Medicine Bird Edition
RIP Munro, RIP Rothenberg, RIP Stella. Anton Janša and the Barberini Bees. Stivers on conversion, Mattix on transgression, Madu on the miraculous hummingbird.
Happy June, friends. Here’s my semi-regular roundup of what I’m reading and working on.
Home news.
Last month was busy. I won a poetry contest! If you missed it, you can read all the finalists here.
I am also thrilled (a word I don’t use often, I know it reads like press release copy, but I am surprised to find that underneath the accumulated aeons of cliché there is a literal sensation—thrilled) to have been accepted to my first artist residency, “the only arts residency in the world that takes place at an active Catholic monastery.”
So in July I will spend a week off grid among the Benedictines, tending sheep and speaking with the bees, and hopefully producing some good work. Or at least, finding and planting some seeds of good work. Longtime readers will know that this fits the mission of this little online hermitage to a T. I am very thankful, and hope it may illuminate some sort of path forward. I am already rushing to practice my plein air technique.
What else. RIP Alice Munro, RIP Jerome Rothenberg, RIP Frank Stella. The formidable midcentury artistic pantheon continues passing away. What comes next? That is up to us.
(Read the rest. Very interesting reflections on the writer as “thinly clothed” and on never being able to go home again, linguistically.)
Links & treats.
Speaking of bees, May 20 was “World Bee Day.” Perhaps alone among our proliferating and contradictory morass of “days,” ersatz echoes of a long-abandoned liturgical calender, this may be worth salvaging. May 20 is the birthday of Anton Janša, a Habsburg-era apiarist credited with modernizing the field.
“Bees are a type of fly, hardworking, created by God to provide man with all needed honey and wax. Among all God’s beings there are none so hard working and useful to man with so little attention needed for its keep as the bee.”
—Anton Janša, “A Full Guide to Beekeeping,” 1775
Jane Cooper writes on the “Barberini Bees,” of Roman fame.
Casimire Sarbiewski SJ (1595-1640), considered the ‘Polish Horace’ by admirers such as Hugo Grotius, was a trailblazing poet… Casimire’s Ode XV Lib. 3, in honour of the Barberini Bees (the three bees on the Barberini coat of arms, pictured), delights me. It was composed on the occasion of the election of Urban VIII of the House of Barberini to the papacy. I’ve imitated it.
Justin Smith-Ruiu’s remembrance of poet and translator Jerome Rothenberg.
He convinced me that translation is, though often undervalued, itself a kind of poetry. You can’t translate a poem without writing another poem. And he convinced me, much more generally, as part of this coming-out, that I may as well open up and be honest about the all-consuming interest I have, as he had, in thinking about the range of human experience in a way that cuts rather deeper than whatever is on offer in the collective “bourgeois etiquette manual” that is most contemporary academic philosophy, openly to go in search of layers of the human that are more primordial and deep-seated.
From Smith-Ruiu’s older meditation on Rothenberg, Nick Cage, poetry, and violence:
This is what the censorious prudes of Left and Right consistently miss about the place of violence in art: it is not a “gateway” to the real thing, nor an approval of human suffering. It is rather a lucid recognition of the fundamental violence of things—even if, per impossibile, we were to render all human beings docile, we would still be getting constantly slammed by nature—and of the deep human need to come to terms with this condition through the free play of the imagination.
The New Yorker resurrects Peter Scheldahl on the “indestructible art of Frank Stella.”
[Stella’s] last phase was neo-Baroque, with mostly metal, often wildly complex reliefs and sculptures. He was, he said, inspired by Caravaggio, though you wouldn’t have guessed that. But Stella was changeless, fundamentally. One stubborn principle reigned at every turn, expressed in his famous words: “What you see is what you see.” His was a formalist gospel, forbidding interpretation.
“I don’t see any point in making anything but controversial statements. There is no other way of getting any attention at all. I mean you cannot get people thinking until you say something that really shocks them, dislocates them. That is the way the arts work; the painters, the poets, all work like that. They work by dislocation of attention. That is why new styles are necessary for perception. The function of the arts is training in perception. It is not instruction. It is to train your ability to see and use your senses.”
—Marshall McLuhan, Education in the Electronic Age (1967)
Will 2025 be the start of a unified date for Easter?
