The Paris Review's Blog, page 744

Strawberries and Cream and Spinal Injuries

Yeats at age fifty-eight, via Wikimedia Commons

Today marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of W. B. Yeats’s death.

Ottoline had what she called her Thursday parties, at which you met a lot of writers. Yeats was often there. He loosened up a great deal if he could tell malicious stories, and so he talked about George Moore. Yeats particularly disliked George Moore because of what he wrote in his book Hail and Farewell, which is in three volumes, and which describes Yeats in a rather absurd way. Moore thought Yeats looked very much like a black crow or a rook as he walked by the lake on Lady Gregory’s estate at Coole. He also told how Yeats would spend the whole morning writing five lines of poetry and then he’d be sent up strawberries and cream by Lady Gregory, and so Yeats would have to get his own back on George Moore. Another thing that amused Yeats very much for some reason was Robert Graves and the whole saga of his life with Laura Riding. He told how Laura Riding threw herself out of a window without breaking her spine, or breaking it but being cured very rapidly. All that pleased Yeats tremendously.

—Stephen Spender, the Art of Poetry No. 25

 

Characters Get Together

Wilshire Boulevard ca. 1959. Photo: Roger Wollstadt, via Flickr

There were extenuating circumstances. I was in LA for work, and I had known, intellectually, that it would be warm in California—hot, even. But when you’re deep in a New York winter, who really thinks to pack a sundress?

The lightest thing I had was a pair of jeans. So on a particularly Saharan afternoon, I ducked into a thrift store and grabbed a cotton dress off the rack without trying it on. When I got back to my room and changed, I noticed that the dress was brief. It wasn’t until I had donned my sandals that I realized the dress was in fact too small for me. Oh well, I thought. Better to look silly than to burn, as Saint Paul would most certainly not have said.

The bus let me off some distance from my destination. I didn’t mind; I like to walk. But I was the only pedestrian on that stretch of Santa Monica. Then, as the wind whipped my flimsy skirt up around my thighs, motorists started honking. One car slowed so the driver could catcall me.

If you think this is flattering—and no woman reading this does—think again.

Worse, it wasn’t just that my legs were exposed. I was wearing my prescription sunglasses, much smaller than the glasses I usually wear. I first started wearing big glasses many years ago, after agreeing to have my hair dyed blonde for a magazine makeover story. It seemed to me crucial at the time that I balance the blonde hair with something aggressively unsexy, lest anyone think for a minute that I hoped to look attractive. The idea of being caught out for such presumption made me physically sick with shame. Even when my hair went back to its natural brown, I found I preferred that people see the glasses first.

With nowhere to hide from the honking cars, I ducked into every open business I passed: a gas station, a hardware store, a nursery. I kept my eyes on my phone, watching as the distance between me and my destination shrank block by block, while awkwardly holding my skirt down with my other hand. A drifter hissed something obscene at me. It felt like forever. It was probably only about a mile.

When I reached the dollhouse museum, I could feel the tension drain from my shoulders. The gentleman who accepted my donation seemed wholly indifferent to my anatomy. If anything, his manner was slightly suspicious. Then I walked into the first room of the converted private house, and gasped. “Is that the Mexican Dollhouse from the Flora Gill Jacobs collection?” It was. And each of us had made a new friend.

His specialty, he told me, was larger-scale eighteenth-century wooden peg dolls. The museum collection had a few, but as he explained sadly, they were not acquiring much nowadays; the founder’s children were indifferent to the enterprise. Kids had no interest, either. “It’s a good thing,” he said, “that there are still a few of us who never grow up.”

We sat on the porch, and he told me about the period in the 1970s when he became the de facto companion of a famous 1920s and ’30s movie star, a former sex symbol who by that time was very old. He said she was only about four foot ten. Although he was her only visitor, she always insisted on full makeup, elaborate platinum wigs, and elegant peignoir sets.

I hated to go, but I was due to meet a friend a few blocks away on the Santa Monica Pier. The docent and I exchanged information, and hugged.

As I was crossing the street, a guy pulled up next to me on a bicycle. He was wearing a straw cowboy hat, and straddling the bike, sort of rode-walked beside me as I stared straight ahead and held my skirt down.

