Wednesday Links
The first review of Flannery O’Connor’s “Why Do the Heathen Rage?,” a history of curtains, revisiting the Ruskin-Whistler feud, AI and deconstruction, and more.
Good morning! I get what Greil Marcus is trying to say in this essay, but, boy, does he sound insufferable throughout most of it: “I realized I had a choice as a writer: make the world bigger and more interesting and live in that world, and find a life’s work, or shrink everything down to your own crabbed and paltry self, hang on for years conning editors and publishers and yourself, and find your life’s a lie.” He chose the former, he says, and I guess we’ll just have to trust him. More:
There was the day in 2013 when I walked into the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and stopped in front of Jackson Pollock’s 1947 Alchemy, one of his first poured paintings, one of his first experiments, or proofs, that by practicing an arcane art you really could turn not merely a few cans of lead paint into millions of dollars, but turn something anyone might have in a garage into something no one could have predicted and that had anything been different on the day it was made would never have existed at all. I had walked past it many times before, but this day I stopped. I stood up close, and started looking at it, and then realized I couldn’t. There was too much there, too much going on, too much movement, like the montage in Sunrise, which you can’t see all at once either. I began to see, or think I did, that just as I can only remember Sunrise on a square screen, now I could begin to discern the intention hidden in the chance.
The whole thing is an exercise in self-congratulation. He does reflect on the religious nature of art, which is worth reading, if you can make it that far.
In Current, Katy Carl reviews Flannery O’Connor’s unfinished and (until now) unpublished novel, Why Do the Heathen Rage?:
In this unfinished work, now available to the public in its first edition, O’Connor strives to grow beyond her comic gifts. She seeks to develop the latent strengths of her Dostoyevskian religious consciousness, chronicling life after the violent moment of grace while also handling social questions in earnest.
O’Connor died in August 1964, before she could finish these larger things she needed to do. What little she had made of Why Do the Heathen Rage?—fewer than a dozen disjointed vignettes—lay hidden in an obscure Georgia archive of her unpublished papers for more than fifty years. Thanks to the work of scholar Jessica Hooten Wilson, the unfinished manuscript of O’Connor’s last novel now appears for the first time in book form, together with Wilson’s own contextual framework and textual commentary.
To open this new book is to know O’Connor in a new way and grow to love her even more, despite her acknowledged flaws. In the central character of Walter Tilman—an intellectual trapped on his family’s farm, Meadow Oaks, not unlike O’Connor trapped at Andalusia—we find her searing critical wit (“Hysteria affects syntax”) alongside her tenderness rooted in the love of God (“The letter in his hand was an invitation, a plea, a cry from the heart”). We also see, through Walter, how the effects of this tenderness could be cooled by her own certainty of being right (“I’m leaving my death to humanity, so they can learn”).
This is the first review of the work. I am looking forward to read what other critics have to say about it.
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