Let's Talk About Art -- Buffalo edition

It took me two tries, but I finally made it to the Albright-Knox Museum in Buffalo.  While I was extremely annoyed not to have made their Greatest Hits exhibit around September, that will be on display in Milwaukee this summer, and there is a good chance I will be able to take the Amtrak up from Chicago and see that.

I'll start off with the main reason I was visiting, which was the Helen Frankenthaler exhibit upstairs.  This runs approximately 6 more weeks (through mid Feb.), so if interested, you should make plans to soon to go, especially as it can be pretty unpredictable with the lake effect snow.

As it happened, I find Frankenthaler's color field paintings a bit hit or miss.  Some I like quite a bit, whereas others are just too diffuse.  While I guess ranking artists is always a mug's game, of the female abstract expressionists, I tend to prefer Joan Mitchell.  I guess I rate Frankenthaler about as highly as Lee Krasner.

I liked three paintings a fair bit, though it wasn't even clear all were in the catalog.  I've found two on-line, but the third (Square Field from 1966 or 1967 is still eluding me).

So here are the two others I thought were quite nice.  (In person, Riverhead is enormous, much larger than The Human Edge.)

Helen Frankenthaler, The Human Edge, 1967

Helen Frankenthaler, Riverhead, 1963

I wasn't very impressed with the other special exhibit upstairs, but I thought the main galleries were really impressive, even considering that many of the masterworks were back out on tour.

In a bit of a reverse from the AGO, the most current guidebook to the Albright-Knox stresses contemporary works but they seem to focus on displaying cubism through abstract expressionism.  The AGO, in contrast, has some masterworks of abstract expressionism in the gallery guide, but these haven't been on display for perhaps 10 years or so.  Personally, I think it is a somewhat misguided effort by the AGO to avoid abstract expressionism, specifically, as it is so identified with the U.S. artworld and thus displaying it would almost be a surrender to American hegemony (or something like that).  Not that I dislike the Canadian rooms that they have added, but I think they probably would do better closing down the David Milne display and putting up 20th Century US and European art back there.

I can't possibly display all the great paintings that I saw at the Albright-Knox, but I will definitely include the Clyfford Still room, as it is very impressive, and a few other paintings I liked quite a bit.  I'll do them basically chronologically, rather than the order that a visitor might encounter them. 
 

Gustave Caillebotte, Study for Le Pont de l'Europe, 1876

Max Weber, Figure Study, 1911

Norman Lewis, Street Music, 1950

 

Franz Kline, New York, NY, 1953

Adolph Gottlieb, Dialogue I, 1960

Despite the annoyance of actually getting to Buffalo, I'll probably try to take the family once a year or so to soak in the art.  As one can see, the ratio of visitors to great art is pretty good -- from the visitor's perspective.  I'll just note that I was pretty underwhelmed by downtown Buffalo near the Greyhound bus station, so I'll plan on driving from here on out.

Detestable characters

While I am sure we all know plenty of terrible people in our real lives, I will be sticking to literature in this post.

There are no end of terrible villains and semi-villains in literature, particularly in the fantasy vein and/or in children's stories.  It is a bit less common in literary fiction as one moves from, say, the Victorian era (where Dickens had quite a few outright villains) to more contemporary fiction where almost everyone has a valid point of view (or at least a convincing story to justify their actions) and thus outright villains are fewer.  Now I am not talking of genre fiction, where there remain many villains.  I guess one of the few villains I can think of in high literature (aside from David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas where he is drawing heavily on pulp conventions) is the Indira Gandhi stand-in in Rushdie's Midnight's Children.  I'm sure I'm forgetting dozens, but mostly the contemporary fiction I read has more nuanced antagonists.

