stairs and life

This is an article that was recently printed in Diario Vasco. It immediately felt like a footnote in the book "My Attempt to Figure Out Life". I like the emphasis on gaining perspective in this metaphorical outlook...it's definitely not about the despair found in Plath's fig tree. This is my translation from the Spanish. So, a look at another metaphor in hopes it may give us a grasp on the real thing.


"Those that have arrived to the seventh floor tell us that, although their feet are heavy, the view was worth the journey. If you peer out and look below the ground goes blurry but if you search along the horizon you see a beautiful and calm landscape.
We learn to climb stairs before we learn to walk. We advance with insecure steps, propelled by innocence, until the first floor, and upon arriving and looking backwards, we discover that the stairway has been erased, that the only way out is up. Each floor is painted a different color, each landing is a different meeting place. Between the first and second floor there is, thrown on the ground, a white album. You go on completing it with the experiences you run into on the stairwell. At first we have so much curiosity that we would climb the huge steps two by two but, after the second floor, we aren't in as much of a hurry to arrive. From the third the stairs seem taller. It's a stretch in which it is easy to trip up because each step implies a decision. On the fourth floor there is a wooden bench. You sit and confirm that your soles have begun to wear out. Then you discover that, any day, one of these doors can be opened. You jump up and for the first time you help yourself up with the banister to be able to continue.
Of all the floors of this building I don't know which is the best. We are all only concerned with reaching the top floor, but a neighbor told me that once you arrive on the seventh floor, the only thing that you regret is not having enjoyed more each step."

*guille viglione, translated from the Spanish article in the Diario Vasco

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marcovaldo by italo calvino

Finished yet another book that made me give thanks for my ability to read...this time the award goes to Italo Calvino's Marcovaldo, or The seasons in the city.

It's a must read. A collection of twenty short stories, each is set in a consecutive season in a small town of northern Italy. They follow a poor laborer named Marcovaldo who has an eye for the fantastic and a disdain for his surroundings. There are fantastical touches, like a plane bound for India accidentally boarded, a breath that clears a yard of snow, a plant with an astounding rate of growth...but this book doesn't ask you to confirm it as factual, but merely to enjoy it.

The book is divided by a decade or so down the middle, and the first half is set in the poorer yet more innocent Italy of the 50s while the second deals with the illusions of prosperity in the 60s. Of course, it's not nearly as didactic as it sounds...these exterior facts are not explicitly stated, but merely offer a bit more explanation as to what the characters go through.

Furthermore, the book is divided into self-contained chapters, each bearing a title and a label of either Spring, Summer, Autumn, or Winter. In a reflection of the interconnectedness of life and the way days and years often unfold, Calvino weaves shadows of the previous season into the most recent. In the first tale, Marcovaldo finds mushrooms sprouting up in the cracks of the city. Although he tries to hoard them for himself, everyone finds out and gathers them up....and the whole town ends up in the hospital. Three stories later, next Spring finds Marcovaldo treating his fellow citizens for rheumatism using wasp stings, which goes awry with a huge wasp attack. The following Spring's story opens with a doctor prescribing a some good air as treatment for Marcovaldo's children, and they end up in the countryside on the grounds of a sanitorium. These little threads he weaves attaching each story make a cohesive unit of the collection.

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figs and life

I saw Curiouser, a play from Skin Horse theater, at the New Orleans Fringe Festival last weekend. It was a lovely side-by-side of two lives that were not as disparate as they initially seem: Lewis Carroll and Sylvia Plath. A quote from The Bell Jar was used in the play, and I think it impacted all the twentysomethings in the group, including myself. So, a look at a metaphor in hopes it may give us a grasp on the real thing.

"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig-tree in the story.
From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and off-beat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out.
I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig-tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."

*sylvia plath, the bell jar

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how to spot true genius, part II

"However, one trait of the ancestral personality persists in our aesthetic cravings: the pleasure we take in admiring skilled performances. Human beings have a permanent, innate taste for virtuoso displays in the arts."

