Hubert and Jan van Eyck: Extremely Close and Incredibly Beautiful

Thanks to a grant from the Getty Foundation, anyone can now examine in stunning detail-- up close and at astonishing magnification-- the splendid Ghent Altarpiece. The high-definition digital images of Hubert and Jan van Eyck's masterpiece, The Mystic Lamb (1432), have been made freely available at a newly established interactive website.

As reported by Melissa Abraham (February 24, 2012, getty.edu), the Ghent Altarpiece recently underwent emergency conservation at the Villa Chapel in St. Bavo's Cathedral, Ghent, Belgium. At that time, the polyptych was removed from its glass-enclosed setting and dismantled, an unusual event which provided an extraordinary opportunity for scholars to study and document the altarpiece and for professional photographers to produce high-resolution images of the work's individual panels. Subsequently, the photographs were stitched together to create the digital images now available on the interactive website. That site is said to contain 100 billion pixels.

Further details about the images, the team who developed the website, and the decision to use an open-source approach are available in Abraham's report as well as at the site itself.

Super-Vapid Tuesday

The New York Times today (the morning after so-called "Super Tuesday") had an excellent editorial on the depressing Republican primary and the obnoxious positions taken by the candidates. Here are a few excerpts:

"Long before Super Tuesday, the Republican Party had cemented itself on the distant right of American politics, with a primary campaign that has been relentlessly nasty, divisive and vapid.... This country has serious economic problems and profound national security challenges. But the Republican candidates are so deep in the trenches of cultural and religious warfare that they aren’t offering any solutions....There are differences [between Romney and Santorum]. Mr. Santorum is usually more extreme in his statements than Mr. Romney, especially in his intolerance of gay and lesbian Americans and his belief that religion — his religion — should define policy and politics. Mr. Santorum’s remark about wanting to vomit when he reread John F. Kennedy’s remarkable speech in 1960 about the separation of church and state is one of the lowest points of modern-day electoral politics....
Mr. Romney has been slightly more temperate. But, in his desperation to prove himself to the ultraright, he has joined in the attacks on same-sex marriage, abortion and even birth control. He has never called Mr. Santorum on his more bigoted rants. Neither politician is offering hard-hit American workers anything beyond long discredited trickle-down economics, more tax cuts for the rich, a weakening of the social safety net and more of the deregulation that nearly crashed the system in 2008."

The editorial goes on to berate the candidates for their mindless and vicious attacks on Obama and for their potentially explosive position on Israel and Iran:

"There is also no space between Mr. Romney and Mr. Santorum in the way they distort reality to attack Mr. Obama for everything he says, no matter how sensible, and oppose everything he wants, no matter how necessary.... They also have peddled the canard that the president is weak on foreign policy. Mr. Romney on Tuesday called President Obama 'America’s most feckless president since Carter.' Never mind that Mr. Obama ordered the successful raid to kill Osama bin Laden and has pummeled Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders, all without the Republicans’ noxious dead-or-alive swagger. Now, for the sake of scoring political points, Mr. Romney, Mr. Santorum and Newt Gingrich, who is hanging on only thanks to one backer’s millions, seem determined to push Israel toward a reckless attack on Iran."

The entire editorial should be widely read. One wonders how relatively sane Republicans (are there any left?) have been responding to this despicable primary campaign. If such temperate right-wingers do still exist, perhaps they will demonstrate their sanity at the ballot box in November.

The Business of Coincidence

Coincidentally, in the recent past I've run across a number of references to the subject of coincidence in fact and fiction. But perhaps it's no coincidence. I'm probably extra-sensitive to the issue because of my own use of the device in a novel I'm currently writing. Here are some of the comments I've seen:

The narrator in Raul Ruiz's film Mysteries of Lisbon observes that "in life, there are events and coincidences of such extravagance that no novelist would ever dare to invent them." Ruiz (or, one should say, the novelist who wrote the book on which Ruiz's movie is based) does of course dare to invent precisely such extravagant coincidences.

