SURREALISM: DESIRE UNBOUND

Surrealism: Desire Unbound, a 2002 catalogue (edited by Jennifer Mundy) of an exhibition at the Tate Modern and the Met, is a well illustrated, theoretically sophisticated, and absolutely essential book about this often misunderstood Modernist movement. It is that rare--indeed, almost unknown--thing in the contemporary artworld, an exhibition catalogue interesting enough to be read more than once. Consisting of scholarly essays on various aspects of the movement, it presents not a narrative history but a thematic survey focusing on the artists' transformations of erotic desire. Unsurprisingly, the theoretical take tends toward Lacan and Bataille, but the authors' interpretations resist dogmatism and revel in complexity, as worthwhile scholarship always should. More important and provocative than the essays, though, are the illustrations, many of which are marvelous. The full-page photograph of Meret Oppenheim's My Nurse from the Moderna Museet in Stockholm shows it to be an object much more multifaceted and polymorphously perverse than her better- known Le dejeuner en fourrure, the fur-covered teacup at MOMA. The large reproduction of Man Ray's great photograph of Oppenheim as phallic woman, Veiled Erotic, is endlessly fascinating, as are the photos of works by Hans Bellmer, Alberto Giacometti, Louise Bourgeois and Joseph Cornell, the last an artist whose works' multi-dimensionality usually resists photographic treatment. There's also an excellent reproduction here of a work very well-known, Magritte's The Rape, an image that should never cease to disturb and provoke. Overall, this catalogue is a fine antidote to the popular tendency to see Surrealism as the whacked-out comic relief side of High Modernism, HighMod for stoners, too 'far out, man' to deserve sustained attention. The artworks the Surrealists created are both more serious and more deeply, distressingly comic than that. Study the illustrations in this catalogue and you'll see what I mean.

A Moment of Truth

Last night on MSNBC's The Ed Show, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, a Republican supporting President Obama, added a rare note of blunt truth to our nation's political discourse:

Col. Wilkerson's words about the current Republican Party deserve repetition:

Let me just be candid: My party is full of racists, and the real reason a considerable portion of my party wants President Obama out of the White House has nothing to do with the content of his character, nothing to do with his competence as commander-in-chief and president, and everything to do with the color of his skin, and that's despicable.

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN by Thomas Mann

Of all the novels frequently cited as exemplary masterpieces of Modernism (a list that also includes Ulysses, In Search of Lost Time, To The Lighthouse, Berlin Alexanderplatz, The Master and Margarita, The Great Gatsby, etc.), The Magic Mountain impresses me least. After spending a week at the International Sanatorium Berghof (cough, cough), I left that mythical institution never to return. I concluded early in my reading that Mann was indulging--in a manner much more subtle and refined than David Foster Wallace's--the fallacy of imitative form: writing boringly about boredom, statically about stasis, etc. In so doing, he constructs  a novel that's longer and duller than it has any reason to be. The Magic Mountain is one of the major disappointments of my reading life. (Perhaps I read it too late. It should probably be read around age 20--just as On The Road should probably be read at age 17--for if the reading is delayed into middle age, the reader will expect too much.) Which is not to say the novel is devoid of interest. There are some very good parts: the 'Snow' chapter, Herr Naphta, Hippe and the pencil motif, the climactic duel (bit of a 19th-century cliche, that; Mann is the most 19th-century of major twentieth-century novelists), the X-ray scene, several other scenes and passages. But these are all like Alpine peaks snowbound amidst too much deliberate tedium. The Magic Mountain might be interpreted as an anti-novel, a book written against itself and against a culture in which people have the luxury to read 706-page philosophical novels while the world crashes around them. The extent to which Mann's text supports such a reading is unclear to me, and since I wasn't impressed enough to re-read the book, it will likely remain so. But the narrator and his tone would probably be the interpretive crux of such a reading: that tone of annoying, deliberately irritating irony. The Magic Mountain might be interestingly read as a book written against its readers--but not by me. My ticket out of the Alps was strictly one-way.

Wily Willard and Slippery Mitt

Long ago in a state as strange as Michigan, two boys were born to the Romney clan. One was named Wily Willard; the other they christened Slippery Mitt.

Wily Willard was the son of a penniless refugee from Mexico; Slippery Mitt was born with a silver car elevator in his house.

Wily Willard was an upright youth, spartanly free of intoxicating substances; Slippery Mitt was an assaulter of longhairs (and perhaps even a drinker of tea).

Wily Willard fulfilled his religious obligations through missionary work and piously supported the Vietnam War; Slippery Mitt dodged the Vietnam draft by taking Joe Smith's gospel to the Champs-Elysees.

Wily Willard scared his dog shitless atop the family car; Slippery Mitt denied ever owning a dog.

Wily Willard became the Brain of Bain; Slippery Mitt donned suspenders and played Gordon Gekko.

Wily Willard bought failing corporations and transformed them into cash; Slippery Mitt bought successful corporations and translated them into Chinese.

Wily Willard wants everyone to know he helmed the Salt Lake City Olympics; Slippery Mitt hopes everyone has forgotten the bribery scandals.

Wily Willard called blind trusts "an age-old ruse" and explained exactly why they are never blind; Slippery Mitt used the 'blind trust' ruse in a presidential debate.

Wily Willard was "a severely conservative governor of Massachusetts" (cue raucous laughter); Slippery Mitt is a moderate in October and a reactionary in March.

Wily Willard is a "car guy" whose "dad ran an automobile company"; Slippery Mitt wanted to "let Detroit go bankrupt." (Can you spell 'Oedipus,' boys and girls?)

Wily Willard has decades of secret tax returns; Slippery Mitt has nothing to hide, so he's keeping it hidden.

Wily Willard has uncounted millions in Cayman Islands accounts; Slippery Mitt prefers Swiss banks and Chinese factories.

Wily Willard wants to be "a president off the 100 percent"; Slippery Mitt considers half the American population a horde of parasites.

Wily Willard is a self-made man; Slippery Mitt is an upper-class twit.

Wily Willard wants to restart the neo-con war machine; Slippery Mitt says the word 'peace' whenever Frank Luntz orders him to.

Wily Willard is a man of principle who "knows what it takes"; Slippery Mitt is an all-you-can-eat buffet of empty rhetoric.

Wily Willard can convincingly portray a human being; Slippery Mitt can't move in the morning until Ann inserts a Krugerrand into the slot between his shoulder blades.


Tragically, this list could go on forever. The idea that either of these assholes might raise his hand and take an oath at the Capitol in January scares the unholy fucking bejesus out of me.

