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A Conversation About John Cage and William Gedney’s Iris Garden

Iris Garden is a 2013 book that combines John Cage’s stories with William Gedney’s photographs—including several of the composer himself—with an ingenious design evoking Cage’s affinity for chance. The stories and photographs were selected by the photographer Alec Soth: twenty-two of the stories are from Cage’s series Indeterminacy, conceived in 1959, which featured stories of varying length, each intended to be read aloud over the course of one minute; and forty-four photographs from the William Gedney archive, shot from the 1950s to 1989 and housed at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University.

Leanne Shapton and Jason Fulford are the founders of J&L Books .

Leanne Shapton: As soon as I started flipping through this book, I thought, I’m so happy art publishing allows for this. It’s a strong book, but it’s quiet and subtle, and the design would never make any marketing department happy.

Jason Fulford: The book comes completely apart, literally. Even the endpapers slide out, and the cover can be unfolded—so you can read it in any order. It reminds me of how my Hasselblad disassembles. You can take all of the pieces apart and lay them out on a table. 

LS: I went to the back of the book and read Cage’s statement, which helped me “read” the book. He wrote: “My intention in putting these stories together in an unplanned way is to suggest that all things—stories, incidental sounds from the environment and by extension, beings—are related, and this complexity is more evident when it is not oversimplified by an idea of relationship in one person’s mind.”

JF: Cage stays with you your whole life. You keep coming back to things you loved about him when you were fifteen, and they still relate to you at forty. Actually, I guess I probably learned about him in my twenties. Did I ever tell you a story about Lee Elickson, the American filmmaker who lives in Amsterdam? When he was fourteen or fifteen, he had a chance to meet John Cage. He brought an empty sheet of music and asked Cage to sign it. Cage asked, What are you gonna do with it? So Lee had to think fast and said, After you sign it I’ll put it on the forest floor for a week, let nature make its marks, and then have it performed by an orchestra. So Cage was like: Oh, okay. Lee still has the paper, but he hasn’t found an orchestra yet to perform it.

LS: When we read books, they have so much of the author’s and editor’s intention in the sequence. Someone’s made our bed. But Cage intended that these texts not be “oversimplified by the idea of relationship in one person’s mind”—he assumed we’d all have completely different relationships to it.

JF: I think we can guess that Cage would have loved this design, but I wonder if Gedney would have. I’ve always seen his images edited according to their subject matter. He’s got pictures from Appalachia, New York City—especially out his window on Myrtle Avenue, near Pratt. He also shot in England, Ireland, France, San Francisco, and then he took a trip to India, I think on a Guggenheim. In a lot of ways his pictures are unremarkable, really quiet, and they seem very personal. He didn’t have a big audience during his lifetime. A handful of really great photographers liked his work and appreciated it, but I don’t know who he thought of as his audience. I read that Gedney never had his work published as a book while he was alive, and when he died he gave all his photographs and negatives to his old friend, Lee Friedlander. Friedlander got Duke University to take them.

LS: Did Gedney have this work grouped in some way?

JF: I visited the archive once, and I remember it being organized chronologically. What do you think about the reproduction of the frame edges in some of the pictures?

LS: I don’t like that generally, but I gave the benefit of the doubt to the editors. Maybe it was what Gedney liked.

JF: When Gedney was alive, a lot of photographers who considered themselves artists would insist on having the frame printed. 

LS: It was a statement about how they cropped it.

JF: Right. “I crop in-camera and here’s the proof.”

LS: Frame edges make for a kind of period piece, but the design of the book speaks to 2014. It’s funny that frame edges are an Instagram filter now. 

 

 

JF: I asked Alec how he made the selection from the almost five thousand pictures in the archive. It was overwhelming, he said, but he tried not to be too strategic about it. He relied on serendipity and chance, like you would if you were hunting for mushrooms. He did include the portraits of Cage and Morton Feldman on purpose, though.

LS: The picture of Cage with the basket at what I considered to be end of the book made him look like Little Red Riding Hood. The pictures match the spirit of the Cage stories—you read along and something happens that turns the whole story around.

