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9

David Lynch: Archaeologist of the American Unconscious by M. G. Turner

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I became fascinated by David Lynch roughly eight years ago, during a difficult and crucial period of my life. I was lucky though, for while I was garnering an appreciation for the artist I now consider the leading archaeologist of the American unconscious, I also acquired the practice of Transcendental Meditation, of which David Lynch is among the world’s foremost proponents.

It came to me almost magically. I had been thinking about adopting a meditation practice, and had dabbled in several forms, until a good friend—whose family happened to be acquainted with Lynch himself—learned the practice and I subsequently joined the party. This experience in meditation was followed by an appreciation of the filmmaker-turned-meditation-advocate: I watched all his movies.

First I saw “Blue Velvet” which represented for me the ending of my childhood and the beginning of what came next. Then I went back to his earlier work, the beautifully absurd “Eraserhead” and the quintessentially humanist “The Elephant Man” which may in posterity’s light be seen as his greatest achievement. Later, “Mulholland Drive” revealed the depravity of an alternate, or perhaps not so alternate, Los Angeles while nodding humbly at Hitchcock and other suspense icons; he has also cited Edward Hopper as an influence. “The Straight Story” is a surprise in and of itself, and adds a touching element to Lynch’s oeuvre and doing much of what the title implies without sacrificing his innate artistic vision. “Twin Peaks” changed the calculus of what American television can accomplish and fashioned a bizarre and complex world that pulsed with reality and intricacy.

It has taken me a few years to really grasp what Lynch’s output means for the larger culture. Not to mention his meditation foundation which these days seems to be his main mission and is doing important work. Its positive impact is well-established and the results it’s achieving in the areas of PTSD and relief of trauma among vulnerable populations deserves the Nobel Peace Prize—if only that institution were more forward thinking, and more open to alternative modalities. However, I want to focus on his artistic output and its importance to contemporary culture. The truth is, America has never felt like more of a Lynchian hellscape. On the surface, as in “Blue Velvet,” there is wealth and beauty, green lawns and bright sunshine—but below the surface, if one simply peers down, there is corruption, degradation, and a deep moral failing at the root of our materialism.

And yet, I have never felt that Lynch was preachy. To the contrary, his view is objective. He is simply presenting reality as he sees it—no matter how bizarre, depraved, or alien. This is where the absolutism of meditation comes in. I use the word “absolutism” to demonstrate the totality of the unified field, the field we reach in Transcendental Meditation, of which Lynch himself is a perennially committed diver. This field feeds the artist’s creativity; in Lynch’s own words it “serves the work and serves the life.” But through Lynch we are also being served a meal of oddities and profundities, which he has dived within to capture and present. For there is something almost incidental about Lynch’s own role in the artistic process. I’m not sure if he would describe it this way, but his language surrounding “catching fish,” which he likens to ideas, seems a unique endeavor in an industry where being a go-getter is praised and people supposedly make their own luck.

The ideas themselves, these fish which he has so patiently waited for and watched swimming under the surface of the mind, and which he has then skillfully fished out—these ideas, in sum, say something vital about our culture. It would be reductive to suggest they say only one thing, but every great artist may only be able to tackle one great idea over the length of a career. In Lynch’s case, with respect to his reluctance to give voice to his reasons and motivations, the question is, how with all we have, with every rolling hill, with every shining sea, with every great thoroughfare to drive down, with every beautiful house that has out front a rich, green lawn, how is it that we are all at base so desperately unhappy? Why do we distrust our neighbors? Why do we hate each other? Yet the corruption Lynch points to is not seen by him as ubiquitous; instead he seems to suggest that these dangerous impulses only control us when we have no conscious knowledge of them. We cannot see them, because most don’t bother to go to the place from which all matter springs; or in other words strive for something deeper.

This brings me back to meditation. It is impossible to look honestly at Lynch’s work without seeing it in the context of a committed meditator, and a man who has faced his personal darkness every day and put it into his art, rather than into the world. There is a moving anecdote in the probing documentary film “David Lynch: The Art Life” in which he describes taking his father down to the basement of his home to show him his “experiments,” which included the carcasses of dead animals, rotting fruit, and similar earthy paraphernalia. Later, as they are climbing back up the stairs Lynch’s father says “David, I don’t think you should ever have children.”

