“He seems to be possessed with a demon of restlessness,” Stanwix’s mother remarked. But his real demon was motionlessness. After eighteen months in California, Stanwix reports: “I am still stationary.” After Bartleby’s employer suggests that he might consider “going as a companion to Europe, to entertain some young gentleman with your conversation,” Bartleby replies, “I like to be stationary.” To which his exasperated employer responds: “Stationary you shall be then.” Published two years after Stanwix’s birth, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” could not be based on Stanwix. But could Stanwix be based on Bartleby? Could Herman Melville, the distant, depressed father, have helped create the conditions for a Bartleby?
Books
Terrifying Forecast
One of the short novels in Strange Weather imagines a future in which climate change has taken a particularly nasty turn: the sky has begun to rain nails. In the book before it, The Fireman, I sketched a world in which our society has collapsed into infection and flame. Yeah, okay… my new book may feature some weird weather, but no one is ever going to call me Mr. Sunshine.
Of course, I come by it naturally: many of my favorite reads forecast harrowing, delightfully grim futures. Here are five glimpses of dreadful days to come. Warning… the outlook is for dark and stormy nights.
Speak by Louisa Hall. Lyrical and funny and heart-felt and sweet, Louisa Hall’s Speak tracks the evolution of A.I. from the earliest days of programming and on into an environmentally bankrupt future. Hall envisions a man against machine scenario, in which robots are condemned for their empathy and potential. We simply can’t bear the thought that our circuit board offspring might have more of a right to the world we ruined than we do.
Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill. Louisa Hall imagines a future in which the robots deserve to inherit the earth. C. Robert Cargill gives it to them. In the scenario depicted here, humankind has already gone the way of the passenger pigeon, leaving the remaining wastelands to the talking toasters. The screenwriter behind Dr. Strange and Sinister knows how to make a story move, and Sea of Rust is an absolute rocket, from the first page to the last… you don’t read this book so much as hang on for dear life.
The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey. There have been plenty of stories about the undead apocalypse, but it takes a writer of M. R. Carey’s intelligence, craft, and wit to make you root for the zombies. In Carey’s vision, humanity may mean well but deep down it just doesn’t have the… hunger to survive.
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Before it was a hit series for Hulu, well before it won all the Emmys, The Handmaid’s Tale was the most brilliant dystopic novel this side of 1984, as essential as Orwell and as visionary as Wells, one of the keystone works of 20th century fiction. Everyone should read it.
Sleeping Beauties by Stephen King & Owen King. A couple young, up-and-coming novelists here craft a portrait of civilization collapsing, as women everywhere fall into the deepest of slumbers. To wake them is death – for those foolish enough to disturb them. Okay, yeah, I’m not unbiased on this one: I confess the authors are blood. But don’t doubt their power to scare the s@% out of you. Start reading and I promise: you won’t sleep easy.
Author photo credit (c) Joe Hill.
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Small-Town Noir
I often wonder if David Lynch is the era’s most original artist, or at least the creator of its most haunting images—the severed ear in Blue Velvet, the Red Room in Twin Peaks, the Mystery Man in Lost Highway—but his works feel too schlocky, seedy, tearful, too male, too white for me to want to say this often in conversation. His cinema is disreputably baroque, brimming with meaning that it seems to disavow.
Black Lives Matter
In Kara Walker’s new exhibition, it is as though she has drawn her images of antebellum violence from the nation’s hindbrain. Walker has been creating her historical narratives of disquiet for a while, and they are always a surprise: the inherited image is sitting around, secure in its associations, but on closer inspection something deeply untoward is happening between an unlikely pair, or suddenly the landscape is going berserk in a corner.
The B&N Podcast: Scary Story
Every author has a story beyond the one that they put down on paper. The Barnes & Noble Podcast goes between the lines with today’s most interesting writers, exploring what inspires them, what confounds them, and what they were thinking when they wrote the books we’re talking about.
Think of one of the first times you encountered the pleasure of a truly spine-tingling story: the kind of book you felt uneasy, maybe, about reading after dark, but compelled you to keep turning pages in that way only scary fiction does. Maybe it was Stephen King, or Bram Stoker, or one of the legions of paperback horror-scribes of the 1980s. On this special pre-Halloween episode, we talk with authors about writing — and reading — the books that turn fear and dread into pleasure and (sometimes) enlightenment.
First, Sarah Schmidt, author of the chilling new novel See What I Have Done, tells Miwa Messer about her stay overnight in the house where Lizzie Borden’s family was murdered.
Then, Benjamin Percy (The Dark Net) and Victor LaValle (The Changeling) talk about writing into darkness — and their early encounters with a certain clown in the sewer.
Books in this Episode
In her riveting debut novel, See What I Have Done, Sarah Schmidt recasts one of the most fascinating murder cases of all time into an intimate story of a volatile household and a family devoid of love.
On the morning of August 4, 1892, Lizzie Borden calls out to her maid: Someone’s killed Father . The brutal ax-murder of Andrew and Abby Borden in their home in Fall River, Massachusetts, leaves little evidence and many unanswered questions. While neighbors struggle to understand why anyone would want to harm the respected Bordens, those close to the family have a different tale to tell—of a father with an explosive temper; a spiteful stepmother; and two spinster sisters, with a bond even stronger than blood, desperate for their independence.
As the police search for clues, Emma comforts an increasingly distraught Lizzie whose memories of that morning flash in scattered fragments. Had she been in the barn or the pear arbor to escape the stifling heat of the house? When did she last speak to her stepmother? Were they really gone and would everything be better now? Shifting among the perspectives of the unreliable Lizzie, her older sister Emma, the housemaid Bridget, and the enigmatic stranger Benjamin, the events of that fateful day are slowly revealed through a high-wire feat of storytelling.
When Apollo Kagwa’s father disappeared, all he left his son were strange recurring dreams and a box of books stamped with the word IMPROBABILIA. Now Apollo is a father himself—and as he and his wife, Emma, are settling into their new lives as parents, exhaustion and anxiety start to take their toll. Apollo’s old dreams return and Emma begins acting odd. Irritable and disconnected from their new baby boy, at first Emma seems to be exhibiting signs of postpartum depression, but it quickly becomes clear that her troubles go even deeper. Before Apollo can do anything to help, Emma commits a horrific act—beyond any parent’s comprehension—and vanishes, seemingly into thin air.
Thus begins Apollo’s odyssey through a world he only thought he understood, to find a wife and child who are nothing like he’d imagined. His quest, which begins when he meets a mysterious stranger who claims to have information about Emma’s whereabouts, takes him to a forgotten island, a graveyard full of secrets, a forest where immigrant legends still live, and finally back to a place he thought he had lost forever.
This captivating retelling of a classic fairy tale imaginatively explores parental obsession, spousal love, and the secrets that make strangers out of the people we love the most. It’s a thrilling and emotionally devastating journey through the gruesome legacies that threaten to devour us and the homely, messy magic that saves us, if we’re lucky.
See more books from Victor LaValle.
The Dark Net is real. An anonymous and often criminal arena that exists in the secret far reaches of the Web, some use it to manage Bitcoins, pirate movies and music, or traffic in drugs and stolen goods. And now an ancient darkness is gathering there as well. This force is threatening to spread virally into the real world unless it can be stopped by members of a ragtag crew:
Twelve-year-old Hannah—who has been fitted with the Mirage, a high-tech visual prosthetic to combat her blindness—wonders why she sees shadows surrounding some people.
Lela, a technophobic journalist, has stumbled upon a story nobody wants her to uncover.
Mike Juniper, a one-time child evangelist who suffers from personal and literal demons, has an arsenal of weapons stored in the basement of the homeless shelter he runs.
And Derek, a hacker with a cause, believes himself a soldier of the Internet, part of a cyber army akin to Anonymous.
They have no idea what the Dark Net really contains.
Set in present-day Portland, The Dark Net is a cracked-mirror version of the digital nightmare we already live in, a timely and wildly imaginative techno-thriller about the evil that lurks in real and virtual spaces, and the power of a united few to fight back.
See more books by Benjamin Percy.
Take a tour through the horror paperback novels of two iconic decades . . . if you dare. Page through dozens and dozens of amazing book covers featuring well-dressed skeletons, evil dolls, and knife-wielding killer crabs! Read shocking plot summaries that invoke devil worship, satanic children, and haunted real estate! Horror author and vintage paperback book collector Grady Hendrix offers killer commentary and witty insight on these trashy thrillers that tried so hard to be the next Exorcist or Rosemary’s Baby. Complete with story summaries and artist and author profiles, this unforgettable volume dishes on familiar authors like V. C. Andrews and R. L. Stine, plus many more who’ve faded into obscurity. Also included are recommendations for which of these forgotten treasures are well worth your reading time and which should stay buried.
