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Fished out of the river Rhone last fall, a bust of Julius Caesar dating from 46 BCE, two years before his death. Oh yes, his death: on that delicate yet never untimely subject let us attend to Brutus once again…
Romans, countrymen, and lovers! hear me for my
cause, and be silent, that you may hear: believe me
for mine honour, and have respect to mine honour, that
you may believe: censure me in your wisdom, and
awake your senses, that you may the better judge.
If there be any in this assembly, any dear friend of
Caesar’s, to him I say, that Brutus’ love to Caesar
was no less than his. If then that friend demand
why Brutus rose against Caesar, this is my answer:
– Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved
Rome more. Had you rather Caesar were living and
die all slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to live
all free men? As Caesar loved me, I weep for him;
as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he was
valiant, I honour him: but, as he was ambitious, I
slew him. There is tears for his love; joy for his
fortune; honour for his valour; and death for his
ambition. Who is here so base that would be a
bondman? If any, speak; for him have I offended.
Who is here so rude that would not be a Roman? If
any, speak; for him have I offended. Who is here so
vile that will not love his country? If any, speak;
for him have I offended. I pause for a reply.
- Julius Caesar (Act III, Scene II), by William Shakespeare
It took me nearly a year to notice this place, despite the fact that it’s located about half a block north of my office. Maybe it’s because I don’t frequently walk north (the GO train lies in the opposite direction); maybe it’s because there’s no glaringly bright signage announcing its presence (if you don’t look directly at the window you’ll miss the quiet little logo — subtitled, ironically enough, “read the fine print”). Maybe it’s because I’m staring at my Blackberry too much.
Whatever the reason, I was happy to find it. Ben McNally Books opened up last fall in the heart of Toronto’s financial district, in brave defiance of the laws of 21st century book retailing economics, which dictate that There Shall Be But One Retailer, Its Scope Shall Be National, and Its Tastes Middlebrow. Ben himself is the former general manager of Nicholas Hoare Books, a quality bookstore of longer standing (it’s part of a three-city chain, in fact) which, while being located in what one must call “downtown Toronto”, is not truly positioned on the spine of Canadian finance as Ben’s shop is — Hoare is several blocks to the east, a culture zone of restaurants, cafes, and galleries which attracts slow-walking browsers just ripe for book buying.
Bay Streeters, by contrast, generally have somewhere to go, fast. Languid walk-ins, therefore, will be rare. What Ben’s store must be hoping to attract instead is that (not insignificant) sub-set of business people who read more than the financial and sports pages, and who will be happy to have a quality bookstore in the heart of the district, staffed by people who can point out not only the latest John Grisham, but also the latest J.M. Coetzee.
Unfortunately, this select group of patrons may not often include me. Because of my limited free time, I have fairly precise, project-related reading needs, and these I’ve found are best served via the search-and-ship magic of Amazon.ca and its peers. However, I shall probably buy something occassionally from Ben’s, if only because a physical bookstore offers a different kind of serendipitous discovery effect than on-line retailers can provide (although with its many suggestion-style features, Amazon can come pretty close these days). For example, while scanning Ben’s shelves I ran across an attractive collection of Charles Baudelaire’s poetry, and came very very close to buying it on a whim. But I didn’t; too many other unread books in my house.
Next time, Ben.
I’m looking forward to seeing this building in person. Scheduled for completion in 2010, the 50-story Absolute Tower will be located in the condo-choked heart of my home, um, sprawl of Mississauga, Ontario, and promises to nudge the city in a far more interesting visual direction. The building was designed by Beijing-based MAD (an abbreviation of Ma Design, after its founding architect Yansong Ma), a studio that hews to a philosophy of “futurism” - reflective, no doubt, of the firm’s active participation in developing China’s revolutionary urban aesthetic. “Here,” says Ma in an interview, “it is possible to do anything.”
Of course, by “futurism” I’m pretty sure MAD means to invoke the awestruck optimism of World’s Fairs and 1960s science fiction, rather than the early-twentieth-century anarcho-fascism of F.T. Marinetti. Yet in a way this new futurism may stand in relation to post-modernist architecture as the old futurism stood against neo-classicism, and the words of 1914’s Manifesto of Futurist Architecture (ostensibly written by Italian architect Antonio Sant’Elia) thus do not seem entirely out of place in this day and age:
The decorative must be abolished. The problem of Futurist architecture must be resolved, not by continuing to pilfer from Chinese, Persian or Japanese photographs or fooling around with the rules of Vitruvius, but through flashes of genius and through scientific and technical expertise. Everything must be revolutionized. Roofs and underground spaces must be used; the importance of the façade must be diminished; issues of taste must be transplanted from the field of fussy moldings, finicky capitals and flimsy doorways to the broader concerns of bold groupings and masses, and large-scale disposition of planes. Let us make an end of monumental, funereal and commemorative architecture. Let us overturn monuments, pavements, arcades and flights of steps; let us sink the streets and squares; let us raise the level of the city.
Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May, 1909, by John Waterhouse
In honour of the breaking new year, and of this annual time of resolutions, strategies, and self-reflection, a sonnet about life and youth and time by one of Spain’s greatest poets, Luis de Góngora (1561-1627):
While trying with your tresses to compete
in vain the sun’s rays shine on burnished gold;
while with abundant scorn across the plain
does your white brow the lily’s hue behold;while to each of your lips, to catch and keep,
are drawn more eyes than to carnations bright;
and while with graceful scorn your lovely throat
transparently still bests all crystal’s light,take your delight in throat, locks, lips, and brow,
before what in your golden years was gold,
carnation, lily, crystal luminous,not just to silver or limp violets
will turn, but you and all of it as well
to earth, decay, dust, gloom, and nothingness.(Translation by Alix Ingber, Sweet Briar College)
Happy new year, everyone!
With the writers strike threatening to turn American television into a wasteland of re-runs and reality-based programming, one could be forgiven for assuming that a final and ignominious descent into cultural oblivion is nigh. So it is with a sense of holiday joy that I present to you the counter-argument, namely, that American arts culture is thriving as it never has before. Thus writes art critic and journalist Douglas McLennan in a recent (okay, month-old) post on his very interesting blog diacritical:
In 1950 there was only one full time orchestra in America. In 1965, there were only three state arts commissions. Now there are 18 full 52-week orchestras, and more than 3,000 arts commissions at the local and state levels. The 1990s were the biggest expansion of arts activity in American history; we went on a construction binge, building more than $25 billion worth of new museums, theatres, concert halls and cultural centers. Since 1990, almost one-third of all American museums have expanded their facilities. Major American museums such as the Met and the Museum of Modern Art are now so crowded the experience of visiting them has degraded.
The number of performing arts groups is up 48 percent since 1982. Last year American music schools graduated more than 14,000 students, and new fine art academies are popping up all over and overflowing with students. There are more than 250,000 choruses in America - that’s choruses, not people in choruses. That means that more than four million people a week are getting together to sing. There are at least that many book clubs. Opera attendance is up 40 percent since 1990. Band instrument sales are at an all-time high, and in cities like Seattle, where I live, the youth orchestra program is so crowded, more and more orchestras have been added. Culture is a $166 billion industry, accounts for 5.7 million jobs and is America’s top export.
Now, this says nothing about the quality of art being produced by (or even for) all this activity, and elitists will certainly point out that having thousands of teenagers puffing away on trumpets does little to produce an American Mozart. But certainly the existance and enthusiasm of so many cultural participants and consumers is a sign of hope for the producers of art (or rather, to use a less market-inspired word, for artists); such a constituency provides revenue both directly in the form of sales, and indirectly in the form of favourable public opinion that might positively influence the aggregate level of arts funding granted by governments. It also elevates standards, as any exposure to the great works of the past is wont to do.
Television a cultural wasteland? Sure — but who cares?
Water is Leven, by Henk Hofstra (2007)
The ongoing interplay between man and nature occasionally throws up an oddity. In the usual course of things, cities and farmlands spread inexorably, fundamentally distorting (where not destroying outright) the ecosystems they encounter. Far less frequently, it is mankind who retreats – leaving concrete bunkers behind after a war, for example, which soon enough become overgrown and inhabited by wild cats and bats (see my post on Germany’s Westwall here).
What man hardly ever does, however, is memorialize the nature he has displaced. This is one of the objectives of Dutch artist Henk Hofstra’s “blue road” in Drachten (thanks to Torontoist for featuring the project and several pictures of it), which runs for 1000 metres exactly and sports eight-metre-high letters that say (in Dutch) “WATER IS LIFE”: the city road that Hofstra painted vivid blue runs along the course of a former waterway.
