Category: Reviews

A young Henry James, writing about Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1879, notoriously remarked, “One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.” For James, Hawthorne’s country had been a void, as immensely small, you could say, as it was big (which presented a daunting prospect for the writer), but certainly different from the clearly marked boundaries of nation and class that European writers had been accustomed to patrolling and negotiating. The problem of America is in effect a problem of scale and measure, not just how to measure the immeasurable but how to measure up to it, and in that way it anticipates the problems of accounting for the unaccountable that confronted the twentieth-century novelist. Gertrude Stein, twenty-six as the century began, saw this as clearly as anyone. America, she wrote in 1932, is “the oldest country in the world because by the methods of the civil war and the commercial conceptions that followed it America created the twentieth century, and since all the other countries are now either living or commencing to be living a twentieth century life, America having begun the creation of the twentieth century in the sixties of the nineteenth century is now the oldest country in the world.” In this nicely gnomic pronouncement there’s the wit of Oscar Wilde as well as—looking at the Civil War as method—an almost Leninist realism and sangfroid, not to mention the familiar twang of American self-promotion. It is a characteristically insightful and provocative comment from a brilliant woman who grew up in America with an ineradicable sense of the foreignness of her German Jewish immigrant family and went on to live all her adult life as an American in Europe. Stein, of course, was not in any sense alone in seeing America as a central presence in the new century—the American Century, as it would be called by many people with varying degrees of hope, resentment, and dread—but she was unusually sensitive and responsive to American formlessness. She found, not without a good deal of searching, a way of working with it that worked for her. In doing that, she also helped to transform not only the American novel but the twentieth-century novel.

Stein began in an unlikely, lonely place. The youngest of five children of Daniel and Amelia Stein, first-generation German Jewish immigrants and members of a prosperous merchant family, she grew up between America—she was born outside of Pittsburgh in 1874—and Europe, to which her restless father removed the family for a spell of years almost immediately after her birth. She grew up between continents, and she grew up among languages, speaking German (the language of her home) and French before English, which she initially picked up from books, and once back in the States, she grew up between the coasts. The Stein family was largely settled in Baltimore, until Daniel decided he’d be better off in Oakland, of which Stein would famously quip “there is no there there.” In a big house on the sparsely settled suburban outskirts of the expanding western port, Stein’s mother fell ill and slowly died while her father grew ever more irascible and demanding, and Stein buried herself in books: Shakespeare, Trollope, A Girl of the Limberlost.

Daniel died suddenly in 1891 and was neither mourned nor missed. His son Leo, to whom Gertrude was close, went east to Harvard; Gertrude followed him to attend classes at Radcliffe, where she studied English literature and took an interest in psychology. Henry James was a favorite writer of hers, and his older brother, the psychologist and philosopher William James, now became her teacher. He made a strong impression, and she impressed him; he encouraged her scientific ambitions, urging her to go to medical school at Johns Hopkins at a time when few women had MDs and those who did were often unable to practice. Leo was already at Hopkins, pursuing a degree in biology, and Stein joined him at the university, but instead of studying, she fell in love with a fellow student named May Bookstaver and became entangled in a tormenting lesbian love triangle. Leo left for Europe, in order to learn “all about art” at the foot of the famous connoisseur and socialite Bernard Berenson; escaping Bookstaver, Gertrude once again set out after him. At Berenson’s house in England, Leo and Gertrude met and argued about politics with Bertrand Russell, and Gertrude stayed on through a bone-chilling London winter. But then she went back to Baltimore and Bookstaver, only to flunk her qualifying exams. A medical career was not to be.

She wanted, in any case, to be a writer. Imitating Henry James, she wrote a novella called Q.E.D., about her relationship with Bookstaver, that she promptly packed up and forgot about. Then she started a novel about a German-Jewish American family like the Steins. It was to be called The Making of Americans, and it seems to have begun conventionally enough, until Stein, apparently dissatisfied with the results, had another idea. Recalling some of the research she had conducted under William James, she decided that her novel should constitute not just a family history but a comprehensive inventory of every type of human character. “I began to be sure,” Stein would remember, “that if I could only go on long enough and talk and hear and look and see and feel enough and long enough I could finally describe really describe every kind of human being that ever was or is or would be living.” This was certainly an unusual project, but the more Stein pursued this encyclopedic butterfly, the farther out of reach it flew. She would come back to The Making of Americans in time, completing it after almost a decade—an immense work—and she would always promote it as her greatest achievement. She did not hide what a struggle it had been. Years later, as a traveling celebrity in America, she delivered a lecture on “The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans,” and the quotes she culls from the book’s pages are telling: “I am altogether a discouraged one. I am just now altogether a discouraged one … I do a great deal of suffering.”

It was 1905, and Stein had picked up and followed Leo to Paris, but in a sense she was still where she had always been: betwixt and between continents and languages and caught in the thick of family. Leo, however, had at last found his calling: having discovered Cézanne, he set up as a “propagandist” for modern art. Leo and Gertrude and their oldest brother, Michael, who looked after the family business and had also come to Paris, were all busy collecting the work of young artists, and they were surrounded by them—Matisse and Picasso were their friends—and absorbed in questions about art and innovation and the somehow related question of their Americanness, which  defined them in their own and others’ eyes. (“They are not men, they are not women,” Picasso said of the Steins. “They are Americans.”)

And for Stein of course there was the question of her own character and loneliness and work. Leo suggested that she translate Flaubert’s Three Tales, a literary touchstone of the turn of the century. The task would improve her French and perhaps give her ideas. It did, but not in the way Leo intended. “A Simple Heart,” the most famous of Flaubert’s Three Tales, tells the simple story of the life of a French servant woman. No, Stein would not translate it. She would write three lives of her own: American lives—American lives and women’s lives and lives that all bear a certain resemblance to the life of Gertrude Stein. The lives of the Gentle Lena and the Good Anna bookend Stein’s collection. These are poor German immigrant women toiling away dutifully as servants all their life long, their gentleness and goodness as much bane as boon. In the middle is the story of Melanctha, a “complex, desiring” young woman, a searcher. Melanctha is Black and, by the conventional standards of Stein’s day, not good at all. All three women live in a fictional American city called Bridgepoint (which is to say neither here nor there, but on the way to somewhere, the American situation par excellence), and all three are poor and, though very much American, in another sense, not: foreign-born, Black, speaking nonstandard English, they are very much outsiders, just like their creator in Paris.

“Melanctha” is the longest story in Three Lives, and it was in telling the story of Melanctha that Stein discovered herself as a writer. Melanctha is the child of parents who resemble Stein’s—the father angry and threatening until he simply disappears from his daughter’s life, the mother present only in her being interminably ailing—and the story starts when she is a teenager, avid to find out what she can about life. Hanging out at the train station, she finds out something about sex and men. She finds out more about sex and men from an older woman, educated, experienced, hardened—her name in fact is Jane Harden—who takes her under her wing and perhaps into bed, and then she begins to find out about love from the young doctor attending to her mother. Jefferson Campbell is very much the opposite of the mercurial Melanctha—he is “very good” and “very interested in the life of the colored people”—but then opposites attract. Melanctha and Jeff grow close—he is infatuated—yet when Melanctha hints suggestively at her sexual history, Jeff turns jealous. Melanctha resents what she encouraged, and the relationship turns into a torment. Melanctha and Jeff break up, and she takes up with “a gambler, naturally a no-good.” Depressed, Melanctha comes down with TB and dies. “Melanctha” is done.

The story is quickly told and in a sense not much of a story at all. Sometimes it seems like a nineteenth-century cautionary tale about how bad girls come to a bad end, or perhaps a tongue-in-cheek send-up of such a tale. At other times it might be taken as the story of a good person whose life is blighted by racial prejudice and social intolerance, a sad story, though told with a certain off-putting ruthlessness. “Melanctha all her life did not know how to tell a story wholly,” Stein writes, as if preparing the way for her premature demise. In places, it appears to be a kind of modern fairy tale, almost willfully naive, while elsewhere and quite differently it comes off as a near clinical examination of the psychological dynamics of love, not unlike the sorts of things Marcel Proust and D. H. Lawrence were starting to write at around the same time.