“Hey, can I ask you a question?” he said. “I’m a filmmaker, and you have exactly the look I’m looking for in my films.” He pressed a card into my hand; on it was a handwritten Facebook address. “They’re really artistic short films,” he said. “Characters get together.”

I crumpled the card and tossed it into the first trash can I saw. I wondered how many other women he had approached that day.

But then, for all I know, maybe he was totally legit: maybe he was a veritable Rohmer, making atmospheric short films in which characters connected spiritually, or had long talks on a porch about lost friends and the childhoods they never outgrew. As Jane Austen wrote, “it is such a happiness when good people get together—and they always do.” And I wouldn’t want to presume.

 

Beware Usen’t To

This is what happens when you use usen’t to. Constance Charpentier, Melancholy, 1801, oil on canvas.

At ten every morning, Garner’s Usage Tip lands in my inbox—I’m sure Garner could suggest a less clunky formulation for “in my inbox”—providing a quick bit of unfussy, eminently sensible grammatical advice. There are worse things to look forward to.

Yesterday’s installment was the third in a scintillating four-part series on used to, which gets pretty spicy, as far as grammar goes. Fun fact: the contracted form of used not to is usen’t to, which has been, despite its pleasant lilt, almost wholly displaced by didn’t use to.

You could try to bring it back into style, but apart from sounding pretentious—which you would—you’d run the risk of becoming very miserable. Take a look at usen’t to as it appears throughout literature and you’ll see: it’s almost always used in the context of a total bummer. See below for examples from Forster, Trollope, Beckett, et al., none of which make the sun shine any brighter.

Please, if you can find any positive instance of usen’t to, direct me to it. Otherwise I’m inclined to offer a warning: abstain from this phrase, or you’re liable to be plunged into cafard, parochialism, censoriousness, or just sort of a downer mood.

E. M. Forster, Howards End

“Meg, may I tell you something? I like Henry.”
“You’d be odd if you didn’t,” said Margaret.
“I usen’t to.”
“Usen’t!” She lowered her eyes a moment to the black abyss of the past. They had crossed it, always excepting Leonard and Charles. They were building up a new life, obscure, yet gilded with tranquillity. Leonard was dead; Charles had two years more in prison. One usen’t always to see clearly before that time. It was different now.

Arthur Wing Pinero, The Second Mrs. Tanqueray

“My face is covered with little shadows that usen’t to be there.”

Iris Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat

“They’ve got a sharper eye than we have for what’s rotten in this society.”
“Young people have always had that. But it usen’t to affect their joie de vivre.”

Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now

“Anyways the girls shouldn’t let on as they are running after the gentlemen. A gentleman goes here and he goes there, and he speaks up free, of course. In my time, girls usen’t to do that. But then, maybe, I’m old-fashioned,” added Mrs. Pipkin, thinking of the new dispensation.

Samuel Beckett, Embers

I usen’t to need anyone, just to myself, stories, there was a great one about an old fellow called Bolton, I never finished it, I never finished any of them, I never finished anything, everything always went on for ever. [Pause.] Bolton.

 

Free of One’s Melancholy Self

The Quaaludes featuring the DT’s album cover, 2011.

When Jordan Belfort—played by Leonardo DiCaprio in a truly masterful moment of full-body acting—wrenches himself from the steps of a country club into a white Ferrari that he drives to his mansion, moviegoers, having already watched some two hours of Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, are meant to be horrified. His addiction to quaaludes (and money, and cocaine, and sex, and giving motivational speeches) has rendered him not just a metaphorical monster but a literal one. He lunges at his pregnant wife and his best friend, played by Jonah Hill, and equally high; he smashes everything in his path, both with his body and with the aforementioned Ferrari. He gurgles and drools and mangles even monosyllabic words. He’s Frankenstein in a polo shirt.

But what of the movie’s glossier scenes? The one where Belfort and his paramour engage in oral sex while speeding down a highway? Where he and his friends and colleagues are on boats and planes and at pool parties totally free of the inhibitions that keep most of us adhering to the laws of common decency? What about the parts that look fun?

Everyone I spoke to post-Wolf (at least, everyone who liked it) rapturously praised Terence Winter’s absurd dialogue, DiCaprio’s magnetism, Scorsese’s eye for beautiful grotesquerie. Most of them also included a half-whispered, wide-eyed aside: what exactly are quaaludes, and where can we get some?

