Robert Desnos: "I have dreamed of you so much"

My translation of "J'ai tant rêvé de toi."


I HAVE DREAMED OF YOU SO MUCH

I have dreamed of you so much that you are losing your reality.

Is there time to reach your living body, to kiss the voice so dear to me as it springs from your mouth?

I have dreamed of you so much that my arms, accustomed to lying folded on my chest from embracing your image, would perhaps no longer bend to the shape of your real body.

For, faced with the actual appearance of the one who haunts me and who has ruled my days and years, I would, without a doubt, have also become an image.

O, scales of feeling….

I have dreamed of you so much that, without a doubt, there is no time for me to wake.  I sleep standing up, the body exposed to all the shapes of love and life—and to you, the only one who counts for me now.  I can no more touch your forehead or your lips than those of a stranger passing by.

I have dreamed of you so much, walked, talked, slept with your image, that there is nothing left of me, perhaps for now and ever, but to be an image among other images, a hundred times more shadow than the one who walks and will continue to walk brightly across the sundial of your life.

Translated by D. LeH. Sweet

American Voices: Hemingway

A sample essay for my undergraduate course, "American Voices."


INDIAN GIVING 

He bent over the Indian woman. She was quiet now and her eyes were closed. She looked very pale. She did not know what had become of the baby or anything.

            “I’ll be back in the morning,” the doctor said, standing up. “The nurse should be here from St. Ignace by noon and she’ll bring everything we need.”
            He was feeling exalted and talkative as football players are in the dressing room after a game.
            “That’s one for the medical journal, George,” he said.  “Doing a Caesarian with a jack-knife and sewing it up with nine-foot, tapered gut leaders.”
            Uncle George was standing against the wall, looking at his arm.
            “Oh, you’re a great man, all right,” he said.

In this passage from Ernest Hemingway’s “Indian Camp”—one of the opening short stories in his debut collection, In Our Time (1925)—the reader immediately senses the feeling of accomplishment experienced by a skilled doctor after successfully performing a life-saving operation in unfavorable circumstances.  The life of a Native American woman is in jeopardy due to complications during labor.  But she is rescued and her child safely delivered thanks to the intervention of Dr. Adams, the father of the young Nick Adams, a character in the story who appears throughout In Our Time at different stages of his life. 

            As in many of Hemingway’s stories, the language and sentences of “Indian Camp” seem very simple at first, though some words and references require clarification.  The first reference that might draw one’s attention is “St. Ignace,” the French name of a Catholic saint—St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus, or the Jesuits—which is used in the story to identify a hospital or charitable institution in the area.  Next is the word “Caesarian,” which obviously refers to the operation being performed on the Native American woman (or “Indian” woman) in the story.  Like the name of the hospital, a “Caesarian” or “Caesarian section,” is named after an eponymous figure—in this case, Julius Caesar—someone who was supposedly delivered as a child by the same method being used by Dr. Adams (in antiquity the mothers always died, however).  Finally, in the very same sentence in which “Caesarian” appears, the reader notices the “nine-foot, tapered gut leaders,” a more obscure, technical term that refers to the kind of front line attached to the bait in fly fishing and which is here being used as a substitute for conventional surgical thread.  It was made of cat gut, a strong fiber that was harder for fish to sever when they bit on it.  This reference to fly fishing might also be an indication of why the doctor, his son, Nick, and his brother, George, happened to be on the lake when the woman in the Indian camp was giving birth. 

            So what, exactly, is being said in this passage?  The brief, opening paragraph presents the doctor standing over the sleeping figure of the woman after he has successfully performed the delivery of her child.  She is unconscious and exhausted.  Her paleness suggests how close to death she has come, but might also seem ironic, as she is a Native American, the opposite of a so-called “pale face,” a term that was supposedly used by “Indians” to refer to white people, but which, as an English expression, was actually only attributed to “Indians” by whites—the people whose arrival in the New World ensured that native peoples such as the pregnant woman would be living in such places as the “Indian camp” or shanty town in which the reader finds them.  Nonetheless, the exhausted woman now seems at peace after her ordeal, if also oblivious to her child and her surroundings.   On straightening up, the doctor states that he will be back in the morning and that a nurse from St. Ignace will arrive by noon with more medical supplies, presumably better ones than those available during the actual delivery. 

At this point, the reader comes to a crucial statement in the passage.  Having successfully completed his mission, the doctor feels “exalted” and “talkative,” much as a football player might feel after a successful ball game.  Hemingway’s comparison of the doctor to athletes talking in a locker room after winning a game is significant, both in this particular story and in the collection as a whole, partly because it zeroes in on the heightened emotions experienced after performing a task, sport, or art very well and shows the exhilarating sense of empowerment such an achievement brings, especially one that is accomplished with difficulty or at great risk.  Dr. Adams’ successful operation is clearly such an example, though in most circumstances the procedure would be considered routine.  The doctor makes this clear by calling it “one for the medical journal” and describing the extreme conditions in which he managed to pull it off—using a common jack-knife and sewing up the mother with gut leaders.  As mentioned above, the fishing leaders were made of gut, which was also used to make strings on a guitar or tennis racket, for instance.  There might also be a funny pun here, considering that the “gut leader” is also being used to sew up a woman’s belly or “gut.” The doctor himself becomes a sort of “gut leader,” using his best instincts (another connotation of “gut”) and meager resources to prove he is a master surgeon. 

