Isak

Naked : Nude

One of the very first things I learned in my art history classes at college was the difference between "naked" and "nude." Really, it was something I knew intuitively. Bodily, you might say. But of the many reasons that studying art history was good for me, one of them is that took my visceral experiences -- awe, repulsion, knee-shaking vulnerability before beauty -- and pushed me into articulating what I felt. That is, to see what I felt. To know these feelings, and to make friends with them. 

Art History 101: The basic story about naked : nude is this: A nude is a human figure that is idealized, prettified, and dependent on the viewer's admiration. Take, for example, Titian's 1538 oil painting, "Venus of Urbino."

 

Venus, with her coy oh-I-didn't-even-know-you-were-there expression, is posed to full advantage for the viewer. Her nudity is polished-pretty, hairless, voluptuous, glowing, inviting.

Naked, on the other hand, is the bare human figure full of agency: a being independent of the gaze from us viewers. Consider, for example, Manet's "Olympia" from 1863 (which is a direct reference to Titian's classical painting):

 

 

See how she's naked, and not "a nude"? She looks directly, unflinchingly, un-shyly, back at the viewer who is looking at her. Particularly with her left hand, she makes clear that she is possessive about her own body. But she's also not tensed-up or cowering: she looks awfully self-assured. She isn't interested in the flowers that someone has had delivered to her. The lighting is stark, not warm like the light that Venus is bathing in.

Naked.

I got to thinking again about the fundamentals of nakedness after reading Amanda Palmer's wonderful blog post about it: "Art, Nakedness & Museums, Oh My! (Warning: Contains Art, Nakedness & Museums, Oh My!)" Somebody had the inspired idea of having Palmer do the voice of the audio tour of the new exhibition of "Degas and the Nude" at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. The occasion prompts Palmer to reckon with her own experiences with nudity nakedness and art, to think on what Degas was up to with his explorations of bodies as bodies, and to do her own bit of modeling in the Degas exhibition hall as husband Neil Gaiman sketches in pastels. I used to get to hang out at the Boston MFA all the time, and I'm utterly envious that it is no longer in my neighborhood -- so I will neither get to see this show, nor get all naked in the gallery. Curséd luck! But Boston friends, get thee over to Huntington Avenue! Find joy and inspiration there! And in the meantime, enjoy AFP's visitation of it via her blog. Altogether, a wonderful exultation for all of us, our own skins and shapes.

It's getting colder over here in Detroit. I've been piling layers of wool clothing and blankets on my body to keep my own skin warm. I'm walking around clothes-less a lot less than usual. But I know that even with my shirts and sweaters and doubled-up socks and hiking boots, I'm naked all the while, whether it's seen or not. So are you.

Literary & Media Indulgences - 11/27/2011

-- Fifty years ago this month, Jane Jacobs published an enormously influential book: The Death and Life of Great American Cities. (See the Random House advertisement for it above.) Grist remembers it as "the book that inspired a revolution." The Toronto Star thinks Jacobs' critics may have had a point. Anthony Flint in The Boston Globe thinks her urban legacy is in "need of renewal." A reader of Flint's piece writes in to correct his portrayal of Jane Jacobs ("...first and foremost his characterization of Jacobs as a housewife"). The Atlantic looks at the -still- unusual phenomenon of a city planner and urban thinker who is a woman.

-- A striking comparison of TIME Magazine covers in the US, Europe, Asia, and the South Pacific. The dissonance of newsy concerns of American audiences "is not an isolated incident."

-- Binyavanga Wainaina challenges the "insularity" of British literature. His ideas on why American literature resonates more with Kenyans than British literature, despite Kenya being a former British colony, are particularly interesting.

-- "The Long Hard Road to Mars." Caleb A. Scharf shares the great story of our attempts to reach and explore Mars -- extending far further back than I realized (1960). The occasion? Our current window of opportunity to launch the Curiousity rover which just might make it to the red planet.

-- Related: This wonderfully engrossing National Geographic illustration of our decades of interest in Mars. And here's my book review of Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars, the first of the trilogy that is one of the best things I've read in some time. (Green Mars and Blue Mars are far overdue for their own reviews.)

-- Sci-fi and fantasy author Anne McCaffrey has died at age 85.

-- All Over Coffee: A beautiful three-part graphic collaboration between Daniel Handler and Paul Madonna.

-- Funny, I was just reading about Soviet Realism in Adam Thirlwell's delightful book, and here I find World Literature Today's special section looking at post-Soviet literature in the two decades since the superpower's collapse.

-- "Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer accuses the ANC of apartheid-style censorship." Also, South Africa's The Daily Maverick connects Gordimer and Nawaal Sadaawi's search for democracy. "Few African women’s voices have been raised higher than Nadine Gordimer and Nawaal Sadaawi."

-- "This past summer I came across a camel that had lost its hump." A New York Times account of the drought in the Horn of Africa, from the vantage of northern Kenya and with particular attention to how international aid and media intersects with a story of famine.

-- "The End of Chinatown."

-- David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow have been tearing it up lately with their longreads in the New York Review of Books on sexual abuse in prisons. Their latest focuses on immigrant detainees in a peculiarly precarious position -- their jailers effectively double as their jury and judge.

-- The public editor of the New York Times writes an important piece on how journalism, and consumers of journalism, confuse sex and rape.

-- On the push to translate more of Arabic literature, contemporary and classic, into the English language.

-- Related: Al-Ahram reviews the English translation of Samuel Shimon's An Iraqi in Paris.

-- Good news from RiverRun Bookstore in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

-- Related: Ann Patchett on bucking the trend and opening her new indie bookstore in Nashville.

-- "Just the Right Book." An indie bookseller experiments with a matchmaker service.

-- "Lovers of prose in these image-dominated times have no greater ally than W.G. Sebald." In the current Critical Flame, Scott Esposito essays on W.G. Sebald and reviews My Two Worlds by Argentine writer Sergio Chejfec (tr. Margaret B. Carson) from Open Letter Books.

-- The LA Times reviews a re-release of Agatha Christie's autobiography.

-- Grace Dane (Gretchen) Mazur has happily been pushing further into her writing about visual art. In ArtsFuse, she explores Wendy Artin's work and "translating marble onto paper." See also the Isak interview with Mazur (my former teacher) on her latest book, Hinges: Meditations on the Portals of the Imagination.

-- The "best of" lists have been pouring in. See, for example, the Globe and Mail 100, The Guardian best-of-the-year, and the New York Times Book Review list of 100 notable books.

-- Which reminds me: stay tuned for the release this week (!!!) of the new, updated, expanded, revised, all-around-awesome edition of "Choose Books: A Gift Guide for People Who Love Stories."

-- Ta-Nehisi Coates chose to pick up George Eliot's Middlemarch recently, and of it, he says: "She really does command the light."

-- A very tiny book made by a 14-year-old Charlotte Bronte has been discovered. "Its 19 pages are crammed with more than 4,000 words — short stories, news, even advertisements — discernible only by magnifying glass."

-- "Beattitudes: On Ann Beattie."

-- Michael Silverblatt has a great line-up of recent interviews on his KCRW Bookworm show: Jeffrey Eugenides (who looks adorable in-studio with his glasses), Joan Didion, and, um, Ann Beattie.

-- Five decades of journalism, as seen through the pages of the Columbia Journalism Review: a graphic timeline.

-- On the #fridayreads controversy, and "what is an ad," in The Washington Post.

-- How not to respond to literary plagiarism charges.

-- Among the great influences on me: Joni Mitchell's Blue album, which The Rumpus revisits.

-- Alan Moore revisits V for Vendetta, in light of how masks inspired by the comic series that began in 1982 (and more recent film) are catching on in the Occupy movement.

Illustrating the Cover of Lord of the Flies

In a competition that marks the hundred-year anniversary of William Golding's birth, Faber and Faber is doing a search for a young artist -- aged 13 to 16, resident of the UK or Ireland -- to create the cover image of a new edition of Lord of the Flies. One of the submitted entries is above; The Guardian has a gallery of a few others. At the official contest site, you can see all entries, which is awfully fun. In nearly all of them, a certain doomed pair of spectacles feature prominently. The entry deadline is January 20, 2012: go on and prompt the young (British/Irish) artists in your lives to create something and enter it (or just create something for its own sake).. Besides the chance to make the cover art, there will be a full-on exhibition of selected entries in a London gallery in February.

Correspondent's Course: Fiction from the Mitten

"There are many Michigans, at least three that I know, unless you get unhitched from time, in which case there are more." Over at the Tin House blog, novelist Scott Sparling narrates the literature that's emerged from America's High Five. Look for heavy-hitters (Joyce Carol Oates, Jim Harrison, Jeffrey Eugenides, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Charles Baxter) alongside the most interesting newbies (Michael Zandoorian, Matt Bell, Kristina Riggle, more).

AIDS, Africa, and What the Pope Doesn't Say

What you may not know is that Africa is home to the fastest-growing number of Catholic congregations in the world, and producing Catholic priests at a higher rate than anywhere in the world. The pope made his second visit to the continent this past week, speaking in Benin and leaving behind a 130-page pastoral guide called the "Africae Munus" -- a sort of spiritual vision for the future of Africa. It has strong points: it calls for an abolition of the death penalty and speaks of compassionate and intellectual engagement with people of other faiths, including Islam and indigenous religions. But while the church made a few hopeful, if agonizingly tentative, steps over the last year in showing support for contraceptive use to protect against HIV/AIDS transmission, the matter is utterly elided here. It is a perilous omission for a leader that appears to be increasingly influential.

