That’s a statement from Han van Meegeren, a Dutch art dealer who was charged with collaborating with the Nazis by helping them purchase works by Johannes Vermeer. In a new book, The Forger’s Spell: a true story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the greatest art hoax of the twentieth century, Edward Dolnick describes how van Meegeren helped fill a “Vermeer gap”, created by the scarcity of the Dutch master’s paintings, producing “unknown work”. In his review of the book Daniel Stashower says it raises “provocative questions about the nature of art and the psychology of deception”, but seems to miss a larger, and more difficult, issue. What is it about Vermeer? It’s not just the scarcity of his paintings (only about thirty-five are known to exist) or, for that matter, the scarcity of known facts about his life. Even the shortness of his life (he was baptized in 1632 and died in 1675) isn’t enough to explain the fascination. In fact for almost two centuries after his death Vermeer was largely unknown; the French critic Théophile Thoré corrected earlier critics and collectors who’d attributed his paintings to other artists, and throughout the 20th Century his work steadily increased in value.

In addition to the Nazis Salvador Dali had a fascination with Vermeer, putting him (or at least a figure believed to be Vermeer, since we have no actual portraits of the artist) into at least one painting (The Ghost of Vermeer of Delft Which Can Be Used As a Table) and doing variations on some of Vermeer’s paintings, particularly The Lacemaker.

Vermeer has also inspired fiction. Tracy Chevalier’s Girl With A Pearl Earring tells a fictional story of how one of Vermeer’s paintings came to be, and Girl In Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland tells a story of a previously unknown Vermeer, tracing it backward through time to its origin. (What is it with Vermeer’s girls?) There are several more books about stolen Vermeers, such as The Music Lesson by Katharine Weber, and a young adult novel, Chasing Vermeer by Blue Balliett about a couple of kids who get caught up in solving the crime of a stolen Vermeer painting. And in Thomas Harris’s Hannibal former guard Barney is caught auctioning off the infamous Dr. Lecter’s items to finance his plan to see every known Vermeer painting in person.

What is it about Vermeer’s paintings, seemingly simplistic as they are, that they inspire so much passion, so much fascination, and, for that matter, such high prices? I have to admit I can see, in Vermeer’s deft handling of things like light and texture, why he’s considered one of the greatest artists of all time, but the kind of mania he inspires seems to go beyond mere appreciation for his technical accomplishments.

Check out this video of Salvador Dali taunting a rhinoceros with Vermeer’s Lacemaker. It doesn’t answer any questions about Vermeer, and doesn’t really explain anything about Dali either, except that he was a bizarre showoff.

And it does seem like I packed quite a bit into those ridiculously brief weeks of camp. My first camp was Camp Ozone. Ozone, Tennessee, where it was located, is still a tiny little town, and although I’ve been able to find a little information about Ozone Falls, which was nearby, I’m pretty sure the camp is gone now. Or if it’s still there it’s unrecognizable. The beauty of Camp Ozone was that it was so rough around the edges. The cabins we stayed in were real buildings, although the front and side porches were rotting, and there was a big dining hall with a linoleum floor, a piano, and screen windows. There was also a bathhouse with communal showers. Past the bathhouse were the hogans, which were basically wood floors covered with canvas. The younger kids stayed in the cabins. Moving to the hogans was kind of a rite of passage. The main thing I remember about Camp Ozone, though, was the lake. Dark green, it was long and narrow, a man-made lake that, at no point, was more than twelve-feet deep. We could paddle out to the middle in our canoes and see water plants, like emerald anemones, just a few feet below the surface. Step into one of those patches of lake weed and you’d sink up to your knees in silty black muck. It was absolutely wonderful. There was sort of a road that ran around the lake, but it was never paved. In a few shady spots it was covered with gravel, but mostly it was just a big path. That was both Camp Ozone’s beauty and its weakness: there was no concrete or overdevelopment. It was too rustic to be maintained or to attract enough campers to keep it in business.

When I got older and became a Boy Scout trips to Camp Ozone were replaced by trips to Camp Boxwell, where several Boy Scout troops would be assigned their own camping areas and we’d spend a week working on skill awards, merit badges, and running around the woods trying to kill each other. There’s something incredibly rewarding about fifteen or so teenage boys stuck together, some of them really, really, really skilled with knots and with access to rope, footlockers, and matches. And we all complained about the food. I don’t remember that the food at Camp Boxwell was really that bad, but that didn’t stop us from putting up signs in the bathroom that said, “Flush twice, it’s a long way to the kitchen” and signs in the mess hall that said, “We use recycled food.” And then there was the commissary where we got raspberry slushies that fueled long nights of cutting saplings into swords and getting to use our newly learned first aid skills.