Finally, the doctor’s brother, George, is seen standing against the wall and looking at his arm, which was previously bitten by the woman in her agony, an act which caused him to call her a “damn squaw bitch,” thus highlighting, perhaps, some of the racial antagonisms that remained between whites and Native Americans at this particular juncture of American history (to say nothing of gender antagonisms).  George confirms that his brother is indeed a “great man.”  In this way, the passage puts a point on the earlier references to other great men in history, like St. Ignatius or Julius Caesar, though it does so in a subtle, indirect way.  (Note that in the process, women’s roles—even in losing their lives while giving birth—are subtly disparaged.)  Ironically, his success as a doctor cannot prepare Dr. Adams for the surprise awaiting him and everyone else when they discover that another, very bloody, operation was being performed in the upper bunk of the same bed at the same time as the Caesarian section being performed below:  the husband of the “squaw” is found with his throat slit open, an apparent suicide.  No longer feeling exalted, the doctor now regrets having brought his young son for this lesson in human endeavor and survival.  With the suicide it has become a much darker lesson about death, desperation, and maybe injustice, too—not exactly the lesson one might want a son to learn at such a young age (though the doctor was willing enough to risk letting him see a mother die). 

            What carries over from this passage to the collection as a whole is the theme of performing well, showing one’s skill or mastery under pressure, but also showing a determination to adhere to a code of excellence even in situations of great stress and potential disaster.  In doing this, one avoids emotional sloppiness, false sentiment, and making pledges one cannot keep (I think this may be the reason Dr. Adams tells his son earlier on that the woman’s screams are not important, though it seems a rather heartless thing to say).  Everything depends on knowing the rules of the game or the techniques of one’s art, and although winning brings a feeling of exuberance, one might just as easily lose according to the same rules by which one sometimes wins.  The references to football and fishing are simple indicators of fairly ordinary activities or items.  They imply that if one adheres to the rules of the game, remembers one’s training, or simply applies one’s knowledge as best one can (even in unusual circumstances), one is likely to come out a winner. 

But even great persons can fail in the best of circumstances; human beings and society are such that even those with the best of intentions can often go wrong or lose heart.  Life itself is sloppy and people inscrutable, their motives unknowable.  One cannot say why the husband of the Indian woman killed himself:  “He couldn’t stand things, I guess,” says Dr. Adams later on.  Some things can’t be stood:  whether it is the screams of a woman in labor or the injustice of living in an Indian camp utterly dependent on one’s white masters.  Later, Nick Adams will fight in the trenches in the so-called “Great War” of Europe (1914-1918).  Yet no matter how much integrity or faith in his cause an individual soldier might have, many will come away with the sense that the entire conflict was a farce revealing the hollowness of “great men” and the great myths (of God, country, and honor) such men foist upon the rest of society.  In retrospect, the war will seem more like an act of collective madness or suicide.  After returning home from Europe, Nick seeks isolation from the messiness of social entanglements and tries to find solace in the simpler values of being a good sport, as shown on the “big two-hearted river” where he fishes for trout at the end of In Our Time.  At one point the text indicates that he is trying to recuperate the old feeling of performing well, of winning fair and square, in a sport that pits one against another, or a lone man against a river.

The theme of good sportsmanship also suggests a sort of writer’s code or “aesthetic” that Hemingway consistently adheres to, an aesthetic that demands clarity and honesty and disdains flashiness and rhetoric—false drama.  His stories present, with a stark simplicity and realism, difficult truths and lives that do not lend themselves to the sort of moral commentary or grand pronouncements many seem to demand of fiction.  Instead, his stories quietly ask the reader to judge the situation based on the facts of the case, on the most direct or fitting description in a clear and simple language.  It is a language that means more by saying less—though in saying less, it also risks incomprehension, risks provoking the stupidity of the crowd.

Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi 1707-1857

The Asia Society Museum, February 7 – May 6, 2012


MUGHAL MINIATURES AND ENGLISH ENLARGEMENTS

Embedded within The Asia Society website is another site for the “Princes and Painters” exhibition of miniatures and other artifacts of the late Mughal dynasty.  The site is worth studying before visiting the exhibition because by doing so one won’t have to read the long texts that accompany the works, having learned about their historical context in advance.  But without this historical foregrounding, the crux of the exhibition—the transition from late Mughal to early British patronage of the arts in India in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries—might very well be missed.  So rather than getting a major headache from reading too much in a dimly lit space, one can enjoy the minor headache of looking exclusively at the art—objects well worth close scrutiny. 

            The historical information can’t be ignored because, in the end, there is an amazing, mind-altering lesson to be learned from the exhibition: a historical lesson rolled into a paradox and bound up in a contradiction.  As the various scholars, curators, museum spokeswomen and spokesmen seem at pains to inform us (including guest curator William Dalrymple, author of City of Djinns and White Mughals, art historian Yuthika Sharma, and Melissa Chiu, director of the museum), the works on display were never considered the apogee of Mughal artistry or brilliance.   Although this attitude is occasionally borne out by the work on display, it is also thrown into doubt at others, as if the Peacock Throne of artistic truth had suddenly been wrested from the clutches of common sense and turned over to the conceit of scholars, who turn out to have been very wise after all.  