In my new article in The Guardian, I write about this story. The crux is this: "We are 30 years past the first appearance of Aids. This not an ideological conversation anymore. Lives are at stake."

Alas, a good deal of my article had to be cut -- both facts and commentary. To see the full version of my original draft, read on after the jump.

 

Return to Wrath

 

It has been more than seventy years since John Steinbeck first published The Grapes of Wrath in 1939, and who knows how many years since high school sophomores across the nation could expect to find it on their American Literature reading list. Melvyn Bragg, who is making a new BBC film adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath, thoughtfully looks to the text for insight on today's trouble with jobs, banks, migrant labor, and -- I'll just say it -- opportunity. The novel finds the Joad family driven off their farm by "the bank--the monster." They pile into their truck, twelve people deep, to travel a thousand miles through the desert in search for work on the coast.

We started filming with a small crew in Oklahoma, near the spot where the novel begins. This summer there was another drought, as there had been in the 1930s. They farm land better now, but even so, many farmers are going bust. The resonances with contemporary America were powerful: the working and middle classes have once again been holed by the big banks. Once again, the protests have started up, as Americans scan their continent for work. As in the 1930s, there is a powerful feeling that the promised land promises nothing, not even hope.

Infused in the text is Steinbeck's engagement with both natural science and myth, a juxtaposition that remains potent and, in my mind, is what gives the novel altitude. But the novel's politics of poverty is what is probably most remembered, for better and worse. What I did not know when I first read Steinbeck's book in Mrs. Dumke's English class at St. Joseph High School was how the novel's fierce class critique was not something the author got away with lightly. Again, from Bragg's article:

It was the bestselling book in America in 1939. ... Arthur Miller wrote of Steinbeck, "I can't think of another American writer, with the possible exception of Mark Twain, who so deeply penetrated the political life of the country." And yet Steinbeck was also called "a liar", "a communist" and "a Jew acting for Zionist-Communist interests". The book was burned in the streets; it was banned in schools and libraries, with its explicit sexuality given as the excuse. It was virulently attacked in Congress, and Steinbeck's subsequent success in Russia eroded his reputation from the cold war onwards. He bought himself a revolver for self-defence and had good reason to fear for his life. ...

... His reputation was blasted regularly by the new metropolitan tastemakers. The New York Times poured bile over his head the day before he won the Nobel prize, in 1962 ("The Swedes have made a serious error by giving the prize to a writer whose limited talent is in his best books watered down by 10th-rate philosophising"), though there were many fine writers who rushed to defend him. Steinbeck answered his critics in his acceptance speech in Stockholm. "Literature is not a game for the cloistered elect. Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it and it has not changed except to become more needed."

Longreads

I am a big fan of Longreads and its clean curation of great narrative journalism, with the engaged mind of the reader always at the forefront. So I'm feeling chuffed that the site put me up as a featured member, today highlighting ten longform articles that it caught me sharing. I'm a bit embarrassed that two of them are my own articles ... heh. But check out the others! Among them is the brilliant Rebecca Traister writing about Elizabeth Warren and the politics of "change" in the New York Times Magazine. And there is a striking CNN story on the "death and life of the great American bookstore" -- that is, Borders. The writer tells the story from the vantage of the original Borders store in Ann Arbor, Michigan. For this bookstore story, I owe Beth S. a hat tip for being the first to share it with me. And I'm as surprised as you to see substantive coverage that could be called literary on CNN.com.

As well, I shared a brilliant article on the enigma that is Venus Williams, a long Paris Review interview with John McPhee, fiction I found in World Literature Today, a fascinating story of Oprah's rocky start in Baltimore, a story of girls basketball in D.C., and the uneasy intersection of Kaplan Education Co. and The Washington Post,

Baxter Looks "Behind Murakami's Mirror"

Charles Baxter reviews Haruki Murakami's new tome, 1Q84 (translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel), for the New York Review of Books. Baxter places it among a literary tradition that he names here as "Unrealism" -- "Unrealism reflects an entire generation’s conviction that the world they have inherited is a crummy second-rate duplicate."

Murakami’s novels, stories, and nonfiction ... display, often very bravely and beautifully, the pull of the unreal and the fantastical on ordinary citizens who, unable to bear the world they have been given, desperately wish to go somewhere else. The resulting narratives conform to what I have called Unrealism. In Unrealism, characters join cults. They believe in the apocalypse and Armageddon, or they go down various rabbit holes and arrive in what Murakami himself, in a bow to Lewis Carroll, calls Wonderland. They long for the end times. Magical thinking dominates. Not everyone wants to be in such a dislocated locale, and the novels are often about heroic efforts to get out of Wonderland, but it is a primary destination site, like Las Vegas. As one character in 1Q84 says, “Everybody needs some kind of fantasy to go on living, don’t you think?”

