Recently in arts Category
Unbourne
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then the makers of the Bourne film franchise should be very flattered indeed, and the makers of Unknown might be forgiven their heartfelt, if inept, compliment.
If you trotted off to see Unknown in its opening weekend, against the advice of critics and your better angels, you should be forgiven, too. (If not: spoiler alert.) After all, Unknown offers intrigue, explosions, interesting scenes of a faraway city (Berlin), and the prettiest collection of middle-aged white people currently onscreen. We get to gaze at Liam Neeson, Diane Kruger, Aidan Quinn, and the remote, frosty beauty of January Jones, who imports her Betty Draper character from Mad Men almost in toto.
(But I do mean white. We see a Saudi prince from a distance, flanked by his phalanx of hotties, and the one black character, who gets only a couple of lines of dialogue before he's killed, is from "Africa" and named "Biko." I'll say no more.)
It's an action thriller only a Warner Bros. accountant could love. The scenes in which we learn that the supposed scientist played by Liam Neeson is really--gasp--an assassin, now stricken, after a blow to the head, with--gasp--amnesia, who--gasp--wants to do the right thing and is helped by a good woman to do so are almost painfully imitative. There's a car chase scene that basically stars the gearshift, but the chase has neither the inventiveness nor the staircases of the "tires feel a little splashy" scene in The Bourne Identity. When Frank Langella informs Neeson's character of his true, assassinish identity, and says he was his "best boy" but now must be killed, I longed for Chris Cooper to step in and take over. When Neeson's character discovers the stash of fake passports in the false bottom of his briefcase, I just felt embarrassed. An homage is one thing; a shameless rip-off is another.
Diane Kruger, once tapped for Helen of Troy, plays the Franka Potente character: the loner in trouble with a heart of gold, an alluring accent, and a penchant for bralessness. The difficulty is that Potente, with just a glance or gesture, can convey a three-dimensional character, a rocky past, and a sinuous mind at work, while Kruger is, well, pretty. Even her tragic backstory, when she blurts it, feels predictable and untrue, like the writers couldn't be bothered to offer her something fresh, and she couldn't conjure up any complexity of emotion for the lines.
Bruno Ganz (Wings of Desire) as a former Stasi member is lovely, though, and Eva Löbau does a great dead nurse. Olivier Schneider makes a scarily ruthless and relentless killer. Most of the interesting stuff happens in the minor roles.
A fresh moment involving one of the leads, however, is when we get to see January Jones explode.
Perhaps Mad Men could take a lesson.
If you trotted off to see Unknown in its opening weekend, against the advice of critics and your better angels, you should be forgiven, too. (If not: spoiler alert.) After all, Unknown offers intrigue, explosions, interesting scenes of a faraway city (Berlin), and the prettiest collection of middle-aged white people currently onscreen. We get to gaze at Liam Neeson, Diane Kruger, Aidan Quinn, and the remote, frosty beauty of January Jones, who imports her Betty Draper character from Mad Men almost in toto.
(But I do mean white. We see a Saudi prince from a distance, flanked by his phalanx of hotties, and the one black character, who gets only a couple of lines of dialogue before he's killed, is from "Africa" and named "Biko." I'll say no more.)
It's an action thriller only a Warner Bros. accountant could love. The scenes in which we learn that the supposed scientist played by Liam Neeson is really--gasp--an assassin, now stricken, after a blow to the head, with--gasp--amnesia, who--gasp--wants to do the right thing and is helped by a good woman to do so are almost painfully imitative. There's a car chase scene that basically stars the gearshift, but the chase has neither the inventiveness nor the staircases of the "tires feel a little splashy" scene in The Bourne Identity. When Frank Langella informs Neeson's character of his true, assassinish identity, and says he was his "best boy" but now must be killed, I longed for Chris Cooper to step in and take over. When Neeson's character discovers the stash of fake passports in the false bottom of his briefcase, I just felt embarrassed. An homage is one thing; a shameless rip-off is another.
Diane Kruger, once tapped for Helen of Troy, plays the Franka Potente character: the loner in trouble with a heart of gold, an alluring accent, and a penchant for bralessness. The difficulty is that Potente, with just a glance or gesture, can convey a three-dimensional character, a rocky past, and a sinuous mind at work, while Kruger is, well, pretty. Even her tragic backstory, when she blurts it, feels predictable and untrue, like the writers couldn't be bothered to offer her something fresh, and she couldn't conjure up any complexity of emotion for the lines.