Then there is a subset of characters who are generally unpleasant and perhaps even monstrous in some ways (to their children perhaps) but whom we probably wouldn't call villains.  I'd definitely classify many of the mother figures in Molly Keane's work under this category.  In some ways it can be tougher to read about these figures, as it is never entirely clear what they are up to.  Are they blocking the protagonist out of spite, or is it more of a positional thing where they and the protagonist are both after the same goal (job, house, treasure map ;) etc.)?  If it is really just positioning of two characters with different motivations, and thus it is nothing personal and this character may even change alliances and allegiances over the course of the story.  What can be somewhat unsatisfying in high literature is the fact that unlikeable or indeed truly detestable characters so rarely get their comeuppance, just as they so rarely do in real life.  It is only in fantasy where the villain is defeated (or double-dealers unmasked), though even here with the rise of multi-volume series, the longed-for triumph of the hero (i.e. gratification for the reader) can be extremely delayed.

There is a much larger group of unpleasant (or just socially awkward) characters, even main characters, whom one probably would want to avoid but that I would certainly not classify as villains.  For me, this includes Ignatius J. Reilly from Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces and Ed from Vandergaeghe's My Present Age, whose similarities I discuss a bit here.  I found Spark's Miss Jean Brodie pretty unpleasant as well.  Obviously, it would be incredibly boring if one only read fiction about morally upright people with whom one would get along.  A few books like that are acceptable (most of Barbara Pym for instance) but literature largely does require some conflict, unless it is totally internal conflict (I found myself far more interested than I expected in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, which is almost entirely about a decent preacher who struggles to be an even better man).  So I don't think we'll ever see the end of the unpleasant or unlikable core characters, and this is particularly true on stage where subtlety and interior motivations don't work well at all, and conflict must be externalized.

What I do find intriguing is the rise of the morally ambiguous main character where some readers will go along for the ride and others will be turned off right away and probably will put down the book in disgust.  While I assume there are some sprinkled throughout history (and certainly one can find caddish individuals justifying their behaviour in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, to say nothing of Milton's Paradise Lost or most of Shakespeare's silver-tongued evil-doers), these are usually somewhat secondary characters or figures who are clearly not to be emulated.  I suspect that the first roguish character we are meant to have some sympathy for is Becky Sharp in Thackeray's Vanity Fair.  Some people find her assertiveness quite reasonable in light of her circumstances, and there is certainly a thread of pushy, relatively unaccommodating, unapologetic women that leads right to Muriel Spark.  I have to admit, while I am looking forward to reading Vanity Fair (after all these years of lugging it around), I probably shouldn't write any more on it until I finally have this under my belt.  In any case, do not hesitate to point out if Becky Sharp isn't the turning point I have made her out to be.

I am thinking about this because I have just finished James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, which features one of the most detestable main characters (Robert Wringhim) I have ever come across.  I so wanted him to have his ass handed to him when he kept following his older brother around and interfering with various games of sport and so forth.  He intentionally tries to get himself beaten so that he can have his older brother thrown in jail.  (Sort of like one of the scenes in Fight Club.*)  What gives the book a bit of extra frisson is that so much of the justification comes from the doctrine of predestination, surely one of the most twisted religious doctrines that ever existed, namely that a very tiny number of individuals have been written down in a book in Heaven that guarantees they are the sheep to be saved on Judgement Day (and God knowing all will only have put them in this book if their actions are all aligned with His commands) but the vast majority of humanity are goats that will be doomed not matter what they do.  There is an interesting slice of theology (only lightly explored here) that good works are meaningless if one does them in the hopes of gaining entrance to Heaven, since that in effect turns them into selfish works.  While most adherents of predestination were perfectly moral (if highly priggish) individuals, a small number did commit various crimes, knowing that they would still get into Heaven no matter what.  Well, Wringhim is one of the very bad sheep.  I won't go into any great detail, but his crimes are many and great.

What I didn't care for was that in the second half, it becomes far more Gothic, as it turns out that the Devil himself is accompanying Wringhim and leading him astray.  I basically lost interest at this point, simply because the Devil (here called Gil-Martin) could do anything -- change his features, switch Wringhim's clothing, put Wringhim into a trance for six months and commit more crimes in the guise of Wringhim, etc.  It's just boring -- far more boring than a supernatural creature with at least some limits.**  It reminds me of the ending of the 1998 movie Fallen (with Denzel Washington) which I thought was an unbelievable cop out, though I thought that whole movie was pretty silly.  There are certainly some attempts to read the whole Gil-Martin thing as Wringhim externalizing his crimes, but in the first part of the book two other observers see Wringhim with the supernatural being, so I don't think Hogg means anything other than Wringhim was literally going around with the Devil or some powerful demon by his side.

