Tag: art

“I don’t know what I’m doing”: Do Not Send Me Out Among Strangers by Joshua Segun-Lean

Having never tried journaling until now, I can’t say if I’m doing a good job. Of all the activities people recommend for ‘staying positive’ through the pandemic, journaling seemed the most obvious choice for me. Though I have set no grand expectations for myself, I’m afraid I will be unable to keep from filling each page, eventually, with minutiae. With the flatness of time as it passes here. An instinct, I think, from an earlier, truncated life in the sciences. Or perhaps like the voice in Sans Solei, ‘I have been around the world several times, and now only banality interests me.’

I am not that far gone, I don’t think.

Some books are best measured not by the number of pages they hold between their covers, or the number of words they carry. Do Not Send Me Out Among Strangers by Nigerian writer, essayist and photographer Joshua Segun-Lean tells a deeply personal, vulnerable story in this slender volume that, at first blush, appears deceptively sparse and quiet, not unlike the pandemic-sheltering world in which it was conceived. But at its heart lies a raw testament to loss, distilled into a spare collection of images and words that is no less powerful than the too-much-information memoir that has become so ubiquitous.

Less is more.

Do Not Send Me Out Among Strangers is a collection of brief journal entries—observations, accounts, and recollections—nested among a series of harsh black and white photographs of soil, rock, and debris, marked with occasional tufts of vegetation. Numbered and time stamped, these images are titled “Field Notes.” This is the visual record of the search that occupies Segun-Lean’s lockdown days: he has been tasked with the dispersal of his father’s ashes. He thinks back on their strained relationship and his insecurity about the responsibility he has been given. Meanwhile, friends are falling sick with Covid; some are even dying. A journey of grief lies in the stillness of this book.

A couple of colour “Interior” photographs, also numbered and time stamped, appear along the way, echoed by a few Edward Hopper paintings. The explicit theme connecting these illustrations is the colour red. The inherent loneliness of the artwork perhaps, the author admits, “too obvious,” given the circumstances. There are also a handful of sketches, abstracted, and, finally, a number of short excerpts dealing with ancient burial practices from various archaeological and historical texts.

Taken together, this collection of thoughts and images, speak of the complicated relationship we have to life, death, and disability—to the body in sickness and health, whole or incomplete. At a time of isolation and uncertainty, as Segun-Lean is searching for the right place to scatter his father’s ashes, he is quietly exploring, as the book description says, “the strange terrain where private and public grief meet.” He is carrying both, as he will reveal.

Do Not Send Me Out Among Strangers by Joshua Segun-Lean is a haunting little book, the kind of small, unclassifiable work that UK publisher CB Editions specializes in.

Seeking release in the séance: The Unfinished Life of Phoebe Hicks by Agnieszka Taborska

Was it something in the air? In the history of the seaside town? Providence, Rhode Island in the mid-nineteenth century was, this curious biography assures us, famous for its abundance of unsettled spirits:

It is true that other towns also have their ghosts — nowhere, however, are they so noisy and restless. So many phantoms live in Providence they fill up every nook and cranny. Saturated with their breath, the air grows oppressive and causes headaches. You don’t so much walk down the streets as fight your way through invisible throngs.
(from “The Female Presence”)

And a plethora of phantoms makes it easier for a medium to conduct a séance that will satisfy the spiritualists gathered in her parlour. For an attentive and innovative medium like Phoebe Hicks, a successful séance was almost guaranteed, night after night.

Her story, and that of the rise of Spiritualism in America, unfolds through a series of episodes recorded by Polish writer Agnieszka Taborska, and paired with stunning collages by Selena Kimball, in The Unfinished Life of Phoebe Hicks, new from the inimitable Twisted Spoon Press. If it seems odd that Taborska, an art historian specializing in French Surrealism has chosen to turn her attention to Rhode Island and placed her fictional heroine there, it shouldn’t be. She divides her time between Warsaw and Providence, and her affection for the town and its ghostly history comes through in this imaginative biographical endeavour.

Phoebe Hicks, medium extraordinaire, stumbled into her unlikely profession through the most peculiar circumstances. On November 1, 1847, she found herself violently ill with a bout of food poisoning triggered by a meal of clam fritters. Were it not for a nosey photographer who happened to peer into her window and catch her vomiting into the bowl on her washstand, the incident would have passed into Phoebe’s feverish memory and stayed there. But instead, the invasive images—coincidentally captured with a recently patented photographic method that allowed for an exposure of only three minutes—would be reproduced and widely interpreted as evidence of ectoplasm spewing from her mouth. Although ectoplasm, the manifestation of spiritual matter, would not be officially described until 1894, Phoebe would prove to be ahead of the curve in so many ways—so far ahead in fact that she would even entertain the ghost of Harry Houdini years before his birth—but for some reason her notable achievements have fallen from the records of the history of Spiritualism.

This book aims to rectify that oversight.

Phoebe’s first séance was awkward, but she quickly learned from her mistakes and as her gatherings grew in sophistication, her fame spread. Of course, as the interest in séances increased, so did the number of practitioners, both sincere and false. Yet, as ever, Phoebe was a class act. Her guests would be greeted by the cook’s son, and then ushered into the parlour by her maid, Miriam, a woman so dignified in manner and appearance that some would mistake her for the mistress. Others, however, mused that she may have been the true secret to Phoebe’s  success.

They accused her of practices employed by accomplices of other mediums to gain information about clients: bribing servants, placing “their people” in noisy inns where alcohol loosened tongues, studying gravestones — the most reliable sources of information about family relationships. They forgot that it sufficed to reside in Providence a little while to know enough about one’s neighbours to imagine the rest. For the inhabitants of the magic town were strangely alike.
(from “The Maid”)

Now, Phoebe was not content to simply summon the spirits of the locally departed, she also welcomed figures from history, and is reported to have performed a number of impressive feats during the course of her gatherings. But more critically, she established standards for the practice of conducting séances, strengthening the acceptance of the role of medium. For not only was Spiritualism a practice that held particular appeal for women, the profession of medium offered some of these same women an opportunity to support themselves outside of the traditional bonds of marriage. And for some that was a very worrying trend:

A few ill-disposed doctors claimed that Spiritualism was no more than a safety valve for madness and old-maidenhood, that participation in séances was conducive to hallucinations, that the fashion for the table turning, spreading at dizzying speeds, was responsible for madhouses bursting at the seams, that instead of a parlour with its round table a more fitting place for mediums was a hospital isolation ward.
(from “Something That Might Be Called Hysteria”)

Behind the accusations of madness, of course, lay the fear that in the communion with spirits might lead to emancipation.

Twisted Spoon publishes some of the most delightfully strange books and The Unfinished Life of Phoebe Hicks is no exception. Presented as a serious account—albeit with a healthy amount of wry humour—of the role of this somewhat mysterious medium in the early years of spiritualist practice, the portrait that emerges is of a woman for whom the boundary between the world of the spirit and the world of the flesh has become somewhat permeable. She ultimately disappears, not only from history, but from the town of Providence itself, her final whereabouts unknown. But the insinuation is that, unlike the many impostors and charlatans who flocked to the profession in its heyday, there was something uncanny about Phoebe. Something wise, practical, and well, just possibly, genuine. . .

The Unfinished Life of Phoebe Hicks by Agnieszka Taborska with illustrations by Selena Kimball is translated from the Polish by Ursula Phillips and published by Twisted Spoon Press. It is available now in the UK and Europe, and will be released in November 2024 in North America.

An extraordinary interrogation: Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe

I want to tell how sorrow makes a shape that is familiar. And how that familiar thing can be difficult to both name and to narrate. (Note 83)

For the past week or so I have been sitting in the presence of this singular text. I have been ill, so it has had a little extra time to spin through my fevered brain. And yet, it is not easy to articulate my response.

Ordinary Notes is a text one must come to openhearted and openminded. Over the course of 248 numbered “Notes,” writer and professor Christina Sharpe examines, interrogates and honours the reality of ordinary Black existence. This collection of reflections and observations, some as brief as a single sentence, others extending for several pages, supplemented at times with photographs, documents, and artworks, may appear fragmented yet there is form and direction as Sharpe moves through a series of themes or inquiries, with careful focus and lyrical intensity. The result is a dynamic response to the many horrors and losses faced by Black communities, in the face of white supremacy, historically and recently, but, at the same time, it is a deeply personal work—a memoir, an acknowledgement of the writers and artists who have inspired her, and, above all, a love letter to her mother.

Although a wealth of thinkers, writers and historical figures are referenced in Ordinary Notes, Ida Wright Sharpe is the central inspirational figure in this project. In a number of the earliest notes, Sharpe reflects on the resolve of some of the earliest Black individuals to challenge the colour divide in middle class America: Elizabeth Eckford daring to attend an all-white high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, or a Black family moving into an all-white Pennsylvania neighbourhood in the early 1960s. She recognizes an echo of her own experience years later as the only Black student at an all-white Catholic elementary school and then as one of a small number of Black students in a public junior high where it seemed she had made good friends.

Sharpe describes how her mother, recognizing that these friendships her daughter had made were destined to shift with the onset of adolescence, wanted to ensure that she had the necessary knowledge to make her own life choices moving forward—choices she might not have even known she had:

This telling set into motion a series of events that fundamentally changed me.

My mother wanted me to build a life that was nourishing and Black.

My mother wanted me to live in spaces where I would be reflected back to myself without particular distortions.

She spare me tremendous pain.

This Black note changed the course of my life. (from Note 10)

Later Sharpe will explore the lives of her mother and her grandmother, whom she did not know, and the nurturing atmosphere within which she was raised. In a world where Black people are still subjugated in so many areas of ordinary life and society, her mother was determined to ensure that she and her siblings were exposed to literature and arts in which they could see themselves as valued and strong.

As one makes one’s way through this volume, it is perhaps best to take time to stop and process what is being presented, take advantage of the generous footnotes as needed, pay attention to the images. Many of the impressions of anti-Black brutality may be historical, others very recent and widely covered. Slavery, lynching, police violence. Museum visits commemorating historical injustices are described. A multitude of Black voices are welcomed into a conversation with the past and present, the voices of Toni Morrison, Dionne Brand, Audre Lorde, bell hooks and many more. As the Notes accumulate, the observations, reflections, and memories naturally and gradually gather into an examination—a questioning—of the way art, beauty, and literature can form a positive understanding of the meaning of Black experience.