Bruno Ganz (Wings of Desire) as a former Stasi member is lovely, though, and Eva Löbau does a great dead nurse. Olivier Schneider makes a scarily ruthless and relentless killer. Most of the interesting stuff happens in the minor roles.
A fresh moment involving one of the leads, however, is when we get to see January Jones explode.
Perhaps Mad Men could take a lesson.
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Call Me Sonic
When Grey was little, one of his favorite stories to hear--and one of my favorite ones to read--was Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle. What could be more charming than a hedgehog who does ironing? Potter based Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, considered to be one of her most positive characters, on her own pet hedgehog and a Scottish washerwoman. Today, my nephew Indigo loves Sonic the Hedgehog--to the extent that when we were last in Texas, he wouldn't answer to his own name. "Call me Sonic," he'd sternly correct us.
And now Muriel Barbery's French novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog is charming grown-ups everywhere. (Thank you, Faye, for the gift!)
I guess hedgehogs just have perennial, irresistible appeal.
So you can see why I'm excited to be reading The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle to children this morning at Indigo Bridge Books--in the company of a real live hedgehog! It's part of the bookstore's indiZoo program, which brings live animals (with an expert handler) into the store, so preschool children can learn about them. This morning's program runs from 10 to 11:30 a.m. (but you can drop in and out), so if you're in Lincoln and have little kids--or are simply a geek for hedgehogs yourself, like I am--please come down to the Creamery Building (isn't that a wonderful address?) and join us!
Here's my quotation du jour, from an interview with filmmaker David O. Russell about his new movie The Fighter. The passage has nothing to do with hedgehogs but everything to do with human interactions (think of your workplace--and maybe your family--and maybe your intimate relationship?):
This passage also has everything to do with creative persistence. Rejection, ego pain, harsh criticism, setbacks, failure: they're part of the game.
You wanted this. You chose it. Get back up.
That's the most beautiful thing that I like about boxing: you can take a punch. The biggest thing about taking a punch is your ego reacts and there's no better spiritual lesson than trying to not pay attention to your ego's reaction. That's what takes people out of the fight half the time. They get hit and half the reaction is your ego is saying, I cannot believe that person just lit me up, how humiliating. And what a fighter has to do . . . is they kind of just go. [He mimes ducking and getting up.]
This passage also has everything to do with creative persistence. Rejection, ego pain, harsh criticism, setbacks, failure: they're part of the game.
You wanted this. You chose it. Get back up.
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Dancing in the Middle of Nowhere
I am so proud of my friend and colleague Rhonda Garelick, and the Chronicle of Higher Ed is impressed with her, too! Tomorrow, I'm taking Amara, my "Little Sister," to the dance performance mentioned in the article--and we'll see Joan Acocella speak afterward. Is that not the coolest? Cannot wait.
I had to laugh, because the bleak, hilarious, all-too-accurate video that's gone viral among academics--you can see it here, on Tayari's blog, if you haven't had it forwarded to you a hundred times already--has the dour, burned-out professor saying she's in Nebraska, i.e., nowhere, i.e., career and cultural suicide. (When I got home last night, the HH asked, "Did you write that?" I could have been moonlighting as a secret animator; it's that close to home.) The video's so painfully funny and awful and true, I almost hurt myself laughing. (Thanks to John Robinson, the first friend who sent it to me.)
Despite Nebraska's anti-immigrant and anti-affirmative-action weirdness, I'm bizarrely happy here. Thanks to Rhonda Garelick for making it an even better place to be!
I had to laugh, because the bleak, hilarious, all-too-accurate video that's gone viral among academics--you can see it here, on Tayari's blog, if you haven't had it forwarded to you a hundred times already--has the dour, burned-out professor saying she's in Nebraska, i.e., nowhere, i.e., career and cultural suicide. (When I got home last night, the HH asked, "Did you write that?" I could have been moonlighting as a secret animator; it's that close to home.) The video's so painfully funny and awful and true, I almost hurt myself laughing. (Thanks to John Robinson, the first friend who sent it to me.)