“Melanctha” is all those things and none of those things, and sometimes it seems like it is really nothing much at all. The main reason it’s so hard to pin down what “Melanctha” is getting at is that the story is so very long in the telling, not to mention the ever more peculiar language in which it is told. “Melanctha” is 120 pages long, composed in a manner that might be best described as conspicuously wordy:

Life was just commencing for Melanctha. She had youth and had learned wisdom, and she was graceful and pale yellow and very pleasant, and always ready to do things for people, and she was mysterious in her ways and that only made belief in her more fervent.

What wisdom had she learned? What did she do for other people? Whose belief is it that grew more fervent? Her own beliefs (in what?) or others in her? (Both readings are possible.) “Melanctha” is full of vague sentences like these—filled out with conventional descriptions and polite nothings and sentimental or racist turns of phrase like “the wide, abandoned laughter that makes the warm broad glow of negro sunshine”—and as it goes on, those sentences tend to grow longer and more and more and more repetitive:

“Melanctha Herbert,” began Jeff Campbell, “I certainly after all this time I know you, I certainly do know little, real about you. You see, Melanctha, it’s like this way with me … You see it’s just this way, with me now, Melanctha. Sometimes you seem like one kind of a girl to me, and sometimes you are like a girl that is all different to me, and the two kinds of girl is certainly very different to each other … I certainly know now really, how I don’t know anything sure at all about you, Melanctha.”

“I certainly know now really, how I don’t know anything sure”: I am not sure that Stein knew for sure what she was up to as she hit on this style, which—with its limited vocabulary, ever-expanding paratactic sentences, and repetition compulsion—might be dismissed as both flat and flatulent, maddening and even perhaps a bit mad, but as “Melanctha” proceeds becomes ever more recognizable and unignorable. Stein may have been up to a number of different and not, at first sight, necessarily compatible things. Here she is finding words at last to tell her own story, the Bookstaver story. Bookstaver would later remark that Jeff and Melanctha’s grinding exchanges were little more than transcripts of hers with Stein. In that sense, the language of “Melanctha” might be considered symptomatic on the one hand and therapeutic on the other, a way for Stein to get something off her chest and put it behind her. Then again, she is also finding words to tell the story of a woman, Melanctha, deprived of the authority or capability to tell her own story, someone whose sex and race and life place her outside the space of “proper” storytelling. To that extent, her writing of Melanctha is as public and political as it is private and therapeutic. Though Stein was never an overtly political writer—she didn’t do messages—and her actual politics involved an unsavory fascination with such putative strong men as Napoleon and Marshal Pétain, she was alert to politics (those “methods of the civil war”) and to the political nature of language.

In the end, however, “Melanctha” is not so much about telling anyone’s story as it is about putting story aside. Here, Stein, trained in scientific experiment and emboldened by the experimentation of the artists around her, turns from story to take a new look at what stories are made out of: language, sentences, words. “Melanctha” is written out of an intense, even desperate awareness of how language shapes experience—its imprecisions, its evasions, its formulae, its structure, its unavoidable limitations. She takes, for example, the clogging –ings and jingly –lys intrinsic to the English language, and instead of playing them down, as “good” writers have long been taught to do, she lets them loose. Is what results “bad” writing? It is writing that tends toward a drone, and a drone is perhaps the tone of boredom, depression (the melancholy inscribed in Melanctha’s name). Certainly, to echo Stein, one of the things this sad tale of an unrealized life is designed to do is to make the reader feel language and also feel language fail.

And it does that, but then again (as I keep having to say) it does something else: it gives language, rather miraculously, a new life. Stein’s drone begins to gather overtones, until Melanctha’s story breaks the bonds of story and conventional usage to become an exploration of and a meditation on the possibilities of language, language that exists in and for, as she would come to define it in a later essay, “Composition as Explanation,” a “continuous present.”

Repetition renders Stein’s simple words and chain-link sentences surprisingly complex in effect, opening them up to multiple and shifting registers. The language of “Melanctha” can be read as Black American dialect (at least that is what a lot of Stein’s early readers took it for), and Richard Wright later told a story of reading it aloud to an illiterate Black audience who responded with immediate recognition. The language of “Melanctha” is dialect, and it is also language as it is spoken, in which we often return again and again to the same words to try to get a point across. Then again (again), the language of “Melanctha” is very much written language, an oddly unreal and quirky idiom of the printed page on which, by dint of its repetitions, it practically prints patterns (which is to say that the language of “Melanctha” is visual, too). It is also musical, echoing and chiming, and abstract and philosophical: all those reallys and certainlys and trulys reflect not only how we speak but raise the question of what we speak in the hope of, what certainty, what truth, what reality? Finally, the language is erotic, shot through with sexual innuendo—“Jeff took it straight now, and he loved it … it swelled out full inside him, and he poured it all out back”—and the rhythms (and perversity) of sex:

“But you do forgive me always, sure, Melanctha, always?” “Always and always, you be sure Jeff, and I certainly am afraid I can never stop with my forgiving, you always are going to be so bad to me, and I always going to have to be so good with my forgiving.” “Oh! Oh!” cried Jeff Campbell, laughing, “I ain’t going to be so bad for always, sure I ain’t, Melanctha, my own darling. And sure you do forgive me really, and sure you love me true and really, sure, Melanctha?” “Sure, sure, Jeff, boy, sure now and always, sure now you believe me, sure.”

Much influenced by visual artists, Stein’s work would in time prove an inspiration to such very different American composers as John Cage and Philip Glass, while “Melanctha,” shot through as it is with the rhythms of Black American speech, brings to writing something of the incantatory eroticism of the blues and soul music.

With “Melanctha,” Stein had found a way of writing that was all her own, a no-language and a new language that sounded a little bit like lots of things and like no one else. Overcoming the sense of uncertainty and inadequacy and isolation that had marked her childhood and her intellectual and sexual coming-of-age, she had fashioned an instrument that allowed her to air and explore her most characteristic and intimate concerns—her sexuality, her femininity, her philosophical turn of mind, her love of words and wordplay at once childish and sophisticated—in entire freedom and in depth.

It was her way of writing, and it was her way of being an American writer. If, as a child in America, Stein had felt hardly American, and as an adult in Europe felt at times helplessly American, on the page she was free to be her American self and, more than that—having arrived at this moment of revelation, she would have an unwavering sense of prophetic purpose—to free American literature to be itself.

She returned to The Making of Americans, and as she worked on this, her magnum opus, she also worked out a theory of the Americanness of American literature, in which the problem of scale (something Melville and James and Whitman had in various ways confronted without, however, formally defining it) became—this was Stein’s discovery—central to its promise. She develops her ideas in a lecture on English literature that she delivered in 1934. England, she said, an island nation, had naturally produced a literature marked by a delimited sense of scale, which provided a background for stories of “daily living.” English literature had been a glory in its day—Stein was steeped in it, and she paid homage to it—and it had gone through several phases, from the invention of English as a literary language in the work of Chaucer through the subsequent enlargement of its vocabulary to the muscular and mature syntax and sense of Dr. Johnson. By the nineteenth century, however, English literature had been reduced to mere phrasemaking, saying the expected thing and saying nothing much while having things both ways, a convenient accommodation of God and Mammon that you would expect from an island empire anchored in the harbor of its self-regard. Here Stein rebels against the balance of the nineteenth-century novel.

