Scottunder

The Swerve

Having read all the magazines I brought along to New Orleans, I was forced to purchase something for the trip home, Fortunately, I found The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt, which won the 2011 National Book Award for Non-Fiction.

Though Greenblatt tells his story in a much more engaging manner, I'll put this in a chronological order I can understand:

Building on the work of Democritus, who died a century before, Epicurus (d. 270 BC) founded a school of philosophy (Epicureanism) that is based on atomism, the idea that the universe is built from fundamental and invisible building blocks of matter flying through the void. (This some two millennia before the ideas could be tested in any form.)

Based on random "swerves," these atoms come together and apart to form everything from stars and planets to animals and humans. Nothing is eternal except these atoms, and no one form -- say, humankind -- is more important than another. They are not controlled by any external forces; i.e., gods. Thus, the gods -- though they may exist -- don't concern themselves with human actions and they do not reward and punish good and evil, which leaves humans to choose for themselves how best to live. For Epicurus this meant to seek pleasure and avoid pain, not in a hedonistic sense but by living a good and just life.

Jump forward a couple hundred years to Lucretius (d. 55 BC), who is basically known for one long Epicurean poem, De rerum natura, or On the Nature of Things. Almost nothing else is known of Lucretius's life or works, though his poem is held in high regard by his contemporaries. 

The ideas in Epicureanism and On the Nature of Things are not held in high esteem as the world turns toward Christianity, and many classic works are forever lost both through suppression and neglect. The Christian authorities discredit Epicurus and Lucretius, inventing scandalous stories and creating the idea that Epicureanism entails an immoral quest for pure pleasure, a connotation still attached to the word 'epicurean'. In turn, the works are not copied by scribes and most of them disappear, their only existence brief mentions in other ancient works.

Jump now again to the early 15th Century, when the scribe and classicist scholar Poggio Bracciolini leaves his post as the pope's secretary in order to pursue his obsession: scouring the deteriorating libraries of European monasteries to find the few remaining works from Greek and Roman authors and arrange for their copy and distribution, thus helping to promote humanism. Poggio is the hero of The Swerve, but some of Greenblatt's stories are conjecture -- he possibly visited this monastery and likely spoke with that friar and probably found On the Nature of Things there, perhaps not even recognizing its importance. 

It's this importance that Greenblatt wants us to understand, because he sees On the Nature of Things as a key work to spark the Renaissance, infecting the essays of Montaigne and possibly the plays of Shakespeare. Lucretius's beautifully written philosophy, you see, imagines a world free from religious fear, and entreats us to enjoy a pleasant life of good works, unconcerned with a highly scripted afterlife of eternal pain or reward. It is a signal work to help us break from years of church oppression and appreciate the universe in all its splendor, a place of beauty and art and ideas and happiness. Greenblatt even posits a link to Thomas Jefferson, who owned several copies of Lucretius and managed to write (the pursuit of) happiness into the Declaration of Independence.

Along with the journey of On the Nature of Things into the modern psyche, we learn about the life of Poggio, his navigation of some nasty politics in a time of three warring popes, the work of a medieval scriptorium, Poggio's importance to modern lettering style, even the construction of papyrus rolls and codexes. It's a great trip, and Greenblatt makes it an engaging tale. 

Special Exits

Overnight I read, in two sittings, Joyce Farmer's Special Exits. This is a graphic novel (or memoir, though the names are changed) about Farmer's father and stepmother who grow old together, deteriorate, and die. 

Sounds good?

Okay, maybe it doesn't. But it really is, and not in a heartwarming, sage-elders-teach-philosophy manner. It's honest, and revealing, and unromantic. It's messy. And it is unrelentingly real: this is how it is, or, at least, this is how it was for Joyce Farmer and even if the specifics vary, there is much here to help prepare all of us for the inevitable.

Joyce Farmer was a pioneering feminist cartoonist, and her pen-and-ink work has an old-school quality. There's none of the modern techniques of comic-making here, no varying frame sizes, nothing but story conveyed in a straightforward manner. And all of Farmer's characters and spaces have depth -- the furniture has cat hair, the garages are filled with boxes, and the humans are complex and frustrating. Here's a sample:

 

Dersu Uzala

Twenty years ago or more, I saw Akira Kurosawa's 1975 film Dersu Uzala. Filmed on an epic scale, it's the story of V.K. Arseniev, a Russian captain in charge of surveying the extreme eastern territory of Siberia, and Dersu Uzala, a native Goldi who is at one with the taigá, the Siberian forest. He reads the tracks of animals and man and predicts the weather. Through death-defying adventures with tigers, frozen lakes, and more, Dersu and Arseniev become great friends, even when Arseniev's expeditions are separated by several years. Dersu saves Arseniev's life more than once, and Arseniev takes him back to his home in the town of Khabarovsk to live when Dersu grows to old to hunt for himself.

I've seen the movie a few times over the years, but it wasn't until I was reading Ian Frazier's Travels to Siberia that I realized Dersu and Arseniev were real people. Frazier is a writer for the New Yorker who crossed the 5800 miles of Russia a couple times in a van, writing about Russian people, history, and culture in his trademark manner of wry and insightful observation. As he approached the Pacific coast, I wondered if the subject would turn to the movie, but Frazier mentions carrying Arseniev's book, and his intention to locate Arseniev's house in Khabarovsk! It turns out that the story of Dersu and Arseniev are quite well known throughout Russia, though the expeditions took place 1902-1907. (Kurosawa's movie was a Russian production, using a Tuvan actor in the part of Dersu.)

Then, quite recently, I went through another great book: John Vaillant's The Tiger (which I just wrote about). Vaillant discusses Dersu and Arseniev in great detail, and notes that a small town in the area is named after the explorer. He especially describes how much of Dersu's (and other natives') behavior around tigers is still modeled by the people who live in and around the taigá. The native people call the tiger Amba, a word that also means "devil," but carries much more respect and honor -- even when your life is threatened:

"Why you go behind. Amba? What you want, Amba? We go our way, you go yours; you no bother us. Why you keep come behind? Taigá big place, room for us and you, what?

That is from the book I just finished, Dersu the Trapper, the English translation of Arseniev's classic. In that scene Dersu and Arseniev are, as always, walking through the forest when Dersu realizes a tiger is watching them. He sees a tiger track in the path behind them, and, distinct from the other puddles on the ground, it has no water in it -- very fresh! Dersu yells at Amba and apologizes and after a few minutes the beast is heard from no more and the men continue their journey.

Dersu the Trapper is a great story that ought to be more widely known. It's a scientific journey, not unlike Darwin's voyage on the Beagle, in which Arseniev gives careful and attentive descriptions and bird, plants, trees, animals, and the customs of peoples he encounters, like the native Nanai and Udehé, the Old Believers and the Koreans, and the ever-encroaching Chinese. He also decries the coming exploitation of the region that he can see is not many years in the future. But all this is mixed with a thrilling adventure narrative starring a clever, resourceful, and memorable type of man who has now all but disappeared from the earth. Facing bandits and bears, starvation and injury, severe weather and impassable obstacles, Dersu achieves his goals without losing the honorable connection he has with his beloved taigá.

Bonus: here is a fascinating and thorough Polish website devoted to all thing Dersu Uzala. Book covers, posters, museum exhibits, Arseniev's map, and more -- it even details the existence of an asteroid named after Dersu and includes an essay that compares him to Herman Hesse's Siddhartha!

The Tiger

I've just finished as exciting a book as I've ever read, all the more remarkable because it's nonfiction: The Tiger by John Vaillant. Subtitled A True Story of Vengeance and Survival, it tells the story of a poacher killed in 1997 by a tiger near a remote village in extreme eastern Siberia, and of the tracker who must take action. 

