Yesterday I wrote about young Ukrainian artists working towards change. Today I thought I’d introduce a dead Ukrainian artist who was not just working towards change but whose life was the epitome of change.

Taras Shevchenko is mostly revered as a literary giant in his own country, where he lived a short 47 years from 1814 to 1861. His life overall, though, reads like a Russian novel, pun intended, although he would nowadays probably turn in his grave if put into the same sentence as the Russians.

The guy was a serf who became an intellectual, a painter who became a poet, a traditionalist who became a revolutionary, a prisoner who became a national hero, a fighter for Ukrainian independence who als was best friends with Russia’s Greats (Dostoevsky spoke at his funeral.)

Born into serfdom in central Ukraine, he showed promise as a painter from an early age on, drawing and painting whenever he could find time between the work done for various masters, priests and his owner. He was allowed to go to St. Petersburg to serve and learn from various artists, who eventually raised the money to buy him out of serfdom. Despite winning prizes for his paintings he increasingly turned to writing. His most famous work, published in 1840, is a collection of poems, Kobsar, named after a wandering Ukrainian bard who plays the string instrument Kobsar or Bandura. The poems focussed on the suffering of the working class people, the exploited women and men of his country, mourning their victimhood. It was language crying out against oppression, that of Tzarist Russia as well as the general one experienced by those without power to defend themselves.

In 1847 he was sentenced to exile at the Caspian Sea because his literary output was seen as an attack on the Tsar. He was strictly prohibited to paint or write, but was able to sketch some during geographic expeditions and became famous for smuggling out written works in people’s boots. He returned from exile in 1857, his health ruined after eventual imprisonment, with a much more forceful revolutionary stance, and a will to bridge two worlds: the traditional world of the simple folk and the intellectual world opening up to modern forms of poetry. After his death in Russia, where he was buried, he was disinterred after 2 months to find a final resting place in Ukraine in accordance with his wishes.

Shevchenko became something of a cult figure, famous enough that the Soviet regime tried to co-opt him as a social revolutionary fighting against the Tsar and a symbol for Russian-Ukrainian friendship. His call for national independence was conveniently ignored. He was and is certainly revered by all Ukrainians even as that nation is ripped apart by diverging political aspirations.

(I learned much of this from the link below, alas in German…. https://ukraine-nachrichten.de/taras-schewtschenko-ukrainischer-nationaldichter-sozialrevolutionäre-ikone-sowjetmacht-bohemien-trunkenbold-kein-fußballer-eine-würdigung-150-todestag_3064

To learn more we could travel to Kiev,

http://museumshevchenko.org.ua

or to Toronto, which has a museum for him as well

http://www.infoukes.com/shevchenkomuseum/

Here is one of his poems:

Since I have never been to Ukraine, I have no photos of the wheat fields it is famous for.  So you get images of plowed fields instead, waiting to be seeded with grain.

Today I am recycling a post from 2 years ago today, featuring two British writers. The reasons are various: on the pragmatic side I had to finish two articles yesterday and was wiped out after that. On the substantive side my thoughts were drawn to Great Britain – never mind Trump’s visit. I had been reading about instances of expressed anti-semitism in England and was reminded of a rather unsettling experience there. We spent a sabbatical in Cambridge, UK, when the boys were little, 5 and 2 respectively. We rented a flat from a Jewish couple, rather well to do, who invited us for afternoon tea on their estate, my towheads in tow. Watching them play, our hostess remarked “Good, they’re blonde, you won’t have any trouble.”  I leave it at that.

Here are Byatt and Drabble:

We can be short today: there will be no meeting with the women I’d like to talk to. They are beyond mediation – not that I’d be daring to offer that given the depth of the abyss between them. You have probably heard of each of them, after all they are both famous, justly prize winning writers, and some of their books have been made in to successful movies. (Possession – see review here http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/possession-2002 for one, The Waterfall for the other.)