I'll come back around if any other character is as upsetting as Wringhim, but so far he wins the sweepstakes as the most detestable main character in a novel.  (It's quite probable that the narrator of Ellis's American Psycho would be even worse, but I have no intention of ever reading that novel or watching the movie.)

Edit: After a bit of reflection, I decided that the narrator of Mohsin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is another fairly unpleasant chap, but top honours goes to the narrator of Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger, who like Robert Wringhim becomes pretty blood-thirsty along the way and yet always finds a way to justify his crimes.  Perhaps he is even worse, since he doesn't even have the excuse that the Devil was by his side, urging him on.  It was all down to his desperation to escape crushing poverty.  So if one actually is looking for detestable characters to loathe, then The White Tiger is definitely worth checking out (and is eminently more readable than Justified Sinner, which drags in many places).  Still, any other suggestions are more than welcome.
 
* Apparently, I am not the first one to link Fight Club to Hogg through its immediate successor Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.  See Stirling, K. (2004). "Dr Jekyll and Mr Jackass": Fight Club as a Refraction of Hogg's Justified Sinner and Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Postmodern Studies, 35(1), 83-94.

 ** I guess it is an open question why I don't let the same sort of thing bother me in Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, but the shenanigans the Devil gets up to in Moscow are only part of that book, not the entire motivating force of the novel, as it is here in Hogg's Justified Sinner.

Happy New Year (2015) and resolutions (to be broken)

Yes indeed, Happy New Year.  I found the last half of 2014 pretty awful from a geopolitical standpoint and a bit disappointing on the personal level.  We're starting to realize how hard it will be to buy a home in the Toronto neighbourhood we like, but we haven't given up.  I am trying to reorient towards more research-oriented projects at work, but it is difficult.  To that end, I actually have a paper to work on tomorrow (due Wed. at noon!) and will be spending much of the day at Robarts.  If I get there early enough, I may be able to browse through the MacLeans issues and do a bit more background research for my novel, though I admit it is starting to just feel like I am stalling.

Not to be too cynical about it, but most resolutions are meant to be broken.  If it is something you really want to change about yourself, then you should begin that when you are ready, and not make a big deal about it on New Year's (Eve or Day).  But what is far more important, is that if you are serious about it, put a support structure in place that will help.

So for instance, I have been feeling really low about getting out of shape.  I was making minor but real progress once I started biking, but it has gotten quite hard to bike, though I did bike to work once last week.  I really thought I would go once or twice this week, but it was just bitterly cold, and I do not have the proper winter biking gear, aside from the gloves, which are an upgrade.  On the other hand, the recreation centre near my house has changed its lap swimming times to something that actually works for me, so I could go twice a week.  I think now I will go over and sign up for a three month membership and make a real effort to go over.  Also, if the weather warms up even a bit, I will try to bike once or twice a month through the winter, on days the bike lanes are not clogged with snow or, even worse, slush.  I consider this a more feasible lifestyle change, than just announcing my resolution is to lose X pounds.

At any rate, I simply no longer resolve to be more patient with people, as I can't change my stripes.  I can try to be more patient with my immediate family and to spend more time with the kids in the evenings (when I am not swimming that is...).

I have 10 or so outstanding posts that I will try to wrap up by the end of Feb., but I will definitely be posting less.  I have made decent progress on a new play (called The Study Group) and I want to spend more time doing revisions on my older plays and of course make serious progress on a short story and the novel.