JF: I think Cage would have loved all of this—his theories about found sound imply that your mind wants to find connections. If we just stop talking for a minute and listen to what’s happening in the room, and through the window, that to him would be a piece of music.

LS: There’s a great piece in the book about a man hearing his blood in his ears, his heartbeat. I love all of the pictures of people asleep. There’s one piece of writing where a man says, I have my best ideas when I’m asleep. Cage said you’ll have good ideas if you execute something boring—which is how I think. Do it until you’re bored by it.

LS: I hadn’t realized Cage’s writing is so funny.

JF: Everything I’ve ever read of Cage’s sounds like a gentle, amused Zen master.

LS: How close were Cage and Gedney? When you look at the pictures of Cage, you feel like Gedney loves him. There’s a real care in the moments he chooses. They’re tender—they’re not poses. 

JF: I asked Alec about this, too. He said he didn’t find much evidence of a relationship between the two, but a theme in Iris Garden is their imagined relationship. “The whole spirit of Cage’s music, and most photography, is listening to what is not there, the sound between the notes, the story between the photographs.”

LS: Tell me about Little Brown Mushroom, the publisher.

JF: It’s a company that Alec Soth started a few years ago. He started publishing his small projects and some of his friends’ work. It’s similar to how and why we started J&L, I guess: to have the freedom to champion stuff. He does it out of his studio in St. Paul. This book seems new for them, going back into the history of something. There’s so much love in this book, from the editor and from the content.

LS: There’s a nice patience, a temporal quality that gets paired with the spoken pieces and the tone of the spoken pieces asks you to think about something happening in a different time and space.

JF: Some of the pieces actually require a lot of patience. If there are only four lines, you have go real slow. Cage has a famous “Lecture on Nothing” where the audience gets very restless. He often ran into audience resistance with his work. 

LS: We’ve talked about this before—at what point is something pretentious and at what point is it brilliant? I think it has to do with rigor. If you don’t put that much effort into something and just do it for the sake of its idea, then it’s pretentious, but if you throw yourself at it and into it and it’s layered—

JF: If you listen to a performance of one of the short pieces, there’s a lot of drama that happens while you’re waiting for the next word. The … suspense … adds … content. I didn’t read these texts with a stopwatch, so Cage’s rule is going to be broken. Would he scold me for that? 

LS: Gedney’s pictures mitigate that bossiness, they round it out and soften the idea. His images show that the palette Cage is working in isn’t avant-garde—it’s absolutely human and quotidian. It’s gentle. The book is literally flexible.

Hey, Babe, and Other News

Frédéric Soulacroix, The Cavalier's Kiss

Julian Gough’s celebration of Joyce wins the award for Title of the Year: “James Joyce: You can’t ignore the bastard.” “Joyce entered your life very differently in rural Ireland in the early 1980s. Back then, he still existed outside the official system. Too difficult, too scandalous for school. It was still possible for teenagers to read Joyce as an act of rebellion against teachers, government, church. You read Joyce the way you listened to late punk, or early rap.”
What’s the point of infantilizing pet names? “In the mid-twentieth century, Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz proposed that babies’ cuteness is an evolutionarily advantageous adaptation without which they wouldn’t survive; adults need some sort of incentive to provide them with constant care, and Lorenz thought that motive was admiring their cuteness. He believed men carry this preference into adulthood by looking for women who retain elements of babyish ‘cuteness.’”
The story of an art historian’s shrewd detective work: “A supposedly minor work from the Qing dynasty turned out to be a masterpiece nearly 700 years old.”
In 2012, before Kara Walker’s exhibition arrived there, David Allee photographed Brooklyn’s dilapidated Domino Sugar Factory. “While his pictures could not convey the smell of the factory—‘crème brûlée mixed with mold and rot’—he hoped to communicate something about its complicated history … Inside the prison-like spaces, there was also ‘a visceral sense that the work that took place here was torturous.’ At the same time, he said, ‘everything is literally sugar coated.’”
In the sixties, TV and film writers dreamed up a bunch of supercomputers with one thing in common: they were hell-bent on annihilating humanity.

