On Further Reflection

Jonathan Miller

Description

This collection of entertaining and enlightening writings from the famous comedian, neurologist, and intellectual is ';dazzling from beginning to end' (Oliver Sacks). Actor, doctor, sculptor, TV personality, director of both film and operaSir Jonathan Miller's career covers a vast range of artistic and intellectual pursuits. But common amongst all of these trades is Miller's exceptional talent for writing about them. On Further Reflection gathers together Miller's best and most memorable excerpts, articles and essays written over the last six decades. The collection features his reflections on the famous comedy revue Beyond the Fringe, which he cowrote and performed with Dudley Moore, Peter Cook, and Alan Bennett; as well as fascinating explorations of everything from mesmerism to Dickens; neurology to art history; and opera to epistemology. In these pages, Miller contemplates how we interact with our own bodies, and how television changed in the wake of the Kennedy assassination. For each extract he provides a small introduction, placing the writing in the context of his work in the arts and sciences. A celebration of one of our finest minds, On Further Reflection brings together the best of Jonathan Miller for the first time in one collection.

Sujets

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Informations

• Publié par: ABRAMS Books
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781468312850
• Langue: English

Extrait

A ctor, doctor, sculptor, TV personality, director of both film and opera-Sir Jonathan Miller s career covers a vast range of artistic endeavors and intellectual pursuits. Common among all of these trades, though, is Miller s exceptional talent for writing about them. Because his work has been published in locations as numerous and diverse as his interests, On Further Reflection is the necessary gathering-together of excerpts from Miller s best and most memorable pieces from the last six decades, and serves as a staggering indicator of the depth and variety of his preoccupations.
The collection features his writing on mesmerism and neurology, art history and drama; it contains thoughts on how we interact with our own bodies, and how television changed in the wake of the Kennedy assassination. Miller casts light on many oft-overlooked aspects of the world, and reminds us with his trademark wit and perception that to this day he is a unique presence on the cultural scene.
A celebration of one of our finest minds, On Further Reflection brings together the best of Jonathan Miller for the first time in one collection.
BOOKS BY JONATHAN MILLER:
Marshall McLuhan
The Body in Question
Subsequent Performances
Nowhere in Particular
On Reflection
Camouflage
( INTRODUCTION )
On the Move
( CATALOGUE )
Voices of Victorian London:
In Sickness and In Health
( FOREWORD )
Copyright
This edition first in published hardcover in the United States in 2015 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
www.overlookpress.com
For bulk and special sales, please contact [e-mail] , or write us at the address above.
Copyright 2014 Jonathan Miller
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Skyscraper Publications Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN: 978-1-4683-1285-0
CONTENTS
Books by Jonathan Miller
Copyright
Introduction
1. From England to America
Schooldays: Led Astray
Beyond the Fringe
Been to America
January in New York
By train, New York to Chicago
Views of a Death
On Lenny Bruce (1926-1966)
2. A Gower Street Scandal
3. The Body in Question
Natural Shocks
4. States of Mind
Interview with Sir Ernst Gombrich
5. Plays and Performance
Directing a play - Robert Lowell s Old Glory , July 1964
The green umbrella
Novels into films
Solving dramatic problems, April 7, 1976
6. Paying attention
Sketchy perception
Associated movements
Bernie s baby
Actions
More actions
A game of snap
The present tense
Mental states
Social constructions
Apes and men
What are you looking at?
Visual information
Seeing as and seeing in
More about seeing in
Words and pictures
Reproduction
Attention
Reading
The spared glance
Another spared glance
Vacant gazes
Averted gazes
Types of gaze
Visions
More visions
Further thoughts about looking
Photographic smiles
Representation
Ways in which a person can be represented
Upside down
Flemish narrative
Roles
Dreaming
Offence versus insult
Time present and time past
Seeing as
Advice about shadows
More about shadows
Identifying colours
Sunday in the park (circa 1965)
Air miles
Overheard
Overseen
A view
Radio astronomy
Reflecting surfaces
7. The vision thing
Reflection
Camouflage
8. Visualising Action
9. The Afterlife of Art
10. Doing things
Acknowledgments
Index
About the Author
Introduction
S ome people know a little about a lot of different things; others know a lot about a few things. Jonathan Miller seems to know an awful lot about an awful lot of things. I owe it to him that I first read and came to love Proust. One day over a drink in a wine bar, astonished to discover that I had never tackled Remembrance of Things Past, he pretty well ordered me to, and I have never regretted it. When we made the television series The Body in Question together, our discussions were punctuated by insights into how the body works - not unexpected in that context - but also into the significance of small coral brooches in the paintings of Madonnas by North Italian artists of the renaissance, or the profile of Mussolini visible in the newel posts of one of his palaces.
I have been surprised at the way Jonathan Miller and his work are recognised by the generation that grew up between 1960 and 1980, but not by anyone much younger, even though hardly a year has gone by without a Jonathan Miller production somewhere in some art form. As his writings show, his ideas and observations can be appreciated by anyone, because his deep and sometimes breathtaking erudition is usually worn lightly and always tempered with humour, a constant element in his work since the wildly successful revue, Beyond the Fringe, which set him off on an unexpected career path. And often the starting point for an ideas-rich piece of writing is some everyday event that could happen to anyone. An incident with a pair of broken spectacles leads to a meditation on words, and the difference between copying and reproducing . The behaviour of a cat outside Miller s house introduces an essay on reflection. The different uses of the word in help to convey Miller s ideas on why novels can t easily be turned into films. A Robert Frost poem is the trigger for a long and fascinating essay on how photography and cinematography tackled the task of representing movement.
The choice of pieces in this book is Jonathan Miller s. They represent what he is most proud of in over sixty years of writing. There is something in it for all interests, and the juxtaposition of short pieces with long ones; paintings with neurology; mesmerism with Dickens; or zoology with epistemology often leads the reader in directions he or she might not have expected.
Karl Sabbagh
Three cartoons from a series drawn for Granta in 1956
From England to America

