Is It True Eva Gabor Wore Inexspensive Makeup Because Of Allergies

A Style Magazine calls me to ask whether any contemporary stars have inherited Jackie's glamour. I mention Jeanne Moreau. Silence on the other cease of the line: Moreau is not a contemporary star. Tonight shall I go to the Quad and see her new moving-picture show about walking into the ocean? (Now the film has fled to some other locale.) I suggest to the mag that I would dear to interview Doris Twenty-four hours or Sophia Loren. Silence. I am confused about what's contemporary and what'due south outdated. I am confused near the spirit of the age.

In dreams I've been trying to teach remedial English language. It's not merely a class, it's a century: the 20th. The dream recurs. Terminal nighttime with a swoon of relief I realized that, though I missed meetings, the students take reading assignments to tide them over until my return: easy books well-nigh Bambi. Poor things patiently wait Teacher'due south reappearance. Is "Teacher" a fiction? A friend told me that a teacher can create furnishings of power by all of a sudden using hard linguistic communication in a seminar, or, better yet, by not showing up. The students will interpret Teacher'south absence as a terrifying judgmental presence.

Out of the bluish my sixth-grade instructor writes me a letter. Now she is a drug-rehabilitation advisor. Does she recall my inability to pay attention?

I dejeuner with a favorite mentor, and nosotros discuss whether it's possible to lecture objectively nigh hysteria: can you talk nearly a bailiwick without enacting it? Nosotros antipodal near cough and MTV, and nosotros concur, provisionally, that hysteria is a precondition for creativity. I recommend Hysteria (1964).

Vintage stars are returning to Gotham's stages: Julie Andrews, Carol Channing, Maria Callas (channeled by Zoe Caldwell). Ladies of my anterior life, revived! Now Debra Monk recirculates "The Ladies Who Lunch"—Elaine Stritch's signature song from Company. Everybody rising! And Oscar Wilde'due south Salome is "back" at BAM!

At the cafe table, a scholar interested in automatic writing uses the words "iconophilia" and "iconophobia." Great words! I jot them down. Our age has both syndromes simultaneously: it is enamored of representation but agape of querying information technology. Mr. Automatic speculates that Jews have iconophobia, and cites Walter Benjamin, but this seems a instance of iconophilia, and so we drop the subject.

The 24-hour interval of the O.J. verdict, an expert appears on a news testify to clarify the defendant's body language. Did his gestures broadcast guilt or innocence? I annotation the presumption that we, equally a nation, can't evaluate nuance; do we need an expert to interpret human being gesture? Or, as a instructor once told me, "The reader is non a potato."

At a conference nearly Modernism, Ian Hacking, from the University of Toronto, uses the phrase "the wound of the twenty-four hours" to describe the fin-de-siècle French phenomenon of les automatismes ambulatoires, or vagabondage: men who, overcome by states of fugue and amnesia, wandered away from family and chore. What an bonny disorder! In Belle de Jour, Catherine Deneuve had it. And then did the Beats and Paul Bowles: the compulsion to drift off from identity.

I wander down 22nd Street on a hot, late-September day (global warming) and find Jimmy De Sana's photos at Pat Hearn Gallery. In one, a nude human being buries his caput in a toilet, suds pouring out of the basin. Practiced! In some other: a high-heeled shoe is crammed inside a pantyhosed crotch. Satisfaction! Jimmy De Sana died in 1990, and these photos document what one calls, knowingly, "another era." I am interested in our era only to the extent that information technology is besides not ours, not now, not here: an era of identity'southward displacement.

8th Avenue: in the crosswalk, a beau and I talk virtually poetics. His cervix looks like nutrient.

From obituaries I glean the spirit of the age. Ida Lupino died this year. She was just 77. I should have written her a letter. "Her leisure pursuits included skin-diving, writing brusk stories and children'southward books and composing music. One work, 'Aladdin Suite,' was performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra." If I tin locate her vehicle Ladies in Retirement, the story of a "stolid housekeeper who kills her overbearing employer so she may use the house as a sanctuary for her two insane sisters," then I can deduce whether the sisters are actually insane, and I can define "sanctuary."