I am on the fence with regards to cutting back the reading in favour of more creative writing.  As long as I am taking public transit, it is pretty dicey expecting to get a seat (and thus be able to write).  Reading is a lot more feasible.  However, I should seriously consider taking away some reading time in the evening and work on my writing.  Of course that means that just as I am wrapping up the Russians and getting back to my original list, I'll have less time for it.  But that is just the way things are.  Sometimes you do have to pick and choose, and I don't really want to scale back my concerts and theatre events.

I can't really think of anything else that I resolve to do in 2015, but feel free to post your resolutions (realistic or fantastic) below...

Aga Khan Museum architecture

Before I get started, I thought I would share one more objet d'art from the Aga Khan Museum.

Perhaps it is a bit cheeky, but when I saw this coat:

I couldn't help but think of this Davie Bowie cover art.

Moving onwards, from the outside, the Aga Khan Museum is not terribly distinguished, though I assume when the trees are mature, it will be a nice plaza/entryway into the museum.  That's not really a major criticism, as it generally is a bad idea to spend more on the building than on the art within.

From the inside, however, there is quite a nice interior open-air courtyard.

In the last photo, you can even see the pastry bar.

I would say that the architecture is generally low-key and serves the needs of the museum without unduly calling attention to itself, so in that sense it is a success.  The museum has a number of nice side rooms (not pictured), and the main exhibit hall is airy.  Now whether at some point they will feel they need to expand to show more of the collection, it might be hard to grow, unless they add an underground gallery.  Still, I will keep my eyes open to see what else will be going on at the museum in 2015 and if the next special exhibit is worth checking out.

The Lost Dhow surfaces in Toronto

So this could just as easily be Let's Talk about Art, part 3, but I decided that the focus of this post should be on a special exhibit at the relatively new Aga Khan Museum in Toronto.  A bit later in the post, I'll go ahead and put up a few photos of their permanent collection.  I'd read about the Aga Khan Museum and this special exhibit in the paper and then when I realized it was essentially just up the street from me (considering the 25 Don Mills bus as a continuation of the 72 Pape bus), I thought I should check it out.  Indeed, it is just a couple of stops past the Ontario Science Centre.

The Lost Dhow show runs through late April.  I thought it was definitely worth seeing, particularly if you are interested in anything vaguely related to archeology or in particular in the Silk Route.  I think my favourite part, aside from a few gold objects was the large number of bowls for trade. Apparently, there were 57,000 bowls mass-produced in China, though the interiors were individually decorated.  How little actually changes over the years.  By that I mean that trade and "globalization" is nothing new, though certainly the scope and impact of global trade has increased dramatically since the early 1900s.

The dhow itself ran aground off the coast of Indonesia roughly 1000 years ago, during the Tang Dynasty in China.  There is speculation that since the waters there (at the time) were quite shallow, the crew not only escaped but took the majority of silk and spices with them.  What is unclear is why they never returned for the rest of the cargo later.  The wreck was discovered in 1998 and has been carefully excavated and put into the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore.  This marks the first time that any of the cargo has been on tour in North America, though it is possible that it will travel south later on.  As I said, it is worth seeing if in the area between now and late April.

The rest of the museum is nice, though I would say less spectacular than the Islamic collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.  There is an interview with the curator, describing how he is intentionally focusing on everyday objects and deglamourizing them to some extent.  There is something to that approach, but the entrance fee is on the high side, and people may expect to be "wowed" after they have paid it.  I guess I'll see if this style catches on.  It is good that coat checking is free at least.  Also, there is a small pastry bar in the lobby with amazing (and very reasonably priced) baklava for sale.  Probably a good thing that I don't live right next door after all...

There is only one rug on display in the permanent collection, though it is very prominently featured.

Without a lot of editorializing, I'll just include a number of the other objects that caught my eye.

 

Not surprisingly, they had several Qurans on display.  I thought this was probably the most attractive of the bunch.

Now what was surprising is that they had quite a few artworks with images of animals and even people.  It is an understatement to say that figurative art is not very common in Islamic art, but there were clearly some exceptions in some cultures.  I thought this page from a manuscript was particularly intriguing (sorry for all the camera glare).

