Mervyn Peake wrote: "For drawing should be an attempt to hold back from the brink of oblivion some fleeting line or rhythm, some mood, some shape or structure suddenly perceived, imaginary or visual. Something about a head that calls out to be recorded: something about the folds of a long cloth: the crawling wave; the child; the tear; the brood of shadows. That movement of the arm that hinted fear: that gesture that spelt amazement: the dream; the alleyway; clown; broker; stone or lizard. The quicksands closing on a centaur's head tokens no more of magic than the penny loaf. ... Anything, seen without prejudice, is enormous" (from his 1946 booklet, The Craft of the Lead Pencil; above are his sketches of Steerpike and the Countess Gertrude, below of Flay with little Titus, Fuchsia, and Flay alone, illustrations to Peake's novels of Gormenghast ).
While Tolkien from his seat at Oxford was at the same mid-century moment creating (or updating) a Mythos For England, based on "that Northern thing," Peake-- ensconced on Sark in the Channel Islands just off the French coast--was plumbing the Universal in the melancholy comedies and grotesqueries of Gormenghast. Peake is that decidedly un-English thing: a practitioner of the baroque, a Mannerist, an open sluice for rococo passion. Where Middle-Earth is thick and delineated by maps (both for the characters and for the reader), Gormenghast is endless and unknown to those who reside there and to the reader...and outside Gormenghast the territory becomes utterly unmarked, inchoate, as Titus learns in his exile. Middle-Earth is earnest, realistic, precise, multitudinous, full of exteriors described...Gormenghast is exaggerated, surrealistic, romantic, suggestive, full of interiors portrayed.
English-language fantasy fiction has since, as is well-known, overwhelmingly followed the Tolkienian mode, harking back to Beowulf, to the sagas, the eddas, the lists of dwarves fleeing through Mirkwood. Modern fantasy does not favor its other parents, including the ones celebrated by Peake. He is a caricaturist in the finest, fullest sense of that word, distorting the external to reveal an essential truth (it is arguably harder to produce a good caricature than it is to render a good realistic portrait). Caricature does not sit well in our modern field of fantasy; to extend the analogy, the market right now demands grand historical and quasi-religious paintings. Few modern fantasists can be considered caricaturists (my short list includes Jeff VanderMeer, Sylvia Townsend Warner, D.M. Cornish, Angela Carter, Theodora Goss, Jesse Bullington, and perhaps needless to say, Italo Calvino), and fewer of those have enjoyed the kind of commercial success accruing to writers of the grand epic.
I am no Peake scholar but I have to believe that Peake, a professional artist, had immersed himself in the great Italian and Spanish traditions of caricature, beginning with his studies at the Croydon School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools, and then as a teacher at the Westminster School of Art and at the Central School of Art in Bloomsbury. I have neither time nor space today at Lobster & Canary to do more than toss forth below some examples of the sorts of latinate visions I imagine Peake knew well. I encourage us as we review our genre's recent history to acknowledge not only the Northern elves but also the hippogriffs and pantagruels of the South, not only the stern reality of dragons and rings but the traditions that give us the labyrinth of the lady Gertrude's mind, the depths of Flay's devotion, the anguish of the seventy-seventh Earl of Groan.
[Ubaldo Gandolfi, a study of heads, c. 1760-?]
[Goya, They Are Hot, 1799]
[Parmigianino, Figures in a Ferry Boat, c. 1535]
[Parmigianino, The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine, c. 1527]
Heidi Julavits, the novelist and co-founding editor of The Believer, reviewing in this week's New York Times Book ReviewGlen Duncan's Talulla Rising marvelously describes the relationship between that which is "literary" and that which is "genre" in current fiction:
"If literature is lacinato kale, genre is gelato. Despite regular critical attempts to reconstruct this outdated food pyramid, the base holds strong. Fortunately, thanks to a surge in literary molecular gastronomy, readers can enjoy an ever wider array of broccoli rabe (or brussels sprout, or Swiss chard) ice cream. When cooked by mad word scientists like Glen Duncan — whose new horror novel, “Talulla Rising,” is a sequel to “The Last Werewolf” — this harmonic hybrid delivers sweet (plot), salty (character), sour (emotional pathos), bitter (psychological probity) and umami (stylistic and linguistic panache)."
She goes on to say that the plot can best be described as a gleeful mash-up of Raymond Chandler's entire work, the vampire novels of Anne Rice and Foucault's Pendulum, with Proust looking on. For the full review, click here.
Meanwhile, in last week's New Yorker, Joan Acocella superbly overviews the evergreen impact of fairy tales on modern fiction ("Once Upon A Time; The Lure of the Fairy Tale," July 23rd issue-- click here for the entire essay). One example from among her many smart assertions:
"In truth, most of the Grimms’ tales cannot be made wholly respectable. The rewritings that seem most persuasive are sometimes more unsettling than the Grimm versions—for example, Angela Carter’s “The Company of Wolves,” inspired by “Little Red Riding Hood.” This story stresses the eroticism of the girl’s encounter with the wolf."
Acocella also deftly traces the recent history of fairy tale studies in the English-speaking world, noting that Maria Tatar has emerged as the preeminent scholar in the field. The New Yorker already has Tatar in the fold as well-- see, for instance, her March 16th, 2012 New Yorker blog post "Cinderfellas: The Long-Lost Fairy Tales" about the discovery of five hundred (!) previously unknown (!!) fairy tales in an archive in Regensburg, Germany. Click here for that.
In May, the New York Times published an article entitled "On the Vaunted City Subway Map, Mistakes and Phantom Blocks" which revealed that the iconic NYC subway map contains wayward streets and hidden realms:
"On the West Side of Manhattan, beginning near Lincoln Center and extending toward the campus of Columbia University, Broadway is seemingly misplaced. It is west of Amsterdam Avenue at West 66th Street when it should be east. It drifts toward West End Avenue near 72nd Street, where it should intersect with Amsterdam. It overtakes West End Avenue north of the avenue’s actual endpoint near West 107th Street, creating several blocks of fictitious Upper West Side real estate. [...]
On the current map, West End Avenue has inexplicably been extended to around West 116th Street, forging roughly nine blocks of phantom terrain.
Pedestrians on Broadway in this area can stumble upon an Ivy League university or gaze through the windows of Tom’s Restaurant, of “Seinfeld” fame. They can find a copy of “Pride and Prejudice” for $2 at a stand on West 112th Street, and, four blocks south, a taco for 50 cents more. They can even sip mojitos at Havana Central at the West End, near West 114th Street.
But they will never find West End Avenue between Broadway and Riverside Drive."
I am delighted but not surprised. Abandoned stations lurk throughout the subway system, realities no longer shown on the map ("The Map"); you can catch shadowed glimpses of them as your train speeds by: Worth Street on the IRT downtown, 18th Street on the east side, 91st Street on the west side, and many others. On the other hand, the Second Avenue Subway has lived fitfully and half-wrought, a cartographic ghost of endless promises, for going on a century, and now we ponder maps that portray planned stretches of the 7 Line and of the Long Island Railroad.
