Oh, swoon-worthy Eugenides!

Check out my guest post on Reading Between the Lines. I discuss "swoon-worthy" author Jeffrey Eugenides' new book The Marriage Plot as it compares to his novel Middlesex, and I ponder many other questions relating to the author.

The Book is the Art

A great collection of art book images over at BibliOdyssey is inspiring. Pulled from the Art Institute of Chicago's Joan Flasch Artist Book Collection, the archive is searchable by medium, binding, or category. The example below is a Wizard of Oz pop up book. I never did do the pop up book I had wanted to, but some of the books in this collection are reviving that desire.


The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Robert Sabuda

Loot

Q: When is it legal to take an ancient and valuable cultural object out of its country of origin without the consent of the inhabitants?

A: Before 1970, the UNESCO cut-off date for pieces without provenance (often smuggled). Especially in the colonial empires of the 19th century, archeologists from England and France and Germany would race to get the best plunder for their home museums. If the book I'm reading now is correct, this has not changed so much as gone under the table.

The Euphronios Krater
I just got to the chapter 'Tomb Raiders on Fifth Avenue' in Loot, a book by Sharon Wexman describing the battle over stolen antiquities. Until last January, she describes how a red and black pot sat alone in its glass vitrine in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, labeled "Terra cotta calyx-krater. Greek, Attic 315 BC. Lent by the Republic of Italy." This deceptively understated label did not mention that this was the Euphronious Krater, an exceptionally rare and fine vase.

Of course, it also did not mention it was raided from tombs nearby Rome as late 1971 when pieces of unclear provenance should not have been bought by museums. It turns out the curators were aware that it was stolen and did not care. Italy was immediately suspicious but could not prove that the items were indeed stolen until January of last year. The Euphronios krater was returned to a victorious Italy, where it symbolized the war against illicit trafficking of the nation’s cultural patrimony.

The Lydian Hoard
The Euphronios Krater is by no means the only questionable antiquity under the Met's roof. In 1993, after much press and pressure, the Metropolitan Museum of Art agreed to give back the Lydian Hoard, a collection of coins and jewelry looted from Usak, Turkey in the 1960s. Turkey similarly celebrated the return of this excellent collection, and housed it in the town where it had originally been discovered. The tomb robbers who sold it came back to see it in its new home. All was well. Then in 2006, the masterpiece of the collection--a golden hippocampus--was discovered stolen. It had been replaced with a fake. Still unsolved, many suspect the museum director, a respected local archaeologist.

However, he is hardly the only person who might have done it given the museum's lack of security. There was one guard who was also in charge of tickets, one small lock on the glass case holding the hippocampus, security cameras that didn't work, and no visitors to witness anything--the museum estimates to have had 769 visitors in the first five years it opened to exhibit the collection. This state of underfunded disorganization is hardly limited to the museum in Usak. Theft is a problem in museums throughout Turkey.

As the Euphornios Krater and the Lydian Hoard suggest, the tide is beginning to flow the other way in the battle for restitution. You might have noticed with the recent opening of the Acropolis museum and renewed demands for the Elgin marbles. On one hand, antiquities belong in the land where they are discovered as part of the cultural heritage there. The blatant recent thefts are shocking and greedy. On the other, developing countries like Turkey or Egypt often have a richer cultural heritage than government budgets allow them to care for, causing problems of maintenance and security. 'Universal' museums such as the Met and the Louvre have the laudable purpose of giving their millions of visitors a round-the-world knowledge of civilization. Very little of the Met's universal art collection would remain were we to begin returning things to their ancient homelands. How much restitution is enough?

Dennis Dutton's The Art Instinct, Darwinism and a Question

The following piece on Denis Dutton's new book The Art Instinct, originally published yesterday in Blogcritics Magazine, is a case of 'ask and ye shall receive.' I wrote the review of a book lecture around a question: does a Darwinistic basis for art mean we can judge art's merits by its popularity? Then the author answered my question!

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The heady realms of aesthetic theory floated during a recent Friday afternoon when I attended a lecture at NYU's School of Philosophy. It was not so heady as it might have been given that lecturer, Denis Dutton, rebels against the jargon of much aesthetic criticism. He was promoting his new book, The Art Instinct, which argues for a Darwinian basis to art and aesthetic tastes in man.

Note that this Darwinism contradicts the common assumption of art as a cultural construct. It also implies that art has helped humans survive in some way. Yet nobody knew how, including Dutton, for certainly art seems to be a useless, weird, and inexplicable impulse.

Dutton, inspired by how “weird” our aesthetic tastes are, investigated the human reason for creating and valuing art. He believes that strong roots in Darwinism complement our understanding of why art is important and what, in fact, art is. It's a contentious argument for an ambitious book. Dutton starts by defining art.

For all the audacity, Dutton made some interesting points. For instance, why is it that humans have developed from their sense of hearing the tonal music of Beethoven that so delights us instead of using their sense of smell to create nose symphonies? Smell is just as useful as hearing. Yet very few people pick out the notes of a perfume the way they do out of a symphony, nor are perfumes created out of a structured set of notes.

Dutton also commented that humans, unlike other animals, constantly seek out imaginative representations of reality rather than true, real things. That is, they seek out lies rather than truth. Think of all the time that is spent watching TV shows, reading stories, or looking at pictures. How have lies proven a more useful trait, in an evolutionary sense? By extension, how has art?

A different question bothers me, and I wished I had asked Dutton for his opinion. His theory considers art a natural need and that we are uniquely configured as a species to appreciate it. A Darwinian basis for art suggests a set of universal aesthetics that people everywhere use to appreciate and judge art. If aesthetics are universal, are artworks that appeal to the most number of people better?

I don't know if Dutton would agree. In fact I doubt it, despite the fact that he ridiculed the academics who congratulate themselves on being sophisticates for understanding modern and contemporary art in comparison to a “bourgeois” majority.

One could argue that Darwinism provides a biological basis for elitism. In fact, Dutton's theories are more useful for enticing one to form arguments than they are at answering questions. Often enough I'm satisfied with discussions with no answers, yet this particular question fascinates me. While I'm no philosopher, my art instinct suggests that popular art equals better art.
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Dutton's response to the original article here (scroll to the bottom of the page).

Book Club: Extreme Decisions

The Good: I'm starting a book club! It's called, creatively enough, Contemporary Fiction Club (CFC to those in the know). At least for now anyhow...

The Bad: I'm floundering in impossible choices. A good book club is a lot of pressure!

What books should my fledgling book club read? My co-founder and I think focusing on contemporary fiction would be fun. But then, I've picked up some poor fiction choices lately. The book should obviously be well-written and discussion-worthy. Hopefully it will lure people of all kinds into thinking CFC is the best book club ever. I feel like this is an impossible decision, and important because I want everyone to come back. Any thoughts?

And then there's the additional worry of how to handle the meetings. Should I have questions? Let people just talk?

All suggestions welcome. Also please note, despite the above pathetic ramblings, I'm actually hosting a lovely brilliant book club full of intelligent and fascinating discussion, so it would be the highlight of your literary life to come to our first meeting--Feb 2!

Lazy Books

A great article for anyone who has ever tried to write, well, anything. I am leaving you with this link to it instead of putting up a long/thoughtful/witty post.

Why? Because I too am fed up with my lazy book, which resembles this one.

That Girl With a Pearl Earring

Jan Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring, 1662

Remember her? I know you know her, if only from that beautifully still 2003 film Girl with a Pearl Earring starring the beautiful Colin Firth and Scarlett Johansson. Tracey Chevalier also wrote a light novel of that name. Why nobody could think up another title, I don't know.

But as my lovely avidly artsy readers are aware, both movie and book springboard off the gorgeous portrait above, whose subject is as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa despite the touching intimacy with which she is portrayed.

Most people think of her when they think of Jan Vermeer, that moderately successful Dutch provincial whose interior scenes are infused with incredible light. They think of women near windows or reading letters. Within his works exists an intangible beauty that is not rooted in the woman or her pose or the room but in the quality of the painting that makes me assume that Vermeer had a beautiful mind and painted his simple genre scenes with great love.

So imagine my surprise when I found that the Rijksmuseum listed the painting below as a Vermeer. Referred to as The Little Street, this painting from 1658 is the only outdoor scenes by Vermeer. On second thought, it looks exactly like what Vermeer would paint if he painted the outdoors. A quiet little street with women and children happily employed. His version of the everyday is full of peace and light.

Bel Canto: Unlikely Situation Sings

To my own surprise, I have finished a good contemporary novel. I suspected it might be one, but then I was warned it got slow in the middle. I reserved judgement until I shut the covers last night. Bel Canto is an engaging and graceful read by award-winner Ann Patchett.