Despite Nebraska's anti-immigrant and anti-affirmative-action weirdness, I'm bizarrely happy here. Thanks to Rhonda Garelick for making it an even better place to be!
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With Nothing Except Your Life
Rest in peace, Abbey Lincoln. The jazz singer and civil-rights force passed away last Saturday; NPR ran a tribute that includes cuts from her music and great clips from two past interviews; you can read and/or listen here. Lincoln has interesting things to say about artistic integrity and (heads-up, mujeres) about her own transformation from sexy supper-club commodity to "warrior woman."
Moving into a semester of teaching memoir-writing to graduate students, I was particularly grateful for what Lincoln said about art and claiming the right to one's own voice:
I recently reread the three memoirs that my graduate workshop will be analyzing for craft strategies--Alice Sebold's Lucky, Rigoberto González's Butterfly Boy, and Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss--and was knocked out all over again by their power. I picked books that deal well with really hard, hard material--intimate, tricky stuff like trauma, family, loss, shame, sex--because that's so much harder to handle, for us as writers, than, oh, I don't know, cooking or traveling or learning to tango, all of which are fun and interesting and can take you to deep and difficult places but don't necessarily do so. I learn best from urgent, crucial, driven writing that sticks close to the bone, "words that," to quote Kay Boyle, "must somehow be said."
And it's the how in somehow that we'll be analyzing in the workshop this fall. How does Sebold handle moments she can't fully remember, signaling to readers her lack of specific recall without breaking the flow of the scene? How does González use a real, literal journey to its fullest, richest advantage as an organizing structure? How does he handle shifts in time smoothly and clearly? How does he use descriptive language to suggest resonances between different characters, and how does he work on the page to be fair to the other people in his life? How does Harrison select details that function as object correlatives for the emotional story that's taking place?
Can you tell I love these brave and brilliant books? Getting to talk about this stuff with smart, talented, eager people for three hours every week--and then talk about the students' own work!--is a gift. For a dayjob, it's definitely pretty great.
In that regard, ladies and gents, I'm happy to say that THE DESIRE PROJECTS is finally off my desk. 408 pages of obsessively polished prose that publishing houses may or may not find desirable went into the mail to my agent on Friday--which is a great relief, since classes start on Monday. (When I have to say what I did last summer--and last summer, and the one before that--I'm just going to point mutely to that fat stack of paper.)
The draft came super-fast: on April 1, 2008, I had 22 pages of notes that I'd been dinking around on for about a year, just this and that, sketches toward an outline. By June 10, I had 364 pages. Since then, it's been revision, revision, revision. Expand, cut, edit, polish. Repeat.
And now it's that beautiful feeling, when the manuscript is out of my hands and out in the world. My agent and I haven't decided yet which publishers it will go to, but I'll be posting full reports here as the process unfolds this fall. (I'll try to keep my woes in check when those rejection letters arrive, but consider yourselves forewarned.)
Adding to the cheerful chaos of back-to-school preparations, Greyby arrives tonight (from California--by Greyhound) and will be here with us until early September (when he leaves for Massachusetts--by Greyhound; don't ask, it's a carbon-emissions thing), so the rest of my Saturday will be devoted to cleaning, laundering linens, and hanging shiny gold papel picado all around the room where he'll sleep. The Handsome Husband is out stocking up on vegan cookies and other sundries Grey likes. Hurray!
Ahhh. Family. The good kind. My two very favorite people in the world, right here with me, together for ten days. Forgive me if I look a little dreamy.
Moving into a semester of teaching memoir-writing to graduate students, I was particularly grateful for what Lincoln said about art and claiming the right to one's own voice:
Amen. Writers, artists, everyone: go for it, and be glad.. . . "Oh, why don't you--why don't you shut up?" I think I've had that said to me more than anything else over the years when I was younger. "You talk too much." You know? "Don't rock the boat." Even though they're miserable--people are miserable--they'll tell you this. But you're not supposed to say anything about it.
So when I discovered that there was the world of the artist, it saved my life, because I could strive to be individual and as best as I could be. I didn't have to have money. I didn't have to have anything except my life.
And I went for that. And I'm glad I did.
