Song of a Reformed Headhunter

from Patrick McCaughey's review of the MoMA show "Inventing Abstraction 1910 - 1925": I have never seen Malevich better displayed or better served as an artist. His excitement at his discoveries in abstraction becomes our excitement. At last we are shown, not just told, how right his boisterous claim was: "I destroyed the ring of the horizon and escaped from the circle of things, from the horizon ring that confines the artists and forms of nature."  The Malevich wall comes hard on the heels of a well-chosen group of Fernand Léger's "Contrast of Forms" (1913). They are at once Léger's extension of Cubism and his major contribution to abstract art. They share the high seriousness of Picasso and Braque, the same intense investigation of pictorial form and the same sense of substance and matter. The power of their blue-and-white cylinders grinding their way through the painting, pushing aside the white-and-red rectilinear blocks, has the d...

Easter your body an arrival you know is false but can’t outrun —Jorie Graham, “The Geese” The manufacturers have dropped the on button from their machines, or else have made the on button also the off button. Every day is full of indignities. Light wash, normal wash. Back to front. Push to turn. The beautiful spring day in the park proves the forecast wrong. It is worrying. The perambulator threads the submerged rocks. The tulips dazzle their beds. They leave tomorrow, they wave. Normal wash, heavy wash. The woman who grew up with her grandmother in Florida played alone. The other children visited with the winter, when there was no flooding. The woman with breast cancer announces that her medication has made her menopausal. She is the one who is pushing the pram and needs the bathroom. There are only ever two women. Heavy wash, light wash. You remove the dirty dishes from the broken cycles. You look up the flights to San Francisco. You check all the che...

Backache Every part of us alerts another part —Kay Ryan, “Chinese Foot Chart” When we were together, I rubbing your shoulders, my cock would press against my shorts in sympathy. My heart would run to your fingers caressing my scalp. How strange that morning, crawling out of bed, you complained of a backache and I felt nothing, but helpless to stop the two of us from coming apart.

Rabbit eats and eats to fill the growing emptiness of his life as he ages. The taste of things, the last flickering appetite for life, is vividly described in this final installment of John Updike's Rabbit tetralogy, as well as the invasion of medical technology into one's decaying body. Rabbit has an angioplasty, and the scene is humorous, terrifying and unforgettable. Unlike Ian McEwan, who casts a coolly satirical eye on modern-day consumerism in his novel, Solar , Updike sizes up not just the meanness of greed, but also its meaning. For nothing that a human being is capable of doing is without redeeming value. Updike is not Rabbit, but at times Rabbit speaks for him. Like Rabbit, Updike "never had much use for old-fashioned ethics but their dissolution eats at him." This novel is an elegy, yes, but it addresses a dying morality as much as a decaying body.

TLS March 4 2011 from Wendy Doniger's review of Mark Singleton's YOGA BODY: The origins of modern posture practice : The word "yoga" occurs in this text [The Rig Veda], but only in the primary sense of "yoking" horses to chariots or draft animals to ploughs or wagons (the Sanskrit and English words are cognate, as is the English "junction"); and then, secondarily, designating the effort of "yoking" oneself to do physical labor. * Many contemporary yoga practitioners cite this text [Patanjali's Yoga-Sutra ] as the basis of their praxis. But Patanjali says nothing about the "postures" other than remarking that the adept should sit in a manner that is relaxed and conducive to meditation and breath control. On the contrary, he speaks of cultivating "aversion to one's own body". * One yogic text composed some time between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, the Hatha-yoga-pradipika ("Illuminat...

No point looking to this film for narrative or character, because you won't find either. Directed by French provocateur Catherine Breillat, "Anatomy of Hell" is about the power of images to elicit strong emotions like loathing and aggression. A woman pays a gay man to "watch her where she is unwatchable." Inside her house, which quickly becomes a metaphor for the female body, the woman (Amira Casar) strips naked and lies down in bed like a Renaissance nude but in a room lit like an operating theater. The man (porn star Rocco Siffredi) began as a voluble and complacent observer but very quickly became a silent and helpless participant in the woman's search for her sexual identity. He hates the weakness of female flesh, because it reminds him of his own mortality, and so he punishes it by sticking his dick into her anus and, on another night, by sticking the handle of a rake into her vagina. He is both fascinated and repelled by vagina fluid, rolling it on h...

I was asked, once, for a word that is not in the English Language but I wish it were. I suggested a word that means both soul and body, a word that reunites the pervasive dualism in my language, and therefore in my thinking. In an interview in P EN America #13 Lovers ,  Atiq Rahimi, who won the 2008 Prix Goncourt for his novel The Patience Stone , gave such a word from classical Persian poetry: "jaan." He says to his interviewer Lila Azam Zanganeh: It's a word used in Iran and Afghanistan and Tajikistan. It is a word of daily life. It's something that we add to the name: for example, you would be Lilajaan. It would be translated as "my dear Lila." It is a word that describes at the same time the body and the soul. There is no separation in "jaan." This separation is something that we find in Christian culture, in Judaism, and in Islam, but before that we had this idea. The separation came about with Islam and with the Judeo-Christian tradition;...