* * *

Often prescribed to nervous housewives, a quaalude was something between a sleeping pill and a sedative. First synthesized in the late fifties, by 1965 ’ludes were being manufactured by William H. Rorer Inc., a Pennsylvania pharmaceutical company. The name “quaalude” is both a play on “Maalox,” another product manufactured by William H. Rorer Inc., and a synthesis of the phrase “quiet interlude”—a concept so simple and often so out of reach. Just whisper “quiet interlude” to yourself a few times. Seductive, no? It’s the pill in the “take a pill and lie down” directive thousands of Don Drapers gave their Bettys.

Of course, housewives have children who grow into curious teenagers, and medicine-cabinet explorations led the children of boomers to discover a new use for the drug. Most sedatives are designed to take you away within fifteen minutes, but—as Belfort explains in a lengthy paean to ’ludes—fighting the high leads one into a state almost universally described as euphoria. “It was hard to imagine how anything could feel better than this. Any problems you had were immediately forgotten or irrelevant,” said one person who came of age when ’ludes were still floating around. “Nothing felt like being on quaaludes except being on quaaludes.”

* * *

William James thought the world was made up of two halves: the healthy-minded, or those who could “avert one’s attention from evil, and live simply in the light of good … quite free of one’s melancholy self,” and the sick-souled, or morbid-minded, “grubbing in rat-holes instead of living in the light; with their manufacture of fears, and preoccupation with every unwholesome kind of misery, there is something almost obscene about these children of wrath.” In the end, to be of morbid mind is, according to James, the better option—the harsh realities the healthy-minded cheerily repel “may after all be the best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.” Still, it’s not easy, being a sick soul. James himself was in and out of institutions for a good portion of his adult life, and he’s one of the first persons to pop up in a search of “neurasthenia,” the catch-all term for those who suffered from nervousness, exhaustion, and overthinking in the nineteenth century.

Maybe William James needed a quiet interlude. Maybe something like a quaalude, something that makes you feel like yourself without any of the stress of actually being yourself, can be, for a healthy mind looking to spice up a Saturday night, something that enhances dancing and drinking and sex and honesty. But for someone like Jordan Belfort—whose desires beget more desires until he isn’t sure whether they’re real or if he’s wanting just to want—quaaludes were probably more an occupational necessity than a recreational getaway. 

* * *

To stay home feeling ecstatic was one thing, but imagine being out! Music! Lights! Sweaty, writhing bodies! Of course quaaludes were at the center of the seventies disco movement. Manhattan was littered with “juice bars,” nightclubs where no alcohol was sold but quaaludes could be had for a song. (Speaking of songs, here’s an incomplete list of musicians who wrote songs referencing ’ludes: David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Cheap Trick, and the Tubes, whose lead singer’s stage character was called Quay Lewd.)

As with all fashionable drugs, quaaludes make countless appearances in the diaries of Andy Warhol, who, for the sake of verisimilitude and sheer meanness, took great pleasure in documenting the quantities ingested by those on the dance floor at Studio 54:

January 3, 1978: “Liza said to Halston, ‘Give me every drug you’ve got.’ So he gave her a bottle of coke, a few sticks of marijuana, a Valium and four Quaaludes.”

Liza and Halston, of course, need no further introduction. They are the shiniest stars in a room too shiny for most of us to even imagine. They are at the peaks of their respective professions. Studio 54 is the most important place in the most important city in the most important time the world has ever known and they are its royals. But they can’t dance without quaaludes.

* * *

What happened in New York City nightclubs was just a more moneyed version of what was happening in suburban living rooms, and the lust for ’ludes was no exception. By the early eighties, though, the supply was running low—in 1978, Rorer sold Quaaludes to the Lemmon Company, who continued to market them as a sleeping aid even as the DEA was cracking down on street sales and quack doctors who would, for the paltry sum of fifty bucks, write anyone who walked in off the street a prescription for “714s,” so termed for the number Lemmon stamped on each pill. For those too young or too far away from New York, I’m told, “They were always very hard to get—I assumed most of them came from people who robbed pharmacies or raided parents’ medicine cabinets, or they were stolen from medicine cabinets in burglaries. I remember paying a very pricey eight dollars each for them. I knew a guy who used to steal them from his mom, who was dying of cancer.”