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Lou Reed: A Life
To those of us who spent our college years debating whether we should stick the Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat on the turntable one more time or spare our dorm-mates the 2 a.m. noise by just melting down the vinyl and ingesting it — sure that VU front man Lou Reed would approve — it’s still something of a surprise, albeit a welcome one, that Reed had an old age at all. In 1973 or so, he took second place in a music magazine poll naming the rock star most likely to croak soon. Even Reed probably knew that nobody was going to beat Keith Richards in that showdown. Nonetheless, the Lou Reed of the 1970s, who was the Lou Reed my generational cohort got scalded by, was an ongoing reminder that “wasted” can have more than one meaning.
Often cynically, but sometimes wrenchingly, he spent much of the decade treating his genius, which the Velvets’ largely posthumous legend had enshrined beyond his solo career’s ability to measure up, as just another monkey on his back. Reading Anthony DeCurtis’s Lou Reed: A Life can sometimes give you the feeling that the author can’t wait for the absurd to quit courting the vulgar, but DeCurtis — a longtime MVP of the Rolling Stone writers’ stable — knows he can’t completely gloss over the seamy, abrasive, riveting spectacle Reed made of himself in those early post-VU years. His gross and hardly secret drug and alcohol abuse, bizarre behavior, and alarming physical mutations from boozy Pillsbury doughboy to strung-out ectomorph never stopped playing monster-mash hopscotch with his truculent interviews, hostile and often downright adversarial concerts, and well-advertised sexual envelope-pushing.
At least in public, his fellow propagandist for perviness David Bowie mostly just talked — and dressed — a good game. Reed, by contrast, spent three years flaunting his relationship with a striking-looking transsexual known only as Rachel before dumping her for his second wife, Sylvia Morales, and penning Reagan-era odes to heterosexual bliss. (Then again, one intimate claims that “Reed first encountered Sylvia at a meeting of the Eugenspiegel Society, the BDSM support group” — so deviancy’s honor was saved after all.) During that time, he also released a slew of albums — twelve total between 1972 and 1979, including three live ones — that ranged from the fey, sometimes strained wit of Transformer, his Bowie-produced solo breakthrough, and the metal move of Rock N Roll Animal to Berlin‘s cesspool idyll, Metal Machine Music‘s unlistenable rejection of stardom, Sally Can’t Dance‘s bitterness, the bittersweetness of Coney Island Baby, and the self-conscious art move of Street Hassle. Anticipating the man’s next record could give you a case of pre-traumatic stress disorder.
Once Reed married Morales and got sober, he turned maturity from an enemy into an ally. Beginning with 1982’s The Blue Mask, his music stopped casting about for outré alternatives to the Velvets’ indelibility — hey, what about making my jazz move next? — and settled into accepting his old band’s signature sound as the bedrock ensuring that his latter-day innovations and variations on it wouldn’t sound random. That was due in large part to kindred-spirit guitarist (and onetime VU obsessive) Robert Quine, at least until Reed got fed up with Quine getting so much of the credit for his renascence. As DeCurtis notes, this was a recurring pattern: “Reed was happy to collaborate until the goal of the collaboration was achieved. Then every collaborator became a competitor and needed to be cast aside.”
Both with and without Quine, Reed’s albums of the ’80s and early ’90s generally qualify as “better” records than his erratic Me Decade output. They’re more poised and surer of the true nature of his gifts. But with the partial exception of 1989’s New York, which added a stab at literal-minded topicality to the Velvets’ bleak projection of a permanent present tense, they also largely abandoned Reed’s old job of playing the zeitgeist’s most disconcerting and venomous pied piper. This was durable music for relieved longtime fans to admire and enjoy, not an assault on conventional preconceptions of good taste, artistic cred, and sexual or psychological waywardness.
In other words, Sane Lou wasn’t as culturally consequential as Warped Lou had been, a vexing conundrum — who’d have wished more substance abuse and emotional ravage on him? — that DeCurtis mostly ignores. He’s clearly happiest with his subject once Reed is safely ensconced as one of New York’s grand old men, resting on his laurels and contentedly married to performance artist Laurie Anderson after Sylvia Morales went the way of all lifesavers. For one thing, that’s when DeCurtis got to know him, and you can hardly blame the biographer for including fond reminiscences of their bantering encounters in Reed’s later years. But since he values his equanimity as much or more than his acquaintance with the man, maybe it’s just as well that DeCurtis apparently never came face to skeletal, snarling face with Warped Lou back in, say, 1974.
