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Cabinets of curiosities were a strange bridge between atavistic myth and dawning scientific reality. As such, their revival speaks to our own vexed relationship with the natural world, at a time when we seem bent on destroying it — partly as a result, some might say, of the schism between science and art. However, few of the contemporary artists attempting to emulate the exotic appeal of the wunderkammer wonder cabinet could compete with what is happening in continental Europe, where curators have some of the most famous works of art in the world to play with.

The sprawling halls of the Prado in Madrid are usually filled with heaving tour groups being led by the nose from one lustrous masterpiece to another. Today, they have been stopped in their tracks. Standing in front of Rubens's Rape of Europa is a full-sized, majestic, stuffed bull. The beast's horns point dangerously towards the painting, ready to impale the turbulent body of Europa as if she were a matador.

Yet, surreal as it is, there's something rather apt about the intrusion of this glassy-eyed animal. The Prado was originally created as a natural-history museum to house specimens brought as tributes to the Spanish royal family from around their empire. It was, in effect, a giant cabinet of curiosities. Which is what it has become again. Three hundred years on, Natural Histories , a monumental exhibition by the Madrid-born contemporary artist Miguel Angel Blanco, echoes that spirit while taking it to another level.


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Rather, he sought to provoke an "alchemical process". A portrait of Charles II of Spain, who believed himself bewitched and had himself exorcised, is faced by a mysterious round Aztec mirror carved from pitch-black obsidian, as if to reflect the evil spirits within the possessed emperor.

Another installation — featuring a lusty 17th-century oil of Orpheus charming the animals in the forest, with his kit off for some unaccountable reason — riffs on the myth of the unicorn. A narwhal tusk, almost three metres long, sits next to the painting. Such tusks, the erupted teeth of Arctic whales, were once touted around Europe as relics of unicorns. They were worth 20 times their weight in gold: the one owned by Elizabeth I could have bought her a new castle.

The Horrifying American Roots of Nazi Eugenics

A cabinet of curiosities was part-witches' cave, part-apothecary's chamber and part-science lab. Thus, one of the Prado set-pieces incorporates Goya's The Witches' Sabbath: a fabulously gothic depiction of a gathering of witches attended by Satan in the form of a goat. The modern trend for the cabinet shows little sign of slowing down. Curiosity and the Art of Knowing — a brilliant show curated by Brian Dillon that has just left the Castle Museum in Norwich bound for Amsterdam — has as its star exhibit the overstuffed carcass of a walrus.

Aquatopia , a watery-themed show currently at Tate St Ives, mixes priceless Turners and contemporary sea-themed film pieces with carved sperm whale teeth and 19th-century diving helmets. Farmer's miniature winged humans, attacking wasps under glass domes like something from a microscopic horror movie, are a particularly effective evocation of the spirit of the wunderkammer. Literature, too, has picked up the challenge — from Amy Leach's Things That Are , drawing on animals, plants and constellations alike, to Caspar Henderson's Book of Barely Imagined Beings , a fantastical but scientifically rooted compendium, subtitled A 21st Century Bestiary.

The awful contemporary relevance of the theme is inescapable: busily exterminating species as we are, our modern cabinets are being rapidly denuded. The very idea of collection is generally tantamount to appropriation — in the Prado's case, fine art paid for by gold and silver stolen from Spain's Central and South American empire. Or do we need them for an ironic perspective that most of us acquired in childhood, when we first started sneering at commercials?

Yes on both counts, according to the jurors of the National Book Award, who gave White Noise the nod in The novel's inflated reputation remains a clear signal that we should expect less from contemporary fiction than from books written in our grandparents' day. Just as it is now enough for a prose poet to be vaguely "evocative," it is enough for an intellectual writer to point our thoughts in a familiar direction.

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Jayne Anne Phillips praised White Noise in The New York Times in for choosing to "offer no answers" and instead posing "inescapable questions with consummate skill. This is an America where no one is responsible or in control; all are receptors, receivers of stimuli, consumers.

Warhol even wrote better, for God's sake. But then, where would Notable New Fiction be without the willing suspension of cultural literacy? Most of DeLillo's admirers hedge their bets by praising his style—or, my favorite, his "analytic rigor" Jay McInerney —while offering only a phrase or two of textual evidence. Phillips at least had the guts to quote a lengthy excerpt from White Noise in which a character holds forth on the semiotics of—what else? That couldn't be rendered any less coherent if the sentences were mixed up in a hat and pulled out again at random.