Entire new precincts have sprung from the mud and shells of our rivers: Battery Park City, the East River Park. Our real estate brokers conjure forth neighborhoods that exist only on paper until pioneers make them real: where exactly is "NoLiTa" or "FiDi" or "Manhattan Valley"? Equally vague and peripatetic are the boundaries of Chelsea and of Gramercy Park, of Turtle Bay and the Meatpacking District (not to speak of Williamsburg's ongoing annexation of Bushwick in Brooklyn). On the other hand, very discrete entities such as Grove Court in the West Village, Henderson Place on the Upper East Side and Sniffen Court in Murray Hill exist like Rivendell, i.e., tucked away in plain sight, refuges from the wider world, and not always marked on maps.
The best writers of what is currently called "Urban Fantasy" are exquisitely attuned to such vagaries, to the bizarre, hidden and surreal elements of city life, to the fecundity of the city itself, the city as a seemingly independent actor outside of full human control. China Mieville specializes in dissecting the hoarsely breathing, patchwork body of the modern metropolis, most masterfully in The City and The City. His short story (autobiographical essay?) "Reports of Certain Events in London" details the clandestine movements of feral streets, stealthy intruders that disrupt the maps and go their own way, sometimes playing tourist in other cities altogether.
Catherynne Valente, in her city of Palimpsest (and surely all major cities are palimpsests), describes a train with an impish mind of its own: "It became apparent to enthusiasts of locomotive travel that there was at least one unscheduled train on the tracks of Palimpsest. It did not stop at any of the stations, for one thing. [...] ...the 3:17 northbound Decretal had had a somewhat unhappy affair with the 12:22 eastbound Foolscap. The mysterious train was their child, and like any child whose parents no longer love each other, it runs wild and does what it likes and there is little at all to be done about it." And here every NYC commuter nods, thinking of the J train that seems to fall asleep somewhere in Brooklyn because its only constancy is its caprice, and recalling also the quirky G, while not forgetting the dainty 1-2-3's who apparently dislike water so intensely that the smallest rainfall causes them distress and delay, and the way in which buses travel their routes in packs, creating long caesuras for the anxious or resigned rider-in-waiting.
Theodore Sturgeon in the oft-reprinted "Shottle Bop" captures another reality well known to all big-city dwellers: the cool, curious little shop that you stumble on and then can never find again. "I'd never seen the place before, and I lived just down the block and around the corner. ...between Twentieth and Twenty-First Streets on Tenth Avenue in New York City. You can find it if you go there looking for it. " Or-- as the narrator discovers--maybe you won't find it. It happens all the time, this losing your landmark stores, the boutiques and bodegas that orient and anchor you as you navigate the city.
Delia Sherman knows all about the magic of the city, having mapped out a "New York Between" in her Changeling novels. Terri Windling and Ellen Kushner know this too, having pioneered and then continued to refine the genre with the shared world of "Bordertown". Neil Gaiman's "London Below" in Neverwhere, Ekaterina Sedia's alternate city in The Secret History of Moscow, Marie Brennan's Onyx Court in her Elizabethan historical fantasies, Jeff VanderMeer's City of Saints and Madmen (in which he takes the game to the next brink, which is creating alternate spaces within cities that are themselves fictional), M. John Harrison's Pastel City with its uncertain addresses and deliberate vagueness... the list is long and worthy, with grafts from Gormenghast (a castle that is a city that is a world, animated by its own desires beyond the petty ambitions of its inhabitants), from the tales of flaneurs in Paris and coffee-drinkers in Vienna, from the calqued realities of Dickens and Mann and Balzac, of Whitman and Kokoschka.
Aren't we all looking for Platform 9-&-3/4 at King's Cross? For Number 221B on Baker Street? For Avenue Q, and Coronation Street, and Albert Square, and Sun Hill?
Pardon me, in fact, as I stroll out now into Manhattan's Lower East Side, to stand wondering at the corner of Ridge Street and Grand Street...at least, to stand by an official street sign proclaiming the existence of such an intersection in the broadest of daylight, while the ocular evidence yields no such place, only the one street (Grand), with an apartment building of Babylonian proportion and across the way a nondescript but bustling Roman Catholic Church where this alleged piece of Ridge should lie.
I should write Mr. Mieville to inquire if any sightings of a block or two of a "Ridge Street" have been reported in his London neighborhood.
Adoration of the Shepherds (El Greco, 1614, originally in Toledo, now at the Prado).
Of this painting, the eminent historian John Hale-- a worthy successor to Burckhardt and Huizinga-- wrote: "It is a dazzling technical virtuosity. But this is a Mannerism of the mind, not of ingenious rule-breaking or a search for novelty, a style without a dominating source and which could have no progeny" (page 326 of The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance, one of my touchstones for understanding that place at that time; published in 1993, the book won awards from the Royal Society of Literature and Time-Life).
For grand pronouncements such as this, I love Hale's work. I love the firm assurance that brooks no retort, the god's-eye view, the sense of doors properly opened and closed, indeed of door-frames finely measured, angled and planed...and yet, and yet...the very finality of the assertion starts to bend and elongate (like an El Greco figure!) under closer inspection, does it not?
What--I ask myself--is a "Mannerism of the mind," as opposed to, say, a Mannerism of the heart or a Mannerism of the body? Or, alternatively, whose mind: that of the painter, that of the viewer (the intended original audience at the monastery in Toledo, or today's in the museum in Madrid), that of the critic (the critic at the time, the critic re-discovering El Greco in the 19th century, the critic writing today)?
What, I murmur: no ingenious rule-breaking, no search for novelty? But what had driven El Greco from Venetian Crete to Rome, and thence to Toledo if not his deep desire to break free of first Byzantine and then Italianate artistic rules? Others, some known to El Greco, shared his iconoclastic desires: Pontormo (I think), surely Parmigianino and Tintoretto. And the doom-laden, definitive claim that there not only were no progeny, but that there could not be any--?...even allowing the simple declarative, one ought to note that the offspring of aesthetic invention sometimes skip (many) generations: El Greco's role as progenitor was acknowledged by (among others)Cezanne and Picasso, presumably also by Dali and the other Surrealists.
My point though is not to flyspeck the powerful and enduring work of an expert such as Hale, but to force myself as a reader to slow down and scrutinize the struts and props beneath the carapace of authority, to question my own understanding, to query even the most persuasive of statements-- especially when I need only bend my vision to the image or text being critiqued. To quote Blake (another mannerist ill-understood in his own time): "As the eye is formed, such are its powers."
We traverse the streets and lanes of our commonplace books, strolling like Benjamin through the arcades, wandering like Woolf through notes and quotes made by our younger selves, intrigued and sometimes amazed at who and what we meet juxtaposed at the odd corner and skewed intersections.
For instance, we read and re-read the opening lines of the first poem, "Unknown," in The Unswept Room, by Sharon Olds (2002):
"On the last morning of the summer, a little/ family comes over the dune, across/ the pond, and lays out their cloth, and their nutmeat/ basket, the sweets and freshes cached in its/ worried-forehead lattice-shell."