I recently reread the three memoirs that my graduate workshop will be analyzing for craft strategies--Alice Sebold's Lucky, Rigoberto González's Butterfly Boy, and Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss--and was knocked out all over again by their power. I picked books that deal well with really hard, hard material--intimate, tricky stuff like trauma, family, loss, shame, sex--because that's so much harder to handle, for us as writers, than, oh, I don't know, cooking or traveling or learning to tango, all of which are fun and interesting and can take you to deep and difficult places but don't necessarily do so. I learn best from urgent, crucial, driven writing that sticks close to the bone, "words that," to quote Kay Boyle, "must somehow be said."
And it's the how in somehow that we'll be analyzing in the workshop this fall. How does Sebold handle moments she can't fully remember, signaling to readers her lack of specific recall without breaking the flow of the scene? How does González use a real, literal journey to its fullest, richest advantage as an organizing structure? How does he handle shifts in time smoothly and clearly? How does he use descriptive language to suggest resonances between different characters, and how does he work on the page to be fair to the other people in his life? How does Harrison select details that function as object correlatives for the emotional story that's taking place?
Can you tell I love these brave and brilliant books? Getting to talk about this stuff with smart, talented, eager people for three hours every week--and then talk about the students' own work!--is a gift. For a dayjob, it's definitely pretty great.
In that regard, ladies and gents, I'm happy to say that THE DESIRE PROJECTS is finally off my desk. 408 pages of obsessively polished prose that publishing houses may or may not find desirable went into the mail to my agent on Friday--which is a great relief, since classes start on Monday. (When I have to say what I did last summer--and last summer, and the one before that--I'm just going to point mutely to that fat stack of paper.)
The draft came super-fast: on April 1, 2008, I had 22 pages of notes that I'd been dinking around on for about a year, just this and that, sketches toward an outline. By June 10, I had 364 pages. Since then, it's been revision, revision, revision. Expand, cut, edit, polish. Repeat.
And now it's that beautiful feeling, when the manuscript is out of my hands and out in the world. My agent and I haven't decided yet which publishers it will go to, but I'll be posting full reports here as the process unfolds this fall. (I'll try to keep my woes in check when those rejection letters arrive, but consider yourselves forewarned.)
Adding to the cheerful chaos of back-to-school preparations, Greyby arrives tonight (from California--by Greyhound) and will be here with us until early September (when he leaves for Massachusetts--by Greyhound; don't ask, it's a carbon-emissions thing), so the rest of my Saturday will be devoted to cleaning, laundering linens, and hanging shiny gold papel picado all around the room where he'll sleep. The Handsome Husband is out stocking up on vegan cookies and other sundries Grey likes. Hurray!
Ahhh. Family. The good kind. My two very favorite people in the world, right here with me, together for ten days. Forgive me if I look a little dreamy.
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Breaking Silence
If you'll be in Lincoln this weekend, consider attending the screening of the award-winning documentary The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, with a discussion led afterward by a local psychologist who does trauma work with survivors. Filmmaker Lisa Jackson, a survivor of gang rape herself, has won multiple awards for her documentaries over the past 30 years.
This particular film is the one that led the UN in 2008 to classify rape as a weapon of war.
It screens at the Ross, which is hosting the film festival Women Make Movies: Women Changing the World. It begins today and runs through March 11, and if you're a student or a senior, you can get a pass to all of the films for $15. A full-price pass costs $25 and lets you into all 13 astonishing, award-winning movies from around the world.
Here's the info on Saturday's screening and talk:
This particular film is the one that led the UN in 2008 to classify rape as a weapon of war.
It screens at the Ross, which is hosting the film festival Women Make Movies: Women Changing the World. It begins today and runs through March 11, and if you're a student or a senior, you can get a pass to all of the films for $15. A full-price pass costs $25 and lets you into all 13 astonishing, award-winning movies from around the world.
Here's the info on Saturday's screening and talk:
Film Discussion:
THE GREATEST SILENCE
with speaker Megan Watson, PhD, LMHP
Saturday, Feb. 27 - Film begins at 1:00
Discussion following film (approx. 2:20 p.m.)
Admission to the discussion is free and open to the public. Admission
to THE GREATEST SILENCE is at regular Ross prices.
Megan Watson is a psychologist in private practice who works with
treating immigrants, refugees, and torture survivors. Watson does
trauma work and focuses on culturally competent, holistic treatment.
