Everything that Rises

I couldn't be more pleased with my McSweeney's book subscription. The latest book is by Lawrence Weschler and is titled Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences. It came in the mail today along with another big folder with two copies of Don't Forget to Write that Gloria had ordered from the Eggers Pirate store.

It's nice to not have to think of books to read, and just have them sent to me.

From the introduction to the Weschler book:

I don't remember exactly how I got started—come to think of it, it was probably reading John Berger one day in college, the essay on Che Guevara in The Look of Things where he's talking about Che's corpse, gruesomely splayed out like that for public display, his military captors proudly arrayed alongside; and Berger in effect says, "We all know what this photo's based on," and then proceeds to tell us: Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson. And of course he's right, he's dead right: that's undoubtedly the image (hot-wired, as it were, into all of their brains) that taught all of the strutting officers how to pose in relation to their prize, and taught the photographer where to plant his camera in relation to his subjects. And I just remember thinking at the time, regarding Berger: Jesus (Jesus, of course, comprising another apt trope at that particular juncture)—Jesus, this guy doesn't read his morning newspaper the way I or anybody else I know reads the morning newspaper.

Then a luscious book full of similar images, some annotated, some not: an Apollo photo from the surface of the moon next to an eerily-similar Mark Rothko painting from 1969, for example.

I've had Berger's Ways of Seeing on my shelf for years (although it may have gotten boxed up in the last round of boxing up and delegating to the garage—at least I can't see it now, looking back on the shelf where I expect it to be), and have often wondered at that book, just in the way Weschler describes.

[finally—why is "Weschler" so hard to remember how to spell? I misspelled it three times in typing this thing in. I think it's because of the following German words that take up all the space that his name might otherwise occupy in my brain:

moneychanger -- der Geldwechsler
quick changer -- der Schnellwechsler
record changer -- der Plattenwechsler ]