Naturally, Lynch is devastated by this. But in his narration he seems more devastated by the fact that his father misunderstood a pursuit he was deeply excited about, rather than his insensitive command to refrain from procreating. He wants to be understood—but for Lynch the type of understanding he traffics in is not of the conscious understanding that can be easily categorized. His movies enter you at a different, more subliminal level than most movies being made today—perhaps ever. It stands to reason that would be the case, given his almost fifty-year meditation practice and the wisdom he has gathered from it, the wisdom he has sought to infuse, perhaps furtively, into the movies we have all enjoyed and embraced.

All this meant a lot to me eight years ago and still does; given the few degrees of separation between us I could very well have met him, though never have. But I don’t have to meet him to appreciate his work, nor feel personally connected. Truly great artists make us feel as if we know them; they consciously lower the barriers of morality and good taste so that we can have an experience that is free of judgment. These days when most of what is being peddled smacks of 16th century morality plays, where good always wins and the bad are always punished, it is refreshing to have someone stepping in to say “Not so fast. The world is much more complicated, and much more nuanced than anything you can reduce into a simple catchphrase.” Maybe a more concise statement is what the character named Donna Hayward says in “Twin Peaks”—“It’s like I’m having the most beautiful dream and the most terrible nightmare all at once.”

If that doesn’t describe America today, I don’t know what does. All I know is I’m glad David Lynch is around to illuminate us. It’s nice to know someone is meditating for our sins. Maybe one day soon the world will join him.

M. G. Turner

10

Ruth Gruber: Friend, Mentor, Surrogate Grandmother by M. G. Turner

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[caption id="attachment_17658" align="alignleft" width="192"] Ruth Gruber April 2007[/caption]

A few months ago, while undergoing an ultrasound for something disconcerting I’d found on my body—which mercifully turned out to be, officially, nothing—I was suddenly hit by a wave of gratitude for an old friend: author and photojournalist Ruth Gruber, who despite our wide age gap was one of my closest confidants, and even at times a surrogate grandmother.

The reason for my gratitude was simple: in 1944, as a newly appointed general by the Roosevelt Administration she personally escorted 972 refugees to America; many, though not all, were Jewish. Among these refugees was a man named Alex Margulis who, as chronicled in Ruth’s 1983 book Haven, would go on to invent the CT Scan, MRI, and other examples of medical imaging technology which have saved an unfathomable and beautifully absurd number of lives. As I was having my procedure I couldn’t help but think of Ruth, and all she meant to me, and to the multitude of people who knew her. After passing away in 2016, at the age of 105—nerd that I am, I admit it’s titillating to use the actual numerals for her age, as in the Chicago Manual of Style only numbers under 100 are spelled out—she left behind a legion of admirers, followers, and yes, even fans. I consider myself as belonging to the latter category, but at the start my connection to her was a personal one. Yet beyond personal and professional appreciation lies my aforementioned feeling, gratitude: especially as the technician utilized that life-saving device and informed me with a wink that, because the doctor did not want to see any more, I was “good.”

***

I don’t recall the first time Ruth and I met, but it had to have been around my seventh or eighth year—as in 2004, when I was still very young I subjected her to an interview, filmed by my mother on a camcorder, one steamy day in August, while I was on summer vacation. I still have the video, rendered into digital form but no less evocative of that early VHS period: amid wavy lines there I am, in almost knee-high white socks, sitting lackadaisically in a stuffed armchair, rattling off a list of question I had memorized, forgotten, then memorized again; while Ruth herself, looking dignified and very well at just ninety-three, listened and nodded and tried with honesty and precision to answer my questions—the questions of an eight year old who was very much wowed by her, and kept repeating after her every statement “That’s a great answer!” in an effort to impress a woman who could not have been kinder-hearted or more willing to engage with a young person.