* * *

There are uglier moments. One person I talked to sheepishly admitted that quaaludes were something you gave girls to “loosen them up”—to get them to say yes to anything. Roman Polanski gave a quaalude to his thirteen-year-old rape victim that night in a Hollywood jacuzzi. On first reading this story, in a nail-salon copy of Vanity Fair ten years ago, I assumed all the drugs available to rich LA filmmakers in the early seventies were pretty much to the same.

Now I know that’s not the case.

In Bunny Tales: Behind Closed Doors at the Playboy Mansion, Izabella St. James, Hugh Hefner’s former live-in girlfriend, says that every night out was prefaced with an offer of ’ludes from Hugh. The later descriptions of post-nightclub sex parties—I’ll spare you the gory details, but there are some depressing references to unintended uses of baby oil—make much more sense knowing the participants would’ve been feeling the euphoria and increased sexual desire the drug can create.

* * *

If you Google “what drug is most like quaaludes,” the answer that most often pops up is Ambien, a prescription sleep-aid made famous for its other effects by golf superstar/sex addict Tiger Woods. Much as with quaaludes, fighting the sleep-inducing effects of Ambien can send one into a state of decreased inhibition, heightened libido, and lucid hypnosis. It’s when I read this that I realize what I was grasping for during Belfort’s explanation of the quaalude high—“I’ve been here before.” I have a (very sparingly used) prescription for Ambien—insomnia is, I think, a plague suffered by all morbid minds—and I always take it meaning to go directly to sleep, to drift away into the good night, but once in a while something distracts me and I’ve passed the fifteen-minute window into a curious netherworld where I am wholly myself: perhaps too much myself. A cursory search through my e-mail turns up notes sent to old boyfriends; to people to whom I no longer speak; to people to whom I do speak, just not particularly frankly. My sentences in these notes are coherent, sometimes even lyrical, and the words are funny, direct, revealing. In the morning I have hazy memories of these exchanges and feel not the embarrassment one feels after a night of too many drinks and too many sloppy “It was the booze, I swear!” moments, but the embarrassment of having revealed thoughts and feelings I’d otherwise expect the civilized part of my brain to keep locked up. I might not’ve danced, like Liza did, or spent ungodly sums of money on a domineering prostitute named Venice, like Jordan Belfort did, but my own morbid mind does, in its way, understand the appeal.

* * *

Despite one person’s assertion that he could have quaaludes in my hand by the end of the day (hypothetically, of course—he refused, and I’d probably be too scared anyway), finding pharmaceutical-grade quaaludes in 2014 is virtually impossible. Lemmon, citing bad publicity, ceased manufacturing the drug in 1983, and by 1984 Ronald Reagan had signed into law a ban on the production and sale of prescription quaaludes.

That doesn’t mean people didn’t still get them—plenty were left over from the three decades in which they’d been legal, and really, wasn’t it easier to just call a guy than bother with a doctor?

Amateur chemists, too, tried (and still try, mostly in South Africa, where street-manufactured quaaludes account for a startling percentage of the drug trade) to replicate the original, often using Valium and other milder sedatives to capture a fleeting bit of the quaalude high. More than anything, though, ’ludes simply fell out of fashion, becoming a historical oddity. People who are now responsible parents took them in the seventies. Hugh Hefner still does, maybe.

I don’t know a single person under thirty who has seen one.

The Wolf of Wall Street is as much about addiction as anything else. In a scene near the film’s end, Jonah Hill’s character, Belfort’s best friend and partner in crime, visits his ankle-monitor-wearing comrade at the Long Island mansion Belfort will have to mortgage in order to pay his mounting legal fees.

Addiction narratives in which the protagonist survives often see the hero praise the light, expressing a newfound joy in living clean—in living healthy-minded. Hill’s character, joining the now-quaalude-free Belfort by the pool to sip nonalcoholic beer, asks what it feels like to be sober. His face is genuinely curious—if I had to decide, I’d call Hill’s Donny Azoff a sick soul, and it’s easy to imagine him wondering if it’s possible to get to the quiet interlude without chemical assistance.

There’s a pause.

“It fucking sucks, man,” says Belfort. “It really fucking sucks.”

