A Painting a Day In Support of the NEA: Kramskoy's "Portrait of an Unknown Woman" (1883)

I took a brief hiatus from my "a painting a day in support of the NEA" due to the death of Yevtushenko. But to honor him once more, here is a famous Russian painting from the era of Tolstoy: Ivan Kramskoi's "Neisvestnaya" or "Portrait of an Unknown Woman" (1883). This was a scandalous painting when it was first exhibited, though it's harder to see why today. However, in the 19th century, women were not allowed to travel alone--you always need a husband or a suitable chaperone. This woman is clearly quite used to riding alone, and looks down, somewhat haughtily on the viewer, as if sizing up a new conquest. More conservative Russians felt that she was a prostitute or at least a fallen woman without shame or morality. Yet there is also something poignant about this woman too, as she seems utterly isolated and hemmed in by her frigid and lifeless surroundings.

And the more we look at her face, the less sure we are that this is an arrogant glance, one of command and superiority. Something in her eyes seems frightened, or at least trapped; she has to play this elaborate social game of flirtation and seduction to stay alive, and what does she get for her pains? Many people have likened her to Anna Karenina, and the portrait has adorned many covers of this book. Anna abandoned a loveless marriage (and sadly, her own children) and the safety of society for a foolish love affair, one that never provided her the comfort of understanding she desired. She was then forced to endure the scorn of her former friends, while all the time watching her lover's fading interest and the legal threats removing her from her children. Even so, her dignity remains intact, and she refuses to grovel...yet her confidence is only skin deep, as she knows a single push could send her toppling off the coach and into the grime and slush of poverty. Kramskoy has beautifully captured her strength and fragility, as well as her quiet beauty, which stands heads and shoulders above the imposing architecture of the city.

In Memory of My Greatest Teacher, Yevgeni Yevtushenko (1932-2017)

My colleague in the English department, Dr. Sukholutskaya, asked me to write a short remembrance of Yevgeni Yetvushenko (who died a few days ago at 84 in Tulsa) for her to share at an upcoming conference of Russian language teachers. It had to be short (no easy task for me) but it was all-too easy to write. I have a dozen such stories, of which this is merely one:

My favorite memory of Yevtushenko was during one of his classes at the University of Tulsa. It was the first or second day of class, and he was asking the students to tell him their favorite work of literature. Though a few students had favorite books, most said they didn't read that much, and some offered works that weren't 'literature' by any stretch of the imagination. Yevtushenko's surprise grew by the minute, and he finally asked one, "what about your great authors Mark Twain and Jack London? Do you still read these?" And surprise turned to outright shock when a student said "who's Jack London?" Yevtushenko then launched into a thirty-minute speech about the importance of these authors in his childhood, how every Russian knew Jack London's stories and this formed their very ideas about the American landscape and its culture. "How you could not know your own literature?" he demanded, in his idiomatic way.

His speech was so passionate, and so genuinely concerned, that I think most students scrambled out of class to buy copies of The Call of the Wild that very evening (I know I did). But what most affected me was his sincere passion and relationship to authors and ideas that went beyond a mere class curriculum. These books WERE alive to him, and the thought that his students had no knowledge or curiosity of these works gave him heartfelt sorrow. Words mattered to him, and he was the first professor I had ever had who worshiped the written word. When he spoke, he was writing poetry, breaking his comments into stanzas and meters...even his stray prose seemed to have tumbled out of a play. Simply put, you couldn't leave a class of Yevtushenko's without knowing why language and literature mattered, and even the greatest literary atheist would have a crisis of faith by the semester's end. His classes made a professor of me, before I even knew I had an inkling to step into a classroom.

I mourn his passing since he taught me so much, and was probably the greatest man I've ever met (for all his flaws, which he, himself, would acknowledge). He was also a living link to the great poets of the earlier 20th century, such as Pasternak, Akhmatova, Mayakovsky, as well as great composers such as Dimitri Shostakovich (another hero), whom he collaborated with on the latter's Thirteenth Symphony. It was an honor to briefly know him and to pass on his legacy to my students when I teach his works or share insights which originated in his classes or in casual conversation. 

A Painting A Day In Support of the NEA: Edward Burne-Jones, The Beguiling of Merlin (1872-77)

My protest of Trump's proposal to cut funding to the NEA and other arts organizations continues. Every day I will post a great work of art as a reminder of what could easily be lost in the shuffle of more "useful" government spending.

