Borges' Library

A blog that will interest almost no one...

Ciao, Carpaccio

Ciao, Carpaccio!: An Infatuation
by Jan Morris

 

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The Annunciation of the Virgin at Galleria Giorgio Franchetti alla Ca' d'Oro 

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My Goodreads Review:

This is pretty much a "perfect book." A jewel. A book to be treasured! Charming, witty, and enlightening, it is a must-read for anyone who loves Venice, Carpaccio paintings or well, I think pretty much anyone in the world would fall in love with this small gem of a book. In fact, I am not sure I’ve read too many books by Jan Morris-- but I have to say, I am now very much committed to reading as many as I can! Carpaccio is one of my favorite painters, John Ruskin was also quite fond of him --though he would declare not one but two Carpaccio paintings to be "the most beautiful picture in the world."

Like Morris, while I don't think he is one of the greatest of the sublime artists of the Renaissance--not one of the "greats" perhaps (Gombrich didn't even include Carpaccio n his famous Story of Art!) Still as Morris rightly says, his paintings are unforgettable. They are gentle, with those glorious Venetian colors, and the bestiary of enchanted animals... Bellini pups! And those pheasants and rabbits; lions and deer... While Ruskin put the Ursula painting as "most beautiful" he later changed his mind and famous declared the Two Venetian Ladies in the Correr to be the finest picture in the world... I myself would probably agree, as for me, the upper part of that picture (in the Getty) of Hunting on the Lagoon, is a painting very, very dear to my heart. Morris, for her part loves St Augustine in his study (still in situ). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Aug...

Her musings about this picture are just delightful.

The book begins and ends with her personal impressions of Carpaccio's paintings. Oh, if only I could write so beautifully about art.

And yes, I must read Calasso's Tiepolo Pink! (With its titled plucked from Proust).

And oh, that little white dog!

As Jim C says below: What she says of Carpaccio, I would say of her own work – that she is an artist of "that simple, universal and omnipotent virtue, the quality of Kindness."

Don't miss this one!

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114550Vanishing Point
by David Markson

Goodreads Review

As someone said below, this is a great novel...unless you're in the mood to read a novel.

"Ravenna, Dante died in..."
"El Greco was a pupil of Titian's"
"Forgetting to remember that Tintoretto's name comes from the fact that his father was a dyer."
"Or that Correggio's comes from the name of the small town where he was born."
"Farinelli was at one period commissioned to sing to Philip V of Spain every evening for a decade."
"Luca Signorelli, at the sudden death of a young son--having the corpse striped and making a full length drawing of the boy for remembrance. And with extraordinary fortitude, shedding not a tear, Vasari says."
"Cafavy worked for the Ministry of Public Works in Alexandria for thirty years."
"Shakespeare's equal, Voltaire called Lope de Vega."
"Was Andrea Mantegna's Padua fresco, The Martyrdom of Saint James, destroyed by a bomb in 1944, perhaps the greatest loss to art since WWII?"

This the book... there is an "Author" who talks about wanting to transform these many index cards of factoids that he keeps in two shoeboxes into a novel... how? And to what end...? The book is like that. But it is wonderful...
I am going to start a Vanishing Point section on my blog to jot down interesting things found in texts... in the old days, I always did this--jotting them on my journals to be treasured and thought about again and again... now? Not so much. Highly recommend this... have wanted to read Wittgenstein's Mistress for years. The closest thing this reminds me of is Sebald's Unrecounted Poems--also recommended!

Below from Joan's great essay on rest.

During this time that I’ve been so exhausted, David Markson’s Vanishing Point has been the only book I recall in which the author (or Author as he calls himself) very occasionally mentions just how tired he is while he writes. How his tiredness is keeping him from getting his work done. I believe Markson had cancer at the time he wrote it, though at that stage probably undiagnosed. Early in the book he writes:

One reason for Author’s procrastination is that he seems not to have had much energy lately, to tell the truth.

For work, or for much of anything else.

It’s unusual for a writer, not writing a memoir, to be this frank about his physical state. And the book, which is funny and weird, full of great two- or three-line stories about racism and writers and musicians and artists and the whole odd business that is life, illuminates the sometimes funny, sometimes tragic strangeness that is reality. It is also a lot about death. And, Author’s very occasional mentions of himself give the book an even more moving quality.

Toward the end Author has developed some difficulty moving his body in the way he’s used to as well.

Actually, more than his persistent tiredness, what has started to distress Author lately is the way he has found himself scuffing his feet when he walks.

Markson suspects some neurological issue. Or just age. There is the “damnable obstinate weariness.”

In the last few pages of the book there is a section comprised only of dates and locations. Some are easy to recognize:

Fireplace Road, East Hampton. 10:15 P.M. August 11, 1956.

Ketchum, Idaho. Soon after dawn. July 2, 1961.

Others I’d have to look up. But obviously all are the times and locations of singular deaths. Death is the Vanishing Point.

