"When you loosen yourself, as I tried to, from all the obvious delusions—religion, ideology, Communism—you’re still left with the myth of your own goodness. Which is the final delusion."

From "I Married a Communist" by Philip Roth. 

That's very close to the end of the book, which I have now finished reading... in case you're wondering how many times is Althouse going to blog quotes from this book. I'm done... unless something else I'm blogging reminds me of something that fits right into the stream of consciousness....

Actually, no. I'm going to give you one more: "The excitement in marriage is the fidelity. If that idea doesn’t excite you, you have no business being married."

Both quotes are said by a character, and not the first-person character who represents Philip Roth or the main character who in some ways represents Roth (because he's married to a beautiful actress who betrays him by writing a memoir about their marriage). These quotes are both said by another character who tells much of the story (so that there are 2 main first-person voices, the Roth character who's usually just there listening and this other guy who's doing most of the talking).  

So — does Roth want us to believe these 2 fascinatingly challenging statements? Do we all cling above all to the idea of our own goodness, and is it a delusion? How exciting is sexual fidelity and is that particular form of excitement the sine qua non of marriage?

The novelist, by using the voices of multiple characters, has so much freedom to express exciting ideas. Perhaps the excitement in fiction is the infidelity to a single point of view and if that infidelity doesn’t excite you, you have no business being a novelist.

For the Annals of Lateral Thinking: Ohio makes vaccinating into a million-dollar lottery.

Governor Mike DeWine announces on Twitter: 

Two weeks from tonight on May 26th, we will announce a winner of a separate drawing for adults who have received at least their first dose of the vaccine. This announcement will occur each Wednesday for five weeks, and the winner each Wednesday will receive one million dollars.

The pool of names for the drawing will be derived from the Ohio Secretary of State’s publicly available voter registration database. Further, we will make available a webpage for people to sign up for the drawings if they are not in a database we are using. The Ohio Department of Health will be the sponsoring agency for the drawings, and the Ohio Lottery will conduct them. The money will come from existing federal Coronavirus Relief Funds.

To be eligible to win, you must be at least 18 years of age or older on the day of the drawing. You must be an Ohio resident. And, you must be vaccinated before the drawing. We will have further, specific details tomorrow and in the days ahead.

I know that some may say, “DeWine, you’re crazy! This million-dollar drawing idea of yours is a waste of money.” But truly, the real waste at this point in the pandemic -- when the vaccine is readily available to anyone who wants it -- is a life lost to COVID-19.

You could spend $5 million on ads cajoling people — or shaming them — into getting vaccinated. One way or another, it costs money to complete the vaccination project. The great thing about the lottery idea is that it's an effort to reach minds that are not primarily oriented to science — people who are emotional and transrational.

Am I making up the word "transrational"? I had to look it up. I can't credit myself with coinage. There's a whole Wikipedia article, but let's see if it means what I — in my thwarted word-coining effort — had in mind:

Transrational... refers to the experience of phenomena occurring within the natural universe where information and experiences does not readily fit into the typical cause and effect structure; the kinds of experience that are often dismissed as unfathomable or superstitious. It differs from the ‘supernatural’ and the ‘rational’ in that it neither directly controverts nor affirms rational reason. A transrational experience is not pathological. One of the most popular examples of transrational experiences are individuals witnessing blessed/evil omens which turn out to become true, or feelings of extremely intense dread which helped staved an individual from disastrous catastrophes, even if the individual has zilch prior knowledge or context....

People are often so afraid of being considered "pre-rational" that they avoid and deny the possibility of the transrational....

Well, this particular Wikipedia article isn't written according to the usual Wikipedia standards. It's more like a blog post. There's an effort to flip rationality into irrationality: People cling to rationality out of fear. That's not an entirely irrational thing to say, but it's just interesting speculation. I happen to think many people irrationally believe in their own rationality, but the answer to that isn't to become "transrational," but to work endlessly on the rationality of your rationality, which is not easy.

The Wikipedia article ends with 6 examples of the transrational, beginning with this:

[After an account of human communication with animals and stones] “Of course, many of us shudder when we think of some of our companions who do talk with inanimate objects or invisible friends. Yet even here, I think that psychologists’ scholarly prejudices have often overcome their common sense and analytical skills. The point is not whether people talk to animals and plants, but the validity of the messages that are given and received.”

