In Harper’s, Alan Jacobs writes about the Tate’s recent William Blake exhibit. The show is “fascinating but also disappointing—disappointing for two reasons”:

The first reason is simply this: in his long career as an artist, Blake produced very few works that were meant to be hung on walls. His chief productions are what he called ‘illuminated books,’ with images and text alike engraved by him and then colored using a unique process that he developed over time. The artist and historian Michael Phillips has closely studied and meticulously reproduced Blake’s technique, as can be seen in this video. Watching Phillips at work, one cannot help being struck by the process’s complexity and physicality: the way the printmaker must alternate the most delicate of motions—minutely adjusting the copper plate while holding the burin firmly against it, then dabbing gently at the engraved plate with an inked leather pad—with the hard pulling on the crank of the press. And then delicacy is required once more with the coloring of the images, which, contemporaries reported, Blake’s wife, Catherine, did with great skill and grace. One peculiarity of these works—impossible to represent in a show such as the Tate’s—arises from Blake’s habit of keeping his engraved plates around and, as the years passed, developing varying ideas about how they should be colored. The same engraving could have significantly different emotional connotations depending on whether Blake was in the mood to use the pastels that characterize some of his work or the deep, dark reds and browns and ochers that at other times seemed right to him. (It is difficult to know whether Catherine shared the decision-making in these matters or just carried out her husband’s instructions.)

All this was typically done on a small scale: many of the prints displayed at the exhibition are five-by-seven inches or even smaller, which, when they’re presented on walls or in glass cases, makes for an awkward experience in a full room (and when I was there, the rooms of the exhibition were quite full). Often in a museum people gather in a semicircle around a painting; here, you could only really see one of Blake’s prints by getting close enough to it that no one else could view it at the same time.

The second problem with this exhibition was its creators’ insistence on portraying Blake—so the YouTube trailer for the exhibition tells us—as a ‘REBEL / RADICAL / REVOLUTIONARY.’ Well, yes and no. Blake spent a good deal of time in the company of political radicals and probably shared many of their political views, but his tendency to what he called ‘Nervous Fear’ kept him relatively quiet in public about such matters.

In other news: Oliver Wiseman reviews a new book on the state of conservatism in Britain: “On paper, British conservatism is in good health: Boris Johnson is the third successive Conservative prime minister to form a government; the Tories hold a robust majority in Parliament; and by the next election, the party will likely have held power for a decade and a half. Brexit, which began as a pipe dream of the Euro-skeptic right, won the support of a majority of voters in 2016 and finally became a reality in January. And so, you might expect conservative journalist Ed West’s memoir-cum-tract, in which he reflects on the fortunes of his tribe, to strike an optimistic, even triumphant, tone. There is nothing cheery, however, about Small Men on the Wrong Side of History. West believes that these recent electoral victories are minor, and that his side is more or less doomed.”

Percival Everett’s new novel, Telephone, comes in three different versions: “Once you’ve finished Telephone, the latest book by Percival Everett, you may be talking about it with another reader and finding that you disagree on what happened. That is intentional. ‘There are three different versions of this novel, they’re all published identically, and you can’t know which one you’re getting,’ Everett said during a video interview from his home in Los Angeles . . . The differences between the editions, which begin with the colophon, include extended or altered scenes and three distinct endings. The cover designs are nearly identical, but if you look closely, you can spot the differences.”

Considering numbers: “The reality (or lack thereof) of numbers is the kind of problem some philosophers consider overwhelmingly important, but it’s of no consequence to just about everyone else. It does not make a wink of difference to your life whether the figures in your bank account or the digits on your clock are, in a philosophical sense, really real, so long as they work as expected. The mathematician Paolo Zellini’s book, now translated by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre from the 2016 Italian original, does not exactly elevate the number-reality problem to a matter of concern to non-philosophers, and it certainly does not explain the problem in a way that will make it tractable to them. But Zellini does offer a creative shift in perspective that challenges certain philosophers and philosophy-minded mathematicians to see the problem differently.”

Stanley Johnson—Boris Johnson’s father—has asked publishers to consider re-issuing his 40-year-old virus novel: “Long out of print, the book is based on a real disease outbreak in Germany in the late 1960s. Johnson denied being opportunistic in wanting his novel to be made available again. ‘I’m a professional writer,’ he said. ‘Is it opportunistic for journalists and newspapers to be writing about the coronavirus?’ He pointed to his previous thrillers which have also tackled contemporary issues, including his latest book Kompromat, which tells a story of devious Russian influence on western politics. Johnson said his novel had a prescience, in that the plot was driven by the desperate need to find a vaccine. ‘I don’t think the novel is far fetched because look at what is happening now,’ he said.”

In praise of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns: “Leone was ahead of his time in making movies that were centrally about the movies — about their conventions, about their hypocrisies, about their clichés. He turned away from the gloss of the Shane era of lyrical Westerns that aimed to be thought of as wholesome or high-toned in favor of an aggressively rank, nasty, festering landscape of cutthroats and degenerates. Background characters are an anti-gallery of freaks and uglies.”

Dwight Garner explains how to play the paperback game: “My family didn’t invent the paperback game (I don’t know who did), but we’ve played it for years. It’s for four to 10 people and perfect for lockdown. You can play at the table after dinner, after the dishes have been cleared and everyone is loosened up. An Earl Hines record on in the background sets the mood perfectly.”

Photos: Arizona

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