It is important to stress the reason for my early acquaintanceship with her which soon blossomed into a friendship: my father was her editor—and according to a quip she made on more than one occasion at dinner parties and events to the chagrin of some present, he was her favorite editor. This favoritism was likely rooted in her appreciation of his no-nonsense editing style, and his direct, fearless approach to publishing. It matched her own brand of journalism, which was in the words of one of her mentors Edward Steichen to “Take pictures with her heart.” Not only did she take pictures with her heart, she wrote with it too! As any of her readers know there is a declarative majesty to her prose that is only outmatched by her subject matter; she had so much to say and a great deal of life experience to back it up—whether becoming the youngest Ph.D. in the world, doing so in Germany in the mid-thirties and seeing the tail end of the Weimar Republic give way to Nazi Germany; or having tea with Virginia Woolf in London—the very subject of her thesis—and being struck by the author’s corrosive nonchalance, and low-grade anti-semitism, while still managing to hold a nuanced view of her; or when in 1944 she, as mentioned, escorted by ship nearly a thousand refugees who were escaping persecution in Europe, and fighting for them to be accepted by the virulently anti-immigrant State Department, despite President Roosevelt being considered a friend to the Jews.

This is to say, she had something unique—content. Like other, more famous writers and journalists of the time—Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Gellhorn come to mind—after literally living her stories, she put her experiences into words that could be understood by everyone. But her egalitarian style permeated not just her written work but the way she spoke about her career—this held even while speaking about it to me on that sultry day in 2004 when my mom and I stopped by to see her to conduct and impromptu interview. There would be many days and evenings like this, when we would look at each other, and one of us would ask: “Do you want to go see Ruth?” and the answer was always, invariably, the same.

***

Ruth had been living in the Eldorado—a quintessentially regal Central Park West apartment building—for several decades when I first became acquainted with her. Just going over there was a grand experience for me; at the time I had not yet glimpsed New York’s magisterial splendor; the lobby looked like an art deco palace. But visiting Ruth was the start of something more than architectural or stylistic appreciation. I can easily recall these visits as the first time I considered an importance beyond the aesthetic; or rather, that the aesthetic and the moral and meaningful could coalesce into something highly impactful: the notion that one’s life could be an adventure.

[caption id="attachment_17660" align="alignleft" width="202"] Ruth Gruber embarking on the voyage to bring nearly 1000 refugees to America in 1944. They sailed from Naples, Italy, crossing the Atlantic protected by a convoy of US warships. The story is told in her book, “Haven,'” and the 2000 CBS miniseries of the same name, with Natasha Richardson cast as Ruth.[/caption]

It was this adventurous spirit that Ruth embodied, as well as a presentation of self that prized dignity and demeanor. Whenever we saw her—it didn’t matter if we had come on three consecutive Sundays—she got dressed up; always with her light gold hair perfectly coiffed; her jewelry always tasteful; her greetings broad and demonstrably delighted, as if she wanted us to know, really know, how glad she was that we had stopped by. And we stopped by many times, whether to simply have tea and talk, or to take her out to Central Park, or even have dinner with her.
It was on these nights that my conception of an intellectual community was formed—namely that such a thing could exist, and that I could be a part of it. This feeling carried over into my schooling; in college I had the unique experience of going with my archives class to visit the New York Public Library to see Virginia Woolf’s diaries, which my friend had been mentioned in, however unkindly by the sadly disturbed writer, whom Ruth saw as a woman trapped by her own mind. Though Woolf used an anti-semitic slur in her journal to describe Ruth, she did not hold a grudge beyond feelings of sadness and disappointment.

[caption id="attachment_17661" align="alignright" width="219"] Ruth Gruber photo “The Embrace”[/caption]

While I stood with my class looking at Woolf’s pages—most of which were written in a flourishing lavender hand—I knew that among them were those referring to my friend.