 

Party Like Bilbo

Alan Hollinghurst is sixty today.

Photo: Larry D. Moore

HOLLINGHURST

I was rather a goody-goody as a child. I hated the idea of being in the wrong and dreaded being punished. Everyone at my prep school was being beaten by the headmaster with the back of a hairbrush round the clock, and I was keen to avoid that. It was only later on I discovered that you could be naughty and get away with it.

INTERVIEWER

What were you reading at that age?

HOLLINGHURST

There was a bizarre library at the school that had a lot of old-fashioned children’s adventure books by G. A. Henty and R. M. Ballantyne. I got very ­involved with Rider Haggard—I still have the tie-in paperback for the film of She with a picture of Ursula Andress on the front, “the most beautiful woman in the world.” I also became an avid collector of a series called The Pan Book of Horror Stories, edited by Herbert Van Thal. I still have these as well, and the gruesome covers take me back—the whole atmosphere of the school suddenly closes in on me when I look at them.

In my school reports, one of the masters was worried about this “­macabre reading,” but by the following year, I had discovered Tolkien, with whom I became totally obsessed. I read The Lord of the Rings over and over. I made charts of the kings of Rohan and so on. I used to write letters to my friends in dwarfish runes. The English master took a dim view of this and made me read Barchester Towers as an antidote, when all I wanted to do was to get back to Bilbo Baggins’s eleventy-first birthday party for the seventh time. I’ve never been able to read Trollope since.

—Alan Hollinghurst, the Art of Fiction No. 214

Recapping Dante: Canto 30, or Triple X

Gustave Doré, Canto XXX

We’re recapping the Inferno. Read along! This week: flesh-eating, incest, the lute-man, and more!

Dante has shown that almost every canto in the Inferno obeys a certain logic. First, Dante and Virgil enter a new circle or ditch; Dante notices a small cluster of sinners being subjected to a gruesome, albeit clever punishment (shit-eating for the flatterers, amputation and disembowelment for the schism-makers); then Virgil will encourage him to approach a sinner, who inevitably ends up being an Italian eager to tell the story of his life in a way that downplays the gravity of his sin. Virgil and Dante move on afterward. Salt, pepper, and serve. This formula is so apparent that had Dante been less skilled, his stories less heartrending, the Inferno would’ve been a heavy-handed entertainment instead of a lyrical masterpiece.

The opening of canto 30 abandons this formula. We pick up where canto 29 left off, as Dante meets the alchemists and the Falsifiers of Others’ Persons. In order to convey exactly how psychotic these sinners are, Dante compares their violence to two famously macabre stories from the ancients. First he tells the story of the goddess Juno, who arranged the death of Ino by sending Ino’s lover into a fit of madness during which he took Ino’s son and “whirled him round and dashed him on a rock.” Ino jumped into the ocean after her dead son and drowned. That’s plenty gruesome, but then Dante tells a second story, this one about Hecuba of Troy, who saw her two sons killed and went mad with grief. These mad Thebans and Trojans, Dante writes, are nothing compared to the crazed sinner we encounter here, in the Tenth Pouch of the Eighth Circle of Hell, who bites into the neck of a fellow sinner.

Capocchio, one of Dante’s former classmates who was introduced in Canto 29, is the guy being bitten; Griffolino, another sinner who was introduced in 29, explains that the aggressor—the biter—is Gianni Schicchi, who, when he was on earth, pretended to be the late Buoso Donati in order to help his own family inherit a sum of money. Griffolino also points out Myrrha, who appears in The Metamorphoses as the daughter of the King of Cyprus. She so lusted for her father that she put on a disguise and seduced him. Oops!

This canto is dedicated to those guilty of falsification. Dante dedicates the canto to Ovid, whose Metamorphoses he cites throughout—those opening stories of Thebes and Troy are also from Ovid.

As Dante moves on, he sees a sinner “fashioned like a lute”:

He had been sundered at the groin
From the joining where a man goes forked.