Edward Burne-Jones' "The Beguiling of Merlin" (1872-77) captures the Victorian love of voluptuous beauty as well as the allure of Arthurian legends and romances (as Tennyson would immortalize in his series of poems, Idylls of the King). Jones is one of the later painters in the Pre-Raphaelite movement, which was a loose confederation of artists and poets who sought to capture artistic themes and worlds before the Renaissance through a distinctly Victorian/late Romantic prism. This painting is one of the most celebrated and beautiful: the colors and textures alone make this work beguiling, full of dreamy yellows, greens, and blues, as well as the delicate flesh of Morgan's feet and neck and Merlin's hands. It's the kind of painting you could take a bath in--cool and comforting yet warm and inviting.

Everything is languid and dreamy, capturing the moment when Morgay le Fay (or Nimue) ensnares Merlin in a hawthorn bush so she can steal his book of spells. That's the framework for this painting, which really seems to be about something else: the pair's eyes are locked together, Morgan holding the book away from her body as if no longer as enticed by its charms. Merlin, too, seems a quite willing captive, and rather than being caught, he seems to be luring her in. His pose is almost humorous, as he leans back, legs crossed, while he seems to crook his finger as if to summon her to the branch beside him. Clearly, she is torn--she wants the spells, but she wants him, more. Both have become ensnared in a spell neither one of them cast--love and desire--and Morgan seems to realize that all of her plans have come to naught. In the end, love always wins, and the steps Morgan seems to be taking away from Merlin are arrested in mid-flight. The next step, we imagine, will be back to him, with the the book on the ground, and herself in his arms.

Note, too, the binding of her hair with an elaborate headdress: she was in love with him from the start, though convinced herself it was only his spells she was after. Now, with him helpless and the power in her hands, she can't even remember why she stole it. She was caught from the start, and Merlin assures her that being "beguiled" isn't such a bad thing...in fact, to be free is infinitely worse.

A Painting A Day In Support of the NEA:Cassandra Austen's Portrait of Jane Austen (1810)

My protest of Trump's proposal to cut funding to the NEA and other arts organizations continues. Every day I will post a great work of art as a reminder of what could easily be lost in the shuffle of more "useful" government spending.

Today's work of art isn't exactly a "great" work of art, but an unfinished sketch that hints at greatness--the beginning of a portrait of Jane Austen by her sister Cassandra (c.1810). What makes this portrait so priceless is (a) it was never finished, and (b) Jane doesn't look like she's posing at all--she looks pretty annoyed, actually. Both qualities make this a far more documentary portrait than usual, one composed "from the life" and "on the spot," which is probably why it was unfinished--Jane said "enough of this nonsense!" Yet for all of this, it reminds us how art can capture the mood, character, and essence of a person which is so quickly lost behind a veil of myth and rumor. Jane Austen is always gussied up as a delicate, romantic flower, when the opposite is actually true: she liked long walks in the country, biting social satire, and abhorred romantic cliches and conventions. If anything brings us closer to the woman she actually was, this portrait does it. Not surprisingly, the family suppressed this painting for decades, and it's rarely ever been used to adorn the cover of a Jane Austen novel. Far too real, I'm afraid, and not nearly romantic enough! And thank God for it.

More than anything, I see her heroines Anne Eliot, Fanny Price, and maybe even a little Elizabeth Bennett in this portrait. It's a woman of uncompromising views, not afraid to be alone, and willing to sacrifice herself for the right cause. This portrait brings me closer to the voice of her stories, particularly the later ones, when Austen seemed to be reaching at a new style of writing. Pithier, less satirical, but also richer and more nuanced. Austen never completed her own maturation nor even her last novel, Sandition, which makes this portrait seem all the more emblematic: unfinished, hinting at the incredible genius which had too little time to record her ideas. Yet what remains is more than a good effort--it's enough to savor and ponder over for the next thousand years. 

A Painting a Day in Support of the NEA: Repin's Portrait of Mussorgsky

My protest of Trump's proposal to cut funding to the NEA and other arts organizations continues. Every day I will post a great work of art as a reminder of what could easily be lost in the shuffle of more "useful" government spending.