English fiction, the fiction of a closed circle, had lost its honesty and its power, just as England had lost the power to dominate a world that had begun to expand continuously and violently outward—a world that could be said to have begun with the discovery of America and that looked like America more than anything else. England had the defined shape of an island, but America had no defined shape: it was a frontier, moving, the eccentric center of a widening world, a world not of settled definitions, but of unending exploration, where everything was in question. James, in Stein’s view, had been the first American writer to catch a glimpse of this new, decentered reality, for though he had worked with an inherited English sense of the shape of the novel, he also had, in her words, “a disembodied way of disconnecting something from anything and anything from something [that] was an American one.” This accomplishment had paved the way for Stein, who not only recognized it for what it was but formalized it, isolated it, as a researcher might a strain of bacteria, and made it into a matter of conscious procedure:

I went on to what was the American thing the disconnection and I kept breaking the paragraph down, and everything down to commence again with not connecting with the daily anything and yet to really choose something.

So she characterizes her way of working in “The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans,” and she goes on from there to describe how this new way of breaking things down became a way of building things back up, and so on. The work was forever ongoing, a continuous revelation of the writer’s power not to reflect given realities in given forms, but, as Stein says, “to really choose something,” and from it emerged a vision of a new kind of wholeness born of words: “I made a paragraph,” she boasted, “so much a whole thing that it included in itself as a whole thing a whole sentence.”

And this is the key thing that Stein discovers and passes on: putting the sentence at the center of writing, a sentence that can go on and on or be cut as short as can be, but that one way or another, as a kind of exploratory probe, takes precedence over the idea of the work as a whole. You start with the sentence and the sentence finds out where it is going and you go from there. This American “disembodied way of disconnecting something from anything” goes on finding its own path across the page: “Then at the same time is the question of time. The assembling of a thing to make a whole thing and each one of those whole things is one of a series.”

She concludes: “I felt this thing, I am an American and I felt this thing, and I made a continuous effort to create this thing … a space of time that is filled always filled with moving.”

From Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth Century Novel, to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux this November. 

With hundreds of exhibitions and events vying for attention in London during Frieze week, Apollo’s editors pick out the shows they don’t want to miss

By 1900, when he was only 23, Yoshida Hiroshi already had the makings of an international star. The Japanese painter had recently exhibited at the Detroit Museum of Art (now the Detroit Institute of Arts) and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and was touring Europe when he stopped in at Dulwich Picture Gallery, where he signed the guestbook. Though he had not yet played a formative role in the shin-hanga movement, which would revitalise the art of the woodblock through innovative impressionistic techniques, his printmaking work – and that of his wife Fujio; their sons Tōshi and Hodaka; their daughter-in-law Chizuko; and their granddaughter Ayomi – is the subject of this show at Dulwich Picture Gallery (until 3 November). An exhibition of this nature is rare enough, but this one offers more than novelty value: it captures how art-historical currents shaped woodblock art over several decades. Tōshi and Hodaka, for instance, incorporated post-war abstraction into the art form, and the work of Chizuko, Hodaka’s wife, bears the sweeping influence of Abstract Expressionism. Hiroshi’s work, however, is the real treat – and most of the prints that are currently on display in Dulwich have never before been seen in the UK. Catch it while you can.

The omens weren’t good for young Ranjit Singh. A bout of smallpox he contracted as an infant left him blind in one eye; he was targeted for assassination at the age of 13, and orphaned a few years later. But the fact that he dispatched his would-be killer at such a tender age offered a clue to his future military success: in 1801, when he was 21, he founded the Sikh Empire, which grew to comprise 12 million people across more than 250,000 sq km of north-western India. Given that he was a patron of the arts as well as a military leader, it is fitting that paintings and crafted objects as well as arms and armour form the crux of the Wallace Collection’s exhibition on the Sikh Empire under Singh (until 20 October). Among the most impressive exhibits are a miniature painting of Singh perched in a crimson and gold seat; a lavish golden throne, on loan from the Victoria and Albert Museum; and a lengthy curved sword – its golden scabbard encrusted with gemstones – that may have belonged to Singh himself.

Rede de Elásticos (Elastic Net) (1973), Lygia Clark. Photo: Hagêge A. Courtesy Associacão Cultural O Mundo de Lygia Clark

In a recent column for Apollo, Hettie Judah declared herself ‘every conservator’s nightmare – that person who wants to touch the art’. But there are those artists who have warmly welcomed audience participation. Lygia Clark is an early example: born in Belo Horizonte in 1920, she was a key figure among Brazil’s neo-concrete artists, who chafed against the geometric strictures propounded through the constructivist movement then popular in Europe and gaining ground in Latin America. Many of Clark’s notions of art have more currency now than ever – art as therapy; art as something physically accessible. A sweeping survey of her work at Whitechapel Gallery captures the nature of her accomplishments: highlights include Bichos, geometric metal sculptures with hinges that allow viewers to manipulate the pieces into different positions, and a series of live performances that honour Clark’s ideas of creating art through group participation (until 12 January 2025). The show coincides with an exhibition of the artist’s early work at Alison Jacques, comprising studies, maquettes, paintings and collages from a time when new ideas were occurring to Clark more quickly than she could execute them (until 26 October).

At 74, Magdalene Odundo is as visible as she’s ever been. Her recent exhibition at Houghton Hall in Norfolk – the first show at the country house of work by a woman or a Black person – featured new works as well as ceramics from the last three decades, placed in counterpoint to the opulent surroundings of the Palladian mansion. Now, in her first solo show in London in more than 20 years, Thomas Dane Gallery is displaying a number of the artist’s recent works in clay (until 14 December). As elegant as they are elemental, these ceramics are melting pots of influence: even as they evoke British studio pottery, modernist sculpture or traditional vessels from Kenya and Nigeria, they are most clearly informed by Odundo’s own distinctive sensibilities.

Untitled (2023), Magdalene Odundo. Photo: David Westwood; courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery; © the artist

Sometimes it seems that I have spent a lifetime listening to news of war and little but war. Just halfway through is twenties, Nabil Kanso must have felt the same. He spent the rest of his life bringing the news to others in paint.

For Kanso, news of war was always news from home. He fled war in Beirut for the United States, knowing full well that it put him at risk of another. It was 1966, and Vietnam was already tearing apart his adopted country, but to him it must have felt like more of the same. He painted armies, civilians, and a ravaged landscape, because who can look at any of these without seeing pain? He did not live to know war’s return to the Middle East and Ukraine. Yet the news he brings still seems altogether new, at Martos through October 5.

It all blends together, but not to numb the senses. And he did paint Vietnam and the Lebanese Civil War, but a title speaks only of Accumulated Agonies. He worked large, as if to claim for himself the entirety of art history as well. He had seen Disasters of War from Francisco de Goya and Goya’s graphic imagination, and he adopted Goya’s explicit violence and accumulating darkness. Warriors and their weapons take up the foreground, with near horizontals at center for rifles and the barriers they penetrate. Their diagonals give the paintings a kind of architecture while adding to the chaos.

As the poem goes, ignorant armies clash by night. The scale itself calls for heroics and history painting. The paintings would not be out of place in the American wing of the Met, but heroes, too, cry out in cruelty and terror. The scale recalls another kind of heroism as well. Kanso came to New York when Abstract Expressionism was a living memory. Artists had to paint big and messy, with visible brushwork covering every inch.

He has, as far as I know, pretty much dropped off the map, although he himself worked on the business side of art, as a dealer. “All-over painting” was itself out of fashion. So were representation and sentiment, and I do not mean to canonize him now. Something was in the air, though, with the Neo-Expressionism of Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer, who looked back to the Holocaust and World War II. Kanso has something of their earnestness and, conversely, irony. He also knew the demand for color.

Kanso uses color for its own sake and for the horrors of war. It runs to blood red and fiery orange. Deep blue can suggest shadows, discolored flesh, or battle dress, perhaps from the Napoleonic wars. Color can also light up the anonymity of inarticulated faces. They can gather in arcs with red lips or in a crowd. One painting, though, sticks to a smaller canvas for a single face, The Confronting Mother.

