The week’s best arts and culture reads – including writers’ last works, horrible creative geniuses and an appreciation of verdant hues.
Michael Gorra | New York Review of Books | 10 September 2014
Michel Pastoureau draws on superstition and legend, art and costume, industry, science, high and low culture to explain what colours mean to us and why. Green is his third book on colour, following Blue, and Black. He has also written a history of stripes. Further volumes are planned on yellow and red. Green is “stuffed with rarities and wonders, an attic of all the centuries, right up to Babar’s cheerful lime suit.”
Bob Duggan | Big Think | 9 September 2014
Artists aspire to individual immortality; religions to collective salvation. But each can instrumentalise the other. Artists can profit from the communal energy of religion; religion can profit from the expressive power of artists. Some modern artists have tried to use politics as a substitute for religion; but politics has nothing to say about immortality. With religion, you have Michelangelo; without it, Jeff Koons.
Alex Ross | New Yorker | 8 September 2014
You listen to music differently when you shift from CDs to streaming, and it’s mostly things that are lost rather than gained. You don’t have the sleeve notes to hand, so most of the time you know you less about what you are hearing. You don’t feel the same sense of connection with artist. And you lose the associations with the disc itself — the nostalgia of when you bought it, and why, where you played it. The music is much less yours.
Roger Grenier | American Scholar | 8 September 2014
How writers end their careers. Sometimes they seem to know a work will be their last: “Molière coughed up blood and wrote a farce about a hypochondriac. He died during the fourth performance.” Vladimir Nabokov’s last, unfinished, novel, The Original of Laura, was at first called Dying Is Fun. In his notes for The First Man, Albert Camus wrote: “The book must remain unfinished.” And it did, when he died in a car crash.
Emily St John Mandel | Humanities | 8 September 2014
Reflections on Susan Sontag, provoked by a “fascinating, moving, and often gorgeous” new documentary film, Regarding Susan Sontag. “It’s a given that Sontag was possessed of an extraordinary mind”. But her brilliance sometimes “curdled into arrogance”. She never much understood others, and never let them slow her down – not even her husband, who said: “I think what I wanted was a large family, and what she wanted was a large library.”
Philip Larkin: Life, art and love
Roger Lewis | Financial Times | 5 September 2014
Great artists are not necessarily great people. “Wagner was horrible. Orson Welles was difficult”. Philip Larkin was “the greatest poet of the 20th Century”; but he was “unable to share his life with others”; he “rather enjoyed drab lodgings and bad food”; and there were several mean streaks in his personality. But he deserves our admiration all the same: “When was it necessary to be a nice person if you wanted to be a creative genius?”