Grim Reader, Nov. 27, 2009: Yang Xianyi, Jeanne-Claude and Charis Wilson
NOVEMBER 27, 2009 TAGS:
One reason Grim Reader peruses obituary pages from Great Britain is that the best British papers tend to cast a wider net, covering locales that American papers sometimes miss. But this week, reading through his feed from the Guardian, even Grim Reader wondered if the London paper was taking things a bit too far: The obituary in question wasn’t just about a Chinese literary figure. It was actually in Chinese. Who was this man? A few clicks later, an identical page in English revealed that it was Yang Xianyi, a celebrated translator.
It turns out that, in May, the Guardian launched an experimental collaboration to run Chinese-language translations of its articles online — where, at least theoretically, they’ll be accessible to Chinese readers whose domestic media is heavily censored. The Yang obit offers a nice example of the difference between the government-controlled press and the free kind.
Highlights from the Guardian version, in its English original version: “When they came during the Cultural Revolution to take away Yang Xianyi … he had one regret — that he was hauled off to prison, accused of being a British spy, in his old slippers.” … “He belonged to a generation of Chinese intellectuals who had chosen to support Mao Zedong’s New China only to suffer for it.” … “After Mao’s death … the authorities apologised to the Yangs for their ‘unwarranted arrest.’” … "His message was that [the 1989 Tiananmen massacre] was ‘a fascist coup engineered by a few diehards against political reform.’”
Highlights from the official Xinhua News Agency version, which appears in the Communist Party’s official China Daily, among other outlets: “Together with his British wife, Gladys Taylor, Yang translated scores of classics” … “Yang’s wealthy family sent him to study the classics in England at Oxford University in 1936” ... “the Yangs were also the first to render ‘The Odyssey’ into Chinese from the ancient Greek original.” The official papers, of course, leave out the politics: Global Times, another government outlet, alludes to his Cultural Revolution troubles, only to declare that, once freed, “Yang dedicated himself to the promotion of Chinese culture and civilization to the world.” His views on Tiananmen, which led to his expulsion from the Communist Party, simply vanish.
It’s easy to get caught up, as Grim Reader sometimes does, in the inadequacy of today’s Obitosphere: the overly sentimental write-ups, the personal scandals that go unexamined, the scant attention paid to the wider world. But this Thanksgiving we’re glad to live in a place where only occasional blunders — and not anything more menacing — are to blame when the obit pages describe something less than a real life story.
There’s significantly more attention this week to the passing of Jeanne-Claude, the artist known for the massive, intentionally ephemeral public artworks she created with her husband, Christo. The obits mainly play it straight, offering a greatest-hits package of the couple’s projects (wrapping Berlin’s Reichstag in silvery fabric; erecting thousands of giant umbrellas along the California coast; surrounding Biscayne Bay’s islands in pink material). This is a relief, because there’s something about the installations that brings out the pretentious art-history sophomore in even the silkiest writer. Don’t believe it? Time’s Richard Lacayo reprints his take on their most famous American effort: “In their beckoning but impenetrable Other-ness, their aloofness from whatever meanings we would try to attach to them, The Gates always reminded me of that jar in the Wallace Stevens poem, the one that ‘did not give of bird or bush/like nothing else in Tennessee.’” OK, then.
Beyond the public works, the nature of the couple’s relationship seems to fascinate obituarists. For years, the projects were known only by Christo’s name. But, explains the American Prospect, that was just because “the pair originally decided it would be easier to brand Christo.” In 1994, they started using both of their names, retroactively re-attributing past projects as well (not that it mattered, since the works were all removed after their brief runs). “Theirs was no artist/muse codependency, nor the union of a creative soul and his harried helpmate. This pair was equal,” declares the women-centric blog Jezebel. Interestingly, though, the Washington Post appears to be the only outlet to describe the somewhat unusual early days of their romance: “Jeanne-Claude was pregnant with Christo's child in 1959 when she married Philippe Planchon, deemed by her family a more suitable match. She left her marriage after three weeks, telling The Washington Post in 1995, ‘His key didn't fit my lock.’” OK, then.
