Considering the toll it takes on me to construct a writing boiled down to within an inch of its life about something I think, punctuate it punctiliously, then figure out too late what I’ve said, much less thought, if anything, it got my attention when Darryl Pinckney said that Elizabeth Hardwick was “a writer who composed prose like poetry.” This doesn’t mean her prose was “poetic,” God grant. I prefer it to mean that her prose partakes of the “exquisite compression and technical precision” that Dwight Garner elsewhere attributes to poetry. That way in my dreams go I on the page.
Of several delicious reminiscences cited in the review of Pinckney’s memoir about Hardwick, there’s one whose sprightly wickedness on the part of a woman who loved gossip keeps cracking me up (note the parentheses; they enhance the mischief):
(“Gossip, according to Hardwick, was merely ‘analysis of the absent person.’”)
Then there’s this: “As Hardwick once put it, ‘Reading was such a wonderful thing that to have made a life around the experience was almost criminal it was so fortunate.’” That’s for you, cherished reader. You know who you are.
(Maggie Doherty, “”Elizabeth Hardwick’s Master Class on Literature and Life,” New York Times, 10-23-22; Dwight Garner and Parul Sehgal, “19 Lines That Turn Anguish Into Art,” New York Times, 6-18-21)
Curators have increasingly come to recognize the depth and complexity of Jennifer Guidi’s art. “It’s more than it initially appears,” said one museum director. Credit… Alex Welsh for The New York Times.
The comment attributed to a museum director about Jennifer Guidi’s painting reminded me of Mark Twain’s remark that Wagner’s music is “better than it sounds.”
“I’m thinking of color as a way to connect — a way to engage — that invites people into a sense of aliveness,” Guidi said. “More colors. More dots. More energy. More vibrant. More vibration.”
A bit of fun can be had with the dulcet, polka-dot-and-moonbeam language of this review. Where’s the harm? Gentle bemusement is the rhetorical reward when movers and shakers of the arts community rally around an artist in furtherance of the addition of zeros to her work’s financial accomplishments.
One of her paintings, “Elements of All Entities,” sold last fall at Christie’s for $625,000, more than four times the low estimate of $150,000 (her work sells privately for $100,000 to about $500,000).
“Till Sunbeams Find You (Painted White Sand, Orange, Pink, Hot Pink, Yellow, Turquoise, Lavender and Purple, Black Fill),” 2021-22. Credit… Alex Welsh for The New York Times.
“She is straddling the space between the spiritual and the hallucinatory… They’re very much these meditations on the ambience and the atmosphere of our West Coast environs — where the sky meets the sea”… “She quietly absorbs the world around her and distills it into meditative and hypnotic, often pulsating imagery.”
“The Various Planes on Being and Life (Painted Natural Sand, Red-Orange-Yellow-Blue-Purple-Dark Purple Mountain, Painted Black Sand, Yellow, Red, Pink, Green and Orange, Painted Black Sand, Blue, Yellow, Green, Pink, Black Ground),” 2022. Credit… Alex Welsh for The New York Times.
(Robin Pogrebin, “Where the Sky Meets the Sea: Jennifer Guidi Leans Into Beauty,” New York Times, 11-4-22)
Cézanne’s Sugar Bowl, Pears, and Blue Cup (1865-70) is a conventional depiction of a still life (Credit: Alamy).
[His] early Sugar Bowl, Pears and Blue Cup (1865-70)… shows Cézanne seeing and painting in a relatively traditional way. Apart from the rougher handling of paint, it is a close relative of traditional scenes like Harmen Steenwyck’s…
(Matthew Wilson)
I confess to a predilection for the earlier work of certain well known painters versus the output on which their reputations rest. Mondrian is a good example. His severe geometry is reverence-triggering, but I’ve seen paintings he made on his journey to the mature work that I could cozy up to, putting it blandly.
The early still life shown above isn’t recognizable as a Cézanne to my eye, nor as a “conventional depiction,” though yes, perhaps painted “in a relatively traditional way,” as viewed by an observer able to compare it to a little known baroque-era work of 1640.
What sets Cézanne’s still life apart is precisely that “rougher handling of paint” — the slathered impasto modeling, the inky backdrop, and the quality of oozing light, captured as if on the fly, and left almost dripping from the vessels. Damn if it’s not remarkably fine and relatable!
(Matthew Wilson, “The painter who revealed how our eyes really see the world,” theguardian.com, 10-18-22)
Below is jargon improvised for gauging how a translation navigates its source text. Note how the verbiage is strewn with hedging adverbials, conceding a priori that the labels are judgments, which by definition are subjective, privative, compromised, blinkered and fallible. (See “U.S. Supreme Court.”)