While fortunately my own mood remains good, and fortunately the people I know who contracted Covid-19 have all recovered, I’ve also noticed that recently I’ve been reading (in a lax and weary way) about ghouls and crypts and mourning and melancholia. Because states of deep tiredness do naturally lead to thoughts of death. My own fatigue has made me more cognizant of the phrase dead tired. Whether or not this is how one would feel when close to death, certainly there is a sense that this is how it might be. When exhaustion forbids almost all activity, death leaps (crawls?) to mind. I found myself going back to those two great poems: Donne’s A Valediction Forbidding Mourning, and Dylan Thomas’s A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London. Forbid. Refuse. It is possible I can’t let myself feel all my grief about the world, the unnecessary and terrible deaths from Covid, the unnecessary and terrible deaths from racism, the unnecessary and terrible death of the planet, and so I transfer my feelings about death to my reading. And though I think my fatigue has a pretty clear physical basis, I don’t discount the possibility of some somatization; after all, many people who don’t have immune issues and have not been exposed to the virus are also tired.

Near the end of Vanishing Point, Markson brings up the term Selah.

Selah, which marks the ends of verses in the Psalms, but the Hebrew meaning of which is unknown.

And probably indicates no more than pause or rest.

Why does Author wish it implied more—or might stand for some ultimate effacement, even?

While I’m not yet ready for ultimate effacement, I am looking forward to a time when rest rejuvenates and I can stop rattling shakily around in my skin.

Pause. Rest. With Markson, Selah.

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el Escorial

IMG_3865With the possible exception of the dazzlingly perverse Borgia popes and the women who surrounded them, I am not sure any family in history has quite the dark and dastardly reputation as the Spanish Habsburgs.

I have written at length about my own attachment to the dark legend of Queen Isabella.

Even after reading--and really appreciating-- the fair portrayal of Queen Isabella in Giles Tremblett's Isabella of Castille, I must be honest and confess that I am stubbornly sticking to my image of her as the psychopathic religious fanatic and power hungry queen that I have long imagined her to be-- as portrayed so memorably by Salman Rushdie in his wonderful short story that appeared in the New Yorker way back in 1991, called Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella of Spain Consummate Their Relationship, Santa Fe, January, 1492. ( Download The-New-Yorker-Jun-17-1991) 

Rushdie is such a genius. In just a few short pages, he somehow evokes the most unforgettable picture of Columbus and Isabella; for this so perfectly captures just how I have always imagined them:

 ….he bowed over her olive hand and, with his lips a breath away from the great ring of her power, murmured a single, dangerous word. 'Consummation.' — These unspeakable foreigners! The nerve! 'Consummation', indeed! And then following in her footsteps, month after month, as if he stood a chance. His coarse epistles, his tuneless serenades beneath her casement windows, obliging her to have them closed, shutting out the cooling breeze….”

And so she plays with him! At luncheons she promises him everything he wants and cuts him dead later in the afternoon, looking through him as if he were a veil.”

 He wonders if she is tormenting him for fun alone…!

 Isabel la Católica~~ 

Love her or hate her (she is my own personal arch enemy), her religious fanaticism takes center stage in most books about her. Our British tour guide in Seville referred to Isabella and Ferdinand as "the psychopaths"~~ for indeed, everyone knew who he was referring to. 

 Her daughters don't fare much better either... In The Noble, Tragic Lives of Katherine of Aragon and Juana, Queen of Castile, author Julia Fox very courageously sets the record straight on these two much-maligned women. Just leaving aside Catherine for now and looking at Juana... Juana, is the stuff of dark Spanish legend. So passionately in love was she with her husband (otherwise known as Philip the Gorgeous from Burgundy), she went stark raving mad after his death. The story goes that she, despite being pregnant, insisted on traveling with the corpse of her dead husband from Burgos to Granada (they never made it that far), where she had wanted to have him buried. It is said that she would not allow any women near the body, so jealous was she in his death as much as in his life and that she opened the coffin on several occasions to kiss his hands and feet-- and lips. Julia Fox does a wonderful job poking holes in the legend and explaining that it was probably her father who was the "mad" one and by locking her up in a nunnery was able to take the rulership of Castille for himself. 

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Henry Kamen, in his wonderful book on the Escorial, has perhaps the hardest legend of all to right: that of Philip II and the building of the Escorial. Probably no one quite captures the black legend on Philip II as Carlos Fuentes does in in 1975 novel, Terra Nostra. This is from a Kirkus review:

It is like a movie by Bunuel unreeling marvels, cruelties, compulsions--a Buneul, who had been given unlimited funds by some mad mogul. Fuentes' labyrinth starts in Paris in 1999, when the Seine is boiling, the Louvre has turned to crystal and the Eiffel Tower to sand. Flagellants parade the streets. On a bridge a man meets a woman with tattooed lips; he falls into the river; the story shifts back to Spain on the eve of the New World's discovery, it is a Spain of blood, torture, religious and sexual obsessions, ruled by El Senor, who hates life (God's greatest sin was the creation of man) and has immured himself in a necropolis. His mother consorts with the cadaver of her husband."

In the novel, Juana la Loca is Philip's mother, instead of his grandmother, but you recognize the consorting... and she is not the only necrophiliac as Philip II has long been portrayed as a cross between a religious fanatic and necrophiliac. In the novel, for example, we find him engaging in self- flagellation (wildly whipping himself as he prays prostrate on the cold marble floor of the basilica at el Escorial. They say he was unusual for a king in his avoidance of most pleasures and indeed, in the novel, he is depicted as entertaining some very strange religious ideas. 

The Black Legend

The Black Legend itself has its roots in the aftermath of the failed Armada but really more than anything it is a product of the Protestant Reformation, which as part of its cultural wake, saw Catholic countries (especially Spain) portrayed as extremely backward--with religious superstition and fanaticism holding the country back in ways not seen in more enlightened Protestant countries. And so we have the inbred Hapsburgs with their courts filled with incredible art (from Bosch to Valesquez) their many dwarfs; religious sects and the dreadful Spanish Inquisition. It was a world embodied by black-clad aristocrats, in women strictly hidden away in their palaces and Byzantine religious practiced that had a strong hold on everything. 

Philip II in particular was seen as monomaniacal in his building of the tremendously expensive Escorial. It didn't help that the monastery-palace itself was constructed on top of a hill in a rather remote and harsh location and built in an unadorned and cold-feeling classical style. It appeared harsh and authoritarian and was much loathed by Europeans of the time... And did I mention that this monastery-palace was also a pantheon? Philip had designed what later writers described as a necropolis-- a place of burial for the Spanish royals. 

EscorialPanteoThere must be other places like this somewhere in the world but for the life of me, I can't think of any. Basically, when the building was completed, bodies were taken out of their mausoleums and brought to el Escorial for their final interment. Royalty who died after the building's construction first had to be reduced to bones before being interred so fresh cadavers were first laid to rest in the “El Pudridero” (aka the rotting room). 

You can read all about it here (since pictures are not allowed inside, I didn't get any of my own). 

This project dominated Philip II's mature years as he spent enormous resources and energy in designing the huge complex and bringing artists from Italy over to adorn it. 

Much was made of this in other parts of Europe--especially in lands prone to discriminating against the Spanish in the first place. But in all fairness, the Spanish themselves did much to spread the memes about their dark and morbid king Philip II.

In the book, Kamen addresses every single trope. His book is less a history of the building of el Escorial as much as it is a revisionist history of the life of Philip II (with special attention to his latter years). It is really stimulating reading--especially if you have read a lot of Spanish history. Kamen pays close attention to art--from the many Titian portraits to the opera by Verdi (based on Friedrich Schiller’s  play about Philip and his son, the Don Carlo of the title):

I will sleep alone in my royal mantle
When my day has come to evening
I will sleep alone beneath the black
vault
There in the depths of the Escorial.

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Kamen's book is a dazzling tour through the life of Philip II. But as he tackles each different element in the myth surrounding Philip II, you will probably be left clinging to the Black Legend despite Kamen's best efforts since; well, where there is smoke there is fire. And the Expulsions did happen and women were very much hidden away and in some ways Spain was indeed as "backward" as people said until fairly modern times (If you look up how long the Spanish Inquisition was continued down to modern times, you might be surprised).

As Ingrid Rowland's fabulous review to the book states:

Kamen notes that the king attended “only” four autos-da-fé in person, and that none of them involved burnings at the stake. But surely it is incontrovertible that Spanish colonial rule, the Spanish Inquisition, and Spanish pressures on the Catholic church caused the world untold misery. The legacy of Philip II and the Escorial is as mixed and ambiguous as their eclectic heritage.

HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS ONE! 

Ingrid Rowland: The Fortunate Journey in the New Republic

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Gaudi's Heaven on Earth

31451074The Sagrada Familia: Gaudí’s Heaven on Earth by Gijs van Hensbergen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A short and wonderfully-written history of the Sagrada Familia. You will definitely need to get some kind of coffee table book with pictures of all Gaudi's main works, as well as with photographs the Sagrada (or look them up online) otherwise the read won't be as illuminating.

Being quite heavy on the political and historical context of the building of the cathedral and it is less detailed on the religious and biographical context, which is fine. But readers might want to see the author's biography of Gaudi, as well.

I cannot recommend enough the wonderful film, Sagrada: the Mystery of Creation. It is really moving, thanks in great part to the photography. The film also spends quite a lot of time with the Japanese sculptor Etsuro Sotoo - 外尾悦郎.  Sotoo is a fascinating person--from Japan, he left his country decades ago after feeling called by the stones he saw in wait at the Sagrada building site... after learning Spanish, he then converted to Roman Catholicism and insists that it is through the lens of Gaudi's faith that one must approach the miracle of La Sagrada Familia.