Before its closure, Watson spent three years working at the FIRST
Project, a torture treatment center in Lincoln.
THE GREATEST SILENCE: RAPE IN THE CONGO
Winner of the Sundance Special Jury Prize in Documentary and the
inspiration for a 2008 U.N. Resolution classifying rape as a weapon of
war, this extraordinary film, shot in the war zones of the Democratic
Republic of Congo (DRC), shatters the silence that surrounds the use
of sexual violence as a weapon of conflict.
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Fall Break & All You Artists
So UNL's got fall break for two days, which means I've got time to catch up on grading and blog to you.
So lately I've been thinking about creativity and self-doubt. And the long-story-short of my convoluted, haphazard inquiry is this: Given that the world does not clamor for your art or mine, that the world does not beg for another book (when it publishes 250,000 a year in the U.S. alone), that the world wants you instead to feed the hungry, teach the uneducated, reverse climate change, maximize profits, and march on Washington--and meanwhile, the world wants to cut your pay and jack up your utility bill--given that you're slogging away in the midst of all that, and that no wildly adoring audience clamors for your voice and vision, how can you keep helping yourself make art?
A weird thing about blogging: sometimes when your brain has announced a theme-of-the-week, everything from the world comes sailing straight at it, on point.
An interactive sculpture by Miranda July:
Self-doubt will not devour her dreams.
Here's Jay Smooth's vlog on the little haters inside--which you don't need to view unless you happen to be subject to bouts of perfectionism, procrastination, or both:
(I'm having trouble embedding it, so just go here.)
And here's Mother Teresa's view (hey, this blog is nothing if not eclectic):
Keep making your art. This is a shout-out of love to you and your beautiful persistence. Maybe nobody needs your art, or maybe lots of people do. You can't know. Maybe the people who'll need it aren't even born yet.
The point is, you need to make it. It's how you're built. So keep on.
So lately I've been thinking about creativity and self-doubt. And the long-story-short of my convoluted, haphazard inquiry is this: Given that the world does not clamor for your art or mine, that the world does not beg for another book (when it publishes 250,000 a year in the U.S. alone), that the world wants you instead to feed the hungry, teach the uneducated, reverse climate change, maximize profits, and march on Washington--and meanwhile, the world wants to cut your pay and jack up your utility bill--given that you're slogging away in the midst of all that, and that no wildly adoring audience clamors for your voice and vision, how can you keep helping yourself make art?
A weird thing about blogging: sometimes when your brain has announced a theme-of-the-week, everything from the world comes sailing straight at it, on point.
An interactive sculpture by Miranda July:
Self-doubt will not devour her dreams.Here's Jay Smooth's vlog on the little haters inside--which you don't need to view unless you happen to be subject to bouts of perfectionism, procrastination, or both:
(I'm having trouble embedding it, so just go here.)
And here's Mother Teresa's view (hey, this blog is nothing if not eclectic):
If you are discouraged it is a sign of pride because it shows you trust in your own power. Your self-sufficiency, your selfishness and your intellectual pride will inhibit His coming to live in your heart because God cannot fill what is already full. It is as simple as that.(For "God," it helps me if I read "emptiness," as in the Buddhist sense of no-ego, or presence--which for me functions as the real, true ground of art-making--but hey, whatever gets you through the night. You fill in the blank.)
Keep making your art. This is a shout-out of love to you and your beautiful persistence. Maybe nobody needs your art, or maybe lots of people do. You can't know. Maybe the people who'll need it aren't even born yet.
The point is, you need to make it. It's how you're built. So keep on.
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Greyby Number
Happy Birthday, Baby Grey! My son and only turns 21 today, and I'm wishing him all good things.
He's in the midst of his senior year of college. At the moment, he's just gotten back from protesting at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh and is trying to wrap his head around what he saw there.
When he was little, he made up the magical "Greyby number" (Greyby, of course, being a meld of Grey and baby), which was, if I'm remembering correctly, more than a billion and more than infinity. Why not? When our family would part or talk on the phone from far away, we'd say, "I love you Greyby number!"
If I said, "I love you to the moon!", he would say, "I love you to the stars beyond the moon!" And so on. You can just imagine.