Not that you would know its gender. Chalk white sets off large black eyes that speak of forced witness. Black tears drip from wide eyes, and flames run along its chin. Something or someone else intrudes at left, whether or not she can recognize it as hers. Maybe Kanso leaves so little explicit because he did not want to be known as the guy from Beirut. Or maybe he just knew at his death in 2019 that there would always be another war.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

I was still but tried, in a burst it’s all lit up by.
In the quiet permission

I took my unit of heart and wondered if it was enough.
Can’t in cannot, the backwater was canceled

So a quiet commercial
Could play inside instead. An artifact

Gathered and became immobile, and even so
Changed year to year until its recognition fell to wind itself.

I felt myself. I felt myself inhabiting it so I felt myself. In everything
To see a circular tape, again and

Again I see it, determining the summer was suddenness
Netting how images can melt, can melt

the video lengthening some dream
Because exhaust is unmanageable and so released. I push in the tape,

Iridescent and wet. I’m soggy and failing at no end in sight
And just figures on their way, where are they going,

What is their position. Let me place you inside the deer
To keep you warm.

You can read two more poems by Sara Gilmore, “Mad as only an angel can be” and “Knowing constraint” in the new Fall issue of The Paris Review, no. 249. You can also read Gilmore’s thoughts on writing “Safe camp” here on the Daily. 

Sara Gilmore is a poet and translator. She teaches at the University of Iowa and works as a phlebotomist.

Rakewell’s eye is drawn to many things – especially stories about eyes being drawn to things. The results of a study commissioned by the Mauritshuis in The Hague came in earlier this week, revealing just what it is we’re looking at when we look at a painting. Volunteers were fitted with eye-tracking equipment and a brain scanner and asked to look at five works in the museum’s collection – including Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (c. 1665). Perhaps absence had made the heart grow fonder: the artwork had a holiday in Amsterdam last year to star in the Rijksmuseum’s blockbuster Vermeer exhibition, so it’s only natural that the Mauritshuis welcomed it home by lavishing it with close attention.

It turns out that when faced with Girl with a Pearl Earring, we tend to look her in the eye, before looking down to her mouth and then to the earring – and then back again in what the researchers call a ‘sustained attention loop’. So beguiling is the painting that it garnered an ‘attention score’ of 0.48 – even higher than the score registered when the lift transporting the volunteers briefly stopped working without warning.

Rakewell usually grows jocular at all things ocular, but your correspondent finds themselves pondering the consequences of reducing art to datasets. Could more of such studies usher in an age of ‘optimised’ art, in which AI software, or desperate artists, try to game our photoreceptors?

As is often the case, taking the long view is somewhat cheerier. Artists have been breaking art down into rules, diagrams and schematics for hundreds of years. At the turn of the 16th century, Luca Pacioli published Divina proportione, featuring illustrations by Leonardo that made clear the links between art, geometry and inherently pleasing designs. (Many of Pacioli’s ideas drew from an earlier treatise by Piero della Francesca.)

Leonardo is often cited as a proponent of the ‘golden ratio’, with his Vitruvian Man (c. 1490) regarded as the prime example of a design that consciously incorporated mathematically harmonious principles. But though this claim holds little water, other artists have actively pursued the golden ratio – Salvador Dalí, with his Sacrament of the Last Supper (1955), being perhaps the most famous. Rakewell also confesses to being partial to the work of M.C. Escher, who experimented tirelessly with perspective and planes to send the eye darting about the canvas.

Escher’s visions seem simple next to some of the work of the Venetian painter Carlo Crivelli, particularly The Annunciation, with Saint Emidius (1486). A rectilinear feast for the eyeballs, it is so exquisitely detailed in foreground, mid ground and background that Rakewell finds it hard to imagine how a heat map derived from eyeball data might look for this painting. Perhaps the anodes applied to the head would simply explode.

The Annunciation, with Saint Emidius (1486), Carlo Crivelli. National Gallery, London

In the mid 17th century, Samuel van Hoogstraten, a keen student of Rembrandt, knew how to get the eye zigzagging: his Peepshow with Views of the Interior of a Dutch House (c. 1655–60) pits rhomboids against rectangles in a ‘perspective box’ that yields three-dimensional views through peepholes at both sides of the box.

A Peepshow with Views of the Interior of a Dutch House (1655–60), Samuel van Hoogstraten. National Gallery, London

But the fascination of Girl with a Pearl Earring endures because of its simplicity. In this regard, we must doff our cap to Piero himself. When it comes to combining technical virtuosity with emotional force, Flagellation of Christ (1455–60) takes some beating.

The Flagellation of Christ (1455–60), Piero della Francesca. Image: Wikimedia Commons

Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often, we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We often share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some of the curious, striking, strange, and wonderful bits we found, from books that are coming out this month.

—Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor

From Hélène Cixous’s Rêvoir (Seagull Books), translated from the French by Beverley Bie Brahic: 

I lie, I say I’m going to the hairdresser, secretly I’m off to see you, I am on my way right to the day when the Question peeps up, I no longer know which day that was. Dispatched on the instructions of Time, of Age, like a sprite ready to demand the Shadow’s identity card, proof of domicile, like the spirits of dates delegated to persecutions, of retirement dates, of warrants of life, of entry into silences, of fateful anniversaries

          Day broke, the tale was back on the road, I followed it

From The Silver Snarling Trumpet, a memoir by Robert Hunter, the primary lyricist of the Grateful Dead, written in the sixties. The manuscript was long thought to be lost, but his wife recently rediscovered it in a storage unit. It will be published in full by Hachette:

It was the people who made the “scene” revolve; wonderful, inexhaustible people we thought … until we began to question things that perhaps we ought not to have questioned, things such as, “Can we live this way forever?” Perhaps we could have if we hadn’t asked, but by the very act of becoming conscious that a question existed, an answer became imperative. Part of the answer seemed to lie in the realm of whatever it was that society demanded of us … and what it demanded was our lives. Given impetus by this snatch of what seemed to be an answer, we began to ask the question of one another, and from there, it was only a small step to becoming frightened. And that, of course, was the end of being carefree, for we had begun, if only by the act of questioning, to care. 

Others came along, others who would have belonged with us before, except that we began to question them too. Not seeing fit to acknowledge that such a question existed, they took over our philosophy and our guitars, our beards and cigarette butts, and left us with the world.

I remember coffeehouses and empty pockets, the unplanned, unending parties … the bad wine, the music that is inseparable from the impoverished decadence, and wonder sometimes if it was a fair trade. 

From Elsa Richardson’s Rumbles: A Curious History of the Gut (Pegasus Books): 

To quieten his patient’s obstreperous belly, Darwin devised a specially tailored course of treatment: she was to swallow ‘ten corns of black pepper’ after dinner, take a daily dose of crude mercury and allow a ‘small pipe’ to be occasionally inserted into her rectum to ‘facilitate the escape of air’. This dispiriting prescription would seem to imply that they were dealing with a purely physical problem, but in his notes Darwin pointed to another possibility: an excessively noisy gut, especially in a young woman, was often a symptom of ‘fear’.

From Jean Giono’s Fragments of a Paradise (Archipelago), translated from the French by Paul Eprile:

 On L’Indien the captain started to curse. Calmly. At his pipe. At his lighter. At a button on his tunic. Just for the fun of it. The officers were cursing, but not in anger, and the crew began to indulge in the sheer pleasure of cursing. One evening when the moon was out, Hourdeau, on the night watch, went looking for the cabin boy, who’d gone to sleep on a stack of tarpaulins. He wondered where that little fool had gotten to. Then Hourdeau went below, took off his boots, and started to curse, calmly. First at the candle. Then at a flask of rum in the pocket of his peacoat. He went back up on deck, not worried, simply wanting to find the cabin boy. He called to him to windward. As it left his mouth, the boy’s name had no substance. It was immediately torn away. But what had real substance, and hit just the right note, was an old swear word he recalled, which he started to repeat with glee.