Five Poems "When we stumble over a stone It guides us." --Suzan Alaiwan, "Poems" He listens for the stumble in a poem, so he can find the stone. On a white stone is scribbled this stark poem: "Our guide stumbled." When you stumble over poems, don't pocket the stones, or else you can't move. I do not say, O my body, you are a stone, but I do say I am home. Take this stone: may it be to you a guide and a poem.

TLS July 9 2010 from J.P.E. Harper-Scott's review of Roland John Wiley's Tchaikovsky , and Adam Zamoyski's Chopin: Prince of the Romantics : Very touching are Tchaikovsky's letters to his brother Modest in 1876, which show him racked by his urge to perform sexual acts that he admits are contrary to his Christian belief. "Buggermania," he writes. "forms an impassable gulf between me and most people." Admitting to thoughts of joining a monastery, Piotr implores his brother, whose sexual interests were similar, to exercise control over himself. Some of the letters are more explicit than others. of Josef Kotek, fifteen years his junior, he writes,  When he caresses me with his hand, when he lies with his head inclined on my breast, and run my hand through his hair and secretly kiss it . . . passion rages within me with such unimaginable strength . . . . Yet I am far from the desire for a physical bond. I feel that if this happened, I would cool towar...

TLS June 11 2010 from Mark Hutchinson's review of "Lucian Freud: L'Atelier" at the Centre Georges Pompidou: Where, then, does the heart of Lucian Freud's originality lie? Over and above his unquestionable technical virtuosity, there are two areas of his work in which Freud can be said to have opened up new ground. One is the series of portraits he made of his mother, who posed for him in his studio more than a thousand times between 1972 and her death in 1989 . . . not only are they among his most powerful paintings but, as Jean Clair, the man who first championed his work in France, observed some years ago, the theme of the son watching over the dying mother is a visual counterpart (and an unusual one) to one of the most haunting images in Western art, that of the mater dolorosa . The second area, of course, is his nudes, in which the model's genitals are, often as not, positioned at or near the centre of the composition; and, by extension, at the very ...

Walking around the narrow treasure gallery in the Forbidden City, I was jostled by the Chinese tourist horde. I turned to a girl pushing behind me, and snapped "Don't push me" in English before I registered the uselessness of saying so in a language that she would probably not understand. She, in turn, said in sneering Mandarin to her father, "A Chinese but he does not know how to speak Chinese." The grandmother of one of the home stay families complimented me on my grasp of Mandarin. When I protested, more out of honesty than modesty, that my Mandarin is actually very poor, not having taken my lessons seriously when growing up in Singapore, she would have none of it. She also would not hear of me calling myself Singaporean. For her, a Chinese anywhere in the world is still a Chinese. Criticized or complimented for my Mandarin, I never felt at home in China during my 18-day sojourn. No reason why I should feel that way, for my personal history has little to ...

Hard Fire duro fulgor resuelto ya en cristal y claridad pacífica —Octavio Paz, “El río” I burn my body up. or rather it burns me, not for a greasy plate but brilliant clarity. Not eye nor stub of toe, not even strand of hair, in lighting up the night my furious heart will spare. Not smoke nor flickering but an unearthly blue will pierce the veil of sky when burning me is through. *

The Dilapidated God A depilated dog would not look well. —Elizabeth Bishop, “Pink Dog” He lives in a dilapidated god or he is one, he isn’t very sure. The blurry windows are his eyes or windows that will not rub clean and so are given up to time’s deposits and air’s irreversible chemistry. The roof is thinning, he is sure, for when it rains he feels the water seep through the plaster of the ceiling, drip on the furniture and lick his hands, leaving on them a thin layer of mucus that stains everything he touches. Or he is stained by what he touches. He can’t be sure. When his god was strong, strong with the bright consciousness of strength, his god was clearly two. His body was a vital stroke and outside of his sword the world flashes like a sword. But now the water in the sink goes down slowly and he doesn’t know where the problem is. He knows he can’t fix it but it would be some comfort to know what’s holding it up. *

The book begins with a white-hot description of the male body. "Three types of male physiques, " writes Woods, "three distinct ideals, occur in Western art: the adolescent pliancy of Narcissus, Apollo's form but graceful maturity, and the potency of Heracles, tacitly poised on the verge of deterioration." He elaborates: The three physical types correspond with sexual types. The adolescent may be endowed with an indefatigable penis, but is chiefly admired for the delightful promise of his backside. Shakespeare is not interested in his boyfriend's penis (sonnet 20). . . . Heracles is the opposite type, unequivocally phallic. When he lays down his club, he is still heavily armed. His musculature seems designed for the pinning down of loved ones, while the phallus does its work. He and the adolescent, as sexual opposites, together form the perfect couple: Heracles and Hylas, Hadrian and Antinous. Between the two lies the adaptability of Apollo, the single coup...