Despite Woolf’s callousness, I cherish these kinds of synchronicities. Growing up in New York brings one into the vicinity of great people, particularly if your parents happen to know some of them. These same great people can in their own way sum up entire eras, especially if the person in question is a centenarian. Ruth was born under President Taft and died in November of 2016 while Barack Obama was mercifully still President—though about to leave office to make way for the degraded eventuality that was to come. In one final act of goodness, to add to her litany of mensch-like deeds, the recently turned 105-year-old was taken by her daughter to the polls and cast her last vote for Hillary Clinton. It is unclear whether in the coming hours Ruth was cognizant of the election results, or fully grasped their implication, but it didn’t matter, for she had raised her voice one more time. This was something she’d grown accustomed to, whether from her efforts to counter the anti-semitism and isolationism of the United States government; or in 1944 reporting for the NY Post on the fate of refugees on the ship Exodus; or her early contributions to the newly-named field of Feminism in the 1930s.

***

[caption id="attachment_17662" align="alignleft" width="300"] Ruth Gruber is showing me a hinged, painted case my mother, artist Kyle Gallup, made. Inset in the case is a collage Kyle also made comprised of photos Ruth took documenting the refugees on the Exodus ship. It became part of the cover art for Ruth’s book—”Exodus 1947: The Ship that Launched a Nation”—which my father published with Ruth in 1999.[/caption]

Despite her far-reaching influence, my dearest recollections of Ruth remain rooted in more personal soil. She was simply an older woman whom I cared for, and who at times felt like a surrogate grandmother to me. Given that my biological grandparents lived far away and I did not see them often, Ruth became a special friend, who was not relation nor teacher, but a figure whose influence was hard to define or put into a single box. It was in fact so unique, that, due to my own immature faculties at the time, I was unable to fully comprehend how lucky we were to know her and be close to her.

Yet where nomenclature fails, one recollection appears to sum up this relationship. And it was that, in my third grade year, she took it upon herself to attend Grandparents Day on my behalf. While most children had their family relations with them, Ruth was at my side, explaining who she was to the awed faces of the class. I remember my mother thanking her, and Ruth saying it was her pleasure—in her parlance everything was almost always “her pleasure”—and walking her back to her Central Park West apartment building where I knew we would soon have another one of our special get-togethers. Sometimes the canvas of memory is confused, disjointed, opaque; but not my memories of Ruth. There is a single beam of clear light which is cast upon all my imagistic renderings of her, and it starkly illuminates the privilege of having sat in her company, of hearing her stories that always seemed to conclude thematically with the victories of dignity over oppression, of passion over indifference—I took these tales to heart without deciding to, for there was something so indelible about her influence. Among her many gifts was the ability to make you feel that life could be made better by the simple act of putting pen to paper, or pressing the camera shutter. Sometimes the simplest actions have the greatest impact; sometimes saving one life can save many others.

Ruth’s influence transcends an easily measurable calculus; many close to her said if she had been a man she would have won the Noble Peace Prize, but Ruth herself did not think in those terms. She simply did the work she was passionate about, and believed to be right, and encouraged others to do the same. For a long life well-lived what more can anyone ask?

M. G. Turner

October 1, 2022

11

Remembering My Dad, Earl I. Turner, on Father’s Day 2022

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My father, Earl I. Turner (Feb 7, 1918-July 8, 1992), was a dear man who showed me so much about being a kind and decent person. Here’s a letter he wrote for his three children on May 8, 1978, four days after we’d opened Undercover Books, our bookstore in Shaker Heights, Ohio. Jewish tradition embraces the idea that a parent may offer to their children what’s termed an “ethical will,” which is pretty much what he gave us here, with its discussion of ethics in business, while standing up for one’s self. The photograph was taken on a visit he made to the Canadian Rockies in 1982, a sightseeing journey that he gloried in. My own enjoyment of gorgeous scenic views was no doubt inspired by him. His handwriting and signature were very distinctive, and I’m always comforted when I see his script on something, as here. Thank you, Dad, gone thirty years, love for you always.

12

Ernest Hemingway and the Agony of Inspiration by M. G. Turner

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As a writer, I’ve had multiple run-ins with Ernest Hemingway. The first was in the spring of 2021, following the airing of the Ken Burns documentary, and the most recent was last month, after buying a large Hemingway boxed-set, which I wolfed down in two weeks. The set included The Sun Also Rises, and A Farewell to Arms, which I had previously tried to read all the way through and failed.