The Death of the Critic: Robert Hughes 1938-2012

This has been a bad year for great writers: Carlos Fuentes in May, Gore Vidal last week, and now word comes of the death of Robert Hughes. Of contemporary art critics, Hughes, John Berger, Arthur Danto and Robert Herbert are the ones I value most highly, and Hughes was the best writer in that superhumanly perceptive crew. Though I never met him, he was my master. As a student of art, I stole so many magisterial bon mots and Olympian opinions from the writings of Robert Hughes that even now it's sometimes hard for me to tell where he ends and I begin. Every time I look at a portrait by Courbet I think of Hughes's great, sensual line, "He painted hair...as though he were running his fingers through it." In him I found affirmation for my own insistence, drawn from experience, that nothing substitutes for a face-to-face encounter with a painting: "You cannot think and feel your way back into the way something was made by looking at a slide: only by studying the real thing." (Note that uncharacteristically unwieldy sentence's encapsulation of an entire ars critica: the duty of the critic is neither to flog and blog unargued assertions, nor to bemerde works of art with the latest, hippest critical theories, nor to find in art convenient confirmations of one's favored ideologies; the critic's task, the critic's gift, is to "think and feel [his or her] way into the way something was made".) In him I also found an object lesson in the tentative nature of all critical opinions (or as I like to put it, the principle that every interpretation should end with an implied "...or maybe not."): when Hughes first saw Philip Guston's late works, he failed to understand them, failed to really see them, and panned them accordingly; later he came to consider these same paintings among the most important of the late 20th century and saw his earlier misunderstanding as the most notable mistake of his critical career.

Robert Hughes leaves a body of work that's nothing short of heroic, and I recommend every word: The Shock of the New and American Visions are definitive; Nothing If Not Critical, a collection of essays and reviews, is as compulsively readable as (and even more enjoyable than) John Berger's Selected Essays; his book on Goya is marvelous, his autobiography to ca.1970, Things I Didn't Know, is a wonderful read; his contentious entry in the 1990s culture wars, The Culture of Complaint, remains valuable and thought-provoking. I've yet to read his works of history (The Fatal Shore, Barcelona, Rome), but the first was widely praised and the last provoked the professional ire of classicists, which is perhaps not a bad thing. Death's triumph robs us of the second volume of his memoirs (unless he finished it before his final illness), but more importantly it stills the most eloquent, intelligent and pugnacious voice in the contemporary artworld. I will miss this burly Australian generalist with his Sydneyfied vowels and his infallible bullshit detector. I miss him already.

Check out his friend Peter Carey's impassioned eulogy in The Guardian.

The entire BBC series The Shock of the New can be viewed online here.

The 2012 Sight and Sound Poll: First Thoughts

All "best of" lists, even my own, are meaningless except as recommendations of films to be watched, books to be read, etc. and as representations of one person's (or group's) taste. De gustibus non est disputandum and all that. That said, I wish to dispute a few examples of the grouptaste represented by this decade's Sight and Sound Poll:

What, no Bergman?!? My own top ten list begins with a three-way tie for first place among Citizen Kane, Vertigo and Persona, so I'm rather shocked to see not a single title by Ingmar Bergman on either list. Persona, Cries and Whispers, Scenes From A Marriage, Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal and Fanny and Alexander are all on a level with most of the films chosen this decade.

No Kieslowski?!? Maybe it's still too soon for K's work to enter the canon of canons, but I predict that future decades will see The Decalogue or Three Colors: Blue, White, Red in the top ten. (Provided that S&S revises the rules to permit series films to be counted as a single film.)

No Kurosawa?!? The great, moving Ikiru would have been my choice for a Kurosawa film in the top ten. It is surely among the greatest films ever made.

No Truffaut?!? No Godard?!? No Malle?!? This decade's poll exhibits a serious bias against the French New Wave. My purely hypothetical list would've included Truffaut's Quatre-cent coups (The 400 Blows), Godard's Vivre Sa Vie, and Malle's Murmur of the Heart.

No Bunuel...This is less surprising. Luis Bunuel has never received the respect he so clearly deserves as the director of Viridiana, The Exterminating Angel, Los Olvidados, Belle de Jour, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, and The Phantom of Liberty. Most non-Bunuelites know him solely as the director of Un Chien Andalou and L'Age D'Or, brilliant Surrealist films but only a tiny fraction of his oeuvre. It's time to lift Bunuel out of the Rodney Dangerfield slot and give him a little respect.

I also disagree with the choice of Tokyo Story on both lists, finding its position at the top of the director's poll almost incomprehensible. Far from being one of the greatest films ever made, Tokyo Story isn't even Ozu's best film; it doesn't come close to the brilliant, beautiful Floating Weeds.

The critics need to re-screen Renoir's The Rules of the Game on a double bill with his Grand Illusion. They will discover, as I did a few years ago, that the latter is the greater film.

I didn't like Tarkovsky's Mirror at all the first time I saw it, but on the evidence of its strong showing here, I'll give it another look.

On the positive side, I wholly endorse the selection of Vertov's Man With  a Movie Camera while simultaneously wondering "No Eisenstein?!?"

In the interest of full disclosure, here's something like what my purely hypothetical 'top dozen' list would look like:

1. Vertigo (Hitchcock)
1. Citizen Kane (Welles)
1. Persona (Bergman)
2. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Parajanov)
3. 8 1/2 (Fellini)
4. Murmur of the Heart (Malle)
5. The Godfather trilogy (Coppola)
6. The Decalogue (Kieslowski)
7. Short Cuts (Altman)
8. Ikiru (Kurosawa)
9. Belle de Jour (Bunuel)
10. Napoleon (Gance)

And looking over my own list, I ask "No Truffaut?!?" "No Eisenstein?!?" "No Godard?!?" Yes, listmaking is indeed absurd. So let's compound the absurdity:

11. Les Quatre-Cent Coups (Truffaut)
12. Vivre Sa Vie (Godard)
13. The Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein)
14. Sunset Boulevard (Wilder)
15. Koyaanisqatsi (Reggio)
16. Grand Illusion (Renoir)
17. City Lights (Chaplin)
18. An Angel at My Table (Campion)
19. The Last Laugh (Murnau)
20. Ali: Fear Eats The Soul (Fassbinder)
21. Playtime (Tati)
22. Pickpocket (Bresson)
23. Man With a Movie Camera (Vertov)
24. Peeping Tom (Powell)
25. Eraserhead (Lynch)
25. Goodfellas (Scorsese)

And since I've now lost all fear of absurdity, a prediction about a few recent films that might show up on future Sight and Sound lists:

The Tree of Life (Malick)
There Will Be Blood (Anderson)
Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman)
The Matrix (Wachowski siblings--We can't call them brothers anymore because Larry is Lana now, and she's a pretty hot chick.)

