Reader's Digest: January 6, 2024
I don’t think of myself as a “prose poem person.” I like (some) poetry but I am rarely a fan of the lyric essay or its relatives. I’ve made an exception, though, for Nina MacLaughlin’s Winter Solstice, on the basis of a sparkling review by Helen Treseler in the LARB:
Like Joyce or Virgil, MacLaughlin plays with a full rock band—casting a spell with her alliteration (“fat flakes,” “wide wings,” “glittering ... galactic”), rhymes and slant rhymes (“low ... snow,” “black ... thwap”), assonance (“croaking ... throats,” “inside ... light”), and expertly varied pacing. Riding this sonic riff, she segues from the guttural cries of paired swans to the lovers’ midday tryst, inviting the reader to follow her run of associations. This is poetry disguised as prose…
Treseler’s description brought to mind one of the few lyric essays I have loved. At some indeterminate age—maybe eight years’ old?—I stumbled on A Child’s Christmas in Wales and was awed by the sentences, like nothing I had ever read before. I don’t think I’ve returned to it since, but Dylan Thomas still enchants:
All the Christmases roll down towards the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged, fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out come Mrs. Prothero and the firemen.
From poetry and prose to painting: here is Julian Barnes on Claude Monet, in the LRB:
In seventeen years it will be the 200th anniversary of Monet’s birth, yet he might still be the best way to introduce someone young to art—and not just modern art. This is partly because of what he didn’t paint. He didn’t do historical or religious subjects: no need to know what is happening at the Annunciation (let alone the Assumption of the Virgin) or what Oedipus said to the Sphinx or why so many naked women are attending the death of Sardanapalus. He never painted a literary scene for which you need to know the story. None of his paintings refers to an earlier painting. He was the first great artist since the Renaissance never to paint a nude. He painted portraits but it didn’t matter (except to him) whom they were of. You don’t need to know the history of art to appreciate a Monet picture because he wasn’t much interested in the history of art himself (though he revered Watteau and Delacroix and Velázquez). He had even less interest in the science of visual perception. His art was secular and apolitical.
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And the final, central thing (as with the art of most of the Impressionists): it is cheerful. Truthful, deeply truthful, the result of long looking, but a cheerful truth.
And finally, to music, not so cheerful. In a recent New Yorker, John Adams wrote about Jeremy Eichler on musical monuments to horror, and about his own composition, written for the victims of 9/11, “On the Transmigration of Souls.” He concludes with his response to the response of listeners when it debuted with the New York Philharmonic:
What remain in my mind are the appreciative but puzzled faces of the families of the victims who attended the performance. They were the ones I really cared about. “They didn’t get it,” I said to myself in remorse. The breach between their experience and mine, no matter how hard I’d tried to close it, remained unbridgeable.