Even though I feel like I missed something having camp experiences that were limited to only a week, I wouldn’t trade a minute of those times I spent at camp. Even the bad parts–like the time I almost stepped on a copperhead–were great because, well, it’s not something that can really be put into words. It was camp, and if you ever went to camp yourself, you know what that means.

Like so many others in the past, he didn’t comprehend what he saw. But his status as leader meant that he must straight away translate his fear into violence.

As afraid as we might feel for her at this point there’s also an uneasy feeling of recognition here. We tend to respond to the unfamiliar in the most primitive way, and that’s not always best.

Safe at home she, working as a “compositor of fantasies”, creates a character, Rosa, from her research material, but then Rosa takes on a life of her own. Thomas goes beyond technology, exploring the very nature of the creative imagination, and the consequences of both machines and humans being more than the sum of their parts.

There are numerous Yiddish words that have been appropriated into English, from putz to schmooze to maven (see, for example, my very entertaining colleague The Movie Maven who lives up to the meaning of the term “maven” which comes from a Yiddish word meaning “expert”). Native Yiddish speakers could be forgiven for thinking this appropriation isn’t kosher, or, at the very least, that goyim have a lot of chutzpah for doing it. This kind of appropriation does, sometimes, spell the end of one language as a small number of words are absorbed into another that’s more widely spoken. In an essay in Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams And The Diet of Worms Stephen Jay Gould describes finding, by accident, the former home of a Yiddish publication, Farvarts–”Forward”–and he reflects on extinction. He says, “If we regard the details of diversity as precious and glorious…then the profession of preservation becomes one of the most noble callings that a person can undertake for a life’s work.”

Yiddish, like many other languages, may be gradually dying out as its speakers disappear and are not replaced, but to forget it completely, and to forget its contributions to the English lexicon, would take some serious chutzpah. I started out wanting to write something funny, but, reflecting on the disappearance of linguistic diversity, I found that very hard to do. Instead I’m using the word chutzpah with a sense of seriousness, with a sense that no English synonym–impudence, brazenness, gall, nerve, audacity, shamelessness–carries the same significance.

To be fair it may be hard for her to avoid sensationalism because the article is a review of Captivated: J.M. Barrie, the Du Mauriers and the Dark Side of Neverland by Piers Dudgeon. She sums up Dudgeon’s view that Barrie “filled the vacuum of his own sexual impotence by a compulsive desire to possess the family who inspired his most famous creation, Peter Pan.” This goes against the Hollywood version, Finding Neverland, in which Barrie, played by Johnny Depp, is a friendly but mature man, a kind of eccentric uncle who has a strained relationship with his wife but has a fulfilling, although strictly platonic, relationship with Sylvia Davies. It seems like too much of a cliché to say the truth must lie somewhere in the middle. Nico Davies, quoted by his daughter (who was one of Barrie’s godchildren), said, “I don’t believe that Uncle Jim ever experienced what one might call a stirring in the undergrowth for anyone - man, woman, adult or child. He was an innocent…” Picardie adds that this view is shared by Birkin, who had more extensive access to Barrie’s archives than any other biographer. I also can’t help wondering why there’s a need for some to ponder the sexuality of some children’s authors. Dodgson is also mentioned, and while it’s true that Dodgson made some creepy photographs of little girls and Barrie wrote some unnerving things in his novel The Little White Bird, isn’t it possible that they had an interest in children and an understanding of children that was rooted in their own childhood and not in some sexual deviance?

While it’s tempting to say that Dudgeon is simply wrong because Barrie never had a “vacuum” caused by “sexual impotence”–that he couldn’t miss what he never had, I think there’s also a risk in leaning too far the other way as Alison Lurie did when she called him “the boy who couldn’t grow up”. Barrie was, like anyone else, the sum of his life experiences, from the death of his brother (who was their mother’s clear favorite) to what may have been a glandular problem that prevented him from developing into adulthood (although he could grow a pretty impressive moustache). I think the reason why J.M. Barrie still fascinates us is because none of us really want to grow up, but he inspires sensationalism because we have a conflicting desire to grow up.

