Surprised by Ernst

I dislike Max Ernst's works more often than not, but Ernst surprised me the other day at what has become my favorite museum in the Netherlands, and one of my favorite museums in the world, the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, or the Municipal Museum of the Hague.   More on the building later.   The picture is called "The Entire City," and its technique (frottage) involves scraping away layers to reveal color beneath.  It is as good a representation of any I've seen of the plural feel of city life and the historical layers of urban history.  The thorny growths outside the city bristle threateningly but they also twirl with awkward delight, especially at the margins.  (Here the technique as it's practiced today affects my reaction to the picture, because I remember doing frottage with crayons from grade school art classes.)    

Some days I believe with Simon Critchley that philosophy begins from disappointment rather than wonder.  This is why looking at art has become so crucially important to me: it is an experience of wonder, especially when an artist surprises me, as Rembrandt did earlier this year.  Wonder matters.  

Retromania!

Today my colleague here at the NIAS, Mitja Velikonja, lent me a new book by Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past.  Its first footnote (really a marginal comment at the bottom of the page -- the NIAS' writer-in-residence has alerted me to the nuances here) is making me wonder if I could write something similar about Augustan culture, circa the year zero (a great title, by the way).   Here's the marginal comment, with my rewrite below:

THE RETROSCAPE
2000/April: The Smithsonian Institution's Memphis Rock 'n' Soul Museum opens >>>> 2000/May: Julien Temple's Sex Pistols doc The Film and the Fury is released, kicking off a decade-spanning trilogy of punk documentaries... >>>> 2000/June: The Experience Music Project, a huge rock 'n' pop museum founded by billionaire infotech mogul Paul Allen, opens in Seattle >>>>> 2001/July: Garage-rock revivalists The White Stripes release their commercial breakthrough album White Blood Cells to huge acclaim >>>>  etc etc
The note runs along the bottom of the book's first fifteen pages.  

So:
THE RETROSCAPE:
39/April (let me make up the months): Gaius Asinius Pollio's Great Writers of the Past public library opens >>>>> 37/October: Vergil's ten Eclogues, adaptations of Theocritus' third century Bucolica are released, kicking off a short-term fashion of ten-poem poetry collections and a longer trend in bucolic songs... >>>>> 24/May: The Experience Hellenistic-Persian Gardens Project, a huge music 'n' art complex founded by billionaire banker Maecenas, opens in Rome >>>>>>  23/November: Lyric-elegy revivalist Horace releases his commercial breakthrough collection Odes to huge acclaim >>>>>> etc etc
Classicist readers may supply their own notes on Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid, Valerius Maximus, Livy (perhaps the Retromaniac par excellence) and others as they please.  

Happily at work:

Back

Delays in posting happen.  Why?  In my case, I agreed to serve as dean of humanities at NYU starting in September, which has already led to a surprise extra trip back to New York and a good deal of time on skype, phone and email learning the ropes.  I've experienced the rapture of art by Mondrian, Calder (heart-lifting wire sculptures and miniature-circus films), and Sol LeWitt at the marvelously refreshing Gemeentemuseum in the Hague.   LeWitt's slabs of bright color on the wall slammed me back into my body after a couple of days I'd spent floating in thought -- the best path back to the world after burying yourself in writing that I know of.  Then after those blasts of color, Mondrian's wonderfully meticulous designs that somehow give the impression of being both careful and carefree.  I'm participating in a series of conferences, most recently on Dionysius of Halicarnassus at Leiden University, admirably organized by Casper de Jonge.  My nights and a few very early mornings have been absorbed in novel-reading -- Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies, Elmore Leonard's Tishomingo Blues, H. F. M. Prescott's Man on a Donkey, and now Laurent Binet's brilliant HHhH (the perfect book to read while you're writing your own: hardworking authors take note!).  And drawn by provocative parallel lines of thinking in Axel Honneth, David Velleman, Cicero, Horace, Paul Allen Miller, Judith Butler and Simon Critchley -- the kind of crazily heterogeneous yet utterly sensible reading list I most love to build up -- I've dipped into Levinas.  From there it's impossible to resist following a few smoke-puffs of thought that relate to my next hoped-for project on ethics and literature:

The proximity of things is poetry; in themselves the things are revealed before being approached. In stroking an animal already the hide hardens in the skin. But over the hands that have touched things, places trampled by beings, the things they have held, the images of those things, the fragments of those things, the contexts in which those fragments enter, the inflexions of the voice and the words that are articulated in them, the ever sensible signs of language, the letters traced, the vestiges, the relics—over all things, beginning with the human face and skin, tenderness spreads. Cognition turns into proximity, into the purely sensible (Collected Philosophical Papers, 118-119).