Olds-- who in this collection once again powerfully demonstrates why she is one of our leading poets of the intimate and the elegiac-- follows the opening lines with an entire story of loss and yearning. I urge you to read all of "Unknown."
In the meantime, I see the "little family" coming over the dune, repeatedly in the theater of my mind, and I wonder about their history. I create stories of my own, little filigrees that spiral off the original text, drifting like down, down the by-ways and into the suburbs of the locus communis. I imagine the family's conversation over their nutmeats and sweets. The child-- a little girl-- traces the lattice-shell; she will always remember the feel of it, the whorl of its glaze over the anxious ripple, combined with the bark of a dog playing in the waves and the distant "halloo'ing" of the dog's master. The mother looks out over the surf, her hand shielding her eyes from the glare of the sun. The father spears a stranded jellyfish with a salad fork. Behind them on the crest of the dune, playing a flute very softly (just audible under the call of gulls and the suss'ing of the waves), is the figure of death, his long scythe laid lovingly on the hot sand.
And so on and on...many small fictions spinning out from the main story...and eventually, in the pages of our commonplace, catching upon the prongs of another reference, in this case the first song, "Twice," of the eponymous first album (2007) by Little Dragon, the band from Gothenburg, Sweden (one of our favorite cities, but that is just happenstance) led by Yukimi Nagano, a song they made the soundtrack of a shadow puppet play called "Dreams from the Woods," directed by Johannes Nyholm.
Ellen Dissanayake has been saying very wise things for decades about why we humans make art. As I stir my coffee this morning and contemplate Deep History and the Big Picture, I am happy to read her words:
"Paleo-archaeologists and ethnographers tell us that from as early as a hundred thousand years ago (some say much earlier) until very recently, in many parts of the world, members of our species have spent enormous resources of time, metabolic energy, and costly materials (such as feathers and ivory from rare and powerful creatures or shells and minerals from far distances) to mount complex ceremonies in which the elaboration of bodies, surroundings, and paraphernalia is joined with vigorous and intricate dancing, dramatic performances, and complex songs, chants, and drumming. In other words, although they lacked money, they nevertheless invested their human capital in the arts.
[...]
To an evolutionist, devoting time, effort, and resources to apparently non-utilitarian pursuits should have made people less rather than more likely to survive. Yet the fact that they occur so extravagantly, universally, requires an opposite conclusion: the arts must have enabled their practitioners to better survive than humans who did not go to such extensive and expensive extremes. Their “value” had to be not only cultural but biological."
Excerpted from an essay, "What Is The (Adaptive) Value of Art?," published August 16, 2011 on the NEA website. You can click here for the full text plus much more about Dissanayake and her work.
Fantastical motifs flourish everywhere in our contemporary field of vision: a steady return to the images we conjured around the first campfires, celebrating the most intimate and original of our minds' companions-- odd, whimsical, frightening, amusing (sometimes all at once)-- a constant counter-point to the Enlightenment's banishing of the hobs and the fairies-- a dancing, shimmering retort to the streamlined functionality and no-nonsense sleekness of industrial design and the various sects of modernism.
To take just one example from modern, urban life: Visiting the craft beer aisle or a wine merchant is now like a tour of Ali Baba's cave, with labels as lovingly created as the liquid within the bottles, labels awash with phantasmagoria, eccentric figures, legendary creatures, and the just plain bizarre.
Surely there is a line from the great book illustrators (Rackham, Dulac, Beardsley) and poster-artists (Mucha) of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, through the original funny papers and then comic books and the pulp covers, meandering around fantasy and science fiction book covers, traipsing through the font foundries and the hills of Dadaism and especially Surrealism, to the concept art and posters for a thousand strange and speculative movies (Terry Gilliam!), and music album covers of the '60s and '70s (think of Hipgnosis, of Roger Dean).
Thumbnail sketches of empires east of the moon and west of the sun, cameos of curious creatures, a slantwise glance at the Old Man of the Mountains and the Old Woman in the Shoe... all in aisle seven of your local Whole Foods or in the racks at your neighborhood wine boutique.
Pam Grossman has curated yet another fabulous show, this one focused on the sigils and signs that illuminate our various paths to enlightenment (however one wishes to define the term). If you are in NYC these coming days, I urge you visit this show.
[Full disclosure: my wife, Deborah Mills, and I have a collaborative piece in the show, and one of Deborah's solo works is also exhibited there, so this is hardly disinterested advice. But don't go just to see stuff by Lobster & Canary-- check out the many other fine and wondrous items, some difficult to describe, others easy to describe but hard to fathom...in all the right ways!]
Alchemical symbols, kabbalistic designs and notations, and much more await you. Go!
For more, click here.
"And Vulcan answered, 'Take heart, and be no more disquieted about this matter; would that I could hide him from death's sight when his hour is come, so surely as I can find him armour that shall amaze the eyes of all who behold it.'
When he had so said he left her and went to his bellows, turning them towards the fire and bidding them do their office. Twenty bellows blew upon the melting-pots, and they blew blasts of every kind, some fierce to help him when he had need of them, and others less strong as Vulcan willed it in the course of his work. He threw tough copper into the fire, and tin, with silver and gold; he set his great anvil on its block, and with one hand grasped his mighty hammer while he took the tongs in the other.
First he shaped the shield so great and strong, adorning it all over and binding it round with a gleaming circuit in three layers; and the baldric was made of silver. He made the shield in five thicknesses, and with many a wonder did his cunning hand enrich it.
He wrought the earth, the heavens, and the sea; the moon also at her full and the untiring sun, with all the signs that glorify the face of heaven- the Pleiads, the Hyads, huge Orion, and the Bear, which men also call the Wain and which turns round ever in one place, facing. Orion, and alone never dips into the stream of Oceanus."
--The Iliad, Book 18, lines 478 ff (trans. Samuel Butler, 1900).
__________________________________________________
At their digital forges, the masters of CGI have in the past decade rendered Middle Earth, Narnia, Westeros and dozens of other fantasy worlds. Lobster & Canary always sits in the theater watching the ever-lengthening credits rolls, applauding until the lights come on the platoons of artisans who bring the techne to the screen: the programmers, engineers, designers, matte painters, miniaturists, concept artists and storyboarders, compositors, animators, simulation researchers, visualizers, developers, shader writers, special effects wizards of every description. Click here and here, also here and herefor insights into how leading firms such as RODEO FX, Pixomondo, Industrial Light & Magic and Weta Digital work their craft.
Weta is the bridge to the even more fundamental craftsmanship that propels the best recent fantasy/science fiction films: the devoted attention to making traditional sets and props in traditional ways to make the fantasy real. Weta Digital's mother company (founded six years earlier, in 1987) is Weta Workshop...which created Middle Earth for Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies.
Artisans at Weta-- John Howe, Ngila Dickson, hundreds of others directed by Richard Taylor, Tania Rodger, Daniel Hennah-- made 900 suits of armor, hundreds of swords, 10,000 arrows for 500 bows, 19,000 costumes, 20,000 household implements and artifacts, landscaped and built massive outdoor sets for Hobbiton, Helm's Deep, Minas Tirith, and so forth.
