On Kenneth Branagh's HAMLET (1996)

When I first saw Kenneth Branagh's 4-hour "full text" version of Hamlet during its initial theatrical release in 1996, I was not overly impressed. I thought it was OK but too long, had too many cameos and was too much of a Kenneth Branagh Experience. Now, having just finished watching the pristine DVD release, I wonder what kind of bad weed I was smoking back in '96. Branagh's Hamlet is a great film. And more than that, it is the best Hamlet I have ever seen on film: better than Olivier's reductive "man who could not make up his mind" interpretation; better than Tony Richardson's 1969 film with Anthony Hopkins miscast as Claudius to Nicol Williamson's Hamlet (although Hopkins is actually a year older than Williamson, he looked about 10 years younger in 1969, and Claudius should really look noticeably older than Hamlet); better than Zefferelli's version with crazy Mel Gibson pretending to be sane; better than the tame 1980s PBS film with Kevin Kline; better than the Ethan Hawke 'Wall Street Hamlet' with Sam Shepard as the Ghost (providing the best scene in the movie, by far). Brilliant and thrilling and as mad as its protagonist, Branagh's film deserves to be seen again and again. Yes, Jack Lemmon's wooden line readings weigh down the front end a bit, but that's ultimately a minor flaw, and what works in the film massively outweighs it--to wit: the "too, too solid flesh" soliloquy in the suddenly emptied great hall; the mirrored "To be or not to be" soliloquy during which the camera moves in so that the edges of the mirror become invisible and we have an image of two Hamlets with daggers drawn preparing to duel, an absolutely perfect visual analogue for the soliloquy; the thrilling "let my thoughts be bloody" speech reimagined as a German Romantic aria performed atop a snowy mountain out of Caspar David Friedrich; Derek Jacobi's Claudius, who comes off in this production as almost a Macbethian tragic figure (it could be argued that this is Jacobi's movie); Brian Blessed's performance as the Ghost, especially the wonderfully understated side-glance of tenderness he directs at Gertrude in the bedchamber scene; the amazingly fluid camera work (looks like steadicam, but it's actually all dolly shots); the marvelous Wellesian low-angle shot that shows Hamlet and Gertrude reflected in a pool of Polonius's blood; the perfect casting of Charlton Heston as the Player King (which made me think: if Chuck had been offered more roles like this during the 90s, maybe he wouldn't have gone looking for love at Wayne LaPierre's house); the mad genius of Branagh's set with its rooms behind mirrors, secret passages and myriad hiding places, a set on which no one can say with certainty "Now I am alone..."; the fact that one of those mirrors conceals the padded cell in which Ophelia will rave... I could go on ("I'll rant as well as thou") because this is a great film, probably the only Shakespeare film that's worth watching twice solely for its excellence as a film. The DVD commentary track by Branagh and the film's textual advisor is also quite good. It was only when watching the the movie with the commentary track on (and Shakespeare's words muted) that I was able to fully appreciate the filmic beauty of this work (the mise en scene, shot compositions, etc.). This is a Shakespeare movie that still looks amazing even without Shakespeare's words. Check it out.

THE RENAISSANCE by Walter Pater

Pater's Renaissance is one of my Bibles. Specifically, it's my Pentateuch. Joyce's Ulysses is my New Testament, Gravity's Rainbow my Apocalypse, Tristram Shandy my Apocrypha, Kafka my Koran, and A la recherche du temps perdu my endless Mahabarata. One of the most beautifully-written books in the English language, The Renaissance has an undeserved reputation for purple prose and an all-too-deserved one as the holy book of decadent aestheticism. "I wish they would not call me a hedonist," Pater once complained, "it gives such a wrong impression to those who do not know Greek." As we all know, however, the real reason we are discomforted by any description of ourselves is the possibility that it might give people the right idea. Pater was an aesthete, and his book is the first and best English-language manifesto of aesthetic life. Here's a taste (and just a taste) of what Pater is capable of:

On Pico Della Mirandola: "And yet to read a page of one of Pico's forgotten books is like a glance into one of those ancient sepulchres, upon which the wanderer in classical lands has sometimes stumbled, with the old disused ornaments and furniture of a world wholly unlike ours still fresh in them."

On Michelangelo: "A certain strangeness, something of the blossoming of the aloe, is indeed an element in all true works of art: that they shall excite or surprise us is indispensable. But that they shall give pleasure and exert a charm over us is indispensable too; and this strangeness must be sweet also--a lovely strangeness."

On Michelangelo's pietas: "He has left it in many forms, sketches, half-finished designs, finished and unfinished groups of sculpture; but always as a hopeless, rayless, almost heathen sorrow--no divine sorrow, but mere pity and awe at the stiff limbs and colourless lips."

On the Uffizi Medusa (also the subject of a poem by Shelley): "What may be called the fascination of corruption penetrates in every touch its exquisitely finished beauty."

On the proper use of philosophy: "Philosophy serves culture, not by the fancied gift of absolute or transcendental knowledge, but by suggesting questions which help one to detect the passion, and strangeness, and dramatic contrasts of life."

On aesthetic experience: "Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch."

I could continue quoting Pater until my hands curl up like lobster claws, but that would only wrench more quotes out of the contexts in which they really must be read. In the long last chapter, Pater quotes Goethe on Winckelmann: "One learns nothing from him, but one becomes something." The same is true of Pater. If one reads him deeply and well, one might become an aesthete. The Renaissance is one of my 'essential' books. Every literate human being should own a copy.

OUT OF SHEER RAGE: WRESTLING WITH D.H. LAWRENCE by Geoff Dyer

Geoff Dyer is a wanker. Anyone who has read his dire book of travel pieces, Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It, knows just how much of a wanker he can be. Out of Sheer Rage, on the other hand, is a much better and more original book, a first-person account of Dyer's failure to write a book about D.H. Lawrence that becomes, in its way, a rather beautiful book about Lawrence. Reading it, I was reminded of Henry Miller's early attempt to write a Lawrence book; as I recall, Miller amassed reams of research material and became so engrossed in the research that the book itself was never written. Something of that sort happens to Dyer, but fortunately he turns his inability to sit down and re-read Women in Love into the motive for a globe-spanning tour of Lawrentian locales that rarely fails to entertain and sometimes does much more. There are memorable visits to Lawrence's childhood home and his house in Italy, but the book really comes alive when a Lawrentian consciousness seems to leak out of Dyer's reading and invade his world. After a moped crash in Greece, for example, Dyer and his girlfriend have post-traumatic, injured sex. Lawrence would've understood their need for sex at this moment, but he couldn't have written a scene with the gentle humor of Dyer's. (Humor was not D.H.'s strong point; it's hard to laugh while coughing blood.) Even better--the high point of the book, in fact--is a druggy scene on a Mexican beach in which Dyer takes himself in hand (the arch-wanker wanks) while staring at his girlfriend's pussy and imagining himself licking her clit while she pisses on his chin. Dyer can hold this vision for only a few seconds, though, until self-consciousness kicks in and he realizes he's sitting naked on a public beach preparing to wank. There are quite a lot of good scenes, interesting thoughts and questionable assertions in this book, and they are all worth reading.