I hasten to add that Phillips made those ellipses herself, in a brave attempt to isolate a logical thought from the original mess. All the same, she presented the above as evidence of DeLillo's "understanding and perception of America's soundtrack. Throughout DeLillo's career critics have called his work funny: "absurdly comic I have a notion it's things like "Are the men in hacking jackets? What's a hacking jacket?

Literature is GREAT - Part 2

Luckily for our purposes, Mark Osteen, in an introduction to a recent edition of the novel, singles out the following conversation as one of the best bits of "sparkling dialogue" in this "very funny" book. It is telling that the same cultural elite that never quite "got" the British comic novel should split its sides at this. Osteen would probably have groaned at that exchange if it had turned up on Sex and the City.

The fuss he makes over it in this context is a good example of how pathetically grateful readers can be when they discover—lo and behold! Anyone who doubts the declining literacy of book reviewers need only consider how the gabbiest of all prose styles is invariably praised as "lean," "spare," even "minimalist.

This could be said in half as many words, but then we might feel even more inclined to ask why it needs to be said at all. Who ever thought of night and day as an absolute condition anyway? The flat, laborious wordiness signals that this is avant-garde stuff, to miss the point of which would put us on the level of the morons who booed Le Sacre du Printemps. But what is the point? Is the passage meant to be banal, in order to trap philistines into complaining about it, thereby leaving the cognoscenti to relish the irony on some postmodern level?

Or is there really some hidden significance to all this time-zone business? The point, as Auster's fans will tell you, is that there can be no clear answers to such questions; fiction like City of Glass urges us to embrace the intriguing ambiguities that fall outside the framework of the conventional novel. All interpretations of the above passage are allowed, even encouraged—except, of course, for the most obvious one: that Auster is simply wasting our time.

It's always risky to identify a novelist's thoughts with his characters', but the prevalence of these free-associative parlor games in Auster's fiction suggests that he finds them either amusing or profound. This is from Moon Palace That talk of secret correspondences and gnostic joy appears aimed at making trusting readers think there must be some insight here that they are too dim to grasp. For the rest of us the narrator includes a disclaimer: "I was going mad, perhaps.

What gives Auster away is his weakness for facetious displays of erudition. In passages like the following it becomes so clear what Nabokovian effect he is trying for, and so clear that he can't pull it off, that the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.

An encyclopedia of philosophy articles written by professional philosophers.

By falling in love with a Chinese woman, the narrator can perhaps be said to have "discovered" China, though God knows that's awful enough, but set foot in it? It is no mean feat to be precious and clumsy at the same time.

HISTORY OF IDEAS - Romanticism

More examples:. Timbuktu , Nobody's perfect. But why should we forgive a writer for trying to pass off a schoolboy anagram as a celestial pun , or snowball as a meteorological reference, or tonality as a synonym for "tone," when he himself is trying so hard to draw attention to his fancy-pants language?

Even worse is the way he abuses philosophical terms. This is for people who know only that nominalism has something to do with names. In fact the nominalists argued that just because words exist for generalities like humanity doesn't mean that these generalities exist. What does that have to do with Uncle Victor's talk? Another hallmark of Auster's style, and of contemporary American prose in general, is tautology. Swing the hammer often enough, and you're bound to hit the nail on the head—or so the logic seems to run.

Blue can only surmise what the case is not. To say what it is, however, is completely beyond him. Ghosts , My father was tight; my mother was extravagant. She spent; he didn't.

Literature is GREAT - Part 2 | General English - Britain is GREAT | British Council LearnEnglish

Hand to Mouth , Inexpressible desires, intangible needs, and unarticulated longings all passed through the money box and came out as real things, palpable objects you could hold in your hand. Hand to Mouth. This sort of thing is everywhere, and yet the relative shortness of Auster's sentences has always fooled critics into thinking that he never wastes a word.

Dennis Drabelle, in The Washington Post , called it "always economical—clipped, precise, the last word in gnomic control," which looks like something Auster wrote himself. Why he still hasn't received the National Book Award I cannot imagine. Critics compare him to Kafka, but it is from Borges that Auster borrows his allegories detective work, biographical research and his favorite theme: the impossibility of ever really knowing anything.

This is an unwise choice of material, because he is not enough of a thinker to convey the fun that makes intellectual exercise worthwhile after all. The gnostic correspondences between Chinese food and food for thought ; dog spelled backwards is god —this is philosophical writing? Then again, Auster is commercially successful precisely because he offers so much cachet in return for so little concentration.

Whole chapters can be skimmed with impunity.