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WORK TITLE: Gaslight
WORK NOTES: trans by Isabel Fargo Cole
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1948
WEBSITE:
CITY: Leipzig
STATE:
COUNTRY: Germany
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1948.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Essayist, literary critic, and translator of authors.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Joachim Kalka is an essayist, literary critic, and translator of authors. Kalka has translated works by authors including Martin Amis, Angela Carter, G.K. Chesterton, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Christopher Isherwood, and Gilbert Sorrentino. He lives in Leipzig, Germany.
Gaslight is a collection of essays concerning figures and works of cultural importance from the 19th century. Primarily a work of academic criticism, the book reflects Kalka’s interest in a variety of subjects, ranging from well known ghost stories and mysteries to classic films and comics. Kalka focuses on German, French and English-language literary, musical, and cultural references.
Kalka examines such works as Wagner’s opera “The Valkyrie,” Balzac’s novel A Woman of Thirty, and individuals such as Wolfgang Menzel, a German critic of Goethe’s, and Jack the Ripper. The title of the book, Gaslight, is taken from Kalka’s interpretation of the relationship between artificial lighting, such as light from gas lamps, and the notorious murderer Jack the Ripper. In writing about Jack the Ripper, Kalka examines such cultural figures as Charles Dickens and Sherlock Holmes. He moves the essay to an examination of Patrick Hamilton’s play “Gaslight,” and concludes with an explanation of the term, ‘gaslighting,’ used in modern language as a description of intentional reimagining of the truth to avert accountability.
Kalka makes original and unconventional leaps in his assessments and comparisons. In one essay he considers the possible erotic connotations of the title of Balzac’s, A Woman of Thirty, while in another he defends his claims with references to “Mickey Mouse and His Sky Adventure.” Discussing German literary critic Wolfgang Menzel’s characteristic xenophobia and racism, Kalka cites 20th-century writer Arno Schmidt’s assertions that Menzel’s literary assessments were so consistently inaccurate that any book that he condemned is considered an enjoyable read today.
Kalka dedicates a section of the book to a reflection on food and how its role as edible art has been lost. He describes the former practices of creating elaborate edible structures, noting that the only remaining gastronomical art remaining today can be found in wedding cakes. Kalka continues by explaining the malleability of cake art, writing about Emma Bovary’s elaborate wedding cake. He moves the essay into past purposes and roles of food, noting the significance of mutton chops and celery stalks in Victorian England.
Michael Dirda in the Washington Post noted that Kalka is “content to circle around a subject, illuminating it from various angles. Then, instead of closing with a knockout summary of the evidence, he simply stops.” Kalka displays extensive knowledge on the subjects about which he writes, though he often chooses to fall short of pushing a particular opinion or message about the works or their significance.
As the book progresses, there is an increasingly apparent criticism of the 19th century’s fast acceptance of evermore complex forms of technology. He suggests that technological innovations are potentially dangerous for the persistence of art and culture. He notes that technology can be described as breath-taking, only for that it moves and advances so quickly, that one literally cannot breath.
Kalka suggests that technology puts a hinderance on the abilities of the imagination. Pointing to the accessibility of any information or image, he writes that the ability to literally see any image on the internet weakens the ability of the mind’s eye to produce images within the imagination. He concludes this section of the book by reflecting on the industrial age, once regarded as the height of alienation. Compared to our current state of estrangement as the result of technology, he asserts that the days of factory work are to be longed for. Dirda in the Washington Post wrote that Kalka’s essays reminds the reader that “the fierce hatreds, economic disparities and zeal for new technologies that characterize life today are hardly new.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, February 6, 2017, review of Gaslight: Lantern Slides from the Nineteenth Century, p. 58.
Washington Post, June 20, 2017, Michael Dirda, “‘Truth Thrives in the Margins’ and Other Insights from a Master Essayist,”; June 22, 2017, Michael Dirda, “Book World: Essays on the Past’s Present Relevance.”
ONLINE
Reviews by Amos Lassen, http://reviewsbyamoslassen.com (June 6, 2017), review of Gaslight.*
Joachim Kalka is an essayist, literary critic, and translator of authors such as Martin Amis, Angela Carter, G.K. Chesterton, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Christopher Isherwood, and Gilbert Sorrentino. He lives in Leipzig, Germany.