            In the first rooms one is treated to a résumé of works of the early Eighteenth Century.  Many of these were produced by the same ateliers patronized by the great Mughal rulers of the preceding century, rulers who combined the despotic genes of the Mongol Khans with the Persian Timurids (eponymous descendants of Tamburlaine, as popularized in two tragedies by Christopher Marlowe).  Every student of world history will remember Babur, Humayun, Akbar the Great (religious syncretist and builder of uninhabitable pleasure domes like Fatepur Sikri), Jahangir, and of course Shah Jehan (builder of the Taj Mahal, the Red Fort, and other architectural wonders), culminating in the loathèd Aurangzebe (also popularized in the English theater, this time by John Dryden on rather positive terms).  Although Aurangzebe is usually dismissed as a religious zealot, a cultural helot, and a ruthless expansionist, some of the first works to be seen in the show were created under his patronage of the Delhi workshops.  Indeed, their visual eloquence undermines the conventional wisdom that he was little more than a philistine and a murderer (to his credit, he merely imprisoned his father—and that in the Agra Fort just across the river from his beloved Taj Mahal).  Perhaps the most exquisite example is the equestrian portrait of the aging emperor, holding a spear and wearing a scimitar under his patterned green tunic as he sits, in profile, astride a pale horse with black mane and hooves, the cream-colored haunches elegantly curved like a pair of italic parentheses, as a young attendant raises a fringed parasol from behind the horse to shield the old pillager from the setting sun, signified by orange wisps of cloud against a grey background.

            What followed Aurangzebe’s reign was a period of rapid and violent transition, punctuated by more murders, imprisonments, court intrigues climaxing in at least one quick blinding, some very slow starvation, and the complimentary strangulation of various Mughal potentates at the bequest, it would seem, of two fraternal wazirs, as the painted record implies (though the curators offer no definitive conclusions about that).  Nevertheless, the grand ateliers continued to commemorate the intervening episodes with consummate grace, courtly episodes in which power was passed on from ruling emperor to favorite grandson, for instance, in the form, say, of a pretty sarpech:  a pearl ornament pinned on a turban.  The formal representation of this scene at the court of Bahadur Shah I (r. 1707 -1712) seems to capture a world of ritual exactitude and barely-repressed chaos, with the emperor presiding on his dais as four rival sons sit cross-legged at his feet on a rich Persian carpet.  In another work, Grand Wazir Khan and his attendants sit debating in pajamas among pillows and bolsters while musicians perform in the foreground as one or two officials in white skirts enter from the right looking like whirling dervishes, except that they are not whirling.  It’s like a modern sleepover in which all the guests are bearded officials, except at this pajama party the interiors are elegantly decorated with niches and vases, the furnishings quaintly rendered out of perspective.  

But there are other genres of works, including such things as elephant fights for the entertainment of Emperor Muhammad Shah I (r. 1719-1748) who is shown in profile and well-protected from the mammoth fury below in his high window perch.  One supposes these fights were the Mughal equivalent of the bear-baiting being done at the same time in monarchical England, which also liked to indulge in cruelty to animals.  Other more delicate genres include Hindu themes, notably represented in the so-called ragas or raginis, male and female inflections of painterly modes related to music and dance, much as Poussin might paint a picture in the Lydian, Phrygian, or other such mode associated with Hellenic forms.  In one particularly charming work, a beautiful lady, clothed in sheer garments revealing breasts and thighs, visits a Saivite shrine (that looks remarkably mosque-like) to leave an offering at an almost miniscule lingam, while an austere yogini looks on.  The painting seems a tribute to Mughal tolerance, but an acknowledgement, also, of a desire to reduce the signs of cultural difference to a minimum.

            As one studies these exquisite, almost jewel-like miniatures, one imagines the vast wealth of India waiting to be snatched up by some very shrewd and enterprising scoundrels. 

Enter, the British East India Company!  Their representatives’ names seem pregnant with imperial know-how while concealing a remarkable virtuosity at assimilating Mughal tastes (if partly for the purpose of extirpating the dynasty):  Sir David Ochterlony, a Boston Tory transferred to the eastern colonies, Sirs Charles and Thomas Metcalfe, the lordly William Frazer of Inverness, and finally Colonel James Skinner of Scottish-Rajput descent.  Of the many adventurers who fled Britain for the colonies, not a few of these eccentric “Residents” went perfectly native before it would be considered a sure symptom of the heart of darkness.  Yet four of the aforementioned gentlemen seem to have done so with consummate aesthetic judgment (indeed the portrait of the youthful Frazer by Henry Raeburn on loan from the Met bespeaks the young man’s unmistakable self-confidence and sense of entitlement).  Admittedly the early commissions by British patrons reflect conventional Mughal-style formatting and imagery with the awkward addition of some bicorned British officer at an otherwise average-looking imperial durbar.  But when we come to the selected works of the Frazer Album, an illustrated book commissioned by Resident Ochterlony’s assistant and eventual replacement, the viewer finds himself or herself curiously unsettled by a surprising fusion of representational impulses derived from East and West.  Two illustrations leap off the walls of the exhibition:  the first, a meticulous rendering of a village in Rania, the home of Frazer’s Indian mistress and Anglo-Indian children.  The painting seems to combine elements of the Mughal miniature tradition with a new desire to catalogue the ordinary details of rural life, a kind of primitivist minutia that only makes sense when we learn that Resident Frazer, as intimately involved as he was with the people of the region, also sometimes exacted from his painters a visual inventory of a landscape’s taxable properties, from chimneys to water buffalos.  But an even more extraordinary work is found in the group portrait of tax collectors and village elders accompanied by Frazer’s secretary and scribe, seated a little to the right of the others.  The miniature portraits are rendered with an amazing artistic sensitivity that conveys extraordinary psychological depth, though the mostly anonymous faces of the collected “Zumeendars in Cutcherry” stare blankly out at us from a lost world, rarely glimpsed but for Frazer’s efforts to make a visual record of the lower strata of Indian society in the early Nineteenth Century.  Whether for posterity or revenue assessment, it hardly seems to matter.  We end up feeling strangely indebted to these thrifty, cross-cultural cads.