On the plus side, DeCurtis has put in commendable spadework, exhuming everything he can about Reed’s early years, from his simultaneously impudent, sitcom-esque, and damaged midcentury Long Island adolescence to the embryonic but recognizable Lou Reed his college pals and early girlfriend Shelley Albin recall, as well as the stint as a tyro songwriter for cheapjack Pickwick Records that fortuitously introduced him to future VU co-founder John Cale. Notoriously, Reed’s parents were so unnerved by their firstborn’s odder tics — glaring hints of then taboo homosexuality included — that he wound up suffering the electroshock treatments that provide the overt subject for his song “Kill Your Sons” and the subtext of his recurring portraits of father figures much more monstrous than the real Sid Reed apparently was. Add in the search for a nurturing, nonjudgmental mother that DeCurtis convincingly identifies as Reed’s default romantic mode (Rachel too? Yes, Rachel too), and the diagram’s Oedipal banality is offset only by the original uses Reed’s creative temperament put it to.
At Syracuse University, Reed encountered his first artistic role model-cum-substitute dad: poet Delmore Schwartz, who was an alcoholic, paranoid wreck by then. But still a charismatic conversationalist, apparently, at least if his campus acolytes were bombed too. “Delmore was not half as interesting or magical to me as he was to the people who were drinking around him,” Shelley Albin says, and let’s count our blessings. If she’d confessed that to Lou back in ’63, he might not have written “Pale Blue Eyes” about her in 1969.
Perhaps because Schwartz was accommodatingly dead by the time the Velvets’ first album came out, he was the only mentor Reed never felt compelled to disown, harping on instead about “Delmore’s” example for the rest of his life. While DeCurtis is shrewd enough to recognize that Reed’s “version of Schwartz was, in part, his own invention,” he never notes the fatuity of Reed’s oft-stated ambition to raise rock ‘n’ roll to the level of literature. Considering how much he did to redefine rock as an art form in its own right, his persistence in trying to upgrade its — and his — status by playing the Joyce-and-Shakespeare card was always wince-worthy.
Once Reed had left Schwartz, Syracuse, and then Pickwick hackwork behind, next up for the mentor slot was, of course, Andy Warhol. Warhol and his Factory factotum Paul Morrissey recruited the then barely germinal Velvet Underground — they’d played only a handful of gigs — for the multimedia show they dubbed the Exploding Plastic Inevitable and took on tour in 1966. The Warhol association would have guaranteed the Velvets fleeting pop world notoriety even if they’d stunk, but as the world now knows, they didn’t.
Nonetheless, the world might have stayed unsuspecting if, to Reed’s annoyance, Warhol and Morrissey — “visual artists, after all, not musical ones,” DeCurtis notes — hadn’t insisted on adding tall, glacial German fashion model Nico to the lineup as the group’s somnambulist chanteuse. That guaranteed photographers would have something more glamorous to shoot than a quartet of Lower East Side oddballs: Reed, classically trained Welsh expat Cale, Reed’s Syracuse buddy Sterling Morrison, and Maureen “Moe” Tucker, an unlikely — but who wouldn’t have been? — candidate to become the first important woman drummer in rock history.
Minus Nico, DeCurtis speculates, the band might never have gotten a record deal, but they did. Hence The Velvet Underground & Nico, perhaps the only album of 1967 that rivals Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in influence — even though the Beatles’ influence was immediate and the Velvets’ long delayed. Hence Brian Eno’s famous quote about how everyone who bought The Velvet Underground & Nico ended up forming a band. Hence, back at the time, Reed’s irritated decision to get the hell rid of Nico — and, eventually, Warhol and then Cale, two other collaborators who’d outlived their usefulness. As his future collaborator David Bowie might have — and in fact, did — put it, only then did Reed become “the special man / Then we were Ziggy’s band.”