Sight and Sound Poll 2012: The Top Ten Greatest Films of All Time

Big news for Hitchcock fans: Sight and Sound magazine has just released the results of this decade's poll of critics and directors, and the former have chosen Hitchcock's Vertigo for the number one spot, displacing perpetual winner Citizen Kane. In the director's poll, Ozu's Tokyo Story displaced Kane, which tied with Kubrick's 2001 for number two. Here are both lists in their entirety:

The Critics’ Top 10 Greatest Films of All Time:

Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)
Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953)
La Règle du jeu (Renoir, 1939)
Sunrise: a Song for Two Humans (Murnau, 1927)
2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968)
The Searchers (Ford, 1956)
Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, 1927)
8 ½ (Fellini, 1963)


The Directors’ Top 10 Greatest Films of All Time:

Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953)
=2 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968)
=2 Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
8 ½ (Fellini, 1963)
Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1980)
Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979)
=7 The Godfather (Coppola, 1972)
=7 Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)
Mirror (Tarkovsky, 1974)
Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948)

The Last Literary Lion: Gore Vidal 1925-2012

"Yesterday the Reagan Library burned to the ground. Both books were destroyed. But the real tragedy is that Ronnie hadn't finished coloring them yet." -- Gore Vidal, on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, 1980s

American literature just lost its last lion. Gore Vidal died yesterday in Los Angeles at age 86. Obituaries are proliferating online, so I'll keep this post more personal.

When I turned on my computer this morning, the news of Vidal's death hit me like a punch in the gut. It was not unexpected; he was old, his body and mind had been fading, and his best work was two decades behind him. But I still hoped that somehow he would be immortal. He was one of those who deserved to quaff the ambrosial nectar and live forever, to be unto eternity an outrageous thorn in everyone's side. Novelist, essayist, playwright, politician, screenwriter, wit, raconteur, cultural critic, political commentator, sexual rebel, WWII veteran, one-percenter, traitor to his class, gossip, bitch, WASPy scion, grandson of a senator, friend of a president (JFK), enemy of a president's brother (RFK), stepbrother of Jackie Kennedy, buttfucker of Jack Kerouac, Vidal was an almost incomprehensibly comprehensive man. He lived his life with such overplus that his prolificity as a writer seems almost impossible: all those novels, all those essays, those plays, those movies... Surely there were two or three 'Gore Vidals' living in that house on the Amalfi coast, a gang of compulsively typing doppelgangers who could be stashed away in a basement trunk whenever outsiders came calling... But no, Gore did it all, and (to paraphrase another of his old friends) he did it his way.

"To be demoralized by the withdrawal of public success (a process as painful in America as the withdrawal of a drug from an addict) is to grant too easy a victory to the society one has attempted to criticize, affect, change, reform. It is clearly unreasonable to expect to be cherished by those one assaults. It is also childish, in the deepest sense of being a child, ever to expect justice. There is none beneath our moon. One can only hope not to be entirely destroyed by injustice and, to put it cynically, one can very often flourish through an injustice obtaining in one's favor. What matters finally is not the world's judgment of oneself but one's own judgment of the world. Any writer who lacks this final arrogance will not survive long in America." -- Gore Vidal, "Norman Mailer's Self-Advertisements," 1960, collected in United States: Essays 1952-1992.

The only way to mourn a writer is to read him. Of the novels, I recommend the marvelous Julian, the outrageous Myra Breckenridge, the deliriously revisionist Burr, the bestselling Lincoln (it reveals its TV miniseries roots at its weakest moments [it began life as an unproduced TV screenplay, then Vidal novelized it, then it became a TV miniseries several years later], but Mary Todd Lincoln's mad scenes are perhaps the greatest and most affecting scenes in all of Vidal's fiction), the wonderful Hollywood, the deliciously blasphemous Live From Golgotha, and Vidal's stated favorite among his 'serious' novels, Creation. The prose in Vidal's essays is consistently superior to his novelistic prose, so his overall masterpiece is probably the dictionary-sized essay collection United States, virtually every page of which contains at least one example of 'the quotable Vidal.' But of all his works, my personal favorite is the beautifully written and compulsively gossipy memoir Palimpsest.

I distrust the very concept of the 'hero,' but if I had heroes (and I do; we all do), Gore would be one of them.

He will be buried in Rock Creek Park Cemetery, Washington, DC, next to his companion Howard Auster. His grave deserves to be a pilgrimage site, like the tombs on the Appian Way. He was, after all, in many ways, more an antique Roman than an American--and thus the noblest American of them all.

"He was a man, take him for all in all, / I shall not look upon his like again."

THE LAND AT THE END OF THE WORLD by Antonio Lobo Antunes

Is Antonio Lobo Antunes Europe's greatest living writer? The question is far from absurd, and the answer might well be 'yes.' (Of course, no one who suspects any other answer would bother to ask this particular question.) Since the death of Jose Saramago, Lobo Antunes is widely considered Portugal's GLW--and many Portuguese readers preferred him even during the Nobel laureate's lifetime. And when I consider the contemporary European literary scene as a whole, only a few other writers (Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Peter Nadas and the late W. G. Sebald come immediately to mind) have produced bodies of work comparable in beauty, originality and profundity to the novels of Lobo Antunes. So why is this other Portuguese novelist still something of a secret in the United States? Unfortunately, it seems that we American readers have only ourselves to blame. Grove Press published translations of Lobo Antunes' 1980s novels throughout the 1990s, and they are still in print and/or readily available on the used book market. Recently, both W. W. Norton and Dalkey Archive have published translations of 4 additional novels and a so-so collection of short nonfiction pieces (The Fat Man and Infinity). So as of this writing (and to the best of my knowledge) ten of Lobo Antunes' 21 novels are currently easily available in English translations by translators as distinguished as Gregory Rabassa, Richard Zenith and Margaret Jull Costa. Here's a list, with dates of original Portuguese publication:

• The Land at the End of the World (1979)
• Knowledge of Hell (1980)
• An Explanation of the Birds (1981)
• Fado Alexandrino (1983)
• Act of the Damned (1985)
• The Return of the Caravels (1988)
• The Natural Order of Things (1992)
• The Inquisitor's Manual (1996)
• The Splendor of Portugal (1997)
• What Can I Do When Everything's On Fire (2001)

That leaves 11 of his novels still untranslated, including all of his fiction since 2001 (quite a backlog) and, apparently, his first novel, 1979's Elephant Memory. But the ten translated novels should be more than enough to elevate Lobo Antunes to household name status among American readers. He should be as well-known as Garcia Marquez or Vargas Llosa and at least as widely read as Saramago, Sebald and Bernhard.