Occasionally, Easter falls on the same date, and that will be the case in 2025, a year, coincidentally (or some might think providentially), in which the Christian world will mark the 1,700th anniversary of the First Ecumenical Council, held at Nicaea in the year 325. That council occurred, of course, when the Churches of East and West were still in communion, and one of the resolutions of Nicaea was determining the best way to calculate the date for Easter.
What actually happens when you buy a €1 home in Sicily?
Were once-sepulchral towns reinvigorated by newcomers eager to put down roots? Were the new residents integrating into small-town life, or was an influx of new blood bringing unintended side effects? And did a town that drew enough newcomers lose the qualities that had attracted said newcomers in the first place?
Valerie Stivers was converted by reading Kristin Lavransdatter:
Religious people, places, and traditions are not there to condemn Kristin for breaking the rules—though she has broken them. For her sins, she is mostly punished by life. The religious people, places, and traditions are there to meet her in the pain of her struggle and offer things: forgiveness, wisdom, tradition, community, advice, punishment when needed, endless fresh starts. I had always imagined the Church as a distant and cruel regulatory body, and suddenly I saw it as Undset did, as the place you turn with the whole unregulated mass of your life—as the only place large enough for it.
Was Beethoven’s deafness caused by lead?
When he was 32, Beethoven mourned that he could not hear a flute, or a shepherd singing, which, he wrote, “brought me almost to despair. A little more and I would have committed suicide—only Art held me back. Ah it seemed unthinkable to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I feel lies within me.”
Ira Wells reviews Rushdie’s latest:
Memoir, as a genre, is always torn between revelation and creation, authenticity and artifice. The author promises to reveal the truth of his experience; the narrative insists that that experience take a certain shape and conform to certain formal patterns. Rushdie presents his life immediately prior to the attack as a state of prelapsarian perfection, shimmering with love, friendship, and deeply satisfying work. Were things so perfect?
When the full power of a human imagination is backed by the weight of a living tradition, the resulting work of art is far greater than any that an artist can achieve when he has no tradition to work in or when he willfully abandons his tradition.
—Hassan Fathy
Micah Mattix on the difficulty of true transgression:
It is difficult to write truly unsettling work. Books that are pitched as “shocking” or “transgressive” often fail to be either. The ordinary world the novel depicts may be so paper thin, so insubstantial, there is nothing to transgress. The authorial intention may be so obvious as to make the supposed shock entirely predictable. Rather than “complicating” our view of the world, these books confirm it, while also pandering to the us by presenting our view of the world as strangely original when it is, in fact, the most pedestrian of things. But it is even more difficult to write a work that is “re-settling”—that moves from disorder to order—without sacrificing complexity.
Jared Marcel Pollen appreciates Lispector’s The Apple in the Dark.
The envy of silence is heavily present in her work. But unlike Rimbaud or the young Wittgenstein, she was not a renunciator, nor even, like Beckett, a great negator. Instead, what we see in her work is language that attempts to transcend itself through prolonged derangement and disarticulation.
Simon Sarris on the proliferation of “anti-technology”:
These devices strike me as mostly careless. They often have a pretext of technology, of getting more-for-less, but I think this is a false economy. If you buy a Smart Lightbulb and have to concern yourself with device pairing, versions, updates, and buying only the same product now to match, you are making tradeoffs… Many modern devices (and apps) really excel at squishing tradeoffs into weird shapes.
John Adams on the pleasures of pseudonyms (his was “Humphrey Ploughjogger”):
On 13 February 1792, in a letter to his son Charles, Adams recollected writing only one Ploughjogger letter, but he now gave a better report of its reception: “That my Confessions may be compleat I must tell you that I wrote a very foolish unmeaning thing in Fleets Paper in 1762 or 1763 under the signature of Humphrey Ploughjogger. In this there was neither good nor Evil, yet it excited more merriment than all my other writings together.”
Finally, Zito Madu on the wondrous hummingbird:
There are almost as many names for the hummingbird as there are tales, stories, and poems about it: Sky Spirit, Nectar Bird, Tobacco Bird, One Who Brings Life, Sun-God Bird, Little Rain Bringer, Little Life Giver, Medicine Bird, Sun-gilded, Bird with Face Painted by Sun, Bird of Gold with Throat of Fire, The Hoverer, Reborn One, Bee-like One, Firefly, Little Doctor Bird.
May your June deliver you the consoling companionship of impossible creatures,
As ever,
J
Congrats on the residency, James! That's awesome