Okay, back to earth. I've been attending way too many bureaucratic meetings this week, so I'm very grateful to my friends for three good links:
From writer Tanya Whiton, who sussed out my swoony admiration for Jane Campion (remember that tea-cup, shot from above?), this interview about Campion's latest movie (the one about Keats and Fanny).
From Sandra Cisneros, who first introduced me to Mercè Rodoreda--"the greatest Catalan novelist of our time and quite possibly the best Mediterranean woman author since Sappho," according to her translator--this piece about Rodoreda in The Nation. (Forgive me for sounding like an ad for cheap perfume, but if you like Jean Rhys, you'll love Rodoreda. Swoon.)
Lastly, for you denizens of Star City, my charming colleague Sonam Singh offers a heads-up about this Friday's opening at the Sheldon, "Agents of Change: Mexican Muralists and New Deal Artists." Maybe see you there!
He's in the midst of his senior year of college. At the moment, he's just gotten back from protesting at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh and is trying to wrap his head around what he saw there.
When he was little, he made up the magical "Greyby number" (Greyby, of course, being a meld of Grey and baby), which was, if I'm remembering correctly, more than a billion and more than infinity. Why not? When our family would part or talk on the phone from far away, we'd say, "I love you Greyby number!"
If I said, "I love you to the moon!", he would say, "I love you to the stars beyond the moon!" And so on. You can just imagine.
Okay, back to earth. I've been attending way too many bureaucratic meetings this week, so I'm very grateful to my friends for three good links:
From writer Tanya Whiton, who sussed out my swoony admiration for Jane Campion (remember that tea-cup, shot from above?), this interview about Campion's latest movie (the one about Keats and Fanny).
From Sandra Cisneros, who first introduced me to Mercè Rodoreda--"the greatest Catalan novelist of our time and quite possibly the best Mediterranean woman author since Sappho," according to her translator--this piece about Rodoreda in The Nation. (Forgive me for sounding like an ad for cheap perfume, but if you like Jean Rhys, you'll love Rodoreda. Swoon.)
Lastly, for you denizens of Star City, my charming colleague Sonam Singh offers a heads-up about this Friday's opening at the Sheldon, "Agents of Change: Mexican Muralists and New Deal Artists." Maybe see you there!
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Hats Off!
Hats off to Timothy Schaffert, who ran another great (downtown) omaha lit fest this weekend! I loved the setting--the cooler-than-cool KANEKO in the Old Market. Cody Lumpkin, a UNL grad student and compelling poet, did a beautiful job moderating the panel I was on with writers Amelia Montes, Belinda Acosta (about whom you've heard so much of late), Jeff Koterba, and publicist Lauren Cerand. We talked about options for meaningful and effective self-promotion in the age of Twitter to a huge, lovely, and gracious audience. (Jamie, please come by and see me! Yes, you! Yoga lady, drop me a line!)
Hats off to Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, who've donated hundreds of copies of their terrific new book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (reviewed in today's NYTBR, featured in a recent NYTimes Magazine), so that they could get their important message of investment and uplift out into the community. Many thanks to Jacqueline Scoones, associate director of KANEKO, where Kristof and WuDunn will be speaking this fall, who sent me home with a box of 12 brand-new hardcover copies to distribute to colleagues here at UNL.
Hats off to Amelia Montes for her great reading today at the Bennett Martin Public Library here in downtown Lincoln! She read from the introduction, letters, notes, and text of her brand-new Penguin Classics edition of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton's 1872 novel Who Would Have Thought It?. If you're in the mood for a witty Civil War satire by one of the first Latina writers published in North America (the style reminds me a lot of Dickens), you should check it out. Amelia followed the Ruiz de Burton reading with an essay of her own, "Queen for a Day," that had us all moved and laughing. Luckily, it will be published this December in An Angle of Vision: Women Writers on their Poor and Working Class Roots.
Regarding Peter Schjeldahl's piece in the recent New Yorker, however, I feel much as the narrator does at the opening of Moby Dick: "that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off." Here's why.
The concept of the destructive and reductive potential of the male gaze has been around in the culture for, oh, 30 years or so now, since John Berger and Laura Mulvey, so it's an unpleasant surprise to read not really much at all about the new Vermeer show at the Met in Schjeldahl's "Dutch Touch" but rather about the fact that one of Vermeer's milkmaid subjects is not quite to Schjeldahl's personal taste. She is "husky," he tells us--and then, two columns later, back on the topic, he makes sure to specify that she is "sturdy." Just in case we're unsure, he tells us that her "mass," "monumentally composed," "would stand [him] off, in an attitude of reverence, even if she were naked."