The primary audience Sharpe is addressing and speaking with in Ordinary Notes is a Black one. But a white reader open to listening will find much to both challenge and expand understanding and, as with any intentional engagement with literature, where one comes from and one’s own experiences will inform the reading. Sharpe makes some telling observations about the expectations the often-white reader or reviewer, by virtue of colonialism, brings to a book by a Black writer, fostering a view that “all of that book’s explorations, its meanings, and its ambitions lodge in a place called identity.” They may then praise the writer that “‘bravely’ eschews identity” or does not centre their work strictly in “Black life” as if this is to be commended:

These readers and reviewers are stuck on something they call identity and not something called life or genre or craft or intertextuality or invention or literary tradition.

These readers continually misread the note. They decant all complexity, all invention into that thing they name identity that they imagine is both not complex and not relevant to them.  (from Note 97)

This comment strikes me as applicable to the way much literature is presently reduced to identity, whatever that “identity” is perceived to be, when seen as something distinct from a reader or reviewer’s own experience, disregarding that we are all much more complicated—and ordinary—than any arbitrary designation of identity.

Some things I remember but they no longer live on the surface of my days. (Note 198)

Ordinary Notes has been my companion throughout this Black History Month. It has stimulated much reflection, especially on the legacy of anti-Black racism that is still with us and growing, along with other elements of racism and intolerance, as we don’t have to look too far to see. It challenges me to think more deeply about these issues and explore some of the authors and artists she highlights with whom I should become better acquainted.

Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe is published by Knopf Canada, Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the US, and Daunt Books in the UK.

“Ask the light to be clement”: Portrait Tales by Jean Frémon

This book arrived unannounced. An author unfamiliar to me, but on the very first page ten previous titles are listed, complete with translator and publisher. Then, on the title page, a personalized salutation from the author himself and the explanation of how this lovely little book found its way to me—the name of the translator: John Taylor. Over the years, through John’s translations, I have come to know of a number of writers and poets who have quickly become indispensable additions to my library. And now, another.

Jean Frémon is French author who, in the words of the publisher of this volume, Les Fugitives, “has been contributing to a trans-genre tendency in contemporary French letters since 1969.” By day, he is the president of Galerie Lelong, by night a prolific writer of poetry, fiction and essays on art, or, quite often, work that blends all three forms. He has published over twenty books in France and the present text, Portrait Tales is a selection of narratives on portraiture originally published in his 2020 book Le miroir magique. His tales explore well-known and little-known works and artists alike, and demonstrate Frémon’s extensive knowledge and deep appreciation of art whether he is playfully fictionalizing his subject or examining artistic techniques or revealing the historical consequences faced by those who allowed their likenesses to be captured against religious or cultural mores.

These short narratives cover a wide range of subjects. He begins with Lucian Freud’s singular, and less than flattering, portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, travels back in time and across the world to close with a remembered conversation with Louise Bourgeois, the only artist to appear twice and someone he worked closely with as a gallerist. In between—although reading the pieces in order is not prescribed, freedom of movement as in an actual gallery is encouraged—we are invited to learn about an Indian ambassador who paid the ultimate price for allowing Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun to paint his portrait in defiance of Koranic law and entertain a meditation on the legendary impossibility of rendering a likeness of a young Jewish prophet named Jesus.

We travel back to Imperial China and Japan, to trace changes to ideas and styles of portraiture and conventions about what can or cannot be captured.  Meanwhile in Europe, a number of factual or elaborated tales unfold. Frémon details, for example, the obsessiveness of Maurice Quentin de la Tour who worried his pastel portraits into being and the revenge of a young sculptor who becomes enamoured with the woman he is commissioned to portray.  One of the shortest and most charming essays, is a sketch of the life and remarkable art of seventeenth-century Italian painter Sofonisba Anguissola:

Having withdrawn to Palermo, Sofonisba continued to paint. There is a self-portrait of her at age seventy-five. She is sitting in an armchair, in a three-quarter profile, her arms on the armrests. A large white ruff surrounds her oval face, which she has not tried to make look younger; her cheeks are hollow, her lips thin and tight; two large folds surround her mouth; but the pose is dignified and her bearing is not without nobility.

Ever confident in her ability to capture life in her many noble subjects and in herself, Frémon closes his sketch with an account of her submission to another artist’s pencil, the young Van Dyk, when he visits her at the age of eighty-nine. Her only instruction to him: “Ask the light to be clement.” It almost feels like each of the artists, or artistic moments  Frémon considers here, is presented in a clement light. It is an intrinsic element of his tone.

Varied in spirit and style, every piece in this slim volume is a gem, enlightening and entertaining. As I was reading, I frequently found myself stopping to search the internet to find the portrait or artist in question, if such a record was available. That is a compliment, of course, not a criticism. A sign of a good book is, for me, one that sends a reader down the odd rabbit hole or two, expanding the experience of reading beyond the pages of the text.

Portrait Tales by Jean Frémon is translated from the French by John Taylor and published by Les Fugitives.

