What do you think?
Rate this book
Summoning Pearl Harbor
Summoning Pearl Harbor is a mesmerizing display of linguistic force that redefines remembering. How do words make the past appear? In what way does the historian summon bygone events? What is this kind of remembering, and for whom do we recall the dead, or the past?
In this highly original meditation on the past, renowned art historian Alexander Nemerov delves into what it means to recall a significant event—Pearl Harbor—and how descriptions of images can summon it back to life. Beginning with the photo album of a former Japanese kamikaze pilot, which is reproduced in this volume, Nemerov transports the reader into a different world through his engagement with the photographs and the construction of a narrative around them.
Through its lyrical prose, Summoning Pearl Harbor expands what we traditionally associate with ekphrastic writing. The kind of writing that can enliven a work of art is also the kind of writing that makes the past appear in vivid color and deep feeling. In the end, this timely piece of writing opens onto fundamental questions about how we communicate with each other, and how the past continues to live in our collective consciousness, not merely as facts but as stories that shape us. Here, Nemerov’s constant awareness of the power of language to make an experience—seen or remembered—become real reminds us that great ekphrastic writing is at the heart of every effective description.
In this highly original meditation on the past, renowned art historian Alexander Nemerov delves into what it means to recall a significant event—Pearl Harbor—and how descriptions of images can summon it back to life. Beginning with the photo album of a former Japanese kamikaze pilot, which is reproduced in this volume, Nemerov transports the reader into a different world through his engagement with the photographs and the construction of a narrative around them.
Through its lyrical prose, Summoning Pearl Harbor expands what we traditionally associate with ekphrastic writing. The kind of writing that can enliven a work of art is also the kind of writing that makes the past appear in vivid color and deep feeling. In the end, this timely piece of writing opens onto fundamental questions about how we communicate with each other, and how the past continues to live in our collective consciousness, not merely as facts but as stories that shape us. Here, Nemerov’s constant awareness of the power of language to make an experience—seen or remembered—become real reminds us that great ekphrastic writing is at the heart of every effective description.
- GenresHistory
80 pages, Paperback
First published November 21, 2017
19 people want to read
About the author
Alexander Nemerov
51 books26 followersA scholar of American art, Nemerov writes about the presence of art, the recollection of the past, and the importance of the humanities in our lives today. Committed to teaching the history of art more broadly as well as topics in American visual culture — the history of American photography, for example — he is a noted writer and speaker on the arts. His most recent books are Wartime Kiss: Visions of the Moment in the 1940s (2013) and Acting in the Night: Macbeth and the Places of the Civil War (2010). In 2011 he published To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s America (2011), the catalogue to the exhibition of the same title he curated at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Among his recent essays are pieces on Peter Paul Rubens, on Henry James, on Thomas Eakins and JFK; and on Rothko and Rembrandt.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 29, 2024
Nemerov is revelatory, and so incredibly nimble. Honestly one of my favorite scholars working today.
