Storytellers and stargazers

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What Sin Is Purged Here in the Circle Where We Are Standing? (2023)

Tammy Nguyen’s painting was not on view the last time I visited the Toledo Art Museum — at least I’m pretty certain it wasn’t. But even if it were, this was the visit during which it demanded my attention. Here’s a link to more about this startling and compelling work.

At the Smart Museum yesterday, I experienced a similar sense of discovery when I encountered Patrick Nagatani’s Beware Artist. We were in the area for the Sunday matinee of An Iliad at the Court, which is drop-everything-and-get-your-tickets theater. We had seen Timothy Edward Kane in this role three times before — live in the 2013 production and in the 2020 production at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures Museum (formerly, the Oriental Institute) and streaming during the pandemic. Mesmerizing as he was then, he is even more spectacular in this iteration of The Poet. The post-show discussion with Kendall Sharpe of the University of Chicago Graham School and Charlie Newell, former artistic director of the theater, was time spent well, too. We returned for the evening performance, which featured Kane’s understudy, Jason Huysman. To me, the role of The Poet is not necessarily to be interpreted as Homer but rather as one of many singers of the Iliad, so it was a gift to hear another vocalist, to encounter the material in a different way. While both actors impart the heroic, the beautiful, and the doomed, however, Kane is, as Newell suggested in his remarks, a demigod, and like Achilles, his work towers above that of other men, his shield illuminates worlds, and his voice stops hearts.

After sleeping in this morning, we walked, then finished all of the yard work in time to watch the Vera C. Rubin Observatory “First Look Event.” Sharing the link with my sister and nephew, I wrote, Humans may be warriors and conquerors, but we are storytellers and stargazers, too.

Juxtaposition

By Posted in books, nature, walking 1 Comment

While walking along the Huron River last weekend, we found ourselves in one of those places that would probably prove a bit dodgy once the sun set but that in the late afternoon simply provided an image of nature and infrastructure in uneasy harmony. Much of the view from Amtrak’s Wolverine arrests my attention in the same way — the detritus of industry overlaid with fleeting glimpses of wildflowers and birds. I drove this time, but I think I will take the train again later this summer.

Today after chores, a long walk, main meal, and a short nap, I am settling into my favorite chair with the latest issue of The Atlantic to read Elizabeth Bruenig’s “Witness.” Beside me are Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Rosalind Rosenburg’s biography of Pauli Murray, Jane Crow. A long and dangerously hot weekend is forecast. Stay hydrated. Seek shade. And keep your cool.

Something completely different

By Posted in books, commonplace book 1 Comment

Another stack of books to be shelved (although I will consult Homer and the Heroic Tradition soon).

This morning’s seminar on the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke represented as profound a pivot from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian as can be conjured, I reckon.

From this —

They rode through regions of particolored stone upthrust in ragged kerfs and shelves of traprock reared in faults and anticlines curved back upon themselves and broken off like stumps of great stone treeboles and stones the lightning had clove open, seeps exploding in steam in some old storm. They rode past trapdykes of brown rock running down the narrow chines of the ridges and onto the plain like the ruins of old walls, such auguries everywhere of the hand of man before man was or any living thing.

to this —

Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were
behind you, like the winter that has just gone by.
For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter
that only by wintering through it all will your heart survive.

I know, right?

But I have now returned to the forbidding and unyielding landscapes of Blood Meridian and am struggling with the assignment for our final class meeting: Develop an elevator pitch to convince others to read McCarthy’s magnum opus. That I loathe this sort of thing is as unsurprising as my recent discovery that Werner Herzog and McCarthy admired one another’s work. (Check out this terrific NPR feature.) Wait! I’ve got it: If, like Werner Herzog, you believe that “the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder,” read this book. Or maybe: Imagine a Moby-Dick in which the whales are people. You know what? I think I will mysteriously end video when we are required to share our pitches tomorrow.