Bronze exhibition at the Royal Academy

Posted on October 29, 2012 by Houyhnhnm

A huge collection of bronzes from all over the world and all over history, with a room dedicated to explaining, with models and videos, how these amazing objects are created. “Cire perdue” (“lost wax”) is the commonest, and oldest:

wax model
cover with plaster
melt out wax
pour in wax to make a thin model
?fill with plaster to make a hard core
chip off plaster
cover with plaster again
fix outer plaster to core with pins
attach rods for getting rid of molten wax and gases
bake – wax pours out
pour molten bronze into the thin gap left by the Lost Wax
tadaaa.

African, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Egyptian, Greek, Etruscan, Roman, and later European and American. Highlights:

huge Roman ram
Herculanean standing toga’d man
Renaissance huge Perseus standing over Medusa’s corpse, spewing out bronze blood spumes from its severed neck
the reason I went: the Thracian King’s head – life-size, eye-to-alabaster-eye with a real ancient king’s powerstare
Picasso’s baboon with its children – its head made from two toy cars
Anish Kapoor’s circular bronze mirror, reflecting everything and nothing: impossible to focus, so you get confused, as if drowning in metallic murk
bizarrely elongated Etruscan votive statue, about 18″ high – a proto-Giacometti
the dancing Shiva with the absolutely-perfectly-raised thigh, victoriously treading on the baby Ignorance, which I’m sure I saw here a few years ago
a chimaera (Etruscan? I forget), with its snake tail biting the horns of the impala growing out of its lion’s back
Jasper Johns’ two beer cans

And, immediately as you enter, a Greek-Sicilian dancing satyr, crazed in its fragmented stance. I nearly forgot this one, because it occasioned a minor embarrassment: as we gave in our tickets we were pressed quite hard to buy audio guides, which I usually don’t like. We succumbed; the satyr was duly described through headphones, but in such patronising and directive ways that I went back through the doors and got a refund. It made the exhibition like watching a documentary on tv, something I usually really dislike. The headphones-touts warned that there wasn’t a lot on the labels, but there was plenty enough to set the bronzes in context.

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“The Poet of the Iliad” by H.T. Wade-Gery

Posted on October 28, 2012 by Houyhnhnm

An eye-opening book; why did no one put this my way when I was studying Homer properly (or perhaps they did)? Probably because there was a reaction against detailed historical reconstruction, seen as sterile and unliterary. Yet Wade-Gery’s lectures are a really exciting combination of meticulous research (genealogies, Dark-Age Greek migrations to Asia Minor, textual enquiries), literary understanding (he’s very good on Achilles, and the gods – see below), and a style which is a combination of almost-fun combativeness and gentle exposition (it is a collection of lectures, after all).
Notes ad loc.:

Hesiod made poetry personal.
Evidence of three Ionian festivals (πανεγυρεις) in the Iliad and Odyssey: and they’d provide an audience.
The break in our thinking about myth and history rests on the invention of the alphabet.
The Greeks liked the alphabetical system because it showed how many syllables were in a word so it was a mode of representing verse.
Three-day performance, similar in size to Wagner’s Ring or all plays in the Great Dionysia. The Iliad’s existence presupposes such a panegyris.
1: start to end of IX; 6,000 lines
2: interlude (X); to XVIII; 6,000
3: interlude (Shield); to end; 4,000

Goethe: “mythologie: luxe de croyance”

Herodotus says Homer <;400 years previous. He must have worked this out from real pedigrees, so is therefore to be believed.

Earliest quotation from the Iliad is 600BC.

The Homeridae began as Homer’s actual descendants, performing his work, but were ousted by professional rhapsodes, growing literacy, and new genres like comedy and tragedy.

Lecture III:
Really interesting Shakespearian parallels: the gods are like the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; and Patroclus’ death loads the air with tragedy in the same way as that of Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet – till then there had only been intrigue.

Appendix on the Catalogue of Ships: convincing argument that Homer lifted it from somewhere else (possibly a poem describing the muster at Aulis), but then integrated it fully into his poem. Clues are the added explanations of why Protesilaus and Philoctetes weren’t there, although included in the lists.

In short, I feel much more able to think about the historical context, the historical reality, of Homer’s poems, and (dare I say) feel closer to Homer the poet.