SHAKESPEARE, TRAGICAL AND COMICAL

Hamlet and Twelfth Night were made for each other. Probably written around the same time (yes, my 'probably' covers a multitude of scholarly sins, but let's leave the fraught matter of Shakespearean chronology aside for the length of this post), the two plays strangely and surprisingly complement each other, and could be fruitfully performed on alternating nights. If Hamlet is Shakespeare's greatest theatrically self-conscious work (the play within the play; Hamlet as an actor who performs madness so well that his own disbelief is at times suspended, etc.), Twelfth Night may be his greatest textually self-conscious work, frequently reflecting on problems of reading, writing, language, representation and (mis)interpretation. ("Malvolio: By my life, this is my lady's hand. These be her very c's, her u's, and her t's; and thus she makes her great P's." [insert groundlings' raucous laughter here]). And at the beginning of Act Three, Feste is a most Derridean clown (or should we think of Derrida as Feste translated into labyrinthine French?):

Viola: Thy reason, man?

Feste: Troth, sir, I can yield you none without words, and words are grown so false I am loath to prove reason with them.


I am suggesting that each of these plays mirrors the other--or that we should make them mirrors in our minds. We should read Viola's performance through Hamlet's, and vice versa; read Malvolio's 'scene of reading' through Polonius's, and so on. This might be the best way to break down the thoroughly artificial historical barrier separating Shakespeare's raucous tragedies from his serious comedies. And this barrier must be laid low if we are to understand Shakespeare at all. "Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world" is the plea Shakespeare makes through Falstaff (playing Hal pleading for Falstaff in a typically mind-boggling bit of meta-theater), and too many critics and readers have been too quick to reply like Hal, "I do. I will." An important lesson of ALL of Shakespeare, though, is that any idea of tragedy that slights comedy cuts out its own heart before it has had a chance to start beating. Maybe we can't really understand Shakespeare unless and until we can see fat Jack Falstaff and melancholy Hamlet and tranvestite Viola as brothers.

THE MAD MAN by Samuel Delany

Oh boy... This is the book in which Samuel Delany, never one to fly his freak flag at half-staff, runs that sucker all the way up the pole, over the top and into the stratosphere. The Mad Man is the story of John Marr, a young, gay, African-American grad student in philosophy, and his decade-long quest to understand the life, work, thought and death of Timothy Hasler, a young, gay, Korean-American philosopher murdered in a New York City hustlers' bar in the early 1970s. That's the standard Publisher's Weekly-type description of this novel, and it's pretty much bullshit. The Mad Man is nothing like A.S. Byatt's Possession (which Delany reviewed and which probably inspired the novel's conception), and Gwyneth Paltrow will definitely not be appearing in the movie. The Mad Man isn't an academic novel, either--at least not after the first 20 pages. And the 'mystery' of Hasler's death is solved with a pathetically minimal amount of investigation and no real thought at all. No, while The Mad Man flirts with these genres, uses them, cruises them, it never really hooks up for a meaningful relationship. So what, finally, is this book? The Mad Man is one of the filthiest and raunchiest pornographic novels of the twentieth (or any other) century. It's a novel that concerns itself, in explicit, extensive, sometimes comic and occasionally tiresome detail, with men whose sexuality takes the form of drinking other men's urine and eating their feces. This is Delany's long (almost 500 pages in the definitive revised edition of 2002) song of urolagnia and coprophagia, a novel in which the narrator repeatedly falls to his knees to drink the warm piss of filthy homeless men. Now, the last part of that sentence might make the novel sound rather stupid, an academic exercise in transgression, slumming for tenure. But The Mad Man isn't that, either. It is one of the most highly intelligent--indeed, intellectual--porn novels ever written, a book that belongs on the shelf with Bataille's Story of the Eye and Sade's Philosophy in the Bedroom. Delany's novel might be subtitled 'Philosophy at the Mine Shaft,' for it is during an early-80s 'wet night' in that bar that the narrator begins to understand Heidegger's concept of 'meditative thinking'--surely the raunchiest context in which that thinker has ever been invoked. Delany shows us two 'wet nights' over the course of his novel, and both are among the most eye-opening scenes in the book. But if The Mad Man were only an intellectual / philosophical porn novel, it probably still wouldn't be worth 500 pages of my time. What kept me reading was the book's strange alienation effect: since Delany describes desires so far away from mine, I'm alienated from his sex scenes (the novel thus functions for most readers, straight and gay, as the very opposite of traditional pornography--another, and especially triumphant, example of Delany's deconstructive genre-cruising). I am alienated from the novel's raunchiest scenes in a way that opens up space for reflection on the nature of desire. At what may be its deepest level (understanding that the very notions of 'depths' and 'levels' would be exceedingly problematic to a postmodernist like Delany, and also that they would be, in the book's own terms, 'Hasler Structures'), the novel is an examination of the farthest shores of human desire in all its messiness and of the structures we build to contain that chaos. One critic has likened this book to "an unbelievably raunchy Magic Mountain," and while that comparison is at least a bit hyperbolic, I think it would be fair to call the novel an extended dramatic meditation on Hegel's discussion of the master-slave relationship. The narrator is impressed enough by The Phenomenology of Spirit/Mind (different translators translate geist differently; the German word denotes both meanings) to plan at one point a vast Hegelian summa to be titled The Systems of the World. The Mad Man might be read as a chapter in that abandoned effort.

THE STRONGER by August Strindberg

Strindberg's 6-page play The Stronger, a work that exerted an obvious influence on Ingmar Bergman's film Persona, is a smaller and considerably less complex work than that film, but it remains of interest because of the extreme psychological movement at its climax. When Mrs. X, the speaker, evokes her colonization by the silent Miss Y, she does so in imagery that is luridly sado-masochistic. This poetic vision of ultimate inauthenticity, probably the first and only few lucid seconds of the character's life, is immediately 'flipped' into a self-aggrandizing embrace of inauthenticity as ultimate superiority. The change comes fast enough to give readers and viewers a severe case of whiplash, and that's probably why it feels so compelling, so accurate. Defense mechanisms do tend to slip into place this quickly and efficiently, a fact that renders The Stronger a most chilling little play.

And what of Miss Y? She remains an unknown quantity, a silence upon which we can project our prejudices and call them interpretations. She may well be every bit as inauthentic as her Chatty Cathy companion. To be seduced by her silence into an overestimation of her character is to hear the sound of a Strindbergian trap closing around us.

