These are links to some of the longer pieces I’ve written so far this year. The painting of the great Indian fruit bat (c. 1777-1782) is attributed to Bhawani Das or one of his followers.
The Last Jedi and the anxiety of influence
A review of Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Phantom Thread
A review of The Paris Review’s overproduced podcast
A review of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz’s collection Narcotics
A few paragraphs on beginning Iris Murdoch’s novel The Bell
On a compelling Stephen Crane character
A review of Iris Murdoch’s novel The Bell
On a particular Gordon Lish sentence
On rereading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance
On Goya’s painting The Straw Man
On Don DeLillo’s novel The Names
On the radical postmodernism of Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “Schrödinger’s Cat”
Polygamy as a metaphor in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance
On Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “silvery veil” — and David Foster Wallace’s Madame Psychosis
An analysis of William Carlos Williams’s ekphrastic poem “The Wedding Dance in the Open Air”
A close reading of Lydia Davis’s very short story “Happiest Moment”
On a passage from Gerald Murnane’s short story “Stream System”
Something on a scene from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance
On John Berryman’s Dream Song 265
On making a literary cocktail, the sherry cobbler
On Robert Coover’s short story “The Brother”
On Claire-Louise Bennett’s short story “Stir-Fry”
On Balthus’s portraits of young girls reading
On the postmodern comedy-horror axis of Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy
An interview with the editors of Egress, a new literary magazine devoted to innovative writing
A completely subjective and thoroughly unnecessary ranking of Thomas Pynchon’s novels
Antoine Volodine’s Writers blows me away
A review of Dave Cooper’s queasy abject comic Mudbite (at The Comics Journal)
On Michael Radford’s film adaptation of 1984
Is The Running Man a good film?
On William Friedkin’s paranoid, claustrophobic horror flick Bug
Mary and the Witch’s Flower, a love letter to Studio Ghibli from director Hiromasa Yonebayashi
On Hayao Miyazaki’s film Porco Rosso
A review of Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon
Painter Kerry James Marshall has written a wonderful appreciation of the artist Charles White. The piece also serves as a miniature artistic autobiography of Marshall himself, set against the backdrop of African-American history in the latter half of the 20th century. The piece, published in Charles White: A Retrospective (ed. Sarah Kelly Oehler and Esther Adler, 2018) is excerpted today in The Paris Review. Here’s the opening paragraph:
I have been a stalwart advocate for the legacy of Charles White. I have said it so often, it could go without saying. I have always believed that his work should be seen wherever great pictures are collected and made available to art-loving audiences. He is a true master of pictorial art, and nobody else has drawn the black body with more elegance and authority. No other artist has inspired my own devotion to a career in image making more than he did. I saw in his example the way to greatness. Yes. And because he looked like my uncles and my neighbors, his achievements seemed within my reach. The wisdom he dispensed to the many aspiring artists who gathered around him was always straightforward: do your work with skill and integrity, everything else is superfluous. It is a right time for him to be considered again in the fullness of his expertise. And fitting that he should be recognized with a survey in three of the best museums in the world.
Perhaps my favorite section of the piece is where Marshall situates White’s commitment to human representation:
Charlie himself remained steadfast in his commitment to representational art through all the shifts and changes in the contemporary art world of his era. He was not taken up in the rush toward abstraction and what the art historian Thomas McEvilley called the “misconceived belief that abstract art represented a kind of nothingness that made it seem the final term in a semantic series.” …
It was always clear with Charlie that to make good work, one had to know a thing or two about more than how to draw or paint. He had a scholar’s interest in history, which informed the work he made. He often said your work should be about things that mattered but reminded us all to concentrate on making the best drawings we could, adding, “the ideas will take care of themselves.”
Read the full essay at The Paris Review
The Wedding Party (Birth of a Book) by Henry Koerner (1915-1991)
The Fall of the Damned, 1450 by Dieric Bouts (c. 1415–1475)
Portrait of Marguerite Van Mons, 1886 by Théo van Rysselberghe (1862-1926)
Spare, dark, cruel, and unflinching, Lady Macbeth (2016) uncoils with an austere beauty that belies its dark core. Set in rural England in 1865, the film is the story of Katherine, a young wife essentially imprisoned by her cruel father-in-law and warped husband who try to confine her inside their drafty country estate.