The man is Master Adam, who counterfeited coins. His physical condition leaves him parched and unable to move, and so he must sit, mutilated, dreaming of his home and the cool green hillsides near the Arno. He hears that some of his countrymen are also in hell, and says that if he could move only one inch in one hundred years, he would already be on his way to find the people he knows.

Master Adam starts ragging on the other sinners. One of them, in earshot, takes offense and flings an insult back at Adam, thus beginning a stichomythian exchange in which lyrical quips devolve into to Odd Couple–style insults. Dante is engrossed—he wants to see how the rest of the argument unfolds. This feels very much like pausing in the street to see just how far a fight between two bickering cab drivers will go.

Virgil intervenes to tell Dante that his rubbernecking has gone on long enough and that if they don’t move on, he’s going to get very upset. (Virgil’s relative absence in this canto is another reason it’s so unusual—the Hollanders point out that this is Virgil’s longest silence so far.) Dante, whose feelings are hurt by Virgil’s stern language, scurries off and tries to make things right with his guide, who probably wasn’t thrilled about being snubbed for the first 130 lines of the canto.

The Hollanders cleverly point out that the verbal tiff between the sinners is similar to the sort of petty bickering Dante was known for in his interactions with another poet of the time, Cecco Angiolieri. Cecco’s most famous poem is “S’i Fossi Foco”; its opening line goes, “If I were fire, the world, I’d set ablaze”—an ode to sinister intentions. But one of Cecco’s less studied poems is the equivalent of a dis-track aimed at Dante:

Dante, if I’m head fool it’s by a narrow
margin, you are right there at my heels.
I chew the fat and you suck out the marrow:
if I’m the houseguest, you appear for meals.
If I seem virtuous, you're canonized;
if I hold forth, you’re burning to butt in;
I’m stuck in Rome, and you get Lombardized—
I hang the suit up, you brush off the lint.

It looks, praise God, like neither one of us
can justly act superior about
the other’s lack of sense or adverse fate, 
and now if you persist in this debate,
Dante boy, I’ll simply wear you out:
since I’m the cattle-prod that drives your ox.

To catch up on our Dante series, click here.

Alexander Aciman is the author of Twitterature. He has written for the New York Times, Tablet, the Wall Street Journal, and TIME. Follow him on Twitter at @acimania.

The Wide World of Typewriter Art, and Other News

Otto von Bismarck (1898), typewriter art published in George Mares‘s The History of the Typewriter (1909)

The Glasgow School of Art’s library, designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, caught fire over the weekend, but the art school is confident that most of its holdings are intact.
A new anthology of typewriter art explores “the development of the typewriter as a medium for creating work far beyond anything envisioned by the machine’s makers.”
Remembering the Boston Molasses Flood of 1919: “Just after noon on January 15, 1919, a hail of gunshots rang out in the North End. The thunderous cascade of collapsing metal caused the ground to rumble and shake. Residents barely had time to register the sounds before an astonishing sight greeted them: a two-story wave of molasses barreling down the streets at thirty-five miles an hour.”
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw a number of utopian preconceptions of what would become the Internet. Among them was Paul Otlet’s plan for “electric telescopes,” which he hatched in 1934; the telescopes “would allow anyone in the world to access to a vast library of books, articles, photographs, audio recordings, and films … Otlet also wrote about wireless networks, speech recognition, and social network-like features that would allow individuals to ‘participate, applaud, give ovations, sing in the chorus.’”
The many lives of Aubrey Lee Price, “the Bernie Madoff of the South.”

What We’re Loving: Real Struggle, Real Soul, Real Tennis

D’Angelo, right, with Nelson George at the Brooklyn Museum Wednesday night. Photo: Drew Gurian/Red Bull Content Pool

