Damion Searls on Thoreau

If you have 48 minutes to spare, there are worse ways to spend it than by listening to Christopher Lydon talk with Damion Searls about Thoreau. Even if you don’t, the introductory article is worth reading, especially the quotation from Searls about the links between Thoreau, Proust, and Rilke—authors not usually bracketed together.

Searls, the editor of NYRB’s excellent abridged edition of Thoreau’s Journal, is one of the most astute readers of Thoreau that we have, and Lydon’s sensual and intellectual appreciation of Thoreau’s prose (he actually groans when hearing something especially good) makes him the right interviewer.

Lydon brought up Thoreau’s preoccupation with color, of which yesterday’s entry at The Blog of Henry David Thoreau is one of many examples: “We love to see any part of the earth tinged with blue, cerulean, the color of the sky, the celestial color.” He also endeared himself to me by quoting Thoreau on frogs:

Frogs are strange creatures. One would describe them as peculiarly wary and timid, another as equally bold and imperturbable. All that is required in studying them is patience.... At length he becomes as curious about you as you can be about him. He suddenly hops straight toward [you], pausing within a foot, and takes a near and leisurely view of you. Perchance you may now scratch its nose with your finger and examine it to your heart’s content, for it is become as imperturbable as it was shy before. You conquer them by superior patience and immovableness; not by quickness, but by slowness; not by heat, but by coldness.

Searls impressed me in his response to the episode of Thoreau and the giant squash. One summer Thoreau raised several enormous yellow squashes from seed, weighing a total of 310 pounds. He noted later that they were coarse and tasteless, and I remember the incident mostly because of this cranky observation: “I raised last summer a squash which weighed 123 ½ pounds. If it had fallen on me it would have made as deep and lasting an impression as most men do. I would just as lief know what it thinks about God as what most men think, or are said to think.”

Searls, though, focuses on a different passage (September 28, 1857), in which Thoreau marvels at the thought that the tiny seeds he planted somehow called those enormous squashes into being:

I planted six seeds sent from the Patent Office and labelled, I think, ”Poitrine jaune grosse” (large yellow pumpkin (or squash?)). Two came up, and one bore a squash which weighs 123 ½ lbs. [Here he lists and adds up the weights of the others.] Who would have believed that there was 310 pounds of poitrine jaune grosse in that corner of our garden? Yet that little seed found it.

To Searls, this passage conveys a sense of “identity and friendship with this heroic little seed,” and that is a pleasant way to think about it.

Monet at the Gagosian

The exhibit of late paintings by Monet at the Gagosian gallery is currently one of the best things you can do for free in New York City. (At 522 West 21st Street in Chelsea, the gallery is only half a block away from the High Line park—another of the best things you can do for free.)

The four rooms of paintings begin with the classic images of waterlilies floating in an indefinite, shimmering blue-gray-violet mist, then move on to waterlilies done with bolder colors and brushstrokes. The water in the picture above (the photo doesn’t do it justice) has a streak of cobalt blue you could get lost in.

The last room is devoted to paintings of Japanese bridges and arched trellises of roses. If some of these last works seem heavy, overworked, or even muddy, they underline the achievement of the seemingly airy and effortless paintings that came before. 

Missing them already

As a writer and editor, naturally I don’t have any time for TV. In fact, I don’t even own a TV. Well, I own one, but it stays in the closet. Actually, it’s in a cabinet. But the cabinet is locked.

All right, I confess. The TV is planted right in front of the couch and Jenn and I watch it a lot. But all of a sudden, most of the shows we enjoy seem to be going away: Lost is wrapping up on Sunday, and 24 is drawing to a close (though Jack Bauer has gone so far off the deep end that watching him is more traumatic than enjoyable).

FlashForward has been absorbing, though not as ingenious as Lost. It’s been canceled, though for some reason V continues. Better Off Ted is the funniest show I’ve seen in years, but it’s been canceled too.

Strangest of all (at least to me, who pays no attention to ratings), the original Law & Order is going off the air after twenty years, while Law & Order: SVU and other spinoffs soldier on.

Why? I’ve tried the spinoffs, but they never seemed to measure up: the writing was slacker and the acting hammier. The original had a winning formula that allowed it to survive years of cast turnover. And the ripped-from-the-headlines format meant that you were never in danger of running out of quirky and original material. How long can you watch a show like SVU that’s only about sex offenders?

At least there’s House, though the nasty details of medical crises—and of House’s personal life—are sometimes hard to take. Jenn likes Stargate Universe, but I find it a little glum and claustrophobic.

Ah well. The harsh Darwinian selection of TV economics is making room for new shows, and maybe I’ll like some of them. In the meantime there’s Netflix. 

Admiral’s Row

For several years I have been visiting Governors Island, where I have enjoyed the ghost-town quality of the empty houses along Colonels’ Row. Yet I have never been inside the Brooklyn Navy Yard, not far from where I live, to see the even more decrepit houses of Admiral’s Row (also known as Officer’s Row).

An article in the Times reminded me of them, and took me to the Officer’s Row website, which features a gallery of haunting images from the houses.

Mourners at the Met

After seeing an article in the Times, I went with Jenn to the Met to the see the procession of 37 alabaster mourners (plus another three in a separate glass case) who have been liberated from the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dijon and are beginning an eight-city tour.

I don’t think I can improve on the Times‘ description:

There is nothing stiff about these figures; their postures are realized with grace and subtlety. One leans forward and raises up his pudgy, beautifully rendered hands in a touching gesture of helpless sadness. Another sings from a hymnal. Some seem to sway, as if to funerary music. Though enveloped by their voluminous, luxuriantly draped and folded cloaks, the invisible bodies within are expressed on the surface, and give each figure vivid sense of animation.

Photography is not allowed, but there’s a nifty website that allows you get a 360-degree view of each figure, from three different angles.