Fado Alexandrino is his breakthrough novel, the work in which the dark, claustrophobic monologue style of his earlier novels (an original combination of Dostoyevsky's Underground Man and Camus' The Fall, among other precursors) opens out into a symphony of interpenetrating voices and stories, but the grand Fado is also a few hundred pages too long to be a good introductory text. The best place to begin an exploration of Lobo Antunes' oeuvre is probably Margaret Jull Costa's recent translation of the novel known in Portuguese as Os Cus de Judas and which Costa chooses to call The Land at the End of the World. The Portuguese title is better: translating literally as 'the asshole of Judas,' it colloquially means 'the most godforsaken place imaginable'; an acceptable (but still unsatisfying because it loses the theological element) American English equivalent would be 'the asshole of nowhere.' In the present context, Judas's asshole represents both the remote backlands of Angola during Portugal's long colonial war and the dull, dreary, postfascist Lisbon of the late 1970s, which the narrator despises almost as much. The novel is easy to describe--a veteran of the Angolan war relates his experiences in 1970s Africa and Portugal in a Fall-style monologue--but in a Lobo Antunes novel (especially his earlier ones), the 'story' is always only part of the story. The real story here, the thing that impresses me so much that I want to read every word this man has ever written, is the amazingly beautiful, deeply thoughtful and utterly original prose style. Lobo Antunes' compulsively metaphorical prose combines with his profoundly materialist sensibility to constitute a style that might be best described as 'baroque lyrical naturalism.' Even his most eccentric lyrical flights remain anchored (for the most part) in the hard, resistant facts of the body and the world, the tragic realities from which Lobo Antunes, at his unforgiving best, refuses to contrive Saramagoesque fantastical escapes. It may be this very refusal of escapism at the heart of his surrealism that makes Lobo Antunes unpalatable for some readers; an imaginative exit is always more exciting and viscerally satisfying than the multiple no exits of reality. Other readers may be turned off by the Bernhardian obsessionalism with which he returns again and again, in novel after novel, to the African colonies and the Salazar dictatorship and the Portuguese Revolution and its aftermath and his generally negative view of the entire freaking world--but then again, those same readers might have advised Faulkner to get the hell out of Yoknapatawpha and stop whining about 1865. (My Faulkner comparison is entirely deliberate, for Lobo Antunes is yet another of those great 'foreign' writers upon whom the man known to some southerners as "Wiyum Fognuh" exercised a decisive influence.) Whatever the reasons, the undeserved American oblivion of Antonio Lobo Antunes deserves to end. He's not only the 'macho Saramago' and the Lusitanian Faulkner; he's also the Portuguese Norman Mailer and the closest thing his country has produced to a native Joyce. He is one of those rare writers with enough raw talent and original imagination to move the art of the novel several steps beyond where he found it. And that may be the most any novelist can hope to achieve.


Addendum: Here, copied from the otherwise scandalously lame Lobo Antunes Wikipedia page, is a seemingly complete list of all the man's novels. Those of us who don't read Portuguese are missing some intriguing-looking titles (Treatise on the Soul's Passion; Archipelago of Insomnia, etc.):

Memória de Elefante (1979) Elephant's Memory

Os Cus de Judas (1979) The Land at the End of the World (available in English)

Conhecimento do Inferno (1980) Knowledge of Hell (available in English)

Explicação dos Pássaros (1981) An Explanation of the Birds (available in English)

Fado Alexandrino (1983) Fado Alexandrino (available in English)

Auto dos Danados (1985) Act of the Damned (available in English)

As Naus (1988) The Return of the Caravels (available in English)

Tratado das Paixões da Alma (1990) Treatise on the Soul's Passions

A Ordem Natural das Coisas (1992) The Natural Order of Things (available in English)

A Morte de Carlos Gardel (1994) The Death of Carlos Gardel

O Manual dos Inquisidores (1996) The Inquisitors' Manual (available in English)

O Esplendor de Portugal (1997) The Splendor of Portugal (available in English)

Exortação aos Crocodilos (1999) Exhortation to the Crocodiles

Não Entres Tão Depressa Nessa Noite Escura (2000) Don't Go Through That Dark Night So Fast

Que Farei Quando Tudo Arde? (2001) What Can I Do When Everything's on Fire? (available in English)

Boa Tarde às Coisas Aqui em Baixo (2003) Good Evening to the Things From Here Below

Eu Hei-de Amar uma Pedra (2004) I Shall Love a Stone

Ontem Não te vi em Babilónia (2006) Didn't See You In Babylon Yesterday

O Meu Nome é Legião (2007) My Name Is Legion

O Arquipélago da Insónia (2008) Archipelago of Insomnia

Que Cavalos São Aqueles Que Fazem Sombra no Mar? (2009) What Horses Are Those That Make Shade On The Sea?

Sôbolos Rios Que Vão (2010)

Judging Books by Their Covers

I'm writing this post from a literary fortress walled with about five thousand books. Good books, great books, bad books, dirty books, clean books, crappy books, jungle books, city books, old books, new books, unread books, re-read books--and all are real books. By which I mean they're constructed from ink and paper, not bits and bytes. They are printed on pages identically cut and glued together or bound like submissive lovers. Now that death knells for the paper book are beeping and burping from every e-reader in the world, I've decided to skip the oblivion phase and go directly to nostalgic revival. Return with me now to a time before Kindles and Nooks. Remember how wonderful paper books were? How their batteries never ran down, how they could be tossed from high windows and still function properly, how you could drop them in the bathtub, fish them out, let them dry, and continue reading them (although they did gain a few new curves in the ordeal)? Remember the fetishistic feel of your thumb sliding across the upper corner of a page to pinch that skin-like texture between thumb and forefinger and lift, lift and turn, turn the page? Sontag didn't go far enough. Along with an erotics of art, we need an erotics of reading, something much sexier than any porn novel and with far more than fifty shades of gray. And one part of such an erotics must be an examination of the book cover as art. Since this art form seems destined for the dire fate of album covers (which reached a fairly high level of aesthetic value in the 1970s and 80s before the coming of compact discs fatally downsized the medium), I've decided to scan and share a few real book covers within easy reach of my writing desk.

We begin with Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins, my sin, my soul:

An early edition used one of Balthus's nymphets on the cover, but this is the cover image I will always think of when I think of Lolita. Barnaby Hall's remarkable photograph on this early 1990s Vintage International edition outdoes both Stanley Kubrick and Adrian Lyne by giving us a Lolita of the correct age. This entire edition of Nabokov's novels featured great photos by Hall, all of them wonderfully appropriate. Here's Transparent Things:

 The design--more prominent here--is by Marc J. Cohen, who also designed Lolita. This cover is even better, and all of the Hall-Cohen covers are superior to the current Vintage run, featuring a series of photographs of paper shadowbox constructions by Chip Kidd.

I understand the reasoning (if anything, the foregrounding of trompe l'oeil artifice on these newer covers is too obvious to be truly Nabokovian), and they do function to illustrate an important aspect of Nabokov's aesthetic, but their minimalism clashes too jarringly with another important aspect of that aesthetic, its maximalism.

