The Anxiety of Intellect

You usually associate street smarts with some one who knows how to negotiate in business. Donald Trump apparently considers this ability to be a top of the line requirement for statesmanship and something which qualifies him to be president of the United States. He has boasted that he will have a wall built between Mexico and the United States which the Mexicans will pay for. You don’t usually associate streets smarts with the world of intellect, but indeed there are intellectuals who exhibit the same kind of intuitive abilities that work in deal making within the realm of intellectual arguments. That is to say there are intellectuals who approach such questions as the branch falling in the forest with no one listening or the question of whether you would turn the trolley in the direction of one hapless soul in order to save five (the Trolley problem) with some degree of swagger. Such thinkers are way beyond reason and deductive logic. For instance Harold Bloom, the literary scholar who coined the term “anxiety of influence” probably can reiterate his theories about the provenance of poetry in his sleep, ditto Steven Greenblatt the Shakespearean authority who wrote Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. Trump who has been around the block a few times when it comes to business probably thinks that he can run rings around a tough guy like Vladimir Putin (and part of his credential may relate to the fact that two of his wives Ivana and Melania come from the Czech Republic and Slovenia respectively) or the notorious bumptious Kim Jong-un. Similarly if you are a street smart intellectual you have to know how to handle the likes of the deconstructionist maeven Stanley Fish, if you’re going to get your feet wet at the MLA. And you’d better have the brashness of a Bill Maher if you find yourself knocking heads on the subject of race with the philosopher Cornel West. Imagine a series like The Sopranos, except set it in the competitive world of upper west Jewish intellectuals, the inheritors of the mantle held by Irving Howe, Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Susan Sontag and the old Partisan Review crowd. Remember Woody Allen’s line “I had heard that Commentary and Dissent  had merged and formed Dysentery?" You need an intellectual shock jock, a kind of Donald Trump of ideas, to make a dent amongst these kinds of egghead mafiosi.

Getting Off the Treadmill

The Boston Marathon GSX Treadmill (Gym Source)

What is the point of exercising if you’re only going to shrivel up and die? A well-toned body is nice, but it’s prone to atrophy. When a cast is removed from a broken leg, the sight of the diminished muscle is unnerving. Injuries or not, at a certain point you’re facing a losing battle. In order to maintain strength, you have to exercise, but the very exercising itself takes it’s toll, due to the decline of the lungs and heart. It’s a Sisyphean struggle. The Second Law of Thermodynamics underscores the entropy that’s a natural condition of all matter. Heat flows from warm to cold, but the reverse isn’t true. Contrary to what experts tell you exercise has relatively little to do with future health or how long one lives. Some people die faster than others. No pain no gain goes the popular saying, but the gains are not about the future. While the effect of exercise on longevity is purely hypothetical (with some people facing death by aerobics on the treadmill), it’s true reward comes in the here and now. Exercising is all about the present. It increases a sense of awareness and mastery and like Zen aids its practitioners in being more mindful and present. Exercising helps you to live in the moment. Mark Greif, an editor of N+1 wrote a controversial essay entitled “Against Exercise” (N+1, Issue 1, Summer 2004). If Susan Sontag’s legendary Against Interpretation made an argument for leaving art alone, Greif extended the sentiment to the body commenting that exercise is “a set of forms of bodily self-regulation that drag the last vestiges of biological life into the light as a social attraction.” The problem with Greif’s point is that he fails to make the mind/body connection. Exercise may start from the physical, but it’s value lies in its metaphysical component—which ultimately makes it a form of prayer.

