What makes a book great?
What is the purpose of literary prizes and how do we determine the excellence of a book? Those two questions have been cropping up a lot lately, from discussion of the National Book Award in the U.S. to the unfolding kerfuffle over the Booker Prize in the U.K.
Booksellers often say that the Booker has more credibility with American readers than the NBA, citing a track record that includes Yann Martels Life of Pi, Hilary Mantels Wolf Hall, Arundhati Roys The God of Small Things and A.S. Byatts Possession as titles introduced to an enthusiastic stateside readership during the prizes 43-year history. Chosen by a panel with varied backgrounds (scholars, novelists, critics, booksellers and the occasional broadcaster), the Booker shortlist tends to be a blend of acclaimed and relatively undiscovered works that many Britons (and quite a few Americans) make a habit of reading in its entirety.
This year is a particularly contentious one, with the panel chairwoman, Dame Stella Rimington (a former director of MI5 and author of spy novels), announcing that the judges prioritized accessibility: We want people to buy these books and read them, not buy them and admire them. Another judge said a book had to zip along to make the cut. Like the typical NBA short list, the 2011 Booker shortlist includes mostly little-known titles, but this time the complaint is that the criteria used were too populist and that more challenging titles by bigger names were neglected. (On Wednesday, Julian Barnes won for his novel The Sense of an Ending.)
To make the dispute even more confusing, the challenging title most often noted as an omission from the Booker shortlist, Alan Hollinghursts The Strangers Child, has been shortlisted for the Galaxy Prize, which is dedicated to books with wide popular appeal, critical acclaim and commercial success. Furthermore, in response to what they regard as the creeping lowbrowism of the Booker, a group of malcontents, led by literary agent Andrew Kidd, is floating the idea of an alternative, to be called the Literature Prize, for novels that are unsurpassed in their quality and ambition without regard to popular appeal.
So its no wonder that all of this (and a ) prompted author and academic Anne Trubek to write a blog post complaining that no one sufficiently explains upon which criteria are the novels being judged What makes a masterpiece? Are there objective grounds or is it relative? What role do race, gender, etc. etc. play in which literary works are elevated to the ranks of the great? Who gets to make those decisions? Which formal attributes are lionized over others? (difficulty = good; sentimentality = bad).
Trubek then goes on to recall a conversation with a friend on the board of the National Book Critics Circle who was ruminating over a possible nominee for that organizations annual fiction prize. The friend ultimately decided against the book because it lacked memorable characters, which Trubek immediately seized upon (at last!) as a definite criterion. If we all agreed that what distinguishes a great novel is great characters, she writes, we could really get down to work. (Although without Trubek, who notes, memorable characters do not, for me, make a great novel.)
Of course, not all novels are about character take, for example, David Marksons Readers Block, a book we put on Salons best-of-the-year list back in 1996. It has no characters at least no conventional characters since its made up of discrete anecdotes, quotations and epigrams, each one no more than a few sentences long. It went on our list because I, for one, was impressed that a work so fragmented could seize my interest so entirely that I couldnt resist reading it while walking down the street (not a good idea in my neighborhood).
So thats an example of my criteria, but the ability to fascinate one particular literary critic is not the basis for judging a national prize, which is a reason why these awards use panels of judges. The space between the poles of personal preference and the notion of objective merit is where the electricity of literary prizes is generated. We can all agree on how to measure the tallest building or the fastest car, but on the question of how to determine the best novel we will be arguing til the end of time.
Trubek is right, though, that we should more clearly state the criteria we bring to that argument. All judges say, We just picked the best books, when controversy arises around their choices, but shrouding their deliberations in mystery only invites more speculation. Like Trubek, Im a fan of the the Morning News annual Tournament of Books precisely because its judges are asked to explain in detail why they prefer one book over another.
Talking about the standards we apply would at the very least make the discussion a lot more interesting. Whatever the merits of their shortlist, this years Booker judges have succeeded in getting their fellow countrymen to talk about what constitutes a great book. That people want to argue with those choices isnt, in my opinion, a sign of dysfunction. Instead, it shows that we care not only about our literary culture but about the idea of sharing it with a world full of fellow readers.