Here is the great Russian painter Ilya Repin's famous portrait of the equally famous Russian composer, Modest Mussorgsky (1881). Painted only a few days before Mussorgsky's death, it is an amazing psychological portrait of a tortured, tragically flawed, yet oddly dignified artist. Mussorgsky was a member of "The Mighty Five," a group of Russian nationalist composers who more or less put Russian music on the map (also included Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, Balakirev, and Cui). Sadly, Mussorgsky was riddled with self-doubt and drank himself into oblivion, almost stifling his outsized talent and revolutionary sensibilities. Repin recognized a uniquely Russian character in Mussorgsky, as we see from the hollow stare and his bedraggled appearance. Yet even so, he strikes a defiant pose, as if aware that he has a powerful message that he will never be able to share with the world. He is a portrait of neglect and ridicule, yet he seems conscious of his worth, even when he most denies it. A bottle might be in one of his hands, just out of view, but eternity is in his grasp--though sadly, it might take his death to reach it. Today, Mussorgsky's opera Boris Godunov is in the standard repertoire, as is his haunting evocation of Halloween, A Night on Bald Mountain, and Ravel's orchestration of his beautiful piano suite, Pictures at an Exhibition. This painting, too, is a kind of orchestration of the man himself, who only existed in an unfinished piano sketch--showing us the face he presented to society, and the one that slumbered beneath--visible only in his music. 

A Work of Art a Day in Support of the NEA: Dore's Illustrations of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Recently, Trump proposed cutting funds to the NEA, PBS, and tons of arts organizations, as if they're just so much fluff that's crowding the budget. The loss of support for the arts will impoverish our culture drastically, not just by encouraging new artists, but by removing agencies, such as PBS, who provide many children and students with their first contact to the rich heritage of the arts in our civilization. Millions of works can be silenced by such an act, and people can grow up with no idea that Beethoven wrote symphonies, or Monet painted cathedrals, or Shakespeare wrote plays. Education isn't a push-button process--you need great material to work with, and that in turn inspires great teachers. By cavalierly cutting these programs, our country might as well say "to hell with culture," and "to hell with our souls." 

In light of this, I've been posting a great painting every day on Facebook (and now here) as a protest to what we stand to lose in the face of such indifference. Please share these works yourself or share others you like, because the only thing that destroys art is not knowing of its existence. 

In 1876, the great artist Gustave Dore made a series of engravings to illustrate Coleridge's masterpiece, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798). While on some level a work of literature needs no illustrations other than the ones we provide in our mind, illustrations are a great way to collaborate with a work and redefine it for a new generation. Dore added a human element somewhat missing in the original, and looked back on it from the perspective of later horror and supernatural literature like Frankenstein and Poe's short stories. His stark, black and white engravings make the poem seem much more frightening than the original, but also anchor us right into the poem itself, since each image is beautifully tied to a specific moment in the text. These engravings remind us that all forms of art echo one another and can enrich the readers' experience, which is why art never dies, but grows stronger over the years and centuries. When I read Dore, I appreciate Coleridge even more, and Dore encourages me to find my own interpretations and extrapolations of Coleridge's vision.

The Art of Reading Indie

Can anyone be beautiful if someone doesn’t say to them, “I think you’re beautiful”? Can anyone be intelligent if the results of a test don’t confirm “you’re a genius”? And more pertinent to our discussion, can any book be good if not validated by a 4 or 5 star review? Can a book without reviews at all be good in any sense of the word? Doesn’t someone need to tell us it is? Otherwise, isn’t beauty, intelligence, and artistic worth a relative term, utterly meaningless without a verifiable source?

To me, the question of indie writers and books comes down to this simple question. When you browse the shelves of a bookstore or library, you implicitly know that these books have been curated for you by the experts. Not only publishers, but booksellers, sales charts, award committees, and librarians have each had their say, and personally picked through the debris of literature to offer these chosen gems: these are good and worth your time, they seem to say. So even if you take a book and decide it’s not for you, the reason isn’t that the book itself is bad, or comes from an inferior pen; it simply wasn’t your cup of tea, or what you were in the mood for. You don’t take it personally (or most of us don’t). 

Playing With Words

Langston Hughes reportedly wrote out drafts of poems on napkins or whatever spare material he had on hand, often composing right in the thick of things in a club or coffee house. When someone asked him why he didn’t invest in some more permanent writing material, he responded that writing on napkins wasn’t “for real,” and it allowed him to make mistakes and not take it so seriously. And he’s right: try writing a poem or the beginning of a story on a napkin sometime, or the back of a menu, or even on your own hand. There’s a sense of play in the activity, a sense that you’re not really writing, just giving it a shot. It’s probably the best cure for writer’s block known to man or woman: change the medium, and you change the writing. 