I was so happy that van Hensbergen ended his book with the story of Sotoo--who is, I believe, the only official sculptor working on La Sagrada Familia. A remarkable man from Japan.

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Suntory ad that launched the Gaudi boom in Japan here

 

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A Captive's Tale

FullSizeRender-28Cervantes in Algiers: A Captive's Tale
by Maria Antonia Garcés

Has any writer had a more adventurous life than Cervantes?

First of all, he was at the legendary Battle of Lepanto. Yes, you heard me right. And there, by all accounts, he was very heroic. Hit three times by harquebus fire, he was struck twice in the chest and once in the left hand. Luckily, his armor deflected the chest wounds, but his left hand was permanently damaged during the battle. His maimed hand earned him the nickname, "El Manco de Lepanto." His heroic service that day got him several letters of commendation; one being from his "serene highness" Don Juan himself. Unfortunately, these letters were on his person when he was captured by the dreaded Barbary pirates and taken to Algiers. His new master, believing him to be a man of great value because of these letters, set his ransom to an exorbitant amount of money, thereby ensuring he stayed a captive for five years, most of which he felt hopeless for ever being ransomed!

Returning home, I wonder if he didn't struggle with trying to fit back into life there. It can be very hard coming home after an intense period abroad because things that you once thought as being "obvious" or "natural," no longer feel that way and you find yourself questioning everything. Cervantes clearly does this in a different way by basically pitting all manner of preconceived notions and narratives against each other--constantly calling into question the act of storytelling itself. Is Don Quixote mad or is the world mad? Are all those notions held by people in various times and places somehow "real" or are we all not bewitched like actors playing parts in a wondrous play?

María Antonia Garcés is one of my intellectual heroes. And her book, Cervantes in Algiers is revelatory. Evoking Freud, she discusses the way that in some people trauma is actually bypassed in the mind: it is not experienced directly and instead is registered in the psyche as a kind of memory of the event that patients or survivors return to again and again, neurotically trying to process what happened to them. Of course, many people have traditionally processed traumatic events by revisiting them in art -- and Cervantes indeed seems to return again and again to issues of captivity and broken narratives. For what is trauma but a deep interruption? Falling through the cracks of one's own life is how I used to put it until I read María Antonia Garcés' book. For trauma is an interruption of life, like a broken thread (el roto hilo de mi historia). And Cervantes himself uses the language of tying up the broken thread in his telling tales. As a former captive of Columbian guerrillas, María Antonia Garcés is is very compelling.

This is an award-winning book for good reason. The opening chapters on the history of Algiers and the Barbary pirates is very interesting. I don't think I have ever read this history before and after going through her two opening chapter twice, I learned so much.

This book is very dear to me. Eye-opening on the history of the time, you will learn more than you imagine on Cervantes life. But, I would add, it is what she has to say about the life-saving grace of literature and about trauma that moved me tremendously.This is an interesting article on her work from BBC culture... and I am posting at 3Quarks Daily tomorrow on it as well. 

[First posted at Goodreads]

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A Drizzle of Honey

A Drizzle of Honey: The Life and Recipes of Spain's Secret JewsA Drizzle of Honey: The Life and Recipes of Spain's Secret Jews by David M. Gitlitz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A friend recommended this book to me, and I am so glad he did. Having a conversation about the Spanish Inquisition, we were talking about how different it was in that country than to what we know of the Papal Inquisition; in that in Spain, the Inquisition was very much focused on cultural hegemony and political consolidation--much less about religious dogma. After 700 years of Muslim rule in most of Spain, in order to get a firm gripe on power, Queen Isabella --Isabel la Católica-- married the king of Aragon, thereby uniting the two most powerful Christian kingdoms and together with her husband, she then sought to gain total control of the peninsula. Part of this project included the horrendous 1492 Expulsion of the Jews. The Jewish population was given a choice: leave or convert. Those who converted, however, were then constantly harassed by Isabella and the Inquisition. Called conversos, the "New Christians" were suspected of all manner of things that put Christians at risk. Conversos who were Christian on the outside but still practicing Jews in the home were a main target of the Inquisition as cultural hegemony under one church was a top priority for the evil Isabella. And one of the main ways these secret practices were thought to be knowable was through diet and practices surrounding the sabbath meal. It is a depressing history and the result was catastrophic for the population that became known as Sephardic Jews.

This fascinating cookbook is a collection of recipes found in Inquisition documents used to prosecute (persecute) those suspected of "secret Judaizing..." The main impression of the recipes themselves look like typical medieval recipes... there is a lot of fowl, eggs and some fish; lots of cinnamon and other spices. It is simple fare. Harmless stews and lots of chickpeas. The main points of contention were no pork, a kosher kitchen.. and ... what else could there have been? Any excuse was used.

"Did the suspect put down a white tablecloth and light candles?"
"Did they avoid pork?"
"Did they create sabbath stews?"