Further reading:
Website for the Man Booker Prize
The article in the Guardian newspaper in which Stella Rimington describes the criteria used in judging this years Booker Prize
Also in the Guardian,
The Galaxy National Book Awards website, announcing the shortlisting of, among others, Alan Hollinghurst
Anne Trubek asks for more clarity about the criteria for excellence in discussions of literary prizes
Last years Tournament of Books at the Morning News website
Wednesday, Oct 19, 2011 12:00 AM UTC
Big Business Now Sweeps Retail Trade, declared the New York Times in 1928. Huge Corporations, Serving the Nation Through Country-Wide Chains, Are Displacing the Neighborhood Store. While some version of that headline wouldnt be out of place in a present-day report about Walmart, the chain that provoked the most anxiety almost a century ago was the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co., which in 1920 began a 43-year run as the largest retailer in the world, transforming the retail industry in ways that made Walmart possible.
In his eye-opening book The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America, Marc Levinson covers the history of A&P, the industry it revolutionized, and the enmity it inspired, in everyone from the mom-and-pop shopkeepers it put out of business to the government trustbusters who for years made the company the target of federal investigation. He also explores the deeper unease underlying the dominance of A&P, as the growth of chains and the modernization of grocery trade seemed to threaten the very existence of small-town life.
Levinson, whose previous books include The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, notes that technical advances ranging from the cardboard box and the tin can in the late 1900s to the refrigerator and the automobile in the first half of the 20th century reshaped the retail food industry. But his primary focus is on the innovations that A&P either created or, more often, exploited to great effect. Led for decades by the brothers George L. Hartford and John A. Hartford, paternalistic bosses known throughout the company as Mr. George and Mr. John, A&P mastered vertical integration: The company manufactured items like bread, coffee and milk for itself, thus eliminating reliance on the wholesalers, brokers and other middlemen who played major roles in the countrys inefficient, archaic system of moving food from producer to consumer.
Where the company did order from manufacturers, it demanded special terms, including deep volume discounts. But the corporations radically new model, according to Levinson, was its high-volume, low-price strategy, which saw A&P slashing prices in order to get more shoppers through its doors. The strategy worked, and throughout the 1920s A&P opened discount stores so rapidly, John Hartford joked that hobos hopping off the trains got hired as managers. There was no way for mom and pop to compete.
Levinson bookends The Great A&P with a discussion of creative destruction, the painful process by which innovation and technological advance make an industry more efficient while leaving older, less adaptable businesses by the wayside. As A&P inflicted creative destruction on the grocery trade, government intervened, with many states passing punitive taxes on chains and, in 1949, the Department of Justice finally winning criminal convictions against the Hartfords for engaging in restraint of trade. Levinson offers too much arcane detail about the antitrust suit, particularly considering that it wasnt the government that finally brought A&P down. The extremely disciplined and visionary Hartford brothers, who had inherited A&P from their father, were childless, and they failed to cultivate outside successors; when they died in the 1950s, the company, unable to adapt to the shift of supermarket shopping to suburbia, quickly lost its way. The speed of A&Ps decline was shocking, Levinson writes. The company that had for so long been an agent of creative destruction at last became its victim.
Tuesday, Oct 18, 2011 7:45 PM UTC
Lauren Myracle is accustomed to seeing her name on lists. The young-adult author, who frequently deals in the complicated, dark, profane, and sexually charged vicissitudes of youth, can be found frequently on the New York Times bestseller list and the American Library Associations collection of the most frequently challenged authors. Her work is included on Anita Silveys 500 Great Books for Teens. Shes made Booklists roster of Top Youth Romances, and the ALAs list of Best Books for Young Adults.
So when her gritty novel Shine was listed as one of five National Book Award finalists last week, it seemed a crowning recognition for an acclaimed novelist. Later that day, Myracle , saying, Im a lucky girl for SO many reasons…. Im grinning BIG time!
And then it all hit the fan.
The kids would call this a WTF? moment. It started when a sixth title, Franny Billingsleys Chime, suddenly popped up on the list of nominees. In what will surely go down in the Alanis Morissette Isnt It Ironic Hall of Fame, it turned out that an organization devoted to the promotion of excellent books had a reading comprehension problem. The Foundation had unintentionally bestowed upon Shine the accolade meant for Chime. Oops, they sound alike! Things got even odder from there. Though the Foundation initially opted to accept its own mistake and expand the field of nominees to six, it then swiftly reversed itself. In a statement, Myracles publisher explained that Myracle was asked to withdraw to preserve the integrity of the award and the judges work.
