Category: The Dish

 

On a visit to the Gemeentemuseum in his home country of the Netherlands, Joseph O’Neill paused before a work by Piet Mondrian:

There was one painting which triggered no déjà vu: Mondrian’s final work, the unfinished “Victory Boogie-Woogie”. The museum acquired it in 1998. Here was something I could inspect with critical purity. I was looking at a large, lozenge-shaped surface occupied by hundreds of quadrilaterals of varying sizes distributed in an irregular gridiron. I was looking at blue and yellow and white and black and grey. I was looking at a canvas marked with oil and rectangles of painted paper tape. I couldn’t help it:

I went from seeing to sensing, which is to say I detected a strong painterly gladness and vibrancy in what I saw, as if a mark, before it is anything else, is a feeling. And then, by a further reflex of subjectivity, I transgressed into the realm of interpretation Mondrian so strenuously resisted: this was a jazzy and urban painting, surely, a homage to the city in which the artist lived as a war exile from 1940 to 1944—New York, where I live. How else to explain the taxi-yellow squares? How else to account for this humming and tooting gridlock? …

Mondrian always worked to music, and in his New York years he loved to paint to jazz. With “Victory Boogie-Woogie”, he never tired of applying and re-applying provisional squares of painted paper tape to the canvas. Either the painting never achieved a satisfactory stasis, or Mondrian joyfully lost faith in the idea of the static. The latter seems more likely. What is seen cannot be reconciled with what is remembered.

(Animated GIF of Mondrian’s Victory Boogie Woogie by Rosa Menkman)

At the age of 71, David Cronenberg has stepped away from filmmaking to pen his first novel, Consumed. Karina Longworth offers an overview of the story:

Consumed begins as the story of a journalist couple, Nathan and Naomi, who travel the world separately with their laptops and high-tech portable camera packages looking for stories. They move quickly, self-styled mercenaries who rarely make time for introspection. It’s a rare moment when these two are not interfacing with another human in person, via technology, or both. Nathan and Naomi are a new spin on the old trope of the lone wolf: They work alone, but no one with an iPhone is ever truly alone. …

As a couple, and as journalists, Nathan and Naomi seem to be mostly post-moral: Their work is intentionally exploitative, and they draw little if any line between the professional and personal. Certainly, neither has a compunction about sleeping with a subject, and infidelity as such only becomes an issue when Naomi becomes frustrated that, during the one scene in the novel in which the pair are actually in the same room, Nathan manages to pass her an obscure STD. Cut from the same cloth in some sense, Nathan and Naomi call one another “Than” and “Omi”—as if to embrace the parts of the other that don’t overlap. In fact, this evocative baby talk is the primary continuing indicator that Nathan and Naomi do have a shared history that they care to hold on to. Otherwise, their alienation from one another expands, even as the stories they’re separately tracking start to converge and become open for, as Naomi puts it in what could be a quintessential Cronenberg phrasing, “cross-fertilization.”

Steven Poole finds Cronenberg in familiar form:

The novel is driven by a fascination for the interplay between technology and sex: there is an extended episode of close-up iPhone cock photography, an artwork using 3D-printed body parts, and a set of hi-tech hearing aids specially tuned so that a man can hear the insects allegedly living inside his wife’s breast. (Fans of Cronenberg’s The Fly will enjoy the entomological interludes.) A man says to a woman: “Let me unbox you” – alluding to the video genre in which geeks delicately open the packaging of new gadgets. A woman muses playfully about “the sexuality of camera apertures”, deciding that “stopping down the fixed 35mmm lens’s diaphragm … to a tight f/16 would be the equivalent of executing a Kegel pelvic floor exercise”. It reads somewhat like a mashup of William Gibson, the king of near-future SF cool, and 1970s horror maestro James Herbert.

Jason Sheehan is impressed that the novel is “skillfully executed in the way that few first-time novels from crossover artists ever are and, more than that, absolutely fearless in its handling of subject matter that most writers wouldn’t touch with sterile gloves and a long stick”:

Get far enough into Consumed and all notions of “reality” without quote marks around it become highly fluid. Everyone lies. Everyone has secrets. Everyone is bonkers. Every photo Naomi and Nathan take is edited and doctored until it shows the reality they want, if not the reality that is.

Consumed has weaknesses. Beyond the fact that not everyone is as into bondage, medical oddities, acrotomophilia, insect infestation and gear porn as Cronenberg is, there are bits that drag … and some leaps of coincidence and interconnectedness that strain even Consumed‘s flexible credulity. But still, if you’re a dedicated connoisseur of weird, looking to shock your book club, or just to take a walk on the literary freak side, Consumed is your book. It’s admirable in its unflinching gaze and beautiful in the depiction of its consensually twisted reality. And if you’re going in as a Cronenberg fan? Then Consumed will not disappoint because the whole thing — with all its artfulness and all its flaws — rolls out like a long-lost film from the man’s wilder days, expansive and strange and pulled, wet, dripping and whole, out of Cronenberg’s own head.