Um, thank you? (Oh, wait: Schjeldahl reads Proust, too, he wants you to know, and himself has a Proustian sensibility.)
This is what passes for art criticism in The New Yorker? Psssht. For shame.
Hats off to Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, who've donated hundreds of copies of their terrific new book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (reviewed in today's NYTBR, featured in a recent NYTimes Magazine), so that they could get their important message of investment and uplift out into the community. Many thanks to Jacqueline Scoones, associate director of KANEKO, where Kristof and WuDunn will be speaking this fall, who sent me home with a box of 12 brand-new hardcover copies to distribute to colleagues here at UNL.
Hats off to Amelia Montes for her great reading today at the Bennett Martin Public Library here in downtown Lincoln! She read from the introduction, letters, notes, and text of her brand-new Penguin Classics edition of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton's 1872 novel Who Would Have Thought It?. If you're in the mood for a witty Civil War satire by one of the first Latina writers published in North America (the style reminds me a lot of Dickens), you should check it out. Amelia followed the Ruiz de Burton reading with an essay of her own, "Queen for a Day," that had us all moved and laughing. Luckily, it will be published this December in An Angle of Vision: Women Writers on their Poor and Working Class Roots.
Regarding Peter Schjeldahl's piece in the recent New Yorker, however, I feel much as the narrator does at the opening of Moby Dick: "that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off." Here's why.The concept of the destructive and reductive potential of the male gaze has been around in the culture for, oh, 30 years or so now, since John Berger and Laura Mulvey, so it's an unpleasant surprise to read not really much at all about the new Vermeer show at the Met in Schjeldahl's "Dutch Touch" but rather about the fact that one of Vermeer's milkmaid subjects is not quite to Schjeldahl's personal taste. She is "husky," he tells us--and then, two columns later, back on the topic, he makes sure to specify that she is "sturdy." Just in case we're unsure, he tells us that her "mass," "monumentally composed," "would stand [him] off, in an attitude of reverence, even if she were naked."
Um, thank you? (Oh, wait: Schjeldahl reads Proust, too, he wants you to know, and himself has a Proustian sensibility.)
This is what passes for art criticism in The New Yorker? Psssht. For shame.
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Happy Anniversaries!
Congratulations to the Rachel Maddow Show and to Indigo Bridge Books for great first years! Congratulations to UNL for opening a childcare center on campus! Congratulations to Obama for another great, important speech!
Thanks for checking in here; I've been out of commission for about a week, and I'm sorry. I have been going through it. But no worries, and I'm back better than ever.
Last night, I was happy to catch the free screening of Jennie Livingston's 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning at The Ross. Livingston herself was there, and she not only took questions but also screened 27 minutes of a new work-in-progress that's about her own family--the loss of her parents, grandmother, uncle, and beloved older brother in the span of a few short years.
What struck me was the way that, in just 27 minutes, the filmmaker's own life managed to function as a painful mirror for the desires expressed by the poor, gay, transgendered African American and Latino drag ball regulars in Paris Is Burning. Again and again, the subjects of the first documentary expressed their desire for wealth, ease, luxury, glamour, and beauty. At the drag balls, they dressed up not only as women but also as military men and male executives in suit and tie. They talked about inclusion, access, and privilege against visual backgrounds of severe economic struggle.
Livingston's montage of home movies, by contrast, showed her family's homes and multiple Mercedes in L.A., while the voiceover described dividing up the family silver and diamonds after her parents' deaths. We saw the grandmother who paid Livingston's way through Yale, the grandfather who was an actual military hero (a WWI balloon spy), and the uncle, a Hollywood producer? director?, who gave Livingston her first job in film. Her life seemed to possess most of the attributes that her Paris Is Burning subjects longed for.
When asked about the continuum between the two films, Livingston made no mention of socioeconomic class or the structuring of capitalist desire. I wondered how it felt to interview people who wanted so badly a taste of what she'd grown up with. Livingston didn't say.