 

From Paper of Wreckage: An Oral History of the New York Post, 1976-2024 (Atria). “Wood” here refers to the front page of the New York Post:

David Rosenthal: Murdoch was very harsh with all the editors. He went around to every editor, whatever your purview was, and made you recite what your lineup was for the next day. He really wanted to get down into the weeds. I mean, what was your tenth or eleventh story that you had for the next day? I have a very firm recollection, because it shook me up, of going through the whole lineup, which was fairly standard, it was not a busy day. I came down to the bottom of the list, I said, “Oh, yeah, we have the shooting of a bodega owner in Brooklyn. It turns out, it looked like a drug deal gone bad with the owner of the store or some shit like that.” I just then went on to the next thing. He said, “Wait a minute, go back for a moment. Tell me more about the bodega murder.” I told him what little I knew. He said, “This is what we want to do. We want to get a reporter and photographer out to the wake tonight. And we want to hire a priest to say some prayers, ‘Brooklyn mourns’ that kind of thing. And we want to make a picture of that.” You could have heard a pin drop in the room. I actually said, “We don’t really do that.” He said, “Oh, yes, you do.” I said, “I don’t remember ever doing that”—because I’m a fool, you know, I know nothing. He says, “You’re going to do it. Otherwise,” he said, “when I’m stuck for a wood at 4:30 in the morning, I’m going to call you at home and ask, ‘What do you suggest?’ Do you understand?”… I went out of the meeting very shook … I forgot which photographer it might have been. I said, “You’ve got to get out to Brooklyn. I’m sorry. This is like a bullshit story. But it’s now a big bullshit story.” Aida [Alvarez] got me some copy, from what I remember. What would have been two graphs turned into books or something like that. I don’t think we ever did get the priest. Then we worked the cops on it. It was nothing. It wasn’t even a sympathy story because it was a drug deal that went bad, as I recall. It wasn’t the typical crying heart story. It was a fuckup story. I don’t think they played it as wood but they played it big the next day.

From Deborah Levy’s The Position of Spoons and Other Intimacies (Farrar, Straus and Giroux):

I have measured out my life with the sea urchins that have pierced my feet with their spines. I have now lost my fear of sea urchins. I don’t know why. There are other fears I would prefer to lose, after all. I know they have to survive in the wilderness of the ocean; their cousins are the sea star and they can grow for centuries. There are sea urchins that are almost immortal, older than the mortal mothers and their mortal children fleeing from wars on boats that sometimes sink. Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we’ll all get home safely. If we were to measure the love of mothers for their children with coffee spoons, there would never be enough spoons for that kind of love. 

To wrap up from last time, Jenny Holzer started with something less public and more obscure. Diagrams taken from science and engineering bear not quite appropriate titles.

And then comes something surprising from so talkative an artist, emptiness. The show really does have empty bays. It becomes a collaboration with Frank Lloyd Wright and his museum, just as with Quiñones and countless others, but not without her usual defiance. When she first installed her crawl screen rising up, exhibitions started at the top and worked their way down.

Silence allows voices to linger in memory, and it asks, too, just who gets to speak. Sure enough, when the artist first moved past crawl screens and truisms, it was to censorship. Paintings in oil of official documents have more than just the names blacked out. They run to near uniform blackness. One document duly states that it never mentions George Orwell, but that is after censorship. His file, now “voided,” once voided him.

Holzer’s first New York retrospective had a heavy bias toward recent work, at the time the marks of the censor. So does this one. Blame it if you like on the curator, Lauren Hinkson, but this artist hears living voices, and she wants her work to live in the present as well. She projects more messages on the museum’s façade at sunset early in the show’s run. When she at last returns to lies and clichés, it is to the unchallenged master of both. Trump and his party gild the lies, and so does she in silver and gold leaf.

Trump’s words appear on fragmented metal, ending in a loose pile on the floor, and her own marble lies up the ramp in fragments as well. Now if only he could be so easily consigned to the ash heap of history. One outburst portrays the January 7 uprising as an epic event, and more paintings capture the voices around him the day itself. Trump-appointed judges are determined to see that courtroom testimony comes only after the election, if it takes place at all. Smeared paint may not show Holzer at her best, but it will have to do. When the crawl screen pauses its messaging briefly to flash in red, it could be sounding the alarm.

Text like hers would look good on t-shirts, and one can see their influence on Rirkrit Tiravanija and his freebies reading The Odious Smell of Truth. Never mind his political neutrality and pandering. They parallel, too, John Baldessari and his California irony, but without his glib detachment. They have an echo as well in the terse anger of Glenn Ligon—or the sheer excess of another African American, Adam Pendleton. I leave Holzer’s influence on text art and her 2009 Whitney retrospective to earlier reviews. She has returned earlier to the Guggenheim, too, as curator of its collection, and you can check out the links for a far fuller picture.

The show’s biases raise tough questions. What is the point of a retrospective anyway? How do the certainties and complexities of Postmodernism look today? Holzer’s whole body of work explores biases, and even her squares of gold look like the marks of a censor. Still, the opening overflow of light, text, and color lingers longest and matters most. For once, the museum rotunda talks back.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Let me begin by insisting that I learned nothing.

What is left of it now, my electronics project, other than the names of these things? A solderless breadboard, and another one, and another one. A fifty-foot roll of twenty-seven-gauge insulated copper wire. Tactile switch micro assortment momentary tact assortment kit, not clear to me what that means. All these jumper wires with their connector pins, I tend to blank on their correct name and call them pinner wires. (When I was a kid, a pinner was a tightly rolled joint. Its opposite was a hog leg.) All the resistors in the whole world, and enough alligator clips to fill the Everglades, and a couple of bags of fuses, and a sack of capacitors, and a box of transistors, and my multimeter.

Starting Electronics, Electronics for Beginners, Electronics for Dummies, Getting Started in Electronics. Schopenhauer is right again: “As a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.”

An Eveready super heavy-duty 6V carbon zinc battery, with its classic black cat logo.

Red and green and yellow and blue LEDs. Even the kid who dropped out of my electronics class knew that Shuji Nakamura had solved the challenge of the blue LED. And why was that a challenge? Don’t ask me, man, I’ve got troubles of my own.

***

Here is my Ohm’s Law Simple Circuits Workbook. What is the voltage in this circuit? What is the amperage in this circuit? What is the resistance in this circuit?

I took my workbook to Florida. Creamy yellows, pastel blues and pinks, bleached whites, stucco, cinder blocks. The flat low buildings and the giant sky. Ibises, herons, egrets, sandhill cranes, crows and vultures. The world of the backward baseball cap.

I was in the Sarasota-Bradenton airport bar. They’d seated us on our plane, then led us back off it. A four-hour delay, they told us. I wasn’t calm, more like numb, but numb was close enough to calm for me to be helpful to the other passengers, who were angry or panicked. They told me about the important appointments and opportunities they were going to miss because of our delayed flight. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” they said to me, one after another. I sat in the bar, ate a sandwich, and solved problems in my Ohm’s Law Simple Circuits Workbook. But our four-hour delay became a thirty-six-hour delay, and a horse walked into the bar. I stopped solving problems and I started causing them.

***

Electronics, for three reasons.

One. My COVID lockdown pod included the writer of an electronics textbook. All behaviors are contagious.

Two. Chris Miller’s fantastic Chip War, the 2022 Financial Times Business Book of the Year, with its description of extreme ultraviolet lithography in the manufacture of integrated circuits.

Three. The bonkers ending of Norman Mailer’s The Deer Park, where God says to Sergius: “Think of Sex as Time, and Time as the connection of new circuits.”

All right, I will.

***

I was doing okay until my parents lost their house in Florida to Hurricane Ian the same month my girlfriend was diagnosed with cancer. Suddenly I needed someone to tell me what to do. I needed rule-governed activities.

I started with chess. An ice-world of rules, I told myself, to sustain me in my burning-down life. I took mate-in-one puzzles to the waiting rooms of oncologists and thoracic surgeons, to chemotherapy and immunotherapy infusions. Mate-in-ones are considered a pastime for children. One book had a cartoon squirrel on its cover.