On going below decks on the *Hornet* ship in the SF Bay:
“We find the throbbing heart of the now-quiet engine, sleeping in its room of meters and levers. Stooping into doorways, turning corners, and staring through screens of metal mesh, we walk among the gray passages and think of the mind of the ship, of minds in general—of passageways and walkways out of Hitchcock and Dali, dream sequences Hollywood-style, of traumas and evasions and dead-ends and spiraling staircases that recall who we are and where we have gone and how we have gotten lost. Stephanie does not mind me writing of her depression, of her traumas and sadness and her long-walking resolve, of her father muttering nonsense to himself in a North beach cafe and of her own attempt to portray, in the measured meter of her words, some note of sanctity and sanity.” (26)
“The past is a slumber of many layers: unconscious, unthinking, dead. It can only dream of what it was. It is gone and even when it was not—when it was fresh-faced and as yet un-seduced by the hag and the fog—it did not know it was awake. Events cast a hex on life as it unfolds, dispensing drams and elixirs to each actor who plays a part. Every act of these actors is a drinking of their action. We recall what we did, we differentiate between our states of waking and sleeping, yet much of what we experience feels like the vapor of a dream. So it is that each player in the past has left no mark. As the beverage went down the throat, so the drinker was erased by degrees. All that is left is the bottle that contained the potion, which, not being consumable itself, fell and cracked on the pavement. Finding the broken glass, the historian smells the perfume of this long-ago stupor. Not by degrees does the vapor of the past’s vanishing come to him. Rather, he gets it all at once, close to the glass, and becomes intoxicated. Holding the broken bottle to his face, he notices that his fingers start to disappear and puts it down. But then he picks it up again.” (34-35)
On “the art of Rubens and the *Metamorphoses* of Ovid on which it is based”:
“I read of Hippomenes chasing speedy Atalanta, tricking her with the ruse of dropping the golden apples. Of the couple unwisely consummating their post-race lust in a cave sacred to the gods, and of their transformation into lions as punishment. I read, too, of Apollo chasing Daphne, Pan chasing Syrinx. Nymphs changing into laurel trees; nymphs changing into river reeds, Jupiter and Io, Jupiter and Ganymede, Jupiter and Callisto—seductions, abductions, swelling tummies swirling past me in rivers of black-and-white illustrations, through which I could sense the carmine of Rubens’s fluid brush, the melting muscles of his jackknife assassins and peeling maidens, their suggestive forms askew in beds and gardens and skies.” (45)
On going below decks on the *Hornet* ship in the SF Bay:
“We find the throbbing heart of the now-quiet engine, sleeping in its room of meters and levers. Stooping into doorways, turning corners, and staring through screens of metal mesh, we walk among the gray passages and think of the mind of the ship, of minds in general—of passageways and walkways out of Hitchcock and Dali, dream sequences Hollywood-style, of traumas and evasions and dead-ends and spiraling staircases that recall who we are and where we have gone and how we have gotten lost. Stephanie does not mind me writing of her depression, of her traumas and sadness and her long-walking resolve, of her father muttering nonsense to himself in a North beach cafe and of her own attempt to portray, in the measured meter of her words, some note of sanctity and sanity.” (26)
“The past is a slumber of many layers: unconscious, unthinking, dead. It can only dream of what it was. It is gone and even when it was not—when it was fresh-faced and as yet un-seduced by the hag and the fog—it did not know it was awake. Events cast a hex on life as it unfolds, dispensing drams and elixirs to each actor who plays a part. Every act of these actors is a drinking of their action. We recall what we did, we differentiate between our states of waking and sleeping, yet much of what we experience feels like the vapor of a dream. So it is that each player in the past has left no mark. As the beverage went down the throat, so the drinker was erased by degrees. All that is left is the bottle that contained the potion, which, not being consumable itself, fell and cracked on the pavement. Finding the broken glass, the historian smells the perfume of this long-ago stupor. Not by degrees does the vapor of the past’s vanishing come to him. Rather, he gets it all at once, close to the glass, and becomes intoxicated. Holding the broken bottle to his face, he notices that his fingers start to disappear and puts it down. But then he picks it up again.” (34-35)
On “the art of Rubens and the *Metamorphoses* of Ovid on which it is based”:
“I read of Hippomenes chasing speedy Atalanta, tricking her with the ruse of dropping the golden apples. Of the couple unwisely consummating their post-race lust in a cave sacred to the gods, and of their transformation into lions as punishment. I read, too, of Apollo chasing Daphne, Pan chasing Syrinx. Nymphs changing into laurel trees; nymphs changing into river reeds, Jupiter and Io, Jupiter and Ganymede, Jupiter and Callisto—seductions, abductions, swelling tummies swirling past me in rivers of black-and-white illustrations, through which I could sense the carmine of Rubens’s fluid brush, the melting muscles of his jackknife assassins and peeling maidens, their suggestive forms askew in beds and gardens and skies.” (45)
January 26, 2021
What a beauty! This whole series by David Zwirner publishing called ekphrasis is a fascinating and so far beautiful series of books
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews