Close to Vermeer. Vermeer in Bosnia SELECTED WRITINGS By LAWRENCE WESCHLER

Close to Vermeer

The excellent BBC Four documentary on the preparations for the 2023 Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

https://youtu.be/CeDADKJ4Em4?si=0KsO7YuO9vEylWHC

"'In ways that I do not pretend to understand fully, painting deals with the only issues that seem to me to count in our benighted time-freedom, autonomy, fairness, love.' And I've often found myself agreeing with Snow's implication that somehow these issues may be more richly and fully addressed in Vermeer than anywhere else."
―from VERMEER IN BOSNIA: Vermeer in Bosnia by Lawrence Weschler

TABLE OF CONTENTS

In Lieu of a Preface: Why I Can’t Write Fiction

A Balkan Triptych

Prelude: The Dikes of Holland
Vermeer in Bosnia 
Henry V at Srebrenica 
Aristotle in Belgrade 
Coda: The Market on the Tuzla/Brcko Road
Three Polish Survivor Stories
The Brat’s Tale: Roman Polanski
The Troll’s Tale: Jerzy Urban 
The Son’s Tale: Art Spiegelman 
Grandfathers and Daughters

My Grandfather’s Last Tale 
Sara’s Eyes 
A Season with the Borrowers 
Why Is the Human on Earth? 
A Fathers and Daughters Convergence: Occasioned by Some 
    Portraits by Tina Barney
My Grandfather’s Passover Cantata

Three L.A. Pieces
An L.A.High School Youth: Robert Irwin 
The L.A. Quake 
The Light of L.A. 
Three Portraits of Artists

True to Life: David Hockney’s Photocollages 
The Past Affixed Also: The Kienholz Spokane Series 
A Parkinsonian Passion: Ed Weinberger
A Final Vermeer Convergence

A Girl Intent:Wislawa Szymborska and the Lacemaker 
Acknowledgments

There are writers who specialize in the strange and others whose genius is to find the strangeness in the familiar, the unexpected meanings in stories we thought we knew. Of that second category, Lawrence Weschler is the master. Witness the pieces in this splendidly disorienting collection, spanning twenty years of his career and the full range of his concerns–which is to say, practically everything. Only Lawrence Weschler could reveal the connections between the twentieth century’s Yugoslav wars and the equally violent Holland in which Vermeer created his luminously serene paintings. In his profile of Roman Polanski, Weschler traces the filmmaker’s symbolic negotiations with his nightmarish childhood during the Holocaust. Here, too, are meditations on artists Ed Kienholz and David Hockney, on the author’s grandfather and daughter, and on the light and earthquakes of his native Los Angeles. Haunting, elegant, and intoxicating, Vermeer in Bosnia awakens awe and wonder at the world around us. READ an excerpt here: http://knopfdoubleday.com/book/188937/vermeer-in-bosnia/

翻譯年糕