Hello, it’s me. I hope and plan to be back blogging in earnest later this week or right after Memorial Day, I really do. For now, while I scramble–and try to recover from last night’s wonderfully crushing “Sopranos” ep–here are a few interesting elsewheres to wander:
– In the NY Observer, Hilton Kramer writes about Constable’s Skies, the gallery show that Terry so enjoyed–heartless coblogger!–a couple of weeks ago. Here’s Kramer:
It’s another remarkable feature of the “skying” paintings that, from our historical perspective, so many of them seem to have anticipated the pictorial syntax and emotional tenor of 20th-century Abstract Expressionist painting. They were not, of course, conceived as abstract paintings, yet to our 21st-century eyes, they often bear such a close resemblance to certain modalities of painterly abstraction that it’s sometimes difficult to “see” them as scrupulously faithful pictures of the natural world. My guess is that they will be an inspiration for our painters for a long time to come.
As Terry guessed, I am going to miss this show, which closes all too soon. I feel relatively all right about it, however. A few years ago on a putative research trip to London, I spent almost all my time looking for Constables, and found the mother lode of sky paintings in an outer reach of the vast Victoria & Albert Museum from which I was able to find my way back by means of a trail of bread crumbs. Someday, when time allows, I’ll write here about why I heretically persist in preferring Constable to Turner.
– Meanwhile, in The New Republic, Ruth Franklin offers a measured assessment of The Believer magazine:
The magazine expresses an enthusiasm for books that most other publications too often either bury or take for granted. This enthusiasm, it must be said, isn’t a valid end in itself; it’s also anti-intellectual, despite the ongoing search for the perfect syllabus. What The Believer offers is essentially a book club, and no one goes to a book club to talk seriously about books. It’s a gathering for fans, and while there’s nothing edifying about fandom, there are worse things than books to be a fan of.
– Old news by now, but good enough that I don’t care, is James Wood’s London Review of Books autopsy of current standard-issue academic lit crit (doubling as a review of Randall Stevenson’s Oxford English Literary History, Vol. XII: 1960-2000). No wonder it isn’t breathing: it’s filled with sawdust.
Stevenson never reflects on a writer’s aesthetic intentions, but this may be a blessing in disguise, for in those rare moments when he considers intention at all, he is crudely materialist. An interesting discussion about the way short stories, in this period, ceded ground to novels, and novels in turn became more like short stories, yields to a mystifying generalisation about novels becoming shorter: “Declining economic confidence among publishers, and dwindling stamina or leisure time among readers, encouraged some novelists almost to usurp the short story’s usual dimensions. When Ian McEwan moved on from short-story writing, it was to produce a first ‘novel’, The Cement Garden (1978), not much in excess of one hundred pages.” Ah, so that is why McEwan’s novels are so short. What layers of evasion are hidden in that careful verb “encouraged”.
I like Wood all the time, but this essay made me do a little dance.