Angela Serratore is the deputy web editor at Lapham’s Quarterly.

 

Your Likeness in Cheese, and Other News

Vincenzo Campi, The Ricotta Eaters, 1580. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Gift idea: cheese portraits. The medium is the message here—this cheese is made with bacteria cultivated from your mouth or toes. It’s you, indubitably, microbially. The artist adds, “The bacteria that you find in-between the toes is actually very similar to the bacteria that makes cheese smell like toes.” You don’t say.
Amazon has purchased another block of Seattle. A technofortress, no doubt, soon to be swarming with drones.
The Sims is the bestselling PC game of all time. It also has—no mean feat—the most poetic, surreal software-update notifications of all time. “Sims will no longer walk on water to view paintings placed on swimming pool walls.”
Presenting the Daphne, an award for the best book to have been published fifty years ago.
Melville the prognosticator: Moby-Dick, Benito Cereno, and modern-day imperialism.

 

Any Nosegays, You Blockhead?

Severin Roesen, Still Life—Flowers in a Basket, ca. 1850s.

The British dramatist Samuel Foote was born today in 1720. Foote was a playwright in the snickering, rabble-rousing tradition—a dry wit who was always getting himself into trouble. He performed plays without licensing them, basically the eighteenth-century equivalent of smuggling your camcorder into a movie theater; he went riding and was thrown from his horse, resulting in the loss of one of his legs; he spent some time in debtors’ prison; he’s rumored to have made passes at a footman or two in his day; and much of his writing features withering, thinly veiled caricatures of wealthy people, which really pissed off those wealthy people, to say nothing of their wealthy coteries. Most important, Foote is responsible for having coined the phrase “the Grand Panjandrum,” as refined a piece of nonsense as I can remember having heard. (He did it off the cuff, having faltered in the recitation of a text he’d “memorized.”)

What better way to pay tribute to the man than with an excerpt? Two centuries before Spiro Agnew’s “nattering nabobs,” there was simply The Nabob, Foote’s 1772 comedy about an aristocrat newly returned to London from the Orient. You could dip into the play anywhere and come up with comic gold; its brand of buffoonery is never out of fashion. I myself have just discovered what good clean fun it is to read an exchange between a fastidious, irascible Brit—that is, Mite, our titular nabob—and his underwhelming florist:

Servant Mrs. Crocus, from Brompton, your honour.

Mite Has she brought me a bouquet?

Servant Your honour?

Mite Any nosegays, you blockhead?

Servant She has a boy with a basket.

Mite Shew her in! [Enter Mrs. Crocus.] Well, Mrs. Crocus; let us see what you have brought me. Your last bouquet was as big as a broom, with a tulip strutting up like a magistrate’s mace; and, besides, made me look like a devil.

Crocus I hope your honour could find no fault with the flowers? It is true, the polyanthuses were a little pinched by the easterly winds; but for pip, colour, and eye, I defy the whole parish of Fulham to match ‘em.

Mite Perhaps not; but it is not the flowers, but the mixture, I blame. Why, here now, Mrs. Crocus, one should think you were out of your senses, to cram in this clump of jonquils!

Crocus I thought your honour was fond of their smell.

Mite Damn their smell! It is their colour I talk of. You know my complexion has been tinged by the East, and you bring me here a bla ze of yellow, that gives me the jaundice. Look! Do you see here, what a fine figure I cut? You might as well have tied me to a bundle of sunflowers!

Crocus I beg pardon, your honour!

Mite Pardon! There is no forgiving faults of this kind. Just so you serve d Harry Hectic; you stuck into his bosom a parcel of hyacinths, though the poor fellow’s f ace is as pale as a primrose.

Crocus I did not know—

Mite And there, at the opera, the poor creature sat in his side-box, looking like one of the figures in the glass-cases in Westminster-Abbey; dead and drest!

Crocus If gentlemen would but give directions, I would make it my study to suit ‘ em.

Mite But that your cursed climate won’t let you. Have you any pinks or carnations in bloom?

Crocus They are not in season, your honour. Lillies of the valley—

Mite I hate the whole tribe! What, you want to dress me up like a corpse! When shall you have any rosebuds?

Crocus The latter end of the month, please your honour.

Mite At that time you may call.

Crocus Your honour has no further commands?