Myracle, whose novel centers on the wrenching aftermath of a hate crime against a gay teen, graciously did just that with one caveat. After Myracles name disappeared from the list of nominees, the Foundation announced that At her suggestion we will be pleased to make a $5,000 donation to the Matthew Shepard Foundation in her name. Meanwhile, Myracle has been a spectacular good sport, tweeting her happy dance congratulations for Billingsley and Chime, and joking to novelist Gayle Forman that SHINE can join the list of my other best-of 2011 books that were not nominated for an #NBA. And in the process, the author, who has in the past found herself in the past nearly left out of the Scholastic Book Fair for her gay-friendly content and condemned in the Wall Street Journal for themes of homophobia, booze and crystal meth and language that cant be reprinted in a newspaper, is enjoying vindication among fans and fellow authors as the classiest participant in this whole fiasco.
As My Life With The Lincolns author Gayle Brandeis tells Salon, Lauren Myracle has really been able to (forgive me) shine through the whole kerfuffle. The awards people asked her to step down to preserve the integrity of the award, but shes the only one to show any integrity (and grace and humor) through the situation… Im grateful that the Matthew Shepard Foundation is going to benefit from the mishegas (and I imagine Lauren Myracle will find many fiercely loyal new readers.)
And Sarah Darer Littman, author of Want to Go Private?, Confessions of a Closet Catholic, and more, told us: Ive been a huge advocate for Shine ever since I read it. I was thrilled when it was nominated for the NBA…. Then we heard thered apparently been some confusion about the award, which must have been mortifying for Lauren a truly kind and wonderful author who deserves much, much better than this. That she has been asked to withdraw her book from the nomination to preserve the integrity of the award and the judges work is reprehensible, and quite simply, a display of mind-boggling insensitivity on the part of the National Book Award Foundation and the judges. The only one who has come out of this affair with any integrity at all is Lauren Myracle.
In many ways, the NBA debacle sums up everything about Myracles career. She is at once praised and has praise wrenched from her. She is lauded and kicked back down. Yet through it all, she goes about the business of resiliency. So the National Books Award finalists is one list she wont be on this year. By turning bad fortune into something positive, shes already proven herself every inch a dazzling winner, raising money and awareness for a worthy cause, supporting her fellow authors, and winning over a slew of new fans. Thats even more than a victory you might just call it a miracle.
Sunday, Oct 16, 2011 4:00 PM UTC
Just over two years ago, an Atlanta writer named Blake Butler submitted a story to Cal Morgan’s short fiction website, Fifty-Two Stories. Morgan, the editorial director of Harper Perennial, was so taken with Butler’s voice — “I was awestruck by how brilliant, unusual and challenging it was,” he said recently — that he published the story that day. Morgan soon signed him to a two-book deal, and he was confident enough in his new find to arrange a marathon, four-night public reading of Butler’s 400-plus page novel “There Is No Year.”
Butler, 32, is young and talented; and as the editor of a popular website of his own, HTML Giant, he brings a well-established link to his readers. He’s prolific, and he writes books that manage to be both earnest and cool. And for a major publisher like Harper part of the HarperCollins family he’s inexpensive. Butler received just a $10,000 advance for his first novel with Perennial, he said in an interview, and $20,000 for his follow-up, out this month, Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia.
“The stuff I do, I never really considered it major-house stuff… so I was surprised that he was even in to it,” Butler said. Because of Perennial’s faith in his work, Butler said he “never even really considered anyone else.”
In a sense, Butler represents everything that Harper Perennial has tried to become since it started a rebranding effort in 2005, trying to find its niche in the unpredictable world of contemporary book publishing. Like Vintage Contemporaries did in the 1980s when it published a series of novels by Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis and Tama Janowitz that captured the zeitgeist, Perennial, with its line of handsome, affordable paperback originals — many of which are penned by members of Butler’s generation — is trying to establish itself as the home of a new kind of literary smarts and style. Its almost a small press inside a much bigger one authors get paid less than they might even from another HarperCollins branch, but still benefit from the publicity and distribution muscle.