CULTURAL AMNESIA by Clive James

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DOUBLE LIVES, SECOND CHANCES: THE CINEMA OF KRZYSZTOF KIESLOWSKI by Annette Insdorf

Anyone who comes to Annette Insdorf's book in search of incisive, challenging criticism of Kieslowski's works should look elsewhere. Insdorf knew and loved Kieslowski (she tells us that she called him 'Wujek' [Polish for 'uncle'] and he called her 'Mala' ['little one']), and she comes solely to praise him, an attitude that tends toward the tiresome. Overall, though, her book is valuable and worthy of measured praise rather than dismissive burial. The book is very good on a strictly informational level, providing an excellent overview of Kieslowski's many early documentaries and obscure pre-Decalogue feature films, and it succeeds well in communicating the complete shape of Kieslowski's career. Indeed, it's really more an annotated filmography than a work of criticism. Insdorf is anything but critical. Her commentaries are, however, often illuminating, especially her discussion of the Three Colors trilogy--a discussion that informs and enriches our understanding of the films despite the fact that Insdorf, like the director himself, works overtime to make the trilogy (especially White) seem more humanistic and hopeful (and consistent) than it actually is. One example of the low level of critical intelligence Insdorf brings to bear on these movies: Even though she writes that the events of White take place over a period longer than one year, she's perfectly prepared to play along with Kieslowski's too-neat ending to Red and write that "the trilogy comes full circle within one year." In fact, as careful viewing makes clear, White, Blue and Red are chronologically inconsistent; Karol and Dominique could not possibly have been on a boat crossing the English Channel one year after the death of Julie's husband.

Insdorf also tells us that Kieslowski had a difficult time deciding on the proper endings for some of his films (The Double Life of Veronique and White, in particular), so perhaps the ambiguity of these endings is less a result of artistic mastery than of directorial uncertainty. Hardly a 'killing' criticism, this may just be another way of saying that Kieslowski's films are courageously authentic, true to the director's and screenwriter's visions even when those visions are uncertain or conflicted.

Since my opinion of this book is making me sound like something of a Kieslowski killjoy, I should probably state that I consider the Decalogue, the Three Colors trilogy and The Double Life of Veronique to be among the best films of the past fifty years. I wish Insdorf had written a book equal to them.

WILLIAM GASS, AMERICAN WRITER

On this July 3, as America tunes up for its annual day of self-congratulatory symphonies, allow me to pre-emptively piss on the parades by presenting a few select passages from the always aphoristic and absurdly alliterative essays of William H. Gass:

"Our culture...desires men who will be willing to be mowed down in anonymous rows if need be, used up in families, in farms and factories, thrown away on the streets of sprawling towns, who want to pass through existence so cleanly no trace of them will ever be found."--Habitations of the Word

"Consciousness is all the holiness we have."--Habitations of the Word

"Theology, it appears, is one-half fiction, one-half literary criticism."--Fiction and the Figures of Life

"...the chief point in life is to die of something and never for something if it can be helped."--Tests of Time

"Francis Bacon prosecuted his patron, Essex, for treason, and was found guilty himself of bribery and consequently expelled from court. Vianini was burned at the stake...At the hands of the Inquisition Giordano Bruno suffered the same painful fate. Nothing was ever done to Louisa May Alcott."--Tests of Time

"In every country, in every clime, regarding any rank or race, at any time and with little excuse, orthodoxy will act evilly toward its enemies. Survival is its single aim--that is, to rigidify thought, sterilize doubt, cauterize criticism, and mobilize the many to brutalize the few who dare to dream beyond the borders of their village, the walls of their room, the conventions of their community, the givens of some god, the mother-smother of custom, or the regimen of an outmoded morality--and even the Greatest Good itself could not fail to be bruised by such handling, and rapidly rot where the bruise had been."--Tests of Time

"One sign of a sound idea is its fearlessness."--Tests of Time

"Writers must reveal and accuse. It will happen naturally. No need to aim at some selected target. Writing well will put the writing in the bulls-eye."--Tests of Time

"When all is well, everyone is ill but will not know it."--Tests of Time

"Early on I learned that life was meaningless, since life was not a sign; that novels were meaningful because signs were the very materials of their composition. I learned that suffering served no purpose; that the good guys didn't win; that most explanations offered me to make the mess I was in less a mess were self-serving lies. Life wasn't clear, it was ambiguous; motives were many and mixed; values were complex, opposed, poisoned by hypocrisy, without any reasonable ground; most of passion's pageants were frauds, and human feelings had been faked for so long, no one knew what the genuine was; furthermore, many of the things I found most satisfactory were everywhere libelously characterized or their very existence was suppressed; and much of adult society, its institutions and its advertised dreams, were simply superstitions that served a small set of people well while keeping the remainder in miserable ignorance."--Finding A Form

"When I looked at man, I did not see a noble piece of work, a species whose every member was automatically of infinite worth and the pinnacle of Nature's efforts. Nor did history, as I read it, support such grandiose claims. Throughout human time, men had been murdering men with an ease that suggested they took a profound pleasure in it, and like the most voracious insect, the entire tribe was, even as I watched, even as I participated, eating its host like a parasite whose foresight did not exceed its greed. Hate, fear and hunger were the tribal heroes."--Finding A Form

"If life is hard, art is harder."--The World Within the Word

"If you enjoy the opinions you possess, if they give you a glow, be suspicious. They may be possessing you. An opinion should be treated like a guest who is likely to stay too late and drink all the whiskey."--A Temple of Texts

"Yeats grew old disgracefully. It is the only way to go."--A Temple of Texts

"It seems incredible, the ease with which we sink through books quite out of sight, pass clamorous pages into soundless dreams. That novels should be made of words, and merely words, is shocking, really. It's as though you had discovered that your wife were made of rubber..."--Fiction and the Figures of Life

"It is the principal function of popular culture--though hardly its avowed purpose--to keep men from understanding what is happening to them, for social unrest would surely follow, and who knows what outbursts of revenge and rage. War, work, poverty, disease, religion: these, in the past, have kept men's minds full, small, and careful. Religion gave men hope who otherwise could have none. Even a mechanical rabbit can make the greyhounds run."--Fiction and the Figures of Life

"Even Arnold Bennett noticed that we do not measure classics; they, rather, measure us. For most people it is precisely this that's painful; they do not wish to know their own nothingness--or their own potentialities either..."--Fiction and the Figures of Life

"Works of art confront us the way few people dare to: completely, openly, at once."--Fiction and the Figures of Life

"The artist is a lover, and he must woo his medium till she opens to him; until the richness in her rises to the surface like a blush."--Fiction and the Figures of Life

And to bring this Gassean litany to an end, one of my favorite quotes from Gass's great essayistic precursor, Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them."--from the essay "Circles"

Have an unsettled Fourth of July.

CANETTI SAID IT (supposedly)

I'm attempting to source the following quote attributed to Elias Canetti:

"Happiness is that ridiculous life goal of illiterates."

More than one movie reviewer quoted it in reviews of Mike Leigh's recent Happy Go Lucky, but none of them bothered to note the source.

UPDATE 11/19/11: The line is from Canetti's novel Die Blendung (English title: Auto Da Fe). The complete sentence reads: “Almost Kien was tempted to believe in happiness, that contemptible life-goal of illiterates. If it came of itself, without being hunted for, if you did not hold it fast by force and treated it with a certain condescension, it was permissible to endure its presence for a few days.” 

Thanks Natalie.

RAMBLING ROUND ULYSSES: A BLOOMING BLOG FOR BLOOMSDAY

Yes it is yes it's Bloomsday again, and if you don't like it, you can K.M.R.I.A....

