Gaya Scienza

A Healthy Daily Intellectual Supplement; Insulin and Art

A smart column last Thursday in the New York Times lifted my spirit for the whole day.

To explain why the situation is becoming more and more tense between Obama's and Clinton's supporters, columnist Nicholas D. Kristof refers to a "terrific new book", True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society (Wiley, 2008), by a young author, Farhad Manjoo (He calls it the best political book of the year so far): We tend to accept the evidence supporting our opinions, and reject the contrary evidence. The effect is to reinforce our views and to make us more passionate about them. Another bias is that we are more willing to gather information supporting rather than opposing our prejudices. "This resistance to information that doesn’t mesh with our preconceived beliefs afflicts both liberals and conservatives, but a raft of studies shows that it is a particular problem with conservatives," adds Mr.Kristof who concludes:

"The situation isn’t hopeless. Similar psychological processes govern our perceptions of race, yet we’ve made great progress in revising our views and reducing prejudices. The same is true of attitudes towards gays.
The only solutions I see are personal ones, to work out daily to build our mental muscles. Just as we force ourselves to nibble on greens and decline cheesecake, we should seek an information diet that includes a salad bar of information sources — with a special focus on unpalatable rubbish from fools. The worse it tastes, the better it may be for us.
If that’s why you’re reading this, congratulations! And thanks!"

***

As I mentioned in my last post I discovered Charles Demuth, by chance, after reading a small article in the New Yorker.

Charles Demuth (1883-1935) is an American watercolorist who spent most of his life in his native Lancaster, a small town West of Philadelphia, in Pennsylvania. During the last years of his life he turned to oil painting and used a style which became know as Precisionism , producing sharply focused images of architectural topics. Between 1927 and 1933 he produced the seven paintings which are considered the masterpieces of his last years, and are the substance of the exhibition at the Whitney (only 6 are on display): Chimneys and Towers: Charles Demuth's Late Paintings of Lancaster (until April 27th). The exhibition was organized by the Amon Carter Museum (Fort Worth, Texas).

The paintings are, no doubt, remarkable, with their very personal style and their intriguing titles for works depicting otherwise uninspiring industrial sites: My Egypt, And the Home of The Brave, After the Fall (from a poem by Whitman)... As writes Ken Johnson, praising the exhibition, in a New York Times article dated February 27th, "other, less overt emotions add to the aura of the series." This is really what I found fascinating.

Demuth was diagnosed with diabetes in 1921 and his health deteriorated rapidly. Insulin was discovered in 1922 in Canada and one of the American experts in the disease had established a clinic in Morristown, New Jersey, where Demuth was treated, thanks to financial aid from Dr. Albert C. Barnes, the rich American inventor who set up the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. Barnes had known Demuth for several years and had been acquiring a substantial number of his paintings. "It is a profound fact that without the temporary restorative effects of the recently discovered insulin with which he was treated,Demuth would never have lived to create [his] late architectural masterpieces," claims Betsy Fahlman in the captivating exhibition catalog. 

Charles Demuth was also gay. He used to travel regularly to New York City where, in addition to mingling with the group which gathered around photographer and collector Alfred Stieglitz and other avant-garde artists, he immersed himself in the gay subculture flowering in Greenwich Village. From these experiences he produced watercolors featuring men, sailors in explicit homosexual activities. Two demure examples are displayed at the Whitney (and none, shamefully, are reproduced in the catalog), but a quick search on Internet brings back amazing, more unrestrained, paintings. Of course the immediate questions which come to mind (to my mind...) are: What was the purpose of these paintings? Who were they destined to? Where are they today? How out was Charles Demuth? Unfortunately, Ms Fahlman's text in the catalog does not provide any answer...

As a trade-off, I cannot resist quoting Ken Johnson's provocative conclusion in his article:

"In her essay Ms. Fahlman speculates that despite the more liberal sexual attitudes that prevailed among American avant-garde artists, Demuth might have felt marginalized by the mainly heterosexual art world. If true, that interpretation casts the Lancaster paintings in another intriguing light.
You could read the series as Demuth’s attempt to shuck off any stigma of effeminacy that might have accompanied his career as a watercolorist and flower specialist. Certainly the Lancaster paintings represent an ambition that his critics at the time would have favorably regarded as more virile.
Having entertained that notion, you reconsider those unmistakably phallic water towers and smokestacks. What was Demuth thinking? Marcel Duchamp was his good friend; Freud’s ideas about the possible meanings of inanimate objects were in the air. Could Demuth have been unaware of the thrusting urgency in his pictures?
I like to think he was having a bit of fun with the expectations of his day, that he said to himself: “They want manly paintings. I’ll give them manly paintings!” What he couldn’t help doing was to make them beautiful."

2008.04.20

Masters

Last Thursday was a beautiful day, the first - short lived - summer day of the year, with temperatures reaching the seventies. In the train on my way to the City my eyes were caught by a short article in a recent issue of The New Yorker: "Do not miss 'Chimneys and Towers: Charles Demuth's Late Paintings of Lancaster,' at the Whitney, a small, pure, gladdening exhibition of major work by the rhapsodic and droll American modernist who died of diabetes in 1935, at the age of fifty-one." I am not in chimneys or towers really, but my curiosity was awaken by this curious sentence. A few other words in the article convinced me to visit the exhibition later in the day, as nothing required my prompt return home: homoerotic watercolors, another gay avant-gardist, Hart Crane, Walt Whitman. It was a superb discovery! I will come back to it. But if you want to see it before it closes you must do so before April 28th.