“Some of the books we’re doing are almost avant-garde, a lot of them are by young writers, and a lot of the promotional efforts we do are online or in innovative new ways,” Morgan said in a recent interview. “But it still is all coming from this very deep-rooted sense of the physical book as our little sacred item.”
Harper Perennial’s model isn’t unique, but it’s an intriguing case study in what an imprint needs to do to distinguish itself in an increasingly stratified market. What it does is innovative and exciting, but also traditional. The imprint nurtures young writers, orchestrates creative — occasionally quite elaborate — marketing schemes, and packages its content in gorgeously designed paperback originals. There is no star system, no bidding wars, no big names — Perennial’s biggest author is not bonus baby Chad Harbach but the moderately well-known Chad Kultgen — and the imprint keeps its costs down by offering most writers modest advances for first novels and debut story collections. Nobody’s getting rich, yet the imprint fosters a sense of team spirit. In a series of interviews, more than one author described Harper Perennial as a “family.” In the best sense, Harper Perennial is selling a cutting-edge aesthetic on the cheap.
As Diana Spechler, the author of Skinny and Who By Fire, and one of the many Harper Perennial fiction writers who’s in the early part of her career, put it in an e-mail interview, “Readers seem more willing to take a chance on a new or under-the-radar author if they dont have to spend hardcover prices.”
Perennial’s methods have caught the attention of some important people in the industry.
“They seem to be the one publisher that’s taking a lot more chances on new authors, for a major imprint,” said Gerry Donaghy, the new book purchasing supervisor at the mega-indie Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore. “There are a lot more quirky writers that sometimes you would expect to see on a much smaller press — somebody who maybe they’re only expecting to sell 2,500 or 5,000 copies of a book. And I think that’s where they’re sort of finding their niche, because they can certainly keep their doors open by cranking out copies of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’”
Kultgen, for one, was unknown when he came to Perennial. As he said in a phone interview this month, in 2006, “I had a book agent at the time who had sent it around to maybe like a dozen or so different publishers, who all said, This is hilarious, there’s no way we can publish it, though. Good luck.”
After the round of rejections, a new agent representing Kultgen approached Perennial, where he found a home. “It’s kind of abrasive,” he said of his work, especially his first novel “The Average American Male,” “and I don’t necessarily think this, but I’ve heard this critique of it from a lot of people: that it’s highly misogynistic. I think for the most part the publishing industry may not want to do something like that, may not want to take a chance on it. But Harper Perennial certainly did.”
At 35, Kultgen has become one of Perennial’s reliable earners; in June the New York Times reported that his debut had sold more than 100,000 copies a figure that Morgan said was “accurate then.”
But sales figures like this are unusual for Perennial’s newer authors, who usually start small. “In an environment where we no longer have Borders as an outlet, we can start off by shipping fewer than 10,000 copies,” Morgan said.
For instance, “Bad Marie,” a 2010 novel by New York City writer Marcy Dermansky, had an initial print run of 10,000, she said in an e-mail interview. But the book, she added, “has been reprinted four times since then.” She said the continued interest in her novel is due in part to the imprint’s creative marketing ideas. “This August, Harper Perennial did an e-book promotion. Twenty books for $20. I loved that… Probably I did not make a lot on royalties with this promotion,” she said, “but I am happy that my book isn’t disappearing.”
An undeniable, if often overlooked, part of a publisher’s success is tied to the appearance of the books it publishes, and on this front few best Perennial. The imprint’s art staff, under Robin Bilardello and Milan Bozic, designs books that are pleasing to look at and equally gratifying in a tactile sense. “Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing,” a 2009 story collection by Lydia Peelle, is a good example: The sturdy, rough-hewn cover features an alluring black-and-white image of a solitary tree set against a cloudy sky, and unlike most paperbacks, it features wraparound flaps that give it a hardcover feel. With its playful reds pinks and yellows, Valerie Laken’s 2011 story collection, “Separate Kingdoms,” is no less attractive.
“I actually really love the cover art for the story collection,” Laken said, “and when they started to show me page proofs and they had all those great little graphics, I was thrilled. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, somebody over there is really getting into this … We all like to think that stuff doesn’t matter, but of course you want to see your work presented in the most elegant and appropriate format.”
