A Book of Secrets

In her front-page review of A Book of Secrets: Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers by Michael Holroyd in The New York Times Book Review (8/7/11), Toni Bentley quotes these lines of poetry from Violet Trefusis, the lover of Vita Sackville-West: “My heart was more disgraceful, more alone/ and more courageous than the world has known./ O passer-by my heart was like your own.” The almost unbearable romanticism and beauty of the lines is tempered by the rhyme. But there is also something blatantly untrue about them, at least on the basis of Bentley’s exegesis of Holroyd’s work. Bentley’s review is a bit of meta-biography in and of itself, as it humorously remarks on a level of promiscuity that requires the diagramming of genealogy. “Got it?” she asks at one point. “If not, reread, and make a chart. I did.” It’s not true that Violet Trefusis’s heart was like your own, dear reader, as she was an obsessional character whose heart was powered by devices and drives, including some degree of self-dramatization, that set it above the quiet desperation of the mass of men. “Today Violet would be on a Lexapro cocktail with an Abilify chaser, Ritalin with some Ativan on the side for particularly fiery outbursts, while attending daily meetings of Sex Addicts Anonymous after a few weeks of inpatient therapy with Dr. Drew at Almost-a-Celebrity Rehab,” Bentley opines. This last is reminiscent of an old Roz Chast New Yorker cartoon that speculates on how pharmaceutical psychiatry would have affected the creation of works like Waiting for Godot. Still, the poetry and the passions described are sensational in all senses of the word.

The Names of Love

Michael Leclerc’s The Names of Love is so French—in its sexuality, its politics and its mixture of the two—and so much an allegory for the current state of French society, that one wonders how it was ever released in the United States. Perhaps it’s Sara Forestier’s charming and unrestrained performance that was the selling point to distributors. Forestier’s Baya is a disinhibiting force and an unsettling presence, not only because she tries to use sex as an anodyne for fascism, but because she churns up things that people don’t want to think about, such as how appearances hide reality. In the case of French society, this translates into an ideological diatribe about how a veneer of complacent infatuation with the idea of being French hides a mélange of past conflict. Both Baya and the man she falls in love with, Arthur Williams (Jacques Gamblin), who is named after a popular appliance, are products of traumatic pasts. Arthur’s grandparents died in Auschwitz, but his parents never talk about it, channeling all their energy into buying new gadgets that become instant anachronisms. Baya’s parents, paragons of radical values, are no more liberated, maintaining a code of silence about the sexual abuse Baya suffered at the hands of a piano instructor. The film ends in 2007, with Sarkozy’s triumph over the socialist candidate Ségolène Royal and the birth of Arthur and Baya’s baby, Chang. The film was obviously made before the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal, but it would be interesting to see if and how Leclerc would have worked it into a plot in which the former French Prime Minister and socialist presidential candidate, Lionel Jospin, has a cameo role.

Rush Hour

Thankfully, the Alexander McQueen show at the Met is finally ending. Under the right conditions, it might have turned into another Happy Land disco, where a fire took the lives of 87 New Yorkers back in 1990. Even the threat of fire could have caused one of those mass stampedes like the one that killed a Wal-Mart worker and injured shoppers on Black Friday in 2008. The most significant esthetic effect of the show is the way it so accurately duplicates the claustrophobic experience of an MRI. Once you have entered, you realize you are not getting out until, like sludge, you finally make it to the end of the sewage pipe. Alexander McQueen made clothes, but is this an example of the Emperor’s New Clothes? Oh, you Philistine, this accusation is like saying that anyone could paint a Pollock. No, it’s worse! It takes great talent to put one over on the public. Romanticism and Scottish nationalism are constantly used to tout McQueen’s work, which is more reminiscent of the Addams Family than anything else. One keeps waiting for the articles of clothing to come to life and reenact the famous Forth Bridge scene from Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps. Instead one is inflicted with a mirror behind which one finds video of a naked woman blanketed by moths, which is arguably the most fashionable image in the show. As you may glean, behind the disruption his work caused at the normally serene old Met, McQueen had things to say, but this is neither the time nor the place to preach to the ever-increasing choir of admirers.  Getting back to the experience of actually attending the exhibit, what other comparisons can be made? Rush hour on the 1-2-3, Heathrow during one of its frequent work stoppages or after the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull. Oh what fools these mortals be!

Noble Laureate

Robert C.W. Ettinger was a physics teacher and sci-fi writer whose greatest contribution may have been to comedy. If there were a Nobel in comedy, he would have received it for his discovery of  “cryonics.” The process, by which bodies are frozen at death to be reanimated at a later date, pending the discovery of a cure for mortality, has inspired comedy greats like Woody Allen and Mike Myers. Sleeper and Austin Powers were byproducts of Mr. Ettinger’s novel appropriation of cryogenics. “In interviews, Mr. Ettinger traced his earliest interest in the possibility of immortality to a story he read when he was 12 in the popular science fiction magazine Amazing Stories,” Paul Vitello wrote in his Times obit (“Robert C.W. Ettinger, aProponent of Life After (Deep-Frozen) Death, Is Dead at 92” NYT, 8/2/11). “It was about a professor who launched himself in a rocket into deep frozen outer space, where he remained entombed for 40 million years until an advanced species of men discovered him and revived him.” A later wartime experience in which Ettinger’s limbs were spared amputation “convinced him that there might be a way someday to fix anything, even death.” According to the Times, there are 106 bodies and 80 pets stored in Ettinger’s Cryonics Institute in suburban Detroit, including now Mr. Ettinger himself. The Times obit has been optioned by Ron Howard for a comedy starring Ben Stiller.