What the River Says The body is a source. Nothing more. --Eavan Boland, “Anna Liffey” I too compare my life frequently to a river, small hidden beginning, final dissolution, body charged with a name but always changing. It is a place to live by, to keep a few chickens or raise a city famous for its graceful bridges, if one cares for good eating or reaching across. On mornings when the rear courtyard is stony, how enjoyable to walk to the water and hear its gossip about the young lovers parting upriver. The annual swelling is a power for great evil but also a pregnancy. It carries boats and people. For explorers, there is a chance of a waterfall. Sinners, those hybrid creatures, like centaurs, may drive their reluctant horses into the flood and experience total absolution in an instant. So, if my body is a river, I won’t dismiss it as a source and nothing more. It is a source of my voice but it is also my voice: that is what the river says on its way to the ...

TLS October 9 2009 from Jennie Erin Smith's review of Mark S. Blumberg's Freaks of Nature and what they tell us about development and evolution : In 1998 the Spanish biologist Pere Alberch died in his sleep at the age of forty-three, nine years after having written a remarkable essay called "The Logic of Monsters". * Blumberg uses the subjects of this book--conjoined twins, men without penises, two-faced cats, Alberch's salamanders, and people born without legs--to advance separate but related arguments. the first is that the development of an embryo entails complex chemical ad physical processes involving temperature and gravity, along with proteins, toxins and myriad other molecules, of which DNA is but one. These "elaborate and complex, tortured and convoluted" processes, Blumberg laments, were intimately explored for centuries, then sidelines ever since the discovery of DNA. Yet there are myriad forms for which no gene can take credit. Two-head...

The Double Boy The clock chatters; with no beating heart Lung or breast how can she tell the time? --Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, “The Absent Girl” The double boy takes off his clothes. He sees his body in the nude face of the glass whose back is covered. He points the mirror, like a telescope, and the glittery dress waves its short inverted sleeves. No one is in the room. The boy in the glass could get into the dress in the glass and into the inverted bed. The bed is rocking gently like a ship. His body waves. His bones wave like a flag. *

TLS September 11, 2009 from Stephen Brown's review of Richard Williams' "The Blue Moment: Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue" and the remaking of modern music": Try this experiment, sing the first seven notes of the major scale, doh, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti . . . and stop on that seventh tone, the "ti." You'll feel the aching incompleteness that so wants the satisfaction of a final "doh." This is the quality that makes "doh" the central tone of the scale, and makes us feel the other tones in relationship to it. A whole system of harmonies grew to support this centredness, granting the listener a reference place in musical space skin to the position in visual space that perspective grants the viewer of a picture. And like perspective, the tonal system was rejected by Modernists. In effect, there had been, by the 1930s, two "modern" revolutions in music: a violent one under Schoenberg and his twelve-tone system; and ...

Just finished reading this weird hybrid of philosophy, biography, myth and poetry. The cross-breeding (or -bleeding) of genres makes the book sound like a monstrous plant from a hothouse or an alchemical tome from a monastery. It is not. It is a book conceived while striding on mountains. It is best read in the open air, as I did, much of it, in Central Park, American elms arching above the Literary Walk to form the vaulted ceiling of a cathedral. From one perspective (and Nietzsche is very much--essentially?--about perspectives), the book can be seen as a parody--a competitor--of the gospels. So Part 1 begins with Zarathustra "going under" from the mountain to the marketplace to preach to the people. Much of the book is made up of these "sermons," often in the form of parables. (Part 4 is different in that it is a continuous narrative.) And like Jesus, Zarathustra gathers round him disciples, is tested by various trials, provides a last supper, and receives a final...

Why Nietzsche inspires me: 1. He is a philosopher but he is also a writer; in fact, the two in him are indistinguishable. 2. He loves what is noble, instead of what is good; he hates what is contemptible, instead of what is evil. 3. He is a psychologist. 4. He is a historian. 5. He stares into the abyss, and sends art over it. Against absurdity, pessimism, asceticism, he opposes the will to power, the will to recreate values. 6. He values sex for its own sake, as a force for life. 7. He is a prophet. * From Ecce Homo : On taste: In all these matters--in the choice of nutrition, of place and climate, of recreation--an instinct of self-preservation issues its commandments, and it gains its most unambiguous expression as an instinct of self-defense. Not to see many things, not to hear many things, not to permit many things to come close--first imperative of prudence, first proof that one is no mere accident but a necessity. The usual word for this instinct of self-defense is taste . It co...