This time I did not fail. But perhaps I should have. You see, for the past year I have been completing a novel that has its stylistic roots in what I like to think of as “modern gothic” with what I hope is fluid and frankly beautiful prose. My work tends to come from a much different aesthetic place than those who follow the Hemingway method, i.e., Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, and George Saunders; yet to my chagrin I found, as I pressed through the great and tragic author’s oeuvre I was losing my sense of self, my sense of who I am as a writer. There are some writers, and artists in other fields, whose voice and style are so magnetic, so enveloping, that they instill in the reader or viewer the sense of nothing having existed before or after them. Hemingway is a quintessential example of this, and an author whom most aspiring writers need to tangle with at some point. And for me, this past month, my collision with Hemingway came, and I left the ring, as it were, feeling as if I’d been continually punched in the face. This could be due to the quick, jabbing, declarative nature of Hemingway’s prose—it stands to reason that he himself was an avid boxer—and clearly brought this quality into even his most lengthy, involved novels such as A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Some writers—I’d even say most—try a different approach with the reader. Some lull, some soothe, and some entertain. Hemingway does none of the above. Hemingway berates and belittles, but he also rescues and redeems. Which is why, even when I recently felt his voice becoming my own, and my boundaries yielding to his force of will, I did not put his books down, did not shunt my new boxed-set onto a high shelf, did not flee the ring. I stood firm. I withstood. I, and most importantly, my young novel survived.

***

I work with fiction writers almost every day, as an editor and a literary representative. Most of the time I think half of my job is to help each writer tangle with the demons embedded in their prose, thorny eruptions that can spring up at any moment. In even more poetic terms, I see myself as a Horatio, Hamlet’s loyal friend, who stands fast as the ghost of his father the fallen confronts the young prince and forces him to wrestle with his conscience. On the page we come face to face with ourselves, and when we read books we come face to face with other people. Naturally every writer, when working in the most effective capacity, will bring themselves to the page, so it stands to reason that when one reads Hemingway they not only read him, they face him, and sometimes even face off with him.

If you’ll allow one more boxing metaphor, when we pick up, say, A Farewell to Arms, we are contending with an experience that Hemingway has transmuted to the page in terms as stark as he could muster. He dares you to withstand him and what he experienced. You feel like you are slogging through the mud, feel like you are tangling through the trenches, and when Henry’s dear love Catherine Barkley dies in childbirth he makes you go through it with him, mourning her to the last page as he denies us even a smidgen of satisfaction. “After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.” Henry does not cry. He does not scream. He simply stumbles on, injured and broken, just as we, having made it to page 332 stumble on.

I know all this sounds like I don’t like Hemingway very much. Quite the contrary—I love him. But it is precisely this love, this agony of inspiration, that writers must learn how to handle. When I was younger it was easy to read a page or two of A Moveable Feast and think, okay this is how it’s done, and immediately run to the computer or a notebook and put down a litany of irredeemably declarative sentences. Now that I am a bit older, this doesn’t happen as readily, and I am able, perhaps because of my sense of self—fragile though it continues to be—to manage it, and am able to cross the tightrope of influence and homage.

As Rainer Maria Rilke posited in Letters to a Young Poet an artist must work with whatever is only theirs, and no one else’s. This sounds easy enough, and yet it is probably one of the hardest things a writer can do, and maybe the biggest accomplishment next to putting a period on the final sentence of a great work. How does one withstand, to use a word I’ve deployed already too often, the gravitational pull of someone so monumentally important to our culture and still have faith and confidence in what they’re offering a reader? I know I used the second person when posing that question, but I am talking about myself as much as others. How was I supposed to let my own novel live when Hemingway had seemingly dashed apart my style with a few choice sentences? The word “confident” kept flooding back to my mind, because the way he comes across on the page is as someone who is so utterly convinced of his literary excellence and aesthetic brilliance that anything less—or more importantly, different—is exactly that, less.