In that light, may I recommend the Haruki Murakami story "Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey"? It's in this new collection. A man encounters a monkey who talks to him at some length — about how he learned to speak, about how his only sexual attraction is to human females, and about how he fulfills his sexual needs by "stealing" part of the name of each woman he loves. But can the man tell anyone about the talking monkey?

Why try if no one would ever believe me? People would only end up saying I was just “making up stuff again.” I also couldn’t figure out what format to use. It was way too bizarre to write about it as if it were real, and as long as I couldn’t provide proof—proof, that is, that the monkey actually existed—no one would ever buy it. That said, if I wrote about it as fiction, it lacked a clear focus, or a point. I could well imagine, even before I started writing about it, my editor’s puzzled expression after reading the manuscript, and the question that would follow: “I hesitate to ask you, since you’re the author, but—what’s the theme of this story supposed to be?” Theme? Can’t say there is one. It’s just about an old monkey who speaks human language, in a tiny town in Gunma Prefecture, who scrubs guests’ backs in the hot springs, enjoys cold beer, falls in love with human women, and steals their names. Where’s the theme in that? Or moral?

That's not how the story ends. There's more, and it's quite satisfying.

"I was accustomed to thinking of most novels the way Nabokov wanted me to, or as Flaubert did—he once wrote that the most beautiful books depend 'on nothing external . . . just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for its support.'"

"Then something happened to change my thinking. I realized that the real world is full of people who, presumably, have feelings about being appropriated for someone else’s run at the Times best-seller list.... Is moving someone down the existence scale from 'human person' to 'character' anything like murder?... I thought that I recognized my past in a stranger’s words... Yet perhaps I was exaggerating the similarities, getting paranoid, self-absorbed.... Who owns a story? In writing my original piece, I lifted the lives of my parents and sister.... If Hall did use my text in some way, perhaps she only turned me from a superpowered narrator back into a character... 'My'... ends up a desiccated, unlovable, insect-like creature; her twin sister dies young.... Interrogating [my] anger now, I find it fascinating. It scans as an authorial fury. My essay was not just a personal history; it was an attempt to reckon with literary and societal representations of anorexia..."

From "Who Owns a Story? I was reviewing a novel. Then I found myself in it" by Katy Waldman (in The New Yorker). This article is from 2019. It came up in a search I was doing this morning (about a book that's mentioned in a different part of the essay).

In asking "who owns a story," Waldman isn't asking for a discussion of copyright. It's about art and ethics. Personally, I've been somebody else's fictional character. More than once. It's a complex matter to be used like that. You may enthusiastically support it, at least some of the time. You might want your story told... but perhaps not quite like that. And if it's told once, is it still there for you to tell it? 

In Waldman's case, she wrote something that another author apparently soaked up as raw material and transformed into a new work of art. Waldman never authorized or encouraged this other person, but she had put her experience out there to be absorbed by other people and to become part of their understanding of the world. Their understanding can't stay locked inside your understanding. And, of course, Waldman reappropriated everything and made a new piece of art out of it, the New Yorker essay, "Who Owns a Story?"

The book I was doing a search on is "The Human Stain" by Philip Roth. Roth used a real-life incident that happened to his friend and spun it out into an elaborate fictional story. The book shows a friendship between 2 men who are essentially Roth and his real-life friend. In the book, the friend insists that Roth write a book about what happened to him, and the Roth character says no. But the book is the Roth character's book about the friend character, but it's not the book the friend character wanted written. It's something else entirely, the book the Roth character (and Roth) wanted to write, not the book the friend character wanted written.

FROM THE EMAIL: Bothsidesnow writes: 

A few years ago I dived into the six or seven volume work My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard. The author takes the narrative of his life and those around him -- his father, his uncle, his brother, girl friends and wife and fashions a novel/long essay/work of some type of literature. By the time he writes the last volume, the first volume has been published, and the last volume in part details the reactions of the living people whose lives he has captured and published for the world to see. The first volume, in my view, is essentially a tale of a monster, with overtones of the Grimm brothers and other works of the literature of monsters. The monster is Karl Ove's father, who dies at the end of volume one in grotesque circumstances, so never gets to read the work. Karl Ove, before he publishes Volume One, sends the manuscript to his brother and uncle and invites or at least indicates he will accept reactions. His uncle responds in a brief email with the heading "I have been raped." [This is from memory] His wife, after reading the manuscript, is admitted to a psychiatric ward for several weeks. [Again, from memory.]