Speaking of artist/muse codependencies, there are also a good number of obits for Charis Wilson, described by the Los Angeles Times, sure enough, as “the muse, model and last wife of art photographer Edward Weston.” Wilson, the Washington Post’s Matt Schudel notes, is best known as the naked body in “some of the most haunting and intimate images created by her husband.” In fact, she did a lot more than pose: Just 20 when she met the 48-year-old Weston, Wilson eventually co-wrote books with him, edited his articles, and became a true partner. The romance was erotically charged and inherently fraught. The Post’s obit does the best job of describing its origins, right down to who made the first move (it was Wilson). The Los Angeles Times, on the other hand, poignantly describes its unraveling. “When I look at the nudes Edward made of me during our last years together, I am struck by the sad face of that young woman who was me,” she’s quoted as having said years later. (The piece also features links to many of Weston’s most celebrated portraits of Wilson.)
Overseas, a couple of disgraced foreign pols make the obit pages. In Thailand, former Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej is remembered by the Guardian as “a ranting, rightwing politician and radio commentator,” but described by the Financial Times as “the plain-spoken former Thai prime minister.” Both, however, paint a fairly ugly picture. The son of aristocrats, he nonetheless “appealed to the poor and uneducated, using crude and vitriolic language that earned him the nickname ‘dog-mouth.’” He played a role in two major massacres of protesters, in 1976 and 1992, both times justifying the bloodshed by saying the victims were Communists. And yet, because like-minded people control most of Thailand’s media, he was ultimately better known as the star of "Cooking and Grumbling" (the Guardian translates it as "Tasting and Ranting"), a TV show that mixed kitchen tips with Samak’s political opinions. Ironically, that’s what did him in when he assumed office: After the Supreme Court ruled that his accepting payment for the show represented a conflict of interest, he stepped down.
In Iran, meanwhile, the story of Ali Kordan demonstrates that even Islamic revolutionaries feel the urge to puff up their resumes a bit. Kordan, a hard-line Interior Minster, was sacked in 2008 after questions arose about his alleged Oxford degree. The university said it had awarded no such thing. Kordan, citing a nefarious Israeli plot, produced the document, which, according to the Associated Press, was “riddled with spelling and grammar mistakes.”
There are also several obits for Waldo Hunt, who revived pop-up books in the 1960s. The form had initially been popular in 19th-century Europe, writes the Los Angeles Times’ Valerie Nelson, until Hunt became “fascinated and motivated by the intricate engineering that went into books that can go from flat to 3-D structures with the turn of a page.” The Wall Street Journal’s take casts Hunt as an early exemplar of globalization: To control costs, he outsourced printing to Japan, Singapore, and South America, novel moves at the time.
Elsewhere in the Obitosphere this week: The Los Angeles Times remembers women’s judo pioneer Rusty Kanokogi, who in 1959 had to disguise herself as a man in order to compete in New York’s YMCA championships (she won, but had to return the medal when her gender was discovered). By 1988, the former Rena Glickman was coaching the U.S. women’s Olympic team. … Another fight figure, boxing manager Harry Kabakoff, also gets play in the paper, which quotes an observer as calling him “‘the General Motors of fight managers,’ with a roster of 67 names but only 10 who could ‘really fight.’” Instead, the obits remember promotional stunts like the time he and a client entered the ring dressed as the dynamic duo to capitalize on the Batman craze. … And most of the major outlets remember opera singer Elisabeth Soderstrom. Unfortunately, the New York Times follows the custom of assigning obits for high-culture figures to critics, meaning that the send-off is long on descriptions of how “she combined insightful acting with nuanced singing and a lovely stage presence to create alluring and memorable performances,” but short on real-life color. Imagine if a judo writer had been handed the Kanokogi obit.
Finally, Abe Pollin is remembered as “the last of the old-school pro sports owners, running the National Basketball Association’s Washington Wizards and earlier the National Hockey League’s Washington Capitals as a family business, shaped by his strong personality and his intense loyalties.” But in D.C., where Pollin was a liberal philanthropic figure, the man who renamed the Washington Bullets — he didn’t like the violence of the nickname — may have had an even bigger impact on the once-troubled city’s downtown revitalization. Building an arena in a once-derelict area, the local booster put his money where his mouth was. Grim Reader’s old colleague Darrow Montgomery, who was able to afford a studio in the gloomy neighborhood of old, offers a photo essay by way of tribute.