I read Irving Chernev’s Logical Chess: Move by Move, Every Move Explained and The Most Instructive Games of Chess Ever Played and replayed classic games on my little folding chessboard at the dining room table after dinner and read Chernev’s commentary, while she snored on the sofa in a heap of her falling-out hair. She hadn’t cut her hair before treatment, and now it was falling out everywhere, making a mess and driving her crazy, but by now her scalp hurt too much for us to cut it.

On Sunday mornings I played chess with my next-door neighbors David and Austin, now and then stepping away from a game to drive my girlfriend to the emergency room.

***

I thought electronics could be the same way. Predictable outcomes, repeatable results, the artist’s dream of science. I took an electronics class because I wanted someone to stand at the front of a classroom and tell me what to do.

I told one doctor, “I wasted my education. I should have gone to medical school like you, because now I am a full-time nurse, but I don’t have the temperament, the technology, or the support team. I don’t have the expertise, I don’t have the peer group. Because I studied the poetry of Edmund Spenser, like a big dummy.”

An example of my bedside manner: “Will you shut up? I am trying to empty the blood out of your lung drain.”

I stayed up late, watching introductory instructional videos about basic electronics, about resistors. I tried not to drink too much, and failed. Farts were funny, until she farted blood. Until the weight loss, until the sigmoidoscopy, until the colonoscopy, until.

As the immunotherapy-induced rash on her leg worsened, I saw with mirthless self-awareness that the title of the book I was reading, Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God, was doing double duty as Cancer: A Crisis in the Life of John. In tonight’s performance, the role of God will be played by John. But I don’t have the temperament or the technology.

I was having trouble reading, but I could still listen to stories. One afternoon between doctor’s visits, I found myself listening to a sexy one. “I’m too stupid. I’m just a stupid little girl who needs her daddy to tell her what to do. Please. It’s so hard. Everything is so hard. Oh, I’m so stupid, Daddy, tell me what to do. Tell me what to do.”

It was soon obvious to me that I was the girl in the story I was listening to. I disowned my own fear and helplessness and projected it outside of myself, refusing to recognize it as mine, flattering myself that instead I was the omnipotent authority the helpless girl was pleading with. But I was the one who was pleading.

That is not pornography, it is a famous prayer. I’m too stupid, Daddy, please tell me what to do. Our Father who art in heaven, tell me what to do.

***

I was the only nonscientist in the electronics class. It was held in a fifty-thousand-square-foot open facility just over the bridge. Battery engineers, software designers, X-ray technicians. I kept my mouth shut. I think I was assumed to be a scientist, too.

I had an awfully good time. But I didn’t understand much of the lectures, and I didn’t understand most of the questions the other students asked, and I rarely understood the answers to those questions. I listened to the fans of the solder fume extractors.

Photograph by J.D. Daniels.

Here’s the “joule thief” I built by following instructions.

Photograph by J.D. Daniels.

What does it do? It does whatever I tell it to do.

 It “can use nearly all of the energy in a single-cell electric battery, even far below the voltage where other circuits consider the battery fully discharged (or ‘dead’).”

Yet again I have built myself. The golem scratches its head.

***

“On Margate Sands,” T. S. Eliot wrote, “I can connect / Nothing with nothing.” I can connect metal to metal with metal: I am good at soldering. I put on my safety glasses, turned on my fume extractor fan, clamped my circuit board, unrolled my little coil of solder wire, heated up my soldering iron, and got to work. One of our teachers said, “We have a winner!” My girlfriend thought it might be due to the summer I had spent learning about welding. I’d taken two safety courses to be allowed to use the metal shop, then a MIG-welding intro, then a more focused and thorough welding course, then a kit course, if you want to call it that, where we all built the same project, a simple grill. Cutting, grinding, drilling and punching, the vertical bandsaw, the belt grinder and belt sander, the hydraulic ironworker, tack welding and stacks of tacks, drag welding, fillet welding, butt welding, cutting and patching, rooster tails of sparks thrown across the room by the angle grinder, pounding headaches from arc flash. I had performed adequately, not excelling but not having any accidents, unlike two of my welding classmates, who were always setting something on fire. Those classes had been years ago by now. But I thought it might be true that I had learned not to be paralyzed by a fear of burning metal.

Then, too, my electronics classmates, as friendly and smart and funny and good-looking as they were, seemed like they might be that commonly sighted species, the Northeastern achievatron. They wanted to get it right the first time and get an A-plus, a gold star, whereas I was confident I was going to do it wrong. So what. I’ll try anything once. I’ll go first. Here, hold my beer.

***

Tell me what to do. I followed instructions and I built little toy desk models. A forty-two-cylinder diesel radial engine model, based on the Zvezda M503 from Soviet missile boats. Before that, a U12 based on the GM 6046 twin-straight-6 from the Sherman M4A2 tank, an H16 based on the Formula One 1966 U.S. Grand Prix winner Lotus 43, and an X24 based on the Rolls-Royce Vulture. I built a toy model of a Schmidt coupling, a constant-velocity joint, a double universal joint, bevel gears, a slider-crank linkage, a sun and planet gear, a Scotch yoke, and a Chebyshev lambda linkage.

I bought a copy of Small Engines and Outdoor Power Equipment: A Care & Repair Guide for: Lawn Mowers, Snowblowers & Small Gas-Powered Implements, and I mail-ordered a used lawnmower-engine power head from an OEM Lawn Boy model 8243AE and a used Toro single-stage Tecumseh AH600 1627 snow-thrower engine to dissect, remembering the happy summer month I’d once spent ruining a weed eater’s two-stroke engine. But did I dissect them? No, I did not. They are still sitting on a rectangle of particle board in the next room. I can see them now.

All of this was playacting and pseudoscience, I see that now. All of it was sorcery. The nurses used telemetry to monitor her vital signs. I bought a blood-pressure cuff and kept a log of my own vitals. I was coming with her, like it or not. Down with the ship.

Tell me what to do, in order to—what? No one knows what I want, and, even if someone did, no one could tell me how to get it. There isn’t any way to get what I want. What I want doesn’t exist.

***

“Burn things out, mess things up—that’s how you learn,” said the cover of one of my electronics textbooks. It was somewhat reminiscent of my old drug-use textbook. The title of this present article is drawn from that textbook’s author, William S. Burroughs, who once asked: “Is Control controlled by its need to control?”

“A friend of the interviewer, spotting Burroughs across the lobby, thought he was a British diplomat. At the age of fifty, he is trim; he performs a complex abdominal exercise daily and walks a good deal.” —Conrad Knickerbocker, The Paris Review issue no. 35 (Fall 1965).

“ ‘Naked Lunch would never have been written without Doctor Dent’s treatment.’ … Burroughs also took up the abdominal exercise system of F. A. Hornibrook—author of the once best-selling book The Culture of the Abdomen (1924)—whom Dent seems to have introduced him to personally.” —Phil Baker, William S. Burroughs (2010).

“Burroughs took a room in the Hotel Muniria, at 1 calle Magallanes, with a private entrance that opened on a garden. He was off junk for the first time in three years, and he was on a health kick. In the morning he did the Hornibrook abdominal exercises he had learned in London, which guaranteed a flat stomach. Then he went rowing in the bay.”—Ted Morgan, Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs (1988).

“The special abdominal exercises that he received from a man named Hornibrook in London, who learned them from the Fijian islanders.”—Barry Miles, Call Me Burroughs (2014).

This would seem to settle the question of what the “complex abdominal exercise” referred to in Knickerbocker’s Paris Review interview with William S. Burroughs was: The Culture of the Abdomen: The Cure of Obesity and Constipation, by F. A. Hornibrook, preface by Sir William Arbuthnot Lane, Bart., C.B., M.S., Consulting Surgeon to Guy’s Hospital, etc.

