October Reading List

I've been busy, so even though I wrote this a while ago, I'm just now getting the opportunity to post it.

And by the way, since it's that time of year already, I hope all of you will have a wonderful and relaxing Thanksgiving.

My Antonia
Willa Cather
In Ways of Seeing John Berger asserts that it is difficult for an artist to successfully portray the object of his desire as anything other than an object. Antonia, the title character of this book, is the object of the narrator’s desire, and also, purportedly, of the author’s. Cather triumphs as a writer however, and gives us a dynamic portrait of Antonia, a sometimes desirable, sometimes offensive woman. Antonia is as far from caricature as a real person, although I’m sure that hasn’t stopped students in college courses across the country from trying. How so? Well, here’s a faux-shocking summary for you: Cather was probably a lesbian, and Antonia has many traditionally masculine characteristics. There, now you don’t need to read any of those papers.

Ways of Seeing
John Berger
Berger’s exploration of the relationship between art and capital doubles as a short and easily understood explanation of Marxist philosophy. He’s also perceptive and entertaining on the subject of art.

Riddley Walker
Russell Hoban
Powell’s Bookstore stocks this novel, written about post-apocalyptic England, in the science fiction and fantasy section. However, it would be equally at home in the literature section. In other words, Riddley Walker is both brilliant and entertaining, and the reader will be rewarded according to what he brings to the reading.

Seven Against Thebes
Translated by Anthony Hecht and Helen H. Bacon
Aeschylus
I decided to learn more about Greek drama when I was reading Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche compared Aeschylus to Euripides, to the detriment of the latter. I like both writers, but this excellent version of Seven Against Thebes, a play often discounted by critics, actually shows Aeschylus at his best and also proves how much translation counts. The writing is stark and dramatic, like some of the best Modernist poetry.

The Eclipse of Art
Tackling the Crisis in Art Today
Julian Spalding
In spite of a long and misplaced diatribe against John Berger, the author succeeds in making his point. Spalding clearly loves modern art but he’s sick of watching so many talented artists struggle while more gimmicky artists get all the acclaim and money. He seems to miss a central irony, however. He and Berger are not so different. Both want to free art, as far as possible, from the judgment of the corporate-minded marketplace.

The Sublime Bruno Schulz

I’m starting this blog because I enjoy sharing my likes and dislikes with friends and with strangers who could become friends. I call it slinging hash because my interests vary, and I expect this blog to contain mixed content, much like the inside of my head.

Of course what I really want to share are the things I love and the things I hate. Bruno Schulz is a good example of the former. I knew almost nothing about Schulz when I recently happened to see his book The Street of Crocodiles sitting on a shelf at our local branch of the library. The blurb on the front cover quotes Isaac Bashevis Singer, “He wrote sometimes like Kafka, sometimes like Proust, and at times succeeded in reaching depths that neither of them reached.” Quite a claim, and book blurbs usually exaggerate, but Schulz makes good on this promise.

Here is Schulz’s description of a night at the local theatre:

We found ourselves again in that large, badly lit dirty hall, full of somnolent human chatter and aimless confusion. But when we made our way through the crowd, there emerged before us an enormous pale-blue curtain, like the sky of another firmament. Large, painted pink masks, with puffed-up cheeks floated in a huge expanse of canvas. The artificial sky spread out in both directions, swelling with the powerful breath of pathos and of great gestures, with the atmosphere of that fictitious flood lit world created on the echoing scaffoldings of the stage. The tremor sailing across the large area of that sky, the breath of the vast canvas which made the masks revive and grow, revealed the illusory character of that firmament, caused that vibration of reality which, in metaphysical moments, we experience as the glimmer of revelation.

The passage is reminiscent of Proust’s poetic descriptions of the Paris stage, although by contrast Schulz relied only on the theatre in his home-town, Drohobych Poland, for inspiration.

The following selection, which claims powers for matter extending far beyond animism, reads like a philosophical manifesto written by Kafka:

Treatise on Tailors’ Dummies, or The Second Book of Genesis

“The Demiurge,” said my father, “has had no monopoly of creation, for creation is the privilege of all spirits. Matter has been given infinite fertility, inexhaustible vitality, and, at the same time, a seductive power of temptation which invites us to create as well.”

Schulz was a gifted artist too. He worked as a high school art teacher, and also studied architecture. He never got the chance, however, to create a large body of fiction or art. He was a victim of shooting in the early phases of the holocaust. He was apparently working on a novel to be called The Messiah at the time, and I also recommend the Cynthia Ozick novel, The Messiah of Stockholm, which alludes to this lost work.

Did I mention that The Street of Crocodiles is only 160 pages long? Think of it as a shot-size version of Kafka and Proust; I can live with that oversimplification if it persuades at least one more person to read Schulz.