Gaslight: Lantern Slides from the Nineteenth Century
264.6 (Feb. 6, 2017): p58.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Gaslight: Lantern Slides from the Nineteenth Century
Joachim Kalka, trans. from the German by Isabel
Fargo Cole. New York Review Books, $15.95
trade paper (172p) ISBN 978-1-68137-118-4
Essayist, critic, and translator Kalka's first work translated into English is an original, learned, and occasionally bewildering collection of essays on the 19th century. Rooted in academic criticism, Kalka's essays are buoyant and snappily written, bringing an endlessly revealing lens to train on Wagner's opera The Valkyrie; Balzac's novel A Woman of Thirty; Wolfgang Menzel, a reactionary German critic of Goethe's (whose judgments, one author said, were "so reliably wrong that each and every book he branded as heretical can be read with pleasure to this day"); and, in the title essay, the relationship between artificial illumination and Jack the Ripper. One needn't be conversant with the works of Balzac, Goethe, or Menzel to appreciate Kalka's essays, but a keen interest in European culture and literature of the 19th century is rewarded. Kalka contextualizes even the most potentially arcane subjects with lucidity and good humor, though sometimes it will take a few pages for readers to find their footing. This accomplished work introduces a strong, if strange, voice to English-speaking readers. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Gaslight: Lantern Slides from the Nineteenth Century." Publishers Weekly, 6 Feb. 2017, p. 58. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA480593877&it=r&asid=6e4a539b5960dd86c4954415e4e5811b. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A480593877
'Truth thrives in the margins' and other insights from a master essayist
Michael Dirda
(June 20, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post
Byline: Michael Dirda
The biographical note accompanying "Gaslight: Lantern Slides From the Nineteenth Century" describes Joachim Kalka as "an essayist, literary critic, and translator of authors such as Martin Amis, Angela Carter, G.K. Chesterton, Christopher Isherwood, and Gilbert Sorrentino." Impressive as it is, that list only hints at the extent of Kalka's literary sophistication. His freewheeling essays -- adroitly translated by Isabel Fargo Cole -- reveal not only an easy familiarity with the obvious masterpieces of German, French and English-language literature, but also a devotee's appreciation of ghost stories, mysteries, classic films and comics. His subjects range from Wagner's conception of the Valkyries in "The Ring of the Nibelungs" to the artistic legacy of Jack the Ripper to a -mini-history of anarchist bomb-throwing.
In fact, Kalka belongs to that admirable line of European intellectuals, such as Roland Barthes, E.M. Cioran, Umberto Eco and Simon Leys, who can write interestingly about almost anything. What he doesn't do, however, is write conclusively. Whereas an American essayist frequently resembles a courtroom lawyer, trying to make an argument or prove a case, Kalka -- who is from Stuttgart, Germany -- is content to circle around a subject, illuminating it from various angles. Then, instead of closing with a knockout summary of the evidence, he simply stops. This can take getting used to. Still, how can you resist a writer who draws insights from "Mickey Mouse and His Sky Adventure" and Gershon Legman's "Rationale of the Dirty Joke"?
Kalka's essays are, in short, anything but conventional. In one he speculates on the erotic implications associated with the title of Balzac's novel "A Woman of Thirty." In still another, he reflects on Baghdad's longtime, and now sadly vanished, connection with Arabian Nights-style romance. "A Good German" relates the career of the ultraconservative 19th-century critic Wolfgang Menzel, who promulgated an intensely Germanophile literature that embraced xenophobia and racism. The 20th-century writer Arno Schmidt argued that one could still use Menzel's writing as a guide, "because his verdicts are so reliably wrong that each and every book he branded as heretical can be read with pleasure to this day."
Kalka's own similarly sharp, though sometimes enigmatic observations dot these pages: "Truth thrives in the margins." All complex narratives "rest upon an invisible foundation of the untold." "Nothing can be more necessary than the superfluous." He quotes well, too. G.K. Chesterton, comparing fiction's portrayal of policemen and amateur detectives, concludes that law enforcement "is the only trade. . . in which the professional is always supposed to be wrong." At one point, Kalka casually reminds us that Proust actually fought a pistol duel over a negative review of his first book.
The long essay on Proust and France's Dreyfus Affair -- the notorious case of a Jewish army officer framed for espionage -- emphasizes a fin-de-siA[umlaut]cle France as politically riven as the United States is now. A right-wing government characterized by jingoist nationalism, fanned national prejudices (anti-Semitism, in this case), suppressed evidence to protect the guilty from prosecution and caused one whistleblower -- the eminent novelist Amile Zola, author of the stirring polemic "J'Accuse" -- to be vilified, convicted of libel and forced to flee to England.