HBO is taking the same care on Game of Thrones. And -- as Peter Jackson does, as Terry Gilliam does, likewise Guillermo del Toro, Ridley Scott, James Cameron, Martin Scorsese--the HBO team, including author George R.R. Martin, highlights the work of the craftsmen and -women who hew and forge, weave and paint the imagined world into a visual reality. Listen to Game of Thrones production designer Gemma Jackson (no apparent relation to Peter) and graphic designer Jim Stanes:
Like millions of others mourning the death of Maurice Sendak, I recall as some of my earliest memories the images from Wild Things and remember wanting to sail and caper with Max, to start the wild rumpus.
Yet influencing me even more were In the Night Kitchen...
....and his illustrations for The Juniper Tree and other of the fairy tales collected by the Grimms...
I just want to be sure we recall these masterpieces as well, not let the brilliance of Wild Things overshadow everything else Sendak produced.
Ridley Scott's Prometheus hits the screens June 8th--a prequel-of-sorts to the Alien movies. Lobster & Canary loves the fact that Scott is finding out for himself-- and sharing with the rest of us-- what the back-story is to the giant downed spacecraft that houses the eggs that contain the Alien in the very first movie.
In that movie--Alien (1979)--when the Nostromo responds to the beacon, the diverted crew's reaction upon their discovery of the derelict vessel is muted. Their exclamations of amazement (a stray "I've never seen anything like it," and "are you seeing this, Ash?") feel perfunctory. They voice no excitement over it being a clearly alien ship, i.e., the movie implies that the humans either already have encountered or expect to encounter other sapient species. The extraterrestrial ship serves more as a MacGuffin to propel the plot than a subject in its own right.
And yet one can sense Scott's own curiosity aroused over one detail on the ship: the giant, petrified corpse (its chest shattered, ribs protruding) reclining in what appears to be a pilot's chair, beneath some kind of massive navigation device. The camera goes in close and then lingers over the corpse's face, whose frozen expression, limned by the shadows the lanterns cast, might seem to be one of warning or sorrow.
Who was this pilot, dubbed "the space jockey" in fan circles? What civilization did he/she/it and the ship belong to? Why was the ship carrying a load of Alien eggs? The questions are not asked, let alone answered, in Alien (and are not even referred to in any of the three sequels)-- all attention moves immediately to the (admittedly pressing) issue of face-huggers and chest-bursters, and so on.
Scott says in a recent interview:
"I always figured it's a weapon, and I always figured that [the ship in the first Alien] was a carrier of weapons. Therefore, who is that, inside that [Space Jockey] suit? That wasn't a skeleton, that was a suit. And if you open up the suit, what do you get inside it? And why were they going, where were they going?"
[Click here for a good summary in io9 of "what we know about the Space Jockey."]
Another wonderful instance of how a story lurks in the back of an auteur's mind, has "a life of its own," opens out on mysteries, pinnacles and pitfalls.
Here's the trailer for Prometheus. Looks like we will get answers about the Space Jockey--be careful what we ask for.
A Lobster & Canary reader reminded me the other day that we failed to note the passage of Moebius, one of the most influential artists of the past fifty years. Moebius (the pen-name for Frenchman Jean Giraud) died last month.
Lobster & Canary fell instantly in love with Moebius's work at the appearance of the first American editions of the pioneering magazine he co-founded, Metal Hurlant, known on our shores as Heavy Metal. Above all, we love the idiosyncratic wanderer, Arzach, soaring over eccentric landscapes on his faithful pterodactyl.
Moebius worked on many fantasy/science fiction touchstones of the late 20th century, ranging from Alien to The Silver Surfer. His influence is pervasive throughout the speculative genres (I suspect he also has a following among urban planners, architects, and clothing designers). Learn more here, here, and here.
Soar on, Moebius.
Brian Stableford, in his indispensable The A to Z of Fantasy Literature (Scarecrow Press, 2009), asserts:
"Literary experimentation in fantasy is to some extent parasitic--and not only in commercial terms---at the expense of the wide and consistent appeal of fantasy's commodifiable formulas" (page 84, in the entry on "Commodified Fantasy").
What a great springboard his statement would make for a panel discussion at, say, Readercon or Arisia, or at the Brooklyn Book Festival! Stableford is an astute, measured commentator on the fantastical genres, with an encyclopedic knowledge of the field-- his views merit serious consideration.
What precisely does he mean by "parasitic"? What qualifies as "literary experimentation," what answers best to "fantasy's commodifiable formulas"? A long-running debate, both within the genre and much further afield (echoes of Aristotle, Horace, and Cicero carry down through the clashes); Stableford's comment above is a part-response to Ursula K. Le Guin, whom Stableford cites in the entry as the source of the term "Commodified Fantasy."
Alas for the lack of time to explore the worthy debate further right now-- but I think the lobster and the canary shall return (here or elsewhere) to the evergreen contest between "commodity" and "experiment." Besides Le Guin's observations over the years, Gary K. Wolfe's Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature (Wesleyan University Press, 2011; Amelia Beamer co-authored some of the essays) figures here, likewise Farah Mendlesohn's Rhetorics of Fantasy (Wesleyan University Press, 2008), and the extensive work by respectively David Hartwell and John Clute. It will be interesting to map our genre-focused explorations against more general recent discussions about fiction and its uses. Zadie Smith's "Two Directions for the Novel" (in her collection of essays, Changing My Mind, published by Penguin, 2009) comes quickly to hand, as does Orhan Pamuk's The Naive and Sentimental Novelist (Harvard University Press, 2010) and the insights of respectively A.S. Byatt, James Wood and Marjorie Garber. And not to forget classics such as E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel, Wallace Stevens's The Necessary Angel, and the critical work of Virginia Woolf, V.S. Pritchett, William Empson, and Owen Barfield.
In honor of poetry month (and to swim with the swift stream of poetry in every month), I recommend The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems In Translation, edited by Greg Delanty & Michael Matto (W.W. Norton, 2011).
With the original Old English on the left-hand side, and its translation (or, as Seamus Heaney reminds us, a "rendering") on the right hand, the collection treats us to "poems of exile and longing," "poems about living and dying," poems of battles and of saints, remedies, prayers, charms, and-- of course-- a rich trove of riddles.
Besides Heaney, the translators include many of Lobster & Canary's other favorite poets as well: Molly Peacock, Mary Jo Salter, David Wojahn, Yusef Komunyakaa, Saskia Hamilton, A.E. Stallings and Jane Hirshfield.
I find it impossible to resist lines like these:
"Wassailing worms
Feast afresh where limbs lie slain
Devouring flesh: only bones remain."
(from Stallings's version of "The Riming Poem")
"My jacket is polished gray
Emblazoned with roses and fire."
(From Billy Collins's rendition of "My Jacket is Polished Gray")
"An etched ship of air, a silver sky-sliver,
it lugged a month's loot from its raid on time..."
(from Peacock's translation of "I Watched a Wonder, a Bright Marauder")
Ah, metrical words to charm the bees, to hold malice and spite at bay, to honor the waves and the clouds and the trembling leaves of the aspen!
Several decades ago, I watched a Green Heron hunting in a half-strangled stream --dwindled to a thread at the bottom of a drainage ditch-- mere yards from a major intersection in a large city.
Wherever I had been going forgotten, I tracked that heron as it tracked fish. It knew I was there, but did not fly, so intent was it on its own errand. I crouched down among the reeds and the minor willows, and watched the heron for many minutes...five, ten, more, I did not know. So close I could see the blazing yoke of its eye, the striations of its throat plumage (it must have been an immature), the delicate fronding of the feathers on its back as it leaned forward, coppery green plumes overlapping with the rusty brown.
I have not lived in that city for many years but I visit often and have, on occasion, passed that spot. I always pause and look, hoping to catch another glimpse of a Green Heron there, furtively, professionally about its business. I never have (not there, though elsewhere), but I see always the palest tint of a shadow stalking down the little stream, and I smile and am for one long moment in the past, while simultaneously also in the past-as-I-recreate-it, the present, the present-as-I-imagine-it-for-the-future, the future, and the future-in-which-I-am-remembering-my-recollection-of-the-original-event.
That "then" is Drop-Time.
When that Green Heron walks with studious ferocity through my mind, I am in Drop-Time; that Green Heron leads me to and accompanies me in Drop-Time. A psychopomp perhaps, at the very end...but for now a guide who also escorts me back to the lands of Clock-Time.
What T.S. Eliot describes in "Burnt Norton":
"Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable."
Drop-Time: private time without intermediation, a surprise and an awakening, time hollowed out from the regular river, elongated and linked across the long stretches of the current, directly tied like a bundle of leaves (or feathers) floating and bobbing and dipping in the stream. Time that has a smell and a texture, anchors itself in a place, and is--above all--intimate, that is, not to be confused with the grand public memories constructed and commemorated in monuments, museums, what Pierre Nora dubbed "les lieux de memoire."
Drop-Time is where we go on our search for paradise, and revival, for our lost youth and our hopes for the future, the retrieval of once-dashed aspirations and the restoration of the world's first green.
Drop-Time is what Stefan Zweig seeks to inhabit-- and where he takes us-- as he calls forth life-as-it-was in the cafes of his vanished Vienna. Likewise Gregory von Rezzori looking for the Czernowitz of his birth in The Snows of Yesteryear, Kamau Brathwaite evoking Barbados and Jamaica, Rita Dove on the enchantment of the everyday ("You start out with one thing, end/ up with another, and nothing's/ like it used to be, not even the future"), Seamus Heaney disinterring memories and roped bog-men from Irish earth, Alice Oswald giving voice to the god of the river Dart. Drop-Time is the Breton childhood chiseled by Pierre-Jakez Helias in The Horse of Pride, is integral to the jazz-mystical odyssey poured forth by Nathaniel Mackey in his From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, is at the core of meaning surrounding the Ephrussi netsuke collection traced by Edmund de Waal in The Hare with Amber Eyes.
There goes my little Green Heron, forever hunting minnows along a tiny brook.
Eliot again, more "Burnt Norton":
"Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.
There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at."
Succumb, succumb to the deception! It yields heaven.
Two quotes struck the lobster and canary this week:
"As museums continue building mobile devices into more exhibits--the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston now offers multmedia tours on 750 rentable iPod Touches--staffers are debating how to incorporate the technology without turning their visitors into what some in the business call 'gallery zombies,' guests who stand inches from a masterpiece while glued to their screens. [//] London-based art collector and art adviser Lauren Prakke says digital gadgets already fill art events. 'Sometimes you think, wow, you've got some of the most incredible art in the world in the room and someone's staring at the telephone,' she says. 'I'm like, "Am I the only one looking at the art?" ' "
---Ellen Gamerman," The Art of the Tablet," The Wall Street Journal, March 9, 2012, pg. D2.
"...curators in this city...need to pay a lot more attention to exhibition design, on- and offline. [//] The performance section of the show [the Whitney Biennial] ... is a sad example. It's left without any sort of livestreaming or video documentation...Surely, if we've learned anything from Marina Abramovic's blockbuster 2010 performance The Artist is Present, it's that more online documentation, not less, draws visitors."
---Paddy Johnson, "Witless Biennial," The L Magazine, March 14-27, 2012, pg. 46.
Puts us in mind of Goethe engaging with Aristotelian aesthetics in "On Truth and Verisimilitude in Works of Art" (published in the first issue of his Propylaen in 1798). Conducting a dialogue within a fictional theater about illusion and the imitation of nature, Goethe pronounces on the value of artful deception and the de-layering of reality. Which matters more: the appearance (Schein) of truth, or truth itself? What is the "thing itself" (die Sache selbst), and how would we know it if we came upon it, as it sleeps, dines, walks and soars within a carved frame or the flicker of pixels? Art imitating nature...
...and imitating itself in auto-mimetic gazings...
...representing a representation...
...imaging images of a truth whose origin may or may not surge from the thing itself?
As Wallace Stevens has it:
"When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles."
Further readings:
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936).
William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930).
Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (2002).
Robert Motherwell, "The Modern Painter's World" (1944).
Erwin Panofsky, "The Problem of Style in the Visual Arts" (1915).
Barbara Maria Stafford, Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images (1998).
Wallace Stevens, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" (1917).
"When I look back at the history of Hauser & Wirth over the past 17 years, I notice a pattern—we have almost always opened our galleries in difficult economic moments...”
-- NYC gallerist Iwan Wirth, quoted in Miriam Kreinin Souccar, "Chelsea Galleries Hold Up During Downturn; Though 25 Galleries Have Shuttered In The Past Year, At Least 10 Have Opened" (Crain's New York Business, May 22, 2009).
Unsung heroes? By nature entrepreneurial, artists-- and the curators, gallery owners, small-press publishers and editors who travel in their van-- have (disproportionately?) propelled the American economy through the Great Recession and its grouchy, spasmodic recovery. As banking, manufacturing and other traditional mainstays have blown up, the arts have adapted quickly and become a hotbed of start-ups and innovative change. In the accelerating shift within American business to individualized design and making, where work crosses disciplinary boundaries and creates wholly new product and service categories at the click of a mouse, the arts are (to paraphrase Marie Ponsot's description of Philip Lopate's poetry) the new economy's "ungovernable alchemic hope."
Here in New York City, the arts drive commerce as much they are driven by it, and they shape the very lay-out of our shared, urban space-- and they are doing so at a greater scale and speed, despite the recession that began in 2008. "Between 2003 and 2005, 94 cultural building projects were completed in the city, according to an Alliance for the Arts study on the economic impact of construction at New York's cultural nonprofits. Now there are more than 400 design, construction and equipment projects in the works at 197 nonprofit cultural organizations..." (Miriam Kreinin Souccar, "Arts Institutions In Midst Of Major Restoration Period," Crain's New York Business, February 13-19, 2012).
Examples abound: the re-openings of the Islamic (November, 2011) and American (January, 2012) arts wings at the Metropolitan, the coming move of the Whitney to the Meatpacking District (broke ground in 2011 for a new 200,000 square foot building), the Park Avenue Armory restoring its 19th-century facades (to be completed this fall) and expanding its programming, the ongoing renovations to El Museo del Barrio, the High Line promenade/outdoor artspace opened on Chelsea's far west side in 2009, the Museum for African Art opening its new 90,000 square-foot building this fall at 110th and Fifth, the Poets House moving in 2009 to its airy new 11,000 square-foot space in Battery Park City...Big Culture never sleeps in the Big Apple.
An even more impressive story is the continuing expansion of Little Culture, thousands of islets in an archipelago spreading throughout all five boroughs (and next door in Hoboken, Jersey City, Yonkers), creating a lushly fervent ecology that is the real secret to the arts' increasingly central position in a modern economy. Thousands of hard-nosed dreamers are starting new festivals, galleries and journals, competitively scrambling to create the new Bauhaus, to emulate and then transcend the workshop of Aldus Manutius or the kharkana of Ustad Mansur, to blend the atelier with the caravanserai.
A handful of examples chosen from among many:
*The Observatory: Founded by Pam Grossman and six colleagues in February 2009 (just a few months after the collapse of Lehman Brothers triggered the downturn!) in Gowanus, Brooklyn-- a deliciously eccentric hybrid exhibition and lecture space, a vision of what future work will look like, presenting (in its own words) "programming inspired by the 18th century notion of 'rational amusement' and is especially interested in topics residing at the interstices of art and science, history and curiosity, magic and nature."
*The Greenlight Bookstore: Rebecca Fittig and Jessica Stockton Bagnulo opened this impressively curated space in Fort Greene, Brooklyn in 2009, into the riptide of the recession--it has become one of the literary hotspots in an intensely literary city, with a readings calendar second to none (disclosure: I am a "community lender" to the Greenlight).
*The Festival of the New Black Imagination: In 2011 Rob Fields founded this groundbreaking event (reminiscent of TED, PopTech and SXSW--Fields has twice been a panelist at the latter)-- a celebration of cross-genre innovation, with a focus on alt music, digital performance and narrative. The 2012 edition is in downtown Brooklyn this September.
*571 Projects: Named after its square footage, 571 (founded in Chelsea in 2009 by Sophie Brechu-West) packs a great aesthetic punch in its small space-- a space where the art interacts with the glories of light coming over the Hudson.
*A Public Space: Brigid Hughes founded APS in Brooklyn in 2006, as "an independent magazine of art and argument, fact and fiction—was founded in 2006 to give voice to the twenty-first century." In just six years APS has become an indispensable part of the cultural landscape--it feels like APS has been with us for decades at least.
*BUREAU: A tiny storefront gallery on Henry Street in the Lower East Side, founded in 2010 by Gabrielle Giattino, BUREAU is a jewelbox of surprises: suitcase poetry, painted bones, sculptures of concrete atop medical walkers.
*Slice Magazine: Maria Gagliano and Celia Johnson founded this Brooklyn-based literary journal in 2007-- its warm-hearted, exuberant approach to the literary life is very welcome--it does "serious" without being pretentious or heavy-handed. The interviews are especially good, on par with those in the Paris Review.
*DODGE Gallery: Kristen Dodge opened on the Lower East Side in 2010, and has garnered strong reviews from the beginning. The space is gorgeous (long ago a sausage factory--such is the power of arts entrepreneurs to recycle the defunct, creating afresh). We are partial to last year's Sheila Gallagher and Lorna Williams shows.
*La Casa Azul: Aurora Anaya-Cerda started her bookstore online three years ago, and opens its physical presence in East Harlem this year.
*BronxArtSpace: In 2009 Linda Cunningham and Mitsuharu Hadeishi opened this in the South Bronx, providing a home for a thoughtful and eclectic mix of visual artists, performers, and educators.
*3rd Ward: The epicenter of the DIY arts & crafts movement, 3rd Ward was founded by Jason Goodman and Jeremy Lovitt on the border of Williamsburg and Bushwick in May, 2006-- and has grown rapidly since (it will soon open a satellite in Philadelphia). A 20,000 square-foot space, 3rd Ward is a teaching site for wood and metal arts, photography and jewelry making (disclosure: my wife teaches a class there).
*The Brooklyn Book Festival: Begun in 2006, the BBF has grown to a four-day extravaganza in downtown Brooklyn, featuring a record 260+ panelists in 2011-- it is already a fixture on the literary circuit.
*Brian Girley, Faith project, album recorded at Mercy Studio in the East Village, and released in summer 2011, with Linda Oh, Gilad Hekselman, Julian Shore, and Ross Pederson: Saxophonist Brian Girley epitomizes the courage of the entrepreneur-- as he notes in the video below, he and his wife left Florida in 2010 for NYC, with three bags and a pair of one-way tickets, no jobs, no apartment, just faith that they would make it. How Girley creates music (as he explains and demonstrates in the video here) is how much work outside of the arts will be conducted in the future--as fluid project-based collaborations, with a leader setting the frame and the goal, and self-directed teammates contributing and creating with and for.
Girley and the other founders/projectors/makers listed above are cousins of the digital technology entrepreneurs who have revived "Silicon Alley" in NYC, which has boomed in the past several years to become one of the country's leading centers for tech start-ups (think Tumblr and Foursquare, for instance):
"New York City had a break out year in 2011, riding a wave of tech enthusiasm to heights it's never seen before. Right now, New York .....is home to one company with a billion dollar valuation — Gilt Groupe — and 28 others with valuations of $100 million or over. Despite a weakening stock market, and deep fundamental problems with the economy, this time next year we expect more billion dollar companies in New York." (Business Insider, October 13, 2011).
(New York Tech Meetup started in late 2004 and today boasts over 22,000 members; its monthly meetings are thronged. Google opened a large site in 2008 in lower Chelsea, just north of the Meatpacking District; Facebook will open a major engineering center in NYC this spring.)
Not two worlds but two (or three or some other number of) continents--flanked and extended by islands, shoals and atolls-- all interconnected by accessible seas. The commercial new media are all about creativity and the arts long since embraced and then took into new directions the possibilities of digital technologies. The arts entrepreneurs (soon we will have to drop the adjective and just acknowledge that "artist" and "entrepreneur" are identical, or at least symbiotic) lead the way into the new economy.
Further reading:
Karen Rosenberg, "Rising and Regrouping on the Lower East Side" (New York Times, April 21, 2011).
---Carnival revelers in Lucerne, Switzerland, February 16th of this year.
So another Mardi Gras has come and gone.
---Carnival celebrants in Belgium last week.
Another Shrove Tuesday...
--Carnival in Ulm, Germany.
Another end to Fasching....
---Carnival somewhere (Venice?) in Italy last week.
As we contemplate a cybernetic future, enthralled within our digital scrim, shadow selves and avatars leading fleshless lives in a Hadoopian world of zettabyte data streams, we nevertheless continue to congregate corporeally, to celebrate mysteries that go back to our beginnings.
Carnevale both refutes and prefigures this future.