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle—judging by the half that’s been translated into English—is a tough book for a critic to grapple with: a six-volume autobiographical novel that can spend fifty pages describing a teenage beer run or a second-grader’s first day at school. The book was a sensation when it appeared in Norway, five years ago; since then it has fascinated (and puzzled) many readers in America, from James Wood and Zadie Smith to Jonathan Lethem. Volume Three is my favorite so far, though no doubt the effect is cumulative: I’ve never read such a vivid depiction of ordinary child abuse—the legal, non-sexual kind—from a child’s point of view; I have never seen a writer evoke the world of child’s play so vividly, or the view from the back seat of a car on a long drive. Not everyone feels the love. In The Nation, the irascible William Deresiewicz dismisses My Struggle as a “giant selfie,” wishes Knausgaard wrote more like John Updike or Saul Bellow, and chalks up the enthusiasm of his fans to narcissism: “The spectacle of a fellow author’s self-revelation . . . has obvious professional significance.” It’s rarely a good sign when a reviewer vents his spleen on other readers. For a corrective, see Ben Lerner in the London Review of Books. Lerner notices all the same things as Deresiewicz—Knausgaard’s use of cliche, his digressions, his seeming lack of form or invention—then tries, brilliantly and persuasively, to explain why they work. Lerner places My Struggle in a long tradition of novels at war with novelistic convention, a tradition that he associates with the avant garde and that others might call realism itself. Agree with it or not, this is actual criticism. As Lerner writes: “It’s easy to marshal examples of what makes My Struggle mediocre. The problem is: it’s amazing.” —Lorin Stein

On Wednesday night, I had the great pleasure of seeing an interview with D’Angelo, perhaps the most gifted, elusive artist working in R&B—he’s ascended into the pantheon with Sly Stone and Prince, visionary but inscrutable. With 2000’s Voodoo, D’Angelo made what remains the definitive soul record of the past fifteen years, a languid, earthy tour de force that borrows in equal measure from the church and the street. Since then, he hasn’t released a thing; he’s scarcely even performed in public. So his appearance on Wednesday had a sense of anticipation: would he announce a new album? He didn’t, but he was such a gracious, remarkable, casual speaker that it didn’t matter. NPR has posted a transcript of the conversation, which was held before a sold-out crowd at Brooklyn Museum. It touches on his adolescence in Richmond, Virginia; his painstaking, deeply hermetic recording process; and his gospel-inflected approach to songwriting. Nelson George, the interviewer, put it best when he told D’Angelo, “You’re one of the few people who has mystique, you know that. I mean in the age of TMZ and all that stuff … there’s an aura still about your career. It’s very unusual today for anybody to have any mystery left.” —Dan Piepenbring

I recently unearthed a 1999 LRB review by Edward Said of a tennis anthology edited by the novelist Caryl Phillips. When I think of tennis, I don’t think of Said (nor do I imagine Phillips, for that matter)—all the more reason to give it my attention. I also have a vested interest in tennis. My father grew up in Forest Hills, Queens, and played at the West Side Tennis Club; his father played competitive tennis into his early nineties (the pool of players in his age group was quite small, as you might imagine); and I grew up watching tennis matches on television with my parents and trying to learn the sport myself. Though I only sometimes watch Wimbledon or the US Open now, I can tell the stakes have changed. As Said bemoans, tennis has largely lost its amateur class, and its league of professional players are “technical specialists” ruined by the commercial interests. Federer is lovely to watch, but his recent dominance of the game was boring. The women’s game, Said points out, retains its “human pace” and “inventiveness.” That no single woman dominates the sport makes the matches more fun to watch, more exciting, more … sporting. —Nicole Rudick

In 1934, Oscar Reutersvärd pioneered the modeling of “impossible objects,” two-dimensional figures that project a three-dimensional object when viewed from a particular direction. The puzzle game “Monument Valley,” available on both iOS and Android, is built on this optical illusion—a sort of architectural Sudoku. It allows the player to interact with the isometric environment of dead-end paths and trick doors, moving the game’s protagonist, Ida, through gaps that seem to defy logic. The game is one of the most beautiful I’ve ever played. It’s like, as many have noted, an M. C. Escher drawing brought to life. The game designer Ken Wong told Wired, “We hope players will stay engaged for the same reasons they might enjoy a walk through a museum or an art gallery.” —Justin Alvarez