Mite None. You may send nosegays for my chairmen, as usual.

 

Sleeping Beauty

Photo: Cory Doctorow, via Flickr

My life boasts few distinctions, but I make the worst coffee you will ever drink. It’s almost as if, on the day I was born, the fairies stood over my cradle (okay, incubator) Sleeping Beauty–style, and the first good fairy declared, “She will be able to remember the lyrics to eighties cartoon themes her entire life.” And the second good fairy said, “I give you the gift of teeth that in the eighteenth century would have seemed straight but look kind of crooked now that everyone else has braces.” But then the malevolent enchantress appeared, cackled, and cursed me with the words: “She will never make a potable cup of coffee.”

You would be forgiven, if you have read about my manifold culinary failures, for thinking that I can’t handle myself in the kitchen. In fact, I am pretty competent in that regard, which makes my persistent inability all the more mysterious. And don’t talk to me about single origins, rancid grounds, Chemex, French press, vacuum, toddy, cold brew, hand-grinding: it makes no difference. The curse is stronger than any of these trifling variables.

Sleeping Beauty was always my favorite Disney movie. I saw it with my mother in big-screen re-release when I was about four, and was enchanted by handsome Prince Philip and perfect Briar Rose and gruff, mannish little Merryweather, and of course the elegant Maleficent. I was fascinated by the notion that, no matter how far you run, you cannot escape your fate. (It was, I guess, many a child’s introduction to the classic tenets of tragedy.)

My awful coffee was notorious at the offices of The Paris Review. Anyone could make better coffee than I, and this fact was quickly explained to any new hire. Now that I work from home, I have been thrown back on my own skills, and the results, while revolting, have been interesting. Because here is the thing: no matter how I try to control the laboratory conditions, it is always awful in a different way. Sometimes too weak, other days unbearably strong. Acrid and bitter, or soapy. Sometimes there are grounds involved. Today’s cup is a strange combination of weak and fruity, and not in an on-purpose, free-trade, deliberate-notes way, either. In this matter, David Lynch and I agree: “Even bad coffee is better than no coffee at all.” But barely.

In the original version of Sleeping Beauty (or at least one of the folktales upon which Charles Perrault based his more familiar telling), there is an especially creepy second act. Here is one concise summary:

After having been secretly wed by the reawakened Royal almoner, the Prince continued to visit the Princess, who bore him two children, L’Aurore (Dawn) and Le Jour (Day), which he kept secret from his stepmother, who was of an ogre lineage. Once he had ascended the throne, he brought his wife and the talabutte (“Count of the Mount”).

The Ogress Queen Mother sent the young Queen and the children to a house secluded in the woods, and directed her cook there to prepare the boy for her dinner, with a sauce Robert. The humane cook substituted a lamb, which satisfied the Queen Mother, who then demanded the girl, but was satisfied with a young goat prepared in the same excellent sauce. When the Ogress demanded that he serve up the young Queen, the latter offered her throat to be slit, so that she might join the children she imagined were dead. There was a tearful secret reunion in the cook's little house, while the Queen Mother was satisfied with a hind prepared with sauce Robert. Soon she discovered the trick and prepared a tub in the courtyard filled with vipers and other noxious creatures. The King returned in the nick of time and the Ogress, being discovered, threw herself into the pit she had prepared and was fully consumed, and everyone else lived happily ever after.

(Sauce Robert is a compound butter flavored with mustard.)

I have floated the curse theory to a few people. No one seemed convinced. The words mental block may or may not have been used. And maybe that is true. Maybe at a period in my life when everything—from the personal to the professional to the small things like learning to unclog my own bathtub—feels like a product of will and effort and work, it is comforting to have something, something tiny, in my life that I pretend I can’t control. Illness and tragedy are truly uncontrollable, and yet we must carry on. Perhaps for some people, the small controllable things are comforting. For my part, I like having something ungovernable. Rather than feeling like a failure, whenever I take that first, bad taste, I feel slightly relieved: it is a slight, necessary abdication. An unimportant one. Perhaps we all need one of those.

But the problem is, when the coffee is that hard to drink, you never really wake up.

 

Lend Me an Ear

Alvin Booth, Nombrillisme, 2013, silicone and porcelain.