When he looks at the constantly accelerating advances of modern technology, often described as "breath-taking," Kalka notes that this only means that "above a certain speed, one is literally unable to breathe." He then points to the growing gulf between "our inventiveness and our moral imagination, between what we are able to picture somehow, that is, everything, and what we are truly able to picture, to face in our mind's eye with all its consequences -- that is, hardly anything anymore." Kalka's critique closes with a surprising view of our rust-belt past:
"We are already beginning to gaze back yearningly at the industrial labor that was seen so long as the epitome of alienation, the destruction of human potential -- yearningly, for our society is unable to provide a large segment of its population with work of any kind, and in hindsight the secure assembly-line job appears not as dehumanization but as a guarantee of existential meaning and pride."
Let me emphasize, again, that Kalka works up fantasias on particular themes rather than systematic articles. His meditation on gastronomy opens by recalling the lost custom of serving elaborate, "edible structures. The only example we are still familiar with (at least from shop windows) is the wedding cake, which combines elements of architecture, sculpture, and occasionally portrait painting." From here Kalka deconstructs the malleability of cake, Emma Bovary's kitschy wedding dinner, and the symbolic meaning in Victorian England of mutton chops and celery stalks.
With a comparable sprightliness, "Gaslight, Fog, Jack the Ripper" dances from Dickens to Sherlock Holmes to novelist Patricia Cornwell's crazed belief that the painter Walter Sickert was the Ripper to Patrick Hamilton's play "Gaslight" -- source of our vogue term "gaslighting" as the deliberate blurring of the truth -- to Alban Berg's chilling opera "Lulu." Yet another essay considers the ethical implications of a once-advanced weaponry, in this case the submarine. In Billy Wilder's comic film, "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes," Queen Victoria reacts with paradigmatic disgust when she learns about an undersea war machine disguised as the Loch Ness monster. This sort of weapon, she says, is "unsportsmanlike, it is un-English, and it is in very poor taste." Her majesty continues: "Sometimes we despair of the state of the world."
Don't we all, at least occasionally? As Joachim Kalka's "lantern slides" remind us, the fierce hatreds, economic disparities and zeal for new technologies that characterize life today are hardly new. They are simply late growths from 19th-century roots.
Michael Dirdareviews books on Thursday for Style.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Dirda, Michael. "'Truth thrives in the margins' and other insights from a master essayist." Washingtonpost.com, 20 June 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA496299011&it=r&asid=ff3979ed63de2b0c68282514e9aa3ecc. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A496299011
Book World: Essays on the past's present relevance
Michael Dirda
(June 22, 2017): News:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Byline: Michael Dirda
Gaslight: Lantern Slides from the Nineteenth Century
By Joachim Kalka. Translated from the German by Isabel Fargo Cole
New York Review Books. 233 pp. Paperback, $17.95
---
The biographical note accompanying "Gaslight: Lantern Slides From the Nineteenth Century" describes Joachim Kalka as "an essayist, literary critic, and translator of authors such as Martin Amis, Angela Carter, G.K. Chesterton, Christopher Isherwood, and Gilbert Sorrentino." Impressive as it is, that list only hints at the extent of Kalka's literary sophistication. His freewheeling essays - adroitly translated by Isabel Fargo Cole - reveal not only an easy familiarity with the obvious masterpieces of German, French and English-language literature, but also a devotee's appreciation of ghost stories, mysteries, classic films and comics. His subjects range from Wagner's conception of the Valkyries in "The Ring of the Nibelungs" to the artistic legacy of Jack the Ripper to a mini-history of anarchist bomb-throwing.
In fact, Kalka belongs to that admirable line of European intellectuals, such as Roland Barthes, E.M. Cioran, Umberto Eco and Simon Leys, who can write interestingly about almost anything. What he doesn't do, however, is write conclusively. Whereas an American essayist frequently resembles a courtroom lawyer, trying to make an argument or prove a case, Kalka - who is from Stuttgart, Germany - is content to circle around a subject, illuminating it from various angles. Then, instead of closing with a knockout summary of the evidence, he simply stops. This can take getting used to. Still, how can you resist a writer who draws insights from "Mickey Mouse and His Sky Adventure" and Gershon Legman's "Rationale of the Dirty Joke"?
Kalka's essays are, in short, anything but conventional. In one he speculates on the erotic implications associated with the title of Balzac's novel "A Woman of Thirty." In still another, he reflects on Baghdad's longtime, and now sadly vanished, connection with Arabian Nights-style romance. "A Good German" relates the career of the ultraconservative 19th-century critic Wolfgang Menzel, who promulgated an intensely Germanophile literature that embraced xenophobia and racism. The 20th-century writer Arno Schmidt argued that one could still use Menzel's writing as a guide, "because his verdicts are so reliably wrong that each and every book he branded as heretical can be read with pleasure to this day."