I was recently sent a book of poetry called A Dark Dreambox of Another Kind, by a poet I’d never heard of, Alfred Starr Hamilton. He wasn’t widely read or published in his lifetime; this is the first full collection of his work. The book, with its childlike, lonely, careful poems, was a revelation to me. Hamilton writes often in metaphor (my sub-pick for this week, if I’m allowed one of those, is Denis Donoghue’s latest, a book on how metaphor changes the world) and manages to create sweet optimism in feelings of sadness or wistfulness, though his life didn’t seem to contain much encouragement. In the preface and introduction to this book, you can read about the forty-five or so poems per week that Hamilton sent to Cornell’s Epoch magazine—a volume that exceeds even The Paris Review record for submissions per week from a single poet—which accumulated in shoeboxes, and about the time Hamilton was arrested for refusing to take shelter during an air raid drill in 1961. Like a gentleman, he notified the police in advance of the necessity for his arrest: “Peaceably protesting the air raid siren on April 28, 4 P.M., I will be sitting in the park at Watchung Plaza by the flag pole, reasonably refusing shelter, I will not resist being arrested impersonally, and may peaceably be taken to the station.” —Anna Heyward

On Monday night, Fun Home, the musical based on Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir, . And just a few weeks ago, Bechdel and the cast and crew of the musical went down to South Carolina to speak and perform in support of the College of Charleston, after the institution’s budget was cut for assigning Bechdel’s gay-positive Fun Home to incoming freshman. Book burners have an unintentional habit of pointing us straight to the good stuff, and the South Carolina legislators are no exception, having led us to this brilliant, thoughtful memoir. In graphic frames, Bechdel curates the accumulated artifacts of her life—drawings, photographs, diary entries, letters, maps—to craft a witty, erudite reflection on her relationship with her complex and secretive father. Childhood habits and quirks, like an original font character that crops up in Bechdel’s early diaries, become fodder for Winnicottian analysis, to delightful effect. A thought-provoking and visually beautiful addition to your summer reading list, perhaps best enjoyed in the company of Bechdel’s masterfully deployed interlocutors, from Winnicott to Joyce to Wilde. If you’ve already read Fun Home, check out Bechdel’s equally hilarious and heartfelt follow-up, Are You My Mother? —Chantal McStay

Before traveling abroad, some people pick up a Lonely Planet guide or two, maybe create a rough itinerary for each day, even go tanning to avoid an early sunburn. I read the local literature, as impractical as it may be. I’m going to Brazil next month, and I can’t tell you about what the weather may be or what the critic’s picks are for restaurants or bars in Rio de Janeiro. But I can tell you, as I read through Hilda Hilst’s novel With My Dog-Eyes, about the country’s “vertiginous-precise landscape done with a Japanese paintbrush.” Or the labyrinthine “veredas” described in João Guimarães Rosa’s The Devil to Pay in the Backlands,” “where a criminal can safely hide out, beyond the reach of the authorities … God himself, when he comes here, had better come armed!” Or the fused language of formal Portuguese and native Brazilian in Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma, whose titular hero was born “in a far corner of Northern Brazil, at an hour when so deep a hush had fallen on the virgin forest that the brawling of the Uraricoera River could be heard.” In these books I can understand, to paraphrase Jan Morris in our Art of the Essay interview, not just how someone feels about a country but something powerful about the country itself. —J.A.

The Paris Review, 1959

Today’s the last day to claim your copy of our twenty-first issue, published in the spring of 1959.

To celebrate American Masters’s Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself—a documentary about our late, great founder George Plimpton—The Paris Review is giving all new subscribers this remarkable issue, which includes an interview with T. S. Eliot, the very first in our Art of Poetry series; fiction from Plimpton pals Alexander Trocchi and Terry Southern; poems by Ted Hughes, Robert Bly, and Louis Simpson; and a special portfolio of “Artists on Long Island” including Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Larry Rivers.

Subscribe now and we’ll send you a copy of your own.

U.S. residents can watch Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself in its entirety online, courtesy of PBS.

Having a Moment

Shaker Church Family Barns, Sabbathday Lake Village, Cumberland County, ME, 1970; photo via Wikimedia Commons

Big in 2014: the Shaker community at Sabbathday Lake, Maine.