It started with an ear. My right ear, to be exact, which the artist Alvin Booth had encased in a pale purple alginate. The material reminded me of blueberry yogurt, and out of the corner of my eye, I watched him scoop the stuff into my ear. We were in Booth’s Manhattan studio, where he lives with his wife, Nike Lanning. I was lying on an antique chaise longue, the type one sees in movies featuring French bordellos. Since my left ear was against the upholstery and my right was swathed in gelatinous goo, Booth’s words were hardly discernible, and at best he sounded like he was speaking from a distant room. I looked up and saw his mouth moving, a wild tousle of hair rising as he spoke.

For the last twenty years, Booth has been amassing a reservoir of work that revolves, capriciously, around the human body. I say capriciously because Booth doesn’t concern himself with the clinical characteristics of form, but rather with the corporeal aspect of the flesh, which is to say, the body erotic. His earlier work in photography has a nostalgic patina; through labor-intensive darkroom techniques, he produced sepia-toned gelatin-silver prints of nudes slathered in oil and gold powder, sometimes bound in latex. The close-ups are at once intimate, almost jarringly so, lending the photos a voyeuristic quality. In his digital works, geometric patterns are superimposed on the bodies of men, women, and sometimes children; his models often posed within a kaleidoscopic mirrored enclosure. The results are highly stylized compositions of natural forms, startling and disturbingly beautiful.

Booth’s newest exhibition, “Come to Your Senses,” is showing this month in Paris’s acte2galerie; it features Booth’s sculptural forms and sound art, most notably the piece Vingt-Quatre Heures, which plays snippets of phatic utterances taken from Radio France Culture programs. A black screen shows a green oscilloscope, which alters with every vocalization. Booth stitched together the nonsensical sounds that announcers made between words or before sentences—“umm,” “err,” “hmmm.” The result is a catalog of what Peter Hamilton calls, in his introduction to the exhibition, “the ridiculous nature of the isolated.”

After the alginate on my ear was set, Booth peeled it from my skin. From the alginate mold, he would create a plaster mold and then finally a silicon ear, which would be used in Vingt-Quatre Heures. In the installation, these became the “ear” phones: listeners could experience the sound by holding their own ears up to the molds. After I washed the remainder of the purple gel from my ears and hair, Booth’s wife breezed into the room in a pixie cut and black vintage boa. They showed me more of his recent work—a silicon cake on a glass stand, each slice resembling a woman’s private parts; a light sculpture fashioned from microphone cables, from which hang two hundred glowing styrene breast forms; a series of brightly colored macaroons, all molded from bellybuttons, arrayed on a cake stand.

Why ears, anyway? Booth told me that anatomy and bodily functions are an endless source of fascination to him. “As in the case of ears … if you repeat a single word over and over again, it becomes nonsensical. The same applies to body parts—repetition disassociates them from their real function. They may create an interesting shape, but they have no actual use. After creating sculptural pieces out of them, I can’t see ears without thinking of how ridiculous they look. But they are, of course, very practical for balancing your eyeglasses on.”

Alvin Booth, Gateau, 2013, silicon, glass, steel.

Alvin Booth, Lustre

Alvin Booth, Aures, 2013, silicon.

Alvin Booth, Lacunae, 2013, rubber, plexiglas, LEDs.

 

Alvin Booth’s “Come to Your Senses” continues at acte2galerie (41 rue d’Artois, Paris) until January 30.

J. Mae Barizo is a prize-winning poet and cultural critic. She lives in New York City.

 

Recapping Dante: Canto 15, or How to Talk to Your Teacher When You Chance Upon Him in Hell

Gustave Doré, Canto XV.

This winter, we’re recapping the Inferno. Read along!

As Dante continues to descend through hell, guided by Virgil, I too read with a guide of my own—Robert Hollander, whose annotated edition of the Inferno I’ve been using to write about Dante every week. I’ve read the Hollanders’ notes on Canto 15 many times over, but I still find myself getting lost in it—Dante’s encounter here is unlike any other.