Kalka's own similarly sharp, though sometimes enigmatic observations dot these pages: "Truth thrives in the margins." All complex narratives "rest upon an invisible foundation of the untold." "Nothing can be more necessary than the superfluous." He quotes well, too. G.K. Chesterton, comparing fiction's portrayal of policemen and amateur detectives, concludes that law enforcement "is the only trade... in which the professional is always supposed to be wrong." At one point, Kalka casually reminds us that Proust actually fought a pistol duel over a negative review of his first book.
The long essay on Proust and France's Dreyfus Affair - the notorious case of a Jewish army officer framed for espionage - emphasizes a fin-de-siecle France as politically riven as the United States is now. A right-wing government characterized by jingoist nationalism, fanned national prejudices (anti-Semitism, in this case), suppressed evidence to protect the guilty from prosecution and caused one whistleblower - the eminent novelist Emile Zola, author of the stirring polemic "J'Accuse" - to be vilified, convicted of libel and forced to flee to England.
When he looks at the constantly accelerating advances of modern technology, often described as "breath-taking," Kalka notes that this only means that "above a certain speed, one is literally unable to breathe." He then points to the growing gulf between "our inventiveness and our moral imagination, between what we are able to picture (BEGIN ITAL)somehow(END ITAL), that is, everything, and what we are (BEGIN ITAL)truly(END ITAL) able to picture, to face in our mind's eye with all its consequences - that is, hardly anything anymore."Kalka's critique closes with a surprising view of our rust-belt past:
"We are already beginning to gaze back yearningly at the industrial labor that was seen so long as the epitome of alienation, the destruction of human potential - yearningly, for our society is unable to provide a large segment of its population with work of any kind, and in hindsight the secure assembly-line job appears not as dehumanization but as a guarantee of existential meaning and pride."
Let me emphasize, again, that Kalka works up fantasias on particular themes rather than systematic articles. His meditation on gastronomy opens by recalling the lost custom of serving elaborate, "edible (BEGIN ITAL)structures(END ITAL). The only example we are still familiar with (at least from shop windows) is the wedding cake, which combines elements of architecture, sculpture, and occasionally portrait painting." From here Kalka deconstructs the malleability of cake, Emma Bovary's kitschy wedding dinner, and the symbolic meaning in Victorian England of mutton chops and celery stalks.
With a comparable sprightliness, "Gaslight, Fog, Jack the Ripper" dances from Dickens to Sherlock Holmes to novelist Patricia Cornwell's crazed belief that the painter Walter Sickert was the Ripper to Patrick Hamilton's play "Gaslight" - source of our vogue term "gaslighting" as the deliberate blurring of the truth - to Alban Berg's chilling opera "Lulu." Yet another essay considers the ethical implications of a once-advanced weaponry, in this case the submarine. In Billy Wilder's comic film, "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes," Queen Victoria reacts with paradigmatic disgust when she learns about an undersea war machine disguised as the Loch Ness monster. This sort of weapon, she says, is "unsportsmanlike, it is un-English, and it is in very poor taste." Her majesty continues: "Sometimes we despair of the state of the world."
Don't we all, at least occasionally? As Joachim Kalka's "lantern slides" remind us, the fierce hatreds, economic disparities and zeal for new technologies that characterize life today are hardly new. They are simply late growths from 19th-century roots.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Dirda, Michael. "Book World: Essays on the past's present relevance." Washington Post, 22 June 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA496379830&it=r&asid=bab3dae477694cab7bc0eb7f1d1db112. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A496379830
“Gaslight: Lantern Slides from the Nineteenth Century” by Joachim Kalka— The 19th Century
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Kalka, Joachim. “Gaslight: Lantern Slides from the Nineteenth Century”, translated by Isabel Fargo Cole, New York Review Books; Main edition, 2017.
The 19th Century
Amos Lassen
Joachim Kalka in “Gaslight” explores the 19th century and ties the time period to our own through essays on a variety of topics in music, film, literature, and art. He looks at the fascination with its “auratic gaslight,” and its mingling of romanticism and modernity, enlightenment and darkness. Here are the roots of contemporary preoccupations with “gender roles and sexuality, terrorism and technology, mad scientists and serial killers, kitsch and commodification”. For example, Kalka gives us “the connections between Balzac and Billy Wilder, Mickey Mouse and the arms race, the cake fights of Laurel and Hardy and Madame Bovary’s wedding cake”. The nineteenth century comes to life and filled with contradictions, aspirations, and absurdities and as it does it invites the reader to reexamine that era and his/her own, and the stories that we tell ourselves about history.