This isn't a museum I will go to on a regular basis, but it had some very nice pieces in the permanent collection, so it certainly worth a look in from time to time if one likes Islamic art.  I'll probably make a point of checking out the special exhibits or if they are putting on an interesting concert before I make another trip out there.  The architecture, particularly seen from the inside, is nice, and I'll put together another post on that shortly.

8th Canadian Challenge - 11th Review - This Isn't the Apocalypse We Hoped For

I read Al Rempel's This Isn't the Apocalypse We Hoped For some time ago, probably all the way back in January!  In my defense, I have generally found it harder to review poetry collections than novels, as it is very hard to convey the overall feel of a collection.  Typically I only end up focusing on the two or three poems I like best, and that can perhaps skew the review towards my mood at the time.  But I'll do my best.

In late 2013/early 2014, I was reading a fair number of poetry collections that I had been tipped off to by the BC Poetry in Transit series.  Here are the actual subway placards for 2013, and here is a page with a more general overview of the program.  I'd already heard of W.H. New's YVR, but several of the others were new to me.  (In general, 2013 looks a bit stronger than the 2014 offerings, though I think I'll check Jane Munro's Blue Sonoma out of the library.)

As it happens, the title poem, which is probably the strongest in the collection, is reprinted in its entirely on the subway placard.  I'll just reprint the first and last lines:
the trains bend and bend and follow the recursive river
and they carry everything I need
...
somewhere in the North Pacific, my plastic obsession
is being stirred into the brine by an invisible finger

If I am following this, I think what Rempel is discussing is how the freight trains are carrying all kinds of unnecessary consumer goods, many of which will ultimately end up in landfills or, worse, be flushed out to the ocean.  He may also be thinking of several news reports from a couple of years ago about the large number of shipments from Asian (of mostly plastic items of one type of another) that ended up going overboard and cluttering up the ecosystem.  We as humans really only have ourselves to blame for this despoiling of nature, though in the case of a place further north, like Prince George, BC where Rempel resides, much of the pollution comes from outsiders.  Obviously, a cheerful message for Boxing Day,* but it is always worth keeping in mind to keep excess consumption to a minimum and to recycle as much as possible and to absolutely not dump in the ocean.

The general anxiety becomes far more specific and pointed in "Have a Bath" where a parent's fears for his (or her) child becomes quite overwhelming. Danger lurks behind every decision that one makes:
what isn’t a question of risk management? we send
our children off in automobiles and buses.
one minute, their smiles bobbing in the window —
but we mustn’t think of it, mustn’t imagine
gasoline tankers or ditches. we’re not sure
how much reality we make with our minds.

Just thinking of the boogeyman can summon him up!  This is particularly on point, since we are just starting to let our oldest walk around the neighbourhood (a bit) on his own and perhaps next year he'll be able to walk to school on his own. Anyway, the parent finally tries to relax a bit in a hot bubble bath, but still seems very edgy. The final line emphasizes how much generalized anxiety has settled in: "wait for the phone to ring", i.e. it is only a question of when (not whether) disaster will strike.

Moving on, to a slightly more positive poem (though one that still implicitly criticizes the wastefulness of the North American consumer) "We Love Bananas":
here’s what we do with bananas. we buy them just
when they’re turning yellow. we play the Tarzan
theme song in our heads as we carry them to the car.
we place them in a ceramic bowl and leave them
out with the still life. we forget to eat them and they go
soft. we put them on the top shelf in the freezer.
we throw them out when we can’t fit
the box of pizza in. we’ve already bought more.

I'll end with a poem about ferries -- "Leaving the Terminal." While I found a few good poems about ferries while researching my poetry and transportation anthology, they are still relatively rare. This poem launches into the voyage from the start:
we’re on board
and the ocean rises to meet us.
the men at the gates are left standing with their safety vests on,
recede with social conventions and the rebuke of seagulls.
we should talk about the light —
it’s gone.
...
your hand on my arm draws me back
not to you, but to the beating rain
which runs rivulets down the ferry windows
lit up in the ferry’s strange light

what is it? you ask

it's dark.