Yes, I am talking of A.S. Byatt and Margaret Drabble, sisters known as much for their incredible gift as their unending feud. I just don’t get it  – yes, there was favoritism of one at home, yes there was a pushy mother making achievement into a competitive sport, yes, they both chose the same métier. But going to war over the use of a familial tea-set as a prop in one of your novels? Depriving yourself of the shared memories of childhood that bring such comfort in later years? Condemning each other for unfair reckoning with your parents in your novels?  Their loss. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/8632911/Margaret-Drabble-Its-sad-but-our-feud-is-beyond-repair.html

I like to read them both, but am partial to Drabble, since she got to me early and in formative years when it came to feminism. Where Byatt seduces with a vivid, colorful narrative explosion, Drabble goes sparse but deep into psychological exploration. I still consider The Millstone a seminal book. Motherhood was never described more accurately within a feminist context.

(Review here:https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/may/15/the-millstone-the-crucial-1960s-feminist-novel)

The quotation in today’s title is the epigraph of Olivia Laing’s 2016 book: The Lonely City – Adventures in the Art of being Alone. (The dedication before the epigraph reads: If you’re lonely, this one’s for you.)

It is a curious collection of musings, criticism, analysis, insights and discourse that were the product of a time span of intense loneliness for the British author. Her proclaimed isolation in New York City when a love affair promptly fell apart after arrival, gave rise to intellectual curiosity about the state of loneliness, its potential adaptive value and ways and means to make it into something useful.

It was hard for me to buy into her description of her status, her experienced sense of vanishing among the multitudes, because the way she writes establishes a sense of intimacy that is rare and so intense that you almost feel that you are linked both cognitively and emotionally to the author as if she were one of your oldest friends. Both what she offers and how it is offered are striking – and connecting, proving the potential illusion that the connectivity must be felt on both ends.

Loosely structuring her chapters around  diverse artists who either experienced or depicted loneliness with intensity, she delves into and out of art criticism, sociological and philosophical discussion, and over and again some confessional writing that ties her own misery or evaluation of unmet needs to the narratives centered on the famous. It is a web she weaves which unravels here, tightens there, slackening when you expect tension, hooks you on unexpected knots, and is loosely netted to afford surprising glimpses over and over again. The web is stretched wide: the discussion ranges from Andy Warhol to Edward Hopper, David Wojnarowicz to Henry Darger, Greta Garbo to Klaus Nomi in an attempt to pinpoint loneliness as one of the sources or preoccupations of their creativity.

Smart as a whip, learned (the notes at the end of the book are a marvel of information), gifted with an ability to use language that flowers in front of our very eyes and ears, Laing beguiles. She is doubtlessly one of the best non-fiction writers in the english-speaking world these days. And she knows it. I think my hesitance to acknowledge her professed loneliness is rooted in the sense that there is a self awareness in her self disclosures that has narcissistic tinges – the need to be liked, acknowledged, desired outweighs the need for unconditional closeness. Of course, I might be completely mistaken, am not making claims just describing my own reactions.

I learned much about art and artists; the similarity of some of her experiences and mine during the same years as newcomers to NYC resonated; I was reminded about the parallel worlds the city afforded to different populations, who might as well not have lived on the same planet much less the same city in their separateness. It brought back the disbelief when the first friends were succumbing to AIDS and it looked like nothing could be done. The book succeeds in making it clear that loneliness can be a driving force towards meaningful, perhaps even extraordinary art. It also convinces that the author is a force to be reckoned with. Lonely or not.

NYT Book Review below -click on the picture

Two more died this May. There will be no obituaries for them but at least we can name them. We can name them because they were a blip in the news, like so many other blips, one outrage succeeding another with little emotional space left to process them, and with little time to digest before the next shock rules the day.