Morgan suggested that a book’s appearance might be more important than ever, given that different stores have varying visions, goals and layouts. “That means one thing for Barnes and Noble, it means a different thing for an independent bookstore, and it means a different thing still — and a very distinct thing — for a lot of the special markets that we sell into,” he said. “We’re really very focused on places like Anthropolgie and Urban Outfitters, places that do sell increasing numbers of our books every year. They look at our books as part of an extremely well-curated physical environment. If we have a book where we think the market is an Urban Outfitters consumer, we try to create a book that looks like it would make sense in their store.”
Harper Perennial publishes about “60 originals a year,” Morgan said, and the goal is to build a brand identity that transcends old-school and newer markets. Their authors include veteran underground writers like Dennis Cooper, smart young voices like Justin Taylor, new-breed Southern authors like Peelle and Holly Goddard Jones, and comic writers like Ben Greenman.
Some more traditional booksellers, however, suggest that it is hard to define a brand by being eclectic.
“Harper Perennial, it’s just been watered down to the degree that it no longer has its own identity,” Robert Contant, one of the owners of Manhattan’s St. Mark’s Bookshop, said recently. “I don’t know that there’s a certain kind of book that Harper Perennial is publishing anymore. There are some publishers — Europa (for one); they tend to be kind of small — that have a well-defined publishing list, and people will actually at least pick their books up and browse them just because of the imprint, but it’s not true for any of the major houses anymore.”
Whether or not this is true, one thing that seems beyond dispute is the loyalty that Harper Perennial breeds among its younger writers. Maybe that’s because the imprint gave many of them a shot when others publishers told them no. “It’s like a family,” said Simon von Booy, another young New York fiction writer who has published several books with Perennial. “It’s really a close-knit community. Everything people told me about publishing — they warned me away, they said be careful — I didn’t find any of that in my experience.”
Butler said he feels the same way.
“They’re such a tight-knit crew, and they’re all really good friends, and they make you feel like you’re part of that, too. I imagine it’s an anomaly in New York publishing,” he said. And he has no intention of going anywhere: “I have already got some other books that I’m finished with, and my full intention is to send them to Cal. I wouldn’t ask my agent to shop them at this point. If Harper wanted to do the book, then I would do it with them.”
Sunday, Oct 16, 2011 2:00 PM UTC
Over the past few decades, linguists have shown that, when it comes to speech, many gender stereotypes hold remarkably true: Men tend to speak loudly, while women whisper; men talk over each other, while women conspire behind each others backs; men hold back their feelings, while women lay them out to strangers they meet on the subway. According to some critics, these differences are merely a reflection of our cultural presuppositions about gender. But, according to a new book, theres a far simpler reason for these linguistic differences: biology.
In Duels and Duets, John L. Locke, a professor of linguistics at Lehman College and the author of Eavesdropping: An Intimate History, argues that men and women have radically different ways of speaking not because of their upbringing, but because they have radically different evolutionary needs. Men, he argues, use antagonistic speech, or duels, to show off their strength and prove themselves to women. Women, meanwhile, use quieter speech patterns to bond with each other and help protect themselves against aggressive men. And, according to Locke, this is a pattern that has been going on for thousands and thousands of years.
Salon spoke with Locke over the phone about sexual stereotypes, the Real Housewives franchise and the future of speech in the digital age.
So what are the differences between male and female speech?
Women are likely to look for common ground when they are talking with other women and tend to produce overlapping remarks in conversations. Those were initially misdiagnosed as interruptions, but it turns out that women tend to like to help each other tell stories some people have called it coauthoring. They tend to have a rather animated and lively way of talking, with very pronounced variations in vocal pitch and much more exchange of emotion in speech. The connective tissue in women’s groups is the divulging of personal and sometimes intimate information about the life and the relationships of the speaker and other people. Thats a trademark of the way women talk with female friends.
The word gossip has a pejorative sound to it, but with it, women are, in a sense, servicing the moral code of the community. One study of gossip showed that gossipers were concerned about women who are bad housekeepers, and women who are bad mothers, and women who are promiscuous. Those things are all threats to each woman in a community; therefore they have every good reason to want to talk about those things. But men speak very differently from women.