Okay, so I'm still struggling with this question, and today I'm thinking about it in terms of art. Art art. Fine art. It's such a loaded question...what makes good art, and who decides on good art, is a question laden with assumptions, prejudice, and snobbery.

One viewpoint suggests there are two schools in which you must separate art to be able to judge its merit: skill and concept.

A recent editorial in the Times pointed out that perhaps we are wired to emotionally respond to skilled works of beauty. What if all this discussion and all this controversy deferred to what people actually felt? I mean, really felt when they looked at a picture/sculpture/objet? Maybe the question would become moot. But I don't think it's possible to expect the many people who analyze for a living to be able to step down from their pedestal. And good art has come from the sanctioned 'movements' of art that have been ordained by the Deciders. It just may not last when the constructs of its value pass into history and all that's left is a skull made of waaaay too many diamonds.

This excerpt from the editorial says it best:



We ought, then, to stop kidding ourselves that painstakingly developed artistic technique is passé, a value left over from our grandparents’ culture. Evidence is all around us. Even when we have lost contact with the social or religious ideas behind the arts of bygone civilizations, we are still able, as with the great bronzes or temples of Greece or ancient China, to respond directly to craftsmanship.....

The appreciation of contemporary conceptual art, on the other hand, depends not on immediately recognizable skill, but on how the work is situated in today’s intellectual zeitgeist. That’s why looking through the history of conceptual art after Duchamp reminds me of paging through old New Yorker cartoons. Jokes about Cadillac tailfins and early fax machines were once amusing, and the same can be said of conceptual works like Piero Manzoni’s 1962 declaration that Earth was his art work, Joseph Kosuth’s 1965 “One and Three Chairs” (a chair, a photo of the chair and a definition of “chair”) or Mr. Hirst’s medicine cabinets. Future generations, no longer engaged by our art “concepts” and unable to divine any special skill or emotional expression in the work, may lose interest in it as a medium for financial speculation and relegate it to the realm of historical curiosity.

In this respect, I can’t help regarding medicine cabinets, vacuum cleaners and dead sharks as reckless investments. Somewhere out there in collectorland is the unlucky guy who will be the last one holding the vacuum cleaner, and wondering why.-Denis Dutton,The New York Times, October 15, 2009


For me, this begs the question of where is the happy medium? Are enough artists making things of beauty that are still original? Yet another impressionist rendering of a sunset on a small village is just as bad as the Hirst pieces Dutton rails against. Perhaps the measure of a true work of art must take into account originality, skill, and beauty, and acknowledge that the three must be linked.

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my special bookshelf

A pause to confirm the excellence of Orhan Pamuk's latest book. It has now been placed on my special bookshelf, whose unofficial title could be 'shelf for the best books I've read and own'. It sits, collecting its first precious dust particles, next to if on a winter's night a traveler (italo calvino), a moveable feast (hemingway), 2666 (roberto bolaño), history of the world in 10 1/2 chapters (julian barnes), confederacy of dunces (john kennedy o'toole), and the bell jar (sylvia plath) among others....not bad company.

So what's the fuss, what enables the 532-page novel to claim such exclusive company? In Museum of Innocence Pamuk continues weaving his interconnect Istanbul world, this time through the eyes of the obsessed Kemal. Kemal's two-month affair with his distant, distant relative stops his current life dead in its tracks and sustains him for almost a decade until happiness flits by him once again. Kemal runs in wealthy socialite circles, and Pamuk explores this world in his ever-luscious detail, with words piling up on each other in sentence after sentence. The eyes of a German model on a soda billboard follow Kemal around for ten years, reminding us of his Gatsby-esque upbringing and potential fate. This book is far-reaching in its plumbing of cultural mores and pieces of Istanbuli history, collecting them as avidly as Kemal collects every particle of his existence with Fusun. If the museum conceit was a bit strained in the more action-packed middle of the novel, it proved its worth as the end approached. The tragic end.

It was every bit as good as those bookkeepers promised me. Perhaps I will thank them as I am returning this weekend to New Orleans...

please read this!

Oh, and quickly I feel I must say Maureen Freely (translator) is amazing at what she does.

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