Taken, not taken: The Nail in the Tree – Essays on Art, Violence, and Childhood by Carol Ann Davis

I accepted this book as a review copy when it first came out, just over three years ago now. I put on the shelf with all the best intentions, and then forgot it. When I rediscovered it there, lost among assorted volumes of nonfiction, I felt ashamed by my negligence. Surely I could have read it earlier, if not when I first received it, at the very least during the trial of Alex Jones for the outrageous conspiracy theories that hurt so many people and ushered in a whole new form of denial, or a few months later when the tenth anniversary of the Sandy Hook school shooting was marked last December. But The US seems an endless supplier of senseless and tragic school shootings so it’s no surprise that, when I finally did take the time to read The Nail in the Tree: Essays on Art, Violence, and Childhood, I happened to finish it on the one year anniversary of Uvalde.

Poet and essayist Carol Ann Davis was newly relocated to Newtown, Connecticut, with her husband and two young sons when the Sandy Hook shooting occurred. They lived close to the site but, due to zoning, the boys attended another school. Willem was in fourth grade at the time, Luke in kindergarten. They were safe, but not untouched. “And this is what it is not to suffer that day,” she tells herself when recalling the shooting, “This is the not-suffering, happy ending story.” But, of course, it’s not that simple. The trauma sends lasting ripples throughout the community in way that leaves no one unaffected:

Sacerdos, from the French and earlier from Latin, literally meaning “offerer of sacrifices.” The children who live here, perhaps it’s strange to say, now glow. They do, they glow. No one can approach unmoved, and the children, understanding their role, shoulder, take on, burden themselves with us. Their skin nearly translucent, they walk around like that, glowing. They offer themselves like bits of mirror, and we accept.

The adults, by virtue of wider perspective, suddenly become acutely aware of the fragility of childhood. For those who still have to send their children back to school, trust them to the school bus each morning, there is the conflicted desire to both protect and prepare. Older siblings want to look out for their younger brothers and sisters. No one wants to trigger memories that may or may not even exist.

It is within the altered dynamic of the six years that follow the tragedy, that Davis endeavours to articulate and make sense of what it means to raise children in the aftermath of violence. In a series of essays that make their way slowly but not strictly chronologically away from the pivotal event, she turns to poetry and art to understand how artistic practice might be a productive way of integrating trauma into life moving forward—for herself and for her sons.

This is not a typical grief memoir, nor does it delve into the specifics of the shooting or the political fallout. The event itself rests as a horror too large to think about directly—it sits, unspoken, in all aspects of community life, especially at the bus stop, in the schools and on the playing field. Yet Davis seeks answers at her desk, beneath the hummingbird feeder, at art galleries and museums and, ultimately swimming in the open ocean, the one desperately longed-for release her newly adopted, landlocked hometown denies her. Along the way, among others, she turns to the work of Hélène Cixous and poet Miklós Radnóti and, for an extended period, she follows the lead of (and argues with) Rumi. She engages with the art of Eva Hesse to better understand the poetic process, and when, four years after the fact she has to fully explain to Luke, now that he is old enough to know, the extent of what happened at Sandy Hook, she draws on Paul Celan and Armenian born artist Arshile Gorky to help her untangle the enormity of her own grief.

Davis’s writing is poetic, pulling images, quotes and refrains through her essays, like threads to link or unravel her thoughts as needed. And she is an astute observer of art who is able to find in a number of artists, their techniques and philosophies about their practice, clues to appreciating how she is growing and, more importantly, how the boys are not only coping, but finding their own ways to thrive. More than once the boys are dragged through exhibitions, like one of Picasso’s sculptures in New York, or shown a show catalogue, like that of American abstract painter Agnes Martin. Davis hopes that Luke, who is a budding draftsman will find some connection in Martin’s geometrically precise but somewhat dissonant canvases (he does not). The message in the artist’s work and her method, however, is less for the child than his mother:

I’m suddenly afraid: I am not ready to admit to myself, as Martin has, that the purpose of art may be to unlock an inner happiness in the viewer. I am doubtful such a happiness is inherent, and unsure whether it is larger than forces with which I’ve engaged in my own work (such as grief and difficulty). I am uncertain I can place the function of art, art-making, its practice, in the category of making-happy, given all I’ve seen and felt in the last five years, all my children have endured in the service of gaining a working understanding of the world into which they’ve been thrown. Of course, any difficulty can be a subset of happiness, Martin’s work virtually shouts at me. Don’t be so narrow-minded.

Throughout these original, thoughtful essays, it becomes clear that the search for meaningful expression—even happiness—after trauma is Davis’s personal journey, one within which her children are her motivation and measure of progress, but not her exactly creative companions. One cannot grieve for anyone else as much a parent might wish shield their child from their own inevitable process. With luck and their parents’ support, Willem and Luke will hopefully have the resources to come, in time, to their own mature understandings of the event that they escaped only by chance. Sadly, with school shootings such a regular occurrence in the US, shadows of the horror that erupted at Sandy Hook on December 14, 2012 may be hard for any of the Newtown residents to fully move beyond.

The Nail in the Tree: Essays on Art, Violence, and Childhood by Carol Ann Davis is published by Tupelo Press.