Three Picks

It is an interesting, if unheralded, duality in the Occupy movements: print and digital media have prominent, purposeful, and parallel roles in the community. This goes against the traditional narrative that has "new" media replacing "old" media, a just-a-matter-of-time, print-is-dead storyline that has never rung true for me. I don't think I am unique in enjoying both digital and print media. My guess is that we're still in a moment of media experimentation and transformation, and eventually a new balance will shake out. I'm interested in how the Occupy movement holds a possible vision for what that balance will look like.

In the Washington Post, Barbara Ehrenreich remarks on the obliteration of libraries that have been a key feature of the Occupy movements, a point of disgust pretty much across the board. As Ehrenreich considers what books she intends to donate for the re-creation of these libraries, she names her top three protest books.

And, oh hell, you know I love bookish list-making, so here are three picks of my own that I'll add to the list of top protest titles:

1. King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa
   By Adam Hochschild
   Among the fascinating narrative threads in this book (which I partially discussed in this book review) is how the first great international human rights movement of the twentieth century came to be. 
2. Selected Writings: By Little and By Little
   By Dorothy Day (ed. Robert Ellsberg
   This is a collection of columns and other writings from the journalist, activist, and founder of the Catholic Worker movement. The book is a testament to living of life of active witness to how the political is personal, and the personal is political. In particular, Day was focused on creating poor people's movements and cultivating creative nonviolence. See also Day's autobiography, The Long Loneliness.
3. Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party: A New Look at the Panthers and Their Legacy
   Eds. George Katsiaficas and Kathleen Cleaver
   The writings of scholars, activists, past members, and current prisoners are collected here in a re-examination of the legacy and fourteen-year-life of the Black Panther Party. What makes this anthology interesting -- and honest -- is that the writers are not in agreement: some are true believers, others are deeply critical, and still others look both ways.

So Says Robert Hass

Writing from the Occupy demonstrations in Berkeley, California, poet Robert Hass writes a dispatch for the New York Times. He speaks of strange contingencies.

The first contingency that came to mind was the quick spread of the Occupy movement. The idea of occupying public space was so appealing that people in almost every large city in the country had begun to stake them out, including students at Berkeley, who, on that November night, occupied the public space in front of Sproul Hall, a gray granite Beaux-Arts edifice that houses the registrar’s offices and, in the basement, the campus police department.

It is also the place where students almost 50 years ago touched off the Free Speech Movement, which transformed the life of American universities by guaranteeing students freedom of speech and self-governance. The steps are named for Mario Savio, the eloquent graduate student who was the symbolic face of the movement. There is even a Free Speech Movement Cafe on campus where some of Mr. Savio’s words are prominently displayed: “There is a time ... when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part.” 

When Hass and his wife hear rumors of violence between police and protesters, they are skeptical, but they show up so that they can offer whatever kind of protective presence they can offer.

My wife was speaking to the young deputies about the importance of nonviolence and explaining why they should be at home reading to their children, when one of the deputies reached out, shoved my wife in the chest and knocked her down.

Another of the contingencies that came to my mind was a moment 30 years ago when Ronald Reagan’s administration made it a priority to see to it that people like themselves, the talented, hardworking people who ran the country, got to keep the money they earned. Roosevelt’s New Deal had to be undealt once and for all. A few years earlier, California voters had passed an amendment freezing the property taxes that finance public education and installing a rule that required a two-thirds majority in both houses of the Legislature to raise tax revenues. My father-in-law said to me at the time, “It’s going to take them 50 years to really see the damage they’ve done.” But it took far fewer than 50 years.

My wife bounced nimbly to her feet. I tripped and almost fell over her trying to help her up, and at that moment the deputies in the cordon surged forward and, using their clubs as battering rams, began to hammer at the bodies of the line of students. It was stunning to see. They swung hard into their chests and bellies. Particularly shocking to me — it must be a generational reaction — was that they assaulted both the young men and the young women with the same indiscriminate force. If the students turned away, they pounded their ribs. If they turned further away to escape, they hit them on their spines.

Read the rest of what Hass witnessed here.

Your Engraved Invitation *

Yes! There is still time to register for the "Breaking into Freelance Writing" workshop I'm teaching in Ann Arbor on December 3. And there's also room for you to arrange a one-on-one appointment on the same topic where -- even if you live too far away for us to meet in person -- we discuss your individual goals for getting your voice out there. This is probably my favorite workshop to do -- it is a joy to share the space with people who are ready to be bylined storytellers. You can check out a selection of testimonials from past participants, which I started collecting once I realized they might be a good thing to collect, and certainly let me know if you have questions.

 

* Metaphorically speaking, of course.