A writer who’s prone to donning surgical gloves when he’s confronted with sleaze, DeCurtis isn’t wowed by the echt-’60s flash and filigree of the band’s Warhol period. Besides providing the material for 1972’s “A Walk on the Wild Side,” the only Top 20 hit Reed ever had, the Factory’s lowlife-gone-highlife cast of transvestites, junkies, misfit society gals, and rent-boy riffraff certainly crystallized his fascination with extreme demimondes. But if part of his interest was journalistic, he was clearly more than just a notepad-toting observer of other people’s kinks. Here and elsewhere, Victor Bockris’s sloppier but more flavorful and astute Reed bio, Transformer, is at home with dirt in a way that underlines how anodyne DeCurtis can be.
Even so, scenesters-by-proxy will no doubt find the Factory era — Edie Sedgwick! Jackie Kennedy! — the most interesting part of the book. But the edition of the Velvets that fans are most likely to dote on today is the post-Warhol, post-Cale VU of their third album, titled simply The Velvet Underground. After the frantic assertiveness of the debut, whose most “daring” tracks haven’t aged too well — its haunting chorus aside, “Venus in Furs” is a post-collegiate showoff’s rubbishy notion of perturbing S & M — and the breakneck brain-melt of White Light/White Heat, Reed opted to seek out forms of beauty he didn’t feel compelled to be ironic and/or distant about. Grasping that those two attitudes aren’t necessarily synonymous may be the key to the album’s idiosyncratic, unmistakably Velvets-y compassion.
That era was also when the band, besides recording any number of unreleased-at-the-time nuggets that went on resurfacing — in distinctly subpar versions — on Reed’s solo albums for years, played the club dates preserved on 1969 Velvet Underground Live and, much later, the three-CD boxed set most often known as The Quine Tapes. (Reed’s future Blue Mask Jiminy Cricket had been no garden-variety obsessive in his apprentice years.) To any VU devotee faced with the waking-up-with-the-house-on-fire dilemma, grabbing either one might make more sense than trying to choose among their four official studio albums. Nowhere else can you hear the disjunctive phases of their eclectic career reconciled into a harmonious and cohesive whole, because they sound like a great band at work in a way that resolves every inner contradiction of their — the right word, for once — oeuvre.
Because the Velvets have inspired more exegetes than you can shake a Ph.D. at, it’s no surprise DeCurtis doesn’t provide much that’s fresh in the way of (cough, cough) rock criticism. Virtually his only departure from orthodoxy — and it’s not even that big a departure anymore — is his view of the band’s valedictory album, Loaded, as a market-friendly sheep in masterpiece’s clothing. Not that he comes out and says so; he just praises “Sweet Jane” and “Rock and Roll,” Loaded‘s two most famous songs, while keeping mostly mum about the drivel surrounding them. The lone potential exception, “New Age,” is so much better in its Live 1969 version that Robert Mitchum would weep.
DeCurtis’s most fruitful insight is his guess that the reason Loaded didn’t gel wasn’t so much the presence of Cale’s much blander replacement, Doug Yule — who virtually took over in the studio once Reed lost interest, and who usually gets the blame for the album’s pasteurized sound — as the absence of Moe Tucker, who was pregnant at the time and got replaced by a hodgepodge of session drummers. It wasn’t only that Tucker’s musical idiosyncrasies had always prevented the band from sounding conventional even when they wanted to be. As DeCurtis explains, “Every band that manages to stay together for any length of time has a member who serves as its glue.”
Why he doesn’t follow up that observation by mentioning that one of the very few songs Reed wrote for Tucker to sing actually includes the line “I’m made out of glue” beats me. Maybe working for Jann Wenner trained him to avoid anything resembling wit. DeCurtis also didn’t interview Tucker herself, who’s still with us — albeit a bit daffily — and the VU’s only surviving member besides Cale. Ironically duplicating Tucker’s MIA status on Loaded, she’s one of the two female voices most prominently — and puzzlingly — missing from Lou Reed: A Life. As rock biographers go, DeCurtis may have more Doug Yule in him than he realizes.
The other glaring absentee — particularly as Reed’s other two wives, Morales and Berlin‘s reluctant anti-heroine, Bettye Kronstad, did give DeCurtis their side of the story — is Laurie Anderson. The lack of firsthand testimony from Rachel is more understandable; hands-down this book’s saddest supporting player, she drifted into such obscurity that no one knows for sure how or when she died. However, Anderson seems to have captivated Reed more successfully than any of his previous romantic partners, simply because she refused to play mommy to him. Unlike her predecessors, she had her own work to do, and even Reed had to accept that it was as important as his.