Turning from Vlad the Inscriber to James the Joyous, here's my favorite cover illustration for Ulysses. Again, it's from a Vintage International printing of the early 1990s (when the publisher was on something of a roll).

 Angela Arnet's illustration marvelously signifies Leopold Bloom, that man made out of Joycean words, as a literal man of letters with eyeglasses to read the title he spells. It's a clever and very Modern conceit, and its humanity contrasts with the oddly Soviet-looking artwork chosen for the Gabler edition, a Ulysses that makes me want to build a dam for Lenin:

All the New Directions covers of W. G. Sebald's novels benefit from a decision to design them as seamless collages of tinted versions of photographs from the texts. The covers are thus as enigmatic and thought provoking as the books they bind:

Compare this to the following UK cover of Sebald's Vertigo, which appears to have been created under the misapprehension that the book was a novelization of the Hitchcock film:

 

As an example of what is being lost forever with the death of paper books (and the trashing of vintage paperbacks), check out this perfectly lovely vintage Penguin paperback of Thomas Wolfe's short stories.

The design is perfectly understated (as Wolfe never was), the illustration perfectly grandiose and nostalgic (as TW often was). It's one of the prettiest old paperbacks I own.

At the other end of the artistic spectrum, check out the pulpy, sensationalistic cover Signet used to market a European literary novel (in translation, no less) to the 1950s American audience:

As another memento of a time when highbrow literature was available in cheap paperback form, here's the 75-cent Fawcett Crest edition of Sartre's The Words, marketed as a "famous bestseller," just like Peyton Place: 

Back to beauty. Here's another of my favorite covers, the intriguing High Modernist Nikolai Punin illustration for Antonio Lobo Antunes' Fado Alexandrino:

Completely different but equally effective is the gorgeous Wanda Wulz self-portrait looking off toward the spine of David Grossman's Be My Knife:

My award for most effective and aesthetically pleasing series design must go to the Library of America. Their signature basic black dust jackets with a significant but non-jingoistic red-white-blue stripe (which in Ashbery's case surely signifies both the poet's nation of birth and his French literary inheritance) and a small author portrait at upper right are both tasteful and ultra-cool. They are what the fashionable American writer will be wearing this season.

This 1970s Bantam paperback of Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 is a good definition of 'groovy.' The nostalgic hipster in me prefers it to the posthorn covers.

Lawrence has inspired some very good covers, but this ca.1990 Bantam Classics edition is my very personal favorite. It encourages me to study botany:



I would prefer to see Rep. Paul Ryan's face on the cover of Bret Easton Ellis's misfired (in my opinion) satire, but this sober male model is very creepy indeed--and too big to fail.

The entire Modern Library Proust six-pack is beautifully designed, right down to the box, but the photo chosen for the Captive-Fugitive volume makes it my candidate for the sexiest literary book cover currently in print. Love that leg:

A breathtakingly beautiful color photograph distinguishes this recent edition of Naipaul's Indian travel book. Whoever chose this photo made an amazingly good decision.

The Viking Portable Joyce was the second Joyce book I ever owned--I purchased the Penguin Portrait as a teenager; its cover featured the same Berenice Abbot portrait of the author--and I will probably always visually associate his work with the cover image of a gull-crazed sky over choppy Irish waves.

Need I mention that this edition of Kundera's Laughable Loves is from the Seventies? Inside the sexy cover, I highly recommend the great short story "The Hitchhiking Game," a work of Kunderan existentialism. 

This Routledge Classics edition of Slavoj Zizek's Enjoy Your Symptom! appears at first to be unimaginatively spartan, austere, minimal--everything Zizek is not. But then we notice that thing (a specifically Lacanian 'thing') in the upper right corner. What the hell is that? Closer examination confirms that it's the lipsticked rim of a mouth opened wide to cry out its subject's ecstasy at the moment of ultimate jouissance. And it's more than that, of course: the tiniest hint of tooth at the top edge transforms it into another kind of 'thing,' a vagina dentata opened to engulf and destroy the author's phallic name, the ultimate nom de pere...and so on and so forth, until we find ourselves living in the end times.

...and another thing for BLOOMSDAY 2012

...because once I get started on the nacheinander and nebeneinander of Joycean thoughts it's really impossible to stop cold turkey (cue the Lennon tune) until I've remarked that the Modernists (a category I'll expand to include everyone from Manet to Philip Roth) have become far too fucking respectable in recent decades, haven't they? They've been mastered and doctored, syllabied and conferenced, MLA'd and IJJF'd, deluxe editioned, multiply translated, banned and boned (I don't even know what I mean there), presidential medalled and national treasured, and now we have a holiday (in puritanical Ireland of all places) celebrating a novel in which the central character does "love sticky" on a public beach. Hell, even that despicable asshole (and sometime great writer) Celine (not Dion, the other one) has been duly canonized--a fate he would surely have bemoaned and blamed on a cabal of les juifs. (To give the sorry sonofabitch his due, the WWI scenes near the beginning of Journey to the End of the Night are among the best war writing of the 20th (or any other) century.)

The Good Celine. Her heart will go on...

The Bad Celine. His heart never did...

Modernism, which hoped to be Henry Miller's gob of spit in the face of bourgeois culture, has become altogether too authoritative, academicized, anaesthetized, too much of an official commodity. (Too Dion, we might say, and not enough Celine.) The culture it was meant to gag has consumed it as easily as a handful of M&Ms. It's time to recover the pornographic scandal of Modernism, to be jolted anew by the multiple electric chair shocks of its new, to understand Ulysses as a work as indigestible as Brigadier Pudding's late night snacks, to see a Miro painting through the lens of the shit banquet scene in Pasolini's Salo (which was re-released by the Criterion Collection to coincide with the 2008 Republican National Convention, because timing is everything), to make Modernism obscene again, to recognize James Joyce as a man who never met a dick joke he couldn't work into the Wake, to read Proust as a guy who wrote 3000 pages and seven volumes so he could conceal from censorial eyes an explicit sadistic brothel scene hidden deep inside the final volume (surely the only reason the Recherche didn't suffer the fate of Ulysses and Chatterley is that no prudes made it to volume seven), to understand the haughty mandarin Nabokov as a punning 13 year-old boy who names a nymphomaniacal character "Dr. Anita Johnson." We need to recover the grand 'immaturity' of Modernism, as 'immaturity' is understood in Ross Posnock's wonderful, essential critical study, Philip Roth's Rude Truth, the title of which reminds me that near the beginning of Posnock's book he quotes from Roth's The Counterlife a character's 'countereulogy' for the Rothian writer Nathan Zuckerman. The passage can be read as a rude, ranting, impassioned lament for the sanitizing of modern art, so I'll quote it in full:

The deballing of Zuckerman is now complete...A sanitized death, a travesty of a eulogy, and no ceremony at all--completely secular, having nothing to do with the way Jews bury people. At least a good cry around the hole, a little remorse as they lower the coffin, but no, no one even allowed to go off with the body. Burn it. There is no body. The satirist of the clamoring body--without a body. All backwards and sterile and stupid. The cancer deaths are horrifying. That’s what I would have figured him for. Wouldn’t you? Where was the rawness and the mess? Where was the embarrassment and the shame? Shame in this guy operated always.Here is a writer who broke taboos, fucked around, indiscreet, stepped outside that stuff deliberately, and they bury him like Neil Simon—Simonize our filthy, self-afflicted Zuck! Hegel’s unhappy consciousness out under the guise of sentiment and love! This unsatisfiable, suspect, quarrelsome novelist, this ego driven to its furthest extremes, ups and presents them with a palatable death—and the feeling police, the grammar police, they give him a palatable funeral with all the horseshit and the mythmaking! The only way to have a funeral is to invite everyone who ever knew the person and just wait fore the accident to happen--somebody who comes in out of the blue and tells the truth. Everything else is table manners. I can’t get over it. He’s not even going to rot in the ground, this guy who was made for it. This insidious, unregenerate defiler, this irritant in the Jewish bloodstream, making people uncomfortable and angry by looking with a mirror up his own asshole, really despised by a lot of smart people, offensive to every possible lobby, and they put him away, decontaminated, deloused—suddenly he’s Abe Lincoln and Chaim Weizmann in one! Could this be what he wanted, this kosherization, this stenchlessness? I really had him down for cancer, the works. The catastrophe-extravaganza, the seventy-eight pound death, with the stops all pulled out. A handful of hairless pain howling for the needle, even while begging the nurse's aide to have a heart and touch his prick--one last blow job for the innocent victim. Instead, the dripping hard-on gets out clean as a whistle. All dignity. A big person. These writers are great--real fakes. Want it all. Madly aggressive, shit on the page, shoot on the page, show off their every last fart on the page. And for that they expect medals. Shameless. You gotta love 'em.

Philip Roth receiving the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama, 2011.

Bloomsday 2012

Bloomsday comes around again tomorrow like the lastfirst sentence of Finnegans Wake, and instead of adding a bit more to the Everest of verbiage occasioned by the novel, instead of saying again things that Hugh Kenner or Richard Ellmann already said 50 years ago, instead of pointing out that the Homeric intertexts, that Odyssey and its prequel at the arbitrary origin of Western literature, are already rather Modernist (belated, ironic, influentially anxious) in their tapestry of allusions to even earlier stories, tales, myths, legends; instead of remarking upon the climactic imagery of the "Nausicaa" episode and its queer reimagining in Kenneth Anger's Fireworks; instead of writing a post titled "Joyscrap" that attempts to think about the role of excrement in Joyce's works without ever referencing Bakhtin, Kristeva or Pynchon's Brigadier Pudding (TP's ultimate comment on the British palate); instead of any of that, I've decided to take it easy this Bloomsday and just link to some photos from my trip to Dublin a few years ago.

And if that's not enough, here's the gallery of all my travel photos and miscellanea that I've scanned in recent years. If you enjoy them, you will have enjoyed them; if not, not.

Apropos of nothing except a trip to my 'pictures' folder, here are three great images of writers influenced by Joyce (a category that arguably includes just about everyone who has written literary fiction since 1920): Hemingway, Georges Perec, and between them the man known to his French Resistance comrades as l'Irlandais, 'the Irishman,' Samuel Beckett (whose photo reminds me of Harold Brodkey's observation that Beckett's nihilism ended at the barbershop door; he had the best hair of any canonical male writer).

Transparency, Translucency, Opacity: Some Thoughts on the Continuum of Novelistic Prose

If the medium of prose can be likened to window glass, then the major genera of novelistic prose (popular, literary, experimental) might be placed on a continuum stretching from transparency through translucency to opacity. The overwhelming majority of the prose that people purchase and read, the prose of popular fiction, is carefully crafted to create an illusion of transparency. It seems a clear, flawless, almost invisible window through which the stories and characters are viewed. Transparent prose is the quintessence of 'slick shit,' even slicker than the glossy paperback covers that usually bind it. (I hasten to add that my use of the phrase 'slick shit' is not as derogatory as it may seem; it was the phrase the Epstein brothers used to refer to their Casablanca screenplay, a work I hold in quite high esteem.) Transparent prose flows like an undammed river, presenting no obstacles to readerly navigation. It is written to be safely and enjoyably consumed, and while it is not exactly the literary equivalent of Muzak (because it must successfully create an alternative world and transport the reader there, a function no one would apply to a canned instrumental arrangement of "In My Life"), it is undeniably the kind of prose most closely associated with commodification. All those rows upon rows of genre novels as superficially different and profoundly similar as breakfast cereals in a supermarket are written in transparent prose. The transparent is a plain style, eschewing complex sentence structures and figurative language, but not all plain styles are transparent. Hemingway and Carver, for example, are masters of translucent plainness, and Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans stands as a perverse masterpiece of the plain opaque. The prose of Stephen King, Elmore Leonard, and Thomas Harris (a trio I choose solely because they are the three best contemporary popular novelists I have read in recent years) can stand as exemplary of a prose that tends toward transparency as a Platonic ideal. James Ellroy would also be a good example, although in recent years his telegraphic style has tended to interpose itself between reader and representation, becoming a reductio ad absurdum of the truism that plainness can be just as mannered as complexity. It's not necessary to quote examples of transparent prose, because it's all around us. Open any bestseller and you will see it.