The idea of building memorials to vanquished nature is an appealing one. Imagine our cities with multi-block areas painted deep green to symbolize the woods that were cut down to make way for buildings, or yellowy-brown to represent the fields bulldozed under. Perhaps we could even paint shadow animals — like the silhouettes we sometimes paint to represent the real or potential human victims of nuclear bombs — here a moose, there a porcupine, that scattering of shapes on the next block representing a flock of passenger pigeons we netted for meat and stuffed into boxcars.
But could we live with such images pointing their accusing wings and paws at us while we shop for designer clothing and eat in fine restaurants? No, which is why we do not mention these ghosts, nor build memorials to them. Far better to forget.
A detail from a rather striking design by Barcelona designer Alex Trochut, prepared for ad agency Wieden + Kennedy. The deliquescent flowers jump out at the viewer, but, once noticed, the hummingbirds are even more pleasing.
Or is it the reverse?
Pollice Verso (Thumbs Down), 1872, by Jean-Léon Gérôme
A recent essay in the London Review of Books (subscription required, alas) — on Death in Ancient Rome by Catharine Edwards and The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint by Emily Wilson – drew my attention to the following passage in St. Augustine’s Confessions (Book VI), which describes how his young and virtuous friend Alypius became corrupted by the sight of gladiatorial combat. Though the Roman aristocracy made a great show of drawing moral lessons from public displays of death, the line between philosophy and merely sadistic voyeurism was a thin one indeed:
Chapter 8. The Same When at Rome, Being Led by Others into the Amphitheatre, is Delighted with the Gladiatorial Games.
13. He, not relinquishing that worldly way which his parents had bewitched him to pursue, had gone before me to Rome, to study law, and there he was carried away in an extraordinary manner with an incredible eagerness after the gladiatorial shows. For, being utterly opposed to and detesting such spectacles, he was one day met by chance by various of his acquaintance and fellow-students returning from dinner, and they with a friendly violence drew him, vehemently objecting and resisting, into the amphitheatre, on a day of these cruel and deadly shows, he thus protesting: “Though you drag my body to that place, and there place me, can you force me to give my mind and lend my eyes to these shows? Thus shall I be absent while present, and so shall overcome both you and them.” They hearing this, dragged him on nevertheless, desirous, perchance, to see whether he could do as he said. When they had arrived thither, and had taken their places as they could, the whole place became excited with the inhuman sports. But he, shutting up the doors of his eyes, forbade his mind to roam abroad after such naughtiness; and would that he had shut his ears also! For, upon the fall of one in the fight, a mighty cry from the whole audience stirring him strongly, he, overcome by curiosity, and prepared as it were to despise and rise superior to it, no matter what it were, opened his eyes, and was struck with a deeper wound in his soul than the other, whom he desired to see, was in his body; and he fell more miserably than he on whose fall that mighty clamour was raised, which entered through his ears, and unlocked his eyes, to make way for the striking and beating down of his soul, which was bold rather than valiant hitherto; and so much the weaker in that it presumed on itself, which ought to have depended on You. For, directly he saw that blood, he therewith imbibed a sort of savageness; nor did he turn away, but fixed his eye, drinking in madness unconsciously, and was delighted with the guilty contest, and drunken with the bloody pastime. Nor was he now the same he came in, but was one of the throng he came unto, and a true companion of those who had brought him thither. Why need I say more? He looked, shouted, was excited, carried away with him the madness which would stimulate him to return, not only with those who first enticed him, but also before them, yea, and to draw in others. And from all this did Thou, with a most powerful and most merciful hand, pluck him, and taughtest him not to repose confidence in himself, but in You - but not till long after.
Don’t Panic, by Ruth Sacks (skywriting over Cape Town, S.A.; video shown at the Venice Art Biennial, 2007)
One of the things I like most about nature is its patient opportunism. Although the presence of human beings invariably pushes animals into the peripheral spaces of our own world — excepting, of course, the impossible-to-intimidate raccoons that have made the Greater Toronto Area their haute-garbage dining lounge, and who consider us no more than trash-bag-carrying busboys – the departure of humans, conversely, leads almost immediately to a squatters’ takeover. Coral conquers our scuttled battleships; rats and bats occupy our abandoned houses; grass grows in the engine nooks of our broken down cars.
So it’s nice to read that the Siegfried Line, the 18,000-bunker network Hitler built to defend Germany’s western border, has now become home to a wide range of wildlife, including foxes, badgers, European wildcats (pictured above) and ten species of bat. Regional authorities have been keen to tear down the ruined bunkers to make way for farmland and development, but wildlife group BUND has been campaigning for an extension to a 2004 federal moratorium on dismantling the bunkers. The politics have been tricky, as BUND wildlife expert Sebastian Schöne told Spiegel Online:
“It’s been hard for us to deal with this issue because in Germany you’re immediately labeled as some kind of neo-Nazi if you say anything positive about the bunkers. We’re accused of trivializing history by calling it ‘Green Wall in the West’. But we’re not saying the Westwall is great. We’re just being pragmatic.”