Yes, you argue that men are constantly sniping at each other in tiny ways. You call this dueling.
There are a number of criteria: It’s symbolic, playful, stylized. In its purest form, it looks quite a lot like a performance. But the disposition to duel sort of seeps into everyday speech too like if two guys, for example, come up to each other, and one of them says, “Hey, you old son of a bitch. How the hell are ya?” and maybe insults him a little bit about his bulging midriff, or his thinning hair, or some weird shirt that he is wearing. Women would simply never, never, never do that. They might later privately tell someone, “Hasn’t she aged terribly?” They would never say to her face, “Well, look at the wrinkles on your face” or, “My God! I’ve never seen bulging breasts like those before,” and so forth.
At one point you use the term verbal plumage, to describe this dueling dynamic, because its partly meant to seduce women.
Both men and women need to know if men are dominant or subordinate. Men need to know because they are very hierarchical in their organization. Women also need to know that, too, because dominant men, or high-status men, have unusually good access to everything women want. Its recently been discovered that a very rich repository of information is carried by the speaking voice of individual men, and women are particularly good at picking this up. Women love to hear men who have low speaking voices, because its correlated with testosterone levels, and those men tend to be more assertive. I don’t think women want men that are aggressive, but they want men that’ll stick up for themselves and bring home the bacon. They especially love a low voice when theyre at the portion of their menstrual cycle when their estrogen is highest.
Ive actually read somewhere that men who speak in a monotone are also more attractive to women than men who dont.
By using unusual words or rare words or words in a creative way, men can give everyone, including women, the impression theyre intelligent. If you ask women what they want in a long-term mate they list intelligence at the top of the list, and one of the best ways for them to see if that man is smart is to listen to him talk. Its almost like a folk IQ test. Words used in a clever way are almost like the colorful feathers of a peacock a display of what biologists would call fitness information that relates to their ability to reproduce.
So whats the biological explanation for the low-key, cooperative form of speaking to ascribe to women or dueting, as you call it?
If you are smaller, and less powerful, and weakened or compromised by pregnancy or infant-care responsibilities, then you do not want to portray yourself as a strong autonomous individual that is going to individually fight off anybody who proposes problems. Even in the other primates, where there is a female-male size disparity, females dont confront males individually, but a group of females will chase males away. Primates also use reciprocal grooming as a favor and a form of respect. I dont say that intimate disclosures by women are equivalent to manual grooming in the primates, but in a sense theyre similar.
When women are dueting and trading in intimate disclosures about themselves and their friends, theyre fortifying a relationship. If you disclose secrets, they could harm you if theyre distributed, especially to foes or rivals. So dueting tends to be reciprocal. If one woman tells a friend about her worries or fears or intimate life, then the woman knows she needs to reply in kind.
Isnt this projecting modern, stereotypical gender roles onto people?
This is about sex. Its not about gender. Weve seen that girls who have a larger than normal amount of testosterone are more likely to be aggressive. Well, thats not because theyre treated in such a way as to make them aggressive, and its not because their parents are more aggressive than other parents. Its because they have something within them that is making them aggressive. We all know about boys that grow up in fatherless homes. Thats a large percentage of young people nowadays. We dont identify them by the fact that they talk like girls. In fact, they tend to be more strongly masculine than the little boys that have a father.
Its been about 6 million years since humans broke off from the other primates, and males are still far more aggressive than the females. Six million years is a long time for something to stay in a species if its not being sustained by anything. In other words, these differences are not purely arbitrary.
I feel like Im always seeing women getting into arguments. Two days ago, I saw two older women screaming and swinging canes at each other on the subway. The entire Real Housewives franchise seems predicated on this kind of fighting. Isnt that dueling?
I dont watch that program, but when you said screaming, thats a real clue. When women do that, they are almost invariably angry. And there is a reason. If a woman has done something to cause another woman anger or hurt, shell scream or yell at them stridently. Its a targeted form of opposition thats designed to cause that individual to back off or to change their behavior in some ways. Anthropologists call it conflict talk. But dueling is done between friends, using insults in a joking or ritualistic way in the same way that two dogs will bite the other as a form of playing. This is a critical difference, because men are trying to accomplish what their ancestors would have done by direct fighting only without bloodshed. Humor is critical to this. You could argue that one of the reasons humor evolved is to keep men from becoming violent.