The Fame Lunches

There is an obligatory and routine sanctimony to op-ed columns mourning the loss of the celebrity who didn’t make it. These antics usually last about a week in which the repetition becomes numbing and something more lurid (a football player delivering knock out punch tho his wife for instance) takes over. That was the case with Michael Jackson and more recently with Philip Seymour Hoffman. But just when one was about to lose patience with all the vapid and often self-congratulatory eulogizing, then came the venerable Daphne Merkin to the rescue, providing her own post-mortem for the actor on The New Yorker blog. Listen to this: “I can’t imagine I am alone in having found an almost preternatural youthfulness about Hoffman, as though he had never fully cast aside the boy he once was, alert to every slight. In any case, when I think of the actor, a line from a letter by Malcolm Lowry, author of 'Under the Volcano,' the ur-novel about the unslakable thirst for self-destruction, comes to mind: 'I am a small boy chased by furies,' Lowry wrote to his mentor, Conrad Aiken. I like to think of Hoffman in a heaven that’s a big swimming pool, held aloft by the buoyancy of the water, resisting nothing, chased by furies no more.” Daphne Merkin is a disappearing species. John Gross wrote a book entitled The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: English Literary Life Since 1800. Merkin is part of an almost extinct breed, the belle letterist. Neither academic, nor journalist, these essayists find their roots in a style, sometimes aphoristic, that goes back to Montaigne, in which everything high and low qualify as ingredients for a delicate recipe known as sensibility. Dwight Macdonald and Susan Sontag were two of Merkin’s storied predecessors. However, she is not only increasingly singular but sui generis within her chosen vocation to the extent that she has also created a reputation as a provocateur. She's the author of a collection of essays entitled Dreaming of Hitler: Passions and Provocations which contained an essay on her own adventures being spanked (“Spanking: A Romance”).  The controversy Merkin has created is both admirable and obfuscating to the extent that it camouflages a glorious talent for the iteration of states of being. Merkin has just published a new collection of essays The Fame Lunches: On Wounded Icons, Money, Sex, the Brontes and the importance of Handbags. She reads both books and the world like no one else. The Fame Lunches includes pieces on topics as varied as Michael Jackson (“Locked in the Playground”),  “The Unbearable Obsolescence of Girdles,” Henry Roth (“Portrait of the Artist as a Fiasco”)  and V.S. Naipaul (“Brilliant Monsters”). She upsets the applecart by beginning her piece on Michael Jackson’s pathology which she describes as representing “in his one tortured and talented being every conflict of identity imaginable--beginning with race and gender-- on the most astonishingly primordial level” in her own therapist’s office where she discountenances the accusations of pedophilia, saying “he strikes me as presexual.”  She employs a wistful irony in citing Milan Kundera’s erotic masterpiece The Unbearable Lightness of Being in her search for an anachronistic undergarment, finally concluding “It was incontrovertible: where girdles had once reigned, rowing machines, ab crunches, personal trainers, and plastic surgeons now held uncontested sway.” No matter how exalted or banal the subject, Merkin never fails to underscore the phylogenic consequences of an ontogenic decision. On Henry Roth’s incestuous relationship with his sister she pulls out her full psychic artillery, “within the context of the violently dysfunctional marriage of their parents, and the generally xenophobic climate of the Roth household, the incestuous detour makes a kind of anthropological sense, as though an ingrained Jewish pattern of tribal endogamy had been taken to its logical conclusion.” Here Merkin takes over a role Lionel Trilling once occupied: the literary critic as psychoanalyst. One of her recurring themes is the price paid by those whose wounded existence leads to the creation of art (an idea famously dealt with by another great belle lettrist Edmund Wilson in The Wound and the Bow). In the V.S. Naipaul (“Brilliant Monsters”) essay, Merkin deals with “the human wreckage” left by a man who inflicted great mental and physical pain on his wife and mistress respectively and wrote with what she calls “a wounded pen." Don’t miss this latest collection of Daphne Merkin's essays.

Barney’s Wall

Barney Rosset was the founder of Grove Press and Evergreen Review and was a proselytizer for among other things the Theater of the Absurd. He brought the works of Beckett, Genet, Pinter and Ionesco to the reading public and also was famous for fighting the right to publish Henry Miller’s Tropics (of Cancer and Capricorn). He released seminal works as varied in their locus of rebellion as Last Exit to Brooklyn and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. As the publisher of Evergreen Review he crossed paths with literally every esthetic and political avant-gardist who was anybody. He was married to the seminal abstract expressionist artist Joan Mitchell and a kind of comrade-in-arms of the writer Norman Mailer, with whom he shared a love of wine, women and provocation. At the end of his life when Barney’s enterprise had been diminished by financial problems, he was no longer capable of employing his voracious appetite for life and manic energy in the same arenas he did as young man. But as the old expression goes one door closes and another opens. Barney turned his attention to a 22’x12' wall of his loft which he turned into an enormous mural. Besides leaving a powerful literary legacy when he died in 2012, he also left behind “his wall." Free expression was Barney’s turf and the cause he fought for and his wall is a mixture of abstraction and figuration, of life and art, that is the epitome what might be termed the  “free expressive style." The mural is really a three dimensional collage that contains sculpture as well as paintings within the parameters of the larger work. It’s outsider art, done by a consummate insider. Barney’s Wall is a picaresque journey through the history of 20^th Century modernism and it conforms to the dictates of the modernist view of what art should be. To quote Susan Sontag it’s Against Interpretation, being not a window onto the world, but a world in and of itself. The impresario's final act was to add himself to his own name to the list of luminaries whose careers he championed. And Barney’s Wall is something to be reckoned with. Yes there are fragments of his obsessions from Thai Bar girls to a pool table that might have existed in some of the famed downtown watering holes Barney frequented like the Cedar Tavern (where Pollock and other abstract expressionists held court). Now filmmakers Sandy Gotham Meehan (writer, producer), Williams  Cole (producer, director) and David Leitner (cinematographer) are creating a film entitled Barney’s Wall in which a number of visitors including writers, curators, analysts of varying persuasions, an anthropologist, a paleontologist and others, most of whom have never seen the wall, have been given an opportunity to free associate or riff about the wall’s effect on them. However, filmmaking aside, what will happen to the sui generis monument to the intersection of political and esthetic revolution--when Barney’s widow, Astrid, gives up the loft on Fourth Avenue where “the wall” now proudly stands? Hopefully MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Whitney or one of the downtown arts institutions like the New Museum  will take it upon themselves to preserve it for posterity.

Naked Before the Camera

"Hermaphrodite" (Nadar) from the Met's Naked Before the Camera

“Controversies are often aroused even more intensely when the artist’s chosen medium is photography, with its accuracy and specificity—where a real person stood naked before the camera—rather than traditional media in which more generalized and idealized forms prevail.” This is part of the introduction to Naked Before the Camera, at the Met. To the right of the commentary is a Brassai from l931 of a nude model on a pedestal who is the subject of “L’Academie Julien.” The word “Naked” is spelled out in light bulbs like a peep show and this is one show you want to see for the multivalent nudity. There is a postmortem of a murder victim by the chief of criminal identification of Paris and the naked body of patient suffering from disfiguring sarcomas. Two Eakins photographs of nude males are offered up along with another Brassai, “Introduction to Suzy’s,” showing the nude prostitutes in a famous Paris brothel. There’s a Diane Arbus from l968, of a naked man with his penis hidden between his legs, “A Naked Man Being a Woman,” which is the perfect complement another photo in the exhibit called “Hermaphrodite” depicting a man/woman with a heterodox genitalia. Larry Clark, the director of Kids, is represented by a shot of a teenaged coupled making love which was used as the cover of his book Teenaged Lust. Jim Jager photographed black nude males in self-published magazines with names like Black Thunder, Black Fever, Black Knight and Black Gold and his well-endowed male, “Sharkey” from l980 according to the curator “set the stage for Mapplethorpe and others to push boundaries and rules, gender and sexuality.” Hannah Wilke’s “Snatch Shot With Ray Gun, from the series So Help Me Hannah offer the naked self portrait as a form of performance art.  In Regarding the Pain of Others (2002) Susan Sontag repudiated her earlier On Photography (1977) in which argued that repeated exposure to images dulled consciousness. Naked Before the Camera continues a discussion which began with the museum’s 2006 love letter to Sontag, On Photography: A Tribute to Susan Sontag. Think back to Stieglitz’s unapologetically sensuous nude photographs of Georgia O’Keefe, which had been shown at the museum, in the Stieglitz and his Artists Show last year. They’re the perfect complement to this exhibit.