“How many lives go into a life?” Leaving by Cees Nooteboom, Drawings by Max Neumann

A man standing in a winter garden becomes aware of something not quite right—a cloud that seems too heavy, bare branches against an ancient wall, the refusal of neighbouring geese—an unspoken uneasiness that carries his thoughts back to the war:

The war that never stopped coming back,
a guest who’s known to all, a toothless
kiss, the language of intimate betrayal
around him now again, remembering a past

he couldn’t share with anyone.

This is how Dutch poet and writer Cees Nooteboom’s Leaving begins, its speaker in his garden thinking about family, war, times past. About those images that fail to fade. But as this three-part sequence of poems was coming into being, another guest, unexpected and uncertain, arrived and shifted the focus. His work would, in the end, acquire a subtitle: A Poem from the Time of the Virus. Without ever mentioning the virus itself outside of his Afterword, the shifting currents of the early months of its spread cannot be ignored even within the poet’s green refuge, for “Whimpering at the garden gate is the world, the / fuss of a newspaper.”

Heads and faces—remembered, imagined, dreamed—form a key motif throughout these poems, complemented by German artist Max Neuman’s series of drawings of abstract figures with spare features, completed in advance of news of the pandemic, for this, their second collaboration. The man in his garden is haunted by heads:

I saw heads, countless heads,
field marshals, lovers, travellers
from star to star. Each head its
own story, hidden in the folds

of the brain, alongside narrow streams
of blood, reeds on the banks, secret
landscapes no one can reach,
except for a lonely traveller

This leads into the second sequence, where the poet, the lonely traveller, wants to make sense of the darkness and strangeness of his visions  that surface from memory. All these heads. Who are these people, he asks, these creatures, these voices? As spartan as Neumann’s drawings, these poems propose questions that the poet cannot or does not want to answer. Can one look for meaning in life if, when looking back, one is confronted with forms, shadows, faces without mouths? The past seems intent on revisiting the man who knows that the end is nearing:

Life, the song of songs? Sure,
but underneath there is that other truth,
the truth of night and fog,
the test that lasts

until the end.

The third and final sequence, or movement if one wishes to read this poem as a musical composition, moves into a space of quiet and melancholy. Others—friends, brothers, lovers—have left the path once shared, one by one, “disappearing like ghosts.” The silence descending on the world is like a nothingness the poet has never heard before: “contradiction / surrounds me, an organ, / no keys, a song // whose sound has been sealed.” Yet, where the poet is troubled by the images that confront him in the second sequence, he is now coming to a place of peace with himself and others in the silence and isolation, and finds he is ready to take the road ahead and let the past be:

Now my feet are counting the road, I know,
looking back is not allowed. My steps measure time,
a dark and peerless poem, a beat
that can’t be slowed.

In the Afterword, Nooteboom who is not a writer to shy away from contemporary issues,  talks about how a poem comes to be, how influences enter and make themselves known, changing the direction in which the poet thought he was headed. It would be strange, he says, if the arrival of a mysterious virus were to be completely ignored; sometimes reality intervenes to help one write. And so we have this thoughtful, timely work, one that invites rereading and lingering on the words and the drawings.

Leaving: A Poem from the Time of the Virus by Cees Nooteboom with drawing by Max Neumann is translated by David Colmer and published by Seagull Books.

What are we going to do now? The Tomb Guardians by Paul Griffiths

Four was a good number.
So now we’re three. What difference does it make?
We knew where we were, then.
And now we don’t?

It’s an unusual premise. Three Roman soldiers, charged to guard the tomb of a “local rebel,” have awoken from their unintentional slumber to find one of their number missing and the heavy stone rolled away from the mouth of the cave where the body had been laid. Panicked, they try to assess their situation. How had they allowed themselves to fall asleep on the job? Where has their fellow guard gone? And how are they going to find a way out of this predicament without even fully understanding what is at stake?

Their debate in its own right might offer material for a light comedy of errors, but our three guardians simultaneously exist, sound asleep, in individual portraits painted by sixteenth-century German master Bernhard Strigel and currently housed in Munich. Meanwhile, in the present day, an anxious lecturer is afraid that his pending presentation about these paintings, and their relationship to a fourth portrait, now in the UK, that somehow became separated from them, is falling apart at the seams. As he and a friend review his arguments about the artistic and theological questions raised by the images—included as four full colour plates—the subjects of the paintings try to imagine a way to get themselves out of an awkward situation, as uninformed bit players at a profound moment in Christian history. As the text weaves its way back and forth between these two conversations, further questions about history, truth and faith arise in clever, unexpected ways.

And it all works like a charm.

The Tomb Guardians, the latest novel from the prolific music critic, writer and librettist, Paul Griffiths, is inventive, witty and wise. This short novel, so simple in its conception and yet so extraordinary in its execution, should be read, on its own, in one or two sessions, rather than slipped in among other reads. It is not difficult, but is best met without distraction so as to appreciate the full effect of the two interlaced dialogues that drive this singular text.

The lecturer works his way through his presentation, responding to his friend’s interruptions and encouragements, beginning with the artist’s depiction of ordinary sleeping figures—unique in his oeuvre and the art of his time—and moving on to consider the possible inspiration to illustrate guardians at all. Most widely known official accounts beyond the Gospel of Matthew make no mention of any watch being set. At the same time, the soldiers, their conversation set apart in italics, have very little understanding of the circumstances that led to this assignment. They try to sort out what they do know and craft potential explanations, from the mundane to the supernatural, to offer their superiors should they be discovered in dereliction of duty or decide to report to their camp. Not surprisingly, consensus is hard to come by:

Whoa, can we please discuss this a bit?

