Where Polytheism Works

Posted on May 12, 2020 by JMN
Nurses and National Health Service workers outside the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London last Thursday during the weekly “clap for carers” to honor their service during the pandemic. Credit… Andrew Testa for The New York Times.

Genesis
Britons have… trusted in the N.H.S. since 1948, when it was created by a Labour government after World War II to forge a country that would eradicate the “five evils”: want, disease, squalor, ignorance and idleness.

Pantheon
We all have respect for nurses, who are ‘angels,’ and doctors, who are ‘gods’ — that is the same as in lots of other countries… But here it is bound up with the institution they work for…”

Doctrine
… While patients have little idea of the financial plumbing behind the scenes, they like the basic principle that “people who are ill should have access to high-quality care.”

Church
“The N.H.S. is almost holy… It’s become the new Church of England.”

Hell
… Most Britons tend to compare their system with America’s and recoil in alarm… “If you are not able to afford care in the U.S., you are often in a dire situation…”

(Stephen Castle, “‘The New Church of England’: Coronavirus Renews Pride in U.K.’s Health Service,” NYTimes, 5-12-20)

(c) 2020 JMN

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The Troubling Arousal

Posted on May 11, 2020 by JMN

While I resist drawing lines between pornography and art, if forced to offer a distinction I might say that pornography, like propaganda, wants us to feel a single thing. Art is made of contraries, of ambivalence and ambiguity; it never wants us to feel a single thing. If I want the reader to be aroused by a particular scene, I also want them to be troubled by that arousal, to question or investigate it, to be moved by a more complicated pleasure.

(Garth Greenwell, “‘I wanted something 100% pornographic and 100% art’: the joy of writing about sex,” theguardian.com, 5-8-20)

Greenwell tickles me with gesturing at where porn and propaganda converge. Eschew not only obfuscation but also simplisticism. I like to echo him that porn and prop are univalent, and then to wonder why art, besides contrariety and ambiguity, isn’t made also of multivalence: multi- or “many,” after all, is more than ambi- or “both.”

However, ambivalence is an attribute of the observer — of his or her sentient or cognitive dimension — whereas multivalence is an attribute of the observed — of the sensed dimension. So which one makes art? It’s complicated — and there it is! — the troubling arousal.

(c) 2020 JMN

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When Less Is More

Posted on May 10, 2020 by JMN
Above, Hiroyoshi Chinzei, the owner and operator of Hidaka Washi, with the world’s thinnest paper. Credit… Kazuhiro Nogi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images.

I’m glad to know about tengujo, the thinnest paper in the world, and to learn a bit about how it’s made. One of its numerous uses is in repairing and preserving old documents in places such as the Library of Congress, the Louvre, the British Museum and the Yale Center for British Art.

Paper deteriorates for many reasons: fungi, moisture, heat, light, atmospheric pollutants… With many Western writings before the 20th century, the ink itself was eating through the paper, in a process called iron gall ink corrosion.

Soyeon Choi is head paper conservator at the Yale Center for British Art, and has worked in the field for morel than 20 years.

Trying to aggressively mend a document is risky because long-term chemical and physical effects are highly variable and relatively unknown. “The more and more I am in this field, I feel that I should do less and less,” Ms. Choi said.

(Oliver Whang, “The Thinnest Paper in the World,” NYTimes, 5-5-20)

Ms. Choi’s comment evokes for me a kind of Hippocratic oath of conservatorship: First do no harm.

(c) 2020 JMN

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“Play Like You Don’t Know How”

Posted on May 9, 2020 by JMN

“… Play like you don’t know how to play guitar.”

That’s the instruction that John McLaughlin recalls Miles Davis giving him. It was on the occasion of his being pressed precipitately into service to collaborate in Davis’s milestone album “Bitches Brew” recorded in August 1969.

“I just closed the score and started playing: no rhythm, no harmony, just playing the melody and casting my fate to the wind. He loved it… He would hit a couple of chords on the piano and say: ‘What do you hear? Do you hear a riff? A bass line?’

(Jim Farber, “‘It sounded like the future’: behind Miles Davis’s greatest album,” theguardian.com, 2-24-20)

Jim Farber’s article gives a taste of the bracing environment surrounding Davis’s project and of his interactions with fellow musicians. (I can say, ruefully, that I would be able to comply quite well with Mr. Davis’s instruction, but not as happily as John McLaughlin.)

(c) 2020 JMN

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The Texas Proviso

Posted on May 8, 2020 by JMN
Joe Del Bosque employs about 300 people on hundreds of acres [in California].
Credit… Max Whittaker for The New York Times.

Along with other farmers, [Joe Del Bosque] has been pleading with Congress for the past few years to legalize farmworkers… because “you need these workers today, tomorrow and for a long time.”

The boys from Mexico worked so hard, Texas ranchers argued during one of America’s cyclical anti-immigrant periods, that the hiring of Mexicans should not be considered a felony. Thus, the Texas Proviso was adopted in 1952, stating that employing unauthorized workers would not constitute “harboring or concealing” them. This helps explain why Americans call immigrants “illegal” but not the businesses that hire them.