Apparently in Scandinavian literary culture, there is now a somewhat extensive body of works by authors who write similar works based on their own life, family, and friends.

Knausgaard is reportedly not a common last name in Norway, in fact, only one family bears the name, so there was never any doubt about the subject. The first volume was purchased by an astonishingly large % of Norwegians.

"For a long time, Roth kept two small signs near his desk. One read, 'Stay Put,' the other, 'No Optional Striving.'"

"Optional striving appears to be a category that includes everything save writing, exercise, sleep, and solitude.... 'That act of passionate and minute memory is what binds your days together—days, weeks, months—and living with that is my greatest pleasure. I think for any novelist it has to be the greatest pleasure, that’s why you’re doing it—to make the daily connections. I do it by living a very austere life. I don’t experience it as being austere in any negative sense, but you have to be a bit like a soldier with a barracks life, or whatever you want to call it. That is to say, I rule everything else out of my life. I didn’t always, but I do now.... I have to tell you that I don’t believe in death, I don’t experience the time as limited. I know it is, but I don’t feel it.... I could live three hours or I could live thirty years, I don’t know. Time doesn’t prey upon my mind. It should, but it doesn’t. I don’t know yet what this will all add up to, and it no longer matters, because there’s no stopping.'"

From a 2000 article in The New Yorker, "Into the Clear/Philip Roth puts turbulence in its place." 

I'm reading that because the recent talk of the new — and out of print! — biography of Roth led me to read his novel "The Human Stain," which came out in 2000, so I was reading contemporaneous articles about that. 

I chose that quote for blogging because it's about heroic isolation and dedication to writing — writing and staying alive. Here's a passage that I found in "The Human Stain" that goes into the same subject:

Abnegation of society, abstention from distraction, a self-imposed separation from every last professional yearning and social delusion and cultural poison and alluring intimacy, a rigorous reclusion such as that practiced by religious devouts who immure themselves in caves or cells or isolated forest huts, is maintained on stuff more obdurate than I am made of. I had lasted alone just five years—five years of reading and writing a few miles up Madamaska Mountain in a pleasant two-room cabin situated between a small pond at the back of my place and, through the scrub across the dirt road, a ten-acre marsh where the migrating Canada geese take shelter each evening and a patient blue heron does its solitary angling all summer long. The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions; the trick to living alone up here, away from all agitating entanglements, allurements, and expectations, apart especially from one’s own intensity, is to organize the silence, to think of its mountaintop plenitude as capital, silence as wealth exponentially increasing. The encircling silence as your chosen source of advantage and your only intimate. The trick is to find sustenance in (Hawthorne again) “the communications of a solitary mind with itself.” The secret is to find sustenance in people like Hawthorne, in the wisdom of the brilliant deceased.

I put 2 things in boldface to connect them for the purpose of contemplating whether they are the same thing.

"Can only have been painted by a madman."

Words by Edvard Munch in tiny letters in the most famous version of "The Scream," The Art Newspaper reports. 

Can we be sure that the artist wrote these words? Mai Britt Guleng, the curator of Old Masters and modern paintings at the National Museum of Norway, says yes. First, the handwriting matches up to other samples of Munch's handwriting. Second, the writing is tiny:

“Had this been an act of vandalism by another person, the size of the letters would probably have been larger and the whole text more striking when you stand in front of the work."

Third — though I think this is a fact that could cut either way — the words are not painted over.

“There has been strangely little attention to the inscription.... some researchers have taken it for granted that it was written by Munch, but they haven’t discussed why and when. From 2008 it has been generally accepted that the writing was made by another person, without any discussion at all."

Guleng notes that Munch heard criticism of his work and was "confronted about his mental health" on one occasion. Why would that motivate him to write on his own painting? That's more interesting than the question whether he or some vandal wrote it. Let's assume Munch wrote it. Why did he write it? Don't assume he was judging and doubting himself. There are other possibilities: he was satirizing his critics, he was inviting us to contemplate whether only madmen paint like that, or he was celebrating himself as a madman.

***

This is the 9th post with the tag "The Scream."

The oldest post with the tag is "Shimmering shining shriek/scream" from April 2005. Excerpt:

Later, I watched the DVD of "After Hours"...