Eva Gabor died this year. From her obituary, this snippet of an interview: "Because of my allergies I like to buy very cheap makeup with no perfume. I purchase things on sale. The prices today are shocking." She ran a multimillion-dollar wig company. To discern what's "at present," I follow wigs. Eva Gabor's sister Zsa Zsa starred in Queen of Outer Infinite (1958), which reshuffles a half-century's card deck of catastrophes and insurrections: Hiroshima, lesbian utopias, Orientalism, Eastern European nationalisms and revolutions, the beautiful fictitiousness of heterosexuality. . . .

Cherry-red Gucci bags. Red Patrick Cox wanna-bes. Some men'south shiny shoes now recall 1959 women's pocketbooks. Unzipped proves that fashion ideas come from "fags" watching revivals and paying acute attention to fugue and fatigue. I want to file "fag" in a clean manila envelope named "fugue," and to shop "men'south shoes" in a conceptual box called les automatismes ambulatoires.

Steven Watson, at a symposium on Florine Stettheimer at the Whitney Museum, New York, plays a record of sometime Virgil Thomson maxim "Gertrude loved nuns," and asserting that high military camp is the only technique that tin can represent religious experience. How weirdly modernistic Virgil Thomson sounds, and how happy nosotros are to have him back. After the symposium I shake the hand of Joseph Solomon, who once held the shoe box containing Florine's ashes. I muse on his virile handshake, a dream of historical continuity.

In a conversation I use the word "surreal" twice, and an fine art historian says I am overusing the discussion, and then, a fiddling drunk, I defend my penchant for "surreal." I say, "In search of the zeitgeist, I'thousand reading Surrealist manifestos! I'thousand committed to fugue states, trances, derangement!" Later, I phone call the body a temple, not to be profaned, and a neuropsychologist tells me that brains require interaction in club to evolve. I ask him whether my encephalon is dying or whether it is generating new files.

A sociologist tells me that the notion of the zeitgeist is a "crock of shit." And so we talk almost the "teacher-student" fornication in To Dice For and I offer him a splash of CK One unisex cologne.

At the Stettheimer symposium, panelists talk about skin tones. Was she a political creative person? Tin a merely "decorative" artist redefine what is considered political? An artist removed from the spirit of her age but also greatly at its helm, she participated in a "public" political soapbox while seeming only to be painting pretty, "private" salon art. If her work is exhibited in full only now, in 1995, can her paintings address today's circumstances, or must we understand her art only within the context of her "ain" time?

A friend has compiled an anthology of gimmicky "world poetry." On the railroad train, he shows me the table of contents. I am agape I volition get my donut glaze on information technology, just magically the manuscript escapes ruin. I'chiliad unfamiliar with most of the writers he's included. My ignorance appalls, hyperstimulates: new poets to discover, many of them alive, composing the age. In today's mail, PEN's newsletter arrives. It suggests that members send holiday greetings to incarcerated writers—Pramoedya Ananta Toer, for example, under town arrest in Utan Kayu, Jakarta.

Poems for the Millennium, edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, has just been published by the University of California Press, and much equally I distrust anthologies I compulsively folio through this one, which advocates futurisms galore, and which includes artifacts that don't usually travel under the name "verse form." In an entrancing excerpt from Mallarmé's Le Livre (he died in 1898, only I accept notwithstanding to accept his mensurate), the poet has crossed words out: lines through "end," "conscience," "And sorrows," "street," "childhood," "double," "their," "oversupply," "criminal offense," "sewer." The editors quote Maurice Blanchot on Mallarmé: "At times his piece of work solidifies into an immobile white virtuality, at times—and this is what matters nigh—it becomes blithe by an extreme temporal discontinuity, given over to changes in time and to accelerations and decelerations, to bitty stoppages, the sign of a wholly new essence of mobility in which another [sense of] time seems to be announcing itself, every bit foreign to eternal permanence equally to quotidian elapsing: [in Mallarmé's words,] 'here moving ahead, there remembering, in the future, in the past, nether a simulated advent of the present.'" The editors also mention Paul Valéry: "For the rest of his life his master labor consisted in rising daily at five A.M. to write down his thoughts & meditations in his Carnets, the notebooks that somewhen numbered two hundred fifty. The written report of consciousness as such was to exist the fulcrum of his notebook writing, & there, however unable or unwilling he was to integrate them into his poetics, he could not escape the essentially fragmentary possibilities of his century. . . ." To do: read Valéry's Carnets.