You say we should embrace the differences in the ways we talk. Why?
We are the way we are. Its not to say we cant change, or cant be more respectful of others, or that we cant harmonize our interests in others. But I dont see the point in telling everyone their natural dispositions make them a bad person. I think that men and women need to learn to get along, I think the best way to do that is to start by recognizing the ways we naturally differ.
As you point out in the book, one of the places these speech differences come to a head is in romantic relationships. But what about gay relationships? I think that Im actually both a dueter and dueler depending on the context.
Thats certainly an area to be looked at. I dont think testosterone is the only variable necessarily, and I also noticed that in my own life, I have very duelly moments and more duetish moments, and Im not one thing all the time. I think sometimes elements of dueling and elements of dueting are present in the same person.
Over the last decade, texting seems to have overtaken speech as a form of conversation. The new iPhone even allows you to automatically turn your voice messages into texts. How do you think this will change this dynamic between the sexes?
I wrote a book in 1998 about this sort of thing, called The Devoicing of Society, but frankly, I dont know. When email first started, a technical report was published called Flaming and Shaming about the use and misuse of electronic communication. They did a survey looking at the percentage of respondents who had said that email had indirectly led them to terminate a relationship. They pointed out that sometimes somebody sends an email to another person without knowing them very well. With email youre left without background information, tone of voice, a face, so the words stand out nakedly on the screen. And email is almost a duelly medium because emails are not usually conversational theyre more like bullet points. Also, I think theres a much stronger impact of speech upon print than print upon speech.
Saturday, Oct 15, 2011 4:00 PM UTC
Those who have visited it know that the resplendent New York library of financier J. Pierpont Morgan is less a museum than a walkable trove of artistic and cultural riches. Among those riches is a valuable collection of Islamic manuscript paintings, which has never been exhibited in its entirety until now.
Over the phone, curator William Voelkle told me a little about the collection which includes an important edition of Ibn Bakhtishu’s “Uses of Animals,” and one of only two known illustrated lives of the poet Rumi and its history, rooted in a love affair between Morgans rather attractive librarian, Belle da Costa Green, and the art historian Bernard Berenson.
An edited and condensed transcript of our conversation is below; see the slide show that follows for a sampling of the exhibitions art.
Roughly when, and under what circumstances, did most of these manuscripts come to the Morgan?
Actually, in a funny kind of way, the collection was the offspring of a love affair. Belle da Costa Green was [Pierpont] Morgans rather attractive librarian; in November of 1908, Bernard Berenson, the famous art historian of the Italian Renaissance, came to the library and it was love at first sight. About two years later, they went off together to the great exhibition that was being held in Munich in 1910. This was one of those great blockbuster shows on Islamic art. And after having fallen in love with each other, they fell in love with Islamic manuscripts. Interestingly, Berenson, between 1910 and 1913, actually developed a small collection of these things; in a letter, Belle da Costa Green also said that she should like to collect in this area for herself. And she did.
At the exhibition in 1910, they saw two magnificent portfolios of album leaves [individual pages from separate works, drawn together by collectors]. These had been lent by Sir Charles Hercules Read, who was working at the British Museum he was the keeper of anthropology and antiquities. Belle da Costa Green wrote to him; she said that she had seen his beautiful leaves, and that she thought they were the best things in the show, and should he decide to sell them, would he be so kind as to give Morgan the first refusal? He did and so Morgan bought the Persian album and the Mughal album from Charles Hercules Read, and those are of course two of the things that are featured in the exhibition. So it was through Belle da Costa Green, really, that Morgan was turned on to Islamic manuscripts.
The core of our collection was purchased by Morgan between 1910 and 1913. When Morgan died, in March of 1913, Belle da Costa Green wrote a letter to Berenson, and said, Isnt it a pity that, just as I got my Mr. Morgan interested in collecting these things, he died? And the second group of manuscripts that we received of Islamic nature were indeed those that were bequeathed to us by Belle da Costa Green when she died, in 1950. These are the two big clusters of these materials in the collection.
