In 2016, the British artist Sam Winston was tired of being bombarded with images, texts, and emails. So, he locked himself in his blacked-out studio for a week—no phone, no screens, no sunlight. What happened? He began dreaming of Donald Trump:

The world in the 21st century is no more richly textured or exotic to touch than it used to be. It smells about the same and there are no new flavours. Not since the coming of factories, then aeroplanes, domestic appliances and motorways has there been a serious uptick in sound pollution. Yet the spill of information and distraction that comes at us by eye has grown and grown ceaselessly for two decades, without any sign of a halt or plateau. DM! Breaking-news! Inbox (1)! This is a time of the scrolling, bottomless visual, when bus stops and the curved walls of Tube platforms play video adverts and grandma’s face swims onto a smartphone to say hi. People watch Oscar-nominated movies while standing in queues, their devices held at waist height. A Netflix executive can quip, semi-seriously, that he covets the hours we sleep (hours in which we do not, currently, stream Netflix shows). Apple has put an extra screen on our wrists and Google retains quiet hope that we will eventually wear a screen inside our specs. Big news lands in 140 characters or less, ideally with a startling picture or piece of video, else it doesn’t register as big news.

Our brains tend to lean on the visual, heavily prioritising sight over the other four senses. Ever since we climbed on to two feet as a species, taking our noses farther from the aroma-rich savannah floor, we have been wired to be seeing creatures and for better or worse we usually experience the what’s-next-what’s-next of this world through our peepers. As an artist, Sam Winston was often on the lookout for topsy-turvy projects – weird, sidelong ways to unmoor familiar habits or nudge his work in new directions. He wanted to know what would happen, to him and to his work, if he hid away from the ocular blitz for a while.

Now, working and sleeping in his blacked-out studio, he began to notice new things. Without sunlight as a guide, the day’s rhythms came via aural clues he had been only dimly aware of before: the cessation of London’s air traffic overnight, or the sound of idling vehicles as they took fractionally longer to move off from traffic lights during rush hour. When he brewed cups of rooibos in a rote-remembered action at his tea station he noticed that he could hear the difference between hot and cold liquids as he poured them. He began to see, he later told me, ‘how intelligent our senses are. And how we just drown them in the tsunami.’

Winston found that he was productive in the dark, too, drawing until his pencils were nubs and creating a series of huge sketches – broad-stroked in places or crowded with overlapping sentences in his crabby handwriting – that would later become part of an exhibition at the Southbank Centre in London. Between drawing jags he had vivid daydreams, even hallucinations, ‘as if my brain was a digital radio left on search, constantly searching for an available channel’.

Winston’s older brother had died, suddenly, the year before, and bereavement was another prompt for him to hole away in the dark. He had expected to use his time under seal to have profound thoughts about love and loss, to feel gratitude towards his girlfriend, a fellow artist, and his parents back in Devon. Instead a very different figure stalked the darkened landscape of Winston’s mind – one who was suited, lardy and omnipresent in the news after his recent election as president of the United States. Winston considered himself only a moderate news junkie, bombarded but not an addict. Yet here was Donald Trump, cavorting around his studio. It was as if, Winston felt, the news was something he’d over-indulged in, even overdosed on, a damaging substance that only now, in cold-turkey conditions, could swirl up out of him and be evacuated.

In other news: Ignore the silliness in the following piece about the importance of having a “more hopeful” view of mankind, and enjoy, rather, the story of what happened when six boys were shipwrecked on a desert island for 15 months.

The boys in the story above just wanted to have some fun, which is why they ran away from school and stole a boat. Being carefree, Luara Ferracioli argues, is one of the things that makes for a good childhood: “To see why children’s lives are necessarily impoverished if they aren’t carefree, when the same is not true of adults, we first need to get our definitions clear: who counts as a child, what does carefreeness amount to, and what does it mean for human lives to go well?”

Little Richard has died. He was 87. So has Jerry Stiller. He was 92.

Poets complain bitterly that the Poetry Foundation, which has a $257 million endowment, doesn’t give them money in these “unprecedented” times. Oh, dear. I haven’t been impressed with Poetry magazine (which the Foundation publishes) over the past five years, but they are a private foundation and free to use their money as they see fit. They don’t owe anyone any more “transparency” than is required by the law, though it is precious to see jealous poets complain about the Foundation’s “‘bourgoisie’ tendencies.” I can’t find the source for this quotation, so maybe the journalist is to blame for this construction, but the noun is bourgeoisie. The adjective, required above, is bourgeois.

Most people’s “taste” of Samuel Johnson comes via Boswell’s biography. What about Johnson’s own writing? Algis Valiunas reviews a new selection of his prose: “As an essayist, Johnson is best taken in measured doses. Johnson preferred to do his own reading that way. He once expressed surprise when a friend said that when he started reading a book he devoutly finished it. Everyone knew, as Adam Smith once remarked, that Johnson had read more books than any man alive, but he announced blithely that he rarely read a book through to the end: ‘they are generally so repulsive that I cannot.’ He ‘looked into’ books and was often satisfied with a brisk survey of the grounds. His own books are well worth looking into, again and again. The 1,300-page selection of his writings recently published by the Oxford University Press, in its 21st Century Oxford Authors series and under the editorship of the master scholar of the English 18th century David Womersley, is the most comprehensive volume now available. Only the exorbitant price—it seems fixed for a captive student readership—argues against it. Johnson’s writing is characteristically sober, solemn, grave—even sorrowful sometimes—as he considers the innumerable follies and trespasses of mankind, the eagerness with which men and women plunge into pandemonium, the lies they tell themselves to evade the lacerations of righteous shame and guilt.

How a forgotten writer changed American agriculture: “History has not been kind to Louis Bromfield: more than 60 years after his death, his name is rarely mentioned among the Lost Generation’s great writers. Such a ghosting would have been unthinkable in Bromfield’s time, when he sold millions of books, won a Pulitzer Prize, wrote Hollywood screenplays, hobnobbed with the rich and famous, and later, influenced countless farmers with his soil conservation and agricultural practices that would predict the modern sustainable and organic movements. With The Planter of Modern Life, journalist Stephen Heyman promises to unearth ‘a lost icon of American culture,’ and in a sense, he does, with a biography that’s something of a contradiction, an engrossing and well-researched work that frequently treats its subject as a punching bag. Too often, the book reads as if Heyman has resurrected an erased character from the early 20th century just to explain why he was rightly forgotten, not why he should be remembered.”

Photos: Kentucky

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