Paul [looking at Kiki's papier maché sculpture]: It reminds me of that Edvard Munch painting. What is it? "The Shriek"?

Kiki: "The Scream."

Googling for a picture for "The Scream," to illustrate this post [that was already] about how things go together, I hit a Reuters story from one hour ago, saying they've just today arrested a man for the theft of "The Scream." (The painting was stolen last August.) I love that feeling of things seeming to converge. I know it's only an illusion.

What I wanted to learn.

I wanted to take the "Master Class" from David Sedaris, but I couldn't bring myself to pay $99 for a subscription to the app until I saw that they also had a class from Billy Collins, a poet I've liked ever since I randomly picked a book off a high shelf at Paul's Books and read one poem.

Both Sedaris and Collins, I see now, begin their writing by noticing some little thing that is present in their own life. Both teach that you ought to carry a notebook with you everywhere and jot down these little things as they happen.

That's all writing. Of course, I wanted to learn about writing, but what else? Master Class has 80+ famous people teaching how they each do their thing. I've watched 2 others, neither in the writing category. I watched Bobbi Brown, who teaches about makeup — the kind of makeup that honors whatever face you happen to have. (You do not need to "contour" your nose or "overline" your lips.) And I watched Alice Waters, the restaurateur, who says you really need to start your cooking by getting in touch with your local vegetables.

Do you see the theme of these 4, which I chose without thinking of a theme? The theme occurred to me as I was doing my sunrise run this morning. I don't listen to headphoned-in music anymore when I run. I listen to the immediate environment and let thoughts rise up from within my own head, and I got where I could see how these 4 choices represented a single desire on my part. All these lessons have to do with awareness of what is right here.

When I got back to my car, the radio was on MSNBC, which I'd listened to on my little drive out to my running place. I'd put up with Joe Scarborough angsting about Republicans being less likely  to wear masks than Democrats — what is wrong with them?! — but I didn't want that infecting me on the ride home. I clicked over to music. It was Neil Young:

Come a little bit closer
Hear what I have to say
Just like children sleeping
We could dream this night away
But there's a full moon rising
Let's go dancing in the light
We know where the music's playing
Let's go out and feel the night

Neil was getting what was for him an unusual idea: To go out and experience the moon.



I got the idea a while back to get out and experience the sunrise, to go running in the light.

"I am from provincial people, though some were academics and scientists and musicians. There was very little money, some religion..."

"... much education, some unrealized talent, some actualized talent, and a strong sense that the world was simultaneously beautiful and unwelcoming. My strongest memories of childhood are of quiet interior spaces as well as the outdoors, full of mud and bugs and us kids running everywhere. I miss running everywhere. It was flight in both senses."

From a New Yorker interview with the writer Lorrie Moore.

The last question in the interview is about something Moore wrote in the New Yorker last month about finding Trump's voice "reassuring." I blogged about that here. The interviewer, the New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman, informs her that "The response on Twitter was censorious" and asks her if she felt "misunderstood." She says she felt "misread" and, in fact, "Not really read at all."

I only meant to present some self-mocking, cock-eyed optimism.... I was a little rambling and wrote past the assigned word count, so things had to be removed from every paragraph. But the point at the beginning is that, if you are in the next room, feeling mildly deranged, and can’t hear the words, the potus can sometimes sound like Merv Griffin or Mel Tormé: one hears a crooner’s croon. This is not praise. This is noting a sound... Twitter’s feeding frenzies seem a display of people with obscene amounts of time on their hands, yet a disinclination to read in any real way. And it seems possible that this one was triggered by the right to get the left to eat its own....

ADDED: The 7th comment at my blog post about Moore's meditation on Trump's voice — from commenter eric — was "She's about to be cancelled and will soon apologize."

AND: If you write about politics and don't say predictable things in an obvious way, you will be misread and read in a way that's well described as not really read at all. But that makes it even more important to keep writing where you don't belong, in that world that is simultaneously beautiful and unwelcoming.

Has Sculpture Become Just Another Pretty Face?

BERLIN — Sometimes on a whim I stop into the Bode Museum here to commune with a tiny clay sculpture of John the Baptist.
It’s in a corner of a nearly always empty room, a bone-white bust, pretty and as androgynous as mid-1970s Berlin-addled David Bowie. The saint’s upturned eyes glow in the hard light through tall windows. Attributed to the 15th-century Luccan artist Matteo Civitali, the sculpture is all exquisite ecstasy and languor.
Sometimes it’s not the saint I check on but a sculptured portrait in the same room of the banker Filippo Strozzi — stern like a Roman emperor, the face of rectitude and power — by Benedetto da Maiano, Civitali’s contemporary. Then I usually climb the stairs to admire Houdon’s bust of Gluck, the composer, and ogle a towering pair of craggy German knights, relics of Renaissance pageantry made of painted wood, each taller than the N.B.A. star Dirk Nowitzki.
Mostly, though, I go to the Bode for the silence.

Like a sentry commanding the northern tip of Berlin’s Museum Island, its back turned to the busier Pergamon Museum, the Neues Museum, the Altes Museum and the Alte Nationalgalerie, the Bode seems to attract just a few handfuls of visitors a day. Some go there to see the paintings, coins and Byzantine art. The sculpture rooms are mostly abandoned.

Is it me, or do we seem to have a problem with sculpture today? I don’t mean contemporary sculpture, whose fashionable stars (see Koons, Murakami et alia) pander to our appetite for spectacle and whatever’s new. I don’t mean ancient or even non-Western sculpture, either. I mean traditional European sculpture — celebrities like Bernini and Rodin aside — and American sculpture, too: the enormous universe of stuff we come across in churches and parks, at memorials and in museums like the Bode. The stuff Barnett Newman, the Abstract Expressionist painter, notoriously derided as objects we bump into when backing up to look at a painting.

A few minutes’ walk from the Bode, the Friedrichswerdersche Kirche, the rebuilt neo-Gothic former church designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel in the 1830s, houses its own sublime assortment of 19th-century sculpture. It’s usually even emptier than the Bode, and it is free to boot. I’ll occasionally spend an hour or so there, feeling small and unimportant before the portraits of Kant and the great German archaeologist Johann Winckelmann. Except for the doleful guards, I rarely encounter another living soul.

I grew up with the smells of plaster dust and clay in my mother’s sculpture studio on Third Avenue. Making a figure out of stone or metal retains its childlike wonder for me. But sculpture skeptics from Leonardo through Hegel and Diderot have cultivated our prejudice against the medium. “Carib art,” is how Baudelaire described sculpture, meaning that even the suavest, most sophisticated works of unearthly virtuosity by Enlightenment paragons like Canova and Thorvaldsen were tainted by the medium’s primitive, cultish origins.

Racism notwithstanding, Baudelaire had a point. Sculpture does still bear something of the burden of its commemorative and didactic origins. It’s too literal, too direct, too steeped in religious ceremony and too complex for a historically amnesiac culture. We prefer the multicolored distractions of illusionism on flat surfaces, flickering in a movie theater or digitized on our laptops and smartphones, or painted on canvas. The marketplace ratifies our myopia, making headlines for megamillion-dollar sales of old master and Impressionist pictures but rarely for premodern sculptures.

Critics bow to fashion and a legacy of lazy disdain, largely avoiding the topic — I’ve done it myself, so I know — and museums only perpetuate the cycle, offering a steady flow of Botticelli, Monet and Rembrandt exhibitions, before which we genuflect like medieval pilgrims praying before sculptured shrines. But sculpture shows that might broaden our horizons, being costly and difficult to mount, are almost rarer than genuine newly discovered Michelangelos.

In an age of special effects, we may also simply no longer know how to feel awe at the sight of sculptured faces by the German genius Tilman Riemenschneider or before a bronze statue by Donatello. We can’t see past the raw materiality and subject matter. Never mind that Donatello may have been the greatest creative genius until Picasso; he long ago got lapped in the public’s imagination by Madame Tussaud, who has given way to “Avatar” in 3-D and Alexander McQueen’s trippy costumed mannequins.

I read the other day that the Metropolitan Museum had decided to stay open late to accommodate the bewildering crowds for its McQueen extravaganza. Mass hysteria is how a friend described it to me. It clearly became the height of fashion for people to stand in the endless line, if only to have been able to say that they stood in the endless line. How many of those people, I asked myself, stopped to look at any of the Met’s sculptures while they were there, or ever had?
How wonderful, I also thought.

I have the Bode to myself.