(Alfredo Corchado, “If They’re ‘Essential,’ They Can’t Be ‘Illegal’,” NYTimes, 5-6-20)

Some operators are not cut from Mr. Del Bosque’s cloth. The Proviso dutifully coughed up by the Lone Star State on their behalf provides a parable of how morbidity harbored in circles of self-interest can infect government with virulent sophistry and, from there, sicken the language (and the populace) at large.

(c) 2020 JMN

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So Playfully Valorized Seriousness

Posted on May 6, 2020 by JMN
Wayne Koestenbaum, whose new book of essays is “Figure It Out.” Credit… Tim Schutsky.

[Wayne Koestenbaum] valorizes the intellectual seriousness of Sontag, and of the poet and translator Richard Howard, but also confesses his attraction to idleness and lassitude. Books are fine and good, but have you tried sex, or doughnuts?

So this review introduces me to Koestenbaum.

Whatever his subject — favorites include porn, punctuation and the poetry of Frank O’Hara — the goal is always to jigger logic and language free of its moorings. “The writer’s obligation,” he states in his new essay collection, “Figure It Out,” “is to play with words and to keep playing with them, not to deracinate or deplete them, but to use them as vehicles for discovering history, recovering wounds, reciting damage and awakening conscience.”

(Parul Sehgal, “Wayne Koestenbaum’s Cerebral, Smutty Essays Playfully Disobey the Rules,” NYTimes, 5-5-20)

So I would walk a mile for a word like “deracinate.” So I can relate to his perverse glee in not coming down on a single side of anything. So have I misconstrued it in myself as a stubborn failing all along? So I may have to read “Figure It Out” to lose the answer.

(c) 2020 JMN

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Alphabeticalism

Posted on May 5, 2020 by JMN
An untitled 1978 watercolor by Madiha Umar recalls Arabic letter forms as well as ancient Mesopotamian crescent moons. Credit… Barjeel Art Foundation.

I once had to choose Arabic or Greek, the sole elective, in a course of study. It made a lot of difference in what I did next. I enthuse time and again over instances of letters lateraled into graven imagery in whatever tongue.

With its lacy interlocking and dotty swoopiness, Arabic script cries out to be pictured. A culture that scripturally abjures the human image has vented itself gloriously in calligraphic fashion. These artists take tradition to modern lengths.

An untitled piece by the Egyptian artist Omar el-Nagdi from 1970 shares its form with the first letter of the Arabic alphabet. Credit… Barjeel Art Foundation.

Most of these artists had some European or American training, and alongside unusual sandy palettes and a few unexpected details, you’ll see plenty of approaches that look familiar: lucid colors à la Josef Albers, crimson bursts of impasto similar to early Abstract Expressionism. But unlike European artists, they also have an alphabet with an ancient history in visual art — and this gives their abstraction a very different effect.

An untitled oil by Wijdan from 1970. “Each little dash, like a letter, insists on its granular distinctness, whatever their overall effect,” our critic says. Credit… Barjeel Art Foundation.

(Will Heinrich, “How the Arabic Alphabet Inspired Abstract Art,” NYTimes, 2-20-20)

(c) 2020 JMN

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But Here We Are: Me and…

Posted on May 4, 2020 by JMN

I feel foolish at bobbing and weaving through the tall grass of music theory, unled and untaught, not glimpsing even sky, much less horizon.

All I would have to have done — note the pluperfect infinitive — is to have lived a different life and gone to music school in it.

There, to be sure, harmony and scale and chord progression are the lingua franca of adepts.

Birds of that feather’s breakneck fluency is ache-making.

All I would have to have done;

but here we are: Me and…

… music-ology, my fugitive friend, my Theo, where my head finds flight and rest, all in one.

(c) 2020 JMN

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Color in Shadow

Posted on May 3, 2020 by JMN

Jordan Casteel’s paintings come at you. There’s no subordination. They are like a roomful of stories told all at once.

“Jonathan” (2014). Lit by a nearby lamp, his body glows with patches of red, green and yellow. Credit… Jordan Casteel and Casey Kaplan, New York.

One figure hides in his colorful skin; two others iridesce, starkly defined. Sofas riot; a hot mirrored lamp commandeers its swatch of space. No crease of flesh nor fold of drapery escapes scrupulous modeling. Uncentered subjects in scenarios “awash with color and pattern… let their surroundings complete the picture.”

“Serwaa and Amoakohene” (2019), Jordan Casteel’s painting of a young man and his mother, in the exhibition “Within Reach.” Credit… Jordan Casteel and Casey Kaplan, New York.

(Jillian Steinhauer, “Portraits That More Than Meet the Eye,” NYTimes, 4-29-20)

(c) 2020 JMN

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A Words’ Worth of Picture

Posted on May 2, 2020 by JMN
Cherry blossoms bloom at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Credit… Bryan Derballa for The New York Times.

I like this illustration to Roger Cohen’s column enough to leave it alone.

(Roger Cohen, “Who Knows Where the Time Goes,” NYTimes, 5-1-20)

(c) 2020 JMN

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