Congruent: matches the source text fairly closely, with minimal liberties taken for readability. Omissive: suppresses elements of the source text without obvious justification. Expansive: adds interpretive structure or content not discernible in the source text but plausibly deriving from it. Inventive: carries the “expansive” element to a level not obviously supported by the source text. Transgressive: departs from the source text in a way that arguably betrays the poem’s letter or spirit.
Omissive was added late. It’s a watchword for the position that loss must entail gain; if the translation discards a feature of the source text which the target language is capable of emulating, a benefit should be realized from the curtailment. If gain is perceptible, the translation accrues congruency; if not, it steers a tick in the remiss direction.
The first line of the section of Gilgamesh’s Snake titled “The Lost Beginning” by Gareeb Iskander (1) attracts attention. It’s a vocative construct.
O master! ‘ayyuhā-s-sayyidu Master! (2)
The vocative is a Hey, you, listen up! utterance involving a particle — ‘O’ in English, ‘ayyuhā in Arabic — followed by a noun or pronoun — here, sayyidun, master, sir, lord, chief. (3) Iskander leaves out the particle in its translation, perhaps from a desire not to sound mannered or highflown. However, sayyidun connotes prestige. It comports well with prefacing by “O.” The formal tone isn’t amiss contextually, and the source text is respected. Iskander’s translation could be tagged Omissive.
Here’s a smattering of Wright’s exposition on the vocative (4):
“‘ayyuhāandyā ‘ayyuhā… require after them a noun, singular, dual or plural, defined by the article, and in the nominative case… The demonstrative ḏā is also admissible….”
Wright illustrates the construction with Arabic phrases translated into fragrant period English. Here are three of them: Thou there, come forward!; O thou there, whose soul passion(or grief) is killing; O thou there, who barkest at (revilest) the Bènū ‘s Sīd.
Thou there, come forward!; O thou there, whose soul passion(or grief) is killing.O thou there, who barkest at (revilest) the Bènū ‘s Sīd.
Notes
(1) Gilgamesh’s Snake and Other Poems, Ghareeb Iskander, Bilingual Edition, Translated from the Arabic by John Glenday and Ghareeb Iskander, Syracuse University Press, 2015. (2) The published translation (“Iskander”) is in italics beneath my rendering and transliteration using this jury-rigged character set: ‘ a ā A i ī u ū ay aw b t ẗ ṯ j ḥ ẖ d ḏ r z s š ṣ ḍ ṭ ẓ ^ ḡ f q k l m n h w y. (3) Hans Wehr, A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, Edited by J. Milton Cowan, Cornell University Press, 1966. (4) W. Wright, A Grammar of the Arabic Language, Simon Wallenberg Press, 2007. Reprint of the classic work first published in 1874, and updated in 1896.
“Untitled” (detail), 2022, from Alexandre’s new show at the Shed, in latex, liquid shoe polish, graphite and acrylic on brown kraft paper. Credit… Maxwell Alexandre.
Brazilian artist Maxwell Alexandre speaks of how exposure to Kerry James Marshall’s painting made him aware of “an absence of representation. You would ask a Black kid to draw a person and he would draw a white person… Just by looking at [Marshall’s] body of work, where every character is Black, it shattered something.”
It’s intriguing to speculate what form children’s drawn depictions of persons of different race would take.
This well-spoken painter’s kitchen-sink approach to media is beguiling. His figures, brushy and flat, jump off their kraft paper with something of a fashion flair. A barefoot, disquietingly faceless male in dangling bib overalls sports a septum ring and assorted bling, along with blonde hair, as his sole discernible features.
“If I were you I’d look at me again” (2018), from “Pardo é Papel: The Glorious Victory and New Power.” The artist uses materials found in a favela, including latex, bitumen, hair relaxer, acrylic and charcoal on brown kraft paper, and borrows patterns from “Capri” [inflatable] pools found on rooftops in Rocinha. Credit… Maxwell Alexandre; via Instituto Inclusartiz and Museo de Arte de Rio.
Alexandre identifies with the “Black figuration” movement in Brazilian painting. It fills a vital gap, he says.
“… You are much likelier to be successful if you deal with this [movement] than if you want to discuss rhythm and emptiness. But you flatten the possibility of expression for young Black artists. You don’t have white figuration. Because white people have been representing the white figure for so long, they can move on to the sublime.”
“Move on to the sublime”! The lofty phrase sticks a landing. Regarding the direction his own work may take, Alexandre speculates: “It becomes abstract, which I would like to do more of.”
As would I. The way he paints his becoming mindset with words, not just shoe polish, Alexandre incites me to think of abstraction as the endpoint, a destination hard to reach, but out there.