I don t think I wrote a word until I left Cambridge in 1956, although I drew occasional cartoons for Granta . But while I was engaged in clinical medicine, at University College Hospital in Gower Street, my brother-in-law, Karl Miller, whom I got to know while I was at Cambridge, had become literary editor of the Spectator . He was housed in an office a few doors down from UCH and he invited me to write an occasional short article, including an account of time spent at a Rudolph Steiner school, to which I gave a false name in the piece.
Schooldays: Led Astray
The Friar House was a progressive school set in large grounds with a gnarled orchard in which a moth-eaten donkey grazed. The building was a converted farmhouse spread about in barns and outhouses which had been turned into huge, draughty classrooms.
We like to think of education as a sort of leading-out, cooed the headmistress at the first interview, and before long I was equipped for the business in a spinach-coloured jumper with a high polo neck. My leading-out only lasted six months but it took six years to lead me back again to a condition where I could take a useful place in society. I believe that the conventional subjects did feature somewhere in the curriculum, but I have only the haziest recollection of them. I seem to recall that they were telescoped in some strange way in order to make room for the more crucial aspects of the leading-out process. Mathematics and languages were, for example, conveniently elided when we learnt the multiplication tables in French.
The morning got off to a good start with prayers, but these were nothing like any prayers I had come across before and nothing like them ever turned up again. In the midst of the restrained Anglican assemblies of later schools I often found myself longing for the wilder practices of the Friar House. The headmistress would stand before us with one hand placed delicately on the piano lid. After a formal cough she would lead us off into a sort of Jungian chant to which I never somehow managed to learn the words. There were a lot of hand movements, however. I remember these clearly. Both fists were placed together, side by side over the heart. Then, as the chant grew to a crescendo (something about the spirit of the sun within us glows ), the arms reached up and out in an expansive double arc of spiritual ecstasy. This was always the signal for a lot of facetious horseplay; the idea being to fell both neighbours with one s outstretched arms. The mistress never seemed put out by this scuffling climax. Perhaps she interpreted it as some sort of transport. Even if she had been ruffled she would never have struck us, as there was a strict embargo on violence of any sort. What discipline there was, was conveyed in a curious system which consisted of ascribing different coloured auras to the various pupils on the basis of their conduct in the previous week. My aura was brown at the end of every week, though there were people who basked in a pink one. I never discovered a way of life which succeeded in getting the wavelength of my aura switched.
After prayers we would settle down to the morning s work, much of which was taken up with garbled Oriental mythology. How Manu led his peoples out of Atlantis was always a popular theme. After the lesson the boys and girls would troop off through the autumn mist to the art room, which occupied one of the barns on the other side of the orchard. Here, with the Manu myth still fresh in our minds, we would interpret our ideas of the story on paper. Wet paper. It had to be wet paper, for dry paper gave hard lines and the art mistress explained