonder where you find such subjects -

-m

Posted by: Matt Lavallee | Jul 30, 2008 8:13:16 AM

Thanks for reading, everybody -- it's wonderful to hear from you. I've had several emails about buying spices from Karen. 3QD being devotedly uncommercial, I guess I left that kind of vague. But, yes, you can buy them -- it's easy, safe, and much less expensive than it ought to be. Just go to her site --

http://karenfood.blogspot.com/

and in the upper right you will see a smashing photo of Ras el Hanout, and just beneath it, another of Baharat. There are PayPal buttons, so it'll be a familiar drill.

Again, many thanks for your readership.

Posted by: Elatia Harris | Aug 4, 2008 9:37:19 PM

Interesting write-up.

Just a note though FYI

Ras al-Hanout and Baharat are Arab spices, both words are Arabic and are used in many Arab dishes. Under the Ottoman Empire, Turks were introduced to Arabic foods and spices and even much of the Turk vocab and phrases came about as a result of the Arabs. I just like to see credit given where credit is due.

Posted by: Leila Elias | Aug 26, 2008 12:23:32 PM

Ras el Hanout is Arabic for "best of the shop" or "top of the shop" and Baharat is Arabic for the word spice. Both blends have regional qualities that are a result of the Spice Road and trade routes. Turkish Baharat is significantly different from Syrian, Lebanese, Israeli, Jordanian, etc. Baharat spice blends. Mine is Turkish as I lived as a chef in Turkey. I hope that you will have the opportunity to try mine and others.

Posted by: Karen Peters | Aug 27, 2008 9:09:25 PM

The most pretentious nonsense I've read in a long time. I'm stupider for the experience. This persons complete lack of training and ignorance appalls me. Let's take one quote and look at it.

"Canadian cuisine has influences from all over the world. I live in a medium-sized city but can access excellent world cuisines here. Toronto and Vancouver have that to a much larger degree as well as the fusion of cultures. Toronto Chef Susur Lee creates wonderfully inspiring food. His cookbook is accessible and comprehensive. Vancouver’s Tojo’s is listed in the book, Top 1000 Places to See Before You Die, and is a great experience. I love the Vietnamese restaurant across the river from where I live, Binh An, where I can get a huge portion of soothing sour soup for $10 with the tip. The owner tells me with pride that the broth is cooked for over 14 hours. While the food provides enjoyment and nourishment, a few questions and a little interaction provide warmth, insight and possible friendships. I guess that you can be open or closed where ever you are."

1. What is Canadian Cuisine?

2. Winnipeg is the most cosmopolitan city in the world. Not Vancouver, Toronto, or anywhere else. That is a statistical fact. Or you can walk down Sargent avenue.

3. You go to a Vietnamese restaurant for the Pho, not the sour soup.

Every statement by this person fails equally under the slightest examination. Terrible reporting, terrible interview.

Posted by: Blue Harland | Apr 11, 2011 3:30:11 PM

Wow, Blue -- thanks for sharing, I guess. Goin' out on a limb here, but you are a rival of Karen's in Winnipeg? You sound a bit like someone who has been outdone by her, but I don't really know, of course. If you are in the food service business in Manitoba, a little solidarity and fellow feeling would get you more clients that what you have just written here. I feel for ya, dude -- if I did not admire and defer to Karen in so many foodie areas, I'd be jealous of her phenomenal skill set, too. Please write to me if you would like me to take down the comment that reflects so badly on you. We have a policy here of letting comments stand unless they are obscene, or unless the writer repents of what he wrote and asks us to remove it. Best to you, regardless.

Posted by: Elatia Harris | Apr 11, 2011 5:04:25 PM

I think that a Liberal notion of tolerance is not a desirable concept. That is, if I’m told that I’ll be tolerated, I’d suggest not to bother.

Bingo, we have a winner!

On a side note, Northern availability to ingredients is limited in comparison to South Asian, or even Peruvian cuisine, so things usually stray toward the more basic strategies.

I thought it was a great interview-
Thanks Elatia!

Posted by: Scott | Apr 11, 2011 8:05:44 PM

Mathis the Painter, 3 Quarks Daily, 11/9/2008

MATHIS THE PAINTER

               

   

Elatia Harris

One autumn decades ago, my then husband and I drove around France, hunting down art masterpieces. We were young and in no hurry to go home, on a mission to be swept off our feet. And France was very obliging that way.  We should have been happy -- did we not live for love and art? I'll never know how far from happy he was, but I was unhappy in spite of being in love and in France, and that's pretty unhappy.

                                   

We came to Colmar, an Alsatian town of such reproachful quaintness that the locals might as well have wandered about in costume. The idea was to spend the day with the Isenheim Altarpiece, housed in the Musee d'Unterlinden, a modern structure built around the ruins of a Late Gothic convent. I knew the nearly 500 year-old work the way you do from art history class -- tiny figures writhing inside churchy frames on a textbook page, 35 mm slides so old they reduced all European painting to a green, amber and russet wash on the pockmarked projection screen of the lecture hall. And I had come to know the painter, Matthias Grunewald -- that's a self-portrait under the title, above right -- from his drawings, which had shown me I was in for something intense. You could count on German painting for that, couldn't you?

                  

 

                                  

Ready, as always, to be overwhelmed by painting, I made my way to the big light vaulted room where the Isenheim Altarpiece had been displayed ever since it narrowly escaped destruction by a mob in the French Revolution. I was geared up for a complex and imposing work about 12 feet across and 10 feet high, oil on huge panels made into hinged wings that opened out to three different views.  It could not possibly be seen all at once, art historians had written. Sometime after World War II, the hinged panels were dismantled and mounted free-standing, allowing you to walk among the three views: the Crucifixion, the Madonna and Child, the Annunciation, the Transfiguration, the concert of angels, the meeting in the desert of Paul the Anchorite and St. Anthony the Great. His demons.

Familiar territory, no? And, oh, had I not studied, believing my time with this work, though long in arriving, was as inevitable as the transit of Venus? I did not then understand that you could over-prepare for experience, grinding to powder your sense of encounter, building in a cosmic letdown as sturdy as a masonry ramp. This would not be the day I found out about that, however, for turning a corner into the big vaulted 700 year-old room in the Musee d'Unterlinden, I came face to face with an image of immeasurable suffering.

                          

                  

                                           

                              

It was the Crucifixion, and it may be wrong to post a photo here, where few readers will take it to heart. For a long time, I have wanted to write for readers here about the Isenheim Altarpiece, but have stopped at two obstacles. First, while Internet photography is orders of magnitude better than any photos available to me back in the day, this work of art defies the camera like few others, defies it not like a painting but like an ocean. Second, it is not just religious painting, but passionately religious painting, and readers might be moved to dismiss it on those grounds, aided by photography that fails to draw them into that parallel world of freedom from the usual philosophical constraints.

Art is the direct language of the human condition, cutting through our stupefactions and sophistries with its matchless power to surprise. To do as I did, to go to Colmar and abide with these images, is to put yourself in the way of an infinite work of art, one that will throw you, and then haunt you, forever. It actually operates more like music -- it will get you. It will show you the pain beyond naming and the love beyond love, and show you that you already know these things -- and feel them, and are made of them -- no matter what you think.

                       

 

                      

 

        

 

Although I am, despite many inhibitions, writing about the work of art that I find more powerful than any other, I am not alone in being superlatively moved by it. I am not alone, either, in appreciating the feebleness of words and photos to give an idea of it. It's not about ideas -- why would I want to give you an idea? For all I know I could be like the street ranter who -- merely by quoting from it -- gives you the very distinct idea not to read the Bible. There are works of art that are annihilating -- blessedly so -- to your powers to conjure them, and this is one of them. That annihilation can resolve to extreme curiosity about the painter. If it does, you'll be almost on your own, out there with others who have been so curious they could find steady ground only in their imaginations. For of Matthias Grunewald -- my software won't make an umlaut over the "u," but it doesn't matter, because that's not his real name -- precious little is known.

Compared to Albrecht Durer, his almost exact contemporary, Mathis Gotthart or Nithart has barely a biography. There is no date of birth, and there was no teacher anyone can be sure of, although as a Rhinelander painting in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, Mathis must have known of Martin Schongauer. The plot of Paul Hindemith's opera of the mid-1930's, Mathis der Maler (Mathis the Painter), is counterfactual -- except that it is established that Mathis was in great distress over the Peasants' War. In the summer of 1525, when Mathis was within several years of the end of his life, 300,000 peasants rose up, from Muhlhausen in the north to Bern in the south. About 100,000 of these insurgents died, and not in battle, for, barely protesting, they were simply cut down. Order was restored, and for a long time after Mathis was known to wear a dark bandage over his face.

W. G. Sebald's prose poem, After Nature, was published in 2003, shortly after he died, although it was written much earlier. Now, there's a writer who can show you Mathis. In the first section ofAfter Nature, "...As the Snow on the Alps," Sebald enters the painter's mind -- I am convinced of it.  First, he quotes Dante.

                      Now go, the will within us being one:

                      You be my guide, Lord, master from this day,

                      I said to him; and when he, moved, led on

                      I entered on the steep wild-wooded way.

It is hard not to understand his use of these lines as both an allusion to the Dantesque themes in the Isenheim Altarpiece, and an invocation of the painter. How many people have summoned the painter to be their guide on the steep wild-wooded way?  They have seen the face of the painter in many presumed self-portraits, usually in St. Paul the Anchorite, below right. Alone in the Theban desert for almost 100 years, clothed and fed by a single palm tree until a raven began flying in with a daily ration of bread, Paul knew the contemplative life, and his grave was dug by lions. Adding decades to the face of the self-portrait drawing under the title, you can see the resemblance -- but St. Anthony, too, below left, resembles the painter in a more courtly mode.

                       

      

Sebald makes much of there being two of Mathis, one wilder than the other, one Grunewald, one Nithart. At the death of Mathis, Sebald tells what he left of wordly goods that were not paint, and then of paint, and then of luxury togs.

                                      lead white and albus,

                       Paris red, cinnabar, slate green,

                       mountain green, alchemy green, blue

                       vitreous pastes and minerals

                       from the Orient. Clothing, too,

                       beautiful, item: a gold-yellow pair of hose,

                       tunics, cinnamon-coloured, the lapels overlaid

                       in purpled velvet with black stitching,

                       a grey atlas doublet, a red slouch hat 

                       and much exquisite adornment besides.

                       The estate in truth is that of two men, but

                       whether Grunewald, an inventor of singular

                       hues, shared his departed friend's liking

                       for such gaudy arrayment

                       we cannot presume to say.

Mathis, painter of extremes, may have sensed a doubleness in his nature -- more than most artists do, that is. Much more. In his self-portraits, Durer famously played up a likeness to Christ as most contemporaries would have recognized Him, but Mathis probably gave his own face to Lucifer. If it is Lucifer, blending in -- sort of -- with the musical angels who serenade the Madonna, sawing away at his instrument more timorously than the others, beringed as others are not, and more extravagantly befeathered than they.

                        

                                  

A contemporary scholar, Dr. Ruth Mellinkoff, makes that argument and supports it soundly. I believe her because, although she was writing many, many years later, her interpretation corresponds to my own thinking the day I saw the Isenheim Altarpiece, and I am under no obligation to have better reasons than that for what I hold to be true of art. Is this not the very picture of a fallen angel setting about regaining insider status? Of a painter who is both insider and exile, dandy and damned? To have painted as Mathis did, you have to have known hell -- you just don't have to have ruled over it.

You must also have seen an eclipse, Sebald writes -- "a catastrophic incursion of darkness." In October of 1502, when Mathis was around 30, "the moon's shadow slid over Eastern Europe," and Mathis,

                              who repeatedly was in touch

                              with the Aschaffenburg Court Astrologer Johann Indagine,

                              will have travelled to see this event of the century,

                              awaited with great terror, the eclipse of the sun,

                              so will have become a witness to

                              the secret sickening away of the world,

This then is how Mathis imagined the state of erosion, after nature, that he painted, the "ruining of life that in the end will consume even the stones."

                                     

 

                             

Mathis believed in Salvation, so it is possible to see his masterpiece as darker, even, than he can have conceived of it himself or intended it to be seen. Among those tights and doublets and rings, among those glorious colors he left behind -- colors reputed to have been different from those of other painters, but they were not: he only used them differently -- were found Lutheran tracts. The Isenheim Altarpiece was completed two years before the Reformation got underway, and it was painted for a special purpose. The Antonite friars at Isenheim, whose Abbot commissioned the work from Mathis, were a medical order, tending the sick for whom there were no cures. There was a plague of ergotism in the land, and those who ate milled rye could become fantastically sick, losing their minds and rotting as if with leprosy before, unswiftly, they died.

As there was no cure, so there was no prevention -- anyone, at any time, could become ill like that. When they did, they were brought to the chapel at Isenheim to have before them a testament to the redemptive power of suffering. They were lain down there the better to find meaning in torment, to place hope in a distant realm, to believe that the love of God included them still and would bear them up. This is where the enormous winged altarpiece, in those days, fit in. 

 

Posted by Elatia Harris at 02:48 AM | Permalink

COMMENTS

Elatia: Simply wonderful. I have always hoped to see the Isenheim altarpiece. Your exposition and composition has done the great thing of criticism: it has made a future visit imperative. Yours Michael

Posted by: Michael Blim | Nov 17, 2008 3:16:03 AM

Amazing stuff, Elatia!

Thanks.

Posted by: Abbas Raza | Nov 17, 2008 5:07:21 AM

A truly appreciated work of art and love, from an exemplary writer.

Posted by: Felix E F Larocca MD | Nov 17, 2008 5:25:03 AM

Elatia, glad you're back, and thank you for your very poignant insights. John

Posted by: John Altobello | Nov 17, 2008 6:32:04 AM

wonderful article....you have managed to convey the passion you felt while seeing the painting. your comment about what art is was remarkable.

thank you,
terri amig

Posted by: terese amig | Nov 17, 2008 8:19:13 AM

What an extraordinary writer you are Elatia. Awesome. 
xo
Kate

Posted by: Kate Vrjmoet | Nov 17, 2008 8:56:29 AM

How lovely to awake to something so wonderful to read and beautiful to see. I'm so glad your back on the blog. Marvelous, Elatia.

Posted by: Harriet | Nov 17, 2008 10:15:55 AM

Elatia, thank you. You have brought Grunewald's masterpiece alive for me, and given it a passionate human face. You have also given me Grunewald himself as an artist and a man.
Please,PLEASE never stop writing these articles.

Thalassa

Posted by: Thalassa Scholl | Nov 17, 2008 10:29:03 AM

Elatia, you must be careful not to write so well, for the effect is that I'm left thinking more about your talent than your subject.

I better go back and read it again...

Posted by: ghostman | Nov 17, 2008 12:27:56 PM

Fascinating that you had exactly the same response to that work as did I. The intensity and vividness of the "affekt" don't go away even after a lifetime. That is the mark of a great work of art. But the crucifixion scene is only half the picture!! The resurrection scene on the opposite side blows the mind away totally. If only from a technical point of view, as the colors are scintillating as their combinations are remarkable. Thanks for the reawakening.

Posted by: Keith Hill | Nov 17, 2008 1:04:44 PM

Thank you Elatia for taking us through a fabulous guided tour. I don't know if I will have the opportunity to ever visit the Isenheim Altarpiece. But as a very visual person who notices and remembers lights and colors far more vividly than sounds, I understand the palliative effects of a dazzling, alive piece of art.

Posted by: Ruchira | Nov 17, 2008 1:32:24 PM

Of the four years I spent in Germany in the 70s, one of the highlights of that glorious time was seeing the Isenheim Altarpiece. I can't thank you enough for recalling those memories and for enriching my understanding of this blissfully beautiful work of art.
Barrie

Posted by: Barrie | Nov 17, 2008 3:16:22 PM

Thank you for bringing this passionate masterpiece alive for me with your gorgeous writing so full of emotion itself. love, cathie

Posted by: cathie | Nov 17, 2008 9:05:59 PM

I agree, this is a beautiful essay.

As you mention, the Isenheim Altarpiece was designed to be viewed by people who were basically tripping to death on the chemical precursor to LSD that accompanies the poisoning induced by ergot-infested rye. In his book The Apples of Apollo: Pagan and Christian Mysteries of the Eucharist, Dr. Carl Ruck of Boston University makes the case that the Altarpiece is aptly loaded with not-so-subtle references to the ecstatic techniques of pre-Christian shamans and striking visual representations of the hallucinations occasioned by the use of these "sacred" plants and fungi. If Ruck is right, and our mysterious Mathis was an initiate into some pagan mystery school, then he was uncannily equipped to paint for an audience suffering from ergotism, to say the least!

There is a graphic depiction of the flow from life to death in this picture—and, through the decomposition efforts of our fungal friends (and, in the case of ergot, enemies)—a literal transformation of death into life. Salvation in this context may be understood to mean the ego-releasing acceptance on the part of the sick and dying that they are part of a greater cycle of life that is in fact eternal.

Posted by: Emily | Nov 17, 2008 9:25:08 PM

Good good stuff here, E - you take me back to my hour after hour exultation of the art I loved back in college, as an art history major. Palpable reality here. THank you. SFB

Posted by: Suzanne FB | Nov 17, 2008 9:31:34 PM

This is such a deeply moving piece Elatia. You have brought together such a confluence of my favorite themes, and the braid you weave here is seductive and lush.

Not to be overlooked: What a spectacular poem by Sebald, my beloved Sebald.

Thank you for taking me back in time to my first and only viewing so long ago. Now I long to schedule another pilgrimage, one that can test if I really do have more bandwidth than I did at 18.

More, more!

Posted by: Deborah Barlow | Nov 17, 2008 9:40:04 PM

Dear Elatia, 
What a comeback!
You've made me see some familiar work with very new eyes.
Brava! and welcome back.