The prose of literary fiction--which I suppose can be defined as fiction intended primarily as an aesthetic object and only secondarily as a commercial one--tends to cluster around the translucent middle of the continuum. If the transparent is a pane of clear glass, the translucent is a tinted or molded window that "diffuses the light so that objects beyond cannot be seen clearly" (as Webster defines 'translucent'). Translucent prose calls attention to itself, becoming a visible barrier between the reader and the object it represents, a lens that distorts the object in the very act of making it visible. If transparent prose is as smooth as a fiber optic cable, translucent prose twists itself into barbs that tear at the reader's brain. In so doing, translucent prose retards the reading process, forcing the reader to notice the medium as well as its representations, the designs and patterns and flaws in the glass as well as the objects still visible beyond. Thus, it raises the questions of reading and writing as processes, makes unavoidable a sense of the novel as a constructed object, and, ideally, forces into consciousness the ideologically inflected decisions made by writers while writing novels and readers while reading them. The slick prose of popular fiction seems designed to forestall these three moments, to keep the reading process easy, fast, naive, and anything but (horror!) dialectical. Translucent prose tends to be dialectically unsettling, with the power to destabilize our received opinions not only of reading and writing but of the world and ourselves. Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, Melville's Moby Dick, Joyce's Ulysses, the vast roman fleuve of Proust--these are the first works that come to my mind as masterpieces of translucent prose. We can always 'see' (in the Conradian sense) the objects that Faulkner or Joyce or Melville or Proust prose-poetically present to us, but we can also always 'see' (indeed, we can never help but see) the poetic prose that presents them. Thus are we teased into questioning the novelistic illusion that enraptures us. If you seek more examples of translucent prose, walk down the literature aisles of a Barnes & Noble (this may be your last chance; brick and mortar bookstores might soon be deader than Adorno). Hemingway, in his own minimal way, is as translucent as Faulkner (James M. Cain would be their transparent contemporary), but in general, translucent prose tends to lengthen sentences to the point of absurdity (Proust, Thomas Bernhard, Faulkner), to promiscuously compound subordinate clauses (Henry James, Proust), to revivify words you might never eye outside pagan papyri and obscure incunabulae inscribed for the perusal of callipygian queens (Joyce, David Foster Wallace, Alexander Theroux), to break up the reading process by means of footnotes, endnotes, parentheses (Nabokov, Wallace, Faulkner), to launch into seemingly endless catalogues of exemplary objects (Rabelais, Joyce, William Gass), to burst unexpectedly into metaphors as natural and abundant as white blossoms on an apple tree after an April rain (Proust, Antonio Lobo Antunes, Bruno Schulz).

If the outer limit of transparency is the purely instrumental prose of children's books (which seems translucently minimal to the mature eye), the endpoint of translucence would be an opacity through which not even the outlines of represented objects would be visible. Opaque prose approaches the condition of a window painted black. It seems to exist only as language on a page, without any recognizable referent. It enacts a disappearance of signified into signifier. I think of Finnegans Wake, Stein's The Making of Americans, Julian Rios's Larva, the later works of Arno Schmidt. None of these is perfectly opaque, of course (only Dadaist glossolalial poetry touches that ultimate Malevich black square), but in passages of each the signified seems to dissolve into 'pure' language. In a way, this is analogous to certain paintings by Picasso and Braque from the early 1910s in which the iconicity of the painted sign (the resemblance between an object and its painted representation) is stretched to the breaking point in a process more familiarly known as Cubism. Perhaps paradoxically, opaque prose tends not to Beckettian sterility but to platitudinous plenitude. It builds Great Chinese Walls of words, literary monuments that seem almost enormous enough to be visible from space. Beyond their walls we can barely see, and this very fact may lead us to suspect a Melvillean void on the other side of the pasteboard mask, an essential Derridean meaninglessness that all language conceals. And it's only a small step from there to the idea that all of this "free playing" of the signifier isn't free at all; it's a compulsive, hysterical defense mechanism. One might further remark that opaque prose silvers the back of the window, transforming it into a magnifying mirror reflecting the writer's already engorged ego back upon itself in an infinitely inflating, infinitely repeating series. It is a synthesis of the infinite and the infinitesimal, an enormous claustrophobia. (Which is not to say it can't be great fun to read. The Wake, for all its opacity, is laugh-out-lud* funny.)

* I'm letting the typo stand since it's perfectly Wakish, referring to the legendary King Lud of London, namesake of Ludgate. It is also, as Joyce the Joyous would surely have pointed out, related to the Latin ludere, to play (whence comes Huizinga's Homo Ludens and the various ludicrosities of postmodernism). And we musn't forget old Ned Ludd, apocryphal first luddite, who would be sledgehammering my Toshiba right about now--

Notes on Technology

Heidegger was an optimist. His adherence to dialectical form in the face of technology's challenge marks him, in fact, as a utopian idealist. The H-man is so enfolded in the forms of dialectical thought that technology (as he defines it) simply must contain, at the core of its essence, a dialectical reversal of the order of technology... But what if it doesn't? What if the core of technology's essence is a mass-anesthetizing black hole from which nothing emerges except profit?

The only question concerning technology asked by the present generation is, "What's next from Apple?" They seek not a mystical 'saving' force but a slimmer, faster iPad.

Wikipedia is positively medieval, a vast Gothic cathedral of information constructed by anonymous artisans. It departs from the medieval model only in this: the stonemasons of the Middle Ages did not permit village idiots to carve their capitals.

The real problem concerning technology is not that it alienates us from the transcendental good/god of Heideggerian Being, but that it alienates us from the mundane reality of ourselves and others.

"What the hell are you taking about?" the techno-utopian asks. "My computer doesn't alienate me; it connects me to the entire world." The fallacy here lies in the idea that communication and alienation are necessarily mutually exclusive. Your computer connects you to the entire wired and wireless world, but this 'connection' is, upon examination, a sentimental illusion generated to mask a purely electronic reality. Computers connect only to other computers, and the communication they enable is so radically disembodied that we can never be certain we are interacting with a human being at the connection's other end.

Maybe the other end of that chatroom heart-to-heart was a computer statistically programmed to give you the answers you desired, the digi-tech equivalent of the old Magic 8-Ball.

Time spent with a computer is time lost with an actually present human being.

If Derrida had not already existed to demonize the "metaphysics of presence," Mark Zuckerberg would've been forced to pay someone to invent him.

If you don't suspect that your computer is impoverishing your life, that life has probably never been rich enough for the difference to be noticeable.

The vast virtual world of online pornography throws the problem of technology into sharp relief. Every time we masturbate to online porn (and don't even try to pretend you don't), we give a corporation the keys to our psyches, we let the multinational that owns our internet service provider know exactly what gets us off, the exact image that produces the most intense pleasure of our physical lives. Now ask yourself: How much would an advertising firm pay for that database?

Online porn is the ultimate commercialization of jouissance.

Every improvement in communications technology is also a further refinement of totalitarianism. The Nazis burned books and distributed radios.

Just as the fatal weakness of student movements lies in the fundamental fact that they are student movements, drawing their membership from a temporary and transient population, the fatal weakness of online protest lies in its virtual quality. Real protest can only happen in the streets, where it will eventually be met with batons, pepper spray and bullets.

The problem with Occupy Wall Street was that they brought a computer to a gunfight. The next Occupation must prepare to defend its encampments the way those Egyptians in Tahrir Square defended theirs: militarily.

But there will probably be no "next Occupation." Occupy already appears destined for a small corkboard display in the Museum of Leftist Nostalgia.

The technological death of privacy is a disaster for the imagination. Those human mysteries that once teased us into imaginative thought are now posted on Facebook for the world to read. In our unmysterious interpersonal world, Tolstoy would be an engineer.