The Men and Women Without Qualities

So who will embody the New Man or New Woman of our age? Parameters are generally established after the fact. Thus, the Victorian era was encapsulated by the Queen because of the monarch’s strength and the morality and counter-morality that it spawned. The fifties were the Eisenhower years, characterized as of the era of silent conformism, in which Americans basked in era of post-war prosperity. This smugness created its own counter-reformation, evidenced in the ennui and rebellion documented in the work of Saul Bellow, John Updike and John Cheever. Here are the opening lines of Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March (1953): “I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.” Cheever’s famous story, “The Swimmer,” in which the protagonist’s escape takes the form of a journey through his neighbor’s swimming pools, creates myth out of the trivial details of suburban life. When and how will our present age be defined? Hints may come the work of yet another writer, David Foster Wallace, who died by his own hand in 2008, just as the economy was teetering on collapse. Tennis and AA were two of the themes of his magnum opus, Infinite Jest, while his unfinished final novel, The Pale King, is partially set in the world of the IRS bureaucracy. Don Delillo’s Falling Man, an obvious reference to an iconic photograph, dealt with the aftermath of 9/11. But perhaps we should look to another continent and age for clues. Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities and Alfred Doblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz capture civilizations on the verge of collapse. A suburbanite, a recovering alcoholic, a thinker, an IRS agent, a thief—which of these sensibilities will be emblematic of our times, which of these characters are we likely to encounter in art as well as in life?

Tabloid

Errol Morris’s Tabloid recalls Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer, about the relationship between writer Joe McGinniss and serial murderer Jeffrey MacDonald, to the extent that it is a narrative about narrative and about the mutually predatory relationship between subject and object in journalism. Morris’s film also recalls the JonBenét Ramsey case in that it is rooted in the culture of the beauty pageants in which its subject, Joyce McKinney, was raised. The sordid chain of events the film depicts goes on to encompasses obsessive love, kidnapping and prostitution. Britain’s Daily Express and Daily Mirror fought over the story of the “Manacled Mormon” (McKinney purportedly kidnapped and raped Mormon Kirk Anderson), and Morris enters the fray as a Johnny-come-lately, the way Malcolm did in the Jeffrey MacDonald case, by assuming a new level of agency as he makes his contribution as a not-always-objective observer. The movie is deceptive in its comic-strip sensibility, complete with action panels, but underneath are very real players in complex relationships. McKinney’s bodyguard, KJ, is enthralled with her, while she in turn is obsessed with Anderson. “Spread Eagled” was another tabloid headline about the affair, and it’s a metaphor for the plight of the storyteller, who is hard put to get a grasp on the personality of a psychopath. McKinney, who skipped bail, would emerge years later when a Korean geneticist cloned her dog Booger. She parrots Brigitte Bardot in the end, saying, “I gave my youth to men and in my old age the dogs all love me.” Despite being the victim of a bizarre burglary in which all her files were stolen, McKinney is now attempting to embellish the myth she created by trying her hand at writing about it.

The ED Team

The fight against erectile dysfunction (or ED) must be a team effort, argues a recent Everyday Health article (“The Erectile Dysfunction Treatment Team,” EverydayHealth.com, 7/22/11). However, it’s common knowledge that the psychology of ED, or Mr. Ed as some sufferers affectionately refer to it, is rooted in that youthful passage when junior is a little off (though maybe not by too far) in thinking that Mom wants him to stick it in. Junior becomes so frightened by his fear of Dad (or the Big Bad Wolf in folkloric terms) that he begins to have murderous thoughts. Perhaps this is the origin of the expression “the only defense is a good offense.” But the ED team must also look to other causes. The Everyday Health piece contains a whole list of people who might be enlisted in the fight against ED, which afflicts over 30 Million men and the women who love them, or at least would like to get laid by them. Everyday Health was correct in adding practitioners of alternative medicine as well as doctors to the ED team, but it’s important that if you do go into the world of alternative medicine to cure ED that you chose a bona fide medicine man. Oftentimes, ED sufferers seek help from urologists who are all too willing to take their money to solve the problem. Just because the pee-pee hole is located at the end of the penis, that’s no reason to conclude that urinary function has anything to do with ED. Most ED sufferers would do just as well to see a vagina specialist or OBGYN than an urologist. In fact, most ED suffers would be better off if they retained an otolaryngologist or even a brain surgeon, since more often than not penile problems originate in the head.