Best,
Sughra

Posted by: Sughra | Nov 17, 2008 11:00:11 PM

Elatia, Thank you for this. Beautiful. "It will show you the pain beyond naming and the love beyond love, and show you that you already know these things -- and feel them, and are made of them -- no matter what you think."

I love the gray-feathered angel, who looks fallen yet still held aloft in spirit through what might be considered grace. 

Posted by: CriticalMassI | Nov 17, 2008 11:57:58 PM

Absolutely spectacular work Elatia! Thank you for opening up these worlds.

Posted by: Karen | Nov 18, 2008 4:08:15 AM

I saw the altarpiece in my early twenties, without knowing much about it. I think it felt in a category all to itself. I had not seen "ugly" and frightening depictions of Christ before. I am going to read and reread what you say. It is very rich. Thanks!

Posted by: marie brown | Nov 18, 2008 9:42:26 AM

Seeing a great work of art, is an experience that belongs to you forever. Elatia, you make me feel that I have seen this painting myself. Thank you for letting me see through your eyes. Holly

Posted by: holly alderman | Nov 18, 2008 7:09:43 PM

Bravo, as always. I hope Elatia's well-earned fans are helping promote her work by sharing her articles with their favorite communities on the web. The bookmarks bar at the top of this screen (right hand side) makes it simple to share with the most popular social networking groups -- Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Delicious, Digg, Technorati. Let your communities in on these treasures (and on your own great feedback as well).

Posted by: Jean Terranova | Nov 18, 2008 8:06:52 PM

Dear Elatia,
This is perhaps the most moving piece I've read that you have written in this column. Maybe that's because I am in Rome right now--where I have spent the last 3 weeks or so, living in a former convent that is now the Rome Center of Loyola U. In the hallways of this academy are digitalized re-prints of Carravaggio (spelling?)and of course, the moment I step out of this gated community, I enter into a realm of such high artistic, aesthetic, and historical proportions for which one can never be fully prepared, and thus one is always surprised and plesed.
Your observation that one can be "over-prepared for the experience" resonated with me, paraticularly when I visited Venice for the first time and deliberately was under-prepared because I was so afraid that the "hype" about Venice's beauty would not match my expectations. Thus, when I finally saw Venice with my own eyes, my first thought was that nothing had prepared me for its beauty...that one had to be there to understand its unique atmosphere and architecture. I for the first time understood Vivaldi's music by just looking across the rippling waters of the Grand Lagoon. No painter has truly captured Venice, although I know why they keep on trying.
Anyway, thank you for your brilliant insight on visiting the Isenheim Altarpiece. It arrived at the perfect time for me. 
Please consider writing a book of essays. Your essays on art are a thousand times more interesting than the didactic art history text that I snored through as an undergraduate.
Ciao, Ulle

Posted by: Ulle Holt | Nov 22, 2008 3:59:13 AM

Indeed a very moving description and a reminder that actual works of art, seen in context, are always more powerful than photographic images

Posted by: aguy109 | Nov 22, 2008 8:49:20 AM

A masterpiece on a masterpiece! Elatia, your lush, honest words bear such rich gifts for your reader. They (both) are almost overwhelming in all they convey.

Posted by: Pamela | Nov 22, 2008 6:30:55 PM

You have a great gift for elevating and refining thoughts.

The site, the post, the photos . . . everything is beautiful. Thanks for making me a part of your circle.

Posted by: Micah | Nov 27, 2008 2:42:35 AM

Elatia,

I’m returning to this article, having read your essay on James Ensor a few months ago. I took your advice, also, to see the James Ensor exhibit at MoMA in NYC earlier this year.

I couldn’t help but read your essay on Mathis because I visited the Musee d'Unterlinden, in Colmar in April-May 1990. I knew nothing of Mathis or the Musee d'Unterlinden except for the blurbs in my tour companion, “22 Days in France” by Rick Steves, and his strong encouragement not to miss the Isenheim Altarpiece triptych. I have many photos from the Musee, and the albums are still packed away in moving boxes in my garage.

I never cared for ‘Crucifixion Art’ after the great plagues and famines of the 1300s CE. The emphasis on gore, lashing that neared flaying, long drawn out suffering, projection of guilt upon the faithful for making Jesus suffer by their sins, and an unsubtle reminder of what is in store for those who do not repent – if you think this hurts, wait till you get to hell – were obsessions that bordered on sadomasochism. Christopher Hitchens’ characterization of Mel Gibson’s film “The Passion of the Christ” as a homoerotic spank movie, convinced me not to see it, though I wasn’t likely to do so anyway. Personal reviews and reactions from people I knew confirmed my decision to stay at home.

My reactions to the paintings at Unterlinden, however, were nothing of the kind. I was awed and moved by the experience on different levels. They were beautiful, strange, incredibly fantastical, captivating, passionate, and FULL OF LIFE. The crucified Christ is as animated as any other figure. I’m not referring to a religious or theological concept of a residual life-on-hold for a Jesus yet to rise from the dead. It’s the face of suffering that had yet to surrender to the inevitable – the ghost will not be given up that easily.

My experience with Mathis’ work was influenced, to some extent, by the purpose to which his benefactor directed his labor and art. This was a free hospital for the sick and suffering who were going to die. The religious culture of the time sought to help the dying cope with their pain and suffering by finding purpose and benefit in their inescapable misery. Other than despair, there were only three things one could do: accept the suffering as a gift from God so one could offer personal repentance for sins, reduce the afterlife suffering in purgatory in a preparatory cleansing before eternal union with God, and find some consolation in the fact that another, Jesus, had suffered far more. It is not necessary to buy into the theology of sin, suffering, dying and salvation to appreciate the benefit to those who were near the end of their coping with the vicissitudes of the human condition. I have witnessed people who were better able to cope with pain and suffering, by coming face-to-face with the greater pain and suffering of others. Given the nature of the time, we might even look upon Mathis’ art as part of an act of love extended to the sick and suffering.

In the 1980s, I was traipsing through a couple of small art galleries in La Jolla, CA. Not being a regular denizen of the scene, I was surprised to find that rich folks in California were lavishing a lot of money on paintings that would not have been classified as collectible art, or collectable anything, in the humble environs of my childhood education and socialization in New York. I regarded them as little more than Stan Lee comic book art that was dosed up on steroids. In Colmar I saw the ancestor of such phantasmagoria. I am too ignorant of art and art history to say that modern equivalents of Mathis’ work couldn’t hold a candle to it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that were true. It’s like seeing modern surrealist painting and asking, from the vantage of naiveté, “Has anyone seen Hieronymus Bosch?”

Eventually, I will have to unpack my moving cartons and pull out the photo albums of my 22 days in France in the spring of 1990. Maybe I’ll do that sooner than later, and try to relive that extraordinary visit to the Musee d'Unterlinden and being in the presence of Mathis’ genius.

Posted by: Norman Costa | Nov 23, 2009 6:21:57 PM

How Never to Write About Your Animals, 3 Quarks Daily, 12/22/08

HOW NEVER TO WRITE ABOUT YOUR ANIMALS

 

                                                                                                 Graphics by Kate Vrijmoet

Elatia Harris

It is 2 a.m., and I am in my reading chair, building a list of modifiers that people set on writing about their animals had better shun. Here are a few.

        little
        sweet
        sweet little
        angelic
        sweet angelic little
        furry
        sweet angelic furry little
        tiny
        sweet tiny furry little angelic
        so tiny
        sweet furry little angelic [noun] that is so tiny

This is the stuff, and its wretched tenderness actually finds a more just expression, an expression more fevered still, in devotional painting. Hence, the dog retablos, based on my own animals. It’s not possible to be more dog-besotted than I am -- and still have anything else going on, that is. I’m hoping to establish my bona fides that way with pictures, and to get somewhere else with words. Everybody feeling safer now?

The Dream

Describe a dream, lose a reader, Harold Robbins used to say. But this one’s different.

The morning of the dream, Lina, my poodle puppy, weighed in at 19.2 lbs. What if Lina got as big as a pony? In the early days of a global financial crisis we cannot fathom, I have taken on a moon-colored puppy that eats and eats. And I have had the dream I know is dreamt the length and breadth of my family-oriented neighborhood, where visible disturbances of prosperity are so very few. I dream I am asleep, and Lina enters my bedroom prowling for food. She takes fluid strides on her hind legs, her eyes avid, sweeping the room. She’s taller than a man, and spectrally thin under bright scant fur, as thin as the zoo bear that survived the siege of Sarajevo for 200 days, too weak to eat the apple a soldier finally brought her. My baby -- rising up in her need, and enormous. And she cannot be sustained.

     

Okay, so I am in my reading chair. It is 2 a.m., and I am fending off the dream. Facing me, Lina sits in my lap on her haunches and hooks her forepaws over my shoulders, her long head level with mine and so close that I see two of her. But for my nightshirt, of the thinnest Indian cotton, we are fur to fur the length of our abdomens. Better not to write about the tongue-showing that goes on, except to say we’re both doing it. The veridical Lina, who still has a puppy tummy, erases anxieties as surely as if she licked them away. She gives off that deeply comforting poodle smell -- of violets and civet, salt flats and fresh kelp, sun on white linen. She is my creature, my teething thriving creature, whose love bites are puncture wounds, who’s in a great, great mood. And we have a long way to go.

 

Ill-Prepared

The animal of my childhood, Babe Ruth, an English bulldog, left me ill-prepared for living without dogs, ill-prepared also for dogs that came later.

     

Babe Ruth was so smart that we were convinced he was another life form, showing up among us as a phenomenal though not a nuomenal dog. That was the beginning of how he got to be a religion, but many religions have begun when enough people are persuaded of something along those lines. One and only one example of what I mean: if there were a noise outside the window that Babe Ruth wanted to investigate, he would not race to press his paws upon the sill and peep out, but drag a chair by its leg to the window and sit high enough to see far. It was as brilliant as if one of us had thought to climb a ladder for a real look at the terrain, and get the advantage of surprise over anyone approaching. This, and other of his calculations, gave us the idea he must be discontented to be a dog -- art, poetry and song flowing from that premise.

More than anything, his appearance – not his demeanor but his markings – suggested a knowing, glittering dismay. He had eyeliner like a pharaoh that made him look angry and lustful, consumed with thoughts of what was not to be. He broke my heart with his otherness and his longing to be included. In “The Birthday of the Infanta,” a story by Oscar Wilde set inside a Velasquez painting, as it were, a dwarf in the thick of festivities with the cruel royal children catches sight of itself, for the very first time, in a distant mirror – and understands. Babe Ruth’s life seemed one long moment like that. Could it be made back up to him in hyperdulia?

He met most dogs, in any case, with an almost episcopal disregard – though that might have been a feint we encouraged. I was confounded whenever he did a frankly doggy thing, a thing that could have no other than a natural explanation. There was a vast dead bush, yellow and dry, bordering a badly tended property not far from us. Every passing dog urinated at its roots, and it grabbed Babe Ruth like music one must follow to the source. Here were signals from the world that was most real to him, after all, that made him pant and swing his head and sniff deeply from behind closed eyes. So that was the life for him, then – to be a dog among other dogs? Or just to shake with joy at their traces.

Good Mother

Decades after Babe Ruth died, I was at last ready for another dog. Up until then, I didn’t want another dog – I wanted the one I’d had. In California, where I went away to school, I saw brown hills in winter, Babe Ruth’s tawny flanks in their lion-colored undulations. The margins of my college notebooks were filled with drawings of his pushed-in nose, rose-shaped ears, paw prints like mandalas and dark-rimmed eyes – when he had been dead for some time. In those days, the IRA was setting off bombs, a number of the terrorists girls my age. One, who died from her own bomb, had been scribbling notes on the Virgin in her journal, minutes before. Of course, I remember thinking, when I read that.

I got married, and that elbowed Babe Ruth – but not entirely. It was a marriage in which there was much, much talk of getting dogs, and for years I was young enough not to know how portentous it was that such a decision admitted of chattering delay. When I did get my next dog, it needed only my decision, and I felt poised to be its good mother. It would be a dog, and not a cult figure.

That happened and it didn’t – if only because the condition of being just a dog is pretty unachievable by most dogs. Certainly, Lucy never achieved it.

I Never Want to do Anything Very Bad

       

 

Lucy, a dark gray miniature poodle, was a rescue animal, so we met cute – just how cute will not be aired here. The first thing I did was to enroll her in a training course – I was going to have a happy dog that fit in and responded well to leadership. I was not going to have another canine situation ethicist. 

When we showed up for the first class, I saw we were coming in from behind, however. At almost 9 months – very young for a rescue animal -- Lucy was 12 to 15 weeks older than the eldest puppies in the class. Unlike her, the others were straining at their leashes in a passion to obey. Lucy was standoffish and down-focused. About halfway through the session, during obedience maneuvers designed to give both dog and owner a rousing taste of success, Lucy lay down sideways, squeezed her eyes shut, and mentally left the room. I’d heard of women in labor, dissociated from the horrific pain involved, who, with the gallant air of a guest who has fractionally overstayed, would whisper to the nearest nurse I’m outta here, swinging their feet to the floor to rise and go. The trainer said Lucy was doing something like that, and let me know what it meant about her short past. 

A few unproductive sessions later, Lucy was assessed as a dog with low potential for high obedience. On account of issues. Oh, I got it. 

Within a year, though, she had yielded to persuasion -- you could not really call it training. She would come when called, but she never learned games like Fetch, never knew what to do with a toy. An air of tight composure would come over her at the suggestion she retrieve an item that neither of us wanted, or beguile her hours with something bright and knobby made of hard rubber. She was, almost until the end, fastidious about going to the bathroom out of doors. I have never known another dog brilliant enough to pee on a grade -- by instinct, nothing to do with me, for I couldn't have thought it up to make her do it. And she could leap like Nureyev, hurtling off the ground, stretching into a frozen arc mid-air, landing noiselessly and slow. During the time I was discovering all this about Lucy, the then teen-aged Natalie Portman gave an interview to Vanity Fair. The interviewer observed her parents were not terribly strict with her, and Portman assented. To paraphrase her: It's true my parents don't discipline me much, but it's also true I never want to do anything very bad. Exactly.

Other Ways of Knowing

While resisting obedience is not a hallmark of a happy dog, Lucy did become a happy dog while remaining too deep for obedience. Or, is that me? She lived for 17 and a half years, and sad dogs make faster exits. Besides, I have other ways of knowing these things.

I have always worked mainly alone and mainly at home, so I had more time with Lucy than I have ever had with any other being. Fine with me if it stays that way -- the deep, nurturing restfulness of such an alliance over such a long time cannot be rivaled, no matter what. I have gotten lost in her hair, and in the contemplation of her paws: each paw was a cathedral, or else a padded star. I know what was knowable about her, if not what there was to know, which will always be a mystery -- one that is language-free.

      

She spoke to me in dreams however -- and this, I suppose, is how never to write about your animals. Two years before she died, I dreamed of her telling me what would happen after that. Heaven, she gave me to understand, was but a field of dogs. And in death they were huge, so large they filled the skies, but they were invisible because they were clear. It was something a perfectly crazy mother might tell a child, and it made me feel a lot better -- until I woke up. 

You don't replace your dog when it dies, but you do know if you are a person who is better off with or without a dog. I know where I fit in. And I'm pretty far gone on Lina, too -- already. She has enormous white finely boned paws that look like Virginia Woolf's hands. Her gait is ungainly -- think Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, clomping offstage after playing a little Brahms. She's in obedience school at Zen Dog, and it's going quite well, although the trainer says I have to get rid of the lilt in my voice when I command her. Dogs take that for a pleading tone, and ignore you or even start to enjoy thwarting you. Oh, yes. But what to do? I'm Southern, and I can't just come on like Hillary Clinton, booming with fatigue and will.

Is Lina as deep as Lucy? That's unfair -- no one is as deep as Lucy. And few are as present as Babe Ruth.

Lucy died last summer in the oxygen cage at the hospital. She was doing beautifully in there, but couldn't be weaned from it. They did a panel of tests and X-rays, and even at her age, nothing so very much was wrong -- she just couldn't breathe. I was not sorry to have the decision taken from me. For a long time, having made up my mind that she would not die of a painful disease, I had been wondering if I would know the right moment to intervene. I could never quite see her as an elderly dog, longing to live no more; when I looked at her, I saw all the dogs she'd ever been. This could have been dangerous to her, but finally was not. Everyone at the hospital said how wonderful she looked, that -- except for that she could not breathe! -- they would never have guessed how old she was or how tired.

They had handed me back her collar and lead at intake -- "We lose these things, " they said. The last time I saw her alive, she was wearing a scarlet grosgrain collar they'd given her, bright against her charcoal coat, and it tagged her for a special world where she would not tarry long. She hadn't eaten for a couple of days, but they'd put her on diuretics, and she licked her lips with thirst. I was happy there was anything she wanted. From a shallow water bowl, she drank and drank. It was so stark: water is life. It will always matter to me that she didn't have to die thirsty.

Maybe Lina and I will carry on into the far future -- until 2030 is in sight if not in hand. She has a box full of toys and she knows how to play with them. It is 2 a.m. From several rooms away, I hear one hit the floor with a defiant Mozartean squeak.

 

Thanks to the artist Kate Vrijmoet for leaving her painting studio to Photoshop my dogs. Please visit her site and blog.

Posted by Elatia Harris at 12:37 AM | Permalink

COMMENTS

Very moving. Thank you. 
I feel as if I have known your dogs and am the richer for it.

I will now check out your blog, if you have one.

Posted by: barbara carlson | Dec 22, 2008 9:26:08 AM

Thank you Elatia for emailing me these, I should compose anything so well as this essay

Posted by: Matt L | Dec 22, 2008 10:14:12 AM

I enjoyed reading about the dogs!

Posted by: Amy | Dec 22, 2008 10:15:20 AM

Elatia:
Tell me if I understand you correctly: it is not recommended that we think of our animals as little, furry, angels but quite alright to see them as oversized gods? Works for me!

