Show Notes
“Taking something very specific—in each case, a painting: a painting by Rubens, a painting by Franz Marc, a painting by Joan Mitchell—this physical thing, it has a place and a time, and it sits in the world somewhere. But then you can spiral out from that into the bigger context that each painting sits in historically, intellectually. But it’s spiraling inward a little, isn’t it, too? Because you’re going deeper into the painting.”
This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with essayist and critic Morgan Meis, author of a trilogy of books about the history of art, civilization, war, and much else. In The Drunken Silenus: On Gods, Goats, and the Cracks in Reality (2020), Meis investigates a painting by Peter Paul Rubens. In The Fate of the Animals: On Horses, the Apocalypse, and Painting as Prophecy (2022), he turns to a masterpiece Franz Marc painted in 1913, three years before his death during the Battle of Verdun. And in The Grand Valley: On Going to Hell, to France, and Back to Childhood (2025), Meis explores Joan Mitchell’s The Grand Valley, a series of twenty-one paintings that Mitchell made between 1983 and 1984. Like the books, the conversation spirals outward into history and inward into the paintings under examination, all the while putting these three artists into conversation with other artists, writers, and philosophers—Friedrich Nietzsche, D.H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, Degas, Klee, and Monet, among others. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
More from The World in Time / Lapham’s Quarterly
“Hannah Arendt has been sanitized in a certain way now, as a kind of wise Jewish figure,” says Benjamin Moser on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “In Germany, she’s probably the most read Jewish philosopher. Germany, with all its censorship of anti-Zionist viewpoints, has kind of adopted her. There’s a Hannah Arendt Strasse in every town in Germany. There will be, you know, a little statue of her as this nice Jewish lady. But this happens, unfortunately, to a lot of really explosive artists and writers. They get sanitized.”
“Friendship is an enormous part of my life, and it was an enormous part of Arendt’s life,” Roger Berkowitz says on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “She was said to have a genius for friendship by her friends. She was an exile, stateless for eighteen years, and she really did come to believe that friendship is what she called a ‘homeland.’ She didn’t think of herself as German, or Jewish, or American, or European. She said, ‘The only people I love are my friends.’ Friendship is hard, and she uses this beautiful metaphor. She says, ‘Friendship exists on the knife’s edge.’”
“Rabbi Luria’s Kabbalist creation story, however baroque, accounts boldly for both moral evil and natural calamity,” Annie Dillard wrote in her 1999 book, For the Time Being. “The creator meant his light to emanate, ultimately, to man. Grace would flow downward through ten holy vessels, like water cascading. Cataclysm—some say creation itself—disrupted this orderly progression. The holy light burst the vessels. The vessels splintered and scattered. Sparks of holiness fell to the depths, and the opaque shards of the broken vessels imprisoned them. This is our bleak world.”
As a companion to last week’s episode of The World in Time, we are sharing with listeners the first episode of Passages: On Morrison, a limited podcast series hosted by Namwali Serpell. The series takes the form of a traveling salon. In this first episode, Serpell and poet Tracy K. Smith read the opening of The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison's debut novel, and discuss all that the passage emits and erases. They also explore how the cultural treatment of Morrison as a literary icon or monument has obscured a true appreciation of her literary form, an appreciation that comes from turning to the page. Lapham’s Quarterly brings voices from the past up to the microphone of the present. Back issues are available for purchase on our website. To make a tax-deductible gift, visit the donation portal hosted by Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities. You can find information about the Quarterly’s ongoing revival here. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
“The canon raised Toni Morrison,” says Namwali Serpell on this episode of The World in Time. “The canon is how she became who she is. Faulkner, Woolf, Shakespeare. She is much more interested in taking what’s there and reading it accurately, honestly. Let us be clear-minded and clear-sighted about what is there. But we don’t need to destroy it. And in fact, the Melville I read after reading Morrison’s analysis of the whiteness of the whale is a richer Melville.”