Alice Munro

Russ Scurr’s review of Alice Munro’s New Selected Stories in the TLS is itself something that aficionados of Alice Munro’s work should run to read (“The Darkness of Alice Munro,” TLS, 10/4/11). If you subscribe to the TLS you now have automatic access to their online edition and if you haven’t read this review/essay you should, for the locutions alone. In analyzing a Munro story called “Chance” from 2004, Scurr zeros in on one of the characters, a 21 year old PhD  candidate named Juliet who happens to be reading E.R. Dodds’ The Greeks and the Irrational while riding on a train. The young woman pushes off the advances of a man who then commits suicide just as her period intensifies, one bloody act superimposed upon the other. Scurr goes back to Dodds’ book which begins with the following quote from William James, “The recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder states of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making.”  Scurr goes on to say, “Munro centers her fiction on catching real fact in the making in precisely this Jamesian sense. Her characters are meticulously located…Through their specific constrained lives she probes the human condition…she explores the irrational states associated with dreaming, sexually desiring and murdering. Her characters are almost case studies; her artistry in creating and observing them recalls the  close attention and cool detachment of a psychoanalyst.”  Munro’s stories, which have appeared in The New Yorker for years are deceptive since they mostly take place in provincial Canadian towns. The fact that they are really tales and not the kind of modernist collages that sometimes appear in The New Yorker sometimes draws attention away from the subtlties of Munro's sophisticated style that as Scurr points out proceeds “through hiatus and interruption.” Scurr’s review/essay elucidates both the intellectual ambition and emotional profundity of Munro’s work.

Eye in the Sky

In a recent story, the Times’ John Markoff described the creation of a fully automated data base which some weird sounding government agencies are supporting(“'Government Aims to Build A "Data Eye In the Sky'” NYT, 10/10/11). Markoff pointed out that Isaac Asimov had anticipated this kind of collaboration between "mathematics and psychology to predict the future" when he coined the term “psychohistory” in his Foundation series back in l951. The term “cyberspace" emanated from William Gibson’s Neuromancer and the concept of the web was prefigured in Samuel Delaney’s novels so we shouldn’t be surprised at Asimov’s prescience. Markoff quotes someone named Thomas Malone, identified as director of the Center for Collective Intelligence at M.I.T. and  mentions Intelligence Advanced  Research Projects Activity or Iarpa, “part of the office of the director of national intelligence.”  Does this sound like something to worry about? Is such tech speak tantamount to the 'banality of evil'?  Should we be assured when we’re told that this system would be fully automated?  Is there such a thing a value free data collection? “The automated data collection system is to focus on patterns of communication, consumption, and movement of populations,” Markoff reported. “It will use publicly accessible data,  including Web search queries, blog entries, Internet traffic flow, financial market indicators, traffic web cams and changes in Wikipedia entries.” There has always been a certain ambiguity about Big Brother? Was Orwell referring to a human entity or a  collective consciousness? Even Wikipedia, which puts forth the dichotomy, can't seem to decide. Was he anticipating some sort of artificial and transcendent intelligence, resulting from the kind of “data eye in the sky” that is being talked about—a more evolved form of the military industrial complex that we might term the academic/intelligence complex?  Or was he simply envisioning the E-Z pass?

Cries and Whispers at BAM

Last summer Carey Mulligan starred in what amounted to a staged reading of the Bergman script Through a Glass Darkly. The Flemish director’s Ivo van Hove’s Cries and Whispers is as much a transformation of Bergman as say Peter Brook’s Midsummer Night’s Dream was of Shakespeare. Bergman was firmly the artist in control of his characters in his original movie. In van Hove’s adaptation his dying character is the artist, creating in this case a multi-media (video and painting) rendition of her own death. Where Cries and Whispers might have recalled Chekhov’s Three Sisters in the powerful relationships created, van Hove’s work is reminiscent of the artist Hannah Wilke’s documentation of her own demise. Pictures are constantly being generated and remind us that we are a culture of image collectors. The collecting of the images takes the place of memory and even contains an element of wishful thinking. If we are too busy recording ourselves will there be no time to die? What are we humans going to do with all the pictures we ceaselessly take? That is not a question van Hove is asking, but it’s a good question to ask in a digital age in which pictures are so facilely rendered that there will never be enough hours in anyone’s life to see them all. The first half of the current production is literally disembodied even as the dying Agnes (Chris Nietvelt) is figuratively disemboweled. But the further away it drifts from Bergman’s narrative the closer it comes to the spirit of the great master and there is one scene between Karin (Janni Goslinga) and Maria (Helena Reijn) which has the dramatic power of Persona. Bergman's Cries and Whispers employed intense colors (in particular red, white and black) and to that extent was a product of its time. The narcissistic self recording which characterizes van Hove's Cries and Whispers is what makes the current production timely. Be prepared besides an Alice in Wonderland set composed of projections and silhouettes this Cries and Whispers features a soundtrack highlighted by Janis Joplin singing Cry Baby.