There’s a story I know I’ve heard although I can’t remember the source, that Adams’s long periods of writer’s block were actually caused by the huge advances he received from publishers. He’d get an advance of, say, £25,000, and write the word “The” then stare at it, thinking, “That word is worth £25,000.” The addition of a second word, “night”, would cut the amount down to £12,500 per word, then £6,250. That could very quickly drive just about any writer insane, and any time I hear about a writer getting a large advance, I have to stop and wonder how they manage to write with such a huge amount hanging over their heads. Not that I wouldn’t like to try it…but I also can’t help thinking that, if I owned Douglas Adams’s typewriter, I’d never be able to write anything on it. I believe artists have to carve out their own spaces and create their own artifacts because trying to produce great work where someone else did, no matter how much an artist tries to rationalize it by saying, “it’s just a typewriter” or “it’s just a pen” or even “it’s just a desk” it will still be intimidating. It’s a good thing these artifacts become collectors’ items and are usually priced way out of the range of struggling artists–unless, of course, they happen to get huge advances. The trouble is, spending that advance on a battered on typewriter might cure one case of writer’s block and give you a whole new one.

Adams was a wonderfully creative and funny guy who left the world much too soon. And it’s a little late in coming, but, so long, Mr. Adams, and thanks for all the books.

It’s in reading the descriptions of Paleolithic art that I get most frustrated. Judith Thurman in The New Yorker has written her own description of visiting the caves, as well as writing about Curtis’s book and Jean Clottes’ book The Cave Painters. In fact most of her article is taken up with the books, meeting Jean Clottes, with the question of who the painters were, and just getting to the caves. She makes a good effort to describe a section of the Chauvet cave:

From here, one emerges into the deepest recess of Chauvet, the End Chamber, a spectacular vaulted space that contains more than a third of the cave’s etchings and paintings—a few in ochre, most in charcoal, and all meticulously composed. A great frieze covers the back left wall: a pride of lions with Pointillist whiskers seems to be hunting a herd of bison, which appear to have stampeded a troop of rhinos, one of which looks as if it had fallen into, or is climbing out of, a cavity in the rock.

She can’t resist speculating, though, going on to add, ” one has to wonder if cave art didn’t begin with a recognition that bear claws were an expressive tool for engraving a record—poignant and indelible—of a stressed creature’s passage through the dark.” And it must be impossible to stand in front of (or lie underneath) these magnificent works and not to speculate about why they were made. It’s a question that’s at the back of my mind any time I look at any work of art. What drives us to make these things?

What’s even more frustrating than the lack of clear answers about Paleolithic art is an attempt to convey the experience of actually being there in front of it. Access to many caves is severely restricted. Let’s face it: even the breath of a lot of tourists could cause irreparable damage to works that have survived tens of thousands of years in dry, cool caves. Feet and camera flashes could destroy them. And yet I want to visit them. I want to be there in the presence of these works, and I want others to be able to do the same. I don’t know how to balance the need for preservation with a need to connect with the art directly. In an interview for Salon the art critic Robert Hughes responded to the question of why even the most high quality reproduction on a screen of an art work isn’t the same:

And the answer is because paintings are things in the physical world, made out of colored mud smeared on a piece of cloth or a piece of board, with a stick with hairs on the end. They have a particular address to your body, and none of this comes across in the computer image.

He was responding, in his own words, to “some Gatesian nerd” who assumes that computers will make museums obsolete, or already have made them that way, but he could just as easily be speaking about why words and even photographs fail to capture the magnificence of being in the presence of great works of art. Words fail us because images speak so much more eloquently, but even the images fail when they can’t capture the full experience.

For more bevies check out the Collective Noun Page, where you can even submit your own suggestions.

This morning on the radio I heard that a Colorado (the specific location wasn’t given) teenager named Robert Hibbs was, in fact, a troll, standing at a bridge and demanding a dollar payment from anyone who wanted to cross. There was no word on whether he was bearded or wearing a loincloth, although he was wielding a broken golf club. He was rolling joints with the dollar bills he got, though, which explains why he broke with the longstanding troll tradition of demanding gold.

The most famous troll story is The Three Billy Goats Gruff, which is an old Norwegian folk tale collected by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen, who, with Jørgen Engebretsen Moe, collected stories and published them. They were kind of the Brothers Grimm of Norway, and some of the other tales they collected–including the story of why the sea is salty–are just as famous as the Grimms’ tales even though they don’t get nearly as much credit.

As for trolls, and not just the internet kind, it seems like they’re here to stay. Neil Gaiman has a story about meeting a troll at a bridge in his collection Smoke And Mirrors, and in the new Hellboy film Hellboy and his team visit a troll market, which they get to by going under a bridge. So if you’re out walking and come to a bridge be prepared. Here’s what I’d suggest: have a dollar bill taped to a string and when you get close to the bridge drop it on the ground. Trolls turn to stone when exposed to sunlight, so you might be able to lure ‘em out.