Got a tip for the Grim Reader? Drop a line to obitreader@gmail.com.
Michael Schaffer’s Grim Reader appears Friday in Obit. He is the author of One Nation Under Dog, about culture and the
American pet industry.
It turns out that, in May, the Guardian launched an experimental collaboration to run Chinese-language translations of its articles online — where, at least theoretically, they’ll be accessible to Chinese readers whose domestic media is heavily censored. The Yang obit offers a nice example of the difference between the government-controlled press and the free kind. Highlights from the Guardian version, in its English original version: “When they came during the Cultural Revolution to take away Yang Xianyi … he had one regret — that he was hauled off to prison, accused of being a British spy, in his old slippers.” … “He belonged to a generation of Chinese intellectuals who had chosen to support Mao Zedong’s New China only to suffer for it.” … “After Mao’s death … the authorities apologised to the Yangs for their ‘unwarranted arrest.’” … "His message was that [the 1989 Tiananmen massacre] was ‘a fascist coup engineered by a few diehards against political reform.’”
Highlights from the official Xinhua News Agency version, which appears in the Communist Party’s official China Daily, among other outlets: “Together with his British wife, Gladys Taylor, Yang translated scores of classics” … “Yang’s wealthy family sent him to study the classics in England at Oxford University in 1936” ... “the Yangs were also the first to render ‘The Odyssey’ into Chinese from the ancient Greek original.” The official papers, of course, leave out the politics: Global Times, another government outlet, alludes to his Cultural Revolution troubles, only to declare that, once freed, “Yang dedicated himself to the promotion of Chinese culture and civilization to the world.” His views on Tiananmen, which led to his expulsion from the Communist Party, simply vanish.
It’s easy to get caught up, as Grim Reader sometimes does, in the inadequacy of today’s Obitosphere: the overly sentimental write-ups, the personal scandals that go unexamined, the scant attention paid to the wider world. But this Thanksgiving we’re glad to live in a place where only occasional blunders — and not anything more menacing — are to blame when the obit pages describe something less than a real life story.
There’s significantly more attention this week to the passing of Jeanne-Claude, the artist known for the massive, intentionally ephemeral public artworks she created with her husband, Christo. The obits mainly play it straight, offering a greatest-hits package of the couple’s projects (wrapping Berlin’s Reichstag in silvery fabric; erecting thousands of giant umbrellas along the California coast; surrounding Biscayne Bay’s islands in pink material). This is a relief, because there’s something about the installations that brings out the pretentious art-history sophomore in even the silkiest writer. Don’t believe it? Time’s Richard Lacayo reprints his take on their most famous American effort: “In their beckoning but impenetrable Other-ness, their aloofness from whatever meanings we would try to attach to them, The Gates always reminded me of that jar in the Wallace Stevens poem, the one that ‘did not give of bird or bush/like nothing else in Tennessee.’” OK, then.
Beyond the public works, the nature of the couple’s relationship seems to fascinate obituarists. For years, the projects were known only by Christo’s name. But, explains the American Prospect, that was just because “the pair originally decided it would be easier to brand Christo.” In 1994, they started using both of their names, retroactively re-attributing past projects as well (not that it mattered, since the works were all removed after their brief runs). “Theirs was no artist/muse codependency, nor the union of a creative soul and his harried helpmate. This pair was equal,” declares the women-centric blog Jezebel. Interestingly, though, the Washington Post appears to be the only outlet to describe the somewhat unusual early days of their romance: “Jeanne-Claude was pregnant with Christo's child in 1959 when she married Philippe Planchon, deemed by her family a more suitable match. She left her marriage after three weeks, telling The Washington Post in 1995, ‘His key didn't fit my lock.’” OK, then.