Pulling at the pilgrim’s hem is a scorched, unrecognizable sinner. After a few moments, Dante realizes the man is his old teacher Brunetto Latini, who is now among the sodomites. Siete voi qui, ser Brunetto? Dante asks. Are you here, ser Brunetto? This warm, perhaps even affectionate question is underscored, Hollander explains, by something else: “I think he is also asking ‘Are you, wonderful man, down here among the scum?’” It seems, at first, a tender scene: Dante asks if Brunetto will sit with him, and for the first time we see Dante speaking to a sinner about himself and his journey, not standing idly by as a sinner tells his story. It even seems as if the two are catching up. For this reason, Hollander says, readers and critics are often charmed by this scene, but they never examine the relationship between Dante and Brunetto as carefully as they should. Dante’s treatment of Brunetto is colder than it appears.

First, consider the literary tension between Dante and Brunetto. Dante’s relationship with Brunetto may have been warm, but Dante’s decision to write a long poem in Italian, rather than in Latin, introduced an element of competition between the two poets. “Brunetto beat him to it,” Hollander says. “Brunetto was the first Italian author of a long poem … the first Dante, in a sense. But he failed because he died before finishing his poem.” In fact, because Brunetto was Dante’s teacher, Dante may feel—even as his teacher is punished in hell—that Brunetto still sees himself as the master. Hollander described the scene to me as one that deals with “the anxiety of influence and the acknowledgment of a predecessor.” If the encounter is tense, it might be because Dante doesn’t wish to deal with Brunetto on those terms.

Hollander points out that what we fail to understand about canto 15 is that it’s not only a canto of beatitude, but one of anxiety. Dante loves Brunetto, but he knows that it he may not be right to.  After all, Brunetto has been placed with sodomites, and some scholars argue that Brunetto’s subsection of sodomites is the one reserved for pederasts; and yet Dante and readers both find it difficult to despise Brunetto because he’s both gracious and wise. The scene, as a result, is underscored by irony. The more we feel love for Brunetto, the more we engage with a sympathy and affection that, stirred by his story and his manner, allows us to see an unrepentant Brunetto.

Someone like Francesca is easy to see this way—her excuse for her infidelity is flimsy. (Hollander went on to imitate a sobbing Francesca: “Oh, I couldn’t help it, we were reading a book and he was very handsome.”) An excuse like that wouldn’t hold up in court. And Pier, as beautiful as his passage is, ends up being one of the most pathetic figures in all of literature; his self-loathing is almost over the top.

But the division between the pilgrim’s sympathy and the poet’s ironic disagreement with it is less obvious in Brunetto’s case—here, the sympathies of Dante the poet and Dante the pilgrim are almost aligned. We see a teacher meeting an old student, not a sinner speaking with a man on a holy quest. But, ultimately, Brunetto presents as a positive figure, which, with his burnt and charred appearance, allows the reader to see how misguided and wrong he is.

Dante the poet faces a greater challenge than his pawn, the pilgrim. The pilgrim deals only with sympathy, but the poet must fumble his way around a love that is not only old, but one that almost forgives sin, and one that is also irritated by literary anxiety. How does he end up facing it? He loves in a way that appears unconditional, but uses irony for judgment. He walks elevated beside Brunetto, but still bows his head in reverence; he praises Brunetto’s poem and even imitates it, but is not nearly as warm to an old teacher as he should be; he thanks Brunetto for teaching him and says that he wishes Brunetto were still alive, and yet here, he writes a scene in which Brunetto’s face is charred by falling fire. Dante allows himself to remain divided—he uses his pilgrim for love and his poet, a lightly antagonized literary heir to Brunetto’s work, for theology.

Alexander Aciman is the author of Twitterature. He has written for the New York Times, Tablet, the Wall Street Journal, and TIME. Follow him on Twitter at @acimania.

 

Life Is One Never-Ending Conference Call, and Other News

From ConferenceCall.biz, a gif-art project by Zach Scott.

Who needs the titillations of Page Six and entertainment media when we have the fifteen hottest affairs in literature?
Who needs a soul deadening nine-to-five when we have the ten worst jobs in literature?
… And, for that matter, “a site that perfectly captures the existential despair of the conference call?”
Victor Hugo: poet, novelist, playwright, furniture designer.
At last, a map that lets you take that dystopian walking tour of Manhattan you’re always going on about.
On Goliardia Sapienza’s The Art of Joy, an erotic seven-hundred-page doorstop now available in English: “the novel reads less like a handbook on happiness than like a sadomasochistic Italian novelization of The Joy of Sex.”