Thanks for checking in here; I've been out of commission for about a week, and I'm sorry. I have been going through it. But no worries, and I'm back better than ever.
Last night, I was happy to catch the free screening of Jennie Livingston's 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning at The Ross. Livingston herself was there, and she not only took questions but also screened 27 minutes of a new work-in-progress that's about her own family--the loss of her parents, grandmother, uncle, and beloved older brother in the span of a few short years.
What struck me was the way that, in just 27 minutes, the filmmaker's own life managed to function as a painful mirror for the desires expressed by the poor, gay, transgendered African American and Latino drag ball regulars in Paris Is Burning. Again and again, the subjects of the first documentary expressed their desire for wealth, ease, luxury, glamour, and beauty. At the drag balls, they dressed up not only as women but also as military men and male executives in suit and tie. They talked about inclusion, access, and privilege against visual backgrounds of severe economic struggle.
Livingston's montage of home movies, by contrast, showed her family's homes and multiple Mercedes in L.A., while the voiceover described dividing up the family silver and diamonds after her parents' deaths. We saw the grandmother who paid Livingston's way through Yale, the grandfather who was an actual military hero (a WWI balloon spy), and the uncle, a Hollywood producer? director?, who gave Livingston her first job in film. Her life seemed to possess most of the attributes that her Paris Is Burning subjects longed for.
When asked about the continuum between the two films, Livingston made no mention of socioeconomic class or the structuring of capitalist desire. I wondered how it felt to interview people who wanted so badly a taste of what she'd grown up with. Livingston didn't say.
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Lightning Round
Because I owe some feedback to one of my graduate students, I'm just going to post a lightning round here. First of all, many thanks to all my students over the years, who've helped me learn--the hard way!--what works and what doesn't. Your feedback is helping me put the finishing touches on the workshop I'll be teaching this weekend at the Nebraska Summer Writers' Conference. But can creative writing be taught at all? Should it be? Louis Menand goes there.
Here's why I keep loving the work of Tayari Jones. When it comes to the humanity of her characters, she never settles for less. (Writers and aspiring writers, definitely read this.) Plus, her latest blog entry says that, after a hectic and tumultuous time, she has finished a draft of her latest novel, THE SILVER GIRL. Hurray! The excerpts I've seen have been beautiful and moving. We'll be looking forward....
Mystery novelist (and fellow West Virginian) Craig Johnson's first novel came out in 2005, and Viking's now publishing his fifth. (Is that humanly possible?) Having just handed off my global revision of THE DESIRE PROJECTS to a reader today, I love what he has to say on the issue of work ethic:
I kind of think of it as the blue-collar school of literature. . . . Never have I met a ditch digger who said, 'I'm just not feeling the ditch today, the ditch muse is not with me, I have to put my shovel down now.'But alas, it looks like he may have been using that shovel just a shade too often, stretching his bio to include a stint with the N.Y.P.D. Oops. Writers beware: Viking/Penguin may not fact-check you, but the New York Times will, even if they're just doing a puff piece on your cool house. (And do me a favor: when they do, try not to respond "petulantly," okay?)
This new exhibit of art by U.S. Islamic women looks fascinating; I especially love the idea of the Persian nesting dolls, above. Me encanta. Our visible image can look so different from who we are inside.
Lastly, for those of you worn out by explaining minority standpoints--re: gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, ability, religion, class, and/or you name it--to clueless members of groups on which you serve, take heart. When you're exhausted and/or fed up, know that you don't always have to argue your position to make a positive difference. You change the dynamic and the awareness just by being in the room. It may not achieve perfect results, but it's something. So take a breath, relax, and just show up.
And many thanks to those of you who wrote in privately to say how much you appreciated my recent post on Sonia Sotomayor. I'm helped by knowing it was useful. Sometimes I think political commentary isn't really the appropriate purview for a literary blog (so many people do it better than I can!), so it's good to know I'm saying something you value. ¡Gracias!
Let me get a little woo-woo on y'all for a second and just say that, according to the Ayurvedic calendar, the seasonal juncture ended yesterday. We're now officially in summer, the season of lightness, play, sweetness, and living out what the deep, introspective shake-up of spring helped us see. If you've been experiencing personal turbulence--and paying attention--now's the time for fruition. I hope you enjoy it!
Till soon!
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