Neither stately nor plump nor Buck Mulligan, I come to the stairhead of Joyce's tower at Sandycove and step out onto the roof. It's a cool, misty morning in the middle of May, and as I emerge into it from the cramped, curving stairway and walk to the round parapet that overlooks the sea, my overwhelming impression is of greyness, a grey so blanketing it must be spelled with the bland British 'e' instead of the more upbeat American 'a'. Grey sky, grey sea, long grey cargo ship inching across a grey horizon that might have been painted by Whistler, grey water splashing against dark grey rocks, on the coastal road a few yards below (the tower isn't tall at all) a gray-haired Garda officer leans against the grey stone retaining wall and works with intense concentration at a cigarette from which a pencil-thin line of grey smoke snakes upward. (Or at least that's the way I remember it now, a few years later, sitting at my desk in a far corner of a distant room in a house in rural Ohio a few days before the longest of the year, attempting to reconstruct the scene, flipping through old notebooks, fingering photographs like rosary beads, not so much recalling or reciting memories as creating them anew on the light-emitting screen of a technological device that probably wouldn't have surprised Joyce at all--as Beckett said, the man tended toward omniscience.) Even the tower itself is grey. I lean against the grey stone parapet and survey the roof, this empty space no more than 10 feet in diameter where the greatest novel of the 20th century, the Rosetta Stone of Modernism, begins. There's something missing here. It's a launch pad without a rocket. The old lapwing already flew. Whereto? Trieste-Zurich-Paris, as we all know. Yes... I turn around to face the land he fled. In Joyce's day the Martello tower was in a relatively desolate spot on a coastal headland, but today Sandycove is where suburbia meets the sea. It's a typical residential suburb of Dublin, distinguished only by the brightly colored houses that line the coastal road, part of a half-hearted attempt to 'brand' this stretch of coast as the Irish Riviera. The only bright spot, from my point of view, is that the coastal houses won't be here long. Year by year the sea encroaches upon encroaching suburbia. Landslips are moving within feet of the coastal road, and the retaining wall won't hold them back for long. Soon--sooner than the residents and realtors believe--suburbia will truly meet the sea... The mist turns to cool, grey rain, and I disappointedly trudge down the stairs while birds the color of melancholy soar overhead. The tower has run out of epiphanies... A few minutes later, walking along the winding coastal road to the train station, I glance back at the tower and appreciate its absurdity. Originally a lookout place, it now looks comically out of place, a stubby lingam of suburbia raising its unimpressive erection between a row of overpriced houses and a road that skirts the sea.

When I arrived at Dublin airport, a place so architecturally unprepossessing that it immediately reminded me of my old high school, an immigrations officer drowsily asked the purpose of my visit and I replied, "James Joyce pilgrimage."
He looked up. "James Joyce?" he asked, speaking the last name with a slightly suspicious emphasis. "You mean Ulysses? That fella?" (This moment gave me my first lesson in Irish pronunciation. The Irish pronounce the name of Joyce's novel with a strong emphasis on the first syllable: YOO-li-seez.)
"Yes," I replied, "that's the guy."
Still holding my passport, the officer gave me a penetrating stare and said, "That's a hard book... Have you read Ulysses?"
I paused for a few seconds to enjoy the moment. I was actually being asked--under penalty of perjury and deportation, no less--if I had read Ulysses. To hell with all the people behind me in line. This was a moment to savor. Glancing down at my passport still firmly held between his thumb and forefinger, I said, "Will you kick me out of the country if I say no?"
He paused before answering, perfectly deadpan: "That is a distinct possibility, sir."
"Well then, yes," I replied overenthusiastically, "Yes, I've read it several times. Yes, I have. Yes."
He handed me my passport and waved me into the country with a bored "Enjoy it anyway."

I did.

When I returned to central Dublin after my morning at Sandycove I walked up O'Connell street, passed the Rotunda, and continued north to another of the genesis sites of twentieth-century art, the studio of Francis Bacon. A few years after Bacon's death in 1991, his studio and all its contents (untouched since the painter's death) were transferred from Reece Mews in London to Dublin's Hugh Lane Gallery. The studio is installed in a separate room at the back of the gallery, past a small but impressive collection of 19th-century French paintings (some of the best of which are jointly owned with the London National Gallery, the result of a massive and seemingly endless Jarndyce & Jarndyce-style legal entanglement that began when Lane died in the sinking of the Lusitania before he could clear up some ambiguity regarding the disposition of his paintings). The gallery is free, but Bacon's studio is not, so one must buy a ticket in the bookshop before trekking back to the dimly lighted room where a short documentary on Bacon plays perpetually. The doc is worth viewing, but the real attraction here is the studio. The Hugh Lane employed a team of archaeologists to map the London studio like an archaeological site, carefully noting the disposition of every scrap of paper, every discarded brush, every empty, tossed-aside paint can. It was all catalogued, removed and shipped to Dublin, along with the studio's walls, door and floor, and here at the back of the Lane all of the pieces were put together again. It's not a large room, for an artist's studio. It's slightly larger than a suburban living room. But it is heroically cluttered. 'Messy' doesn't describe it. This may be the most cluttered room I have ever seen--and I've known some pretty messy people...Yes, this is where Francis did his dirty work... Bacon likened the mess in his studio to the contents of his mind, so this room deserves its place in an art gallery, because it is in fact a work of art, an environment created by an artist as a portrait of his own mind, an objective correlative for the place his art really 'comes from'. And it also deserves its place in Dublin (city of Bacon's birth), for this is a most Joycean work of art, a work that in another medium marries the autobiographical imperatives of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to the encyclopedic surrealism of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. A listing of the torn papers and illustration fragments lying at random around the floor would resemble one of the catalogs from the last two books and would constitute an index of the painter's interests. The studio is sculpture as surrealist autobiography... These thoughts came to me as I stood in the now permanently open doorway of Bacon's studio and stared through plexiglass at the interior. (Unfortunately, we can't go inside; we remain voyeurs peering in at the Baconian aquarium, trying to spot the sea monsters.) There are five orifices through which one can view the studio: the glassed-in doorway, two peepholes sunk into the opposite wall, and two windows in what was the exterior wall. Looking through one of these windows, I had the uncanny experience of seeing myself reflected in Bacon's oft-photographed round studio mirror. So I guess I did make it inside. The mirror captured my face, peering in like an intruder from the gallery's surrounding darkness.

The morning I arrived in Dublin, I passed Bono on the sidewalk. I didn't believe it, of course. After all, who really arrives in Dublin, takes a bus to the city center, drops his bag at his hotel, and steps out for a walk only to immediately cross paths with the world's most famous Irishman? Shit like that doesn't happen... Well, except when it does. Returning to my hotel later that day, I mentioned ironically to the desk clerk that I saw "some guy who looked like Bono." The clerk was unimpressed. "Yes, that probably was Bono," he replied flatly. "U2 owns the hotel around the corner from there, and they stay there whenever they're in the city." The next time I left the hotel, I fully expected to see Van Morrison ambling down Lower Baggot Street. Unfortunately, Van the Man was nowhere in sight.

One morning I sat in Stephen's Green and watched the Dubliners walking past. Every man and woman seemed to move inside his or her own story. How many interior monologues are criss-crossing here, I thought from my bench, what interweaving of minds. Who is this tall, gaunt man who wears his overcoat like a hanger, and why does he sidestep to avoid walking under the shadow of that grove of trees? Who is this young woman in a red coat walking with her head down and hair pulled back in a thick ponytail that bounces softly against her upper back as she strides along? Woman in red aside, Dublin is a city that wears black. Every man his own Dedalus, walking in perpetual mourning for that morning's fall in the stock market.