I found over time, the lack of capitalization felt a bit gimmicky, especially since Rempel didn't go full-cummings and eliminate all punctuation. Note also that "I" remains capitalized throughout. It's a small point, I suppose.

In general, this struck me as a collection that tended towards darker themes. Relationships were somewhat fraught and miscommunication common. There was a sense that disaster, particularly environmental collapse, was just around the corner. If the end of the world was coming, we wanted something else, perhaps something more glamorous...

That isn't to say there aren't more light-hearted poems in the collection, but the ones I thought were the strongest had at least some dark elements to them. I'll try to remember to look up Rempel in a few years to see if he puts out another collection and how closely it follows Apocalypse.

* Edit: I probably should not pick on my neighbours, but I was just astounded by the amount of wrapping paper they were tossing out on Boxing Day (at least it was being recycled), indicating a somewhat out-of-control Christmas.

Best reads of 2014 - a round-up

So the presents are all wrapped, and I am feeling on top of the holidays for once.  I guess that is one of the advantages of your children outgrowing Santa -- presents can be wrapped over several days and not all in a mad rush on Christmas Eve.  (Of course that assumes that one did shopping early and nothing gets lost in the mail...)

Now as it happens, I have not hung the stockings, mostly because I've been getting home late all week, but I will make sure to get home earlier tonight and take care of that.  If I happen to see the chocolate gold coins, I'll pick up a few as stocking stuffers, but essentially I am done.  It's a nice feeling.  (Actually, the stockings are now hung, but not stuffed.)

 

I don't think I did much of a round-up of the year last year, particularly my favourite books read in 2013, partly because I knew I was transitioning to a new job, and I had a lot to deal with, so I wouldn't leave my former co-workers high and dry.  I guess I was roughly halfway through Proust (but not enjoying it) as 2013 closed, and I was reading a fair number of Molly Keane and Barbara Comyns books, since they generally weren't available in Toronto libraries. Of the Keane, I liked Two Days in Aragon (probably read in 2014), Conversation Piece and Taking Chances.

I liked Comnys in flashes and small doses -- The Skin Chairs was pretty good and there were some interesting moments in A Touch of Mistletoe and The House of Dolls.  It's possible that with Comyns I saved the best for last (The Juniper Tree, which I should get to in early 2015).  I think that is probably the case for Molly Keane as well.

It would take quite a while to reconstruct what I really liked in 2013, though Faulkner's The Reivers was a lot of fun, and I appreciated Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy quite a bit, once I finally committed to reading it.  I also got through Anna Karenina, though this is a case where I wasn't really blown away by it.  My more recent reading of Tolstoy's short novels have generally left me cold, and I am clearly never going to be in his camp (much preferring Dostoevsky and Turgenev).

In terms of my top 5 books read in 2014, it would be:

• Dostoevsky's Demons
• Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia Trilogy (saw & read this in 2014)
• Joseph Roth's Hotel Savoy
• Iris Murdoch's Under the Net 
• Michel Tremblay's The Fat Woman Next Door is Pregnant

(The best novel I reread during 2014 was Turgenev's Fathers and Sons.)

Honorable mentions for 2014 go to:

• Turgenev's Sketches from a Hunter's Album
• Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan
• The Lost Books of the Odyssey by Zachary Mason
• The Tin Flute by Gabrielle Roy
• Rebellion by Joseph Roth
• Soul by Andrey Platonov 
• The Girl Who Was Saturday Night by Heather O'Neill

Overall it was a kind of strange year, heavily dominated by Russian literature and books read somewhat out of obligation.  While I still am trying to get through a fair number of books that I can then donate (and clear out my shelves a bit more), I have tried to skew the ever-growing TBR pile towards books I am really excited about reading in 2015 and beyond.  There are actually quite a few at the top of the list that I have wanted to read for a long time, and only one that feels a bit like an obligation (perhaps you can guess which one that is).

Now if I can only remember to carve out some time for my own writing in 2015...

Anyway, Happy Holidays and Best Wishes for the New Year.