But I am here to say: this is false. Though his confidence, even certainty in his style, made him the great writer we know him as, it does not mean other possible fictive valences are worthless, or worth less than his own. When analyzed further, how could it possibly be the only way? A signature of life is its diversity and essential uniqueness. Human beings are varied, not only in terms of race and creed, but also in personality, and yes, style. One writer cannot define the entirety of the canon, no matter how hard they try, or people try for them.

***

But again, I love Hemingway. And I also love what I am working on—you must. This may sound conceited, or foolhardy, but I think loving the pages on your desk is essential to those pages finding an audience and living. I believe a literary figure like Hemingway must be seen in the context of his times, for today, due to his lack of preamble and exposition, he might not have made it out of the pages of minor publications. But in the same way, do we judge Wilt Chamberlain, the only professional basketball player ever to score 100 points in a single game, by the standards of excellence in the current NBA? We do not.

This is all to say that ideas about the greatest writer or the greatest style are inconclusive. I firmly believe anyone, regardless of ultimate success, when they put pen to paper—or fingers to keyboard—are trying to put down the greatest sentence ever. No one enters this field with dreams of mediocrity. We slip into the ring bravely, and work with what we have, with what is most accessible; eventually, if we are lucky, we eschew all influence and find that now vague concept: our voice, that which comes solely from ourselves. We may have influences. We may have shadings in our work that relate or are in conversation with those who came before, but at heart our best work is apt to come when we are in touch with our innermost quality of command, our innermost narrative, our personal dreams. Hemingway had his dreams. And we have ours. But I suspect we will continue to box with him, and writers of all styles, backgrounds, and understandings, until this experiment ends—and let’s hope it never will.


 

 

 

 

M. G. Turner
June 2022

13

From Philip Turner Book Productions—Looking Back on 2020 and Ahead for 2021

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Readers of this blog may recall that last summer I announced here that my adult son Ewan Turner had joined Philip Turner Book Productions as Managing Editor, heading up a new division called New Stories, devoted to cultivating new work, including fiction, narrative nonfiction, and memoir. A BFA graduate of The New School, Ewan is a fiction writer himself, and earlier was the editor of KGB Bar Lit Mag and frequently led readings and open mics at that heralded literary venue. As an editorial assistant, he worked with such writers as playwright Mart Crowley; photojournalist Ruth Gruber; literary scholar Michael Patrick Hearn; and illustrator of the Eloise books, Hilary Knight. He’s also the author of Sotapanna, a poetry chapbook that was featured at KGB Bar and PhotoBookWorks Gallery, Beacon, New York.

Looking back on the year that ended last weekend, I see that in 2020 we:

  • Edited manuscripts and book proposals from seventeen different authors;
  • Sold six new books to publishers and four to audio companies, books that will be published this year and next.

Some of those sales have been noted on this site, such as:

  • Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Life , forthcoming by Todd Goddard, on the acclaimed fiction writer, master of the novella, gourmand, and fisherman;
  • Richard Tregaskis: Reporting Under Fire from Guadalcanal to Vietnam by Ray E. Boomhower, coming in 2021 on the author of Guadalcanal Diary, the first bestselling book to emerge from the Pacific theater in WWII;
  • Sparkling new translations of four of the novels in Alexandre Dumas’s timeless Musketeers Cycle by the polymathic Lawrence Ellsworth, game designer and founding member of the team that created Dungeons & Dragons;
  • Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theater, by Alexis Greene, longtime theater writer, examining the life and career of the prominent woman playwright who’s excelled in a theater world long ruled by a patriarchal structure.
  • And Bring That Beat Back: How Sampling Built Hip-Hop by music writer Nate Patrin, published last May by University of Minnesota Press, and named to many best-of-2020 lists, which will be an audio book in 2021. 

