Reviews and News:
" Dystopian literature is a moral genre, a critique not only of power but, in its most outstanding classics, of progressivism. Without being conservative or right wing, it is often antileft. This is so even though the early canonical authors of the genre—Zamyatin, Huxley, and Orwell—were men of the left themselves."
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A.M. Juster reviews X.J. Kennedy's That Swing: "In our postmodern echo chambers known as 'English departments,' light verse is a dimly recalled genre. Most English professors would be stunned to learn that a major university press has just released a book by America's greatest living light verse poet—and very few would be able to name him."
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Revisiting Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press: "'We unpacked it with enormous excitement, finally with Nelly's help carried it into the drawing room, set it on its stand, and discovered that it was smashed in half,' wrote Virginia Woolf on the afternoon of 24 April 1917. That day she and her husband Leonard took delivery of the hand press that heralded the birth of their brainchild, the Hogarth Press." After this inauspicious start, they would go on to publish 527 titles, though, famously, not James Joyce's Ulysses.
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Enough with the socially conscious criticism: "There's no doubt that a more rigorous formal criticism is hard work. At the very least, it's harder work than dismissing a movie out of hand for casting choices that are perceived as egregious or racially insensitive. It's also harder than wildly inflating a work's 'radical' (usually equivalent to 'conventionally liberal') political content when it manages the modest feat of not being wholly appalling. But yoking art to the project of a given political agenda — even if it's the 'good' agenda of representation, identity politics, and so on — isn't just dreadfully boring, it's fundamentally antithetical to the very project of art."
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Does religion kill democracy? "There may be a statistically significant, inverse relationship—as political scientists are wont to say—between the two but it is not clear if, how, or why religion and democracy are incompatible."
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Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell on the couch.
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"Somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25 million books and nobody is allowed to read them."
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Essay of the Day:
Jed Perl reviews the Tate's Robert Rauschenberg retrospective in the New York Review of Books. The show proves, Perl argues, that Rauschenberg was a sham:
"Rauschenberg would do whatever it took to destabilize the audience's expectations. The curators of the current retrospective—Leah Dickerman of MoMA and Achim Borchardt-Hume of Tate Modern—can do little more than stage-manage the goings-on. Dickerman is an outstanding scholar of twentieth-century art whose work in exhibitions devoted to Dada, the Bauhaus, the early history of abstraction, and the murals of Diego Rivera sets a very high standard. That she has nothing of much significance to say about Rauschenberg in the essay with which the catalog closes says less about her than about him.
"It was as a genre-buster—an artist who crossed boundaries and cross-pollinated disciplines—that Rauschenberg was embraced in the 1960s. More than fifty years later, there are more and more artists who seem to believe, as he apparently did, that art is unbounded. The only difference is that our contemporaries—figures such as Jeff Koons, Isa Genzken, and Matthew Day Jackson—have traded his whatever-you-want for an even more open-ended and blunt whatever. A creative spirit, according to the argument that Rauschenberg did so much to advance, need not be merely a painter, a photographer, a stage designer, a printmaker, a moviemaker, a collagist, an assemblagist, a writer, an actor, a musician, or a dancer. An artist can be any or all of these things, and even many of them simultaneously. The old artisanal model of the artist—the artist whose genius is grounded in the demands of a particular craft—is replaced by the artist who is often not only figuratively but also literally without portfolio, a creative personality-at-large in the arts."
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"The trouble with Robert Rauschenberg is that adventure and innovation invariably confound order and tradition. Didn't it ever occur to him that the search for perfection, however quixotic, is among the greatest adventures? Although this overstuffed show offers only a partial view of Rauschenberg's megalomaniacal output—among the many embarrassments wisely overlooked is a series of bicycles edged with neon from the early 1990s—there are enough twists and turns to leave museumgoers in confusion. From what I could see when I visited Tate Modern on a weekday afternoon, visitors were intrigued, beguiled, baffled, bewildered, and sometimes just plain bored."
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Photo: Rainbow pipeline
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Poem: Andrew Motion, "Fog in Naskeag Harbor"
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