Founded in 1783 in what was then called Thompson’s Pond Plantation, the community consists of eighteen buildings, an orchard, a tree farm, vegetable and herb gardens, livestock pastures, and hay fields, all spread over eighteen-hundred acres of land. The community practices traditional Shaker crafts—basket-making, weaving, printing—although only three of its members—Sister Francis, Brother Arnold and Sister June—are still active today.

This summer, the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, Maine, will honor the Sabbathday Lake community with its 2014 Maine in America Award, which is presented to an individual or group who has made an outstanding contribution to Maine’s role in American art. Prior honorees include Robert Indiana and Alex Katz. They and the three elderly Shakers may seem like strange bedfellows.

Equally unlikely is their association with the famously innovative Wooster Group, whose Early Shaker Spirituals is currently playing in New York. The show—part of an ongoing series based on recordings—is grounded on an eponymous 1976 LP recorded by the Sisters of Sabbathday Lake. Using a technique the company pioneered, the actors wear earpieces through which they hear, as they perform, the actual recordings of Shaker songs. The show also includes pattern dances, inspired by surviving fragments of Shaker ecstatic dance. (You can see clips of a rehearsal here, and watch the actors morph from ecstatic Shakers back into actors, joking and laughing.)

These are real and fitting tributes to people whose work and art have added genuine beauty to the world—it’s gratifying to see the community receiving attention while there are still Shakers around, and to know that there is a living record of their history. And yet, one wonders: will the three surviving members come to New York to see the show? Will they go to the Farnsworth Summer Gala to accept their award?

Here’s the schedule of their days, as laid out on the Sabbathday site:

Daily Schedule

We all rise as duty dictates.

7:30 a.m.

 

The Great Bell on the Dwelling House rings to summon all to breakfast.

8:00

 

Morning Prayers. We read (responsively) two Psalms, followed by Bible readings, prayer, silent prayer and ending with the singing of a Shaker song.

8:30

 

Work begins.

11:30

 

Mid-day Prayers

12:00 p.m.

 

Dinner. This is the main meal of the day.

1:00

 

Work begins.

6:00

 

Supper.

Prayer Meeting is held on Wednesday at 5:00 p.m., followed by a class on Shaker Studies.

Sunday Meeting is held at 10:00 am. During the summer months Meeting is held in the Meeting House. The remainder of the year we meet in the Chapel in the Dwelling House.

The site is a museum, yes, and open to tourists. You can visit; it is very beautiful. But of course it will go on whether we do or not—for a little while yet.

The Inquisitive Fallacy

A professor’s unlikely quest for busts of Alexander Pope.

Unknown photographer, William Kurtz Wimsatt, circa 1961, © National Portrait Gallery, London

Louis François Roubiliac, Alexander Pope, c. 1760, marble, Rothschild Foundation

Louis François Roubiliac, Alexander Pope, 1741, marble, Yale Center for British Art, Gift of Paul Mellon in
memory of the British art historian Basil Taylor (1922-1975)

Louis François Roubiliac, Alexander Pope, c. 1738, terracotta, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham

Louis François Roubiliac, Alexander Pope, c. 1760, plaster, The Trustees of the British Museum

Louis François Roubiliac, Alexander Pope, 1738, marble, Temple Newsam House, Leeds

Joseph Nickolls, Pope’s Villa, Twickenham, c. 1755, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

Adrien Carpentiers, Louis François Roubiliac Modelling His Monument to Shakespeare, between 1760 and 1761, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

Studio of Sir Godfrey Kneller, Alexander Pope Profile, Crowned with Ivy, c. 1721, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Gift of Margaret Wimsatt in memory of William Kurtz Wimsatt Jr.