            One of the principle painters in the employ of Colonel Skinner (a sort of courtly warlord and go-between of mixed heritage for the East India Company and Mughal dynasty in its last spasms of expediency) was Ghulam Ali Khan who added a martial weightiness and panoramic breadth to the representation of Skinner’s rather self-important diwans and regimental parades at Hansi.  The assimilation of English tastes seems virtually complete in a beautiful watercolor landscape by artist Mazhar Ali Khan depicting the scruffy outskirts of Old Delhi, or “Shahjahanabad” as it was called in 1845, with the walls of the Red Fort spreading like a knotted ribbon on the horizon with the minarets and domes of the Jama Masjid to the west, a grand mosque of Mughal construction which can still be visited by almost anyone between the frequent calls to prayer.  The most interesting works to follow are the great pre-Mutiny maps and 360-degree panoramic views of Delhi, also painted by Mazhar and probably commissioned by Thomas Metcalfe whose private bungalow is identified among others (in both Urdu and English) in the Civil Lines neighborhood, recently constructed to the west of the fort.  An elegant and extensive scroll map along with Felice Beato’s photographs of the city provide a record of what remained after the British siege in 1857, a city whose elite quarters were “tragically dynamited” the following year, as the curators inform us.  The exhibition concludes with an overview of the Mutiny itself and the fate of the last Mughal emperor, Zafar, famously pictured in captivity, a broken man lying in bed and smoking a huqqa, his glassy old eyes peering out at us or perhaps only at the photographer’s contraption before him. 

            But not to fear—New Delhi will soon rise up with the help of Edwin Lutyens, and so on and so on.  The Mughal Period is over; it will take another century before Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovski will arrive to redeem the country...

            The exhibition also includes illustrations from the Tashrih-al-aqvam album, an “ethnograpthic, biographic, and topographic” study of the different Hindu castes, occupations, mendicant groups, Indian religions in the Delhi area, and several princely families, the list goes on, all translated into Persian by Skinner and illustrated in an awkward attempt at realism that, frankly, reminds one of the American primitivists—i.e., anatomically inaccurate and basically amateurish.  Here the fusion of cultural tendencies seems to go astray and leaves one wishing the Delhi masters had taken some courses at the Royal Academy.  But despite this rather flat conclusion, the show is amazing.

            The exhibition will close very soon (May 6, 2012), so make a point of visiting this weekend.  Also visit the Asia Society Museum exhibition website before you go:

            http://sites.asiasociety.org/princesandpainters/
 

Charles Baudelaire, "L'Invitation au voyage"

Translation and parody


       INVITATION TO A VOYAGE                 L'INVITATION AU VOYAGE

              My child, my sister,                                       Mon enfant, ma soeur,
              Imagine the pleasure                                     Songe à la douceur
          Of living there together,                               D'aller là-bas vivre ensemble!
              Loving at leisure                                          Aimer à loisir,
              Loving and dying                                         Aimer et mourir
          In that country that you resemble!               Au pays qui te ressemble!
              Its dripping suns                                           Les soleils mouillés
              Its changeling skies                                      De ces ciels brouillés
          Have no less charm to my mind                  Pour mon esprit ont les charmes
              Than the mystery                                          Si mystérieux
              Of your cunning eyes                                   De tes traîtres yeux,
          Shining through their tears.                         Brillant à travers leurs larmes.

          There, all is order and beauty,                     Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,
          Rich, calm and sensual.                               Luxe, calme et volupté.

              Luminous furnishings                                  Des meubles luisants,
              With the polish of years                               Polis par les ans,
          Would adorn our chamber;                         Décoreraient notre chambre;
              The rarest orchids                                         Les plus rares fleurs
              Mingling their perfumes                               Mêlant leurs odeurs
          With a vague scent of amber,                     Aux vagues senteurs de l'ambre,
              The ceilings, coffered,                                  Les riches plafonds,
              The mirrors, deep,                                        Les miroirs profonds,
          The splendor of the Orient;                         La splendeur orientale,
              Everything would speak,                              Tout y parlerait
              Secretly to the soul,                                      À l'âme en secret
          In its gentle, native tongue.                         Sa douce langue natale.

          There, all is order and beauty,                     Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,
          Rich, calm and sensual.                               Luxe, calme et volupté.

              See upon those canals                                  Vois sur ces canaux
              Those tethered vessels                                 Dormir ces vaisseaux
          In a wandering mood;                                 Dont l'humeur est vagabonde;
              To satisfy                                                     C'est pour assouvir
              Your least desire,                                         Ton moindre désir
          They have sailed from the edge                  Qu'ils viennent du bout
                              of the world.                                                   du monde.
              The setting suns                                           —Les soleils couchants    
              Redress the fields,                                       Revêtent les champs,
          The canals, the entire city,                          Les canaux, la ville entière,
              With hyacinth and gold.                              D'hyacinthe et d'or;
              The earth drifts off                                       Le monde s'endort
          In a warm luminosity.                                 Dans une chaude lumière.   