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“Z for Zachariah” by Robert C. O’Brien

Posted on October 26, 2012 by Houyhnhnm

[Spoiler alert]
A girl alone after nuclear war, running her family farm; a man walks in from the dead zone, in a unique suit and equipment that sustains life in radioactive environments. She romantically imagines marriage and a family; he imagines similar, but his attempts to begin the process (grabbing her) scare her off, and a potentially murderous stand-off ensues, rather like the “Hell is other people” Sartre play. This game of chess with rifles ends with our heroine stealing the suit and leaving the valley, with the man’s forced blessing.
It’s a very good book: slow-fused, carefully paced, and strong on the tension between what we know about her from her journal, and what we can make out about His actions and motivations, again from her journal. Is he a difficult, sometimes violent, man, or is he driven by the situation facing mankind to do whatever it takes for the species’ survival? Either way, we like Ann from the start, and admire her resourcefulness and kindness, even if her resourcefulness leads her to walk off to her death, abandoning the last chance mankind has of breeding, or even if her kindness, in continuing to tend and feed a brute, is sentimental and misplaced.
Ann’s Sunday School book started with “A for Adam” – the first man – and ended with what she thought referred to the last man – “Z for Zachariah”. We’re left ignorant of whether he is or not.

Yet the whole book is also a clever metaphor for a girl’s coming-of-age: the girlish fantasies of blossom and marriage; the replacement of (literally) familiar brothers and father by a strange male (who sat in her father’s chair and wore his clothes); the shock of mail sexuality; and, for Ann, a withdrawal into a new fantasty of teaching young children.

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The Social Network

Posted on October 25, 2012 by Houyhnhnm

Miserable film – what twats. Why didn’t the Winklevosses or Savarin just walk away and have an ordinary life? And Harvard – what an obnoxious place. And the students – both sexes – how horrible are they, and how horrible the respective role each sex plays. But I guess that’s what the film wants me to think. What a sad world that makes rich young people so obsessed with money and status that they scratch, claw and chuck their dignity down the toilet.
Zuckerberg gets away with it by playing the nerd defence; his quick talking, funny stares and references to Turing get him big sympathy; and Shaun Parker’s cool, and right. But Savarin, the Winklevosses, and the guy played by Minghella (also Davos in Agora) are life’s losers. Despite the $65m settlement.
Refresh is the film’s Key Word: the last scene is Zuckerberg sitting Facebookzombie-style in front of his laptop, every few seconds refreshing his screen to see if his former girlfriend has agreed to his Friend request. (How many people have been there?) For that’s, according to the film, what it’s all been about: it starts with a painful rejection by his date Erica; Athene-and-Hera-like he stomps off to blog about her being a bitch, and writes a proto-Facebook site comparing girl students; at the height of his success she Didonically rejects even the opportunity of a few minutes’ closure; and at the end he’s trying again to (with apologies to Philip Larkin) refresh, refresh, refresh. All this around the law-plot’s centrepiece – the millionth-member party where Savarin realises he’s been screwed. And how do they know when to stay the party? Refresh, refresh.

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“What is a Classic?” T.S. Eliot

Posted on October 24, 2012 by Houyhnhnm

Lecture to the Virgil Society in 1944, in its second year.

Starts long-Eliotly, with lots of Latin-based words and the kind of categorising I always imagine is rife in the German philosophers I haven’t read, but when he gets on to Virgil it makes sense. He’s talking about a particular definition of “classic”, based around the idea of a work or author which encapsulates all of the possibilities available at that particular time to a language or a culture. Most authors, even great ones, of necessity omit aspects of their culture or language in order to say something (else) well; by historical chance some authors achieve classic status by being able to omit this omitting. To find a true classic Europeans must look back to Latin and Greek, as their own languages necessarily omit other linguistic branches of European culture; and as Greek is brought to us through Latin, it is to Latin alone we need to turn our eyes, and in Latin what else is there but Virgil?

Virgil is the one because of his classic comprehensiveness, particularly his vast grasp of history, and the way in which his hero Aeneas symbolises this: a hero who doesn’t understand what he’s doing, who isn’t happy or successful, but who does see himself as part of something much bigger, and does what he can within that. Eliot articulates this breadth of vision in ways which echo Lewis on primary and secondary epic (pp19-20):

In Homer, the conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans is hardly larger in scope than a feud between one Greek city-state and a coalition of other city-states: behind the story of Aeneas is the consciousness of a more radical distinction, a distinction, which is at the same time a statement or relatedness, between two great cultures, and, finally, of their reconciliation under an all-embracing destiny.

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“The Long, The Short And The Tall”, by Willis Hall

Posted on October 23, 2012 by Houyhnhnm

About “the dignity of man”, according to Willis Hall. Yes – that’s what it’s about. And how war makes stark the choice between dignity and survival.
Lots of Iliad: the bickering of men at war about warrior status and women; and the paradox of widowing one family to keep yours whole.