“As to the –”

Yes, we should be very careful what we say here.

“As to the soldiers sent to stand guard, Matthew indicates that they didn’t just drift off but were shocked into sleep by the appearance of the angel.”

We can’t just say we fell asleep. Anyone would say we should’ve been taking it in turns. Anyone would say that.

“Now how does Strigel deal with this? Observe this fellow here, seated on the ground, resting his head on his left palm, while his right arm dangles.”

Did we try taking it in turns? Did any of us suggest that?
Wait.

“Look at him with his half-open mouth.”

We have to be very careful here, even in what we say just to each other, because you say something, and somebody else’ll remember it, and then little by little it becomes the truth, you know, it becomes the story, it becomes what we all of us remember, even if it never happened that way at all.

As the novel proceeds, the guardians’ musings range wider while the lecturer’s concerns begin to focus more on the likely intention behind the paintings’ commission, how they fit into the shifting religious politics of the Reformation and how one portrait came to be separated. The quoted passages from his presentation are framed within the comments and inquiries of his friend. Against the academic tone of his developing thesis, the guardians’ debate offers a critical and entertaining counterpoint. Speaking in anything but Biblical tones, they are as delightfully anachronistic as their Renaissance dress and weaponry. Together this dual-strand narrative forms a work that richly rewards return visits.

The Tomb Guardians by Paul Griffiths is published by Henningham Family Press.

Among the immortals: The Beloved of the Dawn by Franz Fühmann

Franz Fühmann was a prolific and important East German poet and writer whose own life was fascinating. Born in 1922, in the predominantly German Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia, he was the son of an apothecary who fostered the development of an ardent German nationalism. After the annexation of Sudetenland in 1938, he volunteered for the Wehrmacht but was deemed to be too young so he joined the Reich Labour Service which performed construction work for the military. He saw little direct action until the end of the war when, between 1941 and 1943, he was deployed to various areas of Ukraine. Then, as Germany’s final retreat began, he was transferred to Greece, an experience that would later have a significant influence on his writing. In the closing days of the war he was captured by Soviet forces and would spend the next four years in a POW camp in the Caucasus.

Fühmann emerged from captivity passionately converted to the tenets of Soviet Socialism; he had rejected the Nazi ideology on which he had been raised and was dedicated to the vision of a new world view. He chose to settle in the GDR where his mother and sister were living. He would remain there for the rest of his life, working solely as a freelance writer from the early 1950s until his death in 1984, but his conviction to the realist approach to poetry and literature favoured by the government soon wavered, as his writings grew increasingly confrontational and, to the Stasi, suspect. He would, however, go on to produce work in a wide variety of genres, for both adults and children, and became an important advocate for the translation and publication of authors previously banned in East Germany and a mentor for younger non-conforming writers like Wolfgang Hilbig and Uwe Kolbe.

I have previously reviewed Fühmann’s story cycle The Jew Car, which offers a fictionalized account of his childhood and war years, and his magnificent final major work At the Burning Abyss, a meditation on poetry—in particular that of Georg Trakl—and its power to speak to what is fundamentally human. In this essay he reflects on the way Trakl’s poetry triggered a crisis of literary faith, so to speak, allowing him to heal and understand himself in a way no rigid doctrine could ever manage to do. Both books are translated by Isabel Fargo Cole and published by Seagull Books, as is the very different Fühmann title I am looking at here, The Beloved of the Dawn, a slender volume comprised of four retellings of Greek legends, beautifully presented alongside vivid digital collages by Sunandini Banerjee.

As mentioned, Fühmann spent time in Greece toward the end of the war. As translator Isabel Cole indicates in her note at the end of The Jew Car, this opportunity to spend time in the country was especially valuable: “Since childhood Greek mythology had fascinated him, and the confrontation with Greek reality, the juxtaposition of myth and war, would inspire much of his literary work.” This awareness charges his personal take on these stories—drawn from a collection originally published in 1978—with a certain tension that gives them a contemporary energy. Despite its colourful presentation, this is not a book for young children, rather he is speaking to young adult and adult readers, fleshing out well known incidents with a very human, somewhat subversive tone.

The first of the four legends to which Fühmann turns his imagination in this collection is Homer’s Hymn to Aphrodite (219-239) which chronicles the love of Eos, the goddess of the dawn, for the mortal Tithonus. She begs Zeus to grant him immortality so they can spend eternity together, but forgets to ask for eternal youth. The reality of life with an immortal mortal is vividly evoked. The second tale focuses on Hera’s magic-enabled seduction of her wandering husband as depicted in Homer’s Iliad, chapter XIV, portraying the great king of the gods, he of enormous appetites, in his moment of weakness and subsequent bitter revenge:

That night, three hundred years, he’d sworn fidelity: one night, but what a night!—He was Zeus, and he was who he was.—Then he’d deceived her ten thousand times: with her sister, with the Wanton One and her retinue, with all the nymphs, all the Muses, all the Horae, all the Charities, with all the wives of all the gods and all the daughters of all of the goddesses,  even with his own, not to mention countless mortals: she-humans, she-beasts, and even plants, and with boys, too, with monsters, with ghosts.—He was who he was, and now he was one who desired Hera and none other.