Now I have on my desk a hardback copy from 1935. It is eighty-nine years old. It smells bad.

And it was on this same desk, with its alarming amount of scorch marks, that I did my electronics self-teaching, such as it was. I didn’t want to simulate circuits using software. Instead, unskilled but insistent, I improvised.

What am I supposed to do with all of these resistors now? I guess I could resist something.

***

The rabbits had eaten the coreopsis. The blue jays were interested in something under the Fothergilla, or maybe it was in the yew hedges. The daphnes in the raised bed were all in bloom. The trilliums had become gargantuan. The tree peony was swelling, ready to open. The clematis was swarming over its trellis. A butterfly, a Zabulon skipper, landed on my hand. A hornet dozed on the windowsill. The cardinal skipped and flitted in the hydrangea. I heard the strange call of a catbird who had learned that sound elsewhere and had brought it home.

I saw and heard all of this while I bound the rotten back fence’s top rail and leaning post together with wire from an electronics hobby kit. Turned out it was good for something, after all.

J. D. Daniels is the winner of a 2016 Whiting Award and The Paris Review’s 2013 Terry Southern Prize. His collection The Correspondence was published in 2017. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Esquire, n+1, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere, including The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing.

Game of Thrones may have ended in 2019, but one of the biggest TV-related auctions of recent times has only just begun. Preliminary bidding is now open on some 2,000 items, presented in 900 lots, from the fantasy blockbuster. The sale will be concluded on 10–12 October, so there’s plenty of time to browse online, or in print if you can get your hands on a copy of the 750-page catalogue (your roving correspondent has spotted at least one on eBay already, going for $100). Organised by Heritage Auctions and the show’s maker, HBO, the auction includes every kind of prop and costume imaginable, including some that would have barely registered with even the most devoted viewer. From Jaime Lannister’s gold right hand to the flayed face of Walder Frey, Arya Stark’s Valerian steel dagger to the helmet of The Hound, there really is something for everyone.

It is too early for the bidding to have got going in earnest, but the hot-ticket items won’t come as a surprise: so far the highest bids are for Jon Snow’s sword ($31,000) and the Iron Throne ($26,000). Rakewell thinks it responsible, however, to point out that the latter – described as a ‘seat of power […] only rivaled by Captain Kirk’s command chair from Star Trek’ is only a ‘touring’ version, ‘used for promotional events’ such as Comic Con. For those after a more Benjaminian aura, we recommend trying to snagging the ‘Melted Iron Throne’ from the final season, currently lagging behind at $5,000.

‘Game of Thrones: The Auction’ may be particularly extensive, thanks to the participation of HBO, but it’s not the first of its kind. While the Stark family’s range of wolf-themed wear may be just the thing for dressier occasions, some of the other greats from the era of peak TV – The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad – have provided less fantastical options. We’re not sure we really understand what made anyone fork out $65,000 for Walter White’s copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, but most collectors will, at one time or another, have followed their heart rather than their head. And what could be more practical than a police jacket worn by Dominic West’s Jimmy McNulty in The Wire – sold in October 2018 for $3,350, with the funds going to the Baltimore school system?

Meanwhile, your correspondent finds herself drawn to a fetching foam head of a direwolf (‘non-bloody version’). The connoisseurial heart wants what it wants.

Jenny Holzer has a way with words. She also has a way with silence.

For a time her crawl screens were seemingly everywhere—speaking for you, standing up to you, and getting under your skin. Text art will never speak so forcefully and so elusively again. It made her not just the voice, but the voices of political and postmodern art. Were they never spoken aloud? It brought her to street posters in the 1970s, for Truisms and Inflammatory Essays, and to the ramp of the Guggenheim in 1989. This is not sound art, although that has its place, but it echoes once again through the museum.

Now she recreates that work, but with additional words, because for her the same old words will never suffice. They ascend on LED along the rim of the ramp, facing outward onto the rotunda, with selected work from over fifty years in the bays by the wall, as “Light Line,” through September 29. It is a retrospective as a work in progress, her first in New York since 2009, and text keeps coming, apart from conspicuous gaps and silences. The empty bays and floors all but empty of art speak loudly, too. They allow her words to echo in the silence, and they bring out how much she refuses to say. As it happens, Joyce Kozloff in paint keeps up with the news, too, with maps, and I work this together with a report earlier this year on Kozloff as a longer review and my latest upload.

You may remember Jenny Holzer for the crawl screens, and you could almost take in her show at the Guggenheim without ever leaving the rotunda. It does not have much in the way of seating, but then her art does not run to creature comforts. You might have to stand and crane your head, but it is hard not to keep looking as the words ascend. They emerge from the lobby wall, come into view, and come into view again as they complete the circle and move on to the next. Their terse messages are instantly memorable—and ever so easy to forget as new messages finish them, contradict them, and supplant them. It says something that a review in The New York Times misquoted one of her best known.

Abuse of Power Comes as No Surprise, it goes, and you may have read it yourself on billboards, screen prints, and of course crawl screens. It has such an impact because it, too, may or may not come as a surprise. You are used, you may think, to politics as the abuse of power, and it may have driven you further to the left or to a protest vote for Donald J. Trump. The message can still come as a shock, though, if you expect “abuse of power” to end with something less banal, like a condemnation or an expression of pain. Truisms are often like that—temptingly obvious and temptingly easy to deride. In her hands, they are inflammatory all the same.

Holzer has perfected a voice that combines banality, truth, and lies. Which of the statements are hers? She is not saying, and none are so easy as you may have thought to dismiss. They speak of the need to lie next to someone and of the need to live apart. They veer into family, community, and politics, without distinguishing one from another. They could be personal confessions or the crushing voice of authority.

Her choice of LED works much the same way. It is the medium of advertising in Times Square, where she first took it up on commission in 1972—a medium devoted to gaining your trust and to taking you in. Yet it is also a medium of harsh whites and pixels, with the thrill and detachment of what was then the latest technology. I hope, though, that you will not end your trip in the lobby after all. Holzer got her start in other media, and more lies in store up the ramp. That includes the overflow of voices and silences.

The very year of her Guggenheim installation, she carved her truisms in marble benches and the dark stone of what might be a coffin. Do not expect comfortable seating or reverence for the dead. Media like these may last forever, but they, too, speak of transience. No one settles into park benches for long, and funerals are all about the brevity of life. The truisms began, though, as posters, and the exhibition proper begins with an Inflammatory Wall of them from around 1980. Make that four walls, on the full height of the two-story High Gallery just off the lobby.

It has room for nearly a thousand, in clashing colors and clashing messages. How an artist at age thirty accumulated so many in just three years is a marvel to itself. Still, they are not hers alone, regardless of who wrote them. She has invited another artist, Lee Quiñones, to scrawl right over them. It updates her presentation for street art while bringing out a crucial aspect of her work’s anonymity. She is bearing witness and giving voice to others—and I wrap this up next time with more recent work and the rest of her show.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

For a while there in the late nineties, it seemed to me like every other book of poetry that I flipped open in the bookstore was prefaced by an austere epigraph from the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Plato, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Wittgenstein—for all their many differences—enjoy a special status as “poets’ philosophers” in the annals of literary history. Other lofty thinkers fly under poets’ collective radar; I have yet to come across a volume of verse prefaced by a quotation from David Hume. What makes some philosophers, and not others, into poets’ philosophers remains a mystery to me. But I’ve never really thought of Hannah Arendt as one of them.

Unemotional, anti-Romantic, and doggedly insistent on expunging unruly feelings from collective life, Arendt may seem to possess the least lyrical of temperaments, but a new volume of her poetry reveals that the author of sobering works like The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition was writing ardent and intimate verse in her off-hours. We’re pleased to feature Samantha Rose Hill’s new translation, with Genese Grill, of an untitled poem from Arendt’s manuscripts in our Fall 2024 issue.