One was called Claudia Gomez Gonzales, a 20 year-old Guatemalan seeking refugee in the US and shot in the head by Texas border control who changed their story multiple time after other witnesses appeared.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/may/25/woman-shot-dead-border-patrol-rio-bravo-texas-identified

The other was Roxana Hernandez who, as a transsexual, was persecuted in Honduras, and died under unresolved circumstances during detention by ICE.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/may/31/roxana-hernandez-transgender-honduran-woman-dies-us-ice-box

I just finished a book that, among other things, describes the fate of those tortured in their own country and then seeking refuge in other countries. The historical romance (well, that’s my description) spans parallel stories of 17th Century Jews fleeing the Inquisition in Portugal and 20th Century historians sleuthing a cache of papers left hidden in a cupboard by one of the refugees who ended up in London, a geniza now up for sale by a pair of unmoored Yuppies.

https://newrepublic.com/article/142959/theres-new-literary-celebrity-town-name-baruch-spinoza

Despite thinking of Rachel Kadish’s The Weight of Ink as a mix between Enid Blyton adventure books and a philosophy primer, (or as beach reading without the embarrassment, since the 600 pages sport enough intellectual treatises to give you cover,) the story got its hooks into me. That’s mostly because it centers on two women, centuries apart, whose intellectual drive prompts their decisions regardless of consequences. The plot gets increasingly and deliciously ridiculous, which is understandable if you spend 10 years on writing a novel without a plan for how it is to unfold, letting it carry you where it wants while you desperately try to learn philosophy on the way. (This as per the author’s own report.)

https://daily.jstor.org/summoning-17th-century-scholars-researching-the-weight-of-ink/

Throw an odd couple into the mix, or two, a lot of detailed Jewish history and plenty of  Gentiles who are cowardly at best, an angry mob next, torturing Inquisitors at worst, situate it during the plague, and voila, plenty of action. Be warned, there is not a single character in the book who is happy, or even content – they are all struggling, including not one, or two, but three librarians who are the quintessential stereotypes of old maids, the stern but ultimately helpful kind.

Come to think of it, spend your time with A.S. Byatt’s Possession instead, same basic plot without the Jewish twist. Or better still, with Byatt’s estranged sister, Margaret Drabble, whose The Peppered Moth is still one of the most fascinating psychological studies of female emancipation that I’ve read ever.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/01/05/06/reviews/010506.06merkint.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

In the meantime let us remember those who were denied refuge – here and now.

It was difficult to escape the glowing obituaries of Philip Roth who died this month at age 84. They were ubiquitous, one more fawning than the next. I started seeing red – pun of course intended, since Roth is a name derived from rot the German word for red. The name was often connected to places with smelters, feuerroth or fiery red.

Fiery he was, in his search of identity issues, his willingness to defy the Jewish Orthodoxy around loshon hora, the evil tongue, which prohibits not just spreading lies but telling truths about fellow Jews that might be harmful to them. As he himself put it:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/authorinterviews/8521993/Philip-Roth-dont-be-numb-to-fiction.html

Roth was successful in bringing out the struggle for Jewish identity and ethics, and brilliant in describing a slice of history of second and third generation, secular East coast Jews being at once drawn to and repelled by assimilation. He sharply delineated the conflicted relationship between Jewish and Black communities, and the idea of having a man try to escape his racial fate as a Black person by assuming a Jewish identity, assuming that would free him of restrictions (and failing disastrously), was among his more interesting. But those accomplishments are undermined by that strain of narcissistic misogyny that weaves through every single novel, until the end.

Some say that we should beyond that because of his brilliance. Others say he just described the way the world is and thus holds a mirror to our eyes to stimulate improvement. I go with my gut: when I first read Portnoy’s complaints it was in translation.The German word is Beschwerden, a term that has double meaning. It means complaints but also ailments. After finishing the book all I could think was he has an ailment, indeed. A chip on the shoulder the size of New Jersey.