Refutes because we still crave the visceral connection of one another; we desire the pulse of music and the smell of smoke, sweat and cooked meats embracing us without an electronic intermediary. Welcome, welcome, step right up to the carny...
Prefigures because in our pageants, rites and masques we have forever been imagining ourselves transcendent and hybridized. The trail is not so long from the ships in the rituals of Isis and the mysteries of Eleusis to multi-player online role-playing games and endless self-fashionings on Facebook.
John Jeremiah Sullivan writes in "My Debt to Ireland" (in this morning's New York Times Sunday Magazine) about searching for his roots, about thwarted hopes and the elegiac nature of life on the Emerald Isle.
Among other things, he comments on the great many houses half-built, never occupied, now abandoned and falling into decay across Ireland, the result of the unprecedented real estate boom during the 1990s that lasted until the global recession starting in 2008. Americans are familiar with this sort of boom-and-bust cycle, with tracts and developments that are still born, that move from blueprint directly to ghost town without ever being inhabited (all those empty streets in the exurbs of Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tampa, Houston and so on). We grimace, file law suits, and move on to some other city or state, building anew to meet the needs of our ever-growing population.
For the Irish, however, this has been a new experience; they are grappling with both the phenomenon and how best to frame it.
As Sullivan writes:
"It had been a dream, like something in a Celtic Revival play: faeries built thousands and thousands of houses in the night. In the morning everybody was poor again.
It was hard to see why the government would allow the ruination of so much open land, which is one of Ireland’s principal commodities, namely the 'unspoiled' landscape. People go to Ireland for all sorts of reasons, but they mainly go there because it’s pretty, because it’s 'not all built up.'
From the point of view of the rural Irish themselves, however, this may look very different. The greenness of Ireland is a false greenness, after all. Not that it isn’t green — the place can still make you have to pull off and swallow one of your heart pills. It’s that the greenness doesn’t mean what it seems. It doesn’t encode a pastoral past, much less a timeless vale where wee folk trip the demesne. The countryside is not supposed to look like that, to be that empty. Ireland was at one time one of the most densely populated places in Europe. In the 1830s, there were more people living there than today. What you see in the open spaces the island is famous for are hundreds and hundreds of years of Irish dying and fleeing in large numbers. Famines, wars, epidemics and a wretched postcolonial poverty drove them through the ports by the millions. It’s perhaps not so strange that such a people, experiencing their first flush of disposable income, would undergo a mania of home building and land development. Perhaps in a way, the houses were meant for returning immigrants even before they became ghost estates. They were built for the diaspora."
Dan Beachy-Quick...Nicole Kornher-Stace...Sonya Taaffe...
Three writers, ranging in age from 29 to 39, who have moved beyond the "emerging" stage and are now among our best. Though hardly unknowns, each deserves to be far more widely and profoundly recognized than he or she is. (I have noted the work of each in earlier entries of Lobster & Canary). Each showed early promise that she or he is now confirming and extending.
Beachy-Quick, Kornher-Stace, and Taaffe have much in common: a deep and learned appreciation for language that produces darkly glittering gems; a jackdavian inquisitiveness, omnivorous yet discerning; meta-cognitive glosses on the importance of history; and an ability to approach central mysteries with masterful subtlety and nuance. Erudite delvers through layers, finders of clues in the ores and the air.
I have no idea if they read each other's work, let alone if they know one another. I do sense a kinship in their own reading tastes. I would place them in the workshop that includes Dickinson and Moore, Montale and Rilke, in the laboratory of language occupied by Swinburne, Hopkins, Shelley and Dryden. Novalis and Droste-Huelshoff. Back to Gongora, to Ronsard. And-- in another vein--I would situate them in the amphitheater for encyclopedic musings and polymathic hybridization, where Eco demonstrates and Benjamin strolls, where the walls are inscribed with the wisdom of Goethe and of Wordsworth.
I cannot do justice to my claims in a short blog entry, so will add "write critical essay on Beachy-Quick, Kornher-Stace, Taaffe" to my dauntingly but deliciously endless list of "deliverables before I die." For those of you who want a taste of evidence a bit more substantial, here are some choice ingredients from the alembics of the three alchemists:
Taaffe's most recent effort is a chapbook, A Mayse-Bikhl (hand-bound from Papaveria Press, 2011), collecting some of her best poems of the past decade. The cover photograph is by her grandfather, Alfred Glixman, of the Czech Memorial Scrolls at Westminster Synagogue. A Mayse-Bikhl's poems all wind powerfully and tellingly from that central image, leading us through memory and the hope of the future. Here is a "Kaddish for a Dybbuk," and "Mermaids at Tashlikh." Her opening lines for "Seder Yetzirah": "Every lover's letter is a golem,/ silence stirring at the cut of a name." In "Lilim, After Dark," we see "All the demons that hide/ in the rafters of your dreams..." In "Etz Chayim," we behold The Tree as it must have been: "This tree grew in no mortal garden, ran/ its roots deep into promise and liturgy...angels burning like sunlight/ in its branches, each leaf inscribed/ name upon name of the children/ born beneath the echoes of its bitter,/ hungering fruit..."
Kornher-Stace's novel Desideria (Prime Books, 2008) opens with one of the most eloquently and powerfully enigmatic scenes I have read in many years. An unnamed young woman, dressed in finery, shatters a mirror and sets her room and herself on fire: "At first she does not know just how or why the lamp is in her hand, its glass and brass and fern-curled fire..." She looks out her window at an unnamed city, smells it: "woodsmoke, lampblack and filth, scorched ginger, rotting quays, snow-sogged broadsides, hothouse violets on the far bank of the river." She plunges from the fiery tower ("burning like a plummeting angel"), dashing herself on the street below, to the cries of the gathering crowd. She is taken for dead. She clutches a book. She is, in fact, alive, but mute (her lips have been sewn shut) and unconscious. "But the looters lean in and discern an auburn book. Like saints' hearts, it has not burnt." She is taken to a nunnery for succour.
Tupelo Press published Circle's Apprentice by Beachy-Quick in 2011. He is openly engaging here with Emerson and Hoelderlin (as he was with Melville in A Whaler's Dictionary). The poems in this collection are dense, cryptic, intelligent, delivered in odd (but not artificial) language, full of what he calls "little riddles in the ruins," with "a small god chanting in the synapses." The work loops, aphoristic lines that return to their beginnings, elusive threads in the old maze. From "Poem": "Comet tails/ Darkly flowing back as the horse leaps/ Forward, straining against the catafalque...Vague/ Repetitions haunt the circumference." From "Catalog": "Glowing with stories they have no mouth to tell...Every poem contains a blessing it keeps hidden." From the first of five poems each titled "Tomb Figurine": "My eye was a little sun__working/ In reverse."
A passage in The Hobbit that I have been musing over, the one describing Bilbo's reaction at first seeing Smaug slumbering atop the treasure-hoard within the Lonely Mountain:
"To say that Bilbo's breath was taken away is no description at all. There are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful. Bilbo had heard tell and sing of dragon-hoards before, but the splendour, the lust, the glory of such treasure had never yet come home to him. His heart was filled and pierced with enchantment..." (pg. 206).