Every walk in central Dublin is a walk through Ulysses. The better you know the novel, the more names and places you'll recognize. Wandering in the cemetery from the 'Hades' episode, I seemed to see the last name of a Ulysses character on every other tombstone. Turning north just beyond O'Connell street, I passed Capel Street, home of the lending library used by one Leopold Bloom. Northeast of there, on Eccles Street, the home of the Blooms has been torn down, demolished to make way for a maternity hospital, but the other side of the street remains much as it was in Joycean times, allowing us to project its mirror image on the demolished side and see the street Joyce would've struggled to recall as he imagined it all in Trieste-Zurich-Paris 1914-1921.

Those dates still shock. Joyce started writing Ulysses the year Europe marched merrily off to hell in Flanders fields. Its writing spanned the whole of WWI, the Easter Rising, the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Flu, and the Irish Civil War. He finished the novel not merely in a different city but a different world. An obvious and enormous question arises: how do the events of its years of composition impinge upon the novel?... I'll let you think about that one.

Ulysses turns up in the most unexpected places. Click here to see a reproduction (much too small, unfortunately; a slightly larger and clearer reproduction is here, thanks to Towleroad.com) of artist Paul Cadmus's 1931 portrait of his lover Jared French. Their illegally acquired copy of Ulysses is featured prominently in this portrait, which was recently acquired by the Toledo Museum of Art in Toledo, Ohio. The illicit book, presented upside down with French's phallic fingertip disappearing into a crack in its up-turned bottom, is an almost too-obvious symbol of gay male anal sex. Cadmus uses the smuggled book to smuggle into his painting an image of the unrepresentable. This painting deserves a place beside Meret Oppenheim's fur teacup in that small gallery of 20th century gay and lesbian erotic art icons. (I fell in love with Jerry [the painting's title] when I saw it a few weeks ago, and I will eventually be writing about it at length.)


Finally, here's a Bloomsday to-do list (one item for each chapter):

1. Start the day with rich white milk, not hers
2. Try to awake from your historical nightmare
3. Telephone Eden on your navelcord
4. Discuss the works of Paul de Kock.
5. Stupefy them with Latin
6. Plant Paddy Dignam and watch him, Bloom
7. Kiss Molly's Royal Irish Arse
8. U.P.
9. Prove by algebra that Hamlet's father was his mother's uncle's brother's cousin's mother
10. Stalk Father John Conmee SJ from central Dublin to the hill of Howth
11. Tunefully tup Mrs. Bloom
12. Explain by science the hanged man's erection
13. Come
14. Read Saintsbury's History of English Prose Rhythm
15. Visit a Surrealist brothel and be as bad as Parnell was
16. Buck yourself up in orthodox Samaritan fashion
17. Insert long round end
18. ...and yes I said yes I will Yes.

MERRY BLOOMSDAY!

INWARDNESS AND EXISTENCE: SUBJECTIVITY IN/AND HEGEL, HEIDEGGER, MARX AND FREUD by Walter A. Davis

How good is this book? Just follow this link over to Amazon.com and buy yourself a copy. Right now. It's that good. (Alternatively, go to your local library and politely request that they acquire a copy for their Philosophy section.)

If a great book is one that shows you something more and different every time you read it, that changes with every reading because every reading changes you, then Inwardness and Existence is a great book. It's also a good book, the best kind in fact, the kind you can periodically re-read for the rest of your life. What makes it so special, sets it above most other books written by American academics in the last 30 years? It's a philosophically rigorous and at times mind-bogglingly ambitious book about the structure and construction of the self. While most academic writing on this subject today begins and ends with Foucault or Lacan and their followers, Davis's book begins with Hegel and doesn't really end. The book is circular, like a philosophical Finnegans Wake. It would probably be greatly illuminating to read Inwardness and Existence straight through and then turn immediately back to the first page and begin again, with the foreknowledge constituted by the first reading still fresh in one's mind.

Davis's book is 20 years old this year, and it's time for it to become more widely known in America and the rest of the world. (It appears to be slightly better known in Britain, where it has influenced the thinking of Britain's leading theologian, Rowan Williams, the current Archbishop of Canterbury.) This book and Davis's work generally should be at least as well-known as the works of Derrida, a thinker Davis surpasses and contains. One of the many high points of I&E (for me, anyway) is the section in which Davis compellingly argues that Deconstruction is a prematurely arrested moment of a dialectical movement that issues in Hegelian unhappy (or tragic) consciousness. Furthermore, Davis presents this demonstration not with a view to defending the battered ruins of traditional humanism but with the intention of radically destabilizing both humanism and deconstruction by means of a vast and Romantically ambitious synthesis of central ideas from the works of the four thinkers listed in the subtitle. Even more impressively, Davis doesn't simply lift useful ideas from Hegel, Freud, Marx and Heidegger; he reads each of them against themselves (as traditionally interpreted) to offer interesting and exciting new understandings of Hegelian self-consciousness, Existentialist freedom, Marxist subjectivity and Freudian psychoanalysis. (I did call it mind-bogglingly ambitious, didn't I?) And Davis's extended examinations of these schools of thought are so rich in insight, so powerful and compelling in their discussions of lived experience and of the meanings we give to life, that the book might as well have been subtitled "Subjectivity in/and Consciousness, Death, Culture, and Sex." (The book would probably have sold more copies with this subtitle.)

Both nouns in the title are crucial to understanding this book and Davis's work as a whole, but I want to focus on the second and think about Inwardness and Existence as a major contribution to Existentialism, probably the most important contribution yet made by an American thinker. This book takes Existentialism beyond Sartre, as he is popularly understood, by arguing that Sartrean freedom is not an a priori but must be achieved by a rigorous and extremely difficult process of rooting out the enormous intrusions of the Other upon the Self, the networks of internalized conflicts and ideologies that constitute most of who and what we are. This process of rooting out--called anti-bildung here and elaborated upon in Davis's later works Deracination and Death's Dream Kingdom--is the necessary preliminary to any of the authentic acts by which the Sartrean subject constructs his self, and it is such difficult work that few human beings ever begin it.

I know what you're thinking: If this book is so great, why haven't I heard of it?
Easy answer: You have heard of it now.

THE STREET OF CROCODILES by Bruno Schulz

If no one has yet used the word 'decadent' to describe Bruno Schulz's prose, allow me to be the first. I have defined 'decadence' elsewhere as a mode of artistic production characterized by highly stylized excess, and even the briefest examination of a random page from The Street of Crocodiles is a more effective argument than any I could construct for the work's decadent nature. (I should probably add that to me the word 'decadence' is purely descriptive, connoting no positive or negative aesthetic or moral judgment.) Assuming the general faithfulness of Celina Wieniewska's translation (a controversial issue that I am not linguistically competent to pronounce upon), Schulz writes a lush, beautiful, gloriously decadent prose, the highly figurative lyricism of which overwhelms the narrative gestures in his fiction. Schulz's 'stories' are nothing of the sort. Nor are they Kafkaesque parables. The too-easy Schulz-Kafka connection (made easier by the seemingly obvious influence of Kafka on Schulz's conception of the Father character) obscures the fact that these two artists could hardly be more different. Where Kafka is dry and focused, Schulz is expansive and effusive. Where Kafka's descriptions exhibit scientific naturalism even at their most surreal, Schulz is a lush, poetic painter whose prose is as vividly colored as an Expressionist canvas. Where Kafka describes, Schulz mythologizes. (Gregor Samsa is very matter-of-factly described in his transformed state; Adela and her broom, by contrast, become a furious maenad with her thyrsus when she shoos the birds from Father's attic room.) In short, where Kafka is incomparably and outrageously deadpan, Schulz is gorgeously decadent. His prose is like a burst pomegranate; the over-ripeness is all. I love it.

