Reviews

From The Wall Street Journal:

A medley of games, riddles, rhymes and number problems, “Lewis Carroll’s Guide for Insomniacs” is the perfect companion for the wee hours when sleep won’t come. Adorned with a sprightly new introduction by Gyles Brandreth, the British politician, Carroll enthusiast and European Monopoly champion, the little volume is a reissue of the 1979 compilation “Lewis Carroll’s Bedside Book.” It features the creator of “Alice in Wonderland” (1865) the way his many “child-friends” knew him, as an infinitely resourceful inventor of new entertainments, including an early form of Scrabble and a version of croquet that you can play in your head.

The author himself would have, I fear, objected to the new title. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll’s name in real life) was not, you see, an insomniac. Far from it. A long-time lecturer in mathematics at Christ Church College in Oxford, he actually liked doing math problems while lying in bed. Many of these he gathered in a book he called “Pillow-Problems Thought Out During Sleepless Nights” (1893), a title he soon regretted. For the second edition, he replaced “sleepless nights” with “wakeful hours” and added a new preface, insisting that “I have never suffered from ‘insomnia.’ ” If he was awake at night, it was because he had chosen to be.

Always keep yourself occupied, was Deacon Dodgson’s primary maxim, and he seems to have adhered to it the way only a clergyman can—religiously. Dodgson’s mind was, it seems, in constant overdrive. He was a mathematician, a writer and a photographer, the author of tomes on Euclid and symbolic logic as well as pamphlets proposing new rules for lawn tennis or postal money orders. No wonder that he was especially proud of having invented the “nyctograph,” a tablet with cut-out squares that allowed him to write in bed, using a specially developed alphabet of dots, without having to get up to light a candle.

In his “Pillow-Problems,” Dodgson demanded similar dedication from his readers. But it might not be everyone’s idea of fun to while away the night with stumpers like the following: “How many shapes are there for Triangles which have all their angles aliquot parts of 360°?” The short answer: 10 shapes (the long answer takes up two full pages of print). Reviewing Dodgson’s collection, the Spectator suggested that frustrated nonsleepers try something easier to calm themselves down, such as imagining “a new scheme for hanging the pictures in the National Gallery.”

By contrast, “Lewis Carroll’s Guide” is aimed at the average night owl, not the hopped-up math genius. Instead of trigonometry, it offers simpler fare: “Place twenty-four pigs in four sties so that, as you go round and round, you may always find the number in each sty nearer to ten than the number in the last.” Fans of Scrabble might guess what bird has the letters “gp” as its center. (Hint: It shows up in the title of a Rossini opera.) And they will derive much pleasure from Dodgson’s doublets, which ask you to transform one word into another through a chain of intermediates in which only one letter may be changed. A delightfully British example: “Make TEA HOT” (my solution: TEA pea pet pot HOT). Another wonderful sequence, intended to get us from APE to MAN, might reveal Dodgson’s own latent doubts about Darwinism: “are ere err ear mar.”

Sometimes no amount of nightly game-playing can keep away thoughts you don’t want to think, ghosts who drop in for a visit. Stay calm, the writer recommends: “Retain the normal courtesies of civilized society.” The book includes instructions on how to project some ghosts of your own right onto your bedroom wall: Hold your hands next to a lamp, twist your fingers this way and that, and you get your very own shadowy Cheshire Cat or March Hare. If you really must sleep, treat your stomach right. Consume no “lobster-sauce” (guaranteed to give you a restless night, of the wrong kind), and if you feel you need a drink, try the “Capital ‘Nightcap’ ”: Mix a half-pint of strong ale, a wineglass of brandy and four lumps of sugar flavored with essence of cloves. Stir and drink hot.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

Once again, the publisher of a book, Notting Hill Editions (distributed by Random House) in the case of the Lewis Carroll book reviewed above, misses the opportunity to sell a great many copies to Wall Street Journal readers, who likely have more disposable personal income to spend on books and other non-essential items than the readers of any other large-circulation periodical in the U.S.

Are the traditional publishers unable to respond to great publicity/exposure in a timely manner? What makes a book’s preordained release date unalterable, immutable and invariable?

(Note to regular visitors to TPV: PG is limiting himself to blowing off steam about a particular tradpub pet peeve to a set number of instances during a given period of time. If you perceive this as a very ambiguous description of a limit, you would be correct.)