W.G Sebald, in an interview at Queens College in 2001, wondered about the function of coincidence-- how he/we use it to make sense out of nonsense:

"I think it's this whole business of coincidence, which is very prominent in my writing. I hope it's not obtrusive. But, you know, it does come up in the first book, in "Vertigo," a good deal. I don't particularly hold with parapsychological explanations of one kind or another, or Jungian theories about the subject. I find those rather tedious. But it seemed to me an instance that illustrates that we somehow need to make sense of our nonsensical existence. You meet somebody who has the same birthday as you—the odds are one in three hundred and sixty-five, not actually all that amazing. But if you like the person then immediately this takes on more . . . and so we build on it, and I think all our philosophical systems, all our systems of our creed, all constructions, even the technological worlds, are built in that way, in order to make some sort of sense, when there isn't, as we all know." (from The New Yorker, August 30, 2001)

Julian Barnes is not averse to using coincidence in his fiction. Or to wryly commenting on it. Geoffrey Braithwaite, the narrator of Flaubert's Parrot may or may not speak for Barnes. Braithwaite, who is full of snap opinions about life and literature, "doesn't much care for coincidences" in either. "There's something spooky about them; you sense momentarily what it must be like to live in an ordered, God-run universe, with Himself looking over your shoulder and helpfully dropping coarse hints about a cosmic plan... I prefer to feel that things are chaotic..." But what snappish Braithwaite finds particularly annoying is that "in the more bookish areas of English middle-class society, whenever a coincidence occurs there is usually someone at hand to comment, 'It's just like Anthony Powell.'"

As for coincidences in books, Braithwaite calls them a lazy stratagem. "There's something cheap and sentimental about the device; it can't help always seeming aesthetically gimcrack." Examples he cites: the troubador who passes by just in time to rescue the girl from a hedgerow scuffle; the sudden but convenient Dickensian benefactors; the neat shipwreck on a foreign shore which reunites siblings and lovers-- in other words, all the staples of old romance fiction.

But, as Braithwaite does not mention, coincidence is also central to the even older traditional kinship reunion plot-- what some critics have called the most powerful use of coincidence, as in the Oedipus story.

For modernists, and post-modernists, Braithwaite does have a way of making coincidences acceptable: call them ironies, he says. The modern mode. In that form, who could be against it? "And yet," he continues, "I wonder if the wittiest, most resonant irony isn't just a well-brushed, well-educated coincidence." Which is presumably Barnes's own ironic opinion on the subject.

China Mieville: Evading the Boundaries of Genre

The genre of China Miéville's The City and the City is not easy to pin down. Though the novel can be read as a dark, quasi-realist police procedural, it can also be viewed as a dystopic urban fantasy. I prefer to see it as both simultaneously. Or, better yet, as a terrific instance of the Genre sans Frontières movement. Miéville himself has said that he considers his book to be, above all, a "crime novel," yet he does not abjure the sci-fi side of his fiction, nor will the reader be likely to ignore the fantastical elements of the narrative.

The novel's hero, Tyador Borlu, is a not unfamiliar noir figure-- a downbeat detective, burdened by moral issues, personal failings and the frustrations of trying to operate effectively under the oppressive tyranny of an amoral and dangerous bureaucracy. Borlu's homicide case presents unusual difficulties-- primarily that the detective works in a strangely divided world. The setting is an urban area split into two overlapping yet distinctly separate cities-- Beszel and Ui Qoma. At one level, this separateness can be seen as an analogue of the familiar income and/or ethnic-based divisions common to urban existence. And Breach, the Big Brother-like institution that enforces the geographic and psychological separation of the two cities, could be interpreted as the over-arching police power of a totalitarian state. But the city divisions are uncanny and Breach's powers seem to operate in a fantastical milieu rather than a neo-realist world. The overlapping area between the two cities-- Breach's home base, as it were-- is an opaque region of the magical. And when Borlu, late in the story, is absorbed into that region, the novel turns echt-sci-fi.