***

Several weeks ago the TLS published a review of the second volume of Sheldon M. Novick's Henry James biography (Henry James: The Mature Master, Random House, 2007). Peter Brooks, the reviewer, is a professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University and published last year a study on James.

Novick's first volume on James (Henry James: The Young Master, Random House, 1996) attracted some criticism by previous James biographers because of the sexual episodes he recreated using indirect evidence from James's novels and journals. He seems to have listened to these critics and is more prudent in his new volume.

Peter Brooks supports Novick's attempt, in contrast to his predecessors who were "squeamish about James's evidently homoerotic imagination," to "restaure sexuality to a central place" in his work. He does not entice his reader, though, to read this new biography which "provokes the reflection that James has not yet had the biographer he needs and deserves."

"While other masters of the Modernism he so much prepared and initiated have evoked answering spirits - Richard Ellmann for Joyce, Hermione Lee for Virginia Woolf, Jean-Yves Tadié for Proust - the inner James remains enigmatic and largely unanalysed. It is by no mean simply a matter of his sex life (or lack of it) but rather, the core components of his imagination. Some critics have come closer than the biographers, and Colm Toibin's novel, The Master, while accepting rather too much of Novick's 'evidence', offers a remarkable inner portrait of the novelist."

Too bad. I followed Professor Brooks' advice and read the novel by the great Irish writer (The Master, Picador, 2004) which I had missed when it was published and did not regret it... It's a beautiful book, full of restrained British humor, if this can be said of an Irish work, and a perfect introduction to Henry James whose mystery remains...

***

In the New York Times earlier this week (Disease That Allowed Torrents of Creativity, Sandra Blakeslee, April 8th 2008) I discovered that Bolero, one of the most famous music of our times, has been composed while Ravel, in 1928, aged 53, was suffering from the early stages of a rare disease called frontotemporal dementia. This is what claims Dr. Bruce Miller, a neurologist and the director of the Memory and Aging Center at the University of California, San Francisco. He co-authored Unravelling Boléro: progressive aphasia, transmodal creativity and the right posterior neocortex, an article published last December in the professional journal Brain.

"Bolero is an exercise in compulsivity, structure and perseveration, Dr. Miller said. It builds without a key change until the 326th bar. Then it accelerates into a collapsing finale."

We are, after all, not much...

2008.04.13

Easterlin Paradox; Rechy's Memoirs

For the past 35 years or so, the Easterlin Paradox has been the generally admitted concept linking wealth and happiness: once a given (low) threshold is reached, further increase in wealth does not increase happiness. Now, I discover by reading the FT this Sunday morning not fully awaken in my bed, after analyzing scores of data from the past half century in 132 countries, two Wharton well respected economists have come to the conclusion that the Easterlin Paradox is not true! If a country is richer, its people tend to be happier. What about individuals? The findings will be discussed next week at the spring conference on Economic Activity organized by Brookings, a think-tank...

Whatever! Sometimes simple pleasures can bring happiness. What about a good hot dog?

On the eve of a new baseball season, Raymond Sokolov, the food critic, has crisscrossed the United States in search for the best hot dogs. Last week-end edition of the Wall Street Journal published his report. His top choice is found at Speed's in "a triangular parking lot surrounded by bleak wholesale food warehouses in the untrendy Roxbury area" of Boston (New Market Square). But New York City is also on the winning list (besides Chicago and Los Angeles): Share Shack (Madison Square Park at 23rd Street, 212-889-6600) "gives jaded New Yorkers a taste of serious dog, Chicago-style, with all the trimmings." So if you visit New York to see Andrea, go have a bite at Share Shack. On a nice spring afternoon, it might bring you some cheap happiness...

***

About My Life and the Kept Woman is John Rechy's recently published memoirs (Grove Press, 2008). The book takes us back into the fifties and the sixties. As such, it is an interesting chronicle, not as badly written as David Leavitt, who published a very accurate but critical review in The New York Times (Hustler, March 2, 2008), implies.

Rechy was born in 1934 in El Paso, Texas, from a Scottish father and a Mexican mother. He grew up in the poor Mexican neighborhoods of the city, but because of his light skin he was generally assumed to be Anglo. Racism was widespread. He always kept very close family ties, especially with his mother and his sister Olga, not so much with a bitter and violent father...

In his self-portrait, though, Rechy appears as a very lonely, narcissistic man, unable to establish intimate relationships. His narcissism is highlighted by the black and white pictures included in the book. He did not realize he was attracted to men until late in his life, and never really seems to have accepted it... The way he ended up dealing with his homosexuality was by becoming a hustler, unwilling to express his feelings, only to be an object of desire. From this experience, paradoxically, he got the material on which he built his literary career, as a gay writer.

About My Life and the Kept Woman is mainly about how he became a hustler as a way to deal with his desires and how he became the infamous author of The City of Nights in 1963. It is a sad story. He tells us about his encounters with famous (Broadway director Wilford Leach, Isherwood, Ginsberg, Liberace) and nice men he rejected. "The possibility of aging cannot even be conceded, writes Leavitt; when Ginsberg asks him, 'What about when your body grows old and you can no longer attract your numbers?' he replies - 'firmly' - that 'it will never happen.' But of course it must happen." But this is something Rechy does not address, although he is now past 70...

2008.04.06