Interestingly, the John-and-Yoko parallels, which the couple can hardly have been unconscious of, aren’t the only way Reed’s life can be seen as New Yorky, much artier (and more depraved) parody of John Lennon’s — including, of course, the tantalizing glimpse of what Lennon’s later years might have been like if he’d lived. Even though the Beatles conquered the world and the Velvets only conquered the future, both men led 1960s bands so consequential that their 1970s solo work amounted to a series of hectic attempts to dodge, displace, and sometimes flat-out piss on a mythic status they were simultaneously capitalizing on to guarantee the audience’s continued — if often exasperated — attention. Then, at age forty, they both arrived at a fragile but promising tranquility: Lennon with Double Fantasy, Reed with The Blue Mask.
The problem with this equation is that using Lennon as the point of comparison shrivels Reed into insignificance as the coterie artist of the two. (Sorry, fellow Velvets fans, but pop outreach does count for a lot.) No doubt that’s why DeCurtis doesn’t explore it. But he doesn’t explore much else, either. While he’s skillful at assembling the biographical building blocks that reward interest at a casual level, his book isn’t just short on dirt. It’s short on resonance, advocacy, identification, deep-dive cultural spelunking, provocative arguments, nuance, fervor, and everything else that sums up the difference between perspective and an actual point of view, particularly when the subject is an artist as gnarly and passion-provoking as Lou Reed.
Tellingly, the figure in Reed’s life to whom DeCurtis is most openly hostile is rock critic Lester Bangs, who epitomized the ardent, unruly — and sometimes loutish — engagement with Reed’s music and persona a book like Lou Reed: A Life eschews. As addled, self-promoting, and occasionally tiresome as Bangs’s obsession with Reed was, it did have a dimension that’s painfully absent from DeCurtis’s biography: the beauty, ugliness, and zest of true fanhood, dramatized without any self-censorship by a writer whose thrashing White Whale style could never be mistaken for anyone else’s.
By contrast, if there’s an interestingly phrased sentence anywhere in DeCurtis’s book, good luck finding it. As usual, he’s capable, intelligent, suave, informed, readable — and bloodless. His book is sure to strike lots of people as the Lou Reed biography simply because it’s the classy one, but there can be an awfully big gap between “classy” and “definitive,” especially when we’re talking about a reprobate genius like Reed. Just because he’s now venerated, that doesn’t mean biographers do him any justice by taking a walk on the tame side.
Photo of Lou Reed street art: Chelsea Marie Hicks via Flickr
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Can Kim Jong-un Control His Nukes?
Unlike a conventional military, where tanks, trucks, even planes are relatively simple instruments of war, owning nuclear weapons is a huge, expensive, and complex responsibility. Perhaps the world should worry less about the threat of a North Korean-instigated nuclear war and more about the risk of a nuclear accident. The most frightening question raised by Kim Jong-un’s pursuit of the ultimate weapon is also the simplest: Can he control his nukes?
When Pierre Boulez Went Electric
The piece is written for three separate groups: an orchestra, six soloists, and what the score calls an electro-acoustic system of computers and loudspeakers. No two performances of Répons are the same, bringing to light seemingly new interactions between the electronically treated soloists and the acoustic orchestra, among the soloists themselves, and even a difference in the way that the sounds, captured and dispersed by the electronics, travel through space itself.
An Icy Conquest
“We are starved! We are starved!” the sixty skeletal members of the English colony of Jamestown cried out in desperation as two ships arrived with provisions in June 1610. Of the roughly 240 people who were in Jamestown at the start of the winter of 1609–1610, they were the only ones left alive. They suffered from exhaustion, starvation, and malnutrition as well as from a strange sickness that “caused all our skinns to peele off, from head to foote, as if we had beene flayed.” Zooarchaeological evidence shows that during those pitiless months of “starving time” they turned to eating dogs, cats, rats, mice, venomous snakes, and other famine foods: mushrooms, toadstools, “or what els we founde growing upon the grounde that would fill either mouth or belly.” Some of the settlers reportedly ingested excrement and chewed the leather of their boots. Recent discoveries of human skeletons confirm the revelation of the colony’s president, George Percy, that they also resorted to cannibalism.