The third story—dedicated to Heinrich Boll— recounts the silenus Marsyas’ reckless challenge of Apollo to a musical duel with melodious pipe cursed by Athena. In its graphic depiction of agony, this version makes the hideously aging Tithonus’ fate seem mild. Marsyas’ grisly destiny is hinted at throughout, but he ignores the warnings of dreams and even fails to believe his opponent is serious in exercising his reward for winning as the blade slips beneath his hide. Fühmann makes visceral what no marble statue and few paintings can aspire to.

The final tale similarly breathes depth and life into another of the less fortunate characters in the Greek pantheon of major and minor deities, in this case Hephaistos the physically disabled god of fire, the eternal guardian of blacksmiths, craftsmen and artisans who was, in this role, worshipped and yet required to serve in Olympus. Fühmann portrays this conflicting position, its balance of strength and weakness clearly in his hero. The story at hand is, of course, the famous account of Hephaistos’ response to the news that his wife, Aphrodite, is having an affair with Ares, the god of war. The crafting of an invisible, infinitely strong web to capture a theoretically invincible foe is depicted with poetic, elemental detail:

He laid his hand on the pristine metal.

The beauty of its coldness and resiliency, and the force of the fire that conquers them both.

He melted off a handful of the material and once it had cooled began to rub it between the fingertips of his right hand while stretching it out with his left. When the hot metal had a ductility, when a cool hardness such as he had never encountered, such as could arise only here, as the solar plexus of all metal veins between the heart of the earth and its diaphragm.—Soul of matter: his medium.—What he need now was the finest of eyelets: a flake from a diamond, shot through by a sunbeam.

The net he weaves and the trap he sets succeeds, but only so far. Hephaistos is too bold, and too stigmatized to not be mocked even in his triumph. The resulting story is one of a bittersweet and complicated relationship between a gifted genius and his fellow gods and goddesses, even his beautiful wife.

The strength of each of the tales collected in The Beloved of the Dawn lies not in the overall arc of events which have been illustrated and revisited countless times, but in Fühmann’s ability to tell them anew. His distinctive prose style which employs poetic fragments and a frequent use of em-dashes, often to open new sentences, allows him to add colour, shadow and character to these archetypal figures and convey a relatable, recognizable agency to his portrayals of these familiar legends. His narrative acknowledges that many poems and artworks have come before, and openly claims to be more interested in some of the lesser known backstory, but he never abandons the mythic form. Witty and sharp, he is having fun with these timeless tales of Gods behaving badly.

The Beloved of the Dawn by Franz Fühmann is translated by Isabel Fargo Cole and published by Seagull Books with full colour illustrations by Sunandini Banerjee.

And now for something completely different: the adventures of char, vol #1 by Whiskey Radish

I have, for a number of years now, been an ardent admirer of Whiskey Radish, the enthusiastic, energetic creator of a world like no other—one peopled with an inexhaustible cast of characters whose adventures unfold in single-sentence illustrated frames. These moments sometimes stand alone, sometimes riff off one another with a free form jazz vibe. Her distinctive sketches have been a regular presence online and off—illustrating articles, decorating freely gifted postcards, stickers and other treats, and gathered together in books created and often sold for a song. Now, for the first time, a selection of Ms. Radish’s images have been collected in a fabulous full-colour book published by Ice Floe Press. The adventures of char, vol #1 is a labour of love. It is a treasure for existing fans and a welcome introduction for those who have not yet met the cheerful madness of Whiskey Radish.

Behind the playful moniker is an artist, writer and jazz lover who lives near Boston. A wife and mother of three who teaches private art classes to teenagers, the core stimulus of her art rests in the daily practice of producing a daily “sortie” or burst of thought. Illustrated with her boisterous ink drawings, each thought becomes a story in itself. The images in this volume are drawn from around 300 “sorties” made between October of 2020 and July of 2021. Robert Frede Krenter, the publisher of Ice Floe Press, selected and ordered the images with their descriptive wisdoms and observations to titled create mini-adventues. The result is a collaborative visual poetry.

Whiskey Radish’s primary template is black ink on white, a blend of blotchy exuberance and startlingly fine detail, but in this collection colour is invited to join the party, often adding texture, density and a remarkable range and variety to the images. The creative process and the method of assembly heightens the variability. Some of Whiskey’s familiar characters—Char, Slimbo the Rocket Dog, You and the King—are joined by other wise, wistful and magical personas and even, for a change of pace, a selection of drawings of plants.

I first read this book in PDF—full disclosure, I was asked to provide a blurb—a format that enforces a linear reading. But, now that I have a paper copy, it is just as delightful, if not more fun, to just open it up and slip in and out of the short segments moving forward and back. During a month in which a broken leg has me tethered to home as outside spring is bursting with green leaves and blossoms, and so much news has been shrouded in darkness, it has been wonderful to have a book so full of life close at hand.

The adventures of char, vol #1 by Whiskey Radish is published by Ice Floe Press.

