outside each of our bedroom doors this morning, and no one in the flat will admit to it. Wasn't me, I can assure you -- I would have left bottles of gin. No, everyone's been shuffling furtively around in their bathrobes, avoiding eye contact and slipping round corners (or behind the drying rack -- well done, Matt). I have my suspicions, but.. I also have a chocolate egg.
Nice roundup of foreign fiction in the Times today -- looks like Tanenhaus may have scored his brownie after all. Must confess, either every one of these books really is just the cat's pajamas, or Anderson Tepper has some Jedi mind trick workin' in his reviews of them. These books look great.
Dongwon, you are, in fact, the first person to send me this, for which you win the "Oh, How Much I Wish You Had Not Reminded Me of Thesis Class" Prize. Congratulations, sort of! (I wrote my undergrad thesis on Hopper and ekphrastic poetry, folks, and for the seven of us that made it through to the end (started with ten in September), it was a carnival of blood, toil, tears, and ink from the first page to the last -- or, in Gloria's case, the LSAT).
Warning: cranky and informed opinion approaching. Detour to the end of the post if you please. Avis Berman's write-up for the Times is relevant and respectful, and I acknowledge that for this article she has had the distinct pleasure of distilling her new book into a scant 1500 words, but I start to get jittery when I come across passages like this one, in her closing paragraph, on Nighthawks (1942):
How did that hard-faced couple, the single man and the counterman find
their way in? How will they get out? Like characters in a crime movie
or existential fiction, Hopper's people are trapped in a world that
offers no escape.
Yes, and Hopper criticism is trapped in a world that offers no escape, either, a world replete with tired cliches (get it?) and uninspired forays into narrative accounts of his canvases. I'm sorry, but you see this brand of thought everywhere. Everywhere. Make no mistake -- I'm just as culpable as the rest. The central argument of my thesis was that Hopper depicts incomplete narratives in his paintings, which encourage completion or resolution in ekphrastic poetry -- and I really do believe this, even now. (Translation: when Berman writes, "Hopper had been freeze-framing dramas for years in his glimpses of private scenarios played out between individuals," I finish her sentence by saying that poets and fiction writers, but mostly poets, un-freeze those dramas and allow them to play out as they envision. As Wallace Stegner would have said, they write to satisfy "the inevitabilities of the situation they have started in motion.")
But in looking back on my work, as well as keeping up with what people are thinking about Hopper (this means you, Tate Modern!), I've become increasingly dissatisfied with the critical consensus at play. This means: I do not want interrogations of loneliness, or even (as Berman rightly points out) solitude. I do not want explorations into Americana, as a book on Hopper's relationship to New York will in no way be able to avoid. Nor do I want any exhausted discussions of realism, whatever that means anymore. I want a kind of criticism that is comfortable with looking at a canvas such as People in the Sun (1960) and -- while perfectly licensed to offer exegeses of the lone reading figure and the way he is cropped (punished?) by the frame, or show how the lateral composition extending beyond that frame recurs in other canvases by Hopper, or discuss the tension (here notable) between light and shadow -- while licensed to do all of these things, is much happier saying: this is a weird painting. Hopper has given us something profoundly strange.
Find me something 'realist' about that painting. Please. I beg you.
Okay, the rant is over, you can take your construction hats off now. Sometimes I wonder, though, if too many art historians have been writing about
Hopper over the past fifty years, and maybe we should let the preschoolers have a go. But enough. In other news, I'm flying back to the States this week, to Texas for a conference and thence to home for a bit, so posting will be relatively light for the next wee while. I trust you'll have the weather all sparkly and warm for me when I return, won't you? Guys? Hello?
...where'd you all go?
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