Pub date of Pope Who Quit moving up

Doubleday/Image seems to have just moved the official pub date for my book, The Pope Who Quit, up by a few weeks, from early March 2012 to February 14, 2012. I’m not sure why this is; there has been some speculation about Pope Benedict XVI — perhaps there’s some news from the Vatican coming in mid-February. Or perhaps they believe that my medieval history tale will be a hot item for Valentine’s Day gift giving. Yeah, probably not so much. 

Rabindranath Tagore at The Asia Society in NYC

I finished writing a piece about Tagore for America magazine today. It will show up in their pages early in the new year. But here, I wanted to write a few things that I did not have space for in the America article.

I was only able to mention in passing the marvelous exhibit of paintings by Tagore currently at The Asia Society in Manhattan. He came to visual art late in life (in 1924 at the age of 63) and, to those who have read the poems and the short stories, the paintings bring everything together. Tagore’s spiritual vision, often dark, always full of mystery, is all there. Go and see this exhibit if you can. It leaves NYC in early January and re-emerges at The Art Insitute of Chicago on January 25, 2012.

The paintings are full of birds, and geometric shapes, and faces. They are intentionally one-dimensional. Some clearly originated in doodles, others appear to have been carefully executed according to plan.

Some of my favorites:

*Scene with Nine Figures (these titles are not Tagore’s; he never titled his visual art) — looks like Job and his friends, or a group of desert fathers, or a bunch of sadhus by the seaside.

*Man and Woman Against a Dark Background — is, in contrast to Scene with Nine Figures, exclusively human, without any reference to religious reference points. It seems to communicate a major theme in Tagore’s visual art: the dark side of human relationships, which can be frightening, alienating, even dangerous.

There are many paintings of women’s faces and many of them look like the Virgin Mary, or nearly any peasant Indian woman wearing a sari or veil.

And then there are many paintings of men’s faces, often wearing turbans, and bearded like Christ — or like Tagore himself. I found myself often wondering, staring at these dark creations, what and who the artist was contemplating with his brush.