So is Cronenberg dying to adapt Consumed for the screen? He addressed the question in a recent interview:

At first I thought, of course I’m going to want to make a movie of my own novel, because how many directors get a chance to do that, or how many novelists get a chance to do that? And I have like five producers who I’ve worked with before who all tell me, “We’d like to make a movie of this with you.” But then I realized it was the last thing in the world I wanted to do, actually, because it feels complete. I feel like I’ve done it [already], and I think it would be actually kind of boring for me to do it again. And that surprised me. I didn’t expect that reaction on my own part. And it didn’t feel to me that the novel needed a movie to be validated or to be fulfilled or completed or whatever. And so I’m in the position where — though, I honestly doubt this will happen — but if some other director wanted to do it, I would sell them the the rights.

In another interview, Cronenberg emphasized that he found novel-writing a liberating experience compared to screenwriting:

One of the reasons I wanted to write a novel was: Do I have a literary voice? Do I have a prose voice? And if so, what is that voice? The only way you can discover that is to write and to let it flow in a natural way without a preconception of what you should be writing or what people expect you to write based on your movies. You have to forget all that stuff and just relate directly to your own head, which is part of the intriguing wonderfulness of writing for days and days and days. You can play that sort of game with yourself. It just arises organically out of the desire to create a narrative and to have characters who come alive, who feel physically and intellectually as though they exist to the reader.

Benjamin Hale suggests someone has to stand up for pleasurable reading:

Some part of me is afraid of the reason why the college kids who want to be writers are still anxiously forcing themselves to slog through The Recognitions: because the accepted knowledge that this is a “smart” book has been handed down to them by their literature professors, who in their time were told this is a “smart” book. And how do the “smart” books become the “smart” books that get handed down to you?

Could it be that the books that become the “smart” books are the ones that are fun to teach? The ones that give the English professor something to do? You can’t say much about a fairly straightforward narrative, but one that requires a lot of critical unpacking is one that will get a lot of play in the classroom, and probably survive in the classrooms of the future. There are some ponderously overrated, heaps of pretentious gobbledygook that have been kept alive for decades this way. I’m not saying smart is bad.

Smart is good … but what about pleasurable? [John] Gardner shouted and banged on the table trying to remind everyone not to forget about morality and the “true purpose” of art, but all I want to do is something much more humble: please do not forget to please. Something about your book must on some level give pleasure. This is not a low virtue.

Similarly, Nick Hornby recently argued that readers should ditch difficult books if they’re not captivated:

Battling through them, he said, would only condition people to believe reading is a chore, leaving a “sense of duty” about something you “should do”. Instead, Hornby argued, reading should be seen more like television or the cinema, and only undertaken as something people “want to do.” Speaking at the Cheltenham Literary Festival, about his new novel Funny Girl, Hornby argued even children should not be compelled to read books they do not want to, saying setting targets of books they “should” read is counterproductive.

Laura Thompson is ambivalent:

My instant reaction to this was a sense of laughing relief, that somebody had not only admitted to doing such a thing, but had portrayed it as a positive act. Why on earth should anybody read a book if it is not fulfilling its most basic requirement, which is to entertain? Then doubt crept in. Advising people to cast aside a book, simply because they are not “loving” it? Comparing the sacred act of reading with that of box-setting one’s way through Lewis? Is this not a certain way to render the classics obsolete?

Who, taking on such a mindset, would grind their way through the opening chapters of Bleak House or The Return of the Native, or refrain from skipping to the more obviously attention-holding passages in D. H. Lawrence? As for books such as Clarissa, To The Lighthouse or Ulysses: surely their continued life depends upon a touch of masochism in the reader? Nick Hornby knows this quite as well as anybody, of course. What he is actually saying is serious and sensible. There is absolutely no point, no long-term gain, in turning reading into a duty, when it can be one of life’s greatest pleasures.

At the same time, I am extremely glad that I read “difficult” books when I was young. They form part of my internal furniture, as it were. I am glad that I was obliged to think about Jane Austen rigorously, and therefore do not subscribe to the idea that Pride and Prejudice is simply Bridget Jones’s Diary in bonnets. … In other words, I think that there does need to be a degree of benign compulsion when it comes to young people’s reading.

Ruth Graham explores the world of conservation science, where a precise tally on the number of extinct species is hotly debated:

Actual documented extinctions are vanishingly rare. “If you ask any member of the public to name 10 species that have gone extinct in the last century, most would really really struggle,” [conservation scientist Richard] Ladle said. “Then you’ve got the world’s most famous conservationists telling you that 27,000 are going extinct every year. The two don’t tally up.” The International Union for Conservation of Nature, which keeps the most definitive list of extinct and threatened species, has counted just over 800 total confirmed animal extinctions since the year 1600.