Diasporic Dining XXVIII: Feeling His Neurogastronomic Juices

You’ve heard of neuroeconomics, neuro law and a host of other disciplines which try to isolate areas of the brain that are involved in undertaking  particular types of thinking or emoting. Neurogastronomy is the latest entry into the neuro sweepstakes and it’s the “brain” child of Miguel Sanchez Romera, a neurologist who has named a restaurant after himself, and whose pretensions, which include a $245 prix fixe menu, have provoked the ire of one time Times restaurant critic now Op Ed columnist Frank Bruni (“Dinner and Derangement,” NYT, 10/17/11). Here is a quote from the restaurant’s web site: “Neurogastronomy embodies a holistic approach to food by means of a thoughtful study of the organoleptic properties of each ingredient. The result is a natural cuisine driven by the importance of neurosensory perceptions, the taste-memory and the emotions of food.”  Some restaurants get bad reviews, but few get lambasted on the editorial page of the paper of record. Bruni’s wrath was such that he wrote a an op-ed piece about it proclaiming how the restaurant exemplified “the way our culture’s food madness tips into food psychosis.” “While blazers are optional at Romera,” Bruni remarked, “straitjackets would be a fine idea.” Though Bruni’s biting humor might not spare Dr. Romera’s feelings, there’s a certain poetic justice in this fillip against a provider who doesn’t spare his patrons’ purses. Bruni’s verdict on Romera is a kind of culinary Sharia since it hits Dr.Romera where it hurts. But Bruni’s Inquisition is a breath of fresh air at a time when it’s increasingly difficult to find simple well cooked food at moderate prices. Food has become like the emperor’s new clothes. People actually fall over each other paying exorbitant prices for increasingly microscopic portions, while this time Chicken Little may turn out to be right. The sky is falling.

Letter from Riverhead

A friend writes: “I just got back from a truly marvelous vacation and one that was unlike anything I’d experienced before. I went on a walking tour of discount supermarkets. You go to Costco, Sam’s Club and end up at the BJ’s Wholesale Club on Route 58 in Riverhead. Butterfield and Robinson is a Canada based touring company that specializes in high end biking and walking tours and there are some multi-sports of which this one should qualify since there was walking and shopping for items like toilet paper in bulk. In these economically challenging times many active vacation companies which specialize in bike trips to the Loire where they place their customers in Chateaus at night and pick up the pieces the next day, when wine tastings lead to bike crashes, should consider this growing new market. Holiday Inn Expresses can replace the chateaus with chains like Panera’s and  the Olive Garden substituting for the two and three star Michelins that still grace high end tours. The spirit of the old active vacation trips was still there, if the clientele was somewhat changed in both attitude and appearance. The high rollers, who normally would check their walking sticks and settle back by the pool with a bottles of Merlot, were now seen heading back to the same discount supermarkets they’d spent the day touring with their new found coupon books in hand.  Our trip ended with tearful fair wells at the BBB (Bed, Bath and Beyond), about a mile from I-495, the Interstate that would carry us all back into the major airports and Manhattan—from which we would all disperse to the four corners of the earth.”

Delacroix, David and Revolutionary France

Here’s a curatorial quote about Ingres’ Studies for the Turkish Bath (1859-60),one of the collection of drawings hanging in show Delacroix, David and Revolutionary France currently on display at the Morgan. “In this large preparatory sheet, the eroticism of the Turkish Bath is anticipated in a series of lushly rendered figure studies drawn from life. The sheet seems to summarize Ingres’ ongoing fascination with the female body and reveals a more vigorous richly modeled approach than is typical of his drawings.” The austerity of the portraits of Madame and Monsieur Louis-Francois Bertin, publisher of the Journal de debats and a major cultural figure during the July monarchy of Louis-Philippe, testifies to the polarities of sensuality and severity within the character of Ingres. David Hockney once propounded the theory that Ingres used an optical device and the question with Ingres is always whether the lines are copied or found. Odalisque and Slave from l839, mounted in a separate exhibit of just Ingres drawings simultaneously on display at the Morgan, of course, poses another question entirely, how is it possible to produce a drawing that has the detail, depth and dimensionality of a painting? Two studies by Delacroix on the Death of Sardanapalus, one of his murders and the other of his spoils are brilliant exemplars of how the handmaiden to painting often exhibits a brilliance, modernity and freedom that, in the hands of a master draftsman, can outdo the painting itself. Gericault, Daumier are amongst the other artists whose works are on exhibited in the Delacroix, David show and it's an exhibit that's a testament to social as well as artistic revolution. Apparently Ingres said that the plaque above his studio should read Ecole de dessin.

On Evil

Rae Langton’s review of Terry Eagleton’s On Evil in the TLS (“All About Death,” TLS, 9/23/11) begins at the crossroads of Christian theology and psychoanalytic pathology. “Eagleton’s project is to regard evil in terms of a Freudian morality play that doffs its cap, in all the right places, to its venerable Christian forebears,” Langton remarks. Later Langton says in commenting on Eagleton’s thesis, “The special character of evil is to be located in its attitude, its death-seeking desire to somehow make a nothingness of being.” Not surprisingly Eagleton, being a prominent literary critic, uses literary sources to make his point, amongst them, William Golding’s Pincher Martin, Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock and Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus. Eagleton quotes Greene about Pinkie, the iconic criminal at the heart of the novel thusly, “God couldn’t escape the evil mouth which chose to eat its own damnation.” Leverkuhn, the protagonist of Doctor Faustus presents a unique twist on evil as he flirts with his own annihilation for the sake of art. Langton is critical of Eagleton to the extent that he finds limiting evil to being “an attitude to non-being he leaves out some of its more mundane features.” Finally Langton asks “Will readers be charmed by this Freudian rendition of original sin?” as the roots of the Holocaust are sought in what Langton describes as the weak reminding “the powerful of their own inner nothingness.” Langton admits that Eagleton pre-empts criticism by eschewing the very examples he supplies offering up Kant who “described ‘radical evil’ as a fundamental egoistic choice to place our own ends above those of others.” In the end Langton dismisses Eagleton’s “Freudian Calvinism,” saying “there is need for social change that will render evil less reasonable and readily learnable” urging Eagleton to write “another book on evil, giving voice to his Marxist Jekyll, instead of his Freudian Hyde.”