Now housed in Arendt’s archive at the Library of Congress, the poem is dated to September 1947, six years after the philosopher’s arrival in the United States. Though she had by then settled on New York’s Upper West Side, Arendt reflects upon what she’d left behind on her life’s journey in this wistful poem:

This was the farewell:
Many friends came with us
And whoever did not come was no longer a friend.

The bracing conclusion of Arendt’s opening stanza lands with the impact of a practical realist’s rebuke to a sentimental fool: Friendship is companionship; therefore, whoever is not a companion cannot be considered a friend. (There’s something syllogistic to the philosopher’s adoption of tercets for this poem’s form.) In her introduction to What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt, which will be published later in December, Hill chronicles how Arendt’s notebook of poems accompanied her through a succession of farewells: when she fled Germany after her release from the Gestapo prison in Alexanderplatz in the spring of 1933; when she left her second life in Paris to report to the internment camp at Gurs seven years later; and when she escaped on foot and by bicycle to Lisbon, where she boarded the SS Guinee for Ellis Island on May 22, 1941. “This was the train: / Measuring the country in flight,” Arendt writes, “and slowing as it passed through many cities.”

From its melancholy opening to its bemused conclusion, Arendt’s poem reflects the emotional passage of many who leave home to take up residence in a foreign land. It begins as an aubade, or song of parting, and it ends with the enigma of arrival:

This is the arrival:
Bread is no longer called bread
and wine in a foreign language changes the conversation.

For the German speaker newly arrived in America, bread is no longer Brot. One irony of Arendt’s historical displacements lies in how her original German word for bread is now effaced by “bread” in the English translation. A further irony is to be found in the poem’s final line, where “a foreign language” intrudes on what would otherwise read: “and wine changes the conversation.” The essential purpose of wine—at a dinner party, for instance—is to change the conversation. But what is wine in a foreign language? When many of your dinner guests are, like you, serial émigrés who’ve fled Europe in the political wake of World War II, wine serves an additional purpose; anyone who’s found themselves a little more tipsily fluent at a dinner party abroad will understand how “wine in a foreign language changes the conversation.” Arendt made a home away from home for herself—and for others—in New York at 317 West Ninety-Fifth Street and, later, at 370 Riverside Drive, where she entertained fellow expatriates like Hermann Broch, Lotte Kohler, Helen and Kurt Wolff, Paul Tillich, and Hans Morgenthau. The slightly slanted rhyme of “Stadt” with “Gespräch” that concludes the poem in Arendt’s original German links the author’s mid-century Manhattan to the bonhomie of intellectual exchange; “city” sounds a little like “conversation” in the poet’s mother tongue.

Arendt’s poem, then, tells the story of her farewell to Europe and her arrival in the United States in a dozen lines of verse. But it’s also a self-aware work of art that quietly asserts its own place in the German poetic tradition—the bread and wine invoke the literary sacraments of Friedrich Hölderlin’s celebrated poem “Brod und Wein.” (“Bread is the fruit of the earth, yet it’s blessed also by light,” writes Hölderlin. “The pleasure of wine comes from the thundering god.”) German poetry, for Arendt, was a constant presence in both heart and mind. “I know a rather large part of German poetry by heart,” she said in a 1964 interview on German national television. “The poems are always somehow in the back of my mind.” She wrote her first poems when she was a teenager; some of these early literary efforts were addressed to her teacher—and lover—at the University of Marburg, Martin Heidegger. Those early love poems remained secret, like the affair that produced them, until after her death. Reading them now, we can see the intimate association of poetry and philosophy during this formative period in Arendt’s life. Yet her poems, unlike her philosophy, remained a private affair for Arendt to the end. We don’t know if she ever showed her poems to her close friends Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, and W. H. Auden in New York; to our knowledge, only her second husband, the poet and philosopher Heinrich Blücher, read her verse. The final poem to be found in the Library of Congress archive is labeled “January 1961, Evanston.” Its author was about to depart from a residency at Northwestern University to attend Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem. What she saw there may have marked the end of poetry for Hannah Arendt.

Srikanth Reddy is the poetry editor of The Paris Review.

“My back is scarred by the lash—that I could show you. I would if I could make visible the wounds of this system upon my soul.”

Frederick Douglass made the wounds of slavery visible for a generation of white Americans, starting before the system itself came to an end in the Civil War. Making visible is also the business of art, and Isaac Julien recreates an address by Douglass in all its eloquence, on “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” And what is it, Julien asks implicitly, to African Americans today? The address provides the framework for an intimate look at the speaker’s life as a free man, on video at MoMA. In the exhibition’s title, it poses Lessons of the Hour, through September 28. It asks, too, whether a divided nation can ever escape slavery’s lessons.

This could be Julien’s year. Douglass escaped slavery in at age twenty-one, in 1838, and Lessons of the Hour takes its title from a speech in 1894, a year before his death. Again on video, in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, Julien brings to life the Harlem Renaissance and its leading sculptor. He also curates an exhibition of that sculptor, and I bring together my reviews of that exhibition and Julien’s video as a longer review and my latest upload. As I wrote then, there is nothing savage about the art of Richmond Barthé—and, if there were, he would be the first to tame it. If you have any doubts, head right for Feral Benga, in a gallery retrospective of a thoroughly sophisticated artist.

“I have watched from the wharves,” Douglass said, “the slave ships in the Basin, anchored from the shore, with its cargoes full of human flesh. . . . In the still darkness of midnight, I have been often aroused by the dead heavy footsteps, and the piteous cries of the chained gangs that passed our door.” His words evoke pictures, and so does Isaac Julian, but less painful ones. He opens to trees, to a gentleman’s study and a woman sewing, and to the man himself, slowly leading a horse. He follows Douglass on the train, looking inward and perhaps creating those words in his head. He ends with Douglass standing tall on a mountain’s peak, like the statue of a hero.

He works in film, transferred to video, for the epic clarity of its color. It runs from day into night and from introspection to fireworks on, of course, the Fourth of July. It includes shots of an hourglass marking the hour, if not its lessons. Still, time and history have a way of playing tricks. Day breaks again after the fireworks, on its way to the mountain. The sands of time sometimes flow and sometimes stand still.

Julien hopes to encompass both reality and hope, especially when they collide. A hand picks cotton, but it might almost be picking white flowers for their beauty, with echoes soon after in yellow glistening on a tree. The audience for oratory files into a Methodist church with the bare architecture of an arena today. It includes blacks and whites, men and women—some in the fashion of the day, others in the present. Other clips borrow police surveillance tape of protests against police murder, although I somehow missed them. The video runs just under half an hour, but one can enter as one pleases and, in time, see the loop begin again.

I first encountered the artist, born in England, in London in 2003, already moving in and out of history. Two videos placed him both within a Trinidad community forty years earlier, after a poem by Derek Walcott, and a contemporary city much like Baltimore, where Douglass lived as well. When I caught up with Julien again, with Playtime in 2013, I worried that he fixed all too easily on his heroes and villains. (Do read my review then, for a fuller picture.) Has he finally found the hero he deserves? Has his hero found the response he deserves, in fireworks and, in church, applause?

As Douglass, Ray Fearon makes his character nuanced, steady, personal, and profound (and I wish that the museum took more care to credit him). Then again, I may have sold Julien short all along. Ten Thousand Waves, in 2010, already has many messages and many channels to mess them up. His latest video, a highlight of the Biennial, comes closer still to an installation and a hall of mirrors. It also moves easily in time, back to the Harlem Renaissance. Now MoMA presents Lessons of the Hour, first shown in 2019, as a historical document itself.

Douglass was the most photographed American of his time. And the curators, Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi with Erica DiBenedetto, set out photos, publications, and newspaper clippings, floor to ceiling and in cases. They also include the handwritten text of a speech on the role of images of black and white America. Is blackness once again “going dark,” feared by or invisible to white eyes? For Julien, Douglass speaks forcefully but never gets over his introspection, his memories, and his pain. “Anything, no matter what, to get rid of thinking!”

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.