From The London Review of Books:

Early in​ 1971, Robert Hughes, recently appointed as Time magazine’s chief art critic, was ripping out his loft apartment at 143 Prince Street when he received an unexpected visitor. This was Henry Geldzahler, curator of modern art at the Metropolitan Museum. Hughes, probably the most macho and combative critic in his profession, was, by his own account, sweaty, foul-tempered, sore-footed and ‘grey with ingrained dirt’. Geldzahler, a ‘happily smiling little roly-poly fonctionnaire … [was] immaculately jaunty in a pale blue suit’. He wanted to see the loft. Hughes told him there was nothing to see; Geldzahler insisted. They took the elevator to the fifth floor, where there was only dust and filth and dangling cables. The following exchange then took place:

‘Well, come on,’ he said, ‘I want to see it.’

‘This is it, Henry.’

‘No, no. Where do you keep it?’

‘Where do I keep what?’

‘Your collection. I want to have a peek. Is it in storage somewhere?’

‘There is no collection, Henry. I’m not a collector. I’m sorry, I don’t have a goddamn collection.’

Geldzahler peered at me incredulously.

‘Well,’ he exhaled at last. ‘Someone in here is going to die poor, isn’t he?’

This exchange is recorded in Hughes’s trenchant essay about the New York art scene, ‘Graft – Things You Didn’t Know’. He describes a place where money, or potential money, was sloshing around, and where ‘the whole domain of relations between artists and critics, critics and curators – indeed, of everything that bears upon the art market and its insiders – was then and largely remains today an ethical slide area.’ The high-priest critic Clement Greenberg ‘didn’t believe in buying art, but he liked receiving it,’ from artists and art dealers whom his words had assisted or would assist. But ‘by far the most corrupt art-world figure I knew in New York … was Henry Geldzahler.’ When the director of the Met, Thomas Hoving, wanted to put on an Andrew Wyeth show, Geldzahler was against it – Wyeth’s figurative paintings were the very opposite of the art he believed in and succoured. But when it became clear the show would go ahead, Geldzahler ‘wrote privately to Wyeth himself, offering to curate the show in return for a nice Wyeth watercolour that Henry would personally select. Much to the flinty Wyeth’s credit, this overture was rebuffed.’

Nearer home, there was the case of David Sylvester, perhaps the leading British art critic of the second half of the 20th century. Hughes valued him as a friend and a fine analyst; he was also the best exhibition installer of his time. But he was a very slow writer with ‘an indurated laziness’. And he liked fine things, so privately dealt in antiquities, rugs and modernist drawings, as ‘a purveyor of semi-masterpieces to the rich and fastidious’. As Hughes put it: ‘He would demand gifts from an artist whose work he was about to honour with a review – according to Lucian Freud, who knew Sylvester for decades, the expected rate was usually two pieces, which could be small as long as they were choice, for one article.’

This is all very shocking, the more so as it involves critics and curators at the top of their profession. These men weren’t struggling for the rent, occasionally stretching the rules to put food on the table; they were, or had become, institutionally – and constitutionally – corrupt. But is it surprising? The art market is international and barely regulated; its products are easily transportable, squirrelled away in freeports or swiftly turned into cash. Grifters, fakers and thieves naturally abound. There is often a cosy nexus between artists, dealers, gallerists and critics; value – or at least, price – is constantly moving, usually upwards; and there are an increasing number of very rich people for whom art is a status symbol. Authenticating a work is difficult, and a lot may depend on it. How might a grateful owner or potential purchaser reward such connoisseurship? The classic example is that of Bernard Berenson – in Hughes’s mocking words, ‘the disinterested, Goethean sage of I Tatti’ – who charged his employer 25 per cent on the sale of any work he had authenticated. Today there are art advisers at the shoulder of new money; the deference might be difficult, but parts of the job must be pretty easy. Warhol, tick; Koons, tick; Basquiat, tick; Picasso, tick; Freud, tick; Banksy and Bacon, tick tick; and so on.

When and where did it all start? Probably in Paris; more unexpectedly, when the Impressionists came along. For centuries, the Salon had ruled over taste, over what was and wasn’t art, and therefore over most artists’ incomes. There had been the famous Salon des Refusés in 1863, but that experiment in imperial permissiveness was not to be repeated. So the Impressionists, following Courbet’s example, put on their own exhibitions, the first in 1874. They made little money but received a good deal of publicity. Gradually, the stranglehold of the Salon was loosened: it had traditionally been such that some collectors, seeing a work in an artist’s studio, might offer to buy it as long as the Salon jury found it good enough (and uncontentious enough) to be hung on their walls. At the same time, a younger generation of more imaginative dealers came along, looking for new buyers not just on the home market but abroad, especially in London and New York. Then there was the press: both the critics themselves and the hacks who sought scandal and sensation. Critical mass had arrived: that nexus of artist, dealer, critic and curator, plus shock value and a rising market. Monet, as leader of the Impressionists and the group’s highest earner, was at the heart of this new world. At one point he had three or four different dealers, and delighted in playing them off one against the other. There is no direct evidence of graft in Jackie Wullschläger’s new book, but all the conditions for Hughes’s ‘ethical slide area’ were now in place.

It can seem as though Monet has always been around. In my teens I had a poster of one of his greyer Rouen Cathedral pictures on my bedroom wall; around the same time, I bought a classical LP with The Poppy Field as cover art. In my thirties, after Monet’s house was opened to the public, I came back with two ‘Japanese’ dinner plates from the gift shop (Limoges white, with a yellow rim – the yellow of his dining room – and a fine blue edging), which I still use today. He is one of those artists I have consistently admired while complacently assuming that I had mastered his extent; also, without being at all curious about his life. The first response is the mild (if lingering) sin of youth: the artists you first see and admire can sometimes get cocooned away without re-examination. The second blankness is perhaps more understandable: there was and is no personal myth of Monet. He didn’t die young, or cut off his ear, or even travel to exotic places: London (which he loved, but only in winter, when there was fog) and Venice (also pleasingly foggy) were about the furthest he took his brushes. He also painted at such a consistently high level that it comes as a relief when he produces as ferociously awful a picture as La Japonaise (1876). He knew and admitted that this was ‘a piece of junk’ and presumably saved it from destruction only because it was an image of his first wife, Camille.

In seventeen years it will be the 200th anniversary of Monet’s birth, yet he might still be the best way to introduce someone young to art – and not just modern art. This is partly because of what he didn’t paint. He didn’t do historical or religious subjects: no need to know what is happening at the Annunciation (let alone the Assumption of the Virgin) or what Oedipus said to the Sphinx or why so many naked women are attending the death of Sardanapalus. He never painted a literary scene for which you need to know the story. None of his paintings refers to an earlier painting. He was the first great artist since the Renaissance never to paint a nude. He painted portraits but it didn’t matter (except to him) whom they were of. You don’t need to know the history of art to appreciate a Monet picture because he wasn’t much interested in the history of art himself (though he revered Watteau and Delacroix and Velázquez). He had even less interest in the science of visual perception. His art was secular and apolitical.

In Britain, we like to believe that Turner was a precursor to the Impressionists; Monet always denied that influence. He started afresh, a new eye in a new head (but what an eye, and what a head!). Manet had spent six years in the studio of Thomas Couture; Monet dismissed him as not worth studying under. He never set up an easel in the Louvre to copy from the masters. He went briefly to the sort of art school where you paid a small fee to sit and draw from life models, with a weekly visit from an older artist who made comments. He painted what he saw around him, much of which (the river, the landscape, the sea, trees, gardens, snowscapes, a lunch table in the sunlight, figures walking through a field, haystacks) are still to be found – or at least, their equivalents can still be found; even the cities he portrayed, or the parts that he portrayed, are not much altered. So the way into Monet’s art is comparatively smooth.

Link to the rest at The London Review of Books

From The Wall Street Journal:

How can we reconcile ourselves to the fact that bad feelings—feelings like anger, envy, contempt, spite and Schadenfreude—play such a prominent role in our mental lives? According to Krista Thomason, a philosophy professor at Swarthmore, we would do well to regard them as beneficial more than bad. Such feelings, she says, should be seen as worms in the garden of our mind. Sure, they are “weird and ugly.” But—like worms enriching soil—they are integral to our self-enrichment and self-care. Ms. Thomason believes that by focusing on the unattractive qualities of bad feelings, as we tend to do, we lose sight of their value, and she wants to correct the record.

In what sense do anger, envy, Schadenfreude, spite and contempt contribute to self-care? They all, Ms. Thomason says, help us pick ourselves up when we have suffered some kind of knock, deprivation or opprobrium. If we get angry when someone disses us, for example, our anger is a way of activating—and putting our indignant selves in touch with—our self-respect. When we feel Schadenfreude, Ms. Thomason notes, it is generally directed toward those who act as if they’re above us: If they take a tumble, we get a boost. “When the cupcakes baked from scratch by the self-righteous super mom go uneaten at the neighborhood block party,” Ms. Thomason observes, we “can’t help but smirk,” and our sense of personal value goes up a notch.

When it comes to envy, Ms. Thomason says, we feel it principally toward those who possess something we want but who deserve it less than we do. Our envy, then, is a way of asserting a claim—there’s a balance that needs to be righted. As for contempt, we feel it toward those whom we deem less competent than ourselves and so—in a world where we are always sustaining blows to our self-esteem—it’s a way of reaffirming our stature and restoring our confidence.