Some of the pieces in Crocodiles are extraordinary (the title fiction, "Cinnamon Shops," "Tailor's Dummies," "Visitation," "Birds," "The Comet") while others are slight and forgettable ("Nimrod," "Pan"). At their best, these fictions demand re-reading, if only to catch the elements missed on a first reading. There is a Borgesian richness here, as well as--it must be said--a Borgesian sameness, a repetition of images and ideas that almost (but not quite) could be justified as musical form. There's also, at times, too much too-much-ness, a poetic concentration of idea and image that calls to mind Schulz's favorite poet, Rilke. The Rilke influence may, in fact, be more decisive than Kafka, given the resemblances between certain passages in this book and similar moments in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.

ANSELM KIEFER by Mark Rosenthal

Mark Rosenthal's Anselm Kiefer, the catalogue to the Art Institute of Chicago's 1987 Kiefer retrospective, is an average exhibition catalogue--and in its unexceptionality it fails to rise to the challenge of the artist who may well be our greatest living painter. (As I've written elsewhere, I consider Kiefer the only living painter to whom the adjective 'great' can be unhesitatingly applied.) The reproductions in this book are very good. My only complaint is that they are not larger and there are not more of them. (Cost considerations doubtless limited the volume's size.) With Rosenthal's text, however, I have some major quarrels. Most of them stem from his overly archetypal understanding of Kiefer's work. Drawing upon the writings of historian of religion Mircea Eliade (the University of Chicago's favorite Romanian fascist), Rosenthal's interpretations construct a Kiefer who is far too otherworldly, an alchemical-spiritual seeker of transcendence who concerns are increasingly divorced from historical and political reality. The most obvious problem with this 'Kiefer' is that he is not the artist who created most of the works reproduced alongside the text. The real Kiefer is an emotionally--indeed, furiously--politically engaged artist whose images deliberately and provocatively call up the reality of the present and the recent past. A single example of authorial misreading can stand as a synecdoche for the entire catalogue: Kiefer's 1986 painting Iron Path shows railroad tracks moving through a blasted gray-white landscape. Upon first encountering the image, most viewers will immediately understand it as a reference to the Holocaust. Not so Rosenthal, whose transcendental orientation forces him to interpret the tracks as an image of otherworldly connection, a kind of Jacob's Ladder. Almost perversely, his brief discussion of the painting fails to mention the image's most immediate historical resonance. Fortunately, Kiefer's art is strong enough to blow away Rosenthal's hackneyed ahistorical interpretations. Just turn to page 149 and spend a while looking at and thinking about Kiefer's Osiris and Isis (1985-87), a huge painting of a vast pyramidal monument to which Kiefer has attached a TV circuit board from which emanates a network of wires connected to ceramic shards. Think about the implications of Kiefer's surrealist collision of the ancient sacred and the technological sublime, and you will come to know the artist's work more deeply than does the author of this catalogue.

Having read many recent exhibition catalogues, I almost want to congratulate Rosenthal for not interpreting Kiefer's work in terms of some trendy critical theory du jour (Foucaultian, Lacanian). But unfortunately he feels compelled to embrace a hermeneutic dustier than the collected works of Northrop Frye.

HE DIED WITH HIS EYES OPEN by Derek Raymond

Derek Raymond didn't look like a crime writer. He looked like a crime victim. In the photo on the back cover of the American edition of He Died With His Eyes Open, the skeletal Raymond looks like a member of an obscure 1960s British Invasion band who has spent the intervening decades in Treblinka. In other pictures from his brief late 1980s-early 1990s heyday, he looks like a guy who's been through hell and more than half enjoyed the ride.

This novel, the first of four that established Raymond as the Godfather of British neo-noir (the Brit James Ellroy, let's say, or the anti-P.D. James) is a fast, effective, compact and at times surprisingly complex police thriller. It touches all the usual tiresome generic bases (voyeuristic corpse description, a cast of increasingly creepy suspects, a touch of racism, misogyny, the odd reactionary aside, an ending in which the criminals are punished and the cop-narrator lives on to narrate another day...), but the book's real interest lies in those passages where it becomes more than just a good police procedural, those pages and paragraphs and even single sentences that seem to chafe at the restrictions of the thriller form. The novel's murder victim is a failed writer whose life somewhat parallels Raymond's life until his 1980s success, and the anger, bitterness and self-loathing transcribed from cassettes the victim recorded before his death (excerpts from the transcripts make up a significant percentage of the text) sound at times very much like Robin Cook (Derek Raymond's real name) writing nakedly behind the 'protection' of an essentially transparent mask. In a sense, there are really two books here, and they are at war with each other. Embedded within and often threatening to break out of the thriller form is a literary novel of lyrical beauty and intense self-examination. It includes a gorgeous account of laboring in a French vineyard and a harrowing description of the slaughter of a pig that serve to emphasize by contrast the numbing aesthetic and emotional poverty of the thriller narrative and its grey, urban world--and by implication to indict the genre as a corrupted product of that world. The victim's transcribed voice functions as not only the narrator's but also the author's bad conscience, especially when it speaks a line like this: "Anyone who conceives of writing as an agreeable stroll towards a middle-class life will never write anything but crap."

To be sure, this novel's thriller narrative contains a good deal of crap, but there are also a few metaphors that verge on the surreal (an alcoholic publican's eyes are "red and blue, like dartboards"; a hyperactive man's head "wobbled like an oyster on the end of a drunkard's fork") and a few lines of tough-guy narration that are like synecdoches for the entire genre: "Not only was he a murderer, but he looked like one, which as a policeman I thought was pretty stupid of him." There's a little of this, but not enough. Raymond/Cook, like the contemporary American novelist Jack O'Connell, writes like someone who has straightjacketed his considerable talent into a pre-existing mold. The tension created by this situation can be exciting and interesting, but the cost to the reader (For who can count the cost to the writer?) is that we are left wondering what the book might have been if it had truly exploded the form, if it had consistently broken the first commandment of genre fiction: Thou shalt do nothing to interfere with the reader's masturbatory pleasure. At bottom, Raymond's thriller narrative is still a cheap thrills machine, Mickey Spillane with an East End accent. It encourages the reader to identify with the antihero, fight and fuck alongside him, and close the book with a warm and comfy postcoital glow. The other narrative has the potential to deflate this fantasy balloon (erection?), but there's not enough of it to succeed. In the end, this book is the same old song transposed to a darker key.

