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• Colin Dickey

  The Patron Saint of Dark Days

  Tags:

  death,

  depression,

  Impressionists,

  Paul Gauguin,

  religion,

  saints,

  Vincent Van Gogh

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  Van Gogh’s The Night Café is an image of destitution, its garish colors unable to hide its bleak desperation. Around the edges of the room huddle silent patrons, beneath the dandelion-halos of a few harsh overhead lights. The painting’s perspective is skewed: A billiards table juts out at an improbable angle, and the floor tilts forward as if the whole room is ready to spill onto the ground at the viewer’s feet. It’s an unsettling image, a distorted view through diseased eyes, vertiginous and bleak. “I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad or commit a crime,” Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo. “So I have tried to express, as it were, the powers of darkness in a low public house, by soft Louis XV green and malachite, contrasting with yellow-green and harsh blue-greens, and all this in an atmosphere like a devil’s furnace, of pale sulphur. And all with an appearance of Japanese gaiety, and the good nature of Tartarin.” Van Gogh sought to unearth the darkness in something as banal as an all-night bar to show us what’s hiding underneath.

  A month after Van Gogh finished The Night Café, Paul Gauguin arrived in Arles, invited by the younger painter to form something like an artist’s colony in a small yellow house where Van Gogh had been living. Gauguin arrived at night, waiting until daybreak at the same all-night café, that place of infernal solitude. Things did not go well; within a few weeks, their relationship had begun to sour. “Gauguin,” Van Gogh wrote to his brother, “does not like the little yellow cottage.” They quarreled about art, and about money. (“One thing that made him angry was having to acknowledge that I was very intelligent,” Gauguin later wrote with characteristic humility.) Even as they painted each other’s portraits and encouraged each other’s work, Van Gogh’s behavior became increasingly erratic, and a few times Gauguin awoke in the dead of night to find Van Gogh standing directly over his bed, silently staring at him.

  Continue reading » December 22, 2011
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• Shaj Mathew

  Predicting Their Own Demise

  Tags:

  books,

  bookstores,

  fire,

  the future

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  Borders bookstores around the country have all but shuttered. Magazine newsstand sales have dropped. And Steve Jobs had put it bluntly: “people don’t read anymore.” The good news? The literary world has dealt with these worries long before. Novelists have been composing their elegies for the book since the middle of the nineteenth century. Concerned for the future of critical thought and skepticism, authors have been embedding their fears of a diminished literary culture into their dystopian works. As a result, the book itself has become an artifact, a chronicler of writerly anxiety about the future of reading.

  Jules Verne, who inaugurated the tradition of science fiction with Around the World in 80 Days and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, articulated perhaps the first of these concerns about the future of literature. In Paris in the Twentieth Century, a lost manuscript written in 1863 but published only in 1994, Verne feared that by next century, the poetry of his age would be forgotten, instead supplanted by the antiseptic jargon of science. As the book’s protagonist Michel navigates the year 1960, this becomes quite clear. Searching for the works of Hugo and Balzac to no avail at a bookstore, he bemoans how poorly his favorite authors have aged. “So all that fame had lasted less than a 100 years! Les Orientales, Les Méditations, La Comédie Humaine—forgotten, lost, unknown!” To Michel’s dismay, math and science have infected contemporary literature; popular titles include Decarbonated Odes, Poetic Parallelogram, and Electric Harmonies. Aghast, Michel decries the dominance of “science and industry here, just as at school, and nothing for art!” Representing an artless future in which none of the books dear to Verne have endured, Paris in the Twentieth Century evoked a writer’s trepidation with respect to longevity: Will future societies appreciate the value of the classics?

  Continue reading » November 16, 2011
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• Andrew McConnell Stott

  The Zombie Apocalypse of Daniel Defoe

  Tags:

  apocalypse,

  books,

  Daniel Defoe,

  zombies

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  You can barely flee down a city block these days without running smack into the middle of the newest zombie apocalypse, a genre usually traced back to Richard Matheson’s 1954 survivor novel, I Am Legend, but which finds a much more venerable precursor in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year.

  Defoe’s novel, published in 1722, is a mutant factual-fiction that recounts the plague epidemic of 1665, which dispatched almost 100,000 Londoners. Purporting to be the “memorial” of a survivor known only as “H.F.”, it was based on genuine documentary sources, including the diary of Defoe’s uncle.

  For something so grounded in fact, A Journal of the Plague Year conforms to the expectations of zombie narratives in almost every way. People look to the skies for the origin of the pestilence, as in George A. Romero’s Day of the Dead; its city of spacious abandonment and grassed-over streets anticipates the empty metropolis of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later; and as the King takes flight and the law implodes, the living are faced with the decision to team-up or go it alone in the style of Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead, where zombie-battling is merely a skull-cleaving interlude between the real battles for resources.

  Continue reading » November 1, 2011
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