It concerns a birthday party featuring an opera singer held in a poor South American country, in hopes of luring the guest of honor, a Japanese business tycoon, into building factories there. As she sings, the room is invaded by terrorists who take the group hostage. The substance of the book lies between this action-packed beginning and it's similar, and inevitable, end. The group of prisoners and captors forget more and more of the outside world, as the weeks go by inside their new home. Relationships form, eventually between the captors and their prisoners as well. And then people begin falling in love!But, as they all forgot inside the house they share, the situation is a ticking bomb.

An interesting premise and a well-done story, Patchett excels at creating depth in a wealth of characters. So there we have it, a good book. It's treatment of opera (bel canto means beautiful song), and how it moves this diverse group of people is lovely. Opera in many ways dominates the characters lives, as the singer begins to practise every morning. Conterposed to child terrorists in fatigues it seems improbable, as if both could not exist in the same world.

I am still sticking to my resolve, however. Only classics from now on. Dickens and Proust. There's not enough time to read everything. If only I could have a separate self of me, just for reading. But first some Baudelaire and Jack Kerouac's On The Road.

Hating Philip Roth's The Dying Animal and Sabbath's Theater

Maybe you learn more about yourself by reading a book. Apparently I find lecherous, scheming old men inexcusable, and therefore renounce Philip Roth's works. I finished The Dying Animal, about an aging professor having an affair with a young woman that drives him mad, over a year ago. I didn't enjoy this accomplished, character-driven story last year, for all its merit. I was never going to read him again. Currently, I am not enjoying Sabbath's Theater, which seems remarkably similar.

Indeed, I hate Sabbath's Theater much as I hated The Dying Animal. In Roth's hands, themes of sexuality rankle with me. Adultery is glorified as the only real type of love, where both partners are free. (Except it never really works out well for the aging buccaneer.) His emphasis on sexuality seems wishful rather than a fully formed theory about people. As is imagined sex with young girls and prostitutes and maids were some Freudian projection of his penis, and thus his self-worth. Yet he buys into conventional morality just enough to use its labels of 'bad girl' and 'satanic lust' to great effect. Interestingly, sex ultimately does not offer his characters salvation. Maybe conflating Roth and his characters is a mistake?

I do not identify with, and in fact hate, the protagonist of Sabbath's Theater, which is a problem in a character-driven novel. Hate is no light word, and I think for Roth to inspire such a reactions in me he must be doing something right. Sabbath's Theater is driven by the death of a great mistress and realization that Sabbath has nothing left. Sabbath, a puppeteer before he became an arthritic, lecherous old man, attempts to deal with this much like a mental patient.

Sabbath's (and Roth's for all I can see) merit is a brutal honesty and fluency when describing life without money or friends or hope, when all the women you love have died, and the feeble desires of a fading penis become more than solace but life itself. Despite what you might think, Sabbath needs no pity from you, dear Reader, and Roth accomplished something when he created a character so repulsive that even hearing of his brother's death and mother's tragedy doesn't redeem him somewhat. Theories on the glories of free love, love you pay for, and love with those underage fall much like self-justifications on these deaf ears.

As to recommending these books, rarely have I enjoyed reading something so little. Yet both The Dying Animal and Sabbath's Theater are capably done. The characters are rich and interesting, and the harsh, jaded take on humanity is as humorous as it is dour. Philip Roth is an accomplished writer with a great knowledge of the nuances of people; I just happen to dislike his people. Hating his novels makes me wonder if there's something wrong with me....

Sam Leith defend books, I applaud

An uplifting and moral article by Sam Leith, the Literary Editor of The Daily Telegraph, a UK newspaper. In "Grand Theft Auto, Twitter and Beowulf all demonstrate that stories will never die," he defends the strength of the narrative in human culture to the delight of all writers and readers, with emphasis on the unfair attack on books by proponents of modern technology who feel books are antiquary repositories of knowledge.

Knowledge and stories come in many shapes and forms. My personal favorite form is a book, and not at all because I'm trying to write one. In anything, I'd say the book form and I have developed a healthy antagonism for just that reason. But the power of the narrative in its classic form is something I consider obvious.

I blog, but I by no means use this platform as write a long story. I use it to connect to other short pieces and to combine word with images and videos. It communicates in a different way by its medium, which is the point, I fancy, of Leith's piece, which I encourage all with old-fashioned bookish tastes to read.

In a twist on this, check out Pepys' Diary in online blog format, where each entry in the diary of Samual Pepys from the 1600s is posted daily, so you can follow his story in much the fashion it was written.