Also in 2020, five books we had earlier sold to publishers were issued. These were:

The Twenty-Ninth Day: Surviving A Grizzly Attack in the Canadian Tundra by Alex Messenger (Blackstone Publishing, trade paperback edition 2020, following 2019 hardcover edition)
The Investigator: Justice and Demons of the Balkan Wars by Vladimir Dzuro (Potomac Books)
The Last Days of Sylvia Plath by Carl Rollyson (University Press of Mississippi, hardcover; Blackstone, audiobook)
Blood Royal: A Sequel to The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, translated by Lawrence Ellsworth (Pegasus Books)
Bring That Beat Back: How Sampling Built Hip-Hop by Nate Patrin (University of Minnesota Press, also named above)

This month marks my eleventh year as an independent editor and literary agent, and I am more energized than ever by the opportunities to work more closely with authors than I did during my latter years in corporate publishing. Even with the many challenges the book industry is facing, such as bookstores now open for only limited, distanced hours due to the lingering pandemic. I am optimistic about the book business, as readers are eager to have the companionship of books, and writers are driven to tell their singular stories.

We work on a wide range of material, with special affinity for imperative books that really matter in people’s lives. I’m always interested in first-person work from authors who’ve passed through some crucible of experience that leaves them uniquely equipped to write their book. If you have a project you’re developing, or a personal essay, and want to discuss your work, or a project you think may be ready to offer to publishers, please don’t hesitate to contact one or both of us.

Ewan can be reached at ewanmturner [@] gmail [.] com, while my contact info is philipsturner [@] gmail [.] com.

14

“J.M.W. Turner: The Majesty of Vision” by Kyle Gallup

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[caption id="attachment_16308" align="alignleft" width="225"] “J.M.W. Turner: Watercolors from Tate at the Mystic Seaport Museum” through Feb 23, 2020[/caption]

“J.M.W. Turner: Watercolors from Tate at the Mystic Seaport Museum”

Painting as an Aide-Memoire

Stormy seas as atmospheric notations; sheer, floating sunsets; a bright-white moonrise over a glassy body of water; imaginary, architectural views of early nineteenth-century buildings; and a pastoral River Thames on a cloudy summer day. These paintings comprise five of the ninety-two watercolors, four oil paintings, and one of Joseph Mallord William Turner’s last sketchbooks that are on view in a current exhibition, “J.M.W. Turner: Watercolors from Tate,” at the Mystic Seaport Museum, Mystic, Connecticut, through February 23, 2020.

The watercolors are thoughtfully selected from the Turner Bequest, which contains 30,000 works on paper left to Great Britain and housed by the Tate since 1856, five years after the artist’s death. The show is curated by Dr. David Blayney Brown,Tate’s Manton Senior Curator of Nineteenth Century British Art, and organized chronologically with informative title cards that provide important context for these visionary works within the larger arc of Turner’s long public career.

As you enter the gallery, the first dark, silvery watercolors were done when Turner (1775-1851) was in his early twenties and one, “View in the Avon Gorge,” was painted when Turner was only a precocious sixteen-year-old. In it we see a gorge and river view with an overhanging tree, rock cliffs in powdery blues, and silvery-green leafed trees, delicately painted and already masterfully detailed. These early works, along with the thousands of others on paper, filled his residence after his death. The majority of the bequest was part of Turner’s private collection, made for himself, and not intended for public viewing.

Watercolors—a fragile, fugitive medium—are seldom displayed in public. They are loaned, transported, and exhibited even less often, so it’s very special to have the works on display in the United States at all, and an opportunity to see Turner in an intimate light, not as Royal Academician and renowned artist of dramatic oil paintings, but as a far-seeing, romantic, and hard working painter.

The exhibition has many watercolors with atmospheric notes; dashes and washes of buoyant color; sight and thought as one. I can imagine that Turner used these simple landscapes for reference, and as aide-mémoire when painting other works.

“A Wreck Possibly Related to ‘Longships Lighthouse, Land’s End’ (1834),” “Sunset Across from the Terrace of Petworth House (1827),” and “Coastal Terrain (1830-45),” give the viewer a sense of the weather conditions, movement, and hour of the day. They are Turner’s visual shorthand—pared down, yet still encompassing a larger sense of what Turner was looking at and thinking about at particular moments in time.

For the full essay with all illustrations, please click here.