The City and the City's ambiguous genre and its multiple uses of doubling have inspired some to refer to the book's "interstitiality." Miéville seems a bit uncomfortable with that fashionable characterization. "Interstitiality is a tremendous buzzword," he says. It's a theme that is "simultaneously genuinely interesting and potentially quite useful, and also a terrible cliché, so if you're going to use it, it helps to be at least respectfully skeptical about the wilder claims of some of its theoretical partisans..." Rather, he likes the idea of a "shared terrain" between the fantastic and the realistic noir.

Which may simply be another way of saying that his fiction thrives within the non-category of the Genre sans Frontières....

Opera Starved: The Berlusconi Effect

I've just read Alex Ross's downbeat report on the "lean season" of opera performances this summer in Berlusconi's Italy (The New Yorker, July 25, 2011). Ross laments the Italian government's "indifference, if not outright contempt, toward opera and other traditional genres." Apparently the sharp slash in government funding is having a visibly depressing effect on productions throughout the country and creating a widespread sense of insecurity in the Italian opera world. Sad, sad news, ameliorated only by Ross's nice account of Ricardo Muti's protest at La Scala, a modest success story that should be widely read.

Of all the performances Ross attended, only Monteverdi's L'Incoronazione di Poppea at Florence's Maggio Musicale seemed to impress him. The production had a "well-fed look" and "a degree of international glamour missing from other events." This he attributes to the participation of Susan Graham and "a lustrous cast," but also to the members of Alan Curtis's ensemble Il Complesso Barocco. What especially delighted me was the parenthetical aside in which Ross gives a tip of the hat to Donna Leon, the best-selling writer of Guido Brunetti mysteries. For years, she has been the generous patron of what Ross calls "Curtis's high-class Baroque ventures." Thus, in a season of starvation, a crime writer's royalties came to the rescue. Brava for Leon!

Ross's comments on the Monteverdi opera reminded me of the memorable Jonathan Miller production of Poppea that I saw at Glimmerglass in the summer of 1994. Though Glimmerglass provides none of the "historical resonances" Ross experienced while seeing the opera in Florence, the Cooperstown setting and country opera house had their own unique, if ahistorical, pleasures for me. As for the production itself, the counter-tenors David Daniels (as Nero) and Brian Asawa (as Ottone) both gave stunning performances, as did the brilliant original instrument orchestra, led by the energetic Jane Glover.

Partenope Redux?

This spring, Handel's extraordinary Partenope will once again be performed at the New York City Opera. My question is: which version? I know that Francisco Negrin, the talented director, has staged at least two different versions of the opera. The first, which debuted at Glimmerglass in July 1998, was an impressive and revelatory production that subsequently traveled to the NYCO in September of that year. But in the fall of 2008, Negrin directed another rather different version for the Royal Danish Opera in Copenhagen. Exegette was fortunate enough to see (and enjoy) both the Glimmerglass and the Danish productions (and was impelled to write a few enthusiastic words about the marvelous Copenhagen staging in a blog entry that year). So one wonders whether this year's NYCO production will be Partenope I or Partenope II. Or has the imaginative Negrin prepared yet another version for NYCO's audience this time around-- a Partenope III?

What's Doubly Wrong With Pinchuk's Prize?

I can't resist including in my own blog a link to the following excellent post by Judith H. Dobrzynski in her ArtsJournal blog Real Clear Arts:
What's Wrong With This New Prize? A Lot. - Real Clear Arts

I, too, am dismayed that no women seem to be included in the advisory panel that will help Victor Pinchuk select winners for his extravagant new prize for young artists. But I'm perhaps even more depressed by the sorry group of "older generation" male artists selected as "mentors" for the younger generation. (For details, see Carol Vogel's column in the Dec. 7th issue of the NY Times.)