Possessing a prosaic, non-mysterian imagination, the only vision of heaven that I can conjure up which doesn't bore me to tears is one where I am reunited with every pet I have loved and lost.

Thanks.

Posted by: Ruchira | Dec 22, 2008 11:31:21 AM

Elatia, very moving stuff, and since I've had the pleasure of meeting both Lucy and Lena, I appreciate the writing all the more. Thanks to artist Kate for her photoshopping. John

Posted by: John Altobello | Dec 22, 2008 11:33:12 AM

This is elementally you Elatia. Having known 2 of the 3 four legged featured in this piece, I am even more endeared to Lucy and Lina.

And this line is unforgettable: "low potential for high obedience." Sounds like the description someone would give for me if I were in a shelter.

So well done, AS ALWAYS.

Posted by: Deborah Barlow | Dec 22, 2008 1:10:20 PM

Elatia, remember that reciprocal woo-woo conversation I promised you? In light of your comment re: not wanting to be bored to tears by any other concept of heaven other than being reunited with your animals, perhaps it's time we had that conversation. I think you'll be happy with what you can infer. xoxo

Posted by: Kate Vrijmoet | Dec 22, 2008 2:05:22 PM

Love it - and nice twist of humor. Wouldn't mind having a dog people view as "cute" "little" and "furry." (We've got a street tough on our hands.)
Happy holidays!
Jean

Posted by: Jean Terranova | Dec 22, 2008 2:15:55 PM

Harold Robbins was wrong. This piece is delightful and many other things. I love the devotional art. Thanks Elatia and hello Lina; I think you're going to give your "mum" tons to mull over and write about.

Posted by: PeteChapman | Dec 22, 2008 2:39:41 PM

Elatia, Years ago I made a solemn promise to myself never but never to write about my dog Julio. It's more than 20 years since I made that vow, but now, having read this piece, I must tell you and the world that Julio was a philosopher, a genius and a healer. And that ain't the half of it.

Thanks for another satisfying piece. I find that your writing always points me, however ambiguously, towards something fresh.

I hope to meet you one day.
Sally Reed

Posted by: Sally Reed | Dec 22, 2008 3:29:44 PM

I always want to reread Elatia's blogs just to savor the absolutely original voice.

Posted by: cell phone girl, interrupted | Dec 23, 2008 1:29:50 AM

Elatia, you — and your dogs — are awesome.

Posted by: ghostman | Dec 23, 2008 2:16:06 PM

Elatia, I just came across this and had to ask: which one is Lina?

Posted by: ghostman | Dec 23, 2008 6:52:14 PM

i've been running all through december, on planes all day yesterday, and only now, in the wake of your piece, has time finally stood still.

Posted by: Aditya Dev Sood | Dec 24, 2008 3:15:24 AM

Thanks much for this, Elatia.

And Merry Christmas!

Posted by: S. Abbas Raza | Dec 24, 2008 3:56:09 AM

I don't know what a 'canine situation ethicist' is, but that is somehow the perfect phrase. I'm also sure that like so many others it landed on Elatia's computer screen perfectly formed, exactly on cue, like Athena from Zeus's head.
What enviable magic she has...

Posted by: Thalassa Scholl | Dec 24, 2008 1:00:19 PM

Amazingly fun to read, not just about the dogs, which like all pets are perfect repositories for our imaginations, but about the author. Of course a fascinating and brilliant person would have fascinating and brilliant stories about her animal companions...and yet this article is also beautifully written, heartfelt and very funny. The art complements all these elements. Where else can you find anything like this? Thanks Elatia.

Posted by: OT | Dec 26, 2008 7:12:15 AM

Elatia, what a funny and beautiful tribute. Babe and Lucy have had a measure of the devotion they deserve in the blogasphere if not the dogasphere. Lina, is very lucky indeed to have her attributes recognized in puppyhood.The images are wonderful too. They look lit from within and belong on dog alters everywhere.You are a marvelous writer and I am always intrigued and moved by your articles. Thank you for another remarkable read.

Posted by: Harriet | Dec 27, 2008 1:07:40 PM

Lucky dogs, to have found such and interesting home!

Posted by: chris | Dec 28, 2008 6:26:32 PM

..."civet and violets...." Wonderful. (One could add "heart warming" to your list but then it could be added to all such lists.)

Posted by: J. FitzGerald | Apr 14, 2009 8:53:27 AM

Giambattista Della Porta of Naples: How to Turn a Woman Green, 3 Quarks Daily, 3/9/2009

GIAMBATTISTA DELLA PORTA OF NAPLES: HOW TO TURN A WOMAN GREEN

  

Elatia Harris

Not long ago, I was leafing through an old notebook, of the kind kept by artists on the prowl for imagery. I found some 16th century recipes I’d copied out, lines rich with imagery that never made it into a painting. “If you yearn to turn a woman green,” one recipe urged, “decoct a chameleon into her bath.”

Whose thinking was this? I had his name, Giambattista Della Porta of Naples, and the work referenced was his 20-volume Magia naturalis ( The Book of Natural Magic), a compendium of popular science of the 1550’s that gave its author, then a very young man, renown almost beyond telling. Prof. Louise George Clubb, a scholar of Italian studies, writes of his reputation as a “wonder-worker who had penetrated the secrets of nature, and was expected at any moment to discover the philosopher’s stone.” The Duke of Mantua came to Naples for his sake, the Duke of Florence and the Emperor Rudolph sent emissaries. He was a seer, a cryptographer, a dramatist, a mathematician, a horticulturist, a physician – and so much more. A polymath, it used to be called.

And he could spare a thought for how to turn a woman green.

The painting under the title, Caspar van Wittel's View of the Largo di Palazzo, was painted after Della Porta's death, but shows a Naples that would have been familiar to him. That's the Royal Palace on the right, the old seat of the Viceroy, built in 1533. In the 1830's, it made room for the Teatro San Carlo. The church buildings on the left were demolished in the Neoclassical period for something grander -- the ecclesiastical complex of San Francesco di Paola, with its vast colonnades. And it's no longer the Largo di Palazzo, but the Piazza del Plebiscito, renamed for the plebiscite in 1860 that brought Naples into the unified kingdom of Italy. So this is neither a view nor even a viewpoint -- you can't stand just there -- that can any more be had. Della Porta of Naples might recognize it today only as the largest public space in the city, with the red-walled Royal Palace, currently the National Library, a persistent gracious feature.

Knowledge itself is, always, the largest public space in the city; the eye of Della Porta, who died old in 1615, might search that space frantically for moorings now, though he was once thought -- by himself, among others -- to know all that there was to know. Prof. Clubb observes that, with regard to his intellectual prowess, he was "more content than any man is entitled to be." And if his most ardent pursuit was the confirmation of his own thinking, he was not alone in that. Nor would he be today, among the serious.

Della Porta rose to his position without a university education -- this in a land where the oldest continuously operating university in the West, the University of Bologna, dates to the last years of the 11th century. Little is known about his early education except that it was private. He was born, in 1535 (probably -- he lied about his age) to leisure, if not to wealth, and he and his two brothers were able to acquire books and tuition in the timeless way of well-funded students. Learned men gathered in the family house, an early endowment of intellectual capital. The three brothers studied music in a particularly concerted fashion, and all were declared free of that talent. But there is an aristocratic tradition of high involvement in an art for which one is little-suited that amounts almost to a principle, here attested to. No record shows his ever having been paid for a day's work in the ordinary sense, though patronage and princely gifts were a lifelong benison, seeing him through the ebb and flow of family fortunes, allowing him to travel more than most illustrious men and to dazzle every kind of visitor to his fine house in the old quarter of Naples.

A Science of Secrets

Della Porta did love to show off. As Italy's foremost magus, he would not have understood that as a bad but as a fitting thing. It is well to remember the terrible sincerity he brought to his work. Noting that the kings of Persia studied magic, he was exasperatingly genuine in his belief that natural magic could be an aid to government. It was no prank, but a teasing out of the hidden in nature, mistress of so many secrets. And, arising from close study of nature rather than metaphysics, natural magic had no truck with demons.

In Science and the Secrets of Nature, William Eamon observes that for Della Porta, "...nature cloaks herself in masks, which it is the task of the naturalist to remove, thereby exposing nature's secrets. The illusions and sleights of hand that Della Porta included in his books were imitations of nature hiding herself [...], part of the unmasking of nature that natural magic aimed to accomplish [...] But if nature 'plays' for those who understand her secrets, she also deceives those ignorant of causes, as a juggler, magician or craftsman seems to create marvels in the eyes of amazed onlookers. Illustrating the mechanism underlying cunning, whether human or natural, was an essential part of Della Porta's 'science of secrets.' "

How much of this thinking has come down to us as a legacy? Like the kings of Persia, government leaders currently resort to magic for guidance, both in countries deemed backwards and in countries we hope are more progressive than their leaders. As in Della Porta's day, telling magic from science is not easy for everyone, and when there is a conflict, many of us still like magic to win.

Less disturbingly, much of this thinking remains present in traditions of natural medicine that trace their roots back to the Middle Ages and earlier. The notion that a plant suggests by its appearance its medicinal use -- the doctrine of signatures -- is seen as a fundamental truth in traditional medicine. Beets cannot but be good for all complaints to do with the blood, for example. Last year, there was much mainstream science news about beet juice as an effective treatment for hypertension. Not exactly a matter of the composition of the blood, but it's quaint to ponder whether there's a vindication of natural magic here, and to remember that what "naturalists" did in the 16th century was the special kind of foolishness that led to experimental science.

Certainly the elevated place then accorded the scientist-showman himself is secure in our own time -- we track with furious industry the careers of our science superstars.

         

 

 

                                      

     

 

Magic with Demons

Anyone with an eye for old prints might well recognize Della Porta from the illustrations in his works, especially the paired images of beastly and human countenances. Physiognomy was not his invention, but he kick-started it -- a role he would play in optics and magnetics as well, for he was a polymath who was by no means all nonsense. Physiognomy expressed the secret meaning of deep similarities where one might not ordinarily look for them, but which are also hidden in plain sight. Similarities between the faces of men and beasts, for example. The nobility of a horse can be seen in the bearing of a man who walks with his head held high, whereas men who resemble donkeys are timorous and stupid. Malice is evident in the ram-faced, be they man or beast. First published in 1586, De humana physiognomia was translated into Italian in 1598, and saw 19 editions by 1701.

There is celestial physiognomy too, and it is a striking repudiation of astrology. Della Porta gives an account of the current state of astrology, the better to correct those who let their movements be guided by it. He concludes, "[B]ut things work differently, they do not derive from planets: we declare that they are caused by humours..."  While that lacks for accuracy, it discards the preposterous in favor of the less preposterous, so it may count as progress, and was in any case written at a time that astrology was not only a means of predicting the course of a life but a branch of applied mathematics.

To read the Magia naturalis, as well as Della Porta's subsequent works -- and he wrote, and wrote and wrote -- is hardly to take a ringside seat as the last Neoplatonist struggles to join the Scientific Revolution in one clean upward arc. Through his final years, he was entirely capable of straining away from the Zeitgeist. One of his last works, a Taumatologia, is lost. That would be magic that was assisted by demons. Pushing 80, he may have felt brave enough to engage openly with the subject. And so much of the public side of his earlier career had been driven by one gigantic idea -- keeping clear of the papal Inquisition. They had him once. And it could never, ever happen again. 

The Academy of Secrets

Around 1560, Della Porta got himself in an interesting position by founding the Academy of Secrets, a scientific society. Whoever wanted entrance into the academy had to discover a secret of nature unknown to anyone else. Prof. Clubb writes, "To judge by some of the harebrained fictions Della Porta published as scientific revelations, the emphasis was on meraviglie [marvels] rather than on empirical proof.  Nevertheless, the founder's pride is his academy was justified, for the joint experiments of its members produced many of the valid observations of phenomena in physics, optics, and botany which appear in the greatly augmented second edition of Magia."  

Della Porta produced dramatic literature alongside works on horticulture, cryptography and magic, though by the 1570's none of his plays had been performed. He was nonetheless praised for them by the scholar Giovanni Matteo Toscano. And it was as well to have an unobjectionable literary sideline, for by 1578, there was a distinct whiff of sulfur about the doings of the Academy of Secrets. Their founder was called to Rome to answer for it.

No one knows quite how it happened, for much documentary evidence, mainly in the form of letters, has been suppressed -- presumably by Della Porta, his family and associates. Having a brush with the Inquisition was very much a thing to hush up. Endearing though it may be to ourselves, it can have caused Della Porta and his family nothing but fear and revulsion.

While "a brush with the Inquisition" cannot approach the horror of what Giordano Bruno later endured, it is worth noting that failure to back down from a position the Inquisition found untenable could have resulted in ostracism, revocation of license to publish, house arrest, prison and/or execution -- for anyone. Bruno, a monk, was not strictly speaking burned to death as a martyr for science but for heterodoxy in his firm faith. Tommaso Campanella, a Calabrian monk-philosopher, spent 27 years in prison, convicted as a heretic. A brave man, though hardly a free-thinker, he intervened on Galileo's behalf at the time of his first trial -- a gesture that can have done Galileo no good. The danger posed by the Inquisition to Galileo in the 1630's -- almost half a century after Della Porta's troubles -- was so great one can only wonder that highly placed admirers could act to mitigate it. And that, in the presence of certain risk to themselves, they did.

The problem Rome had with Della Porta may have begun as early as 1558, with a denunciation. Over the next 20 years, two titles were bestowed on him by the populace of Naples -- Indovino andMago, seer and magician. His prophesies had a way of coming true, never a matter for churchly indifference. By a papal order that has not come to light, the Academy of Secrets was disbanded. And Della Porta was let off with a warning, its clangorous echo ringing down the four decades left to him. He never forgot. And he promptly joined a Jesuit lay order, going in for good works one whole day a week thenceforth.

On those occasions the Inquisition had no sterner thing to hand you, it would make unrefusable recommendations as to your next steps. Della Porta was commanded to write a comedy. It was not unheard of to be ordered to make reparations this way. Perfectly understandably, he ramped up his career as a dramatist.

The scholars who have inquired most deeply into Della Porta's life and times do not find that his kind of mind -- mercurial, curious, oriented to practical results even in his penchant for the unperformable experiment -- would truly have shifted into low gear from fright. He was not so fond of speculative thought as of finding out secrets -- how to make a guest mad-drunk by introducing camel froth into his wine, or how to perfect the camera obscura with a convex lens -- and it was speculative thought that the Inquisition wished most to destroy.

The Academy of the Lynx-Eyed

Always clubby and delighted to be flattered by nobles, Della Porta enjoyed in his last years a remarkable association with a handful of very young men who saw themselves as the advance guard of science. The Academy of the Lynx-Eyed (Accademia dei Lincei) was founded in 1603 by 18-year old Federico Cesi, left, the duke of Acquasparta. Its stated purpose, in Cesi's own words, was "reading this great, true, and universal book of the world." It would become the first modern scientific society in Europe, but it made its beginnings on shaky ground. The atmosphere of suspicion that was a feature of Counter-Reformation Rome was hardly favorable to the formation of such a society, and Cesi's own father found it not a good idea.

The Lynxes took their name from the forest animal celebrated by Pliny as "the most clear-sighted of all quadrupeds." Writing about the Lynxes in a May, 1998 article forNatural History magazine, Stephen Jay Gould maintains that they "flourished largely because Cesi managed to keep the suspicions of popes and cardinals at bay while science prepared to fracture old views of the cosmos and develop radically new theories about the nature of matter and causation."

To read about the early years of the Lynxes is to appreciate Cesi for a master diplomat at a time that science desperately needed a diplomatic corps. Adroitly acting to link the gravitas of the rear guard with his own more forward looking aims, he traveled in 1610 from Rome to Naples to recruit the 75-year old Della Porta, with whom he had been corresponding for two years, as the fifth Lynx. For all he belonged to a fading era then, Della Porta was a name to conjure with. There could be no better in all Italy, until one year later, when Galileo became the sixth Lynx.

The Eternally Contentious Issue of Priority

Della Porta's gifts to science may still not be entirely weighed up, but fair treatment was meted out to him by Prof. Luisa Muraro, the Italian philosopher and feminist, in her 1978 monograph,Giambattista Della Porta mago e scienziato. Both Kepler and Descartes studied his writings on optics, with Kepler praising him as the inventor of the telescope. Before William Gilbert wrote De magnete, in 1600, he read the beefed up second edition of the Magia naturalis. So, while it is possible to make the case that Gilbert could have written De magnete without Della Porta, Prof. Muraro shows that he did not.

Stephen Jay Gould writes about the "eternally contentious issue of priority" in assigning credit for the invention of the telescope. "Galileo never claimed that he had invented the telescope from scratch. He stated that he had heard reports about a crude version during a trip to Venice in 1609. He recognized the optical principles behind the device and then built a more powerful machine that could survey the heavens. But Della Porta, who had used lenses and mirrors for many demonstrations and illusions in his Magia naturalis and who understood the theory of optics quite well, then claimed that he had formulated all the principles for building a telescope (although he had not constructed the device) and therefore deserved primary credit for the invention. Although tensions remained high, the festering issue never became an overt battle royal because Galileo and Della Porta held each other in mutual respect, and Della Porta died in 1615 before any growing bitterness could get out of hand."

Alongside work on the lost Taumatologia, it was a campaign to reclaim credit for the telescope that occupied much of Della Porta's final years. One mind divided between the magic of demons and the starry message speaks to the impossibility, in any era, of being fully aligned with even the most compelling future direction. But we should expect contradictions from an aged seer who spent his youth unmasking nature, who, when still a boy, fathomed how to turn a woman green.

Below, written by Della Porta when he was close to death, is a letter now in the archives of the Museo di Storia della Scienza, in Florence. He has sketched for his correspondent, Federico Cesi, the simple tube equipped with mirror and lenses as he had imagined but never built it, 30 years earlier. Or, as he imagined that he had imagined it.

                            

 

Web Resources for this Article

http://homepages.tscnet.com/omard1/jportat5.html

A compendious amateur site of Della Porteana, with well chosen excerpts from pertinent material

http://www.precinemahistory.net/

A site with timelines about technologies, including the camera obscura, leading to the cinema

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/historicalanatomies/porta_home.html

Historical Anatomies on the Web, with Della Porta's Physiognomies

http://www.lincei.it/index.php

Official site of the Accademia dei Lincei, some English translation available

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giambattista_della_Porta

Wikipedia page for Giambattista Della Porta

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Cesi

Wikipedia page for Federico Cesi

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1134/is_n4_v107/ai_20549274

Article on the Lynxes by Stephen Jay Gould, from Natural History magazine, May, 1998

 

 

Books Consulted

Giambattista Della Porta mago e scienziato, by Luisa Muraro, Feltrinelli, 1978

Thinking with Demons, by Stuart Clark, Oxford University Press, 1997

Science and the Secrets of Nature, by William Eamon, Princeton University Press, 1996

The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History, by David Freedberg, University of Chicago Press, 2002

Giambattista Della Porta, Dramatist, by Louise George Clubb, Princeton University Press, 1965

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted by Elatia Harris at 12:20 AM | Permalink

COMMENTS

Another wonderfully erudite, humorous and freshly written piece from Elatia, illuminating yet again a delicious slice of human history.

Posted by: Cathy | Mar 30, 2009 8:22:44 AM

A fascinating dig down into a topic I would be hard pressed to find anywhere but here. And this is right in line with your recommended reading, "The Ancient Shore" (Shirley Hazzard and Francis Steegmuller). So now Naples (and Della Porta) has a new face for me, one that is much more textured and compelling. Thanks for this.

Posted by: Deborah Barlow | Mar 30, 2009 9:11:18 AM

Elatia, you bring science and art together in a most enticing way. John

Posted by: John Altobello | Mar 30, 2009 9:44:17 AM

Congratulations, Elatia, on a truly wonderful exploration presented to us. I was just reading on types of melancholy and the cures, which, aside from the bleeding, types of baths and unexpected curative powers of animals and roots, it does send the patient back to diet and exercise. Some things remain.

Posted by: Karen | Mar 30, 2009 11:08:22 AM

Now I shall throw around the word decoct with abandon.

As usual with Elatia's contributions, I learn so much and find that I want to forward her musings to many of my friends.

Keep up the good work!

Posted by: Reven | Mar 30, 2009 11:56:35 AM

Riveting details, beautifully composed. Thank you for your mastery and generosity in beckoning me into time travel and intrigue. Rewarding in the most unusual way that I confess I have come to expect with pleasure! Your grateful reader, Holly

Posted by: Holly Alderman | Mar 30, 2009 10:11:30 PM

I enjoyed your article!

Posted by: alh | Mar 31, 2009 3:30:57 PM

Thanks to Elatia Harris,
what a wonderful essay. An inspiration and joy to read.
Oh..to be a polymath!
I'm off to try
Martin Moran

Posted by: Martin Moran | Apr 1, 2009 11:20:47 AM

I thoroughly enjoyed this post. I had never heard of Della Porta of Naples. The trajectory of his life and his mind as you have chronicled it, was fascinating indeed. I have often wondered if the geniuses (and they were almost all polymaths) of yore had more prodigious brains than the modern man. 

I am astounded by the information you have stored in your attic (and in your mind) - old books, photos, your mother's travel jottings and post cards, 16th century recipes... Wow!

Posted by: Ruchira | Apr 1, 2009 1:32:58 PM

The polymath is still around, but we fail to call them that because we are all now so used to spreading our interests and methodologies over multiple disciplines.

Although, given the time, money and inclination, I would love to paint, write and practice science all from the same studio/study/laboratory. Give me a polyspace and I will poly in it!

Posted by: Daniel Rourke | Apr 2, 2009 9:00:07 AM

Thanks for reading and commenting, everybody -- I truly appreciate it.

Ruchira, one of the most learned humanists of the Renaissance was Politian of Montepulciano -- we don't read too much about him in English. And you could say he was a polyhistor rather than a polymath. In the late 1400's, so learned was he that it was widely thought he knew all that there was to know. At the time, everything that was considered Knowledge fit into about 500 volumes. That would have been a vast library. Not to take away from a genius of half a millennium ago, but the scope of such learning today would defeat any one person, no matter how spectacular an intellect.

Daniel, if a polymath is someone who does three or more things so well that any one of them could be his sole occupation, then the term might apply, although I think "polyvalent" or "multi-talented" would be more useful. A polymath would have to do these several things on a world-historical scale, so that "talent" would not be the word for it. But I hope you have a room with three sides!

Posted by: Elatia Harris | Apr 2, 2009 9:41:34 AM

I am left wanting to know what Della Porta was going to do with that woman, having made her green. Who "yearns" for such a thing?

This was a great piece, Elatia, and a nice reminder that the history of science, the arts, and hermeticism are not so easily untangled.

Daniel, it's one thing to poly one's maths, another to be rememembered for it in centuries to come. Our modern day Jacks of All Trades come up hard against the competition in a culture that rewards ever-tightening circles of specialization. Anyone remember the Eric Idle joke (from "The Road to Mars"), about the 24th century custom of paleontologists specializing in a particular 15-minute period in history?

Posted by: Chris Schoen | Apr 2, 2009 11:37:07 AM

Who "yearns" for such a thing?

Chris, didn't you know? That would the late medieval male polymaths. They liked their women polychrome.

Posted by: Ruchira | Apr 2, 2009 12:29:53 PM

I guess they shared that predilection with Captain Kirk. Who is supposed to be some sort of future time renaissance man. (Don't tell Eric Idle.)

Posted by: Chris S[c]hoen | Apr 2, 2009 12:54:10 PM

After reading one of your articles, I always turn a little green, with envy. You are much smarter and more interesting than your sister.

Posted by: Harriet | Apr 2, 2009 1:48:27 PM

Where, then, is my Tony Award, Harriet? But it's nice to be envied deeply from within the family...

Chris and Ruchira, there was much Della Portiana that didn't make it into the post. I had A Point To Make, and didn't want the thing reading like an inventory of the quaint fit for a Renaissance Pleasure Faire skit. The recipe for turning a woman green can be found in a section of the Magia called "Some Sports Against Women." Reading this, one believes a boy in his late teens was the author. One such sport was breathing saffron onto the face of a woman to see if she "painted." So, orange and green -- polychrome may be right.

Posted by: Elatia Harris | Apr 2, 2009 2:26:08 PM

Okay, my brain is going to explode...5...4...3...I love you!

Posted by: Kate | Apr 2, 2009 11:20:03 PM

Dear Elatia,
What a delight to read you again! Having been to Naples this past November I was especially intrigued to learn about the city's most famous "polymath."
I confess I had never heard the word "polymath" before (or if I had--perhaps a thousand years ago when I was prepping for the College Boards by perusing through the dictionary for obscure words--I'd forgotten since I'm obviously not a polymath), but I am now going to post this on my mental queue list of fabulously specialized words to use in the future.
But why not use it in the present?
So, I will use this new word right in this "comment" column, by writing: You, Elatia, are the only polymath I know!
I'm dazzled by your knowledge--but I think that's what I always write.
Thank you for filling me in on Cesi's Lynx group and Galileo's connection to it. Another example of "six degrees of separation" for me.
And as for Della Porta's speculation on plants and their medicinal purposes through a study of their physical attributes, all that went through my mind when I read this part of your essay was, thank goodness, I have very low blood pressure because I am allergic to beets.

I look forward to your next article!

Posted by: Ulle | Apr 4, 2009 6:06:28 PM

How lucky we are to have our own 21st C polymath, who immerses us in her breadth and depth of knowledge, inseparable from her beguiling style. Once more, Elatia, thanks for this rich April surprise!

Posted by: Pamela | Apr 6, 2009 10:30:59 AM

Elatia; Whooo....where ever do you find these, elegant and resonant 800 hundred pound gorillas? Picture a small King Kong in top drawer Mannerist finery, quite nearly Baroque. Where to start? Della Porta was clearly the Renaissance Man's Renaissance Man(which would make him a Born Again's Born Again; but I regress) and he's sitting right at that alchemical spot where magic is about to become science. This has me wondering if Clarke's Third Law could be paraphrased as; "Any sufficiently developed magic is indistinguishable from science." or maybe "Any insufficiently developed science is indistinguishable from magic." or maybe not. Thank you also for the section on the Accademia dei Lincei. A horrid pun about a missing Lynx is trying to work its way into this commentary but I'll just have to settle for thanking you for all of the wonderful "links" that you uncovered about these fellows- The Alan Moore fan in me is picturing "A League of Extraordinary Renaissance Gentlemen". sample scene:

The Lynx secret laboratory- Our heroes are pondering their next move.

Galileo- This is a dark turn...If Lord Malatesta has DaVinci's notebooks and is able to realize those seige engines then there is not a force in Chrisendom that can stop him.

Della Porta- It is that truly, Maestro...the answer lies outside of brute force. We must be subtle. I am thinking that maybe a woman's touch is required.

Galileo- We are of like mind on this... Pozo? (The Lynx's faithful footpad and all round henchman, the resourceful if somewhat base, Pozo emerges from the shadow.)

Pozo- Maestro...What is your will? Galileo- Make some discreet inquires as to the availability of Lady Borgia...We may have need of Lucretia's abilities.

Okay...the Lynx eyed among you have caught the obvious anachronisms (House Malatesta was a spent force by 1500 and Lucretia Borgia died in child birth in 1515 but hey...we're talking secret histories here and a cover up and alchemically derived longevity potions, of course.

 

Posted by: Pete Chapman | Apr 15, 2009 12:38:44 PM

Oh man, I missed this while hiking in the rain on spring break. I've always been fascinated by the intersection of science and magic in history and pop culture. Pete, I love your variations on Clarke's Law.

Posted by: Vicki Baker | Apr 15, 2009 1:16:08 PM

Extreme Cases: An Interview with Affinity Konar, 3 Quarks Daily, 6/1/09

EXTREME CASES: AN INTERVIEW WITH AFFINITY KONAR

                


Elatia Harris

Earlier this year, Affinity Konar, a former 3 Quarks Daily blogger, published her first novel, The Illustrated Version of Things (Fiction Collective Two, April 2009.) One of the very few 3QD columnists to post short fiction, her pieces were received in a way that suggests the form has a future here. Her novel, too, has been greeted with excitement – and read hungrily by me, among others.

In a bookstore, one might find The Illustrated Version of Things shelved under coming-of-age fiction. From time to time while reading it, I spared a thought for some classics of the genre – one in which growing up usually does a young protagonist a bittersweet bit of good. Less usually, a bleak childhood will be seen as a lost paradise by a narrator who has crossed over -- if only he’d known. Whatever happens, poignant is the watchword. If to have that note sounded is why you would read about kids, then this is probably not the book for you. Sam Lipsyte has a word for the experience of reading it: “singular.” Ben Marcus, a phrase: “the far limits of sorrow and isolation.” I don’t disagree, but it’s worth adding that it’s also a very funny book.

Affinity and I exchanged emails over 10 days as she and her family prepared to move from Virginia to California, where she grew up. They’re all on the road as I write, headed west.

                                   

Elatia Harris: Though the brother and sister in the novel are extreme cases, I got an uncanny sense as I read of how provisional every childhood is. That it's kind of amazing that any of us makes it through -- assuming adulthood is the point. A children's advocate I know says that adulthood is not really the point, only the result of childhood.

Affinity Konar: I see it as provisional as well, and have always been tempted to view individuals who surface from horrific childhoods—not only intact, but functional beyond all understanding–as unusually talented people. It’s as if they have an extra muscle in their bodies, or a passport that allows travel between worlds with disparate laws of maturity and justice.  

 

EH: Do those laws bind fictional characters? The brother and sister in your novel?

AK: I’d hoped that the brother character would dilute the notion that their childhood experiences were solely responsible for the narrator’s failures.  Her language and perspective were the more pressing issues to me, and I’m still unsettled as to whether or not she’s actually interested in making her life livable.

 

EH: Readers will notice we don't talk about your narrator by name -- they should know we're not being vague. She gives almost every sign of not having a name. Tritely, I'm wondering about your first name. To me, it sounds straight out of a novel by Goethe. Or certainly like something to do with chemistry. And it's refreshing to be asking someone else about her unusual name rather than defending my own.

AK: It's an odd relief to speak to someone else who is eccentrically named, too--I know I should plead Goethe or chemistry, but I just turned around and asked my mother about it, and she says it was a purely aesthetic choice, that she wanted something very feminine, so... It was a good move in any case though, because it sort of encouraged an affection for words that are somewhat off the beaten path. And provides for a lot of funny interactions.  

EH: Mm, tell me about it. But this isn't just gossip. Your having a highly unusual name, and your protagonist being positively handle-challenged, might be unrelated facts but they are not going unremarked on. Names like ours have their good points, but -- would you name a daughter Affinity?

AK: No, I wouldn't, even thought it's been entertaining for me -- and a lot of other people.  I suspect sometimes that my name led to my shyness.  Every time a stranger meets me I want to interject and tell them that it's okay to laugh, I know that it's funny too, and I still, after all these years, can't believe that that's what I'm known as. 

It's definitely led to trouble in naming characters, and I can't say that the protagonist's handle-difficulties aren't related...

EH: I am wondering how being unnamed helps the protagonist more fluidly toggle from identity to identity Whether this may underline her shape-shifting, putting it on a nearly mythological level, where, in the end, it seems unabashedly -- rather, necessarily -- to be. Never to be called by name is to remain unclaimed in some essential sense -- not by the writer of the fiction, but by the other characters. 

AK: I was hesitant to leave her unnamed, but it was also impossible to name her.  I couldn't imagine her answering to any one name--and thought that yes, she'd prefer to have the gift of flitting from identity to identity, given that some of her circumstances offer little wriggling room. While it's never spelled out, there's one moment of extreme duress where she calls attention to its written form--there's always been a great difference to me, in the spoken word and the written one.  I can handle my name somewhat on a page, but it's a whole different beast if I have to hear someone else say it, let alone myself.  There's something so final and limiting about it that's oddly physical to me. 

EH: Well, I'm not telling what it is! Words have such different presences in different forms for writers, but you're talking about something bigger than that...

AK: My parents taught me to read by placing signs with the names of objects all over the house and I'm not sure if it assisted my progress whatsoever, but words have always been strangely tactile to me, and names especially so.  Making her anonymous made her untouchable in a sense, and I wanted to offer her at least that illusion of comfort. 

EH: Well, she needs it. I've read a lot of fiction about late adolescence and its hideous pains, but never before one in which a kid turns bars of soap filthy with her touch -- twice! That really is awful -- you should be congratulated. I was convinced she only saw herself as that unclean, and her soap probably looked as good or bad as anyone else's. But the world of the novel is one in which there's a lot of blood and filth and injury. With the narrator -- not quite literally -- clawing her way through a cloacal passage, laboring under a curse. Why shouldn't it show on her soap? 

People haven't accused you of being a particularly naturalistic writer, have they?

AK: I love that you think that her soap was as clean or as unclean as anyone else's!

I can't say that I'm often accused of being naturalistic. I actually began the novel when a mentor challenged me to write a story as realistically as I possibly could, and in the least opaque language that I could manage. I thought it was a pretty useless task at the time, and was offended as only a young person whose adolescent survival was highly dependent on surrealist word games could be, but that attempt to skew as closely to what other people perceived as natural clued me in to how I might be able to articulate a certain outsider's point of view, one that is constantly in a process of translating itself into acceptability, while having very little idea of what acceptability is. So that assignment became the opening chapter, and while I was in the thick of writing the rest of it I wasn't preoccupied so much with where it fell along the naturalism spectrum. 

EH: Your protagonist is probably the least acceptable kid I've ever met reading. Totally unacceptable, although endearing in how wrong she is for everything, and in how low her sights are set. I kept wanting to put the book down and talk her out of it, and then would realize there was no way to reach her but to keep reading -- which I had other reasons for wanting to do.

People should be careful talking about the mother. But the mother, even off-stage, is a bad mother of the epiphanial class.

It was the father I kept needing to hit, however. There's one scene in which he appears wearing only a beach towel. I thought how much fun to reach in and pull it off. To make him to face himself naked as a nurse who made vitamins for a hobby and spliced up at the sight of the suffering he caused.

AK: Your very physical impulses towards the father are so welcome to me, because I often hear people bemoan the mother exclusively. The fact that she tends to be singled out as the only party responsible for the protagonist's stunted nature has made me more sympathetic to her than I believed myself capable of being while writing the book, and it's given her another life in my mind that I wish I had been able to incorporate. It seems unfair that the narrator's disproportionately extreme longing for the mother serves to indict her as the more ghastly half of the parental unit, but there's also something of a tribute in it, I think--it's difficult to envision her having such extreme swings in affection for the father, whose inertia and passivity are often perceived as more forgivable.

EH: The father's impulse to give aid and comfort to everyone but his children is devastating. And funny. I knew a mom like that -- no, I am not her daughter. I kept thinking of that Bunuel classic,The Phantom of Liberty, wherein the "missing" little girl in the powder blue coat is seen to be found by everyone except her deeply concerned parents, on whom her reappearance does not register. She tugs at their sleeves in the police station, but they can't be distracted from their absorption in the loss of her. The father is blind like that.

I felt the mother needed to be missing, artistically, so I was not necessarily expecting her. (Anyway, certainly not the way she -- never mind!) I felt she needed to be immanent. But positioning your baby under a leak in the roof, the better to obtain nourishment for it, nourishment that was otherwise withheld, deserves a niche in the Bad Mother Pantheon.

I guess you can't write about kids whose parents carry on so without writing a coming-of-age fiction. Are you artistically comfortable locating The Illustrated Version of Things there?

AK: So many of my favorite books rest along the coming-of-age spectrum, and I'm always too happy to hear it classified along those lines; I suspect that a portrayal of the narrator at any age though, would fall into the same category. 

I made a living writing educational scripts for a children's cartoon brand during the whole process, and it's funny to think how much of that informed the novel--I had to make pitches concerned with teaching kids about coping mechanisms and behavioral skills through these super-saturated, pop-culture characters with catchphrases and anagrams, and I can't say that my personal diagrams of maturity weren't frequently corrected by the editors.

EH: So that was one inspiration! What were some others?

AK: Twain’s Huck never really left me. He kicked off my obsession with the supposedly unlovable figures, derelicts, outsiders, underachievers—it’s a love that won’t resolve itself, though I thought it was close to closure after reading "Red the Fiend" by Gilbert Sorrentino, which pulls you through scenes whose horror is matched only by playful, often gymnastic language. I also thought a lot about Gary Lutz and Ben Marcus stories, the sad and comic ways that they bend words, the lines you only have to read once to remember always.  And I ended up returning Grace Paley for conversation, Rimbaud for the synesthesia, Witold Gombrowicz  for nearly everything, and Beckett for just as much, sometimes more.  Lydia Millet’s "My Happy Life" put aside my doubts about creating characters that are at a great disadvantage in the world, but it’s so much more than that, and I wind up wordless just thinking about it.

EH: It's hard to talk about the end of the novel without uncorking it. And, while I think people should read it to be reading it, they should also read it for the way it ends. I will say that while reading -- and after -- one feels caught up in something tremendous, not in a story about quirky kids. There's a filmic aspect to the book, too. Are there films that have made a difference to you as a writer?

AK: Sam Lipsyte referenced My Best Fiend in a workshop once, and spoke about how Klaus Kinski habitually entered a scene with his body at a lean, half-hidden, evasive angle, just lurching into the frame. And he talked about how a writer could enter a story in the same way, at a slant, with an evasive sentence leading to a more revealing sentence. Thinking that way--in terms of physical gestures as applied to language—was really striking to me, and it became a sort of game to play with the narrator and my favorite actors.  As in—here she’s in Buster Keaton mode, completely deadpan, or here she is, doing a teenage Jodie Foster, all narrowed eyes and swagger. I have difficulty thinking visually sometimes, and it was strangely helpful to think of writing as a sort of performance.

EH: Although people in an excellent position to judge have written about your use of language -- and it is striking and beautiful and original -- I considered that asking you to talk about that was like collaring a weaver of the Unicorn Tapestries to make her talk about stitches. Instead, tell me a little about publishing with Fiction Collective Two. I am not so sure most mainstream publishing houses are excited when they hear a writer's use of language is extraordinary.

AK: The prospect of publishing—even though that was supposedly what I’d set out to do—made me feel more uncomfortable and disembodied than I’d thought possible, and abandoning it was a genuine, ever-lurking temptation.  Much of the content of the book had been inspired by my mother’s childhood, and what was written as a personal tribute to her suddenly felt too limited, too final. Brenda Mills, my editor at Fiction Collective Two, pulled a magic trick and drained a lot of the fear out of the experience, but my knees still knock with awe at the fact that my book was accepted by FC2, since it has a history of publishing great work on the fringe of what’s commonly perceived of as publishable. 

EH: I'm a friend of Jonathan Baumbach, who was a friend of my late teacher, Art Edelstein, and a founder of the Fiction Collective. Maybe FC2 is doing for our era what the Fiction Collective did for the late mid-century. 

When you get to California, will you live close to your family?

AK: Oh, yes. We're all joking that we're like the Joads -- but with a happy ending.

 

 

The Illustrated Version of Things , by Affinity Konar, Fiction Collective Two, March 2009.

(amazon.com link)

A Factual History of Fictional Natures, Affinity Konar, 3 Quarks Daily, December 8, 2008.

All We Know, All We See, Affinity Konar, 3 Quarks Daily, January 5, 2009.

In Nutshell Code, Affinity Konar, 3 Quarks Daily, February 2, 2009

Web site of Fiction Collective Two -- http://fc2.org/

Posted by Elatia Harris at 01:08 AM | Permalink

COMMENTS

Elatia, what a wonderful job of interviewing Affinity. You create an atmosphere in which she feels completely at ease in responding and elaborating. yours, John

Posted by: John Altobello | Jun 1, 2009 10:59:46 AM

I don't often read fiction anymore, but the interview convinced me to read the book.

This is interesting:

"Affinity Konar: I see it as provisional as well, and have always been tempted to view individuals who surface from horrific childhoods—not only intact, but functional beyond all understanding—as unusually talented people. It's as if they have an extra muscle in their bodies, or a passport that allows travel between worlds with disparate laws of maturity and justice."

I don't know if it's talent as much as tapping into the human source of resilience -- but it's probably both. I mean, think of Charlie Chaplin.

Thank you, EH. Thanks, too, for info on FC2. I saw the book advertised in NYRB by University of Alabama Press but didn't know about FC2.

Good luck, Affinity, in California.

Posted by: Louise Gordon | Jun 1, 2009 8:26:56 PM

What's epiphanial mean? I've noticed that you use it a lot.

Posted by: Michael | Jun 1, 2009 8:34:34 PM

Michael, I certainly do use "epiphanial" a lot. I searched to see other uses than my own, and on the first Google page, most of the uses of "epiphanial" were my own. Ahem.

I could get Greek on you, but an epiphany is a very clear appearance, one that is usually sudden. It can involve a deity, or something else overwhelming. It need not be material, but it must be visible. If it's not something you've been shown, then it's probably not an epiphany. The result of an epiphany is usually a flash of insight, insight so deep as to be life-altering. What could you be shown that would leave you like that? You can't think, can you? If you could think, it wouldn't be an epiphany. "Epiphanial" is an adjective deriving from epiphany.

Thanks for reading closely enough to notice what I do!

Posted by: Elatia Harris | Jun 1, 2009 9:15:05 PM

elatia,

i notice that your name gives me a kind of joy and lightness whenever i enunciate it. would you know why?

thanks,

aditya.

Posted by: Aditya Dev Sood | Jun 2, 2009 2:15:17 AM

Aditya, that is so sweet! Saying my name makes an exhalation sound -- your breath rushes out with it, you find it disburdening. Of course it could also sound deflating...

Louise, thanks for drawing attention to Fiction Collective Two. I hope writers who are interested will go to the link at the end of the post. These are not your everyday publishers.

Heard from Affinity on the road, btw -- Ohio w/o Internet.

Posted by: Elatia Harris | Jun 3, 2009 11:33:21 AM

Well, she certainly is pretty.

Posted by: aguy109 | Jun 3, 2009 2:41:48 PM

The Affinity of Elatia (they do go well together in the one breath err sentence). I'm far more intrigued by the book than if I had been simply reading a review, I'm sure. Thanks very much!

Posted by: peacay | Jun 3, 2009 4:55:07 PM

What a wonderful exposé. I am looking forward to reading more of Affinity and from you, Elatia.
Thanks!

Posted by: Karen | Jun 4, 2009 5:57:32 AM

This was fascinating on both sides of the discussion. I would love to read more interviews by you Elatia... oh, and of you as well!

Posted by: OT | Jun 5, 2009 9:45:49 AM

James Ensor: Keepin' It Surreal, 3 Quarks Daily, 7/27/09

JAMES ENSOR: KEEPIN' IT SURREAL

   Self-portrait with Masks (detail), 1899, Menard Art Museum, Komaki City, Japan

Elatia Harris

James Ensor, the Belgian painter, died in 1949, having done his last searing work half a century earlier. The man in the sea of masks, above, was wrapping it up in the studio even as he painted this self-portrait at age 40. In two decades of furious industry, he had cast himself as Christ, as John the Baptist, as an insect, a skeleton and a herring. Crucified, beheaded, rattling but undead, made a meal of by critics or simply subhuman, he spared a thought for how he might appear a century after his birth. My Portrait in 1960, below, is an etching on woven paper. It's no self-portrait -- the actual sight of his remains would necessarily be recorded by some other guy. This is just a nudge.

                       

Ensor kick-started Surrealism and Expressionism, driving Flemish painting forward from its roots in the Renaissance to its foundational place in Modernism. In him, Bosch, Bruegel and even Rubens found an heir who would poke holes through the possibilities of paint, and figure forth a vision powerful enough to impel artists a century later to engage with it en route to terra incognita of their own. And that's not all. While it is common to feel repelled by art considered in exquisite taste in the late 19th century, uncommon it is for an artist of that era to step neatly outside taste once and forever, offending a certain high idea of painting with lasting sureness of touch. As the song, Meet James Ensor, written by They Might Be Giants, urges us -- "Appreciate the man."

With the first major Ensor show in the United States in more than 30 years, the Museum of Modern Art in New York makes that very easy to do, through September 21. I have had a lifetime with James Ensor, one of my mother's art gods. Mother was a Southern lady, the kind that naturally thrills to the transgressive in art. And I am brought to my knees, again and again, by this painter so utterly uningratiating.

 

  

 

The Strange Masks, (detail, right), 1892

 

                            

                        The Skeleton Painter, 1895-6, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp

                        

                        Tribulations of St. Anthony, 1887, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Are these paintings beautiful? Or even good? Those are questions that fence-sitters keep on asking -- with reason. In The Strange Masks, poor Pierrot, Europe's wan clown, slumps to the left, rotting within his white tulle glad rags as the other maskers rot, their shoulders liquefying, their masks peeling away from the bone. A shaft of pearly white light makes it all much too visible. Daylit too is the artist as a dapper skeleton, grimacing at the easel in his bright attic, brushing away at a phantom canvas as Ensor himself would later do: 50 years of painting just about nothing.

In The Tribulations of St. Anthony, the red-hooded saint is beset by pests swirling like microbes. No accident -- the mother of a friend of Ensor's youth, Ernest Rousseau, Jr., was a professor in Brussels, and it was she who gave him his first look at the microscopic world. While death, torment, rot and the skull beneath the skin were Ensor's great themes, he also painted critters that were a microscopic affair, adding to them fantastical flourishes and enlarging them to occupy the same pictorial space as human subjects. From time to time, he gave himself and others human heads and insect bodies, and he painted as few painters ever have crowds that do not mass or advance, but sub-humanly swarm.

Long after his brief stint in art school, Ensor learned etching, for a feeling of permanence. The hardness of copper plates reassured him, he said, compared to the fugitive nature of paint. The etching below,Death Chasing a Flock of Mortals -- it pops up, please click! -- shows what kind of graphic artist he had the dedication to become, his eye trained on Rembrandt and Goya. Even people who find him not only a distasteful but a clumsy painter are filled with respect -- and terror -- by his graphic oeuvre.

                                      

                  Death Chasing a Flock of Mortals, 1896, Etching and drypoint, Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent

In his letters and in his imagery, as his second decade of adulthood wore on, one senses Ensor knew on some level that painting was slipping away from him. The fury in his canvases is not all a matter of his chosen subjects, or of their being presented to confront us in a way no one could find agreeable, but of how the paint is laid on -- it is smeared, it is scraped, it is thick like slabs or streaked. As if the painter could only fitfully decide whether to hurl the stuff or snatch it back. His 8 by 14-foot masterpiece, The Entry of Christ into Brussels, was painted when he was 28. He was never to be parted from it. For one thing, no one else would have it. (Click to pop it up.)

             

            The Entry of Christ into Brussels, 1888, J. Paul Getty Museum, Santa Monica

Christ is the tiny figure in the middle distance, mounted on a donkey, set off by an ochreous halo. Fabulously insulting to the burgers of Brussels -- and by extension to every Belgian -- was the implication they were the gaudy, malicious and deathly rabble surrounding Him. (Details below, click to pop up.)

             

Deep in his youth, Ensor had painted Post-Impressionistically: diners tucking into shellfish; light passing through glass; lunch tables enlivened by cut flowers; and, big skies luminous over red roofs.

   

L., The Oyster Eater, 1882, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp

R., Rooftops of Ostend, 1884

These paintings are conventional enough, are they not? Well, they were not, according to the art establishment of the day, when Impressionism and its spawn were still a risky business. Painting like this, Ensor got himself nowhere in terms of acceptance or a career, and it is interesting to see if these early works herald the changes to come. Pop up The Oyster Eater -- oh, yes -- look at the shadows cast by the dresser against the wall. They are writhing. Look to the far right strip of the painting, and you will see the great disquiet they hated at the Brussels Salon. My mother always told me -- look at the edges of a painting to tell where the artist is headed next. But for North Sea light on gleaming white linen, as proper a subject for art as the 19th century ever saw, this is no bad painting.

Simon Schama, writing about the present show at the MoMA for the Financial Times, calls Rooftops of Ostend "breath-taking." And it's true -- there's nothing to forgive here before finding it beautiful. Yet the freedom and vigor, the arbitrary use of color, the palette knife that suggests but does not describe -- all that delights our eye, and that of Simon Schama -- seemed antic to art lovers of the 1880s. Just that crucial bit off-key.

Inside a few short years, Ensor would cease to underwhelm and start in earnest to offend his countrymen. What is the route, then, from the matron soon to eat the oyster in her grasp, from the anodyne eventful sky, to the confrontational and hideously truthful paintings of the next two decades? Paintings that will never fully gain acceptance as long as we can find them rather jokey. Paintings that still repel. If you don't like Ensor -- or, as with many, you don't completely like him because you are not looking at art to be made so uncomfortable -- then you can always take refuge in classifying him as an extremely unfunny joker in the idiom of the poorest possible taste. With images such as Doctrinal Nourishment, a rare hand colored print of 1889/95, Ensor himself will invite you to be disgusted with him.

                             

                 Doctrinal Nourishment, 1889/95, hand-colored etching, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

 

 

 

Yes, it's what you think. The king of Belgium, the personifications of the Church and the Military all sit in a row and defecate into the open mouths of Belgians. Today, this may not look worse than an editorial cartoon -- but it was once considered subversive. Bodily fluids -- excrescence and the process of deliquescence especially -- were Ensor territory. He was as unafraid as a Plague-rattled fresco painter of the 14th century to address the filthy and the malodorous. This distinctly uncharming print fits into a long tradition of art that curiously dried up in the pre-Modern times Ensor inhabited, a tradition that looked unflinchingly at vile bodies, at all their terrible news.

 

 

The scene above, a detail from the vast fresco of the 1330s, The Triumph of Death, is in the Camposanto of Pisa. Painted by either Francesco Traini or Buonamico Buffalmacco, it shows a gaily dressed party on horseback holding their noses. They and their staring, balking horses are literally stopped in in their tracks by an awful sight and stench, three rotting bodies in open coffins. I've been to see the fresco, and there are, perhaps fortunately, no good photos -- a viewer is likely to be overcome. That was the point. Throughout the 14th century, Europe was ravaged by Plague, and no one was safe. Paintings on this theme -- "As you are, I once was; as I am, you shall be" -- were commissioned to remind everyone in finery or in rags to keep their mind on Last Things. To be ready at any moment to leave their corrupt flesh behind to explode, deliquesce and frighten the horses, because their true business was elsewhere. One contender for the title of creator of this fresco cycle, Buonamico Buffalmacco, was known as a practical joker. If this is not his work, but that of Francesco Traini, then none of his work survives. Now that's a good joke.

More than two centuries later in 1562, when Bruegel painted his own Triumph of Death, the danse macabre was in full sway, with skeletons riding in and reaching out to haul everyone, from paupers to cardinals, off to their mortal fates. While Bruegel is not without humor, he is quite without mercy: a dog chews at a dead child's face. The concept of the hellscape that would throw a proper scare into into the illiterate -- most people, that is -- had evolved through the Bosch years, the time leading up to the Reformation. Bruegel painted skeletons whereas Bosch had instinctively preferred fiends. 

 

For a later comer wanting to conjure with these themes, it's quite a dilemma to contemplate: skeleton or fiend? Ensor's answer, as demonstrated in Masks Confronting Death, from 1888, was -- both.

                                        

The dark sky of the typical Flemish hellscape is forsaken by Ensor for that milky, corrosive all-directional light known to habitues of northern beaches. It's not less hellish, just hell by the light of day. In Venice, it's called water light -- the reflection of sky in vast water, doubling the light. 

Ostend, the Belgian city on the North Sea where Ensor was born, and which he almost never left, was beachy indeed, but had a tragic past. The Siege of Ostend (1601-1604) left more dead than any battle of the Eighty Years' War, and was one of the longest sieges in history -- a "long carnival of death," it was called. At its ruinous end, there was for 12 years a negotiated peace that was also the peace of exhaustion between Spain, the technical victor, and the United Provinces. 

By Ensor's time, Ostend was focused on the kind of carnival that ushers in Lent, and it was taken very seriously there, as it was and is elsewhere in Belgium. Below are the "Gilles" of the town of Binche, a medieval city with one of the oldest and most famous carnivals in Europe. The dark green spectacled Gilles Binchois is referenced by Ensor again and again. Now that carnivals have tourist rhythms, and meanings pried well away from their ritual beginnings, it might be useful to look briefly at why Carnival was ever noncommercially important.

                                              

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was after all very important to Ensor. The masks that fill his paintings, that stare up from the very floors when not covering the faces of his subjects, are both fiendish and comical, and were entirely familiar to him. Not from a loud seasonal festival but from his childhood home, where his mother operated a souvenir shop out of the ground floor. There, she sold chinoiserie and tourist trinkets, and in the deep winter, masks for the coming Carnival. Many of these found their way upstairs, and stayed there 12 months a year, year after year. The only studio Ensor ever had was the attic room of his boyhood home, higher than most of the rooftops of Ostend, high enough for the water light, with its property of making everything it reached both garish and pale, to enter freely.

Carnival signals a reversal of ordinary times of the year. Starting as early as January, but usually not earlier than a week before Ash Wednesday, there is great pressure to eat up the stored foods of winter.  These are rich and meaty foods that, suddenly, do not have to last. They wouldn't last, in any case, in the slowly warming weather, and Lent, the season of purification, is coming on. Through the early spring, butchers wander the countryside replenishing their stocks, so none of the old year's animals eaten for meat will escape the feeding frenzy. A possible etymology of the word is "Carne + vale" or "Farewell to meat." After Carnival, there will be many weeks of porridge.

But Carnival revelers bid farewell to meat in another sense, too -- to the meat-suits they habitually wear, to the stations in life they occupy, to the order under which they live, and, if they like, to their genders and identities. Here, the mask is key. For a masker may take certain liberties, and for a few precious and frantic overfed days, be someone else behind a false face, living "as if" in a meat-suit not his own. In the Middle Ages, Carnival involved the whole town -- beggars were exalted, nobles played low-born, women barked out orders like men. As when death chases everybody down, making a joke of the inequalities we live by, Carnival is subversion and, finally, leveling. It was an intoxicating collective performance and dream, long before it devolved into spectacle.

In Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin characterizes the carnivalesque as overturning the ready-made via energies that are normally suppressed, yet suddenly available and ferocious. The temporal arts, cinema especially, have embodied this concept more than the visual arts, and Ensor in his carnivalesque aspect has reached as deeply into cinema as into painting.

 

     

 

Much has been made of James Ensor's improbable life story. In his early 20s, he joined forces with a Symbolist-leaning group of avant-gardistes, Les Vingt, and had for a time the stimulation of peers. But for most of the next two decades, he was an isolate painting in an Ostend attic, living off his mother's earnings, reading Rabelais and Poe to his heart's content. He couldn't stick school, spent a bare three years there. Gaining entrance into the Academie des Beaux Arts in Brussels, he left early, calling it a school for the blind. A bachelor dressed always for a funeral in a black suit and purple cravat, Ensor was neither formed for academic painting nor theory-laden enough for the avant-garde. He was of course a Wagnerite. Throughout his long strange youth, he was a figure of fun in provincial Ostend. Children in the street had choice things to say about him as he passed.

It has been suggested this is the kind of life to make the person who lives it angry. I'll bet. But without knowing any of that, you can tell as much from the throbbing satirical impulse in his painting, from his long private engagement with the outrageous. It may be smarter, anyhow, to save our pity for eccentrics whose subsequent histories have not transpired, who were misfits without genius.

As he climbed towards 40, a mystery overtook Ensor. The establishment he had reviled in such paintings as Dangerous Cooks, wherein art critics serve up his severed head, began to embrace him, the far-seeing Emile Verhaeren first among them. His pictures began to sell. By 1896, the Musees Royaux in Brussels had purchased Lamp Boy, a very early oil. In 1898, fifty-five of his paintings were exhibited by the avant-garde Salon des cents in Paris, the show accompanied by a special issue of La Plume. Only seven years earlier, his paintings -- the scatological ones involving the Belgian king especially -- had been declared impossible to exhibit. "The prosecutor would swoop down on us," the critic Maus remarked.

But this was not the only mystery, and it was nothing that might not be explained by observing that success in Paris warms the provincial heart to even its craziest sons. The greater mystery is the diminution of Ensor's inventiveness as an artist at precisely the time he began to achieve recognition. By the time he was made a Chevalier of the Order of Leopold, in 1903, his work had taken a classical turn, with some forays into the rococo. Always a music lover, but never musically literate, he composed by ear a ballet, The Scale of Love, and designed the costumes -- more Watteau than Bosch. Beneath the masterpiece of his youth from which he would never be parted, The Entry of Christ into Brussels, he played his harmonium, improvising ceaselessly, voicing mild regret he had not pursued music instead of art.

                                        

Among the newsy conditions he experienced as he became an eminence was that of financial success. His mother, who died in 1915, thereby inspiring one of his few original compositions of that era, had labored throughout the 1880s and 90s to support his father, himself, and his sister, Mitche, pregnant and abandoned by her husband. For almost twenty years before her death, Ensor had earned enough -- and then some -- to secure the small family. And, perhaps fatally to his painting, to secure a life of honored leisure for himself.

Did Ensor buy himself out of the struggle? Something subtler happened, I believe. All artists work for recognition, and some work better and longer without it. Ensor might have been one of those. In the catalog for the last major Ensor show in the United States -- at the Guggenheim, in the late 70s -- John David Farmer proposes that Ensor might simply have wearied of accepting the personal and psychological risks of painting as he did. That's a very good guess, but the unknowable truth is a story for Balzac.

Ensor was given the title of Baron by King Albert I in 1929. By then, he was very much Belgium'sgrand homme. When he made day trips from Ostend, it was almost never to go further afield than De Haan, a charming resort town on the North Sea only a short distance away. It was at De Haan, in 1933, in the garden of the Restaurant Coeur Volant, that the photograph below was taken.

That's Einstein on the far left, Ensor, in the black hat, on the right. In August of that year, the German Jewish philosopher Theodore Lessing had been murdered by the Nazis in Czechoslovakia, where he had fled for his safety. Einstein and his wife, traveling in Southern California, got wind that their home in Germany had been ransacked. Belgium seemed a safe enough place to stop and think what to do. King Albert provided a little villa at De Haan, and the Belgians did everything possible to make Einstein welcome. That included arranging a luncheon with James Ensor. As befits a man likely wondering what new alliances might save his life, Einstein is engaged, leaning into the group. Ensor, whom the camera always set apart from any others present, leans back, almost ceremonially displaying the large bony hands that had for decades done nothing but knot cravats and noodle on the harmonium. If the two visionaries had a conversation amounting to more than pleasantries, it was not transcribed, but much Belgian speculation has gone into making it a substantive affair.

Most surreal of all, James Ensor, the painter of such repugnant subjects that "the prosecutor would swoop down," has made an appearance on the Belgian 100 franc note. The English have a way of de-horning their artist mavericks by knighting them, but this is extreme rehabilitation.

Ensor was a letter writer, and it will soon be possible to read every word he ever wrote, translated into English. But, even in the privacy of correspondence he had only the most evasive remarks to make about his own work. The proof of his engagement with the great artists of the past is in his paintings, and he was notoriously close-mouthed about whether the artists of his own day mattered to him. He had parted company with Les Vingt when they wanted to exhibit Georges Seurat, and that's a very bad sign. Also, he had no students -- influence, but no students. So his art thoughts were not passed on. All an artist can know of Ensor is what that artist determines to find out. But, to paint in the 20th century and simply bypass Ensor, it was necessary to have taken a completely rationalist path.

Too much is made, in my view, of the vaulting respectability of his last five decades, and the departure of the muse. When the wonder is what the muse enabled him to do while she was present. For good or ill, the story of the Modern in art is the story of greater and greater freedom from unthinking convention for form and color. If you like the way that's going, you will appreciate the route it took through an Ostend attic. But even if you don't -- like the song says, appreciate the man.

Posted by Elatia Harris at 12:05 AM | Permalink

COMMENTS

I'd vaguely heard of him. Thanks for all the insights into his life and work. The paintings are remarkable in many ways. I do prefer the "tamer" ones but have to laugh with some of his interpretations of the Brusels crowd and all their pomposity. Thanks for this, best, leonard

Posted by: Leonard Cirino | Jul 27, 2009 3:25:36 AM

Great Elatia, I never heard of him, and his possible influence on modern painting. Certainly he has a powerful way to express with seemingly simple tools his opinion!!, cartoonish? no definitely more powerful. Thanks for introducing us to this. I like the pop ups and the etching is for sure a powerful narrative in itself and "the Doctrinal nourishment" has not lost its meaning even today, it would only include some of the media ......Thanks

Posted by: Mica Hubertus Mick | Jul 27, 2009 4:12:18 AM

Fascinating article and beautiful reproductions. Even the Grim Reaper has been immortalized for us. Hell by the light of day or not, the colors and faces, or masks, draw one into Carnival subversion.

Posted by: Louise Gordon | Jul 27, 2009 4:27:25 AM

Thank you, Elatia, for revealing an incredibly interesting story. John

Posted by: John Altobello | Jul 27, 2009 6:17:50 AM

Your "article" or "appreciation" of Ensor is --and I use the word without reserve--a masterpiece, and wholly fitting to the artist. It bursts with eloquence, and sentences that draw the reader deeper and deeper onto Ensor's work and his milieu: "impressionism and its spawn".
And what work. I'd never viewed "Death Chasing A flock Of Mortals" and I was stunned.I loved Ensor as a boy. Now I love him again. I know how discouraged you were by the critical reaction to the MOMA show. Stepping back and writing about Ensor, while avoiding a direct attack on art critics was, I think, shrewd. And it has permitted me, as a reader, the privilege of once again treating myself to your stunning choice of words.

Posted by: Charlie B. | Jul 27, 2009 10:01:49 AM

Elatia: Beautiful and effective appreciation of an artist unjustly neglected. You persuade me that his virtues are far greater than those for whom one might offer tribute to compensate for their neglect. Congratulations! Michael

Posted by: Michael Blim | Jul 27, 2009 10:32:40 AM

What I value is how you never fail to transport me to new places. Thank you for an excellent article Elatia.

Posted by: Kate Vrijmoet | Jul 27, 2009 11:11:48 AM

You have offered up a valuable contextualizing of Ensor's work. And even They Might Be Giants gets a chance to participate in this richly textured paen. I'm going to see the show tomorrow, so thank you for a perfect prelude.

Posted by: Deborah Barlow | Jul 27, 2009 11:27:16 AM

thanks, Elatia.

morgan

Posted by: morgan meis | Jul 27, 2009 11:28:28 AM

This article is a wonderful, exciting piece of work. I can't help noticing Ensor's influence on your own painting. And I never knew he existed!

Posted by: Thalassa | Jul 27, 2009 11:30:07 AM

Thank you, Elatia. I second what Charlie B. said.

You might like this Ensor connection:

http://www.theateraanzee.be/index.php/en/programma/voorstelling/2669G14

Posted by: Jack Frost | Jul 27, 2009 12:12:54 PM

Elatia,

I am a bit overwhelmed by it all - and happy to be feeling as such. I watched James Kahn's video walk through of the exhibit (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acJRIjOkVU8). Now I am even more overwhelmed.

I wish I could comment coherently about your subject, but I'm not quite there, yet. I did a little online research on Ensor knowing you were coming out with this article. I thought of Edgar Allen Poe and the Vincent Price films of his stories and other films of his in the genre. Low and behold, Ensor was an avid reader of Poe.

After reading your ideas on "Doctrinal Nourishment" and studying the work a little more closely, "Piss Christ" and "Elephant Dung Madonna" seem tempests in a teapot. Your comments about his fascination with microbes and insects led my associative neurons to Kafka's "Metamorphosis". It's a mystery how you came up with Woody Allen's "Love and Death", "The Blade Runner", and the Joker in "Batman", but it feels so right.

And then there's the writing. "In Ensor, Bosch and Bruegel and even Rubens found an heir who would poke a hole through the possibilities of paint, and figure forth a vision powerful enough to impel artists coming a century later to engage with it en route to terra incognita of their own."

Thank you so much.

Posted by: Norman Costa | Jul 27, 2009 12:14:47 PM

Thank You, Elatia, for another brilliant and enlightening essay. It is a privilege to be one of your readers. I can't wait to revisit the show at MOMA!

Posted by: Henry | Jul 27, 2009 12:31:49 PM

Elatia,

Why waste your time with this essay on art when you could be debating the nature of Being that is present in its presentness?

Posted by: J. H. | Jul 27, 2009 12:37:13 PM

Elatia, you guide your readers through mysterious territories with wit and the deep aesthetic understanding earned by your own artistic explorations. I wish curators provided gallery goers with such precise ways in for looking at visual art. I also lingered over the superb Harrisian prose, savoring not only what you wrote, but how you wrote it. Kudos.

Posted by: Randolyn Zinn | Jul 27, 2009 2:28:15 PM

Fascinating article! Thank you Elatia Harris!

Posted by: Holly Alderman | Jul 27, 2009 5:55:58 PM

Thanks for the beautiful writing, and beautiful pictures, and wonderful information. Chris

Posted by: chris | Jul 27, 2009 6:56:22 PM

Hooray Elatia! I knew justice for Ensor was riding to town when you mentioned that you were writing on him. You really have provided the "scope" that you rightly said was missing in a certain review. I'm very pleased that you spent time on the subject of the carnival, beneath the jokeyness and scatology he has always seemed to me, when at his best, a profound painter of reversal. On the formal level he gives us the luminous, pretty impressionist palette of pastel landscape subverted into a waxy vanitas, pointing a constant bony finger at the ultimate reversal. And for a subject, the social implications of carnival, that dangerous period of leveling that you mention, when the collective order is shown to be largely a product of imagination, and potentially cast aside like a mask or costume, couldn't be more radical. Thanks so much for this.

Posted by: Jesse | Jul 27, 2009 7:52:26 PM

How remarkable! Thank you.

Posted by: Harriet | Jul 27, 2009 8:05:31 PM

Elatia,

Another one of your excellent guided tours. I should know, having enjoyed one in real life.

This time let me thank your mother!

Posted by: Ruchira | Jul 27, 2009 10:46:43 PM

James Ensor the weirdo becomes almost sympathetic, his paintings more graspable, and my odd attraction to him more comprehensible (at least to me!) thanks to you. That's a lot, Elatia. And your exploration of the subversive role of masks and carnival in his work has given me much to ponder.

I once kept a marvelous Pinocchio mask in my studio, a mask that embodied the magic you describe perfectly as "both fiendish and comical." My work was stalled for almost a year until I gave the Pinocchio to a studio visitor who admired him extravagantly. The next day, released from his thrall, I was literally back to the drawing board.

"Father, father, I'm a real boy."

Posted by: Sally Reed | Jul 27, 2009 11:47:33 PM

Dear Elatia,
This is a beautiful and breathtaking journey! Thank you so much. I'd been feeling interested to go to MOMA to see Ensor, now utterly compelled. You are amazing! Thank you
Martin Moran

Posted by: Martin Moran | Jul 28, 2009 12:10:23 AM

Elatia, you do these paintings and artists a great service.

Posted by: aguy109 | Jul 28, 2009 2:51:19 AM

Thanks Elatia. Ditto to all above (except the bit about the pinocchio mask—with me it was this damned computer).

It seems like rejection of others was a big part of his psyche. "School for the Blind" (love it), his portrayal of his subjects etc. etc. He "thrived" on being outside the fishbowl and, once he was accepted, that was the end of his work.

Posted by: Carlos | Jul 28, 2009 5:59:38 AM

Fantastic piece thanks Elatia. You lose a point, however, for not linking to the (very good) flash exhibition site at MoMA for those of us who are unable to make it in person.

Posted by: peacay | Jul 28, 2009 9:34:49 AM

These are paintings and an artist I would never have encountered without this article. And I wouldn't have appreciated them without your guidance! Thank you.

Posted by: OT | Jul 28, 2009 11:59:15 AM

Thank you for reading, everybody! Ensor is a very hard sell, I have had many years to find out. But if you like him, you really like him...sort of.

Peacay, Norman and Jack Frost, thanks for the links. Here's another I liked. The animator Nick Uff -- you might know him from Portishead -- made a 4 minute vid called "Ensor (Serenade in the Night)," and it's marvelous. It has plenty of what they call in Belgium Carnival Spirit. Towards the end, it's more Munch than Ensor.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD7v_9XgGEU

Norman, your neurons are magnificently associative! Jesse, you should write about art as well as paint. Sally, that was hilarious -- go buy a Snow White mask immediately! Carlos, I agree with you -- outsiders can't imagine their real advantages until it's too late.

Whoever sees the show, please write to me -- I want to know what you think.

Posted by: Elatia Harris | Jul 28, 2009 8:17:18 PM

"My mother always told me -- look at the edges of a painting to tell where the artist is headed next."
Your mum was very cool, most people's mums say totally obvious stuff like,"Look both ways before you cross the street." or "Look at yourself you're a disgrace." 
As for the rest of the piece, as usual you've got me thinking about all kinds of odd things like, carnivals and medieval economy, what is surrealism before you call it that, masks covering faces covering skulls (and what's a skull mask?), artists who have mums that support them as opposed to artists who have fathers that are slave drivers and wondering what Einstein and Ensor talked about (my guess; they were both amateur musicians so maybe it was music although they stopped when the topic of Wagner came up).
Thanks Elatia, brilliant as always.

Posted by: Pete Chapman | Jul 29, 2009 2:19:50 AM

Delightful! I'd never heard of him before (for some reason he reminds me now of the Addams Family), and am glad to have have this characteristically perceptive tour.

Posted by: D | Jul 29, 2009 9:38:23 AM

D, thank you for reading and commenting. Some of the best 20th century cartooning owes lots to the fine art of earlier eras, especially to the late 19th century graphic arts. You can also link Ensor (though not causally) to Jose Guadalupe Posada and the tradition of calaveras in Mexico -- graphic art that is part folk art, part cartoon, part social satire. One area where Ensor pioneered was in the knocking over of the barriers that separated high and low in art.

Pete, thanks! -- it is indeed interesting how many artists have parents who support them. Very early on, Cezanne's father realized he had to give the boy an allowance and let him be. What a dad!!! Ensor's father was a rather feckless man -- an engineer who could never hold a job owing to alcoholism -- but he encouraged his son in art. Which is different from earning the money to make that studio time happen for the kid, but it's also different from oppressing him. I think we tend to judge artists of the last 150 years by which -isms in our own time they anticipated or influenced outright, as if that were the final test of anything. Great painting may prefigure the anxieties and even the obsessions of a coming era without being specific to its -isms, and I believe this is what Ensor did in exploring themes of alienation, doubleness, and exile even from the self. "World Upside Down" exists apart from schools of painting, which may only partake of that idea, occasionally giving it form.

Posted by: Elatia Harris | Jul 29, 2009 7:20:16 PM

I had never heard of this artist. Thanks for again introducing me to a new subject. I shall be forwarding this article.

Posted by: reven | Jul 30, 2009 4:16:28 AM

I have been feeling a bit sorry for myself because I can't get to NYC while the exhibition is there. I'm feeling better since I read your piece.

Posted by: Bob | Jul 31, 2009 12:28:42 AM

Elatia, I think this is your most lucid and beautiful(beautiful in the sense that every sentence registered an immediate, clear image or idea) essay so far that I've read...thank you for taking me out of myself and for educating me and for making me feel both breathless and sated as I read on and on....

There is so much to ponder here...what you've written about and what you've hinted at go way beyond the boundaries of Ensor and painting...

In the crudest terms possible, it gnaws at the bone of how a person who is always working towards a goal--knowble or unknowable--can distinguish the journey from the end goal or destination, or how a person can sustain both or how...well, there it is...we're down to meaning of life and essence of existence and how can one know oneself...etc....philosophy is not my strength, but all of us in a way are struggling with the same issues that you pointed out Ensor the artist did...and of course,we are left with mysteries about ourselves and life just as you are about Ensor....

On a more practical side, your mother's observation about "looking to the edges of a painting to see where the artist was going next" will be advice I look forward to taking. Perhaps it will revolutionize the way I "see" art...It will certainly widen my perspective (pardon the dreadful pun) and make for a livelier viewing of familiar paintings...

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
Ulle

Posted by: Ulle Holt | Aug 2, 2009 10:17:45 AM

How terrific! The photo of Ensor and Einstein is priceless, and the montage featuring Blade Runner and Batman is food for thought. I love the remarks about Ostend and Ensor being on the paper money. I'm trying to imagine Jackson Pollack on the five dollar bill...

Posted by: JMT | Aug 8, 2009 10:14:14 AM

Dear Elatia, I finally had a chance to read your article, beautifully written and fascinating in its detail. I didn't know about Ensor until my trip to LA this past April where I saw his work at the Getty. Reading your description is my next class in art history by Elatia. Especially fascinating was the detail about Carnival. Thank you so much!

Posted by: Barrie | Aug 17, 2009 10:03:36 AM

A many-faceted gem of an intro to Ensor for me, with light on him and his work cast by your foray into history, biography, artistic connections, and the images themselves, which really show him off as a painter, especially with your illuminating prose! After this belated reading, we're off to NY and ready for the Ensor exhibit. Thank you, Elatia.

Posted by: Pamela | Sep 9, 2009 4:07:03 PM

Elatia, Most Esteemed Colleague -

Thanks, once again, for yet another intriguing essay! À propos of attics and chinoiserie, here’s a link to a marvelous Ensor I spotted this summer in Cologne:

http://www.museenkoeln.de/wallraf-richartz-museum/default.asp?s=217&tid=126&nr=&kontrast=&schrift=&bild=587

Your piece echoes many of the reflections and questions that came to my mind as I stood before this particular painting. Your writing is a rich delight to read.

- Alta

Posted by: Alta Price | Sep 14, 2009 12:10:09 PM

(o.o)

Posted by: Jesse | Apr 13, 2010 10:58:45 PM

Jesse, that mask is more like Munch than Ensor...

Posted by: Elatia Harris | Apr 13, 2010 11:06:58 PM

Interview with Brian D'Amato, 3 Quarks Daily, 12/07/2009

BRIAN D'AMATO: MAYAN SCI-FI AND THE TRIBE OF TRUE -- NOT ASPIRANT -- NERDS

     

Elatia Harris

    Thanks to Brian D'Amato not only for the interview but for original visual images not available elsewhere.                                                   Above, Koh's Game, copyright Brian D'Amato

 

 

In the early '90s, the artist and writer Brian D'Amato published Beauty, an international bestseller about cosmetic surgery and young love gone wrong, badly wrong. Back then, it was all slightly futuristic, right down to its not very cuddly protagonist, a metrosexual monster whose fate I shall not uncork here. Reading it was about as much fun as you could have within a 25-mile radius of New Haven; you kept running into Derrida, but it was trashy enough to make you nice and guilty too. I fondly recall its Mayan sub-theme, and was delighted to find, a decade and a half later, that Brian D'Amato had gone Mayan in the biggest possible way, with In the Courts of the Sun, volume I of a trilogy, The Sacrifice Game, set both in the very near future and in 664 CE, the high point of Mayan civilization. 

It's the read you would expect from the writer of Beauty -- smart, funny, always surprising, and very sure-handedly grounded in technology and philosophy of science. You can read this as literature, but you can also get the sci-fi fix you need. You could even read it to find out how an orphaned Maya refugee interfaces with some beamish and satanic Mormons. There are lots of reasons to get involved, and, whichever you choose, you'll be glad you did. Soon, The Sacrifice Game will be available not only as a trilogy but as a game -- one more form of time travel for those with a thirst for it.      

 Recently, I caught up with Brian D'Amato, who writes from Lake Michigan these days.

    

author photo Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

 

ELATIA HARRIS: Brian, let's talk about 2012. After reading In the Courts of the Sun – well, I don't scoff at the prophecy like I did. You've activated that very great uncertainty that lies beneath all our assumptions – good show! What's the rational way into the 2012 mindset? 

BRIAN D'AMATO: The 2012 phenomenon is the main thing that defines the Maya for most people today.  And In the Courts of the Sun is partly about how contemporary people misinterpret the past, so naturally I had to deal with it in In the book.  But I did want to offer a very different take on it. 

EH: Now, don't give too much away...

BD: Right. The book explores the possibility that prophecies, real or supposed, can be self-fulfilling. People wanting something to happen, getting increasingly desperate, and, maybe, trying to make it happen.  I’m also interested in the Inductive Fallacy -- in this case, the argument that something not happening in the in the past makes it less likely to happen in the future.

For me, getting into the Maya calendar has been more about what one might call the poetics of their mathematics. The numbers and operations the Maya emphasize are often quite different from those that are most meaningful to the Western tradition. Studying this helps get one out of oneself, numerically speaking. 

EH: You had a great way of explaining their simultaneous cycles, making it all not too dizzying to keep in mind. I loved going around thinking like that for the time it took to read. Would pre-telescopic astronomy in Mesoamerica stand a comparison with the same in Europe and Asia? If a complex relation to the stars is one sign of advanced culture across cultures, what might have been the conversation among the Mayans and Mesopotamians -- just for instance?

BD: There’s a scene in my book where the narrator explains heliocentrism to a Maya sun-adderess -- my translation of  “ixwaay,” “female shaman” – and, as I think would have happened, after her initial astonishment she comprehends it easily.  I think it’s fair to say that Mayan astronomy in the Classic period was comparable to Mesopotamian astronomy in the 5^th century BCE, and in some ways, for instance in the Mayas’ famously accurate calculation of the solar year, it was superior.  But if any Mayan astronomers suspected, as Pythagoras did, that the earth was round -- a realization that one could regard as the next big step -- there’s no record of it.  Of course Maya texts are frustratingly sparse, but what has survived doesn’t suggest that any Mesoamerican scientist made this leap. Judging from the Dresden Codex, by about CE 1000 the Maya had calculated the Venus cycle. And these calculations were quite precise, but if they’d been working from the assumption of a round earth, the numbers would have come out slightly different.

EH: Are we talking about an educated society?  

BD: Maya astronomy was mostly esoteric knowledge, restricted to the elite. Although for that matter, even today only a tiny percentage of earthlings know that, say, that most of the universe is probably made up of dark energy and dark matter. Societally, things aren’t so different as one might wish.

EH: Reading In the Courts of the Sun, I get a sense of the Maya being a bit set apart from other Mesoamerican civilizations. I see it in their art, too -- even without expert knowledge. What are some of the ways you'd contrast them with the Aztecs? The Aztecs at the time of the Conquest, that is. We think we know more about them.

BD: The first thing to remember is that the Aztecs arrived on the scene very late in the game, only a couple of hundred years before the Conquest.  Before that they were barbarians -- if that word’s still allowed -- from the deserts of northern Mexico.  After they settled in the Lake of Mexico, they gradually took over cultural elements from the Toltecs and other peoples, who’d been, in turn, the inheritors of the attainments of the greatest Classic Period metropolis, Teotihuacan. 

EH: But...?

BD: But the Aztecs never became literate. The Maya, though, were -- and are -- the cultural and probably the genetic descendants of the Olmec, the “mother culture” of Mesoamerica. In CE 664 -- near the beginning of what’s called the Late Classic, and the year the events in my book take place -- the Maya elite had been using their phonetic script for many hundreds of years.  And Mayan languages have a completely different feeling from the Aztec language, Nahuatl. There’s a whole very distinctive class of positionals in Mayan that emphasize the shapes of things and the associations of actions and objects with the human body.  

  

 

But to me the artistic differences are the most important.  Even though all Mesoamericans shared many elements of their cosmovision, after a few minutes of looking at Maya and Aztec art you’d never mistake one for the other.  Even in their most naturalistic mode, the Aztec’s paintings and sculptures have a brutalist angularity that’s almost the opposite of the Classic Maya style, which is curvilinear, tangled, tenticular, and, I’d say, vegetal. You could relate the stylistic opposition to a very recent one: Maya art might remind a modern observer of Art Nouveau, and Aztec art could strike you as a precursor of Art Deco.

                              

 

                                     

EH: I've heard the Maya called peace-loving. Not so accurately, perhaps? 

BD: The Maya certainly weren’t the placid astronomer-kings they were thought to be until the mid-20^th century, but they were definitely less militarized than the Aztecs, who were and are famous for human sacrifice on a huge scale.  The Maya emphasized a sense of rootedness and a certain aristocratic individuality, whereas the Aztecs had a sort of “wistful warrior” culture that can seem almost Samurai-like.

EH: Your time-traveler, Jed Delanda, found the Maya sympathetic -- but Jed is a Maya. Would the rest of us?

BD: I think so. Even though they had a lot of ferocious habits, the Maya would strike a Western time traveler from the 21^st century as refined and even probably sympathetic. At least more so than the Aztecs.

EH: I was so impressed with your descriptions – they were done with a very light hand, and they never bogged me down, yet I took away a very vivid picture. You probably had to re-imagine a lot to write them. One doesn’t see much to base them on.

BD: Depictions of the ancient Maya’s cities and temples, in articles, books, or even in movies, always disappointed me.  Even Tatiana Proskouriakoff’s important Album of Maya Architecture interprets the Maya sites as smoothly white-surfaced temple groups, surrounded by tastefully encroaching jungle and inhabited by a few desultory groups of priests.  In movies the more usual problem is that the cities look much too much the same as the ruins look today -- that is, scruffy and neglected, with not much color and a lot of exposed stone.  But if you look at the structurally similar temples that are still being kept up today -- the Sri Mariamman Temple in Singapore, for instance, or the Meenakshi Sundareswarar Temple in Tamil Nadu -- you instead get this extreme visual overload because they’re entirely covered with all these shells, beads, statuettes, filigree, gold leaf, a hundred bright colors of paint, little mirrors, and anything else their temple society can think of to make the building pop.

So one of the things I wanted out of the novel was a much richer visual atmosphere than in anything that had been done on the subject up to this time.

EH: And you delivered it. But without the feeling of the guided tour that so much description gives. It was like reading Flaubert that way.

BD: Description, in general, is something readers have lost their taste for. People who teach writing fiction these days -- or even books on writing by people I admire, like, say, Stephen King -- tell you to spend as little space as possible in describing things and scenes.  This is a rule I’ve enjoyed breaking, but it requires some planning to break it and still keep pages turning. 

You mention Flaubert. Well, he's a big influence -- not so much in Bovary but in Salammbo. His main trick, I think -- which I try to emulate -- is choosing words and details that are likely to be most credibly surprising. That is, inclusions and juxtapositions that readers -- one hopes -- haven’t thought of, but which will strike them as right on target.

EH: I remember reading Beauty and thinking you were pretty over-educated in the lit crit department. Lit crit and the Maya were very amusing sub-themes in Beauty, by the way. There were lots of influences on you then, including some very unusual ones. What about now?

BD: Well, as long as we're talking about descriptions, for instance, I often think about a writer who’s not known for her descriptions, Agatha Christie. Even if you’re not writing a mystery, I think descriptions stay interesting only as long as the reader is looking for clues. So even when you’re describing a landscape, the reader should get a sense that there’s an indication in it of something that’s going to become critical later -- the character of its inhabitants, for instance, or the way a battle there is going to play out.  And whenever the description you’re writing doesn’t have that sense of urgency, of a hidden significance that needs to be ferreted out, you should probably cut it.

EH: Let me tell you who also comes to mind -- China Mieville. Like you, he is comically well-educated. And his following is looking for something rich and strange, as I imagine yours is. But inPerdido Street Station, he used the distant dystopia idea. In Beauty and in the present work, you are writing only slightly in the future. Just enough for the technologies you write about to be fractionally out of reach. Where does this locate you, among speculative fiction writers? Are you even writing about the future?

BD: No science fiction is really about the future. It’s about the present -- which implies, correctly, that middlebrow mainstream fiction is about the past.  

And science fiction that’s explicitly set in the present day, or in the very near future, has a long history -- including, for instance, almost all of Jules Verne.  More recently, Michael Crichton was a huge inspiration for me and for a lot of other people who work in this space -- I read The Andromeda Strainwhen it came out, which means I was of an age generally considered too young for such things, and I’m still thinking about it.

One problem is that “science fiction” is too big a term.  There are dozens of subgenres, and they all overlap with each other and with other ubergenres than sci-fi. People have called In the Courts of the Sun Gamepunk or, sometimes, Stonepunk. Beauty was, more solidly, Biopunk. But if I had to pick a label, I’d say there is an overarching movement to which Beauty and the Sacrifice Game books -- and, for that matter, most of the visual and game art I’ve done -- all belong: Posthumanism. 

EH: Pray explain…

BD: Well, Posthumanism comes out in the work in a lot of ways, both in content and in style.  But for me the most liberating thing about it is that it makes it seem all right for me to have no further interest in character.  Of course, character is still the master theme of most mainstream or, as I call it, aspirational fiction.  But to me and to more than a few other progressive writers today, it’s just a big drag.  It’s something we want to leave alone.  This isn’t to say that human character wasn’t interesting back when Flaubert, Tolstoy, Henry James, and others were inventing it as an object of fictional investigation.  And when you read their work you still feel that sense of discovery.  But unless some new writer comes up with something about people and their problems and their relationships and their characters that isn’t just the same old same old -- and it would have to be pretty soon at this point -- I think we can fairly safely call character-based fiction a completed field, like gross anatomy.

EH: But what does this leave you with if you want to know why something happens in a fiction? Didn’t Aristotle in his Poetics say that the character of the hero was the source of his fate? Well, words to that effect.

BD: Today, the depth model of character, the interest in families and relationships, and the upper-middlebrow requirement to -- as one critic is famously fond of saying -- “delicately limn the inner lives of the characters” are the most limiting of all the limitations that are making the contemporary novel increasingly irrelevant.

Of course, keeping someone flipping pages, or even in a chair watching a movie, is not a trivial craft.  It’s a tough pursuit, deserving of respect.  And like it or not, in any story over a few pages long, concern for the characters is the only thing known to do the job. 

 EH: You are positing a difference, then, between how a writer may emphasize character development in a fiction, and how much a reader needs to feel involved with a character to keep reading? A reader of In the Courts of the Sun wants to stay with Jed, for instance. It can’t be the same as reading an abstract.

BD: Jed does have to be a character you can stay with.  His voice, his motivations, and even his damnable inner life all have to be fueled up, airtight, and ready to fly.  A novel should indeed be an “abstract” in the sense of not having anything inessential, but even if it were possible to do a novel that was only plot, that plot would still need to reveal character -- in fact, probably the all-time most important rule of fiction, a commandment that’s tough to break even today and even in one’s most Brechtian mood, is that what happens to the characters has to seem a result of their choices and not the author’s.

The difference is more of a question of motivation.  It’s analogous to the way directors like Alfred Hitchcock or Stanley Kubrick always cast such great actors.  Great acting is essential to their films, but the investigation of character, emotion, the self, or any of that class of issues is secondary. 

And even supposing one did set out to write something about, say, families, that really was up to date -- that discussed, for instance, the structures and transmitters in the brain that relate to kin altruism -- it would sound like science fiction. Like much of Margaret Atwood’s work, it would probably be science fiction.

EH: So talking Post-Humanistically – within sci-fi, that is – we are talking about emphases, not prohibitions. Where did this distinction get started for you? 

BD: Most of the canonical twentieth-century science-fiction writers, and a few of the top fantasy writers -- Vonnegut, Dick, Tolkein, Heinlein, LeGuin, Herbert, and Asimov -- were as big a deal for me as they were for so many others.  But the two sci-fi pieces that I'd say were the most Post-human, and that made the biggest impression on me when I was very young were, first, a Fritz Lieber story from 1963 called "X Marks the Pedwalk”, and, second, Arthur C. Clarke’s novella from 1956, The City and the Stars.  Going back a little further -- both in terms of publication dates and of my own age at exposure -- I was especially taken with HP Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, which is from his Dunsanian period but which still has his singular anti-humanism, and with the HG Wells novella The First Men in the Moon, with its eusocial undersurface society.  Continuing back in time, there’s Moby Dick, which I consider a science-fiction novel, and Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd,” which for some reason affected me the most of all of his stories, although of course all his horror and fantasy tales are indispensable. 

EH: I just have three words to say – Phillip K. Dick. Wasn’t he writing about the meaning of being human?

BD: I suppose the unusual thing here, for someone of my generation, is that I don’t rank Phillip Dick as a number-one influence. But in my experience there are basically Dick People and Clarke people, and I’m emphatically a Clarke person.  It’s not that I’m not crazy for Dick, but despite how ahead of his time he was -- and nobody, except maybe Kafka or Lovecraft, has been more so in this century -- his theme is indeed still being human. His stories are about having a human mind and a human’s dissociations and paranoias.  And my feeling is that humanity is no longer an interesting subject. Contrastingly, Arthur C. Clarke wasn’t much interested in the human -- he was interested in the poetry of ideas, which puts him more in the tradition of his friend Lord Dunsany, along with Lovecraft and Borges.

You mention Mieville. I read Perdido Street Station when it came out, and I was quite impressed. He does his own illustrations sometimes, too, which was encouraging for me.  And William Gibson, George Saunders, Neal Stephenson, Neil Gaiman, and Jonathan Lethem are always worth reading.  Still, I generally find much less of interest in contemporary fiction -- even science fiction -- than I do in either classical fiction and poetry or in something unequivocally newer, like computer games.

 

                          

Game Board, The Sacrifice Game, copyright Brian D'Amato

 

EH: Speaking of games… When you come out with the game, following the trilogy – who would like to play The Sacrifice Game?

BD: People who play Chess and Go would like it.

EH: And those are the readers of the trilogy, too. People who are thinking many scenes ahead of the present scene. And who sense contingency as a huge element in the structure of what they’re reading. You called readers of mainstream fiction “aspirational” a while back – what about sci-fi readers?

BD: This may be a truism, but still, I’m always struck by how much books tell you more about their readers than their writers.  You get roughly the same comments other books do, so the only way, say, a prospective buyer can tell the difference between one book and another is by assessing the difference between the two groups of reviewers -- that is, readers. And if those readers are themselves more interesting, we call the books they like interesting. 

When you write anything that has any science fiction to it, you’re limiting yourself to a certain subset of readers -- one that may be growing, but which the mainstream still doesn’t get. And I think that the main difference about the readership -- besides the arguable point that sci-fi readers are, on average, more intelligent -- is that they’re reading less for social reasons. 

EH: That’s the aspiration? A social one?

BD: Exactly. Science fiction isn’t aspirational.  In other words -- even given science fiction’s still-newish academic credibility -- people who read it are usually just reading for themselves.  Socially, they’re already where they want to be, or where they feel they’ll remain, and don’t need to pick a reading list designed to convince other people that they’re socially conscious or intellectually upwardly mobile.  From a sociological point of view, science fiction is not middle-class -- today, for better or worse, it’s primarily directed to the current equivalent of what Paul Fussell has not entirely convincingly called the “X Class” and which is now the tribe of true -- not aspirant -- nerds.

EH: Well, there’s my title. But speaking as an aspirant nerd and reader of literary fiction, In the Courts of the Sun has a lot to offer readers like me. I want to ask you about the illustrations. It’s such a beautiful book – I can’t believe these drawings were done with a computer, and not ink on paper. What did you use?

BD: Until 2003, when I did illustrations of this type I inked them on paper, with pens (mainly using antique Gillott 404 nibs) and W&N Kolinsky brushes.  But that year the WACOM Cintiq tablet/screen hybrid came out, and I and many of the many, many other “analog holdouts” in the worlds of comics, graphic design, and illustration finally switched over to the dark side. 

With the Cintiq you draw directly on the screen, and the pressure sensitivity is very fine, so you can get pretty close to the level of control you’d have with traditional materials, and the added flexibility makes up for the difference.

     

 

    

    Aerial views of Ix, The Sacrifice Game, copyright Brian D'Amato 

I use Adobe software as much as possible because so far it has the widest range of tools and the best compatibilities with other providers.  For instance, I drew the clock on the ITCOTS jacket mainly in Photoshop, but for the brass effect I also used some filters by Andromeda.  There are a few other programs I use for 3D modeling and animation, like Autocad Maya (no relation to the subject of the novel), but most of these will also work with Adobe products. 

 EH: Mac or PC?

 BD: I use PCs because they’re more flexible and, if you get the right components, more powerful than Macs. Another thing I probably should mention is that for a “stained-glass style” outlined colored illustration that might be printed, like this one, it’s important to use the Photoshop color trapping function, so that even if the colors are a little off they’ll still print under the black lines and not leave white spaces.

EH: And now for something completely sentimental. In the Acknowledgment pages of Beauty, you mention your mother, and In the Courts of the Sun is dedicated to your father. Please tell me a little about them. I gather they have been encouraging to you.

BD: My parents met in Vladimir Nabokov’s class at Cornell University in 1958.  My father, Anthony D’Amato, teaches international law and jurisprudence at Northwestern and has written several books and hundreds of articles on law and philosophy.  He’s also written music and lyrics for several theatrical works, including The Magic Man, which was Chicago’s longest running original musical comedy, and he’s produced a few plays on Broadway, where his biggest hit was Grease.  My mother, Barbara D’Amato, has written about twenty-five murder mysteries and thrillers, one nonfiction book, and -- of course -- the books and lyrics for my father’s musicals.  Her next novel is a thriller about hallucinogens, and it’s coming out from Tor/Forge early next year. 

So naturally my parents always encouraged me to do something artistic.  And they continue to edit my writing -- my mother has done so much work on In the Courts of the Sun that I basically consider her a second author.

EH: Brian, two thousand and twelve thanks.

 

Visit Brian D'Amato's Web site, click here to purchase In the Courts of the Sun, and here to purchase Beauty.

Posted by Elatia Harris at 01:30 AM | Permalink

COMMENTS

Elatia,

I made a quick pass through your interview with Brian D'Amato. The first thing that struck me, was that I want to learn a great deal more about the peoples and history of mesoamerica.

The 2012 phenomenon, or obsession, is still less important to me than the fact that their calendar was, and still is, more advanced than the western calendars, and rivaled the incredible calendars and mathematics of the ancient Hindu calendars.

Another thing that fascinated me was Brian D'Amato, himself. Actually, I am more fascinated with the fact that his mother and father met in Vladimir Nabakov's class at Cornell in 1958.

Your article deserves another pass, not so rushed, to get a better sense of Brian, his book, and his ideas. I want to read this one.

Posted by: Norman Costa | Dec 7, 2009 2:00:48 AM

Elatia,
What prophecy did you once scoff at but now no longer do?
I haven't read D'Amato's book, but I do know that there is no Maya prophecy regarding 2012. I acknowledge that modern beliefs regarding 2012 might, through our own idiocy, cause horrible things to happen, but 2012 remains entirely a modern phenomenon, with diverse roots in New Age mysticisms and their (mis-)appropriations of indigenous religions, various species of counter-Enlightenment Romanticism (which is where New Age practices comes from...) eschatological paranoia, and etc.. But anyone who claims the ancient Maya predicted anything in particular for 2012 is spinning nonsense.

There is a good Q&A here on 2012 from one of the scholars who best know the ancient Maya texts.

Nonetheless, the book does sound interesting!

Posted by: giotto | Dec 7, 2009 11:36:34 AM

Great read, well done Elatia!

Posted by: Namit | Dec 7, 2009 11:40:21 AM

2012 from one of the scholars who best know the ancient Maya texts.

It might be a relic of a prior understanding. Back in the 70s, I took courses in Mesoamerican Archaeology from two eminent practitioners in the field: Merle Greene Robertson & Michael Coe. I recall clearly learning from each of them that the calendar just stopped, and it was a mystery what would happen next. I assume they were just having fun with their students, of course, but the meme was out there.

Posted by: Carlos | Dec 7, 2009 12:20:50 PM

I found the article on In the Courts of the Sun and the interview interesting, so I considered getting the book out of the library. But first I looked at the reviews on Amazon, which are relatively negative. Of course your mileage (and mine) may vary. There are many books to read and little time, however, so I try to invest my time in the most rewarding fashion. And the Amazon reviews suggest that In the Courts of the Sun may be a less than rewarding book. I'd be curious to read of other's experiences.

Posted by: Ian Kaplan | Dec 7, 2009 12:34:24 PM

Very interesting, Elatia. Thanks. And thanks to Brian, too!

Posted by: Abbas Raza | Dec 7, 2009 12:59:53 PM

But in my experience there are basically Dick People and Clarke people, and I’m emphatically a Clarke person.

I'm the opposite, so may pass on the read.
Thanks for the interview. I have spent time in Central America, and find the New Age obsession with the area another romantic distraction in dealing with root religion wounds from generally toxic experiences.

Posted by: Dave Ranning | Dec 7, 2009 1:04:36 PM

damn that first image is wicked. thanks for a great piece. peace.

Posted by: ed rackley | Dec 7, 2009 10:22:59 PM

Thanks for the eye-opening dialog and for the glimpse of images drawn with computer as appropriate to define or reflect the time frame, and especially the structure appearing with the author's portrait, a geometric model of the pyramids? - incidentally not similar to the stable octet truss of Bucky Fuller which seems more intuitive than this one. Excellent original structure of thought and your deep curiosity expands my thinking as usual Elatia, thank you.

Posted by: holly alderman | Dec 7, 2009 11:51:09 PM

Fascinating interview and illustrations. Thanks

Posted by: Larry Poss | Dec 8, 2009 12:32:17 AM

Thanks for this interview: perfect lunch-time reading. I will read the book as well; how exciting to find something completely new to discover and explore.

Posted by: OT | Dec 8, 2009 12:42:34 AM

Fascinating stuff. Thanks Elatia, your questions are inspiring!

Posted by: Daniel Rourke | Dec 8, 2009 4:21:48 AM

This is a great piece that told me a good deal about a subject I previously knew very little about.
Fascinating.

Posted by: Sue Hubbard | Dec 8, 2009 7:37:10 AM

Wonderful Elatia I will start dropping hints about this book for my Christmas stocking.

Posted by: Harriet | Dec 8, 2009 8:31:22 AM

The Amazon reviews are widely divergent. I suspect that there are two kinds of readers--those who read for what happens next and those who read for details and the excellence of the language. For richness and vividness IN THE COURTS OF THE SUN is fabulous. But it's long. If you want slick, fast pace you need to know that it's not that sort of book.

Posted by: Barbara | Dec 8, 2009 8:41:15 AM

I would have never appraised Mayan art as the precursor to Art Noveau, or Aztec to Deco, so thanks for that. D'Amato's disinterest in character and the human story, however, sends up red flags for me, like Burroughs' dream of a womanless world. As shocking and "new" as these ideas sound, at the end of the day, we're flesh and blood creatures, struggling with the conflicts of our interior lives versus the demands of the waking, very human world. Which is not to say that I won't check out D'Amato's book. Really, Elatia, great author questions, you're a dream interviewer. Kudos.

Posted by: Randolyn Zinn | Dec 8, 2009 11:45:17 AM

I enjoyed this interview because of the discussion about character-based fiction and "aspirational" fiction. As a product of MFA culture, I'm sympathetic to what D'Amato is saying, though I'm not ready yet to declare character-based fiction a "completed field."

Great interview, Elatia. More, please . . .

Posted by: jfrost | Dec 8, 2009 12:20:25 PM

Note to self- Read the book (but Pete it's about that 2012 stuff that drives you nuts- yes but Pete remember the thoughtful interview with the great illustrations-oh and Pete, stop talking to yourself and read the book, okay? Okay.)
P.S. Also to self- Pete, thank Elatia for the interview. Right.
P.P.S. Thanks Elatia

Posted by: Pete Chapman | Dec 8, 2009 2:02:00 PM

Very interesting chat, mostly due to your patient and disarming interview style.

Like some other commenters, I'm a little troubled about some of the defamatory things D'Amato has to say about so-called "aspirational" fiction. Calling all literature apart from science fiction moribund and "increasingly irrelevant" sounds like trying a little too hard to convince oneself one is relevant, an impression D'Amato does not disown when he consistently characterizes readers of literature "middlebrow."

"Post-humanism" sticks in my craw a little, too. What is the point of the "poetry of ideas" if it doesn't ultimately refer back to human predicaments? You write, Elatia, that "In the Courts of the Sun has a lot to offer readers [of literary fiction]" but I wish you'd elaborated since I couldn't see such an offering in D'Amato's responses, which seemed targeted only to that select group of more intelligent "true nerds" who really get it.

The game looks interesting though. Very elegant.

Posted by: Chris Schoen | Dec 8, 2009 2:40:22 PM

As always, Elatia, you keep on dazzling us with new, fantastic things. I felt like going to Macchu Pichu, which is so close to Brazil... I think the Incas, as well as the Mayas or Aztecs, still have a lot to teach us. Thanks for igniting my curiosity.

Posted by: Fabiane | Dec 8, 2009 5:02:01 PM

Amazing interview, fascinating and inspiring.

Thanks Elatia and Brian

Posted by: Sirarpi Heghinian-Walzer | Dec 8, 2009 10:58:25 PM

As a PKD fan and also as someone who reads a lot of naval-gazing "limn the inner life" fiction, I'm surprised to hear that this book isn't for me... I've read it, and I thought it was terrific. It's about way more than 2012 (at least in the sense that you're probably picturing it from that stupid movie that's out now). It's more like Cryptonomicon, only with Codebreaking and WWII history replaced by Game Theory and the ancient Maya. Actually, in my opinion, COURTS is the better book.

Posted by: Julie | Dec 9, 2009 10:09:23 AM

It's more like Cryptonomicon, only with Codebreaking and WWII history replaced by Game Theory and the ancient Maya.

Sold. And happy to learn we don't actually live in a Dick Clark universe.

Better than Cryptonomicon...HERESY!

Posted by: Carlos | Dec 9, 2009 10:21:59 AM

Ever the heretic, I'll take the opportunity to say that I think Cryptonomicon would have been better had it been a tad more "aspirational." 
"Better than C." is enough of a hook for me, but thanks anyway for this fascinating interview and the imagery, Elatia. I'll take the swipes at "middlebrow" readers as typical punks vs. posers rhetoric, and jump this to the top of my winter vacation reading list.

Posted by: Vicki Baker | Dec 9, 2009 10:42:58 AM

I hadn't really read science fiction since high school, until I read In the Courts of the Sun in the early summer, on vacation in Turks and Caicos. All I can say is that I found it totally gripping; I somehow ended up passing on Caribbean sailing opportunities and chances to pick up French chicks at the cheesy disco, all in the interests of reading the next chapter. Utterly unique. Well written. The ideas, inspired as they are, don't get in the way of the entertainment.

Posted by: EZT | Dec 9, 2009 11:03:02 AM

Salammbo! Anyone who likes historical novels based on Polybius is all right in mayan book.

Posted by: JMT | Dec 9, 2009 1:35:21 PM

Thanks to Norman, Namit, Carlos, Vicki, Abbas, Ed, Holly, Larry, OT, Harriet, Sue, Daniel, Barbara, Pete, Fabiane, Sirarpi, Juli, Vicki and EZT for your sympathetic reception of this material -- I really appreciate it.

Randolyn, Chris, Dave, giotto, Ian, and jfrost -- you make some very good points, and I appreciate that too, while feeling a little worried I have somehow misrepresented Brian D'Amato. I've re-read the interview, and it looks pretty clear to me Brian was talking not about writing a novel free of character -- or of characters with character -- but about matters of writerly emphasis and focus. His distinction between mainstream literary fiction and fiction written by writers who consider themselves progressive is for the purpose of making us think, not for put-down purposes. Literary avant-gardism, or experimental fiction -- not that we touch on that here -- shifts both the writerly and the readerly focus away from narration and character too, and nobody producing it is saying Balzac is irrelevant. Maybe Brian is making the case that trying to write like Balzac today is a bit rear guard considering we lack that mid-19th century milieu from which the real thing arose. So when we get the ersatz thing, it comes off a little retro. That's retro, not retardataire. Take somebody who's doing it fantastically well, like Peter Carey. Whatever you can say in his favor, you cannot say he's pushing the envelope of the form. For a literary novel that is elbowing and piercing rather than pushing the envelope, look at _Destiny_, by Tim Parks. But the revolutionary techniques you find there speak to consciousness rather than character.

I am sad if I made it seem that Brian was saying character=crinoline. I will interpose a thought of my own here: it was then-new technology that drove the big, fat 19th century novel, in that printing and distributing a 600-page book became economically feasible in the time of Balzac and Victor Hugo. No, the technology did not develop because there were great writers writing these things and there had to be a way to deliver them. If only. It was quite the other way around -- it always is. We are in an era that parallels the mid-19th century that way, for technology is driving what is, and can be, interestingly done with the written word and all its delivery systems. We are form-finding again -- we always are but sometimes we know it. Genres and forms are brushing up against one another with fascinating results. I for one am re-reading Balzac this year -- and boy is it good. But I'm also looking at what's new and why it's new.

JMT, you are so right. If you're reading Flaubert for pleasure and writing tips, you're not on literary disconnect.

Posted by: Elatia Harris | Dec 9, 2009 1:59:53 PM

At my local bookstore the other day I noticed a whole shelf of outward-facing books with nearly identical titles - 2012 blah blah. It seems like there are only two positions on the subject -- either you're a whooshy new-age credible type, or you're a smart-n-sensible, very mildly well-read person who walks quickly past this display. I was really pleased to read this interview, and the comments, and find that there might be a third category -- people who might examine an issue with an open, facile mind. I take it from some reviews and comments that this book may not be the Da Vinci Code -- thank God, I'll order it.

Posted by: AKP | Dec 12, 2009 12:20:03 PM

That's the stuff, AKP. It's never a bad thing, to examine how other civilizations see themselves. If we applied this spirit to the present day mythologies we -- and others -- cling to, we might go some distance in making current disaster modeling all wet.

Posted by: Elatia Harris | Dec 12, 2009 12:36:19 PM

Picked this up from the library last night. Loving it. It's a lot of fun on a lot of levels. I feel like I got to open a Christmas present early, so thanks Elatia (and Brian!). Plus as an added bonus, I finally know the name of those bright red seeds I filled my pocket with on the trail to Bonampak back in 19 Kayab 13 Chuen 12.17.18.11.11!

Posted by: Carlos | Dec 17, 2009 9:19:48 AM

Brian is clearly a talented artist & knowledgeable writer.

I've gained so much insight simply by reading this article.

Thank you, Elatia.

Posted by: Lisa | Dec 24, 2009 1:25:45 AM

I'm going to get the book. Thank you! You never cease to amaze me Elatia! xo

Posted by: Kate Vrijmoet | Dec 29, 2009 12:54:19 PM