River of Ink: Literature, History, Art

by Thomas Christensen

Overview

With its title harkening back to the sack of Baghdad in 1258—when the Tigris ran black with the ink of books flung into the water by Mongol invaders—River of Ink is a collection of essays that range widely across time and cultures to illuminate the role of literature and art throughout history. Christensen draws from a panoply of subjects, from the writings of prehistoric Chinese cultures known only through archaeology to the heroic efforts of contemporary Afghanis to keep the legacy of their ancient culture alive under the barrage of endless war.

Christensen's encyclopedic knowledge of world art and vast understanding of literature allows him to move easily from a discussion of the invention of moveable type in Korea, to Johannes Kepler's search for the harmony of the spheres, to the strange journey of an iron sculpture from Benin to the Louvre. Other essays cover the Popol Vuh of the Maya as exemplum of translation, the pioneering explorations of the early American naturalist John Bartram, and the balletic works of Louis–Ferdinand Céline.

It is Christensen's gift to see the world whole, to offer a wealth of connections vital for us as citizens of a rapidly globalizing world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781619024137
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	10/20/2014
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	24 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Thomas Christensen's previous books include New World/New Words: Recent Writing from the Americas, A Bilingual Anthology, The U.S.–Mexican War, and The Discovery of America and Other Myths as well as translations of books by such authors as Laura Esquivel, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, Alejo Carpentier and Louis–Ferdinand Céline. He is director of publications at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco and lives with his wife in Richmond, California.

Read an Excerpt

As the fifteenth century was drawing to a close, William Caxton,
England’s first printer, traveled to the Flemish city of Bruges. Today
the city, with its late medieval architecture and meandering cobbled
streets, seems a museum piece, but then it was a lively trading center
where Italians, Germans, Spaniards, and others met and exchanged
goods — and ideas. Arts and culture flourished, and new technology
was everywhere. Visitors were assured of eating well thanks
to the invention of drift nets, which resulted in an abundance of
seafood. Followers of Jan van Eyck and Hans Memling were filling
the city with paintings in a medium new to northern Europe,
oils. And the printing press with movable type — the machine on
which Johannes Gutenberg had printed his 42-line Bible a couple
of decades before—was changing the intellectual life of the city.
(Printing on movable metal type was well established in Korea, and
information about it could have traveled through the vast Mongol
empire to West Asia, and from there to Europe.)

There in Bruges, at a table overlooking a foggy canal, over a
meal of mussels and ale, Caxton would discuss the new printed
texts with scholars and artists who were arriving from all across
Europe. Among those joining him would have been Colard
Mansion, a Flemish scribe who printed the first book using copper
engravings, as well as the first books in English and French.
Also at the table would have been Anthony Woodville, the second
Earl Rivers, an English Francophile and translator,
had recently completed a translation of a French text called Dits
Moraulx des Philosophes. The book was a compendium of the wisdom
of ancient philosophers. Would Caxton have a look at it?

Editorial Reviews

"Christiensen's lively curiosity informs several quirky and engrossing essays." —Kirkus

"Christensen (1616: The World in Motion) a proud generalist and non–academic, addresses a slew of disparate subjects. . .and proves himself to be voracious reader who can clarify the present with knowledge of the past, accessibly summarize a subject, and share a fine story." —Publishers Weekly

"An eclectic and sporadically brilliant book in which an erudite writer takes his readers on a set of historical and cultural birdwalks. " —The Huffington Post

"An idiosyncratic world tour of diverse cultural histories, a tour de force of eclectic scholarship, a relief map of the journeys of a restless intellect, Thomas Christensen's River of Ink flows from ancient China to the current Americas with myriad revelations along the way. Christensen is a genial guide to little–known wonders with a wealth of information and a light touch.—Stephen Kessler, author of The Tolsoty of the Zulus

From the Publisher

2014-09-28
Assorted essays about people, places and ideas. Editor, publisher and blogger Christensen (1616: The World in Motion, 2012, etc.) intends each essay to make "sense of a little corner of things, each one starting from a different thread of the fabric of everything." That amorphous goal fails to provide coherence for the collection, which contains various writings: histories, author profiles, book reviews, and political and cultural commentary. Christensen organizes the essays by continent. The pieces on West Asia are linked by the theme of cultural repression: the Taliban's destruction of art works, for example, and the title essay, which refers to the Mongol siege of Baghdad in 1258, when the contents of the Grand Library were dumped into the Tigris. "For six months," the author writes, "…the waters of the Tigris flowed black from the ink of the books." Other geographical sections, though, contain essays that are only tenuously connected to place. "Australia, Southeast Asia," for example, contains two essays: a profile of the Australian writer Ethel Richardson, who wrote under the pseudonym Henry Handel Richardson, and a brief homage to Thai artist Montien Boonma, whose installation House of Hope the author admires. In the section on Europe, Christensen writes about the Spanish poet José Ángel Valente, writers Lewis Carroll and Horace Walpole, Céline's love of dance, and Johannes Kepler. The author writes that since he is not a scholar, readers should not expect essays to support an argument, but some pieces (on Chinese history, for one) read like Wikipedia entries and beg for a theme. Nevertheless, although the collection is diffuse, Christensen's lively curiosity informs several quirky and engrossing essays: "Journeys of the Iron Man" documents how a mid-19th-century iron statue commissioned by an African king came to be "branded a masterpiece of world art," and "Sadakichi and America" brings to light the life and multiple identities of a slippery character well-known in avant-garde circles. An uneven collection enlivened by some bright spots.

Kirkus Reviews