          There, all is order and beauty,                    Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,
          Rich, calm and sensual.                              Luxe, calme et volupté.


          (Translated by D. LeH. Sweet)                  Charles Baudelaire

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          Sister, brother,
          Mom and dad!
     Wouldn't it be great to get away?
         To eat at leisure,
         Rest and play!
     In a country we've never been to?
         Coaxing a suntan
         Under a brazen sky?
     For me it’s nearly as terrific
         As your astonished eyes
         When you weep for joy!

     Here, it’s all beauty made-to-order,
     Deluxe suites! Voluptuous babes!

         The poolside bars
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         The coolness of the tropics
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     Here, it's all beauty made-to-order,
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         Look at those catamarans go!
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     Here, it's all beauty made-to-order,
     Deluxe suites! Voluptuous babes!

     
                                        D. LeH. Sweet

Stephen Lennhoff, "Rhythm & Blues"

Film Review


BOY-O-RAMA

Why Rhythm & Blues hasn’t become a cult classic by now should be a mystery to anyone interested in the gay scene and its cultural by-products. A hilarious send-up of the world of male escorts in 1990s London, Rhythm & Blues (2000) was released around the time of the feel-good musical comedy Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and perhaps suffered by comparison. Originally attacked for bucking the trend toward uplifting, heart-warming stories that seem moralizing today, Stephen Lennhoff’s street-smart spoof replaces syrupy piety with pure camp and a dash of raw Warholiana—while also avoiding the soft-porn diversions of a Bruce La Bruce. Oddly enough, the film (already ten years old) evokes such classic 1970s heterosex comedies as No Sex, Please, We’re British! and the Carry On series with their stock-in-trade of sex-crazed pranksters played by the likes of Kenneth Williams and Leslie Philips (famous for that lecherous “helloooo!” line).  But in Rhythm & Blues the heroes are all poofters, the dialogues are cleverer, and the plot is smartly stepped-up with queer twists and cheeky tweaks à la John Waters.  And while no Divine graces its scenes with her raunchy magnetism, an irresistibly silly cast of characters takes up the slack, enjoying a fun-filled romp through the world of rent-boys, sex shops, bad art collecting, and other crimes against respectability.

When pretty-boy John (played by Paul Blackthorne of “24” and “ER” fame) shows up one day in the classic cruising grounds of a London cemetery, he is immediately sized-up by two outrageous drag queens who’ve already staked their turf.  But the new kid on the block wants to make a bigger splash.  Before the queens can get their chops in, John has teamed up with Byron (Ian Henderson), a motor-scootering skinhead and hustler who persuades his new friend to join the Boys Galore Escort Agency, in dire need of “a few good men.”  The desperate proprietors Mitzi (Gary Fairhall) and Bethsheeba [sic] (Sue Tilling) are quick to recognize John’s earning potential.  Within minutes, John and Byron are dispatched to the London mansion of one Bad Daddy, the agency’s most extravagant and beloved customer (Angus MacInnes of Hellboy, Witness, Star Wars).  Meanwhile, a murderer has claimed a second victim from London’s club scene, grabbing the headlines and spreading fear through the gay community.  Who might the murderer be?  Rest assured, the sex-workers at Boys Galore have all been thoroughly vetted!  But there’s something about Bethsheeba’s latest recruit—too perfect by half—that worries her.  If only she could put her finger on it….   

            Later, Bad Daddy holds court in a sumptuous setting of fine antiques, objets d’art, first editions, and two intimates: his full-time partner, French puppeteer and would-be designer Jean-Claude and an ex-RAF officer named Harold, starved for new blood but looking for love.  Byron’s and John’s arrival prompts a very fine discourse from Bad Daddy on the culture of rent boys, or what he calls “rhythm and blues”:  an exchange system in which rich, cultured men like himself raise up the more beautiful, teachable boys from the flotsam of everyday life.  John seems ideally suited for Bad Daddy’s pedagogy, while Byron, with his rough-trade manners, is beyond hope.  “Stop interrupting me!”  Daddy finally shouts in the midst of his squabbling company, “Can’t you see I’m pontificating?  Do people interrupt the Pope when he pontificates?  This is MY Vatican!”  Ignoring him, Byron leaves the room to go to the toilet where he promptly shoots up. 

A wild night of frivolity, drugs, private avowals and promised favors ensues. John struts his stuff in a private photo shoot and discusses philosophy with Harold (What IS better?  Blakean friendship or Nietzschean will to power?)  More rent boys are required; the agency is short, but some new boys are quickly rounded up, interviewed, and delivered to Bad Daddy’s badass address.  This doesn’t prevent a progressive gay activist from trying to spoil the fun, but he’s quickly identified and rejected once Mitzi and Bethsheeba ferret out his hostile views of the British Monarchy.  There’ll be no political interrogation of this agency’s swanky clientele! 

And still another gay man’s mutilated body has popped up!  Could it be the work of John—that seductive philosopher?  Or Byron the addict (done because they was too menny)?  Or perhaps Bad Daddy himself, indulging his cynical erotics of “rhythm and blues”?  But now it’s time for a puppet show: the ridiculous “Garden of Love,” Jean-Claude's unintentionally funny allegory of failed artistic pretentions.  The pageant elicits only eye-rolling and yawns from the party until the unexpected arrival of Byron, who, in a violent, drug-induced fit, attacks the puppets—and DROPS DEAD!  Now the fun really begins!