Its certainly true that after Morgans death, this was not a priority in terms of a collecting area; though we did buy one or two things, it was certainly not built up in the way the Western medieval manuscript collection was built up. But thats why we have those things: [because of] Belle da Costa Green and the fact that she saw this great exhibition.
Is this the first time they have all been exhibited?
We have never had an exhibition of the whole collection. They had an exhibition of art of this kind at the Metropolitan Museum some years ago, and they borrowed some manuscripts, including the ["Uses of Animals"], which is perhaps our most important manuscript. And some of the Read album leaves were sent abroad. But weve never really had an exhibition of the whole collection.
Why now?
One reason why we never did a big exhibition in the past was that we didnt really have an up-to-date scholarly catalogue of the collection. It was only really in 1997 that the first comprehensive catalogue of the Islamic and Indian manuscripts and miniatures [was made]. So having that catalogue having up-to-date information one could finally think about doing an exhibition.
Can we talk a little about the manuscripts themselves? Im particularly interested in Ibn Bakhtishus Uses of Animals [slide 4].
Yes. This is actually, I think, in many ways, the most important single item [in the collection] and there are several reasons for this. The first is chronological, because it comes at the end of the 13th century, and you dont really have a lot of illustrated or illuminated manuscripts before the 13th century. What you do have, before that and we have these here also are Qurans. You know, the earliest Qurans are really from the very end of the seventh century and then you have Qurans in the eighth, ninth, 10th, and all the way through. The early ones, and these are represented here, are on vellum, like [contemporary] Western manuscripts.
We have Qurans represented that were made over 1,000 years from the ninth to the 19th centuries. We dont have some of the very earliest ones, but those tended to be very beautiful because of the calligraphy; they were not illustrated. The very first revelation that came down to Mohammed was the one that speaks about how we were all made from coagulated blood but in the same [chapter], which is number 96, it also says that man was trained in the use of the pen, and writing. So thats right in the Quran. It was the act of writing out the Quran that was very important. And of course that has its parallels also in Western tradition sacred scripture.
There were people who felt that you should not write, lets say, the Gospels, in gold on purple vellum, because that wasnt the point it was really the words and the message. But in even the West, there were those who took a different point of view: that one way of showing the importance of scripture was to write it using the costliest materials, and with the most beautiful calligraphic writing style, and so forth. This idea also manifested itself, of course, in the Quran the concept that while you didnt have pictures, you had very elegant scripts. The format of the Quran eventually changed from vellum to paper, and then you started to get the Qurans in the upright, vertical shape.
So the earliest materials that we do have [in the collection] are from the ninth century, and these are the Qurans. Getting back to your question about the Uses of Animals, the earliest illustrated manuscript in the collection is this one, which one might call a work of natural history. It was made in Maragha, in Persia, which was the center of learning (already in the 14th century they had an observatory so astronomy and science were very important). This manuscript was made in that place, and it tries to be a natural history of animals, in that it describes the habits of animals, and also their medicinal derivatives what the animals parts could be used for, for healing ailments, illnesses and so forth. Thats one part of it.
But the illustrations are another and the most exciting part of it for me, because this particular translation was ordered by [the Mongols], when they conquered this part of the country. They brought with them Chinese pictorial styles, and this is one of the earliest examples that shows the influence of the Far East pictorially.
If you want a comparison with the West around that time, of course we have the medieval European bestiaries and books of beasts but those animals were not observed as they existed in nature; they were abstract, funny-looking creatures. [It's remarkable] that, at the same time that those were being done in the West, in Maragha you have artists showing these animals in a very realistic style. (For instance, in one of our 12th-century English bestiaries, the elephant is painted pink; in the ["Uses of Animals"], the elephant is gray, and you get a sense of the thickness of the skin and all this kind of thing. So they are really very naturalistic. And this I think was a consequence of the Mongol invasion too.)
[Finally,] do you see the gold, jagged clouds [on the page with the mountain rams]? That all comes from the Mongol influence. And then those multicolored rocks that the rams are standing on, those are all part of the pictorial vocabulary that arrived as a result of the Mongol invasion. So this manuscript really stands, you might say, at the very beginning century of Islamic book production.
Treasures of Islamic Manuscript Painting From the Morgan will be on view at the Morgan Library and Museum from Oct. 21 to Jan. 29, 2012.
View the slide show
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