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The Divine Comedy

Posted on October 21, 2012 by Houyhnhnm

Wow. Took ages, particularly ploughing through Paradiso: they’re right that evil is more interesting. But it was a surprise. Mainly the strangely modern beginnings to most cantos, easy conversations on the lines of “you know when a candle…” or “you know how people…” … “Well, that’s how it seemed when x happened.” Then there’s the science: clearly a universe of spheres, and clearly written from a realist, scientific viewpoint; it’s all matter of fact, no mysticism.
As regarding its contribution to the development of epic, it follows the usual medieval pattern of a first-person “true” account (Chaucer, Langland, Gower; though they’re probably following Dante…), and as Paradise Lost has the cosmos as its theme, not just a country (as the Aeneid), though Florence could be said to be its true subject…, as could Dante’s personal romance with Beatrice…
The details of Florentine and medieval history are hard to focus on, but what I found most difficult was understanding the English of Sayers’ verse translation. I enjoyed the terza rima, but the restrictions this involved made the simple expression of complex ideas often impossible. I was also bemused by Sayers’ commentary, which seemed to think Dante was TELLING THE TRUTH!

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“Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov

Posted on July 1, 2012 by Houyhnhnm

A masterpiece: sometimes, just sometimes, the wonderfully secure narrator’s false shields crack, and the respective pain of pervert and victim is revealed. But so lightly done. Beautifully expressed self-delusion.

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Baby-farming and abortion

Posted on June 16, 2012 by Houyhnhnm

This article, by Dorothy L. Haller, describes how “baby farmers” in Victorian England exploited extreme prejudice against unmarried mothers by taking in unwanted babies for payment, but then letting them die slowly by feeding them watered down milk (he longer they lives the more payments they received). The essay focuses on how the clampdown on this practice was reluctant and slow, partly through fears of encouraging ‘immorality’, and partly from the belief that the state shouldn’t interfere in personal matters. What I found surprising was that early suffragettes shared this reluctance:

The Bill contained a clause which required the registration and supervision of nurses in the manufacturing districts who cared for children on a daily basis, and, much to the ILPS’ [the Infant Life Protection Society] amazement, it enraged members of the suffrage movement. Lydia Becker, editor of the Women’s Suffrage Journal and leader of the Manchester branch of the National Society of Women’s Suffrage, blasted the clause. Her journal reeked of the laissez-faire attitudes of the day, “officialism, police interference, and espionage,” would oppress the ratepayers and infringe on the rights of the individual. She also objected to the entire registration and supervision process being handled entirely by men.

This argument, that women should be free from state-, male-based, interference, is parallel to contemporary feminist arguments for abortion (‘Choice’), undermining the arbitrary drawing of a moral line between a human being in the womb and one (just) out of it.

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“The Dispossessed” by Ursula le Guin

Posted on June 13, 2012 by Houyhnhnm

There’s a book on the politics of The Dispossessed which, if I get round to reading it, might help me think and write about that aspect of this novel.

In (that and) other respects it’s a very good book indeed, particularly in having a strong ending (precisely in that it isn’t, as in so many novels, a let down). It also shares the characteristics of very good novels in cleverly mirroring in its ideas the structure of its plot: the separations in space between Shevek and his wife, while both on Anarres, and that between Shevek while on Urras and Shevek on his home world, are paralleled by Shevek’s research into action-at-a-distance in Physics: his Principle of Simultaneity. With le Guin science fiction is properly fiction.

In some respects the novel shows its time: it’s clearly written in a post-hippy world, where the excitements of the Vietnam and civil rights protests have become the disillusion of the Cold War. That helps le Guin avoid trite one-sidedness: the interesting side to the book’s politics is the reader’s wavering sympathy between the two worlds’ political systems. Perhaps she is expressing her own development from sixties to seventies, and asking us to share in her journey? But it’s not a journey, in that she doesn’t want us to end up contented with the later, latter, position, but to be genuinely unsure, convinced of the rightness, and feasibility, of Anarres’ anarchy, yet simultaneously knowing its limitations, of the greater achievements possible in a less egalitarian system. This can be illustrated by an example of an area of life not obviously political, and even more personal – sexual mores.
The free love among the young on Anarres, so genuinely and authorially celebrated in the accounts of Shevek’s youth, contradicts so strongly with the (equally authorial) musings by Shevek in Chapter 10 (p. 275 in the 1999 Millennium edition)

The variety-seeking of the spectator, the thrill-hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.

Here Shevek is with his wife Takver, reflecting on the length and strength of their relationship. With sex, le Guin seems to be saying that youth and age are best suited by opposed but equally valid moralities; with politics, although the two opposed systems come from le Guin’s youth and (relative) age, there’s no such simple answer.

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