First and last, words-- language-- create and carry the tale in Tolkien's work. Tolkien the philologist was very clear on that, always and fiercely siding with "Lang" in what he saw as an endless contest with "Lit."
My own enthrallment with Tolkien's world began with and continues to be sustained by his use of Language (meaning more than just his creation of languages for the inhabitants of Middle-Earth and beyond, though that was surely among his most lasting and innovative achievements).
Which is why I find myself re-reading The Hobbit, The LOTR, The Silmarillion, "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil" in the wake of the Peter Jackson LOTR movies -- and in preparation for Jackson's first Hobbit film later this year. I love the LOTR movies, having watched them many times--they are brilliant cinematic conceptions.
Which is precisely why my affection and admiration for the movies is tinged with uneasy melancholy, akin perhaps to what Galadriel and Elrond-- and the other High Elves who linger in Middle-Earth-- feel, that is, a sense of something valuable overlaid, buried, lost when a new regime takes over.
The images Jackson and his team created on film are so powerful that I must now struggle to regain my own, the images I created directly and through many readings over many years from Tolkien's un-intermediated language. Now however when I read them on the page, Galadriel for me looks and sounds much like Cate Blanchett, Aragorn like Viggo Mortensen, Gandalf like Ian McKellen, Frodo and Sam like Elijah Wood and Sean Astin...all of whom are so exactly perfect in those roles that they threaten to erase my own, long-preexisting versions, and to monopolize forever the characters they play.
More fundamentally, the medium of film inherently privileges given and monolithic image over the multi-valenced, individualized and organic word. Hence the logic of the extended battle scenes in the films, to take that one example.
But at its core, Tolkien's work is about language as a living force speaking through the individuals who wear the words, the grammar, the syntax for our brief time, before we hand those clothes (sometimes a little worse for wear and in need of repair, sometimes refurbished, with new pockets and buttons) over to the next generation.
So, while I will be among the first to see The Hobbit movies when they are released, I am also keen to reclaim and nurture for myself the elements of Middle-Earth that no film can capture (I know Jackson & Co. are far too wise to believe their movies can do so; I am sure they agree that we judge a fish by how well it breathes underwater, and do not compare it to a bird that flies through the air).
I want to be on my own, left to my own courage and devices, as Bilbo was when he crept down that long, dark passage into the belly of the mountain...when he first crept into the dragon's lair, with its "worm-stench" and the ruddy glare of Smaug's banked fires illuminating the acres of stolen gold and glittering jewels...
...to share then Bilbo's "staggerment" in a place where our modern words fall short of describing the Essence of Things as they were in the World That Was, where film is but a sketch of the surface, below which lurk wild and wonderful things.
The lobster and the canary share with you seven new (or at least new-ish) songs that we find ourselves listening to frequently at the moment-- songs that help bring us to a vibrant yet contemplative place when we need such a refuge or niche. Enjoy.
---Regina Carter, "Artistya" (2010).
---Marcus Miller and Alex Han, "Claptrap" (2010).
--- Karsh Kale, with Gaurav Raina (from Midival Punditz) and others, "Milan" (live, 2006).
---Yoshida Brothers, "Rising" (2008)
---Thomas Pridgen, drum solo (2008)
---Medeski, Scofield, Martin & Wood, "A Go Go" (2007)
---Anoushka Shankar, with Javier Limon and Sandra Carrasco, "Inside Me" (2011)
Lobster & Canary welcomes the new year by celebrating the work of Helen Frankenthaler, who died December 27th at age 83. For an especially insightful obituary, click here for Lance Esplund's "Frankenthaler Bridged Genres, Created Worlds of Burning Color"; and click here for the write-up, with slide show, in the New York Times.
May her visionary use of color and her inspired wanderings with form continue to nurture our spirits in the new year.
--Melora Griffis, empty room (2010; acrylic, gouache, pastel on paper).
--Griffis, blue sun (2010; acrylic, gouache, pastel on paper).
In mid-November, the Lobster & Canary made our first visit to 571 Projects, a beautiful small art gallery in NYC's Chelsea founded by Sophie Brechu-West two years ago ("571" refers to the gallery's square footage). We were rewarded with a gem of a show: wings and murmurs, paintings by New York artist Melora Griffis.
Griffis's work has great narrative power, stories emerging from depths below the carefully muted surfaces, and spurred by the enigmatic shapes and figures (many half-rendered, or veiled) the painter places on the canvas. The overall effects are of restraint and solemnity, possibly remonstrance and mourning, overlaid with spectral uncertainty and a sense of things perceived rather than formally witnessed (fittingly, one of Griffis's paintings is titled unsichtbar, which is German for "invisible, unseen, hidden"). Griffis works small wonders with her chalky/milky backgrounds supporting flares of subtle, slightly slurred color. She calls to mind Pousette-Dart's mostly white paintings, the pale mysterious abstractions of Adele Sypesteyn, the finely calibrated gestures on corrugated white done by Saul Fletcher. Her eerie personages recall those of Ensor, and --while her style differs often substantially from each of the following--the tone is similar to those suffusing Marsden Hartley, Johns, Bonnard, Rauschenberg, Gorky, Tamayo, and O'Keefe.
--Griffis, schlossgespenst (2010; oil on linen)
571 Projects is an arts space to watch, a welcome newcomer to the Chelsea scene. The warmly dynamic Brechu-West has a sharp eye, and a strong sense of how the space interacts with and supports the artwork, how the space becomes a part of the overall aesthetic experience. She chose the locale for-- among other things-- its large windows with their unobstructed views of Chelsea Piers, so that the rays of the afternoon sun and of the sunset play a role in how viewers see the art.
Brechu-West is also willing to cross disciplinary boundaries. As an example of the latter drive, 571 Projects hosted a talk last week by Griffis along with three poets-- Betty Harmon, Alystyre Julian, and Shelly Stenhouse--reading poetry inspired by Griffis's displayed work. Alas, the Lobster & Canary could not attend the event, but we love the concept and look forward to more such salons at 571 Projects.
Visit 571 Projects. For more information, click here.
I am Daniel A. Rabuzzi. Lobster & Canary explores fantastical/surreal fiction, poetry, and visual arts, fairy tales, oral epic, & children's lit. CZP (Toronto) published my novels *The Choir Boats* (2009) and *The Indigo Pheasant* (2012). I live in an enchanted city called New York, with my wife and soul-mate, the artist Deborah A. Mills, along with the requisite two cats. Deborah & I design & create art together; our first collaboration was shown in 2012 at The Observatory (Gowanus, Brooklyn). Learn more about me: www.danielarabuzzi.com. Contact: drabuzzi (AT) earthlink (DOT) net. "Lobster and canary" is a Norwegian expression, meaning "odds and ends, a bit of this and a bit of that." The lobster in the header is from Abraham van Beyeren's "Still Life with Lobster and Fruit" (1650s)--the original painting is at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC). The canary above is by Carl Fabritius (1654)--the original hangs in The Mauritshuis (The Hague). My understanding is that I am using the former image by virtue of fair use, and the latter because it is in the public domain.