The gut feeling was borne out. His real life was a mirror of his protagonists’, in ways that make my skin crawl. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5764731/TOM-LEONARD-tempestuous-marriage-Philip-Roth-British-wife.html

It will be interesting to see if his body of work survives and continues to get the acclaim visible in all the obituaries with the advent of younger, less sexist generations.

Tom Wolfe, journalist and author, wearer of white suits, died on May 14th.  (Photographs today in his honor therefor are white flowers. All, by the way, in bloom around late May, early June.)

He was probably unsurpassed in choosing some weird titles – just think back to his exploration of California car culture for Esquire– “There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy Kolored (Thphhhhhh!) Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby . . .” but is most widely known for his novel Bonfire of the Vanities, a book that dissected the culture and power structures of NYC.

Wolfe was a brilliant journalist writing non-fiction before he turned to novels – and went back to non-fiction writing (with limited success, later) in the last years of his life. One of the founders of New Journalism, adding literary writing to reporting, he explored different worlds and delivered detailed, funny, critical descriptions to us readers of Rolling Stone or other publications.  Here is a fitting obituary from the magazine he was so closely tied to.

https://www.rollingstone.com/tom-wolfe-life-genius-impact-legacy-w520764

I am posting two interviews with him today, one from 1975 about his assessment of the art world, obviously close to my heart as a topic, and one about his take on Darwin (one I could not disagree with more, since he doesn’t even get the facts straight.) The latter was done late in his life, and I find it fascinating how a non-scientist takes on one of the fundamental theories on which so much of our science is based.

What interests me in the man and the work, is this curiosity and insistence on learning, that he displayed across an insanely wide array of topics. Whether he got it right or not is secondary to me, given that a critical reader can form her own opinion. He was clever and funny, and actually an incredible informant for a European reading him before being immersed into American culture. Never mind his knack for fashion……

RIP.

Ever read anything by Richard Powers? Even know the name? For someone like me whose research domaine is memory, who is deeply interested in music and who is probably more defined by “head than heart” (as he is often accused of) he is a favorite author.

I chanced into my first encounter with his work at the library: The Goldbug Variations in 1991, during a difficult pregnancy, a full teaching load and the demands of a lovely, temperamental toddler. Science with a science fiction slant, composed in the form of a Bach fugue, call and response through generations, rich with philosophical questions, fun literary and musical references – all a welcome focus and distraction. Burying my head in a book when life got overwhelming did the trick, once again.

I have been a fan ever since. I admire someone digging deep to learn new science and facts that he then weaves into his narratives; I am grateful for someone who is willing to write difficult books – which they undoubtedly are – in the age of beach reading. I can even take excursions into spirituality  –The Echo Maker (Memory, Ornithology!), Orféo (Music), Generosity (Gene manipulation)- when they come packaged within the larger philosophical issues of determinism. My enthusiasm, however, is not universally shared. He won prizes, yes, but a lot of the smart critics over the years have really torn into him, with snarky reviews found in the New Yorker and elsewhere.

And now he has a new book out, (84 holds in front of me at the Multnomah County Library….) that I can’t wait to read: The Overstory (Environmental issues anchored around trees.) Below is a NYT review by Barbara Ehrenreich that glows.

First I thought, maybe this time the review is positive since it is written by a woman – and Powers always struck me as a writer who could be a woman – but that speculation was shot down when I saw Tim Martin’s admiring review in The Independent.

https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/book-reviews/deep-roots-36801794.html

James Wood from the New Yorker, some years back, judged the work to be too cerebral, focussed on larger issues rather than making the characters come alive for the reader. Does not strike me as true.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/10/05/brain-drain

For reviewers looking at Orféo, a story about DNA research, Mahler and Messiaen, not necessarily in that order, the verdict was: too gooey! Did not strike me as true, either.

“It seems that the Powers Problem — producing novels that are more head than heart — has here turned into its opposite.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/12/books/review/orfeo-by-richard-

So: contradictions, unsolved.  I’ll report back on the new book once I get my hands on it.