Written with the careful unfolding of a detective story, it is filled with elements of an adventure yarn, a travel guide, and a history book. We learn about a wild region, the Primorye, and its people: some (like the Nanai) live off the forest in a way that hasn't changed for hundreds of years; others have been stranded since the fall of communism and live bleak existences, lightened only by sardonic humor and vodka. Poaching is common; China is relatively close, and has a large appetite for illegal tiger parts. Surprisingly, the tiger has its champions and protectors as well. 

Amur tigers -- also called Siberian tigers -- are remarkable and awe-inspiring animals, essentially unchanged for hundreds of millennia. As we learn in the book, they are excellent hunters, able to stalk their prey with an unmatched cunning and fierceness, and they are perfectly adapted physically to reign supreme in the "boreal jungle" of the taiga: 

To properly appreciate such an animal, it is most instructive to start at the beginning: picture the grossly muscled head of a pit bull and then imagine how it might look if the pit bull weighed a quarter of a ton. Add to this fangs the length of a finger backed up by rows of slicing teeth capable of cutting through the heaviest bone. Consider then the claws: a hybrid of meat hook and stiletto that can attain four inches along the outer curve, a length comparable to the talons of a velociraptor. Now, imagine the vehicle for all this: nine feet or more from nose to tail, and three and a half feet high at  the shoulder. Finally, emblazon this beast with a primordial calligraphy: black brushstrokes on a field of russet and cream, and wonder at our strange fortune to coexist with such a creature. (The tiger is, literally, tattooed: if you were to shave one bald, its stripes would still be visible, integral to its skin.) Able to swim for miles and kill an animal many times its size, the tiger also possesses the brute strength to drag an awkward, thousand-pound carcass through the forest for fifty or a hundred yards before consuming it.

Vaillant's writing is consistently vivid and compelling, his asides providing illuminating background that give the characters depth and context without overwhelming the central story or its thrilling conclusion. Vaillant's extensive research and interviews provides detailed recreations of places and events that allow us -- almost -- to enter the minds of the experienced woodsmen who eke out their rough years at the margins of a dense northern forest where temperatures often reach 40 below zero, and of the tigers with whom they maintain a careful and usually distant rapport. 

Art Minus One

One of the gifts I got this year was the lovely two-volume set of Lynd Ward's wordless stories. Made using woodcuts inspired equally by German expressionism and Albrecht Durer, Ward's "graphic novels" were made between 1929 and 1937. This set from the Library of America collects all six novels, and the title of one, Song Without Words, put me in mind of artworks that are similarly constrained. I have other wordless books, such as Laurence Hyde's Southern Cross and, um, well maybe that's the only other one I have.

I've long been drawn to songs without words. Not just classical, jazz, or jam-band type rock, but actual instrumental rock and pop songs that manage to be catchy and even hot the charts without words. Some are cheesy pop, like "Popcorn"; some are ambitious, like "Classical Gas"; and some are just downright great, like "Sleep Walk." (Funny to listen to Popcorn again and hear it as a precursor to electronica.) "Taps" is a wonderful example of a well-known instrumental -- nearly everyone can hum it, and it manages to retain its emotional impact. (This scene in From Here to Eternity, in which Montgomery Clift's character honors his dead friend, conveys the mournful feeling so well. That's Al Hirt playing.)

What else can you remove from music? A cappella groups dispense with instruments. Brian Eno's ambient music presents textures of sound that proceed without discernible rhythm. Early Steve Reich works used rhythm without harmonic or melodic development.

What's the visual art equivalent? Expressionist painters (some of them) used shapes and color instead of recognizable figures. Jackson Pollack painted without brushes; artists like Christo or Andy Goldsworthy create ephemeral visual works without canvas or paint. Man Ray created his "ray-o-grams" using photographic paper without a camera. 

Films began as "moving pictures" without any sound, so we have to find other essential elements to delete. Chris Marker's La jetée from 1962 is a 28-minute montage of still images (with one brief exception), its science-fiction story told only in narration. Early surrealist experiments like Un Chien Andalu did without plot, and there must be many versions of character-less films like Koyaanisqatsi.