The story of Beatriz Nunoz is described at the start. Hauled in after she and her husband had converted but there were witnessed who said she kept a kosher kitchen. This was spring 1485. One of the particulars found in the documents claimed that their maid mentioned a Sabbath stew made of lamb, chickpeas and hard-boiled eggs. Sounds innocuous, right? Well the Guadeloupe Inquisition found her guilty and she was burned later that same year.






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Don Quixote: When Professor Wey-Gómez Ate Mochi (Week 3)

Don_Quixote_1My astronomer was worried about how I would react to the book burning scene. It was his own favorite set piece of the novel, he said, but 

"Still, I wonder if what happens to his library will upset you?"

Can you imagine to lose my precious books again or--worse-- have my library sealed up?

Poor Don Quixote, who is returning back after the first sally to his abode of books, has a shock in store for himself. All homecomings are hard, and this one is no different. Badly beaten, our hero is hauled home by a neighbor. More concerned by his mental state than his bruises, a priest and a barber are called  to the house. Remember barbers doubled as surgeons back then, so, as professor Wey-Gómez reminds us, we had a doctor of the soul, along with the doctor of the body, there to try and cure the patient- who is, it has to be said, clearly out of his mind from reading too many romances.

And being doctors, they quickly decide that if they get rid of the cause of our hero's madness (the books), he will be cured. 

This is the famous "inquisition of the books." Out on trial with the priest having final say on the final fate of each volume, books are either saved or cast into the flames. It is very funny! For as books are individually tried and cast judgement upon, those deemed worthy of punishment are "turned over the to the secular arm" (ie, Quixote's niece and the housekeeper, both of whom would like nothing more than to burn them all in a great bonfire). His niece refers to the books as "the heretics." The church, of course, was not directly allowed to take lives --and so their dirty work had always been performed by the state. And how arbitrary it all is!

But being such a great parody of the Spanish Inquisition, some of the students could not wrap their minds around how Cervantes escaped censor or worse. 

Professor asked us if we had ever eaten mochi.

I think this took us all by surprise. And as we happily discussed the delights of mochi, professor lost the thread of where he was going. It was as comical as the book burning scene in the novel and everyone started laughing as we tried to guess why professor had brought up the subject of mochi (he had described a particular dessert he liked, mentioning how fattening it can be)....  And then one of the students suggested that maybe professor had wanted to compare the deadly nature of mochi with the Inquisition. Now, this was truly hilarious, since in Japan, indeed, people have been known choke on mochi and die. In Tochigi, before New Years, there were public service announcements to people to only chew small bites at a time! And who could forget that  wonderful scene from I Am a Cat when the neko almost chokes on the sticky mochi that he was trying to gobble down. Recently, on Facebook someone posted that more die from eating mochi than from handguns in Japan!

It was funny --and I thought the student was quite clever to make the connection between the dangers of mochi and the Spanish Inquisition.

But no, said professor (who had by then remembered where he had been going with this).

Think of how when you press on one side of the mochi, the other side kind of balloons out....ぷにぷにお餅!!!!

Cervantes cannot be pinned down! Carroll Johnson, in his wonderful book, Don Quixote: The Quest for Modern Fiction, also discusses Cervantes' highly ambiguous style that simply resists all definitive interpretation (and therefore censor). One of his plays, La Numancia, apparently was staged to propagate a pro-government position under the Franco regime at the same time it was being performed elsewhere in 1956 to commemorate Franco's defenders of Madrid in a 1937 battle. 

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A quick word about Joseph Pérez's book, The Spanish Inquisition (Review here) and what was in fact censored in el Quixote. 

In wonderfully clear prose, Pérez explains how the Spanish Inquisition was fundamentally different from the Inquisition in Rome. Being founded by the State (not the church) the Spanish Inquisition was created toward a specific purpose: the "eradication of semitism" (asPérez calls it). Spain is unique in that a great part of the modern country was a Muslim-ruled land for more than 700 years. That is a long time! And so when Ferdinand and my arch-enemy Isabella united Castille and Aragon, they quickly did three things: 1) They persuaded the Pope to let them create an Inquisition in Spain; 2) They expelled the Jews (who chose not to converted); and 3) They forced the Muslims in Castille to convert.

At the very beginning, the Inquisition was founded to deal specifically with the conversos, who were accused of "Judaising" in Seville. And it seems, based on Pérez, that for a long time, it was taken up with this issue. Unlike the Inquisition in Rome (and maybe France), it was therefore far less concerned with religion per se. The monarchs were aiming to re-exert control over the land culturally, after the reconquest of Spain from the Muslims. And they did this though a policy of "one religion." So, in the beginning at least, in Spain issues of concern were largely cultural. Is everyone eating the same food and worshipping the same God? What practices are happening in the home? They turned soon after to banning religious books. And then the speaking of Arabic and Moorish dress became outlawed. New Christians were always suspect. And rooting them out was a main occupation. (I read somewhere else that Torquemada was himself a New Christian).

As the Counter-Reformation picked up steam, the Inquisition next turned its eyes to rooting out Lutherans (at first this was mainly about banning books and turning out foreigners).