[caption id="attachment_16309" align="alignleft" width="190"] “A Wreck, Possibly Related to ‘Longships Lighthouse, Land’s End (1834)”. Turner Bequest 1856 © Tate 2019[/caption] [caption id="attachment_16310" align="alignleft" width="183"] “Coastal Terrain (1830-45)”. Turner Bequest 1856 © Tate 2019[/caption] [caption id="attachment_16311" align="alignleft" width="190"] “Sunset Across from the Terrace of Petworth House (1827)”. Turner Bequest 1856 © Tate 2019[/caption]
15

Seven Years On, Saying Bye Again to my Brother, Joel Turner

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Just before it popped in to my Facebook feed today, this photo of my late brother Joel, a career bookseller—which ran with a Cleveland Plain Dealer obituary of him on this date in 2009—I happened to have only a moment earlier responded to a bookselling-related job posting. Unlike Joel, I branched in to editing and publishing after being in the stores together starting in 1978, but I’ve remained tied to bookselling, too. In 2015, I worked for Rizzoli and helped them reopen in New York City, after the wrecking ball took their midtown store. Undercover Books, the small bookstore chain that Joel and I—and our sister Pamela Turner, and our late parents Earl and Sylvia—founded and ran in Cleveland beginning in 1978 really gave me my career and allowed me, in 1985, to move to NY.
You want to know something kind of amazing? For a long time, the number of years I lived in Cleveland always exceeded my briefer term in NY, but a couple years ago that began to turn over, as I have now lived in NYC more than half my life. Here’s the math: I was born in 1954, and moved from Cleveland to NY when I was 30, in 1985. When the calendar turned to 2015 and 2016, after I’d turned sixty, it occurred to me one day that NY had now been my home for more than half my life. Does that mean I’m not a Clevelander anymore? Sort of, but then there are still my sports team preferences (Go CAVs!). Am I a New Yorker? More and more, but not fully that either (I still can’t believe the way people in the tri-state area drive, like in the Midwest no one will ever drive on the shoulder of a highway amid a long jam and construction backup; here in the NY area, people do it all the time!)  
 The photo of Joel—who died unexpectedly, age 58, on December 8, seven years ago—popped up today in one of Facebook’s memories reminders, a feature which I am of at least two minds about. I don’t like that it tempts me to look to the past too often, but it also reminds me of the precious. Here’s the eulogy that I wrote about him on December 9, 2009, the day after my sister and I learned he’d died, and screenshots of that post as it appears elsewhere on this blog. 

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#TBT—Remembering Joel C. Turner, All the Way Back to May 1964

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In this old photo I’m getting a hug from my brother Joel at a reception celebrating his Bar Mitzvah, circa May 26, 1964, which would’ve been Joel’s 13th birthday. I’m about 9 here. Looking at the image, I can almost remember the day.

Joel died suddenly in December 2009. A few years later, on what would’ve been his 61st birthday, I posted this remembrance of him here on The Great Gray Bridge. Screen Shot 2016-02-18 at 5.48.46 PMObits also ran in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Publishers Weekly, and Shelf Awareness.

Thinking about him, as I do often, because Joel was a gregarious, social person, I know he would’ve enjoyed and thrived amid the advance of social media the past seven years. He had started on Facebook at the time of his death, but none of us, including him, was so aware yet, of how our lives would be influenced by this new media. Joel had early in his adulthood worked as a reporter, and always retained a prodigious appetite for knowing about what was happening in society; he really enjoyed talking with people, asking them questions, hearing what they thought, and offering his views on the matters at hand.  He and I didn’t share all the same politics, but the ways we thought about things was were still alike in many ways. He was a kind of social philosopher, and in 2000 ran for Congress on the Libertarian line in a Cleveland-area district. Growing up 3-4 years apart, we encountered many events as a pair in our five-person family—along with our sister Pamela, the eldest + our folks, Earl and Sylvia. We experienced events together, like the JFK and RFK assassinations. I recall be awoken the morning after Bobby Kennedy had been shot, our mom telling us as she woke us that day.  The summer of 1970, Joel and I drove from Ohio out to California and spent six weeks camping in a redwood forest. During that trip we adopted our dog Noah. I relate much of that personal history on this Great Gray Bridge webpage. Joel is much missed by all who knew him.Obit Joel Turner