THE FILMS OF INGMAR BERGMAN by Jesse Kalin

Jesse Kalin's The Films of Ingmar Bergman is an exceptional, exemplary work of film criticism. Well-written, thoughtful, scholarly and focused, it is also wonderfully free of the academic jargon that makes so much contemporary film writing so obtusely boring. Kalin is indeed an academic, a philosophy professor with a Mellon-endowed chair at Vassar, but he writes like something better and rarer today, an intellectual. This is a book that actually takes Bergman's films as its subjects and watches them closely and attempts to understand them, rather than grandiosely 'performing' a Lacanian 'intervention' by mechanically reading those films through a lens ground 50 years ago at the Sorbonne. If more academics wrote like Kalin, more people would read them. The discussion of Sawdust and Tinsel/The Naked Night (which Kalin, to confuse matters even further, translates as The Clown's Evening) encourages me to re-examine a film I had previously considered minor. The introduction, titled "Geography of the Soul," in which Kalin shows us the lens through which he does see Bergman, a paradigm consisting of the development of several themes abstracted from the films themselves (yes, this is circular, but in a good way), is a magisterially concise introduction to some of the major themes of Bergman's oeuvre. Likewise, Kalin's chapters on Shame and Cries and Whispers are examples of the best kind of film criticism, exemplary instead of proselytizing. His interpretation of Fanny and Alexander's deliberately 'unrealistic' rescue scene--that by provoking the viewer's disbelief it causes a crisis in the viewer and forces him to choose between the fictionality of the story (as represented by Alexander) and the literalness of 'reality' (as defined by the Bishop)--is extremely compelling. (In fact, it's good enough to steal and repeat as one's own--the highest compliment.) My only initial complaint is that the book isn't twice as long. I wish Kalin had included extended discussions of Persona and Hour of the Wolf (I consider the former one of the greatest films ever made and the latter one of the weirdest, a stunning and haunting work of art).

Two criticisms: A book about Bergman's films that only mentions in passing such major works as Persona, Hour of the Wolf, Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence, should probably be titled Some Films of Ingmar Bergman. We must also ask ourselves how Kalin's selection of films might present a distorted picture of Bergman's oeuvre, as any selection inevitably does.

And one more thing: Bergman's two 'psychological' films of the 1970s, Face to Face and From The Life of the Marionettes, are currently unavailable on DVD. (Are you listening, Criterion Collection?)

THE DESIGNATED MOURNER by Wallace Shawn

Flaubert knew exactly why most early readers didn't like Sentimental Education. In conversation with an admirer he explained that "The public wants works that exalt its illusions, whereas Sentimental Education..." and here the author demonstrated the effect of his novel by forming an inverted pyramid with his hands and then opening them, casting readerly illusions into the abyss. In this respect, Wallace Shawn's The Designated Mourner is a most Flaubertian work. That's right, I just compared the short, fat, bald character actor who played the psychiatrist on Crossing Jordan to Gustave freakin' Flaubert. On the evidence of this single play (the only work by Shawn I've read), the fact that the playwright is better known as a character actor is almost as bizarre (indeed, unseemly) as the fact that Sam Shepard (my candidate for America's greatest living playwright and one of our best writers, period) is better known as the guy who's in all the Westerns, a kind of highbrow Slim Pickens. Before reading the play, I had known of Shawn's 'other life' via Louis Malle's marvelous films My Dinner With Andre (co-written by Shawn) and Vanya on 42nd Street, and the fact that he was 'also a playwright' (as they say) had shown up on my radar screen, but I hadn't imagined that he was such a fine and troubling writer. Immediately upon finishing my first reading I decided that this was one of those 'you gotta read this' books. Don't bother trying to summarize it; just press it into your friends' hands and say, "Here. You can thank me tomorrow."

The Designated Mourner is a political and cultural horror story, a tale of terror and tyranny as sickeningly plausible as Orwell's 1984. Shawn provides no set description, giving directors maximum freedom, but the play calls for a bare stage and stark lighting. As I read, I imagined the actors sitting in three metal folding chairs (preferably gray) facing the audience and arranged in some kind of wide semicircle. The house lights should be kept up so the audience can't sink back into shadowed anonymity. The confrontational element of the play should be maximized. For this is a deeply confrontational play, and therein lies its Flaubertian power. It's a weapon aimed to unsettle its elite, culturally sophisticated and/or upper class audience (and that is, after all, the only real audience for plays like this; everyone else escapes to Andrew Lloyd-Webber). The play challenges the very humanist, leftist and aesthetic assumptions that draw people to see it. Nor do the play's challenges stop there, for it also subverts itself. Indeed, it ends on such a self-deconstructive note, with a lyrical 'urban pastoral' description of evening in a park that implicitly indicts its own lyricism as a flight from a horrifying political reality. This is a marvelous, beautiful, complex, poet's play that should have made its author much better known. Unfortunately, Wallace Shawn lives and writes in a country where theater is only valued as a local anesthetic. We all need to recall the words of Emerson: "People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them."

While writing the above, I had another thought, a counter-thought. I wonder if Shawn's plays are seen by at least some members of his New York audiences as a kind of penance, a bit of good guilty liberal self-flagellation by which they can vicariously and masochistically atone for the other parts of their lives. Does a member of Shawn's audience secretly--or even unconsciously--think: "Okay, now that I've seen The Fever or The Designated Mourner, I can go back to my office at Merrill-Lynch tomorrow and exploit the world with a clear conscience"? Hmmm...sounds like the sort of question Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory would talk about over dinner...

CUBISM AND CULTURE by Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten

Reproduced on one page of this book is a ca.1910 photograph of Apollinaire by Picasso that makes me wish Picasso had taken more photographs, because he might have revolutionized that art too. The Apollinaire photo gives evidence of Picasso's wonderful visual wit (and thus functions as a kind of 'key' to understanding the wit of Cubism): the pudgy poet poses in a chair in Picasso's studio, his head intersecting the frame of a Cubist painting on the wall behind; his head is also turned so that the smoke from his pipe appears to lay in the plane of the painting, and the depicted Cubist figure seems to rise like smoke from its bowl.

Unfortunately, this single photograph is much more interesting than most of the text in this book. Antliff and Leighten's Cubism and Culture is yet another book on Cubism that fails to understand the true radicalism of the movement. Rather than doing the hard hermeneutical labor of looking deeply into individual paintings and constantly testing and re-testing their ideas against them, the academic authors are content to give us a tour of the Cubist zeitgeist that dubiously attempts to place the paintings in contexts to which they are tangential at best: anti-colonialism, Riemannian geometry, Bergsonian philosophy, feminism, etc. The necessity of arguing their dubious thesis about the influence of Bergson also leads them to grant undue prominence to 2nd- and 3rd-rate Cubists like Metzinger, Gleizes, Le Fauconnier, etc., ignoring superior works by Picasso and Braque. So the book is ultimately a triumph of thesis over art and of academic fashion over taste--in other words, a typical piece of contemporary American art historical discourse. This is what passes for the social history of art today, and it's a long way from Arnold Hauser and Robert Herbert (or even T.J. Clark).