Exploring the other Oxford: A Certain Logic of Expectations by Arturo Soto

When we travel or relocate to a new city or country we inevitably arrive with expectations. We have an image in our minds of what it will look and feel like to be on the ground. Sometimes the preconceived experience bears a remarkable resemblance to the realized one. But sometimes reality blindsides us completely. Either way, any place we visit or live in can never experienced fully—engagement is always subjective on so many levels so that, even if you live in the same location all your life, you will only ever know a corner of it, or a series of images collected over a network of space and time.

In a sense that is the premise underlying this handsome photobook which came to me, in contrast to the title, without any expectations at all. I knew little of Oxford apart from a general awareness of the University and all the academic weight that it carries. As to any specific historical or visual detail—either about the University or the city that surrounds it—my knowledge was minimal. What intrigued me about Arturo Soto’s A Certain Logic of Expectations was the idea of experiencing the city through the eyes of a Mexican studying at Oxford during the Brexit years. I suspected he might have an interesting angle on such a storied place. I was not wrong.

Born in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico in 1981, Arturo Soto earned an MA in Art History from University College London and an MFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York before completing his PhD in Fine Art at the University of Oxford. His fondness for the grittier side of urban landscapes developed early. His first photobook, In the Heat (2018) focuses on Panama, but eschews the travel brochure side of the country and turns its attention to “banal spaces that people rarely consider, partially because of their familiarity, but also because they contradict conservative notions of progress and economic growth.” The same social and aesthetic impulses guide his new work.

A journal in a shop window with the legend Start Where You Are on its cover is the perfect maxim for projects that blend photography with psychogeography. Instead of wishing to document faraway lands, photographers should consider examining their immediate surroundings first.

Oxford is a city with multiple realities. The Oxford Soto engages with through his camera lens, contains none of the esteemed features of the University. He talks about it, yes, but I have to admit that the mention of such architectural landmarks as the Radcliffe Camera, the Magdelan Tower or the Bridge of Sighs brought no immediate images to my mind. I had to google them to find out what they looked like and, even then, I would not have recognized or placed most of them before making a point of looking. Oxford, the University, exists as much as an idea as as a place. Yet I was captivated by, and remain much more interested in, the working class Oxford Soto’s images record—the brick buildings, boarded up shops, back alleys, and strangely vacant streets. They tell their own stories, but they also project a certain anonymity. (A selection of images from A Certain Logic of Expectations can be found on his website.)

Weaving a path of sorts between the two possible Oxford’s is the text. Memories, observations and anecdotes drawn from Soto’s time in the city are presented as discreet descriptive passages, with no connection to any particular image. He considers the dynamics that have formed Oxford as a city, and talks about some of the idiosyncrasies of the photographic endeavour. He records scenes and interactions he encounters on the streets and reflects on the student experience, recalling friends, romances and favourite watering holes. Some of his remembrances have a photographic quality of their own:

A friend and I spot a naked girl through a basement window on Rectory Road. She is sitting down on the bed with her back to us. The basil green sheets make me think of Modigliani, whom I associate with that color. The room is brightly lit, making it hard to understand why she has not drawn the curtains. My friend is equally fascinated by the incident, and we speculate about the situation for a while. She keeps referring to the girl as beautiful, even though we did not see her face.

Oxford, as Soto describes it, is a city constrained by its own history—a history that is actually confined to a very small geographic space. Beyond that, its ability to renew itself is limited. A distinct separation is maintained between “town” and “gown.” As a student, Soto has full access to the college he attends (but not the entire University). For residents of the city with no connection to that side of Oxford, the hallowed halls of the educational institution and the world it contains exist entirely outside their lived experience. Two solitudes.

Soto’s camera brings the otherwise unseen Oxford into focus; his crisp, clear images highlight its absolute ordinariness. To his eye, and given his own background, even its “dodgiest” neighbourhoods appear orderly. His prose passages and vignettes are precise, admittedly subjective and charged with a deadpan humour. It all came together when I learned (also on his website) that his artistic practice:

owes a great deal to the work of the French writer Georges Perec, whose fragmentary and often absurd projects offer a methodology for the study of the infraordinary, the term he coined to describe the nothingness that comprises the bulk of our lives. Perec highlighted the complexity of micro-events and banal spaces, exposing the partiality and selectivity of our attention and making us question why we grant significance to certain things while overlooking others. Perec’s writings provide a fitting analogy for documentary images, which give a realistic impression of the world while also connoting an authorial vision.

In the background throughout this project looms the tensions around Brexit. Soto is a careful observer, noting, for example, party signs pasted up in a window. Yet, as an outsider, without a vote or a particular stake in the matter, it is still impossible to remain entirely neutral. He recounts a friendship that dissolves when he learns of the other’s political leanings. There is inevitably a spark in the air that one senses when in a foreign country at a time of voting or campaigning that fuels an interest and a disconnect at once. It seeps into the memories you take away. There may be a level of discontent in the air, but as Soto reflects on returning to Mexico as his studies draw to a close, he knows he will miss the freedom and safety he enjoyed on the streets of Oxford. That comfort also seems to inform his photographs and his observations such that this Oxford, the one that defies a certain logic of expectations, is perhaps one that can only be seen by an outsider open to all its possibilities.

A Certain Logic of Expectations by Arturo Soto is published in a limited edition by The Eriskay Connection.