Political reasons became increasingly important. 

Don Quixote had one sentence censored from the book. And that was one that declared, "charitable works performed with tepid enthusiasm and laxity have no merit and no value." It is not surprising that this would greatly upset the Inquisition, as it is stepping dangerously close to him weighing in on the meaning and interpretation of scripture and to seeming to side with Protestant sentiments. The idea of Good Works versus Faith being a huge point of contention at that time. A religious and a political point of contention. 

** Also see,  Dopico-Black, 'Canons Afire: Libraries, Books, and Bodies in Don Quixote's Spain,' in Cervantes' Don Quixote: A Casebook, ed. Roberto González echevarría (new york: oxford University Press, 2005):

The scrutiny of the library chapter of Don Quixote brilliantly opens the door to this haunted, enchanted place, a place in which reading is both refuge and risk, in which the traces of power and memory are grafted on skin or on paper, in which bodies and books are fraught with history and desire: madness to surrender, madness not to.

**The librarian and I had hoped to learn more about the term "relaxed in person" as a euphemism to burning at the stake. Also to learn a bit more about the medieval custom of the sanbenito.

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The Most Beautiful Opera Houses of the World (Lists)

La scalaI became interested in beautiful opera houses a few years ago after seeing a performance at La Scala in Milan, which must be one of life's great musical experiences.

Actually, I became obsessed by beautiful theaters after watching Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, whose hero defiantly declares:

"As true as I am standing here, one day I shall bring grand opera to Iquitos." 

Fitcarraldo is the incredible Sisyphean true story of a man who wants to build an opera house in the middle of the Amazon rainforest in the late 19th century and his story is only to be outdone by the crazy outlandishness of the man who decides to re-create the event a hundred years later in film. 

Like a set of nested Russian dolls--each more mind-bogglingly conceived-- the story's central metaphor continuously revolves around the theme of "man against nature." This is a world where it people's dreams that truly matter. And these people will move mountains in order to pursue their obsessions. So, to build his opera house, the hero, Fitcarraldo, has to employ hundreds of Indians to help pull a 320-ton ship over a muddy hill. But perhaps what is the most incredible part of the story is that Werner Herzog, in the making of his film about the historic ship-pulling, insists on physically re-creating the original challenges by struggling to capture on film the impossible task of having the local Indians pulling a real 320-ton ship over a mountain. His hell-bent will to veracity has made Herzog's film the stuff of legend.

And this is all very unexpected since film has never been an art much concerned with literal truth, being taken up solely by images. Not to mention that if all that matters is the "burden of his dream," why doesn't Herzog employ the usual Hollywood devices of stage set and miniatures to evoke his story more poetically? Why does he seek to do the impossible and film actual people pulling a real 320-ton ship over a steep and very slippery hill in the most remote part of the Amazon --given the useless burden of doing so?

Why, indeed?  

The glorious Don Quixote of the Amazon? The Conquistador of the Useless. I love Herzog! And someday to see the Amazonas in Manaus is a dream of mine. 

++

The Most Beautiful Opera Houses in the World, by Antoine Pecqueur, is a fun book. It does not include the Amazonas in Manaus, nor does it include the Colon in Buenos Aires, which is supposed to be another great beauty in South America. It is a quirky and opiniated volume. Originally written in French, it has stunningly beautiful photographs of the old opera houses. And while I cannot say I have any desire to see Bayreuth (sorry everyone), I am hoping very much to visit Teatro Nacional de São Carlos in Lisbon and Teatro La Fenice later this year. Maybe the theater in Barcelona as well--all three recommended by Pecqueur as being among the most beautiful. 

My own list, so far, would have to be something like this:

1 Palais Garnier. It remains my favorite. The two best ballet performances of my life where seen here: La Source and La Sylphide. Ceiling painted by Chagall...I love everything about this theater. Hoping to be there at least once this year. 

2. La Scala. A life experience in a country where the prime minister traditionally attends La Scala's season's openings--always covered by the top newspapers and where art and high culture still really matters. Also, it is a place where attendees are known to boo! We saw Carmen here and shared a box with a very seriously attentive and opinionated Italian couple. They were glued to the performance and adjusted their clapping meticulously to represent their feelings for each performer. Such a difference from the laid back performances in LA, where "it's all good!"

3. Parma Theater. Have not seen a performance here but most visually beautiful and historically interesting theater I have seen. A perfect Renaissance gem. I am hoping to attend the Verdi festival here someday.....

4. The Zurich Opera House Wonderfully beautiful art neo-rococo style inside. It is also associated with Wagner but that is not why I like it. 

5. Santa Fe Opera House. Indescribable!

++ I also have another book on opera houses by another French writer, Opera Houses Of The World by Thierry Beauvert. Interesting, both books list the new Tokyo Opera House in the list of most beautiful new theaters. Sydney too, of course.  Here is National Geographic's Top Ten--do you agree?