Promoted as a film “with the good taste not to have any,” one could also say that Rhythm & Blues has the good sense to keep us guessing and amused with its boisterous mix of ribaldry, irony and grace.  With a deft, witty script by Michael Jones and original songs by Marc Almond, Rhythm & Blues offers a refreshing, yet sly, tribute to sex, friendship, and male beauty that almost any fairy-minded person will enjoy.  The film deserves a second look.

 

Ellen Sussman, "French Lessons"

Book Review


SUBORDINATE CONJUNCTIONS

I once taught English in Paris, so when I learned a novel set in Paris had been published, I became curious.  After reading a hundred pages of Ellen Sussman’s French Lessons (Ballantine, 2011), I realized I had stumbled across a genre of literature I did not understand.

It’s a mystery to me why some people read only romances, or literature written with one gender in mind.  Is it possible to write modern romances that veer dangerously away from convention, that say new and provocative things without losing one’s audience?  And what about Paris?  So many great novels have been written about Paris it’s hard to imagine anyone tackling it in our time.  But there it is, still tempting the American writer with all its cultural cachet.

Unfortunately, Sussman’s novel about transnational love and language-tutoring turns the famed City of Lights into a Capital of Pain (no thanks to Paul Eluard).   Like the genre it represents, the book discourages intellectual honesty or wonder, replacing both with slim plots and facile artistries, culminating in a preachy allegory in which one sex assumes proprietorship over human sensitivity and language while the other accepts its fate as a race of moral inferiors.  We’ve been coddled and pampered for so long in our national media bubble, one almost despairs of anyone finding inspiration abroad again.   

In Sussman’s frame narrative three French tutors meet for coffee one morning before setting off on their individual assignments:  three needy Americans in a fog of cultural displacement.  Verb conjugations might be more interesting than what happens, since the stories just confirm the obvious cultural claims that girls will be empowered and boys will be bored. The tutors—Nico, Philippe, and Chantal—have all slept with each other already because that’s just what French people do in the American imagination.  But will the sick, old-world crew manage to seduce the naïve, new-world visitors?  That’s the big question in this kind of novel and the answer is almost always No—at least not in any way that will challenge our assumptions about the French, about sex, or about love (the last presented as a purely American value provisionally bestowed on pretty French girls who curb their instincts for pleasure and self-abasement).

The beautiful Chantal is at the center of everything.  We know this because Sussman got the idea for her story while living in Paris and arranging a tutorial for her husband.  But the tutor turned out to be gorgeous, giving the author second thoughts.  Although Chantal is already entangled with Nico and Philippe, she complains that her handsome tutee, Jeremy, hasn’t hit on her.  It’s their last lesson and Chantal is ripe for conversion to the American Way because her boyfriend Philippe is a serial lady-killer and Nico, his replacement, seems inadequate (he’s a poet who writes about something naughty he did as a boy, but he’s no Rimbaud).

What Chantal needs is Mr. Right.  Unfortunately, Jeremy is married to a famous American actress named Dana Hurley who, like Sussman, is paying for her husband’s French lessons!  It’s clear Dana not only wears the pants in her marriage but symbolizes authority in the novel.  We know this because all tutorial trails lead to her big film shoot on the Pont des Arts over the Seine.  The promised liaison between Chantal and Jeremy is doomed from the start thanks to the tough, professional woman who enforces the American fidelity factor.  In fact, Jeremy is just like Nico—sentimental, anxious to please, safely domesticated in his artsy cocoon as an interior decorator and architectural restorer.  How cutely apt it all is!

The real man in this novel is the brash, handsome Philippe.  But he must be exposed as the shallow French cad he is.  Sussman makes quick work of him, sandwiching his story in the middle of the novel like a slice of gamey meat between two thick pieces of white literary bread.  He never speaks—he’s always the object of some weirdly Lacanian gaze, fetishized as pure irresponsibility.  His tutee is the frustrated Riley, mother of two and wife of Vic, an American exec.  Vic, surprisingly, speaks perfect French, works with French colleagues, and is having an affair with his French secretary.  Naturally, Riley hates him, and we do too.   But Riley also hates Paris and the Parisians, with their beautiful language, their sophisticated mores, and their obnoxious habit of looking splendid and leisurely all day long.  

Though Riley is a victim of her choices, Philippe must be singled out as a sexual predator who hungrily consumes the buttered croissant she offers him.  But in the end, she realizes she doesn’t want an affair (she knows it’s sordid because Philippe’s apartment is “shabby”).  She wants real love.  She quickly returns to Florida and her mother who’s dying of cancer.  Now that’s real.  We are grateful to see Riley go, for everyone’s sake.  Sex is not love:  Sussman draws a clear, hard line between the categories.  The sort of people who substitute one for the other, or who confuse them, are clearly defective in the view of post-millennial American romancers.

The last of the stories is actually the first in the trilogy, but it’s too long and boring to go into, except to say that Josie is in mourning for her deceased lover and arrives alone in Paris to find Nico.  She comes to terms with her loss by playing a mind-game with herself and acting out a pantomime of young love with her tutor.  Nico hopes to consummate the affair by running off with his client to Provence, but Josie fails to come to the station, leaving Nico with a pair of unredeemable tickets. 