The most important point the authors fail to understand (and they're hardly alone in this) is that Cubism is painting at its most self-conscious. Cubism is painting slowing down--and sometimes stopping--in order to think about itself, to reflect on materials and techniques, on strategies of representation. Cubist paintings therefore come to us with the imperative that we also slow down, stop and look and think--think about the myriad unexamined rules and conventions that determine how we 'see' paintings (and everything else in the world). Cubism is subjectivity cubed. The subjectivities of artist and viewer ideally collide and collude in the interpretation of the work.

Near the end of the book, the authors almost redeem themselves with a marvelous close reading of Picasso's Bottle of Suze. It's too little too late, but it suggests how interesting the book might have been had Antliff and Leighten paid more attention to paintings and less to current academic fashion.

NEW POEMS by Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Edward Snow)

I've been reading Edward Snow's single-volume revised edition of his translations from Rilke's New Poems, and I'm surprised to find myself more impressed by the poems in Book One than by those in Book Two--surprised because the second volume begins with the poem that is deservedly Rilke's best-known short lyric, "Archaic Torso of Apollo." Unfortunately, the volume goes downhill from there. That's the danger of opening your book with a masterpiece. But I think the problem with the second book goes deeper. Compared to the poems of Book One, with their giddy transformational energy, their seemingly unlimited stock of metaphors, their wildness and freedom and daring, the poems of the second part seem more subdued and deliberate--even, at times, exhausted. Book One reads like a fearless flying leap into the future of poetry; Book Two is a more careful and craftsmanlike performance. If in the first book Rilke is conquering new territory, by the second he's already an old seigneur, surveying his lands and putting up beautiful buildings.

As to the hopelessly complex question of the quality of Snow's translations (a question that I, a non-reader of German, am completely unqualified to comment upon), I will say only that I find Snow's versions of Rilke a bit too prosaic, perhaps too literal. Stephen Mitchell's translation of "Archaic Torso...", for example, is clearly superior as a work of art to Snow's translation of that poem. I also find Mitchell's translation of the Duino Elegies superior as poetry to any other version I've seen.

"THE UNCANNY" by Sigmund Freud

Freud's essay on the unheimlich is worth re-reading. There's some good--yes, even uncanny--stuff in there, despite the predictable Freudian attempt to find an infantile etiology for everything. It's all right to have all the answers, but when all the answers are the same, I get suspicious. Especially questionable is Freud's delimiting, late in the essay, of the category of the uncanny so that it includes only those experiences which fit his theory--a theory derived at least partly from experiences that thus no longer fit it (fantasy literature, for example). Still, the essay is good and strange enough to qualify as a work of art (it shares this quality with the best of Freud's case studies), and I will surely return to it.

PHILIP ROTH'S RUDE TRUTH: THE ART OF IMMATURITY by Ross Posnock

Ross Posnock's Philip Roth's Rude Truth is that rare thing today: a work of literary criticism written by an academic that might be of interest to the general reader. More than that, it's a marvelously enjoyable book. This is a most Rothian work of Roth criticism: intelligent, witty, wide-ranging, surprising, audacious and, yes, ballsy. This book has more balls than a sporting goods store. It's not enough for our author to place Roth in a 'tradition' (constructed on the fly by said author) of literary 'immaturity' that includes such exalted figures as Emerson, William James, Musil, Adorno and Gombrowicz. No, Posnock isn't satisfied until he has invoked Stephen Toulmin's Cosmopolis and placed Roth's work in an Enlightenment counter-tradition of thinkers who drink from the capacious well of Montaigne instead of crucifying themselves on the Cartesian grid. Holy fucking shit! The guy who showed us young Alex Portnoy violating raw meat is a descendant of Montaigne? It seems so. Mickey Sabbath would surely approve. Hell, maybe Mickey is our modern Montaigne, singing an outrageously funny and filthy song of himself with roots that sink way past Whitman to tangle together in the fertile soil of Fontainebleau-era France. Stranger things have happened in literary history. And even when Posnock isn't constructing suitably audacious pedigrees for Roth's fiction, when he's doing the more mundane critical work of reading and interpretation, he is never less than illuminating--especially in his chapter-length considerations of Sabbath's Theater and The Human Stain. With this book, American literary criticism finally 'finds' Philip Roth, and Roth at last finds a critic worthy of his achievements. From now on, Roth criticism begins here.

A STUDY OF VERMEER by Edward Snow

Edward Snow's A Study of Vermeer is a book I recommend to anyone who has an interest in looking closely at paintings. Snow has a very good eye and he writes well and (for an academic) clearly. There are a few "deflected gazes" in this book, but for the most part Snow keeps Lacan in the footnotes where he belongs. I was deeply impressed by the book's opening tour de force reading of Girl With a Pearl Earring, a painting that has never greatly impressed me but which will now capture more of my attention on my next visit to the Hague. There follows an interesting discussion of Degas's 'bathers' that leads into some highly arguable interpretations of Vermeer's genre paintings. I find myself agreeing with Snow about half the time, and I think that's about as much as I agree with any good work of art criticism. His interpretation of the Berlin Glass of Wine (a work that blew everything else in its room off the walls at the Met's 2001 Vermeer exhibition) seems much too harsh, as though Snow is attempting to rationalize a 'gut-level' dislike of the painting. And I wish his discussion of Girl Interrupted at Her Music (I'm using the traditional titles that Snow, like most scholars and curators today, eschews in favor of newer, blander ones.) lingered longer on the disruptive force of the girl's Luncheon on the Grass-like gaze out of the canvas. (Where's Lacan when we need him?) Still, Snow's book is well-argued and thought-provoking. It showed me a few things I had not noticed in many hours spent in the presence of these paintings, and I really can't ask a critical book to do more than that. It's a book I enjoy arguing with--high praise.

One such argument arises when Snow spends altogether too much time discussing the minor, early Procuress, surely the worst aesthetically of the canonical Vermeers. Admittedly, his reading is interesting, even poetic (Snow is also a translator of Rilke), but the painting simply isn't good enough to justify extended study in a book that gives far greater paintings shorter shrift. (I should come clean at this point and admit that I'm a member of an extreme minority (perhaps a minority of one) that doubts the attribution of The Procuress. When I saw it in 2001 amidst so many other 'authenticated' Vermeers, I couldn't shake the feeling that it was either an apprentice work by the young Vermeer and other hands or by a different painter altogether. The 'signature' on the canvas doesn't concern me; signatures can be forged...And yes, I am entirely aware that I'm starting to sound like a character in Gaddis's Recognitions. The signature just doesn't impress me because the painting itself fails to impress.)

Overall, I disagree with many of Snow's interpretations and find a few of them clearly and obviously wrong (his reading of Christ in the House of Mary and Martha, for example), and yet I still value the book and know I will return to it. When Snow gets a painting right (as in his readings of A Maid Asleep, Girl With a Pearl Earring, Woman With a Balance and The Artist's Studio), he gets it powerfully and compellingly right. And his eye is at times stunningly acute. For example, Snow points out two spatial anomalies in the Studio that I hadn't noticed before, even though I've spent the last 7 years living with a large reproduction of the painting. His book makes me feel both chastened and argumentative. Like Vermeer's works, when it's good it's damn good.