Katherine would rather take her freedom in the fresh chilly air of the heath, but father-in-law Boris wants her inside, preferably laboring at creating a male heir, a task made nearly impossible by her older husband Alexander’s apparent impotence. Boris and Alexander use a housemaid named Anna to monitor Katherine, and when the father and son have to depart on separate business matters, Anna is left to watch over the bored young bride.
Katherine’s situation becomes much less boring when, only a day or two after the departure of Boris and Alexander, she discovers Anna naked in a sack suspended from the ceiling of a kennel, surrounded by jeering men. Katherine frees the maid and asserts her dominance as lady of the house, even as she has to tussle with one of the men, Sebastian. The scene is utterly Sadean, a strange mix of sexuality, violence, and the thin veneer of social mores that glosses over the id writhing under the surface. The veneer cracks. Our Lady takes up a poorly-hidden (and then not-really-hidden-at-all) affair with Sebastian. To reveal more could spoil the story, but, like, you know some of the stuff that happens in Macbeth, right? Murders and stuff?
While Lady Macbeth recalls Shakespeare’s tragedy at times, it’s actually an adaptation of Nikolai Leskov’s 1865 novella Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. (I read and enjoyed an English translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky a few years back). Director William Oldroyd and writer Alice Birch offer a fairly faithful adaptation of Leskov’s story, although the film’s tone is much darker and devoid of Leskov’s black humor. The film’s conclusion is also darker and more concise than Leskov’s novella’s last chapters (and better, I’d argue). Lady Macbeth’s final moments offer a chilling indictment of Victorian morality (a moral vision that continues to persist in many ways today) without the slightest concession to a mainstream audience’s desire for, say, justice. The film begins dark and strange and ends darker, stranger. Watching Lady Macbeth is a bit like having one’s stomach squeezed from the inside out.
The film’s disturbing tension is not for everyone, but those folks would miss a fantastic performance by Florence Pugh, who plays Katherine with a sensitivity that is both captivating and menacing. One of the great successes of Lady Macbeth is watching Pugh perform a character who moves from emotion to impulse to action–or in some cases radical inaction—in a thoroughly naturalistic way. Oldroyd’s direction is key here; perhaps the most terrifying thing about Lady Macbeth is how natural the film feels. Cinematographer Ari Wegner seems to shoot the film almost-entirely with natural light (and occasionally gaslight), an effect that is simultaneously gorgeous and starkly unsettling. Lady Macbeth would make a perfect double feature with Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled (2017). The film’s repetitions of interiors—often with Katherine staring out—readily recall Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi’s work.
Lady Macbeth creates its own visual grammar to tell its story, deploying dialogue between characters with a spare efficiency that helps build the film’s anxious mood. Extradiagetic sound is virtually nonexistent in the film, too. A slow ominous rumbling swells up exactly three times in Lady Macbeth, matching and then intensifying the viewer’s nervous dread. The final credits play out over the sounds of birds chattily chirping. It’s all very disconcerting.
As I’ve noted (and which I hope is clear from this write-up), Lady Macbeth’s mix of strange Sadean sex and violence isn’t for everyone. It’s the kind of film that will likely disappoint or even upset many viewers—those looking for a Victorian-period romance should look elsewhere, and fans of straightforward horror might not get the tropes they crave. But folks interested in an unnerving but compelling story told on its own aesthetic terms should check this one out.
How I watched it: On a big TV via a streaming service, somewhat late at night, at least for my wife and me. My wife loved it, by the way, and best of all, she loved it despite her usual rubric—she says she doesn’t like films where “nothing good happens.” Maybe something good happens in Lady Macbeth, but the good is so wrapped up in the bad that the two are impossible to parse.
Grandma’s Sunday Walk, 1972 by Russell Drysdale (1912-1981)
Suspended Power, 1939 by Charles Sheeler (1883 – 1965)
Mirror of Life, 1946 by Henry Koerner (1915-1991)
Amazon Books, 2013 by Daniel Rich (b. 1977)
The Dressmaker by Tony Luciani (b. 1956)
A page from Bill Sienkiewicz’s Stray Toasters #1 (Marvel/Epic, 1988)
Before the Singing, 1930 by Antonio Donghi (1897-1963)
Biblioklept 