Emily Dickinson understood the bitty possibilities of her century. In a letter published in an Amherst College paper, The Indicator, on Feb 7, 1850, she suggests revolutionary displacements: "we'll pull gild up to the roots, and plant it in a different place." Too: "That'south what they call a metaphor in our state. Don't be agape of information technology, sir, it won't bite." But what if metaphors exercise bite? Fragments of an agoraphobe'due south poetry touch on—maul—the outside world.

Poetry makes naught happen, yet Adrienne Rich has simply published a new volume, Night Fields of the Republic, from which I quote these rhetorically compelling lines: "But the not bad dark birds of history screamed and plunged/into our personal weather/They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions collection/forth the shore, through the rags of fog/where nosotros stood, saying I." (I dear "rags of fog": musical two gs, two fs.) Rich falsely polarizes "birds of history" and "personal conditions." Birds and weather are figures of speech. To diagnose a national malaise is to employ metaphors.

This yr, Johns Hopkins University Press has republished Gertrude Stein's The Geographical History of America, originally published by Random House in 1936. Democracy-ation. Revivals and republications trumpet the indescribable reveille of this instant. From The Geographical History: "How many animals birds and wild flowers are there in the United states of america and is it splendid of it to take any." From her private vantage, Stein unsentimentally fingered public textures, historical birds; her every judgement constitutes a republication.

A recitation that Stein might have enjoyed, John Keene'due south Annotations, appears this year from New Directions. Its first judgement: "Such as it began in the Jewish Hospital of St. Louis, on Fathers' 24-hour interval, yous not some babbling prophet merely some other Negro child, whose parents' random choices of signs would disorient you for years." More and more I choose a vocalism that disorients. Keene's final sentence: "And then, patient reader, these remarks should be duly noted as a series of mere life-notes aspiring to the condition of annotations." On the book'due south cover, an untitled painting past Glenn Ligon, from which I tin make out just a few words: "But THIS," "DISGUISE," "EXPECTED," "MYSELF," "See MYSELF." The autobiographical project: to find, through close attending to the texture of the speaking, self-revealing voice, what body (nation, subjectivity, history) is existence obliquely annotated.

Also from Annotations: "Missouri, beingness an amalgam of nearly every American organized religion, presents the poet with a specially useful analogue for an articulation of the 'American,' though close inspection shows a sum less metaphorically potent than its metonymically dissoluble parts. Prove me." I want to write more nearly the beauties of "Evidence me" but it is fourth dimension to get to a lecture.

On the mode to the lecture, my friend and I meet Renaud Camus, author of Tricks (1979), due for reissue side by side month by Loftier Risk Books. My friend, one time cutely sedate, now has five piercings. I become to his hotel and the hormonally imbalanced woman who used to work at the dry out cleaners is at present running the reception desk. She wears heavy pancake makeup, compensatory. She winks at me. She knows I recognize her from the dry out cleaners. And so Leo Bersani, at his lecture, proposes that nosotros redo the "relational" by paying attention non only to micropolitics but to desire'south structure. Nosotros can destroy "regimes of the normal" past stepping outside psychological constabulary (in the fashion of Caravaggio or Genet). Bersani pronounces "homosexual" the way Julie Andrews did in the original Victor/Victoria: Man Seeks Ewe Ull. Maybe this pronunciation demonstrates a stance toward sibilance.

Genitalia are "in"? Molly Peacock'due south new volume of poems, Original Love, published by Norton in 1995, uses taut stock-still lengths of verse to annotate on the weirdness of genitals, peculiarly one's own; "When I open my legs to let you seek,/seek within me, seeking more than, I recall/'What are you lot looking for?' and feel it will/be hid from me." Or: "labia like chicken wattles/below a hooded clitoris." This is not only a description of personal weather.