Graham continues:

The huge numbers of extinctions being thrown around may be overstated, or they may be understated. They may also, some say, be the wrong thing entirely to focus on. “It bothers me, and you can quote me on this, that we are still talking about species-level extinction,” said Ross MacPhee, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History who studies extinction. There are other vital questions: Is there a wild population diverse enough to be healthy? Does the animal exist only in zoos? Is a threatened species a linchpin in a large ecosystem? Is it particularly unusual genetically? As Ladle pointed out in a 2010 paper, “extinction” isn’t as binary as it seems: There’s local extinction, extinction in the wild, extinction of subspecies, theoretical extinction of unknown species, and so on—each of which can grab headlines, depending on the fame of the animal.

 

Retro Report dusts off coverage of the antidepressant:

John M. Grohol celebrates the marketing legacy of the drug, despite it not being “as great an antidepressant as its makers claimed”:

Prozac showed how a mainstream marketing effort targeted toward a specific mental illness could change the entire conversation. Before its introduction, depression was stigmatized, people were embarrassed to admit they had it, and they often hid it from others. It was because of Prozac’s marketing campaign that, for the first time in American society, we could have a serious and real discussion about mental disorders like depression.

Not only was it suddenly O.K. to be taking an antidepressant, for many it became a badge of honor. Its marketing let everyone know, “hey, depression isn’t a personal failing or due to poor morals or bad parenting. It’s a biochemical thing that a medication can help with.”

Lisa Schwartz and Steve Woloshin differ:

Prozac has clearly been effective in its marketing campaign but may have faltered, remarkably, in treating depression – especially mild depression, that muddy realm between normal sad emotions and disease. Here, Prozac-type drugs are barely better than placebos and no better than talk therapy, which has a longer-lasting effect, no sexual side effects or withdrawal symptoms.

It’s also unclear if these drugs reduce suicide, the worst outcome of depression. The F.D.A. actually requires a black box warning because of increased suicidal thoughts in young adults.

The pharmaceutical treatment of severe depression has undoubtedly helped many people. But many more have been overtreated for symptoms that don’t require drugs.

Jerry Avorn looks at the broader impact:

Prozac helped usher in the era of the blockbuster drug – a product that brings in over $1 billion of annual sales. With broadening expectations of what medications can do to increase life satisfaction, and the allowance of direct-to-consumer advertising in the mid-1990s, sales of these drugs went into orbit. Psychotherapy withered on the reimbursement vine (“a pill is worth a thousand words” and is much cheaper), and weltschmerz became reason for patients and doctors alike to seek solace from the pharmaceutical industry.

Christine Grimaldi visited a support group for the straight spouses of formerly closeted gays and lesbians:

Straight spouses are largely absent from the national conversation about gay marriage and the modern family. Certainly, it’s easier to talk about two moms or two dads who have been together from the start than to talk about why Mom left Dad for another woman, or why Dad left Mom for another man. (Forget about it if Mom or Dad is elsewhere on the sexuality and/or gender spectrum.) But we need to include straight spouses in that conversation, because as tolerance for LGBTQ people spreads throughout the culture, more closeted spouses will undoubtedly come out. While for them, the light beyond those doors can be liberating, for the straight partners stumbling out behind them, it can be quite harsh.

The Straight Spouse Network is attempting to kick-start the discussion by creating a safe place for straight spouses to share their stories.

Grimaldi also talks with psychotherapist Kimberly Brooks Mazella, who treats straight spouses:

​“Straight spouses are often struggling with competing emotional experiences—their own feelings of grief and loss, anger at the gay spouse’s betrayal, and compassion for their partner’s own painful journey,” she says. Empathy for gay spouses is not unusual among the straight spouse community. Degrees vary based on personal experience, as in any divorce. But ask a straight spouse, any straight spouse, what awaits him or her on the other side of the closet door. The most common answer is a deep sense of isolation.

“Most [straight] spouses endure their pain in silence on their side of the closet, while their gay, lesbian and bisexual partners find support from their respective communities,” SSN founder Amity Pierce Buxton wrote in her 1991 book The Other Side of the Closet: The Coming-Out Crisis for Straight Spouses and Families. From her years treating straight spouses, Mazella adds a few more factors to the mix. The straight spouse can be blamed as complicit in the closet. A gay spouse’s infidelity can be viewed as an expression of his or her true self instead of an act of unfaithfulness. “How did you not know?” is a common question. There are those who are dismissive of the entire marriage, as Mazella encountered. “People said to me, ‘Oh, it wasn’t really a marriage anyway,’ ” she says.