Alexander Pope, The works of Mr. Alexander Pope, Vol I (London: Printed by W. Bowyer, for Bernard Lintot between the Temple-Gates, 1717), title page, frontispiece of Pope by Vertue after Jervas, inside front cover, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

“Fame and Friendship: Pope, Roubiliac, and the Portrait Bust in Eighteen-Century Britain,” recently on view at the Yale Center for British Art, tells a curious tale of Alexander Pope’s legacy, focusing on the strange fervor that continues to surround busts and portraits of him. Pope, whose birthday was earlier this week, was a household name, at least in one sector of British society. He was the first English poet to publish two volumes of his own collected works while living—and with the publication of the first volume, he also became the first English author to sustain himself entirely on the proceeds of his work. And he didn’t lead a meager existence. Pope was able to lease a sizable villa near Richmond, a painting of which was on view in Yale’s exhibition.

For any writer, these achievements would’ve been no small feat, but they’re especially impressive in light of Pope’s many obstacles. He was a Catholic at a time when Catholics weren’t allowed to live within ten miles of London or Westminster or to attend university; and he was beset with health problems that led to a visible hunchback and permanently stunted his height. Even so, Pope became a celebrated member of the British literary canon—someone whose very image evoked intellectual achievement.

Paintings and busts of Pope were commissioned for wealthy families and artistic friends—they conferred status among men of letters. According to Joseph Roach, Sterling Professor of Theater and English at Yale, when Voltaire visited England in 1727, he marveled that he saw Pope’s portrait in “twenty noblemen’s houses.” The placement of these busts was telling of the poet’s reputation; he was displayed with such notable British intellectuals as Laurence Sterne and Isaac Newton.

“Fame and Friendship” assembled an intriguing array of these busts, made of stately marble or—in the case of a petite, mass-produced work—porcelain. At the center of the collection are eight busts of Pope by French émigré sculptor Louis François Roubiliac, created between 1738 and 1760. Though they were made over the course of twenty-two years, they carry certain hallmarks: a telltale droop beneath Pope’s eyes, a marked thinness in his cheeks, an inquisitive gaze, and a slender nose. In Roubiliac’s skillful hands, the signs of Pope’s infirmity are presented instead as characteristics befitting a poetic countenance, with all the sensitivity that poetry implies.

More than two hundred years later, these distinctive sculptures captured the imagination of W. K. Wimsatt, a professor of English at Yale. In the early twentieth century, Wimsatt embarked on a twenty-five-year research project, hoping to gather all the Roubiliac busts of Pope. This meant writing Britain’s oldest families and trekking out to county manors in search of the droopy-eyed poet—an ambitious project, and seemingly a labor of love, as it was extracurricular to Wimsatt’s main research interests. After all, it was Wimsatt who wrote, with Monroe Beardsley, one of the foundational texts of the New Criticism: “The Intentional Fallacy,” a 1946 essay that called for critical objectivity, with a particular disregard of authorial intention or biography. And yet in 1961, a few decades after publishing “The Intentional Fallacy,” Wimsatt proudly mounted an exhibition of six of Roubiliac’s busts of Pope at the National Gallery of Art in London, later accompanied by a monograph, The Portraits of Alexander Pope. Wimsatt even named his son Alexander.

How to reconcile this disparity between theory and practice? At a conference organized around the opening of “Fame and Friendship,” Roach said,

If you want to avoid ending up in poetic biography, impressionism, and relativism, then surely the last thing that you would think of undertaking is an exhaustive study of portraits of the poet, iconic or otherwise … I think Wimsatt himself acknowledges this paradox wittily when he breaks off his narration of all the trouble he went to [in order to find the busts] with the sentence: “But the writing of the book is a story that ought not to appear in the book itself.”

Roach pointed to a kind of loophole, a crucial space Wimsatt left for the author outside the realm of theory: though New Criticism rejects the author specifically in critical readings of text, he said, the study of the author as a separate endeavor is not only a worthy project, but a rewarding one.

Whether or not that’s a satisfying argument, the exhibition speaks to the power of Wimsatt’s impulse to collect—the Pope busts, taken together, are a fascinating record of the poet and his time, and of the peculiarities attendant to his celebrity.

Lilly Lampe is a writer and art critic based in Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared in Art in America, ArtAsiaPacific, Art Papers, Artforum.com, and Modern Painters, among others.

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