The thought of industrial-scale Nazi fortifications covered in moss and turned into homes for small mammals brings to mind Briton Riviere’s Persepolis (1878, engraving (below) by Frederick Stacpoole), which shows the ruined and deserted capital of the Achaemenid Empire now visited only by two curious and wary lions. The picture is on display at the British Museum as part of a very interesting exhibition on the ancient Persian empire. At its original Royal Academy showing in 1878, the catalogue included two lines from the following portion of Omar Khayyam’s The Rubaiyat (1120, trans. Edward Fitzgerald from the Farsi, 1859):
The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon
Turns Ashes — or it prospers; and anon,
Like Snow upon the Desert’s dusty Face,
Lighting a little hour or two — is gone.Think, in this batter’d Caravanserai
Whose Portals are alternate Night and Day,
How Sultan after Sultan with his Pomp
Abode his destined Hour, and went his way.They say the Lion and the Lizard keep
The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep:
And Bahram, that great Hunter — the Wild Ass
Stamps o’er his Head, but cannot break his sleep.
Sir John Everett Millais’ Mercy: St. Bartholomew’s Day, 1572, depicting an anti-Protestant zealot momentarily restrained by a nun’s supplication. Roughly seventy thousand Huguenots were killed in a wave of massacres that lasted from August to October 1572; Jean-Antoine de Baïf, although the most educated of the group of seven French poets known as La Pléiade and a co-founder of the Académie de Poésie et de Musique, penned a sonnet in celebration of the event. Other literary responses were more sophisticated (and less bloodthirsty). Several years after the killings Huguenot poet Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas wrote La Sepmaine, an immensely popular epic about the world’s creation by God. In his conclusion to the seventh day — during which “Th’ Eternall doth his glorious works survay” – Du Bartas reflects on the importance of civic unity and order, comparing a nation to a human body whose parts exist in harmony:
You Princes, Pastors, and ye Chiefs of War,
Do not your Laws, Sermons, and Orders mar;
Lest your examples banefull leprosies
Infect your Subjects, Flocks, and Companies;
Beware your evill make not others like;
For, no Part’s sound if once the Head be sick.[...]
Nor can I see, where underneath the sky
A man may finde a juster Policy,
Or truer Image of a calme Estate
Exempt from Faction, Discord, and Debate,
Then in th’ harmonious Order that maintains
Our Bodie’s life, through Members’ mutuall pains:
Where, one no sooner feels the least offence,
But all the rest have of the same a sense.- Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas, La Sepmaine (1578), trans. Joshua Sylvester as The Divine Weeks and Works (1605)
An illustration for Beatus of Valcavado, In Apocalipsin, showing four beasts of the Apocalypse as envisioned in Daniel 7: a winged lion, a winged leopard, a beast with ten horns, and a bear. Painted in Spain, ca. 940-945, by a scribe and illuminator named Maius.
1 In the first year of Belshaz’zar king of Babylon, Daniel had a dream and visions of his head upon his bed: then he wrote the dream, and told the sum of the matters.
2 Daniel spake and said, I saw in my vision by night, and, behold, the four winds of the heaven strove upon the great sea.
3 And four great beasts came up from the sea, diverse one from another.
4 The first was like a lion, and had eagle’s wings: I beheld till the wings thereof were plucked, and it was lifted up from the earth, and made stand upon the feet as a man, and a man’s heart was given to it.
5 And behold another beast, a second, like to a bear, and it raised up itself on one side, and it had three ribs in the mouth of it between the teeth of it: and they said thus unto it, Arise, devour much flesh.
6 After this I beheld, and lo another, like a leopard, which had upon the back of it four wings of a fowl; the beast had also four heads; and dominion was given to it.
7 After this I saw in the night visions, and behold a fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly; and it had great iron teeth: it devoured and brake in pieces, and stamped the residue with the feet of it: and it was diverse from all the beasts that were before it; and it had ten horns.
8 I considered the horns, and, behold, there came up among them another little horn, before whom there were three of the first horns plucked up by the roots: and, behold, in this horn were eyes like the eyes of man, and a mouth speaking great things.- The Book of Daniel 7, King James Bible