And then there’s spite. We exhibit it, Ms. Thomason says, when we feel we are being told what to do—say, our spouse is nagging us to control our sugar intake and so, to spite her, we eat four bowls of ice cream. The core motivation, in such a case, is to regain our autonomy. “Spite is a way of asserting that my life is mine to live,” Ms. Thomason says, “and that I’m the one who gets to decide who I am.”

Anger contributes to self-respect, contempt to self-esteem, spite to self-mastery, Schadenfreude to self-worth and envy to self-assertion: All are modes of self-care, which for Ms. Thomason is a form of resilience, not a shallow self-help means of “feeling good about yourself.” But for her argument to work, as she for the most part concedes, our feelings must at least be reasonably justified. Toward the person who cut us off in traffic anger might well be appropriate, but banging our car into his would not be. Spiting our spouse by eating an extra bowl of ice cream might well assert autonomy in a restorative way, but spiting her by putting ourselves into an insulin coma would not.

As she makes her claims, Ms. Thomason faults Christian and Buddhist saints for failing to recognize the psychological benefits that our bad feelings provide. Here, though, her argument becomes less persuasive. Such saints, by and large, were focused on something different from self-care: They worried about the moral costs that our bad feelings impose on others. Even when anger is justified, they felt, it closes our hearts and lessens our capacity for mutual understanding. Contempt causes us to despise other people and thereby retreat from our common humanity. Spite leads us to hurt them and Schadenfreude to exult in their misfortune.

But when it comes to the ills the bad feelings can inflict, Ms. Thomason pulls her punches. Anger, she suggests, is morally harmful—it hurts others—if it causes us to lash out but not if we simply “sit with it” until it goes away. Maybe, but how often does that happen? Contempt and Schadenfreude, she says, can actually bring us closer to our fellow human beings, assuming that we’re “laughing at others because we know we’re capable of the same blunders.” But is that how we truly experience those feelings? To claim that the psychological benefits of our bad feelings outweigh their moral harmfulness, it seems, Ms. Thomason has to gloss over how morally problematic they are.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

Were PG a student at Swarthmore, he thinks he would avoid Professor Thomason’s classes.

From N+1:

THE CONTEMPORARY READER IS UNHAPPY. What troubles him? It’s the critics: they are lying to him. He encounters them on the back cover of every new book, promising the world. “An exhilarating debut, poignant and thrilling” . . . “A much-anticipated return, necessary and trenchant” . . . “Dazzling sentences” . . . “An unforgettable voice” . . . “Words that will rend your garments and kiss you on the mouth, that’s how good they are!” The reader trusts the critics. He buys the book. But from page one it is trash: listless, forgettable, unnecessary. He is outraged! He thought false advertising was illegal.

He considers giving the book one star on Goodreads (would you give a lawn mower four stars for being “promising”?), but such overwhelming praise from bright literary lights makes him second-guess his judgment. He opens Twitter. “Is it just me,” he writes, “or does this book suck?”

“It sucks!” someone agrees. “Overhyped [garbage emoji],” says another. A lively exchange is underway when a partisan arrives, here to defend the dignity of the author. It’s only a first novel, he says. It’s chronologically disjointed on purpose. He paraphrases Henry James: We must grant the writer his idea, his subject, what the French call the donnée. “Judge the book he wrote,” concludes the partisan’s thread, “not the book you wish he had written.”

But what about all those critics blowing smoke on the book jacket? our reader asks. Did they read the book?

“Those aren’t real reviews,” says the partisan. “Everybody knows you can’t take them seriously.”

Everybody? thinks our reader. He is stung to learn that he is not “everybody,” which is to say, not anybody.

. . . .

UNFORTUNATELY FOR THE READER, the contemporary book critic does not have one job. In fact, she has no jobs. This is a freelance gig.1 The pay? Maybe $250 for a shorter piece or if she’s lucky, $600 or more for something longer. If she’s never been a staff critic (and odds are she hasn’t), and if she cares (and of course she cares!), she will undoubtedly toil for a poor wage-to-labor ratio. For starters, she has to read the book — or books, if she’s assigned more than one to cover in the review. Then there are the author’s previous books, and if she’s really thorough, reviews of the author’s previous books, as well as interviews, early work, and other miscellany. For a 1,200-word review, it could take a week to write, maybe two if she tends to over prepare. For a career survey, or a review essay in one of the big publications, it could take months or a year to finish (and to get paid). Then factor in self-employment taxes, the unreliability of assignments, delays in payment, and cost of living. Before you know it you’re declaring bankruptcy.

. . . .

The contemporary American book review is first and foremost an audition — for another job, another opportunity, another day in the content mine.

Link to the rest at N+1 and thanks to C. for the tip.

PG notes that one of benefits traditionally-published authors sometimes mention is that their publishers are able to get their books reviewed in various publications.