Racing To The Future: Charting Diversity in Science Fiction

What color is the future? Who inhabits it? What do we call the cultures or races of the 24^th century? There’s no easy answer to these questions, though science fiction has always attempted to answer them, even in times when such topics were largely taboo. Most comic book lovers are familiar with EC comics’ story “Judgment Day” (Weird Fantasy #18, 1953) which tackles the subject of 1950’s race head-on. In the story, a representative of Earth lands on the planet Cybrinia, “Planet of Mechanical Life.” The planet is inhabited by two species of robots: the orange robots and the blue robots. Tarlton, ambassador from “Earth Colonization,” is greeted by a contingent of orange robots, who take him on a tour of their city: he is shown their technology, their government, and finally, their means of production. The ambassador is puzzled that he doesn’t see blue robots anywhere in the facility, though is told that they work elsewhere. While impressed with the means of building and educating their new robots (after a brief apprenticeship, they get to choose their own vocation), he insists on seeing where the blue robots are constructed. Nervously, his robot guide answers, “Well…you’ll have to go over to Blue Town…on the South side of the city for that!” 

You Are What You Read

Image from Jeffers, The Incredible Book-Eating Boy

In the Renaissance, when books were quite scarce and each one a precious object, owning a library was a sign of either wealth or eccentricity. Cardinal Bessarion (1403-1472) assiduously tried to assemble, piece by piece, most of the forgotten learning of the Greek and ancient world before it was irretrievably lost. As he explained in a letter, 

“I tried, to the best of my ability, to collect books for their quality rather than their quantity, and to find single volumes of single works; and so I assembled almost all the works of the wise men of Greece, especially those which were rare and difficult to find…They must be preserved in a place that is both safe and accessible, for the general good of all readers” (Jardine, Worldly Goods).

For Bessarion, there was a difference between many books and good books: he was willing to exhaust his time and coffers to find “quality” rather than simply amass a library. Even a Cardinal knew they needed a richer, more varied diet than 15^th century Europe offered to the masses. If every dish represents a culture, then so, too, each book represents a whole history of ideas, preserved in careful thought and language. By reading the great works of the ancients, he hoped to bring about a true Renaissance of learning, as if books alone could resurrect the academies and agoras of the ancient philosophers.

Would You Rather Read or Play a Novel?

In an old episode of Star Trek: Voyager (“Future’s End, Part I,”: Season 3, 1996), the crew travels from the 24th century to late 20th century Earth, there to encounter the wonders of ‘modern’ civilization, including soap operas. As Neelix (the crew’s cook) tries to explain the intricacies of a specific episode, Ensign Harry Kim is puzzled, remarking “how strange to watch a story you don’t interact with.” He is of course referring to the Holodeck, where the crew literally becomes part of their favorite stories, be it Beowulf or a desperate defense of the Alamo. In the 24th century, stories are meant to be lived in and through—not as passive intellectual entertainment. In a sense, it is the ultimate merging of literature and video games, where classic stories can be re-lived and re-imagined, a basic story template upon which a ‘reader’ can play different roles that lead to unexpected outcomes. 

Giacchino's Rogue One: A Soundtrack Story

Many people were understandably upset (myself included) when we learned that John Williams would not score Rogue One, though he thankfully remains committed to Episode VIII, and we assume, IX. After all, there has never been a Star Wars installment without Williams, from the familiar fanfare to the trademark themes and leitmotifs. But Rogue One always set out to be something different, not part of the trilogy proper, but an addendum, showing us the behind-the-scenes work that led to the heroics of Luke, Han, and Leia. To add to our collective confusion, the composer tapped to provide this installment, Alexandre Desplat, was replaced at the last minute with the uber-busy film composer, Michael Giacchino, fresh off his magnificent score for Doctor Strange. If we believe the press, Giacchino had a mere four weeks to score the entire film—no laughing matter for an epic that spans over two hours of screen time. However, I wonder whether or not that was simply to lower expectations for the score and deflect criticism of a non-Williams work? Either way, what we hear in the film—and on disc or MP3—are simply the notes, no matter how they were composed. After all, Mozart wrote the famous overture to Don Giovanni in the hours before its first performance, and his even more famous Symphony No.36 in a week. So why not a film score in four? 

A Musical Mount Everest: 36 Hours and 104 Symphonies With Joseph Haydn

One of the most daunting tasks in classical music is navigating the symphonic output of Joseph Haydn, the so-called “father” of the symphony. For most composers, the symphony is the most august, serious, philosophical statement one can make in music. A symphony is like a four-act play, with each act/movement capturing something of the struggle of being human, or of contemplating the divine. Even a light-hearted symphony is written ‘big,’ for the gargantuan modern symphony orchestra (often over one hundred players strong) and made to sound like the entire universe is singing. For this reason, many composers wait until middle-age to tackle a symphony, if only because the greatest composers are in their rear-view mirror, seeming hoarding the best themes, structures, and innovations.