Movies recirculate. Without their recirculation, the imagination would lose ghost limbs to gangrene. Queen of Outer Space, in CinemaScope and starring Zsa Zsa Gabor, reappears at a nearby theater, and then, miraculously, Joan Crawford'southward last picture, Trog (1970), rises to sight—then ignored, at its origin and its return, that it has freedom to sing of the future. If I were to begin to explain the significance of Trog, I'd keep you here all night: wigs, microphones, caves, voice-box transplants, boy nudity, unloved daughters, slimy drunkard men who disrupt Joan'south quest for scientific progress. In the final moment of the film and the last frames of her career, she strides offscreen, refusing to comment on the slaughter of Trog (protege, monster, double)—emblem of the pathologized has-been's oracular voice. Outdated images still detonate. Trog (atomic for troglodyte, cave-dweller, has-been, representative of an earlier, superseded moment or mode) nonetheless demands reading, still demands that—in its presence—we not exist potatoes just that we listen to instructions.

A twelvemonth before Trog's get-go release, Marilyn Minter took photographs of her mother, a series finally exhibited this year under the championship "Coral Ridge Towers"—a reappearance oddly rhyming with the Whitney's recent exhumation of Florine Stettheimer'southward lost art. Looking at Minter's mother, I succumb to iconophilia: this lost woman, smoking, mirror-obsessed, seems glamorously agoraphobic, and I revel in her avoidance of crowds. Fear of the marketplace can engender the backward, smashed glamour of the shut-in. Bury Trog for twenty years, or "20 centuries of stony sleep," so the ignored, abject object will come slouching toward you lot, its oral fissure full of fragmentary possibilities.

The circuit of ane'south ain preoccupations leads to agoraphobia (I don't want to leave my apartment, I want to stay hither in bed and smoke and put on makeup and stare at the mirror and the dust bunnies) or wanderlust (I want to travel outside the "Coral Ridge Belfry" of my personality in club to rediscover lost coordinates). When I prevarication alone in bed, am I Trog? Am I a dark bird of history when I cruise the streets, looking for a good movie, or a metaphor?

Emily Dickinson, in 1842, is away at school. Before long she will commit forever to her father'southward house. She writes, in a letter of the alphabet: "this Afternoon is Midweek and so of course there was Speaking and Composition—at that place was one immature man who read a Composition the Subject was retrieve twice before you lot speak. . . . " And from a afterward letter (1850): "I don't recollect deaths or murders can ever come amiss in a young adult female's journal—the country'south yet just at present, and the severities alluded to volition have a salutary influence in waking the people up." The land is motionless. Meanwhile I contemplate the hole-and-corner rapport between the words "Subject field," "twice," and "speak." The Field of study speaks twice. No ane hears the Subject the starting time time, so the Subject field speaks once more. The Subject doesn't exist until the second coming.

To do:

i. Wake the people up.

2. Call back twice before I speak.

3. Write down all the recent deaths and scrutinize them—including the death of Larry, who lent me a homemade Ida Lupino video, and rode a taxi in one case with Anita O'Twenty-four hour period (she reappeared this year at the Rainbow and Stars).

iv. Remember to bear witness upward for the class chosen The 20th Century and assign a volume other than Bambi.

5. Ransack heaven and earth to discover Ladies in Retirement.

6. Attempt to meet Marilyn Minter to ask if her female parent was agoraphobic.

7. Piece together the rest of the words in Glenn Ligon's Untitled.

eight. Examine Florine Stettheimer'due south politics.

9. Discover Trog'south relevance to the futurity.

10. See Master Class, Victor/Victoria, and Company even if I cease upward hating all three.

11. Flip a coin to divine whether, as Penthouse suggests, the penis can save Broadway. (Information technology can't.)

12. Stop writing sonnets.

13. Notice Valéry'southward Carnets.

14. Effigy out whether metaphors bite.