Speaking of artist/muse codependencies, there are also a good number of obits for Charis Wilson, described by the Los Angeles Times, sure enough, as “the muse, model and last wife of art photographer Edward Weston.” Wilson, the Washington Post’s Matt Schudel notes, is best known as the naked body in “some of the most haunting and intimate images created by her husband.” In fact, she did a lot more than pose: Just 20 when she met the 48-year-old Weston, Wilson eventually co-wrote books with him, edited his articles, and became a true partner. The romance was erotically charged and inherently fraught. The Post’s obit does the best job of describing its origins, right down to who made the first move (it was Wilson). The Los Angeles Times, on the other hand, poignantly describes its unraveling. “When I look at the nudes Edward made of me during our last years together, I am struck by the sad face of that young woman who was me,” she’s quoted as having said years later. (The piece also features links to many of Weston’s most celebrated portraits of Wilson.)Overseas, a couple of disgraced foreign pols make the obit pages. In Thailand, former Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej is remembered by the Guardian as “a ranting, rightwing politician and radio commentator,” but described by the Financial Times as “the plain-spoken former Thai prime minister.” Both, however, paint a fairly ugly picture. The son of aristocrats, he nonetheless “appealed to the poor and uneducated, using crude and vitriolic language that earned him the nickname ‘dog-mouth.’” He played a role in two major massacres of protesters, in 1976 and 1992, both times justifying the bloodshed by saying the victims were Communists. And yet, because like-minded people control most of Thailand’s media, he was ultimately better known as the star of "Cooking and Grumbling" (the Guardian translates it as "Tasting and Ranting"), a TV show that mixed kitchen tips with Samak’s political opinions. Ironically, that’s what did him in when he assumed office: After the Supreme Court ruled that his accepting payment for the show represented a conflict of interest, he stepped down.
In Iran, meanwhile, the story of Ali Kordan demonstrates that even Islamic revolutionaries feel the urge to puff up their resumes a bit. Kordan, a hard-line Interior Minster, was sacked in 2008 after questions arose about his alleged Oxford degree. The university said it had awarded no such thing. Kordan, citing a nefarious Israeli plot, produced the document, which, according to the Associated Press, was “riddled with spelling and grammar mistakes.”
There are also several obits for Waldo Hunt, who revived pop-up books in the 1960s. The form had initially been popular in 19th-century Europe, writes the Los Angeles Times’ Valerie Nelson, until Hunt became “fascinated and motivated by the intricate engineering that went into books that can go from flat to 3-D structures with the turn of a page.” The Wall Street Journal’s take casts Hunt as an early exemplar of globalization: To control costs, he outsourced printing to Japan, Singapore, and South America, novel moves at the time.
Elsewhere in the Obitosphere this week: The Los Angeles Times remembers women’s judo pioneer Rusty Kanokogi, who in 1959 had to disguise herself as a man in order to compete in New York’s YMCA championships (she won, but had to return the medal when her gender was discovered). By 1988, the former Rena Glickman was coaching the U.S. women’s Olympic team. … Another fight figure, boxing manager Harry Kabakoff, also gets play in the paper, which quotes an observer as calling him “‘the General Motors of fight managers,’ with a roster of 67 names but only 10 who could ‘really fight.’” Instead, the obits remember promotional stunts like the time he and a client entered the ring dressed as the dynamic duo to capitalize on the Batman craze. … And most of the major outlets remember opera singer Elisabeth Soderstrom. Unfortunately, the New York Times follows the custom of assigning obits for high-culture figures to critics, meaning that the send-off is long on descriptions of how “she combined insightful acting with nuanced singing and a lovely stage presence to create alluring and memorable performances,” but short on real-life color. Imagine if a judo writer had been handed the Kanokogi obit.Finally, Abe Pollin is remembered as “the last of the old-school pro sports owners, running the National Basketball Association’s Washington Wizards and earlier the National Hockey League’s Washington Capitals as a family business, shaped by his strong personality and his intense loyalties.” But in D.C., where Pollin was a liberal philanthropic figure, the man who renamed the Washington Bullets — he didn’t like the violence of the nickname — may have had an even bigger impact on the once-troubled city’s downtown revitalization. Building an arena in a once-derelict area, the local booster put his money where his mouth was. Grim Reader’s old colleague Darrow Montgomery, who was able to afford a studio in the gloomy neighborhood of old, offers a photo essay by way of tribute.
Got a tip for the Grim Reader? Drop a line to obitreader@gmail.com.
Michael Schaffer’s Grim Reader appears Friday in Obit. He is the author of One Nation Under Dog, about culture and the
American pet industry.
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