(Arthur Lubow, “How Rollerblading Propelled Maxwell Alexandre’s Art Career,” New York Times, 10-25-22)
A healthy restored reef in the Little Choptank River is one result of the project. Photo by Oyster Recovery Partnership. [Victoria Advocate]
“Oysters are the bedrock for the vitality of our bays along the mid and upper Texas coast… They are essential to the health of our fish and wildlife, water quality, commercial and recreational fishing, tourism and coastal economies.”
(Carter Smith, Director of Parks and Wildlife)
It may be a sign of the times that the restored reef illustrating the article is in Maryland, not Texas, but never mind. A lesson gleaned from the account of the oyster’s vital role is that nature, given half a chance, can unfuck what we foul.
(Leo Bertucci, “State closes parts of Matagorda, San Antonio bays to oyster harvesting,” victoriaadvocate.com, 10-27-22)
Angela Lansbury (1925 – 2022): Actor Patrick Healy, theater reporter and deputy Opinion writer for The New York Times, recounts how the actor gamely and gracefully confronted the vulnerabilities of advancing age in pursuing her long career (1).
In the past year, I reached out to her team about whether she would write a piece for The Times… I heard back words of thanks from her, and kind regrets that the realities of age and memory would prevent her from writing.
There would be no covering-up by Ms. Lansbury, no ghostwritten pieces; if she could do the work, she would, and if she couldn’t — well, then.
(1) Patrick Healy, “A Phone Call With Angela Lansbury Changed Me,” New York Times, 10-15-22.
Peter Schjeldahl (1942 – 2022): Art Critic Peter Schjeldahl credited a leaning towards poetry for his “not knowing what I have to say until I’ve said it.” A knack for waxing luminously obscure didn’t fade when “the art criticism ate the poetry,” as he put it. (1)
“I define contemporary art as every work of art that exists at the present moment… We look with contemporary eyes. What other eyes are there?…”
A reader could be left guessing as to where exactly an artist lay in his estimation. “Mr. Schjeldahl had… no real urge to pass judgment,” writes William Grimes, obit writer and book critic for The New York Times.
“In a way, the advancement of opinions is the least interesting thing about criticism for me,… but it’s one of the essentials to launch you into a situation, into a conversation.”
In a towering takedown of Schjeldahl in 1991 (cited by Grimes), the editor of The New Criterion conceded sniffily that he was often “witty and not infrequently astringently perceptive.” (2)
Alan Rickman (1946 – 2016): Actor The third death features in a book review. (1) Dwight Garner, book critic for The Times, appraises “MADLY, DEEPLY: The Diaries of Alan Rickman,” (2) and opines without animus that they are “fantastically dull” (his italics). The piece doesn’t discredit the distinguished British actor in any way. Garner doubts that Rickman would have wanted the diaries published. Their appearance gives a seasoned reviewer the opportunity to show his stuff.
“… The entries are rarely fleshed out,” Garner writes. “Much of it reads like an aide-memoire, quickly jotted notes one might return to later for a different sort of book.”
Garner tosses off a nugget parenthetically:
(If Rickman had written “The Metamorphosis,” it would have been one line: “Woke as bug.”)
(1) When I first drafted this note as a solo post, I titled it “A Walk on the Terse Side.” It’s so fetching a title, I couldn’t bear to let it pass unnoted. (2) Dwight Garner, “Alan Rickman’s Diaries: Bread Crumbs of a Fast-Moving Life,” New York Times, 10-17-22.
EthicalDative 
‘A Writer Who Composed Prose Like Poetry’
Considering the toll it takes on me to construct a writing boiled down to within an inch of its life about something I think, punctuate it punctiliously, then figure out too late what I’ve said, much less thought, if anything, it got my attention when Darryl Pinckney said that Elizabeth Hardwick was “a writer who composed prose like poetry.” This doesn’t mean her prose was “poetic,” God grant. I prefer it to mean that her prose partakes of the “exquisite compression and technical precision” that Dwight Garner elsewhere attributes to poetry. That way in my dreams go I on the page.
Of several delicious reminiscences cited in the review of Pinckney’s memoir about Hardwick, there’s one whose sprightly wickedness on the part of a woman who loved gossip keeps cracking me up (note the parentheses; they enhance the mischief):
Then there’s this: “As Hardwick once put it, ‘Reading was such a wonderful thing that to have made a life around the experience was almost criminal it was so fortunate.’” That’s for you, cherished reader. You know who you are.
(Maggie Doherty, “”Elizabeth Hardwick’s Master Class on Literature and Life,” New York Times, 10-23-22; Dwight Garner and Parul Sehgal, “19 Lines That Turn Anguish Into Art,” New York Times, 6-18-21)
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