In the end, we realize that the only acceptable lover for the intended reader of this novel is a faithful spouse.  Jeremy fills the role perfectly since he recognizes, despite Chantal’s charms, the superior claims of his wife.  Who could fail to see the allure of star-power and legitimacy over mere prettiness or exoticism?  But is the author asserting that money, success, and influence are the keys to a good relationship, or are they just helpful adjuncts to the real thing—a deep, soulful unity that comes to those who wait?

While these might seem the only alternatives, I think Sussman is after something else—something writ large in the figure of Dana Hurley, as a celebrity, an actress, a mother and a wife.  More than anything else she signifies the woman-as-artist in her many spheres of influence, tempering and taming her man of choice with apparent effortlessness.  The lesson?  Cultivate your art, gentle lady reader!  The story affirms a woman’s natural gift of expression—she is a true creature of language and feeling, unlike those male pretenders.  And with that insight, one can guess the value Sussman places on her literary abilities, which seems quite high.

            I’m glad there is an entire genre out there to help people feel good about themselves.  What bothers me about novels like this, with their calculated mix of literary pretension and popular pandering, is the refusal to commit to anything but to protecting the target audience’s feelings, its narrow sense of dignity or outrage.  It’s a genre for people who live for sensation but who shun ideas except as confirmation of cherished platitudes.   And although some of Sussman’s Amazon fans consider the book racy, even “raunchy,” it’s hard to see why.  Just because there are one or two scenes of people assuming the missionary position or exposing a pubis doesn’t mean anyone’s values are going to be challenged.  No, it’s all about puffing up the usual suspects for mass consumption.  So while I might envy the success of writers who have learned this little trick, I’ll reserve my admiration for those who haven’t. 

Tim Brown, "Second Acts"

Book Review

ONE ACT PLAY

Are there any second acts in U.S. history?  With foreknowledge, could we have somehow acted differently and gotten it right?  According to Tim Brown’s latest novel, Second Acts (2010, Gival Press), perhaps the best thing the Twenty-first Century has to offer the Nineteenth is Oprah Winfrey-style interview formatting with a dash of local suffragist or abolitionist spice.  Nothing too radical, unless you want to get tarred and feathered—which sometimes happens in this otherwise delightful romp across Jacksonian America, when Chicago was still a skunk-cabbage patch and Wall Street got burnt to a cinder in the Great Fire of 1835 (an event we might consider re-enacting today!).  

Set in the near future of our own time, Brown’s jaunty narrative (which won the 2010 London Book Festival Award for General Fiction) tells the story of one Dan Connor, an average but likable computer engineer, who rides a time warp back to 1833 to retrieve his adulterous, cocaine-snorting wife, Rachel.  She’s ditched him for an egomaniacal, award-winning physicist named Bruce Bilton.  With the help of his colleague Barry Stompke, Bilton has figured out how to break the time barrier, propelling himself out of the 21^st Century and back to the past with his other, less licit partner, Rachel, leaving Stompke behind to reap the rewards.  Outraged, the jilted Connor forces Stompke to send him back too so that he can track down the randy pioneers.  It’s not exactly clear why Connor wants Rachel back, except to spoil her plans and hopefully enjoy once again the great sex she’d already stopped giving him before running off. 

On the road to finding her, he meets up with native-American squaw Listening Rabbit, or “Bunny,” who identifies him right away as a time traveler, thanks to her mystical powers.  She is also a transvestite male, which our right-thinking hero fortunately discovers before making any social gaffes with her.  Bunny’s cross-dressing or “two-spirit” lifestyle appears to have always been tolerated among her Potawatomi tribe; but having recently been jilted by her own husband for an actual female, she agrees to accompany her empathetic visitor from another future in a practical, if uneven, alliance (i.e., as his servant).  Connor’s and Bunny’s unlikely but likable team-up amuses the reader but unsettles the westward moving folks they keep encountering on their journey east, thanks mostly to Bunny’s antics and yelps, her sexual adventures with men, and the harsh cultural judgments she offers on other native Americans she happens not to like.  (Rival Huron women are routinely derided as dog fellators.)  It’s one of the quirky realities of 19^th C life that Brown illuminates and exploits in his wacky fusion of historical and science fictions.   

While told from Connor’s point of view, chapter by chapter, the story intercalates Rachel’s manic diary entries fraught with all the 21^st Century frustrations an independently-minded woman might experience in the backward backwoods of American history.  Her entries always seem to be completed just before Connor arrives in time to discover he’s missed her.  But instead of feeling freed of the shackles of marriage, Rachel finds herself oppressed by Bilton and 19^th Century gender codes.  Despite rigorous prepping for their journey—one that Bilton had hoped to profit big from with his advanced scientific knowledge—Rachel must come to terms with her lover’s entrepreneurial deficiencies and spendthrift ways in a younger, less forgiving America.  Flight is always prompted, not by Connor’s belated arrivals but by Bilton’s latest business debacle, usually the result of overestimating his own intelligence or underestimating his new contemporaries’ ignorance of basic physical laws.

By contrast, Connor’s narration represents the rational voice of the morally-centered white male hero working methodically to jump-start his broken marriage in an America that should seem utterly alien to him.  But it’s clear that, despite the inconveniences and nasty prejudices, the 19^th Century fits Connor’s temperament fairly well.  Armed in advance with a supply of pure-gold krugerrands, Connor is safely transported across Lakes Michigan and Erie to

the cities of Buffalo, Niagara, and finally New York itself, the Emerald City of the Americas in its economic adolescence.  Unlike Bilton, Connor is propelled to the top of the social pyramid as an incipient philanthropic plutocrat.   He’s even learned how to wield a mean bullwhip, either in self-defense, or—to the astonishment of his proto-leisure class chums—to smite a rampant boar!  In a sense then, the book is also a sort of postmodern, pre-term Horatio Alger story wrapped up in a familiar Twainian jokiness, though most of it set in Manahatta.  

The old patriarchal order seems gentlemanly enough at the top, albeit under the benign, watchful eyes of Connor’s new friends and flunkies:  Mr. Gallatin, a former senator and current president emeritus of the National Bank in New York, and Mr. Pemberton, head of a detective agency that mistakenly traces Bilton and Rachel all the way to Louisiana (where they never once set foot).  It’s hard to believe the aging Gallatin is already in a genuine struggle with Tammany Hall’s emergent political machine.  In the end, it will take the intervention of another time-traveler who shows up later in the story to bring the city back from the brink of its more anti-democratic tendencies.  (He will fail, more or less.)

Of course, it’s the ugly part of the 19^th Century that unsettles us most as readers.  Consequently, the novel can’t always afford to go into it too much:  to do so might disturb the comic effect of the book’s more generic aims, regardless of what hybrid elements are also at work.  But Brown is too sensitive a student of American history not to remind us of its checkered past or its pockmarked present.  Brown admits the big apple can get pretty wormy at nighttime when the muggers come out—and downright life-threatening in the Five Points district.  But readers of Second Acts won’t have to tangle too much with the denizens of such places.  Nor with the blacks—though at least one African-American manservant is on call, as well as a “negro” banjo-player who sings a version of “Turkey in the Straw” that tells the story of “Zip Coon” who becomes the first black President of the United States!  (The singer turns out to be a white man in black face, prompting Connor’s one spontaneous moment of 21^st Century liberal ire.)  Slavery is mentioned as a topic of continuing debate, but Connor never publicly takes sides, even if his sympathies are with the abolitionists.  To do so would put him too much at odds with the establishment and with the success he’s managed to find in old New York.

 In effect, he’s a postmillennial member of the silent majority!    While Brown implausibly suggests that 19^th Century New Yorkers were racially and ethnically tolerant, it’s illustrated only in cases when the Other arrives in small numbers.  This makes tolerant curiosity easy enough.  It also makes life pretty good for Bunny, thriving in New York as an assimilated native-American who takes to wearing corsets and flounces, cooks exotic meals of wild game for Connor’s distinguished houseguests, and finally becomes a marriage counselor to paleface couples.  She also ends up instructing Mr. Gallatin in the finer points of Potawatomi grammar as a native informant for this early founder of American ethnology. 

On the other hand, Rachel—as a kind of proto-post feminist—also turns out to be in a minority of one.  But unlike Bunny, she regularly takes issue with her surroundings.  Indeed, she becomes the most adventurous of Brown’s 21^st Century protagonists, exploring and debating the country’s social and political fault-lines in its ante-bellum context.  And while she, too, is gradually assimilated to New York society, she has moments of crisis she can only overcome by ideologically engaging with that society.  She ends up organizing public lectures at the “Downtown Lyceum” to be given by the most radical speakers of her day—or at least, of their day.  It is at one of these events that she and Connor come closest to meeting up before most of downtown New York goes up in smoke, the catastrophe that reunites the couple for the big come-uppance and for final reconciliation.

The great advantage of going back in time is that one might alter the course of history for the better.  This is the view of one Sam Tilden who has followed Connor from an even later time (the year 2075) with the express purpose of ending slavery before the Civil War can take place!  The great fear, of course, is that one might accidentally make things worse or even annul the conditions necessary for one’s future existence.  The irony of Brown’s novel seems to be the fact that there really are no second acts in the way one would like—just a few improvised stunts that reaffirm the pathos of American imbecility and greed.  Brown’s narrative suggests that a truly comic clash of discursive formations can only happen when visitors from the future avoid head-on confrontation and just let history be.  When such conflicts become naked and raw, we get mass destruction—as Mark Twain’s conclusion to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court reveals in one of that book’s less amusing gambits.  In Brown’s book, however, the great make-over-er, Tilden, sees his quixotic undertaking get snuffed-out in turn by historical realities no historically-displaced reformer could ever uproot alone.  Tilden’s efforts produce almost the reverse of his desired effects, effects that confirm, not alter, the history we may or may not already know from the books:  The so-called Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1876, which resolved a disputed presidential election and led to the removal of all remaining Union troops at the end of Reconstruction—not to mention emboldening Southern Democrats who promptly began legislating Jim Crow laws in their respective states.  The fictional Tilden of the future can only repeat the failed presidential candidate of the past he already was.  Instead of trying to stamp out slavery, perhaps he should have focused on preventing the Hayes-Tilden Compromise that hastened segregation, an object-lesson for any future Al Gore who might be waiting out there.   

            In the end, the novel is a story of marital redemption, a fact that explains—by contradicting—the reference in the title to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous quip that there are no second acts in American lives.   Second Acts offers a philosophy of reform and forgiveness that our own culture of contests and political circuses mostly derides (consider the recent Wiener roast in American politics).  In his eccentric, comical tale, Tim Brown manages to look critically at these derisive attitudes—though he, too, reaffirms them in a fundamental way, if one considers the broader spectrum of historic acts and political actions.