Do great white sharks require more energy than we thought?
Hunk Of Skin (New Year’s Resolution, Book Twelve)
I actually bought this for my father. I was browsing the used bookshop run by the Friends of the Library – Montgomery County, when I saw this. My father is great Picasso fan. Naturally, I acknowledge Picasso’s genius and love many of his paintings, but he’s not my favorite (Kandinsky, Pollock, Cezanne would all rank higher for me, for example).
The translation is irritatingly idiosyncratic. For example:
y el clerigo estranados frios
pintados de azafran y verde cargadosThis is translated as:
and the priest standing coldly apart painted
saffron and greenIn the Spanish, pintados, painted, is on the earlier line. Why did the translator move it?
This is a pattern.
Look, Picasso was no poet. He clearly tries to project his visual sensibility into the medium but it is just warmed over surrealism. Does the translator believe that new line breaks, indentations, and spacings will improve it? If so, to what purpose? Surely something like this is more about a historical document about Picasso as it is about publishing very good poetry? But Paul Blackburn, who translated these poems, decided rather on an ill advised effort to… what? Improve? I don’t know. All I know is that these are not particularly good poems (more like your average, MFA style product) but their author gives them a value that an interference minded translator can only diminish.
Weekend Reading – Bookstores Are Back
Blue Rider (New Year’s Resolution, Book Eleven)
I was at MoMA in New York back in January and they had a wonderful exhibit on abstract art – Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925. There was some kind of an effort to make some kind of a point, but they failed quite masterfully at that. So, as a thematically/narratively curated exhibit… well, it really wasn’t. But as a grab back of awesome, early abstraction, it was freaking awesome. I love avant-garde art from that period. And I love how they incorporated music and especially poetry. Some Mallarme and Appollinaire, some of those lovely old journals and publications, with the poets wild typographies. Good stuff.
They also had some Italian futurist stuff, including a long poem/dramatic prose creation by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the manifesto writer extraordinaire of the Italian Futurists. Of course, those folks devolved fairly rapidly into Fascism.
Looking at some of the graphic design on Marinetti’s pieces in the exhibit, I couldn’t help but notice how much it looked those iconic covers of Ayn Rand’s novels (see here and here). They shared an obsession with technology and progress (Rand’s novels, Marinetti, and Fascism). Especially in Atlas Shrugged, her obsession with phallic, thrusting trains and long beams of powerfully strong steel.
But at the very beginning of the of the MoMA exhibit, was a little something about the Blue Rider Almanac, the love child/brain child of folks like Kandinsky (who claimed to be deeply influenced and move by Schönberg’s innovative music.
So, it seemed like fate when, a day or two later, I was in Rizzoli Bookstore (a great place for art books and for Italian language works) and I saw a book on the Blue Rider movement. Since I was on a kind of quest to buy a book at a bunch of famous bookstores and Rizzoli was on the list. I’d been to Rizzoli once before and it’s such an indulgent and decadent feeling place (though also pricey; don’t like for a bargain bin over there; but you do pay for quality).
So, I bought The Blue Rider and I”m now getting around to reading it.
The book itself reads rather like a catalogue or monograph written on an exhibition that never took place. Which isn’t a bad thing. If exhibition catalogues weren’t so darn expensive, I’d own a lot more of them.
When reading about the Blue Rider group on the little placards and seeing the collection of works and documents associated with it, I wanted to learn more about this group. I wanted to read about Kandinsky and Schönberg sitting down at a bar and chasing the same woman and then Franz Marc and August Macke struggling with the typesetting and printing of a broadsheet. I don’t know if these things actually happened (and the first one seems very unlikely), but that’s what wanted that went beyond just a catalogue and I didn’t get it.
Sure, there was some talk at the very beginning about which group drank at which cafe, but for heaven’s sake man, I learned that about some pre-Blue Rider groups! Where in the good Lord’s name did Kandinsky get drunk and take his coffee?! Part of this also about an incredibly drowsy writing style. We’re talking about some of the twentieth century’s most influential cultural figures, yet sometimes, I can hear a voice in my head while reading this saying, ‘Bueller… Bueller… Bueller…’
The book’s progression is also weird. First, there is a description of the cultural environment leading up to the formation of the Blue Rider group. Then there is some description of how they set up their first exhibition. Then there are brief bios of some major figures associated with the group. Then some bios of minor figures. Followed by a narrative history of later exhibitions and activities of the group and its members. And then the author tries to explain what Blue Rider group was about and wanted to accomplish. Then there are a bunch of photos and descriptions of places associated with the Blue Rider group. But those descriptions sometimes appear pulled from brochures. One of these places is actually a walking route across swampy moors. The author recommends that the reader, should the reader take this walk, bring some water. There’s even a recommendation that I, the reader, visit the Wernstein Am Inn in Austria. See what I mean? That’s not history, that’s… I don’t know. Advertising? National park service?
It feels like this whole thing was written without an outline. Like I said earlier, it feels a bit like an exhibition catalogue, but it’s not about an exhibition, so it lacks the unifying drive an actual exhibition might have imparted to it.
But I shouldn’t complain that much. For $19.95 plus tax, I’ve got reproductions of some stunning art work from my favorite period in art, plus some good history about a subject I knew little about (despite a great fondness for Kandinsky, if I ever knew about the Blue Rider group, I’d forgotten it by the time I’d reached MoMA.