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci — bearded sage of the Renaissance, anatomist, engineer, inventor, and creator of two of the most famous paintings in history (Mona Lisa and The Last Supper) — was first and foremost a mensch. He was, according to an acquaintance, handsome and kind, a gay vegetarian, “friendly, precise, and generous, with a radiant, graceful expression.” By temperament he was the opposite of his surly contemporary Michelangelo, whom he found difficult to like. As Leonardo strolled through the markets of fifteenth-century Milan and Florence, he bought caged birds just to set them free.
Although an air of mystery surrounds Leonardo — the backward mirror handwriting, the conspiracy theories — he himself is no mystery to us. Search for his name in a card catalog and you will find every type of monograph, from scientific analyses of the canvases to studies of his place in Western art. There are also many, many biographies, ranging from the intensely scholarly to those aimed at everyday readers. Yet Walter Isaacson, the celebrated biographer of Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs, has shown with a slight shift in emphasis and sheer writerly talent that another life is indeed welcome. To Isaacson, Leonardo was less a painter or a Renaissance man than an avatar of creativity itself. Isaacson’s engaging, sumptuously illustrated Leonardo da Vinci is an outstanding popular biography that presents a Leonardo for the era of the TED talk and the innovation guru.
Where others have focused on the paintings, Isaacson returns again and again to the notebooks. Leonardo always kept a small journal tied to his belt and used it for jotting ideas, to-do-lists, sketches, and reminders to himself. There are some 7,200 existing pages, bound into codices and revealing the preoccupations of a digressive and curious mind. “Get the master of arithmetic to show you how to square a triangle.” “Ask Giannino the Bombardier about how the tower of Ferrara is walled.” “Ask Benedetto Protinari by what means they walk on ice in Flanders.” “Observe the goose’s foot.” “Describe the tongue of the woodpecker.” This last injunction seems to have charmed Isaacson, who presents it as a paradigm of Leonardo’s relentless curiosity. He was, writes Isaacson, “among the handful of people in history who tried to know all there was to know about everything that could be known.”
The notebooks contain extraordinary sketches. There were bridge designs, anatomical drawings, studies of water, blueprints for the layout of cities, portraits, caricatures, and detailed plans for flying machines and countless other contraptions. Some of these became inventions or proto-inventions, like an odometer and a lyre. Others are simply lovely as artistic conceptions. One critic called Leonardo’s famous sketch of a fetus in utero as “for me the most beautiful work of art in the world.” Betraying a point of view that may have to do with his writing about Steve Jobs and other titans of the digital age, Isaacson notes that Leonardo devised “new methods for the visual display of information.” For instance, he pioneered the “exploded” diagram, which shows in three dimensions the separate and interlocking parts of a contraption or physiological structure, like the spinal column. Leonardo made these sketches in order to understand how the world worked. Isaacson writes that he “used drawing as a tool for thinking.”
With his focus on the notebooks, Isaacson bucks a sometime trend in Leonardo studies. The eminent art historian Kenneth Clark wrote in 1974, “The greater part of Leonardo’s notebooks are remarkably uninteresting in themselves,” especially when he was merely diagramming “some elementary machinery.”_ Isaacson could not disagree more; to him the notebooks are “the greatest record of curiosity ever created.” This gets at a persistent criticism of Leonardo as too digressive, too easily distracted: Stop doodling and finish a painting! One of Leonardo’s earliest biographers wrote that “he never finished any of the works he began because, so sublime was his idea of art, he saw faults even in the things that to others seemed miracles.” If we are to view Leonardo strictly as a painter, then his tangents and diversions indeed kept him from his work. But if we view him instead as a humanist, as Isaacson does, each woodpecker’s tongue only brightens the kaleidoscope.
But Isaacson does not neglect Leonardo’s paintings. The book is generous in color reproductions of Leonardo’s masterworks and provides thoughtful discussions of each. Isaacson ably covers controversies about provenance, the role of Leonardo’s collaborators and students, and his pioneering techniques to represent color and light — especially his use of sfumato, or blurred shadows, rather than hard lines. Isaacson is not a professional art critic, but most readers will not pick up this book seeking Olympian judgments. And sometimes a writer beats an art critic at his own game. Isaacson beautifully describes Leonardo’s obsession with the image of a pointing finger, especially in his Saint John the Baptist: “In his last decade, Leonardo is mesmerized by that gesture, the signal of tidings borne by a mysterious guide who has come to show us the way.” He might well have been describing his subject.
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Sig Nordal 