Reader's Digest: Groundhog Day, 2023
Last week I caught up on the New York Review of Books.
In January, Colin Thubron wrote about ruins. One of his subjects was a volume by Matthew Green called Shadowlands: A Journey Through Britain’s Lost Cities and Vanished Villages, which tells this macabre tale:
Green’s most poignant medieval site [is] the once wealthy town of Dunwich on the Suffolk coast. Ever since two violent tempests struck it seven centuries ago, the cliffs beneath have been drastically eroding under the winds and tides of the North Sea. By the mid-sixteenth century more than half the town—five complete parishes with their churches—had sunk into the ocean. For years the remains of All Saints, the last surviving church, teetered alone on the cliff edge. Already most of it had tumbled by chunks into the void: first its chancel, then, by degrees, its nave. Finally, in 1922, its bell tower and the graves nearby crashed down the cliff in a shower of human bones.
I don’t know if the horror/sci-fi author H. P. Lovecraft knew this story when he wrote “The Dunwich Horror” (set in a fictional Massachusetts town), but it is appropriately Lovecraftian.
In February, Alec Wilkinson wrote about the pioneering neuroscientist, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, reviewing Benjamin Ehrlich’s The Brain in Search of Itself. I confess that I'd never heard of Cajal, though Ehrlich ranks him along “alongside Darwin and Pasteur as one of the great biologists of the nineteenth century and among Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton as one of the greatest scientists of all time.” He is important for his discovery that nerve cells are discrete individuals separated from one another by “synapses across which thoughts and impressions and impulses pass”—the so-called “neuron doctrine”—and for his skill as a medical illustrator.
Wilkinson’s description of the drawings is almost as good as the drawings themselves:
They are beautiful and strangely dreamlike, as if excavated intact from the unconscious. Despite being realistic, they seem cousin to some of Paul Klee’s symbolic arrangements of obscurely suggestive forms. Cajal’s drawings, which are still reproduced in textbooks and appear in galleries and museums, are composite. He would stain a slice of brain tissue using the black reaction, study it through a microscope, go out to a café, then come back and draw the image from memory. A literal version, he believed, would have been so detailed as to be incomprehensible.
Finally, Jed Perl on Matisse:
In the 1920s he had reinvigorated what was by then a cloying if not downright disreputable vision of a woman as an idol or an odalisque by using the old romantic clichés with reckless panache, as if they were fireworks or maybe even hand grenades that might go off at any moment. … I don’t think Matisse was ever able to decide whether the women he drew and painted were pinups or goddesses.
Up next: Perl’s book, Authority and Freedom, on (or against) the politicization of art.
BONUS CONTENT: I talk about Groundhog Day with Justin and Laura Khoo on Cows in the Field.