Midweek Staff Meeting – Reviewing the Reviewer
The Sunday Paper – The Typewriter From ‘Naked Lunch’ (The Movie) Is Almost Here
Your typewriter can read your mind.
Perelandra (New Year’s Resolution, Book Ten)
I finished reading Perelandra, C.S. Lewis’ sequel to Out of the Silent Planet.
The religious aspect comes much more to the fore here, as well as an idea you’ll see a lot within Lewis, that of this war between God and the Devil (though still not so explicit).
Also, you can draw a straight line, I think, between Lewis’ Space Trilogy and Madeleine L’engle’s trilogy, beginning with A Wrinkle in Time. I believe that L’engle was also a devout Anglican, too, though that’s not what I’m talking about. And Lewis isn’t writing children’s/YA fiction here, though the style is very similar to Lewis’ books for young people (which maybe is testimony to his not talking down to children or a testimony to a certain childlike nature in his writing in general).
Out of the Silent Planet was a more subtle book, in a way. Perelandra is far more theological, by which I mean that it expressly advocates for and against some specific theological positions. Rather unexpectedly, Lewis (or his stand-in, Dr. Ransom) fiercely opposes, on theological grounds, the idea of humans colonizing other planets. In the context of this system he’s created, it makes sense. Planets and species are born, grown old, and die. This, it is implied, should be accepted as part of God’s plan. But it was surprising and pulled me up short when Ransom was so vehemently opposed to the idea. I thought of 2010, when the alien intelligence told humanity not to colonize one of the moon’s of Saturn, because that was intended for new, burgeoning life. But, in 2010, humanity did the go ahead to spread across other planets and moons in the solar system. Lewis doesn’t think we should be leaving earth, at all.
He also makes an argument against… I would call it evolutionary deism. But a certain kind of non-denominational spirituality. I’m sure it’s referring to something of particular vogue when he wrote it (was Bergsonianism big at the time?).
The idea of God, Jesus, and the Devil are much more explicit here. There’s even a some very real demonic possession (which Ransom is irritatingly slow to wise up to).
The most interesting bit actually occurs fairly early on, when Ransom intrudes upon an edenic moment and appears as if, unwittingly, he will play the role of the serpent, introducing death and evil into the paradise that is Perelandra (better known as Venus). The edenic theme continues, but with a more traditional antagonist.
When I wrote about Out of the Silent Planet, I noted its debt to planetary romances like Burroughs’ beloved John Carter of Mars novels, where half the pleasure is the author’s development and the reader’s discovery of a new, amazing world. But the world of Perelandra is less joyfully explored than that of Malacandra (Mars) and the book itself is far more grim for it. Theology trumps discovery.
As a Catholic, the idea of the devil has always been hardest aspects of dogma for me to wrap my head around. But C.S. Lewis is determined to remind readers of his existence.
Did you ever see the movie, The Usual Suspects? If you haven’t, shame on you. It’s a great movie. I saw it with my friend Ryan in Minneapolis in 1995. Kevin Spacey’s character has a line: ‘The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.’ Or something like that.
He might have been quoting from Lewis.
This was on my mind when I went to confession the other day. The priest behind the screen was not my usual confessor, but a more experienced, but perhaps also stricter and less forgiving (though, of course, he granted me absolution) priest. He said that what I was attributing to my own laziness actually had a deeper cause: the devil attempting to keep me away from God. His discussion with me very much focused on the devil, the idea that, lifting up the skin of our faults would reveal a very real and evil spiritual presence (not that this excuses us for not resisting and doing what is right).
I won’t get anymore into what goes and happens in there, but C.S. Lewis would have appreciated my confessor’s words. He was someone who truly believed, in a way I still struggle to do, in the reality of the devil and the evil that emanates from him and infects the world.
Perelandra is ultimately about the reality of evil and the necessity of resisting it.
There is a lot of didactic dialogue, characters going back and forth over the universe, God, God’s plan for things, creation, evil, necessity, freedom, predestination, etc., etc., etc., etc…
Then. After a ton of that, there’s a fight scene and a climactic chase. Then there’s some more theological discourse. Then, a Burroughs-esque exploration of a strange, underground realm within Perelandra, lovingly described – alien, frightening, and beautiful.
Then, there is a lot of talk by some angels (okay, eldila is what Lewis’ calls them here). Then he safely goes home (which we already knew would happen, because the opening is by a character named Lewis who is helping Ransom on this end, making sure someone is there to open the crystal casket, which is the device by which he travels from earth the Perelandra, who notes that he helps Ransom out of the casket after his return back, but that’s actually okay, because did you really think Ransom would die, because it’s not that kind of book).
Next up, That Hideous Strength. But not just yet. I’m a little tired of this trilogy and don’t intend to start on the final volume for a bit. I’m reading Knife of Dreams, the final Wheel of Time wholly written by the late Robert Jordan (and it already looks an improvement on the last couple of books; it opens with a sword fight and looks like people are going to get down and dirty indulge this fantasy loving boy’s desire for things like battles and magical duels), and Mary Jo Bang’s poetry collection, Elegy, is looking lonely and ready to read in my study.
Midweek Staff Meeting – Good PR Begins At Birth
the coffee philosopher 