I'm sure I'm missing other examples.

(By the way, the title here comes from an old set of LPs for musicians to practice over, Music Minus One. Oh, it looks like they still exist!)

McSweeney's 36

There are few things that make me as consistently happy as opening the shipping box that contains the latest issue of McSweeney's, and #36 has one of their best packaging efforts yet.

This issue is contained within a cardboard head illustrated by Matt Furie. Opening it reveals several booklets, including the magazine proper, a play by Wajahit Ali, an "oral history of resistance in Burma,"  and an excerpt from Adam Levin's 1000-page novel, The Instructions. 

One piece is a plain brown wrapper containing a screenplay and a cover letter, explaining that the script is intended for a new Mike Myers/Dana Carvey vehicle. The most elaborate booklet collects four chapters from a "wrecked" Michael Chabon novel titled Fountain City, encased in a jacket that unfolds to reveal a map of a (partially submerged?) city.

There is also a four-part postcard series of a fish.

On Writer's Block

Passing on from the blog of my friend Bob Sutton, "The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of 'writer's block'," by Dennis Upper, a peer-reviewed paper published in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis in 1974.

Patti Smith, "Just Kids"

I had no idea, really. Beyond the few songs I'd heard on the radio, I knew little about Patti Smith's work, and nothing about her life. She was one of many artists I admire from a distance because of the esteem in which others hold her. 

Just Kids isn't a substitute for listening to her songs or reading her poetry, but it is an entertaining and moving account of her life, centering on her remarkable relationship with her muse and protector, the artist and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.

Mapplethorpe and Smith meet as starving artists in 1967 in New York City. "Artist" here makes them sound accomplished, but really, at 21, they barely had more than the urge to create and the drive to live on the edge of starvation in order to do so. Patti, well-read and voracious in her interests, carries romantic notions of Jean Genet and Arthur Rimbaud, but has trouble completing her own poetry. Less immersed in the work of others, Robert creates odd assemblages but can't realize the large-scale installations in his head. Mostly, they loved and inspire each other while they wait for lightning to strike.

Most of their early life together is squalid, and the kindness of strangers is a persistent theme. Due to luck and their personal charm, they make friends and better themselves in a slow spiral up from poverty. Patti works in bookstores and seems to support both of them. They move into the Chelsea Hotel and hang out at Max's Kansas City, mingling (and more) with everyone from Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin to Harry Smith and Sam Shepard to the social and artistic mavericks of Andy Warhol's Factory. Patti describes moments with friends like Todd Rundgren and William Burroughs in ways that amuse and impress without seeming boastful.

Patti and Robert each move on to other lovers and patrons without ever letting each other go fully, and her description of their bond makes it timeless and mystical. Patti writes well, remembering details of haircuts, clothes, meals, and conversations that helped to immerse me in the heady and charged New York art world of the late '60s and early '70s. (As a former used-book fiend, I especially loved her memories of finding valuable editions for cheap that she would then flip into a much-needed meal or a rent payment.)

Patti's description of her forays into acting and poetry reading make her eventual transformation into a proto-punk rocker completely inevitable, and it's hard not to see Robert's artistic growth as a kind of simultaneous ascent into purity and descent into depravity. In the end, though, this is a story about two people who have a connection like few others have ever shared, though they've long before parted as lovers. It's a beautiful thing. 

Today's ephemera: The Circus of Dr Lao (art by Artzybasheff)

Found this at my library's used book sale, a 1964 Compass paperback edition of a 1935 book, The Circus of Dr Lao by Charles G. Finney. Fifty cents well spent!

Apparently well-known enough to rate a Wikipedia entry, the book sounds fascinating (it was later turned into a movie, 7 Faces of Dr Lao starring Tony Randall and with special effects by George Pal).