Palais_garnier_auditorium_ceiling_chagall1

 



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Bird by Bird

IMG_3274[First posted on Goodreads]
 
I read this book when it first came out in 1994. And I just finished re-reading it again now for an upcoming bookclub gathering. Twenty-five years later....where has the time gone? But it really was so interesting approaching the book again after more than two decades! I have changed so much--and yet maybe I haven't since I still loved her humor and deeply appreciated her thoughts on creativity and the good life. In that way it resonated as much for me today as when I was twenty-five. 

Whether its oil painting, music or writing, I think Anne Lamott is exactly right that creativity can unlock a reverence to life that makes life worth living. It is in the attentiveness and sense of wonder that works of art evoke, both in their creation as well as their reception that makes the creative life so incredibly enriching for people. And I agree that it is an end in itself. Even if you don't end up a Picasso or a Tolstoy, still the activity itself is deeply meaningful. And I wonder how about how life would be somehow unlivable without art--music and books, pictures and dance. Having children can bring this out in us as well --but then when the children become teenagers, everything turns to hell making it a far more dangerous proposition. A true slippery slope. 

And so, I agree with Lamott that for many people, books and literature (or music or art) can be the greatest balm in life. It is a refuge of course, but it can be a kind of medicine as well. One of the oldest library mottos in the world traces its origin back to the ancient library of Pharaoh Ramses II: ITXH2 IATPEION ("house of healing for the soul"). It's true, books are medicine for the soul!!! And the older I get the more I appreciate --and yes, the more I need-- art. 

I am reading a very interesting book right now by Maria Antonia Garces about Don Quixote. It is specifically on the impact that captivity and being enslaved had on Cernavtes' life. The author also was held in captivity by Columbian rebels and she feels she understands the way that Cervantes' captivity by pirates for 4 years in Algiers impacted his inner life. She says something very interesting about trauma. That particularly traumatic events are not experienced by a person. Being too painful to bear, the experience is "registered" on the person's psyche. Being bypassed in the person's consciousness it then comes back as a memory that the person must somehow come to gripes with and according to Garces, it was reading that became her own solace and writing that allowed her to work through what happened to her. She believes that Cervantes' own captivity is inscribed in every word of his works. It saved him. 

Lamott likewise found refuge in books, searching for “some sort of creative or spiritual or aesthetic way of seeing the world and organizing it in [her] head.”

She says:

"I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do — the actual act of writing — turns out to be the best part. It’s like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward."

It is such a lesson for how to live: being attentive and caring. I am really glad I had the chance to re-read this book and don't want to let another twenty-five years pass before reading it again!!!
 
 

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A Poisoner Chalice (Last Read of the Year)


800px-Zürich_-_Grossmünster_IMG_0237In September 1776, in the fairytale-like Swiss town of Zurich, a plot believed to be of a diabolical nature took place in the city's main church.

Someone, it seems, had put poison in the Communion wine.

That something like this could happen in a place as orderly as Zurich-- and that it would have occurred on one of the most important festival days of the German Protestant Church, the Day of Repentance and Prayer; but that this crime took place in the city's main church, the very place where the ruling elite routinely gathered to pray, quickly turned the case into a great late 18th century cause célèbre.

It was not by mere chance that I had picked up historian Jeffrey Freedman's wonderful book on the case, A Poisoned Chalice, on the day after Christmas. For I had myself come down on Christmas night with the worst case of the flu I have had in living memory. No one else was ill in the family, and I had spent the week preceding Christmas home alone sitting by the fire reading. How could I have gotten this sick and where could I have picked it up? Pondering things, a creeping doubt entered my head: Had I gotten sick from Christmas Eve service during Communion? I felt sheepish even considering this since, well, can one get sick from the wine made holy??? 

Pondering my situation, I remembered Freedman's book on the poisoned chalice. (I like to buy any book with the word chalice in the title and have had this one for quite some time).

What sounds like a TV detective novel is actually a wonderfully-written book of serious history. They call it micro-history, where a small event in time is analyzed in order illuminate larger themes and currents. Freedman is a dazzling writer and this book is a real page-turner!

First, I should assure you that no one actually died after drinking from the Cup-- but such was the fuss around the foul taste of the wine and other hints at intrigue that an inquiry was undertaken. This was the city's main church, after all, where all the prominent townspeople came to worship. So doctors were called in to analyze the contaminated wine and it was concluded that someone had indeed put arsenic in it. 

How did one come to such a conclusion in the days before chemical analysis? Simple, they heated it up and sniffed the vapors. Arsenic gives off a telltale garlic stench.

