Hitting The Links: 10/06/24
Some thoughts & drawings on the Boxer At Rest statue, occasioned by my visit to Rome, plus a ton of links
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The Boxer At Rest
We’re in Rome ahead of a trade show in Milan later this week. I’ll tell you all about it sometime; I’ve been taking notes and a sketchbook journal. This morning I spent some time with the Boxer At Rest.
I first encountered the statue of the boxer in the short story The Pugilist At Rest, by Thom Jones. It’s a first-person narrative about a Marine veteran who’s suffering from PTSD (before we had that term) from Vietnam and brain damage from a boxing match back home.
He describes the statue:
“The pugilist is sitting on a rock with his forearms balanced on his thighs. That he is seated and not pacing implies that he has been through all this many times before. It appears that he is conserving his strength. His head is turned as if he were looking over his shoulder — as if someone had just whispered something to him. It is in this that the ‘art’ of the sculpture is conveyed to the viewer. Could it be that someone has just summoned him to the arena? There is a slight look of befuddlement on his face, but there is no trace of fear. There is an air about him that suggests that he is eager to proceed and does not wish to cause anyone any trouble or to create a delay, even though his life will soon be on the line. Besides the deformities on his noble face, there is also the suggestion of weariness and philosophical resignation.”
The cover of Jones’ collection showed the statue, photocopy-degraded, in stark black and gray.
The boxer stuck with me since I read that story in 1993. Twenty years later, when the statue was shipped to the Met for an exhibition, Jerry Saltz did a piece about it for New York Magazine. A color frontal photo of the statue was adorned with insets pointing to different aspects worth noting, the red tints in the bronze, the mutilation of the genitals, the cauliflower ear.
Because I didn’t understand mortality, I didn’t make the trip into NYC in 2013 to see it. I wasn’t going to miss the chance this time, and so after a walk to the Spanish Steps —
— and the Trevi Fountain
— we headed over to the National Museum at the Palazzo Massimo.
The statue was smaller than it loomed in my mind. I’d forgotten Jones’ narrator’s imprecation — “If you see the authentic statue at the Terme Museum, in Rome, you will see that the seated boxer is really not much more than a light-heavyweight. People were small in those days. The important thing was that he was perfectly proportioned” — but the sight of it still arrested me. We’d been through room after room of heroic statues — Zeus in his glory, old emperors’ faces atop beautiful young bodies, mythical triumphs — and now I gazed at this bronze shell of a fighter who’s fought too much, whose body shows the damage, whose posture is one of perhaps not defeat but certainly that resignation Jones writes about.
I sat on the floor, took out my sketchpad and a Micron 01, and got to work. I knew Amy would find me and/or entertain herself in the museum, and she knew this viewing-meeting-communion was what I’d come to Rome for: to look on a figure I’ve drawn from photos so many times, to see the light play off of the musculature, to make sense of that puzzled expression I once spent 4 weeks trying to draw.
My other surprise was the a slight glint of light visible inside the head through the left eye. I knew the piece wasn’t solid bronze, that — like me — it’s hollow, but I wasn’t expecting to see a glimmer of the inside.
I took in the figure as best I could, letting the eye-to-hand of drawing sidestep my over-mind. Tried not to load the encounter with too much Gil, but instead let the still moment of the form speak to me.
Drawing the body again and again, it struck me that the back of the statue is critical to knowing the boxer. The piece is placed such that you can’t get too far behind it, but I did my best to understand that shape, the power in that hunched-over posture, the way it feeds into the shoulders and then the neck as the head has turned to listen to someone standing above.
I think this is the best of the drawings I made, but click through here and you can check out each one.
Okay, fine, some runners-up:
Outside the room, I found Amy waiting for me. We continued in the museum, but on the next floor, I pointed to some seats, and we rested for a little while. I looked at my sketches, then just covered my face with my hands and thought about the darkness in those empty eyes.
We moved along, seeing more emperors, gods, heroes and monsters, but no men.
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And now, let’s hit the links!
Links & Such
Recent Virtual Memories Show podcasts: Christopher Brown • Dmitry Samarov • Stephen B. Shepard • Benjamin Dreyer • Nicholas Delbanco • Dash Shaw • Jess Ruliffson • Joe Coleman
RIP Dikembe Mutombo . . . RIP Kris Kristofferson . . . RIP John Amos (belated) . . . RIP John Ashton . . . RIP Joe Wolf . . . RIP Gavin Creel . . . RIP Ken Page . . .
Also Pete Rose died.
Brett Martin goes deep on gravy.
W. David Marx rightly trashes Malcolm Gladwell in the Washington Post and writes a followup piece about it.
Jerry Saltz ponders the Brooklyn artist, and explains why it’s okay to leave New York.
Klimt’s painting Hope is a key image in Another Woman, that Woody Allen drama I brought up after Gena Rowlands died. Sebstian Smee wrote about Hope II.
Benjamin Dreyer offers up 31 stray copyeditorial thoughts.
MOAR SHELFIES, courtesy of Lavie Tidhar’s new project.
Jess Ruliffson’s part of this neat article on the influence of Harvey Kurtzman on comics journalism.
David Marchese has a barnburner of a conversation with Al Pacino.
Michael Dirda (2012, 2014, 2015) wrote a lovely review of The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, a fantastic new book by Roland Allen. I recorded with Roland last week for an episode later this month, and want to push his book onto lots of my friends’ reading lists.
Current/Recent Reading
The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper - Roland Allen
Roadside Picnic - Los Bros. Strugatsky
Sound Body, Fractured Mind
Didn’t get much done exercise done this past week. I got hit with a head cold last weekend, and the combo of that with flu & COVID vaccination-hangovers and the ridiculous amount of work I had to get done this week before the trip, meant that I was run down and not gonna get any exercise in, except for a yoga workout on Thursday. Doubtful I’ll work out (miles of walks don’t count) during this week, either, although the hotel in Milan looks like it’s got a decent fitness center, so we’ll see. My back still looks pretty good, albeit not Boxer At Rest-worthy.
Until Next Time
Thanks for reading this far! I’ll be back on Wednesday with NO NEW EPISODE but maybe some art & a couple of Instax pix, and on Sunday with links, books, & workout craziness, & maybe a little profundity or something, but really, I’m just going to be tired AF.
Boy Mercury / Shooting through every degree,