I haven't read it yet, but I picked it up because of the cover, and bought it based on the few illustrations inside, drawn by a master: Boris Artzybasheff. They are terrifically surreal, and it's hard to imagine the book living up to their promise.

I don't think they were originally in color, but the Wikipedia article shows a slightly different treatment for the cover art. Also, possibly reflecting his fame in 1964 (the year before he died), the cover of my copy says "with additional interpretations by Boris Artzybasheff."

Anyway, enough of that. Just look at this art! This is all of it -- the two-page spread had the single-page illustrations on either wide of it, and the last illustration was on the final page of the book. Also, each was listed on a separate page, with titles like "A Lecture on Lusus Naturae" (on the illustration above) and "Soft Music on the Piccolo" (on the two-page spread).

Here's a great page of Artzybasheff's art, for everything from Time covers to ads for Shell motor oil. I think I see a little Jim Woodring in his work.

Escaping the Delta

Elijah Wald's 2004 book, Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues begins like this:

There has probably been more romantic foolishness written about blues in general, and Robert Johnson in particular, than just about any other genre or performer in the twentieth century.

In a nutshell, Wald's goal is to help us see Robert Johnson and the pre-war blues as perceived in his time and by his audience. Because a lot of what we in our time think about both of them has been shaped by white intellectuals who came along thirty years later and "explained" the blues as part of a deeply spiritual, almost mystical expression -- a pure music made by naive but brilliant instrumental masters who bared their souls in the swamplands of the Mississippi Delta.

But the blues was pop music, and blues musicians were professionals who played a wide variety of music, not just blues. Whatever their audiences wanted to hear, whatever the girls wanted to dance to, they played. They aspired for the good life, dressing in high style and playing in nice clubs for big audiences in Chicago and New York, and their audiences liked that as well. Nobody wanted to stay in rundown honky-tonks on Southern backroads if they could help it.

But the white aficionados who discovered the music decades later turned it in to a kind of outsider art,the more obscure, the better. Just as now, critics avoided lauding music that appealed to the masses. They felt the popular blues musicians playing the stage in Chicago were too slick, too commercial. They wanted "the real thing," so they searched for the most obscure players and the rarest records. By the '50s and '60s, when white archivists reissued old country blues 78s on LP, everything was turned around: they championed musicians who most people had never heard back in the day, and the big stars -- the ones most in demand by black audiences of the '20s and '30s -- became obscure.

Thus, Robert Johnson, a talented professional musician who sold fewer than 5000 records and died at 27 (becoming a prototype of the tragic rock star), became emblematic of an entire genre. Stories grew up about his abilities and his history, though few people had any certainty about them. Wald makes it clear that Johnson was not a mystical figure in tune with a haunted muse with a skill inspired (figuratively or actually) by a deal with the Devil.

The truth about the blues, as Wald shows, is that white record producers weren't interested in travelling to Mississippi to record black artists crooning romantic ballads or playing upbeat jazz or swing tunes. It didn't matter that black musicians -- and audiences -- loved Guy Lombardo, Bing Crosby, and Lawrence Welk -- these were white-owned record labels making music to sell in Chicago and New York, and what sold were rural black performers playing the blues.

Another interesting reversal Wald describes is with dress. Even if black blues players were poor, they'd spend their money to buy a nice suit to wear onstage. But the white producers liked to promote them as penniless downtrodden ramblers, and the young white rock stars who idolized them adopted jeans and work shirts -- farm and laborer clothes -- in emulation. No contemporary of Robert Johnson would ever play a gig dressed like that! You can see this difference in the original LP cover on the left, and the CD cover on the right -- the CD used a photo of Johnson that hadn't been discovered in 1961, dressed in a sharp pinstriped suit and a jaunty hat.

As with Wald's subsequent book, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll, he strips away decades of received wisdom about popular music and helps us see it -- especially music played by and inspired by African-Americans -- as it really was: a commercial art form played by practiced, talented performers making music that audiences loved.