Good morning, folks. It’s Tuesday in case you’ve lost track. I haven’t because it’s only Tuesday and I’ve already read a half-dozen promising pieces ruined by a stupid sentence or a sudden fit of politically correct box ticking. Take this piece, for example, on reclusive artists. It sounds interesting. Some artists become more famous the less they share about themselves. Others less. But it’s full of banal observations, imprecision, hot air. The first sentence should have clued me in that it wasn’t going to work: “For those of us old enough to remember an era when we didn’t account for our existence on social media, when we could attend a dinner party without being tagged like a shot deer on someone’s Instagram story, when privacy was respected and deeper meanings had room to quietly take root and bloom, it is no surprise to see artists flinching from the din of publicity.” The word “account” rings false. It’s a facile overstatement—not that big of deal—but by the time I hit “when privacy was respected and deeper meanings had room to quietly take root” I should have known that I was reading a piece that was going to be mostly performance.

It only got worse from there. Sontag—of course!—is mentioned in the second graf. Then we have sentences like “there has always existed a small but powerful shadow world of creators who have managed to outfox public expectation to varying degrees, evading de rigueur press and book tours while making their impact resonantly felt” that inflate something quite reasonable—not giving an interview or going on a book tour—into some sort of grand mystery.

Then there are the banalities: “As a critic whose work hinges on the notion that there’s a great deal of value to be learned from the particular contexts, personal and otherwise, in which art is made, I find myself shuttling between two impulses…” (To you aspiring critics out there: If you find yourself casually mentioning your critical apparatus in a piece, you’re taking yourself entirely too seriously, especially if it’s the same critical apparatus everyone else uses. Swing by Long John Silver’s, pick up a platter, and reconnect to reality.) “Rare, in fact, is the artist who has succeeded in entirely separating personal identity from work…” “Hammons is famous enough to let his work largely speak for itself…” Anyway, you get the idea. As ever, coming up with an idea for a good piece is usually not that hard. The difficult thing is doing it well.

Alright, let’s move on before I slip into banalities myself. Anthony Daniels revisits André Gide’s Souvenirs de la cour d’assises: “In 1914, less than four years after the date at which Virginia Woolf famously claimed that human character changed, André Gide published a short memoir of his twelve days as a juror in the French criminal courts, Souvenirs de la cour d’assises. Reading it plunged me straight back into a world that I thought I had left behind me some years ago: that of prisons, trials, theft, robbery, assault, and murder. Nothing much had changed in the ninety years between Gide’s time and mine: nothing, that is, but the décor in which the events he related and those I remembered from my own experience took place.”

Robert King reviews Nancy Sinkoff’s From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History.

An unusual English countryside mystery: “I doubt whether any book would entice me more than a horrible hybrid of crime fiction, speculative fantasy, weird religion and postmodernism. If that makes Jeff Noon’s third outing of the private detective John Nyquist sound like a niche affair I apologize, as it is a rollicking and goose-flesh-inducing novel.”

I missed this story. Thanks to Gary Hartenburg for calling it to my attention: “Birds are weird. Everyone knows it, but no one has investigated it. Until now.” Read to the end and follow the links.

Dana Gioia’s papers have been acquired by the Huntington Library. Excellent news.

Heidi Pitlor reviews a new collection of Madeleine L’Engle’s short stories.

Patrick Kurp considers the complete collection of Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Stories: “In 2018, New York Review Books published Donald Rayfield’s translation of Kolyma Stories. With this second volume, Sketches of the Criminal World, we now have all 145 stories written by Shalamov after his 17 years in Stalin’s prison system. Collections of short stories are not ideally read in bulk, consecutively, but are best sampled at leisure. The experience can quickly turn into a forced march and blunt the impact of individual pieces. Given the nature of Shalamov’s material — the unrelieved and purposeful degradation of human beings — his prose is best appreciated over time.”

Essay of the Day:

Oil is down. So are flowers. In Bloomberg Businessweek, we have the story of the $8.5 billion global flower trade crash:

“The flower trade is a miracle of modern capitalism. A chain of cold storage starts with stems being picked in places as far-flung as Africa, the Middle East, and South America, then packed into refrigerated trucks, driven to refrigerated planes, and flown to Amsterdam to be auctioned off. They’re then repacked into more cold trucks and planes and delivered to supermarkets, florists, and bridal bouquets across Asia, Europe, and the U.S.

“The auctions are run by a cooperative, Royal FloraHolland, formed a century ago by a group of growers who met in a pub and devised a system to better control how their flowers were sold. Royal FloraHolland now runs four auction sites that handle the bulk of the global trade. Its facility in Aalsmeer, a concrete warehouse larger than 75 soccer fields, is one of the biggest buildings in Europe. Each day before sunrise, workers fill it with truckloads of chrysanthemums, roses, and tulips. Buyers assemble in rooms filled with computer screens, where photos of each lot are displayed. Clare’s order likely would have gone from her wholesaler to a broker here.

“The blooms are sold under the traditional Dutch auction system, in which prices start high then tick lower as a clock counts down. The first buyer to pounce wins. As the lots are bought, electric tractors pull long trains of wagons loaded with blooms from one side of the warehouse to the other. The average day sees more than 100,000 transactions. Most of the flowers end up elsewhere in Europe, in under 12 hours.

“Spring is usually a busy season, with weddings, Mother’s Day, and Easter. And in the early days of March, even as the Netherlands was reporting its first coronavirus infections, the auctions went off as usual. But after Italy imposed a national lockdown, France ordered nonessential stores to close, and Germany called for the cancellation of most events, the market collapsed.

“March 16, the same day Dean postponed her wedding, was the ‘blackest day’ at the auctions, says Fred van Tol, international sales manager at Royal FloraHolland. Growers were calling him in a panic. ‘Those are difficult phone calls,’ he says. ‘Their life work is about to implode.’

“Rose prices dropped to €0.07 (8¢) a stem that day, down 70% from their price a year earlier. Traders struggled to make any deals. At the Naaldwijk auction site, outside The Hague, workers tossed cartful after cartful of wrapped bouquets and potted houseplants on the floor so small tractors could scoop them into dumpsters. The auction house could stabilize prices only by capping supply at 30% of last year’s level.”

Perhaps the flower trade isn’t a miracle of modern capitalism but an example of what ails it? Read the rest.

Photo: Barn in Südtirol

Poem: Dana Gioia, “The Ancient Ones”

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