Freedman doesn't dwell on this fact but I think it does bear to keep in mind that this all happened in what was Ulrich Zwingli's church, the famous Zurich Grossmünster. Last year in Zurich, out on a walking tour of the city, our guide pointed to the church from across the river and said, Under Zwingli this city was a theocracy. They were religious fanatics like the Taliban. And that over there, he said still pointing at the church, was Taliban headquarters. Zwingli and his revolution was all almost two hundred years in the past by the time of the case of the poisoned chalice--but it is interesting to note (and historically ironic) that events took place in this church-- of all churches. Zwingli, considered the father of the Reformed tradition, is less well known these days than Calvin, who came in after Zwingli's death to shape the new traditions, which would eventually sweep across southern German and France, and then on to Holland, England and Scotland among the Congregationalists and Presbyterians,--before traveling further still over to the New World. We very much live in Zwingli reformed world. 

Preaching from the Grossmunster, this ancient church, believed to have been founded by Charlemagne in the 8th century, was stripped of all its stained glass and treasures and was reborn as a reformed church. A kind of ground zero, if you will. Doing away with Lenten fasting and encouraging the clergy to marry, Zwingli's most radical stand was concerning the Eucharist. Differing from Martin Luther, who believed that Christ's presence was contained "in, with, and under" the bread and wine, Zwingli begged to differ. Believing that it was rather a commemoration of the last supper, he insisted the wine and bread to be solely symbolic. 

In 2016, I was auditing a religious studies class at Caltech with a small group of undergraduates in which the professor brought in a dialogue from the Marburg Colloquy. Called in 1529 by the German ruler, Philip I, Landgrave of Hesse, who had hoped to unite the various Protestant thinkers of the age so as to unite the Protestant states into a political alliance, many famous thinkers of the time were present--from Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli to Philipp Melanchthon, and Andreas Osiander. In class, I was given the part of Luther and will never forget the awkwardness of the undergraduates--all future scientists-- trying to read out the lines of this debate that was utterly incomprehensible to them.

ZWINGLI: I insist that the words of the Lord's Supper must be figurative. This is ever apparent, and even
required by the article of faith: "taken up into heaven, seated at the right hand of the Father." Otherwise, it
would be absurd to look for him in the Lord's Supper at the same time that Christ is telling us that he is in
heaven. One and the same body cannot possibly be in different places....

LUTHER: I call upon you as before: your basic contentions are shaky. Give way, and give glory to God'

ZWINGLI: And we call upon you to give glory to God and to quit begging the question! The issue at stake is
this: Where is the proof of your position? I am willing to consider your words carefully-no harm meant! You're
trying to outwit me. I stand by this passage in the sixth chapter of John, verse 63 and shall not be shaken from it.
You'll have to sing another tune.

LUTHER: You’re being obnoxious.

Indeed! 

And so here we were again.

Despite the fact that no one died, that someone would do such a thing hinted for the people of Zurich of a moral depravity that defied reason. This was only two decades after the infamous mega-quake of 1755, the Lisbon Earthquake. And as if the earthquake wasn't enough, the massively devastating earthquake was followed by fires and then a great tsunami that caused the complete destruction of one of the world's greatest cities of the time. Indeed, the human suffering was so terrible that the disaster sparked philosophical and religious debates on the nature of Evil that continued across Europe for a long time afterward; Voltaire's Candide being perhaps among the most famous. In one of the vivid scenes of the novel, as Candide is lying there trapped under the rubble, he begs for wine and light. The sailor has gone off to pillage-- but what of Candide's companion Pangloss? Well, our man Pangloss is too busy philosophizing to be of any real help. Though thousands have perished, he tells his friend lying under the rubble, still everything is just as it should have been, for: "How could Leibnitz have been wrong?"

How indeed?

At the time the Lisbon earthquake had a profound affect on the collective imagination, and theologians and philosophers across Europe struggled with the question of evil and God (if God was Omnipotent and All-Loving how could he permit suffering of this scale? Either he is not omnipotent or his is not all loving). The case of the poisoned chalice struck the people of Switzerland and then Germany in a similar manner. What was the nature of evil? Preachers gave fiery sermons on the diabolical meaning of the crime for simply no rational person would ever want to murder hundreds of fellow church-goers.There was also a social aspect to the crime since people came together in trust. The Protestant rite was conducted for both clergy and people (not only priests but all participated), with the Cup being passed from hand to hand within the congregation. So social cohesiveness was also being undermined.

Everything we know about cases like this calls out for a scapegoat. I was surprised that the Jewish community was not quickly targeted until Freedman explained that there were no longer any Jewish people living within the walls of the city, as they had all been driven out a hundred years earlier after a supposed poisoning of a well. Not surprisingly a suspect was found: the church grave digger and bell ringer. In Freedman's words, this was always considered a lowly occupation and in this case could serve as a replacement scapegoat for the crime. A well publicized trial was then conducted. Not enough evidence was found and the accused was eventually released but much like with the Lisbon earthquake the crime touched on a nerve an a great debate was sparked in conversations taking place in newspapers and journals across Germany in Switzerland about the case in terms of Enlightenment philosophy--that starting from questions concerning the nature of evil led to a questioning of truth itself. 

It's a wonderful book that I cannot recommend enough. 

 

Top photo from Wikipedia and below from Steffen Jacobs

Grossmunster

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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