Where is the space for original sexual fantasy--the most imaginative exercise most human beings ever engage in--in a world where internet pornography is but a keystroke away, offering an encyclopedic array of fetishistic satisfactions?

Few things in our technowelt are more ridiculous than online arguments: impassioned, heated, but ludicrously slow-motion exchanges between strangers who exist for each other only as caricatures abstracted from their previous statements, as though the entire situation occurs only to confirm the postmodernist concept of the individual as a discourse construction. Safe behind fortress walls of mediation, the anonymous arguers hurl insults and frame bons mots they would never have had the courage or quickness to create in the heat of genuine human interaction (the face-to-face kind).

Online conversation is to real conversation what internet sex is to bareback fucking.

Rest assured, I fully appreciate the savage irony of writing these anti-technological notes on a blog.

The internet today is an ideal model of an absolutely corporatist world in which governments have withered away and corporations control everything (even access to the world) and dissenting voices are given relative freedom to rant and ramble only because this is still a model and not the real world... How long will this distinction hold?

The mass media discourse of American political culture, separating our political life into a manichean Liberal vs. Conservative opposition, serves the media corporations' ideological goal of concealing the truly dominant ideology of our time, corporate capitalism or, more concisely, corporatism. Corporations distract us with political circuses while they steal all of our bread.

The generation of Americans now coming to adulthood has never known a non-digital life. They are a generation so thoroughly technologized that they see technology not as a threat but as a basic fact of existence, an unproblematic condition. Like the ratio of oxygen to nitrogen in the air or the presence of salt in seawater, technology seems a natural thing that cannot be 'thought' as a problem. This is the true legacy of Jobs, Gates and Zuckerberg.

Does technology make us dumber? Socrates thought so (see the Phaedrus and beware its bottomless ironies) and the case can still be made. Information that can be immediately accessed online need not be learned, need not be internalized, need not become authentic knowledge, something deeply known. Just as the corporatization of the university is transforming it from a site of education to a place of vocational training, so the technologization of thought transforms knowledge into information, a distinction best understood thus: information is something we use; knowledge is something we are. Knowledge is the brick and mortar of our subjectivity; information always remains an object outside us, something used for a specific purpose and quickly discarded. The triumph of information is the death of human subjectivity.

What is to be done? I have yet to hear an answer to that question that does not strike me as hollow, sentimental, nostalgic, utopian. So here's my hollow, sentimental, nostalgic, utopian answer: I believe that in works of the imagination, works of art, we can find a privileged space for opposition to the hegemonic ideology of our time, a kind of Archimedes point from which that ideology might be shaken, moved, even--at a utopian vanishing point I dare not gaze at for fear of blindness--overthrown. I believe that art not only can but must be more than mood music for power (a phrase I steal from Robert Hughes's Shock of the New, betraying my Modernist bias). I believe that art can pierce us more deeply than intellectual argument because it directly attacks our senses. I believe that any artist who does not work toward this end is asleep at the wheel. I believe that both Nietzsche and Picasso, both Rilke and Freud, both Proust and Sartre, are great philosophers because they are first and foremost great artists. And I believe that any artist who works authentically will ineluctably create oppositional art, for authenticity is everything that corporatism comes to crush.

The liberation of the imagination. That old Romantic avantgardish song and dance. This, strangely enough, is what is to be done.

But for now, turn off your computer and love the one you're with.

P.S.: My opinions may be crankier than a Model T engine, but that doesn't make them wrong.

A Metaphor for our Time

"Reality is a cliche from which we escape by metaphor." -- Wallace Stevens, Adagia

And metaphor, as Stevens also knew, is the anti-cliche in which we capture reality. Metaphor brings together two disparate electrodes until meaning arcs between them with a light that burns and brightens.

A metaphor for the present crisis: Corporate capitalism has run off its rails, plowed across an open field and smashed into a suburban housing development, demolishing a swath of middle-class homes, but capitalism's ideologues stand idly by and insist, like good Brezhnev-era commissars, that the system is fundamentally sound. "What rails, comrade?" the CNBC apparatchik insists in his thick Boris Badinov accent, "Train is supposed to run on ground."

Some Supposedly Great Books I Haven't Read (yet)

To begin, allow me a brief orgy of lit-geek bragging: I've read Infinite Jest (every jot, tittle, and footnote), and liked it enough to title this post with a DFW allusion; I've read Ulysses (so many times I've lost count--8 or 9, I think, over the course of 20 years, and I've read individual chapters more often); I've read Finnegans Wake (once end oundly ounced; eat teaks aleavetime to ride its wheel [pardon my truly awful mock-Wakish]); I've read In Search of Lost Time (once complete in Moncreiff's English, and parts of Swann's Way in French while sardined into the coach cabin of a flight from Paris to Detroit); I've read The Magic Mountain, The Recognitions, War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Gravity's Rainbow (twice), Against the Day, Underworld, You Bright and Risen Angels, An American Tragedy, and many, many other books that ill-read philistines like to think no one really reads. (And chances are, if you're reading this, so have you.) If you've ever wandered into the literary fiction or criticism aisles of a Barnes and Noble and picked up a wristbreaking volume and asked, "Who reads this shit?" I'm probably the answer to your question.

But enough literary dick-measuring. This post is about the widely acknowledged great books that, for one reason or another, I haven't gotten around to reading (yet), the canonical books that remain closed to me. Since I can't say anything of interest about them, a bare list must suffice:

• The Aeneid by Virgil
• The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser
• Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
• The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil
• The Glastonbury Romance by John Cowper Powys
• The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle
• The Changing Light at Sandover by James Merrill
• Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
• Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
• The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
• Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes
• JR by William Gaddis
• A by Louis Zukofsky
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

I know, I know...that last one raises your eyebrows, doesn't it? "He hasn't read Jane Eyre?! What the fuck?!!?" People are always surprised when I tell them that. It's my sleeved ace in games of 'Humiliation.' I still don't understand how I was able to acquire a B.A. in English without being forced to read Jane Eyre at some point by a Victoriana-enthralled feminist prof. My only answer is: Without god, all things are possible. (To paraphrase a character in another of these books I haven't read.)

Francoise Gilot and John Richardson on "Charlie Rose"

Charlie Rose justified his existence last night with a marvelous (as Mitt Romney might describe it) conversation about Picasso with John Richardson and Francoise Gilot. The entire episode can be viewed online at the show's website.Television this excellent is so rare on our American air that its infrequent appearances deserve praise in overplus. Of the artworks shown and discussed (currently on display at the Gagosian Gallery in NYC), the most interesting to me was a little-known oil from the early 1950s of Francoise wringing water from her hair: a loose, wet, drippy, contorted, Picassoan transformation of a Degas bather. If I had a fraction of Mitt Romney's money, I'd buy it off the Gagosian wall and repeat "Marvelous, marvelous" all the way home. Here it is: