DIFFERENT STROKES (by Peter Schjeldahl, the New Yorker)

by PETER SCHJELDAHL
Van Gogh and Gauguin in Arles.
Issue of 2007-02-05
Posted 2007-01-29

Vincent van Gogh’s favorite color was yellow; Paul Gauguin’s was red. It was not a trivial difference. It pertains to the clashing, deeply complementary temperaments of two painters whose idiosyncrasies, inseparable from their talents and ideas, became keynotes of modern art and templates of artistic personality. Little about either man fails to fascinate. Both came late to art: Gauguin, the elder by five years, after fitful success as a sailor, financial trader, and family man—he met Impressionist painters first as a collector of their work, then as a protégé—and van Gogh after failures as an art dealer’s assistant and a Protestant preacher. Gauguin was short but carried himself with a swagger. Van Gogh was termed by an observer “a rather weedy little man.” Van Gogh admired Gauguin. That made two of them. While he liked van Gogh’s work well enough, Gauguin’s self-centered ambition made any appreciation of colleagues somewhat perfunctory. Van Gogh was an enthusiast for many kinds of art, including Barbizon landscape and a good deal of saloniste academic painting. He disliked, as “almost timid,” the tight little brushstrokes of the era’s most advanced painter, Paul Cézanne. Gauguin’s taste was trendy, with penchants for the medieval and the exotic. He swore by Cézanne. Both van Gogh and Gauguin revered Edgar Degas and—van Gogh, especially—Japanese art. Van Gogh painted almost exclusively from life; Gauguin favored imagination. Van Gogh was innocent and disturbed, Gauguin savvy and louche. In October of 1888, Gauguin left the art colony of Pont-Aven, in Brittany, where he was the leading light, to stay in isolation with van Gogh in the humdrum town of Arles, in Provence. It was a dramatic sojourn.

“The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles” (Little, Brown; $24.99), by Martin Gayford, the chief art critic of Bloomberg Europe, is a skillfully ordered collection of informative and entertaining nuggets of intellectual and personal biography. The book’s subtitle, however, is over the top. I count just two really turbulent nights in the story, and a few sticky days. Weeks passed in uneventful amity, or at least forbearance. The climax is sensational, of course: van Gogh razors off all or part of his left ear (the forensic detail is lost to history) and ceremoniously presents it to a prostitute named Rachel. She faints. He is hospitalized. Gauguin flees. The peculiar horror of the episode, in tension with the majesty of van Gogh’s art at the time, has made it irresistibly mythological. As a symbol of a supposed kinship of genius and madness, it resonates backward in time to the Greeks and forward to the thoughts of anyone who has wondered at the vagaries of creativity. In an extended anticlimax, Gayford hazards ingenious speculations about van Gogh’s febrile thought process (why an ear?) and proposes, for what it’s worth, a likely clinical diagnosis: bipolar affective disorder. But, in the way of myth, the event’s operative meanings exceed analysis and spurn explanation. They have a life of their own, like art.

“A time will come when people will think I am a myth, or rather something the newspapers have made up,” Gauguin wrote in 1897, in a letter from Tahiti. He was a driven self-inventor, ever conscious of his theatrical effect. Born in Paris, he spent his childhood in Lima, Peru, where his mother had family, and in Orléans, France. He went to sea in 1865, at the age of seventeen, and spent six years in the French merchant marine and Navy. Alighting in Paris, he took undemanding, lucrative jobs in finance, and married a Danish woman, Mette Sophie Gad, whom he bullied psychologically and, perhaps, physically. They had five children. Drawing and carving were hobbies for him. He began to buy art, first by Camille Pissarro and then by other Impressionists and Cézanne. The gentle anarchist Pissarro took an interest in the newcomer and effectively guided him for several years. (He eventually turned against him as a careerist.) Édouard Manet and Degas encouraged Gauguin to pursue his work, and, with little academic training, he became the first major artist formed in the ambit of what was not yet called the avant-garde.

After a stock-market crash in 1882, Gauguin launched himself as a painter. The family moved to Copenhagen, where Mette threw him out. Back in France, he became a leader in reactions against both Impressionism and naturalism, promoting symbolic expression and, in a prescient word he often used, “abstraction.” Amid the motley bohemian artists of Pont-Aven, he was influenced by the bold innovations, with black-outlined flat hues, of a much younger painter and theorist, Émile Bernard, who was a friend of van Gogh and, crucially, of his younger brother, the adventurous Paris dealer Theo van Gogh. Gauguin promptly trumped Bernard’s art with a painting made in the summer of 1888, “The Vision After the Sermon,” which charged their common style with sulfurous content: a man wrestles with an angel, watched by solemn Breton women. He then proceeded to make the most of Bernard’s connection with the van Gogh brothers.

Van Gogh was born in 1853, in Zundert, in the Netherlands, the son of a cultured clergyman and a mother who seems to have despaired of him. (She stored some of his works, and forgot about them.) He grew up religious and hypersensitive, a difficult companion and chronically maladroit in everyday matters. For seven years, from the age of sixteen, he worked for an international art firm in The Hague, London, and Paris, where he was fired for lack of initiative. He was briefly a schoolteacher in England. Rejected in attempts at romance, he had doomed affairs with demimondaines; for a time, he lived with a Dutch prostitute who had two children, gaining a taste of domestic happiness that haunted him ever after. Van Gogh came to rely on prostitutes—“little good women,” in his words—but he advised Bernard in a letter, “Don’t fuck too much. Your paintings will be all the more spermatic.” He became a lay preacher to miners in a desolate part of Belgium but was dismissed for overzealousness and general oddity. (“Children threw things at him as he walked down the street,” Gayford recounts; van Gogh suffered similar harassment in Arles.) As he gave himself over to painting, at the age of twenty-six, he invested his faltering religious faith in literature. Gayford writes, “In Vincent’s mind, modern novels, with their close descriptions of modern life, love, suffering and labor, were more than a substitute for the Bible—they were its successor. He felt that Christ himself would agree with him on that point.” He experienced the characters and events in Zola and Flaubert as virtual realities. (He wrote to Theo that a family friend reminded him of “the first Mrs. Bovary,” who barely appears in the novel.) He read Dickens and George Eliot in English. He was a luminous writer himself, in his letters, with flashes of rueful clarity about his mental condition: “I have moments when I am twisted with enthusiasm or madness or prophecy, like a Greek oracle on his tripod.”

Starting in 1886, van Gogh spent two years in Paris, living with Theo—to the latter’s exasperation and anguish. “All I hope is that he will go and live by himself, and he has talked about this for a long time, but if I told him to leave that would only give him a reason to stay on,” Theo wrote. “It appears as if there are two different beings in him, the one marvelously gifted, fine and delicate, the other selfish and heartless.” (In van Gogh’s final months, his mother wished for an end to the family’s burden, praying, she wrote to Theo, “Take him, Lord.”) At times funny and charming, and admiring of friends, including Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, van Gogh taxed his fellows in the art world by being, in Gayford’s summary, “compulsively articulate, opinionated and tactless.” One of them recalled, “He had an extraordinary way of pouring out sentences, if he got started, in Dutch, English and French, then glancing back at you over his shoulder, and hissing through his teeth.” At last, van Gogh’s suffering sent him south in February, 1888, at the age of thirty-four—“looking for a different light,” he later told Theo, and believing “that observing nature under a brighter sky might give one a more accurate idea of the way the Japanese feel and draw.” He envisioned founding a “studio of the South” and dunned Gauguin, whom he had met in Paris, and Bernard with invitations to join him. In a little over a year in Arles, he made about two hundred paintings, dozens of them masterpieces. Why was he unrecognized at the time? Personality aside, his style of impasto brushwork (much inspired by an eccentric Marseilles painter, Adolphe Monticelli) in service to visual truth was out of step both with Paris fashion, whose new hero was the methodical Georges Seurat, and with nascent, waking-dream Symbolism, pioneered by Gauguin. Though van Gogh had spells of quiet confidence, he felt, to the last, that his art’s fruition lay years in the future.

The two artists exchanged self-portraits before Gauguin’s visit. Van Gogh’s depicts him as an austere, enigmatic character with eyes like a cat’s—as he put it, “a simple” Japanese monk “worshipping the eternal Buddha.” He described the work to Gauguin as “all ash-gray”—a cumulative, simmering effect, according to Gayford, “of mixing emerald green and orange on a pale jade background, all harmonized with his reddish-brown clothes.” It is a far better picture than Gauguin’s devilish presentation of himself as Jean Valjean, of “Les Misérables.” (Gauguin wrote to van Gogh that it portrayed a man “strong and badly dressed,” with “a nobleness and gentleness hidden within. Passionate blood suffuses the face as it does a creature in rut.”) But the Gauguin has zest. It features a lively, off-center composition and begins to divorce line from color in a way that became Gauguin’s major contribution to modern painting, notably that of Picasso. The fact that both painters chose to render themselves in fictional guise—van Gogh was inspired by Pierre Loti’s popular novel “Madame Chrysanthème,” on which Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” was later based—supports Gayford’s thesis that for them, in their different ways, life and literature interlocked. The difference emerges in the artists’ preferred images: Gauguin’s is egotistical and sensual, while van Gogh’s is humble and spiritual. With characteristic generosity, van Gogh discerned rare dignity in Gauguin’s villainous persona. He called him, in a letter to Bernard, “a virgin creature with savage instincts. With Gauguin blood and sex prevail over ambition.”

Actually, ambition was very much involved in 1888, when, as Gayford writes breathlessly, “Paul Gauguin . . . knocked on the door. It was opened by Vincent van Gogh.” Gauguin had high hopes of doing business with Theo, who would have been grateful to anyone willing to keep his unnerving brother company, far from Paris. As it turned out, Theo sold several works by Gauguin during his time in Arles—“the dirtiest town in the whole south,” the artist decided—while failing to move any by his brother, whose depressions accordingly deepened. Their two-story quarters in Arles were half of a cockeyed butter-yellow house (a grocer occupied the rest) on a busy square. The inside walls were white, the doors blue, and the floors red tile. They had gaslight and running water, but the nearest toilet was in a hotel next door. Gayford guesses that the place smelled strongly of “pipe smoke as well as of turpentine, pigment and Vincent himself—the climate was hot and washing arrangements limited.” Gauguin, with a sailor’s habitual tidiness, was appalled by the messiness of the studio. He took the household in hand and, among other interventions, instituted a budget for the modest amounts of money provided by Theo, who always supported his brother: as Gauguin put it, “so much for hygienic excursions at night” to brothels, “so much for tobacco, so much for incidental expenses, including rent,” and so much, in a separate cache, for food. He did most of the cooking.

He was amazed, perhaps despite himself, by van Gogh’s decoration of the guest room: paintings, particularly two depicting sunflowers, of a size and intensity—and, in one case, yellowness—never before seen in still-life. But Gauguin never conceded that van Gogh had anything to teach him. (He later claimed, bizarrely, to have freed van Gogh from Seurat-like Pointillism and to have enabled his yellow-on-yellow breakthroughs. Gauguin’s memory was a chorus ever improvising songs in praise of himself.) Rather, he urged the younger artist to work, as he did, “de tête”: from mental images, by invented design. Van Gogh tried, with scant success—except for one later painting that he made in the mental asylum at Saint-Rémy, near Arles, “The Starry Night,” which he soon regretted, as “another failure” caused by being “led astray into abstraction.”

The two worked hard. They sketched some of the same landscapes and shared portrait models, including the wife of one of van Gogh’s few Arles friends, the politically radical postman Joseph Roulin. (Van Gogh gushed to Theo that Roulin’s family consisted of “real characters and very French, though they look like Russians”; he seems to have planned to paint them continually over the years, as they changed with age.) Van Gogh’s output, which included the acrid and harrowing “Night Café,” was torrid. Gauguin’s style was in transition; a striking work of the period, “In the Heat,” of a half-naked peasant woman and pigs, amounts to a sumptuous dirty joke. A portrait he painted of van Gogh, “The Painter of Sunflowers,” is an animated, rather goofy caricature. Their conversation, when not marred by disagreements in art matters, was full of references to literature and the news. They were avid for crime stories, such as the latest exploits of Jack the Ripper, and closely followed the trial, in Paris, of a charismatic murderer named Prado. Gayford surmises that Prado’s speeches, in his own defense, struck a chord with van Gogh: “Who am I first of all? What does it matter? I am unfortunate. . . . My God, hurled on to this vast stage of human life, I yielded, a bit by chance, to everything I felt beat in my heart and boil in my brain.” (Prado was convicted; Gauguin attended his public execution.)

Gauguin’s habits at the time, except perhaps those involving sex, were moderate. Van Gogh drank ruinously. He explained, “If the storm within gets too loud, I take a glass too much to stun myself.” The effects were not entirely medicinal. According to Gauguin—whose testimony is often unreliable—he awakened “several nights,” toward the end of his stay, to find van Gogh standing over him, whereupon “it was enough for me to say, quite sternly, ‘What’s the matter with you, Vincent?’ for him to go back to bed and fall into a heavy sleep.” (No other evidence hints at homosexual attraction—at any rate, a tendency more thinkable about Gauguin, who was given to fiercely dominating relations with other men.) Gauguin reported that, upon viewing “The Painter of Sunflowers,” van Gogh said, “It’s me, but it’s me gone mad,” and afterward, in a café, threw a glass of absinthe at Gauguin’s head. Still, Gauguin stayed. He wanted to go, Gayford recounts, but he wrote to a friend that he meant to do it “in such a way that Theo would be ‘bound’ to him” and so keep selling his work. The pair travelled forty-two miles to a museum in Montpellier, where paintings by Delacroix and Courbet excited them. But the end was near.

On December 23rd, as Gauguin recalled a few days later in a letter to Bernard, van Gogh asked him if he was going to leave. “And when I said ‘Yes’ he tore this sentence from a newspaper and put it in my hand: ‘the murderer took flight.’ ” That evening, after the usually pacific van Gogh threatened Gauguin with his razor (or so Gauguin claimed), Gauguin spent the night in a hotel. The next morning, he went in dread to the Yellow House, where a crowd, alerted by Rachel, had gathered. In Gauguin’s telling, no one had yet entered the house. He went in with the Arles police commissioner, who asked him, “What have you done to your comrade, Monsieur?” The stairway was splattered with blood. They found van Gogh curled up in bed, motionless. Gauguin told Bernard that he “touched the body, the heat of which showed that it was still alive.” He left for Paris shortly afterward, apparently without seeing van Gogh awake, or ever again. Van Gogh was in the hospital for two weeks, then he passed eighteen torrentially productive months, between recurrent breakdowns, first at the Yellow House, until neighbors, complaining that “his instability frightens all the inhabitants,” petitioned for his removal; then a year at the asylum in Saint-Rémy; and, finally, under the care of the compassionate Dr. Paul Gachet, in the village of Auvers-sur-Oise, north of Paris. Absorbed in his work, van Gogh was flattered but unsettled by an admiring essay by the critic Albert Aurier, to whom he protested that his role in art was “of very secondary importance” to that of Gauguin or Adolphe Monticelli. One of van Gogh’s paintings sold, for a good price. But turmoil in Theo’s business life and his mental state—he was beginning to suffer from tertiary syphilis—made Vincent fear the loss of his allowance. On July 27, 1890, he shot himself in the chest; he survived for two days. Theo died six months later. Gauguin died in 1903, in the Marquesas Islands, also of complications from syphilis, just as he was about to begin a jail sentence for insulting local authorities.

Gayford analyzes van Gogh’s self-mutilation rather as if it were an art work, in a style that was influenced not only by Jack the Ripper, who cut off a prostitute’s ear, but also by at least two texts: Zola’s novel “The Sin of Father Mouret,” in which a friar chastises an altar boy, named Vincent, by pulling his ear, and later has his own ear lopped off by an assailant; and the Bible, where the disciple Peter slices off the ear of one of the men who have come to arrest Jesus at Gethsemane. Gayford piles on the evidence, making his case plausible to a degree (for instance, van Gogh had tried to do a painting on the theme of Gethsemane), but the effort begs the question of why van Gogh’s hysterical self-blame took a gruesome turn when his friendship with Gauguin collapsed. For that, the psychiatric label of bipolarity will serve both as well as and as badly as such previous conjectures, enumerated by Gayford, as “an overdose of digitalis, lead poisoning (from paint), absinthe-induced hallucinations, a condition of the inner ear named Ménière’s disease, severe sunstroke and glaucoma,” not to mention “schizophrenia, syphilis, epilepsy, acute intermittent porphyria”—George III’s probable malady—“and borderline personality disorder.”

The painting on van Gogh’s easel on the night of his self-mutilation, which he finished a few weeks later, was “La Berceuse,” a rousingly colored portrait of Joseph Roulin’s wife, Augustine, sitting calmly in a chair, holding a string that she uses to rock her baby’s cradle. Gayford describes the wallpaper behind her: “Huge white blossoms—dahlias, according to Vincent—sway on long thin stalks, tendrils and leaves twine against a background of thousands of small blue-green forms, each with a red dot in the middle, like a bud, or a pod, or a breast.” He writes that van Gogh “compared the picture with a cheap religious print” while intending it, in the artist’s words, “to achieve in painting what the music of Berlioz and Wagner has already done . . . an art that offers consolation for the broken-hearted!” Fired by Pierre Loti’s book “An Iceland Fisherman,” van Gogh imagined the painting hanging in the cabin of a boat, he wrote to Gauguin, where, on account of it, endangered and lonely fishermen “would feel the old sense of being rocked come over them and remember their own lullabies.” Gayford goes on to adduce still other literary, artistic, and religious sources of inspiration for the work. None of that comes across in the painting, though it is consistent with the subject’s oddly combined airs of looming mass and serene stillness. The work communicates mastery, revelling in itself.

Creativity takes what it needs from the person who possesses it, or is possessed by it, and discards the rest. In van Gogh’s case, two realities—that of what he saw and that of what he used (paint, line, color)—laid imperious claim to his energies. The disciplined, mutual fulfillment of subject and medium transcended whatever he thought or felt while conceiving and executing his work. Something similar can be said of any great artist, though rarely with so jolting a sense of psychological odds overcome. Van Gogh became a hero of modern culture for demonstrating “grace under pressure” to a dizzying extreme. Gayford notes that “La Berceuse” thrilled Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard, and Édouard Vuillard, not with any extractable meaning but with form “which made a whole world of its own.” In an important way, that world excludes its maker, who, at the time, happened to be crazy. Here we come to a classic controversy. If dosed with the proper mood-stabilizing drug in 1888, would van Gogh have become, as Gayford ventures, “a different—and probably a duller—artist”? Given that van Gogh was never dull, I think it would have been worth the risk.

It is hard not to judge Gauguin harshly, in comparison with van Gogh; there’s a meanness about him. But keep in mind that Gauguin sought disapproval: the dynamism of his character and the intelligence of his style, organized by an antinomian urge to shock, proved more crucial to the ethos of avant-gardism than van Gogh’s genius did. Picasso spoke astutely, in 1935, of “the torments of van Gogh” and “Cézanne’s anxiety” as the engines of our interest in their work: “the drama of the man.” But when it came to active dramatizing, in the face of a projected, despised bourgeois society, Gauguin blazed a way for Picasso, his fellow artistic and sexual conquistador, and for every artist, to this day, who has adopted an attitude of renegade or subversive temerity.

As a performance, Gayford’s book is quite in the raffish spirit of Gauguin, who comes off considerably better than in other tellings of the Arles saga. He jumps off the page, to the palpable gratification of an author who is adept at sparkling quotation (in his own translations from the French) and punchy narrative. Now and then, Gayford almost seems to share Gauguin’s irritation at van Gogh’s importunate neediness and passive-aggressive sulks. The bias proves salutary. It forestalls the sentimental self-congratulation with which we may dote on a victim of misunderstanding whose actual company we couldn’t have stood for an hour, let alone nine weeks. The book breaks no new ground as art history and criticism, but it provides a vivid snapshot of issues and passions at a key moment in the formation of modern sensibility. Imagine! A couple of disreputable men in a nowhere town slap paint on canvas and thereby change everything. It has been a long time now, half a century after Abstract Expressionism, since that scenario had its last echo in a real artistic or cultural development, except in tones of irony or elegy. No individual can any longer dandle the world at the end of a brush. The legend is correspondingly estranged and enhanced.

Don’t Feed the Poets (by Jim Harrison, the New York Times)

Note to the capture: Jim Harrison in 1969 at his farm in Michigan.


Note to the capture: Karl Shapiro

By JIM HARRISON
Published: January 28, 2007

I recently wandered through my home library in Montana and rediscovered Karl Shapiro’s “Bourgeois Poet” (1964), a book of prose poems I first read during the vile winter of 1966. My wife and I had moved back to northern Michigan, after I’d left behind a good job in Boston on the promise of my first book of poems, “Plain Song,” having been accepted by Norton. I don’t recall what shape I expected the promise to arrive in: I ended up trimming Christmas trees and working construction for two and a half bucks an hour. Our rented house was only $35 a month, but it was drafty, the furnace was faulty and frequently the place couldn’t be brought up to 55 degrees. All of these numbers can actually describe a life.

Reading Shapiro’s prose poems under such conditions was wonderful in that I was decidedly not bourgeois. As a young Francophile, mostly because high school textbooks of American and English literature in the ’50s were so dreary, I was sympathetic with the prose poem, essentially a French genre. Shapiro seemed to be deranged by the prosperity of his academic position — he was a professor at the University of Nebraska — and since I had flunked out of graduate school for reasons of arrogance I was familiar with the atmosphere he was evoking: “Now when I drive behind a Diesel-stinking bus / On the way to the university to teach / Stevens and Pound and Mallarmé / I am homesick for war.”

I was empathetic to Shapiro’s travails up to a point, but then my wife and I were eating altogether too much macaroni and cheap cheese and he sounded like a man who had had a huge porterhouse and half a cheesecake for dinner and was complaining about indigestion. The subtext, unworded but looming, was that, like coal miners, poets have to make a living, and Shapiro had children.

It should be remembered that bourgeois was a volatile word in the 60s, frequently an insult. After our horrid winter I ended up teaching at Stony Brook on Long Island, where I occasionally noted professors in bell-bottoms with long hair saying, “All power to the people,” whoever they might be. Obviously our workday clothing is also a costume signifying who we wish to be, and professors at the time could be nervous about being bourgeois. Only a Republican would wear a clean trench coat.

Shapiro (1913-2000) had gotten the title for his book at a party, after giving a reading in Seattle, when Theodore Roethke called him a “bourgeois poet.” The question is why it caused Shapiro such severe unrest that he poured heart and soul into what is really one very long poem?

I suspect Shapiro’s evident misery started early in his life with a heroic notion of the poet. Any poet knows that to become immortal all you have to do is write a single great poem. This is unlikely indeed. Perhaps there are tens of thousands of mules and draft horses across the countryside who dream of winning the Kentucky Derby. Better yet, a bartender in Seville told me last March, “We have thousands of aspiring Lorcas but only one Lorca.” Very early on a poet is struck by the cruelty and lack of democracy in the arts — so few get it all, and the hordes receive nothing but the pleasure and pain of an overdeveloped consciousness. Ted Kooser, the former United States poet laureate and a friend of Shapiro’s at the time “The Bourgeois Poet” was written, told me Shapiro was obsessed with the French symbolist poets. This explains a lot, since Shapiro’s notion of what a poet was implies the outsider, the outcast, the outlier, one who purposefully deranges his mind to write poems like Rimbaud, or one who could not walk, so borne down was he by his giant wings, to paraphrase Baudelaire. I must here imagine myself an English department chairman, who has to deal with these troublesome creatures, and say that a poet is hubris through and through in the same manner that an unruly pig is solid pork.

Shapiro was massively famous in the 1940s and ’50s, in the manner of Robert Lowell or Allen Ginsberg in the ’60s and ’70s, though his fame seemed to dip after “The Bourgeois Poet.” He served in World War II, then published “V-Letter and Other Poems” and won the Pulitzer Prize at 32. He became consultant in poetry, now known as poet laureate. Later, on a prize committee made up of famous poets, he was one of only two who voted against awarding Ezra Pound the Bollingen Prize, and it was a grand literary scandal at the time. Shapiro cast his vote as a Jew in opposition to a renowned anti-Semite. He was also voting against the wishes of T. S. Eliot, the virtual pope of poetry during the postwar years. I would suggest the possibility of anti-Semitism in the decline of Shapiro’s reputation. But when you begin your career as grandly as he did, where can you go but down?

“The Bourgeois Poet” is disturbingly brilliant though occasionally it is inadvertently comic. How can you be raffiné, much less stridently Whitmanesque, on a campus in Nebraska? A poet must discover that it’s his own story that is true, even if the truth is small indeed. The work is marvelous in small pieces but deflates a bit in the face of Shapiro’s heroic posturing over what a poet is. There is a wonderful carelessness possible only because it is the kind of poem in which every sort of effluvium fits into the plan. The danger here is that it must be interesting effluvia.

Often in the poem Shapiro refers to himself as “The Beep”:

The Beep feels seasonal, placid as a melon, neat as a child’s football lying under the tree, waiting for whose hands to pick it up.

He also writes, the torpor overwhelming:

Office love, love of money and fight, love of calculated sex. The offices reek with thin volcanic metal. Tears fall in typewriters like drops of solder.

And:

They erect a bust of me after my death. I know the right alcove, where the students sit, in the library corridor, smoking and joking about the professors. “I fought with tooth and nail to save my niche.”

Perhaps as a corrective and a cautionary, “The Bourgeois Poet” should be taught to the thousands taking M.F.A.’s in creative writing who wish to become poet-professors. As I said I tried it myself but found the work too hard. There’s a subdued but relentless hurly-burly in academia that swallows up discretionary time. It’s like living with a slight backache, not fatal but enervating. Besides, academic salaries are falling behind and it’s become questionable if poet-professors have truly achieved bourgeois status. Maybe lumpen bourgeois.

In the ’60s I was actually on a committee in New York City with R. V. Cassill from Brown and Ben DeMott from Amherst, among others, trying to figure out how to get universities to hire more poets and novelists. Through no fault of our own it worked out that way.

Historically, of course, the scales are tipped in favor of the non-bourgeois poet. Yeats warned that the hearth was more dangerous for a poet than alcohol. Rilke said, “Only in the rat race of the arena, does a heart learn to beat.” Well off the margins of the page in “The Bourgeois Poet” there’s an invisible Greek chorus singing, “You’ve got to earn a living.”

Ultimately for a poet the fence is so high the top is invisible, but it is what we are designed to reach for. Everything else is mere scaffolding. You will most likely get the back of the muse’s hand whether you have a chair at Harvard or are pumping septic tanks in Missouri. I must say my sympathies are still with César Vallejo, a grander poet than anyone now living on our bruised earth. In Paris between the world wars Vallejo and his girlfriend would pick out the empty wine bottles in trash receptacles to earn their keep.

Jim Harrison’s new novel is “Returning to Earth.”

Very Fine Lines (Peter Carlson, Washington Post)

What Makes a Cartoon New Yorker-Worthy? Draw Your Own Conclusion.

By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 24, 2006; D01

Two plumbers working on a sink with an alligator coming out of the faucet?

Yes.

Two drunks brainstorming about starting the Drinking Network?

No.

A guy with his hand chopped off pointing the way to the Islamic court?

Ahhhhhh . . . maybe.

It's Wednesday afternoon and David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, is picking cartoons. A few minutes ago, Bob Mankoff, the magazine's cartoon editor, entered Remnick's office carrying three wire baskets and 81 cartoons. The baskets are labeled Yes, No and Maybe. The cartoons are the ones Mankoff chose from the nearly 1,000 he received since the previous Wednesday's meeting. Now, with the help of Managing Editor Jacob Lewis, Remnick will decide which ones the magazine will buy.

He picks a cartoon out of the pile. It's by Roz Chast, the New Yorker's queen of modern neurosis. This cartoon is a gallery of fictitious "Excuse Cards." Smiling in anticipation, Remnick starts reading.

"You know, some of these are not great," he says, sadly.

"I like the concept of it," says Lewis.

"I'm not sure this is working," Remnick says and the cartoon goes into the No basket.

He picks up the next cartoon. It's another Chast: a mock front page of a tabloid newspaper, the "Arctic Enquirer," with headlines about salacious doings in Santa's workshop.

Remnick laughs. "Okay, let's take that," he says. It goes into the Yes basket.

He keeps going. No. No. Yes. No. Now he picks up a cartoon that's labeled "Good Shrink, Bad Shrink." A guy's lying on a psychiatrist's couch with a shrink on each side of him. One shrink is saying, "Face your demons." The other says, "Take a pill."

Remnick cracks up. "That'll be on every refrigerator in America," he says. laughing. It goes into the Yes basket.

No. Yes. No. No. Remnick picks up a cartoon of a corporate boardroom with a bunch of guys in suits sitting around a conference table with one chair occupied by a brain in a jar. The caption reads, "But first let's all congratulate Ted on his return to work."

" Ewwww!" Remnick says, half groaning, half laughing. "Bob!"

"It's great!" Mankoff says.

"It's horrible!" Remnick responds, laughing.

"What? A little brain in a jar?" Mankoff replies. "No animals were hurt in the making of this cartoon."

Remnick laughs. But he doesn't change his mind. "Not here," he says. It's a No.

Hey, wait a minute! Did you catch that? The guy laughs at the cartoon, but he still rejects it! It's good the cartoonists aren't watching. This would drive them crazy. Well, craz ier. Constant rejection has rendered these geniuses half nuts already. In about 20 minutes, Remnick rejects 48 cartoons and buys 33 -- that's 33 out of nearly a thousand that came in this week! It's hard out here for a cartoonist.

Just ask Matthew Diffee. At 36, he's one of the New Yorker's star cartoonists, creator of the classic drawing of Che Guevara wearing a Bart Simpson T-shirt, which has become a hot-selling T-shirt itself. But the man is practically punch-drunk from repeated rejection.

Every Tuesday, like most of the New Yorker's four dozen regular cartoonists, Diffee submits a batch of about 10 cartoons.

"And if you're really, really funny that week," he says, "you'll sell . . . one cartoon! That's a 90 percent rejection rate."

On a bad week, the rejection rate is 100 percent.

This makes for a lot of ego-battered cartoonists. It also makes for a lot of rejected cartoons, many of them very funny. Which is why Diffee recently published a book called "The Rejection Collection: Cartoons You Never Saw, and Never Will See, in the New Yorker."

It's a group of cartoons drawn by 31 New Yorker cartoonists and rejected by Mankoff or Remnick because they were a little too . . . well, one cartoon, by Drew Dernavich, shows a doctor handing his patient a rubber glove and saying, "Give a man an exam and he'll be healthy for a day; teach a man to examine himself and he'll be healthy for a lifetime."

"It's funny to see something drawn by somebody who's in the New Yorker, but it's way too crude to ever be in the New Yorker," Diffee says. "To me, the funniest element is that this guy actually submitted this. W hat was he thinking?"

"The Rejection Collection" is hilarious, Remnick says. "But," he adds, "I did not find myself saying, 'I wish I took these cartoons.' Maybe a few, but very few. I think a lot of these cartoons were purposely submitted knowing they wouldn't get through, and they did it for the hell of it. They know there are certain limits. There's a language limit, a grossness limit, a juvenile limit."

Remnick hates rejecting cartoons. He really does. "There's a heaviness about it," he says, sighing heavily. "Because you're conscious that a certain number of people are waiting on pins and needles to see if they've got a cartoon in that week. It's hard. We're pretty much the only place that runs cartoons consistently, and we run maybe 15 or 20 a week. It's a really tough way to make a living."
Humor Percolator

Here's how Matthew Diffee makes his living: Every morning, he sits down with a cup of coffee, a black Pilot pen and some blank sheets of white paper, and he starts thinking.

"I'll think of something," he says. "I just thought of a barn. What about a barn? A barn raising? Amish people? What about Amish people? They have those beards without mustaches. What would an Amish guy who had a mustache say to a guy who didn't? Those are ideas, but they're not good ideas. So you leave the Amish and you think: corn. And you come up with some bad corn ideas. But maybe one of the bad corn ideas combines with one of the bad Amish ideas and out of the blue, something comes to you."

He's in Washington to promote "The Rejection Collection," and he's sitting in a coffee shop cranking up on caffeine and explaining how cartoons are born. Years ago, he says, he was thinking about the phrase "I was in a different place then."

"I wrote down that phrase and I thought, 'How can I make that funny?' " he says. "And months later, I was thinking about pirates: They walk the plank. They have a hook for a hand. Well, what else could they have instead of a hook? You go through the options. It has to be about the size of a hook. You can't use a broom or a canoe paddle. So it has to be a garden tool or a kitchen utensil. And I thought: A spatula is kind of funny."

Presto! He drew a pirate with a spatula for a hand and the caption, " I was in a different place then." And the New Yorker bought it.

Diffee started drawing cartoons in the late '90s, when he was living in Boston and failing to make it as an artist or a stand-up comic. His first cartoon won a contest sponsored by the New Yorker, and Mankoff encouraged him to submit more. For a year, Diffee submitted 15 cartoons a week, every week.

"I sold four," he says.

That's four out of about 700.

The next year he did a little better. He sold eight.

Now, Diffee lives in Brooklyn and has a contract with the New Yorker, which buys about two dozen of his cartoons a year. He won't say how much his contract pays him -- and Mankoff won't reveal what the magazine pays for cartoons -- but he's getting by.

"I'm not saving money," he says, "but I'm paying my New York rent."

On Tuesday mornings, Diffee goes to Mankoff's office to drop off his latest batch and schmooze with the other cartoonists who've come to drop off their batches. A dozen or so will go to lunch at a restaurant called Pergola des Artistes and talk shop.

"If you expect a lot of one-upping each other in a Gag-o-Rama, you'd be disappointed," he says. "We have serious conversations on how to draw duck feet or whether a duck is funnier than a penguin. And there's a level of bitterness that we're not selling as much as we should."

He pauses. "Sometimes somebody will say something funny and you'll see a bunch of people do this -- " He reaches into his pocket for a pen and paper. "And somebody'll say, 'I claim it!' "
Do You Get It?

Remember the "Seinfeld" episode about the New Yorker cartoon?

Elaine doesn't get the cartoon, so she shows it to Jerry and George, and they don't get it either. Somehow she buttonholes the editor of the New Yorker and demands that he explain it. But he can't.

"Cartoons are like gossamer, and one doesn't dissect gossamer," he says, lamely.

The episode was funny because sometimes New Yorker cartoons really are baffling. It was even funnier if you knew that the script was written by Bruce Eric Kaplan, a TV writer who also draws cartoons for the New Yorker -- cartoons that he signs BEK. Brilliant cartoons that are sometimes, if truth be told, a bit baffling.

Mankoff, who has been cartoon editor at the magazine since 1997, knows that sometimes people are befuddled by New Yorker cartoons. "We don't do focus groups. We don't find out ' Does everybody get it?' " he says. "And sometimes people don't get it. Sometimes it's because we made a mistake. Sometimes it's because the reference is very elusive."

Picking cartoons isn't as easy as it looks. "The funniest cartoon is not necessarily the best cartoon," says Mankoff. "Funnier means that you laugh harder, and everybody's gonna laugh harder at more aggressive cartoons, more obscene cartoons. It's a Freudian thing. It gives more relief. But is it a better joke? To me, better means having more truth in it, having both the humor and the pain and therefore having more meaning and more, uh, uh . . . " He searches for a word, then finds it: "poetry."

Mankoff, 62, is a cartoon philosopher and a cartoonist. He's the guy who drew the oft-reproduced classic of a businessman looking at his datebook as he talks on the phone, saying "No, Thursday's out. How about never -- is never good for you?"

He is also a cartoon entrepreneur. He's the creator of the Cartoon Bank, which sells New Yorker cartoons in every conceivable permutation. You can buy books of New Yorker cartoons about cats or golf or baseball or business or technology or teachers or shrinks. Or you can buy "The Complete Book of New Yorker Cartoons," a massive tome that includes two CDs that, taken together, contain all 68,647 cartoons that had run in the magazine before the book was published in 2004. You can also buy framed prints of every New Yorker cartoon, plus T-shirts, notecards, games, even a shower curtain, so you can look at cartoons when you're naked, wet and soapy.

"Bob is a marketing genius," says Sam Gross, who has been drawing cartoons for the magazine since 1969. "He sells those cartoons on everything but mint jelly."

"Let's look at yesterday, " Mankoff says. He swivels his chair and taps on his computer. The screen fills with the record of yesterday's sales at the Cartoon Bank. "Yesterday we did $26,000," he says, happily.

And the cartoonists get a cut of the action. "On a framed print, an artist might get, say, $60," he says. Some artists have made as much as $100,000 from a popular cartoon.

"Your cartoon that appears in the New Yorker has a life after life," he says. "We pay you for the cartoon and you get royalties. Are you going to be a millionaire? I don't think so. But you can make a decent living."
Rejection Perfection

Looking a tad cartoonish with his scraggly gray hair and his hangdog face, Mankoff flips through a huge pile of cartoons.

"No," he says, tossing one aside.

"Nah," he says, rejecting another.

"Not funny enough," he grumbles, flipping faster. "Definitely not . . . No way . . . Not here . . . Not now . . . Not on my watch . . . Not your day . . . No . . . No . . . For God's sake, no! . . . A thousand times no!"

This isn't real life, thank God. It's a movie, a short called "Being Bob," with Mankoff playing himself as The Rejecter, killer of cartoonist's dreams. It debuted at a New Yorker event last year and now Diffee's showing it at Politics and Prose, the Washington bookstore, where he's promoting "The Rejection Collection."

When the movie ends, he opens the floor to questions.

"Does Mankoff ever laugh?" somebody asks.

"I've never seen it happen," Diffee says, lying about his pal for the sake of a laugh. "He has snickered. But that was because the cartoon was bad and he'd seen it before."

He tells the story of the year he sent in 700 cartoons and sold four.

"And for some reason, I kept doing it," he says. "Some people don't. They have other options, maybe."

A kid comes to the microphone and asks, "Do you get frustrated a lot?"

"How can you tell?" Diffee asks.

That gets a laugh.

"Yes, I get frustrated a lot," he admits.

But that's not necessarily a bad thing. "If you have a pessimistic outlook on life, you'll probably do better," he tells the kid. "If you think nine out of 10 of your ideas will be rejected, you'll work harder."

It's the power of negative thinking -- the perfect philosophy for New Yorker cartoonists and any other poor souls who are frequently clobbered by rejection.

Meet the keystone kops of criticism (by Robert Fulford, National Post)

Meet the keystone kops of criticism
Editorial fears over book reviewers' potential biases are exaggerated

Robert Fulford
National Post

Tuesday, December 05, 2006

When the Los Angeles Times assigned me to review a book about German art some years ago, the editors sent along a copy of their standard ethics memo. If this book happens to be by a friend or enemy, the memo said, "please notify the Book Review imme diately." They didn't want reviews by people connected to the author.

The Conflict Police had struck again!

On the book pages of North America, nothing matters more than conflict of interest. It makes editors fearful and authors bitter. Nobody complains if reviewers can't write, know little about their subject, put their readers to sleep or absurdly overrate a book's quality. But if there's a chance that Bruce's vicious teardown of Samantha's novel was motivated by a rotten review Samantha's husband gave Bruce six years ago, it's a scandal. This is a popular zone of controversy, partly because it's a literary issue that even the illiterate think they understand.

Last year the Washington Post published an abject apology for allowing Marianne Wiggins to rubbish John Irving's novel, Until I Find You. Irving is a friend of Wiggins' ex-husband, Salman Rushdie.

Her excellent piece was far from the book's only negative review. No matter. The Post editors decided they shouldn't have trusted her to deal honestly with her former husband's friend's novel.

When I looked at that note from the Los Angeles Times, I reflected happily that the author in question, being previously unknown to me, was neither friend nor enemy. But reading it also made me think: How fair, how ethical, how pure --and how stupid!

Do the people editing book pages read criticism as well as commissioning it? If they do, they must know that in the last century much of the best critical writing was produced by people close to their subjects. Have they heard that the most celebrated Ame rican critic of his time, Edmund Wilson, wrote more than a few words about his dear friend F. Scott Fitzgerald? Or that H.L. Mencken had a platoon of novelists he both reviewed and published in his magazine, the American Mercury?

That won't impress the Conflict Police. They never rest. They live in fear that a sinister network of interlocking backstabbers operates within the otherwise pristine republic of letters. Armed only with a sense of self-righteousness, they are determined to purge the book pages of unethical conduct, even if they have to destroy reviewing in the process.

The Conflict Police are to books what assistant principals are to high schools, overseers who believe that if they abandon their posts everything will collapse into moral chaos.

of the Toronto Star, joined their number last week with an editorial-page column that started with one questionable case and expanded into an attempt to create previously unknown standards for reviewers. A Star reviewer had seriously disparaged the book o f a novelist (who was new to him) without acknowledging her status: She was well known elsewhere and had been, among other things, a finalist for the Governor General's Award. Moreover, the reviewer didn't mention that his own novel had been rejected, nine months earlier, by the publisher of the book he was reviewing. Quelle horreur! "This," said Burnside, "was a conflict of interest that should have been declared and shared with readers." I don't think so. What if the reviewer had been turned down by a d ozen other houses? (That happens. It happened to Brian Moore.)He would have to speckle his reviews with full-disclosure notices for years or decades to come. Or maybe Burnside would be willing to compromise and legislate a statute of limitations for review crime. |If rejection by a publisher creates a problem, so does acceptance. Burnside believes that reviewers should avoid reviewing the books of publishers for which they have written books. She focuses on the Star's book columnist, Philip Marchand, noting that he's been published by five publishers in Canada and three more in the U.S. Burnside believes he should avoid reviewing the books of all those companies. |That could sharply limit the range of his work and baffle anyone who is familiar with what he does. Burnside doesn't know it, but Marchand's opinions make him the worst possible target for her campaign. He stands well outside the consensual view of Canadian writing and his reviews suggest he's not intimidated by publishers or anyone else. He conside rs Atwood cold and Ondaatje unreadable. As for Ontario Gothic fiction (from the good Robertson Davies to the not-so-good Timothy Findley) -- well, in Marchand it brings on the old ennui. |Burnside and her ilk imply that there are available to the newspapers many talented, unbiased, unaffiliated reviewers whose work will never create "an appearance of a conflict of interest." My guess is that no such reviewers exist. We all have our biases, and should have -- otherwise we would be less than human, therefore less than interesting. |Burnside quotes Dan Smith, the Star books editor, who complains that there aren't enough independent critics. Could that possibly have anything to do with the fees he pays? The Star, by far the richest paper in Canada, pays $250 for a book review, roughly what it paid 15 years ago. |With Burnside's encouragement, Smith plans to send reviewers a cautionary note about conflict of interest. Perhaps that will make them more pure, though still poor. |There's a story about a man who wrote to the editor of the Times of London: "Sirs, of all the people who might have reviewed my book, could you not find one who was not my former wife?" That's probably apocryphal, but maybe not. In 1982, when A. Alvarez, the poetry critic, discussed his own marital history in Life After Marriage: Scenes from Divorce, the London Review of Books carried a rather acerbic review by his first wife. She disclosed her status, not in apology but to prove she was an expert witness. |Umberto Eco, a distinguished journali st in Milan as well as an internationally admired theorist, sees conflict-of-interest hysteria as childish and mainly limited to over-earnest North Americans. As he says, in Italy it's routine for his books to be reviewed by both his friends and his enemies. And if the reviewers weren't enemies or friends when they started reading the book, they were one or the other when the review came out.

FROCKS AND BLOCKS Fashion meets architecture in Los Angeles. (Judith Thurman, the )

Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture

Shigeru Ban
Curtain Wall House
1995
Shigeru Ban Architects, Itabashi, Tokyo, Japan
Photo © Hiroyuki Hirai



FROCKS AND BLOCKS
Fashion meets architecture in Los Angeles.
by JUDITH THURMAN
Issue of 2006-12-04
Posted 2006-11-27

The fashion world is commonly accused of taking itself too seriously. An ambitious show that opened last week at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art suggests that it may not be taking itself seriously enough. “Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture” is the first exhibition of its scale and kind—more than three hundred contemporary works by forty-six mostly avant-garde architects and designers, chosen to represent what Brooke Hodge, MOCA’s curator of architecture and design, calls the “increasingly fruitful dialogue” between the two disciplines.

Calvin Tsao and Zack McKown, the architects who designed the installation, reconfigured MOCA’s cramped galleries as a spacious labyrinth. “Architecture supplies the gravitas, and fashion delivers the big bang, so that’s where we start,” Tsao told me. Mannequins, fashion videos, and a small stage set of Hussein Chalayan’s wearable living-room furniture (a telescoping wooden coffee table that becomes a skirt, and slipcovered chairs that convert into suitcases and dresses in case you have to leave town on short notice) introduce the general themes of “body,” “shelter,” and “identity.” Visitors then thread their way through exhibits of increasing complexity that compare the “tectonic strategies” (i.e. construction techniques) of both disciplines. “The clothes have a visceral impact that the buildings don’t,” Tsao acknowledged, “and only in part because they’re physically present, while the architecture is represented by models and graphics. Our profession tends to be too hermetic. It has a lot to learn about relating to actual human beings.”

An apparent likeness between human beings isn’t proof of an actual, or even mimetic, kinship, and the same is true of their creations. Do the “cables” that hoist the skirt of Yeohlee Teng’s poetic Suspension Dress relate, except semantically, to the structural engineering of Bernard Tschumi’s suspended walkways at the Parc de la Villette, in Paris? Do the pleated façade of Winka Dubbeldam’s Greenwich Street Project and a pleated day dress by Alber Elbaz have anything in common besides elegance? What about the lacy skin of Toyo Ito’s Mikimoto Tower, in Tokyo? Is it conversing with Tess Giberson’s abstract crochet work? The beauty and invention on display in “Skin + Bones” dispose one, perhaps too readily, to nodding in compliance at the alleged parallels between Martin Margiela’s disjointed patchworks and Frank Gehry’s anarchic jigsaw puzzles, or between the shard-like angles of Zaha Hadid’s Vitra fire station and the jaggedly cantilevered shirt collars by the Dutch partners Viktor & Rolf, and I was willing to suspend—or cantilever—my disbelief to perceive, in the arboreal spread of Yohji Yamamoto’s wedding gown, an effort to unite the party tent and the chuppah in one ensemble. But is one really looking at the skin and bones of a new hybrid species, or the anatomy of a metaphor?

Architecture critics have already started to grumble about the tenuous nature of the connections made in “Skin + Bones,” but the fashion world is well served by it. On the runway, inspired feats of virtuosity are all too often quickly forgotten by blasé audiences rushing to the next show. Here they are treated with informed reverence, beginning with the Russian Doll ensemble by Viktor & Rolf, which greets visitors in the first gallery. Eight mannequins on a round platform display the nesting layers, each a masterpiece of couture, that were originally fitted on a live model during Paris fashion week in 1999. In a video of the performance projected behind the clothes, the designers dress an immobile girl standing on a lazy Susan in successively heavier and more ornamental robes, transforming a nubile waif wearing the barest scrap of a jute shift into a royal mummy shrouded by a majestic cloak that seems molded of clay. It is an act of self-mockery and, perhaps, social criticism as much as an advertisement for the label: fashion as architecture entombing woman as it enshrines her.

The fashion retrospectives mounted by major art museums like the Guggenheim and the Met have typically been celebrations of a style, a period, or a couturier (often lavishly subsidized by its subject). The Frick examined the relations of costume to portraiture, and to changing standards of propriety, three years ago, in “Whistler, Women, and Fashion.” A number of specialized institutions here and abroad, including the Cooper-Hewitt and the Victoria & Albert, have entertained contemporary fashion in the context of other visual arts—and Hodge acknowledges her debt to “Intimate Architecture,” an exhibit of conceptual body-housing curated by Susan Sidlauskas, in 1982, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Hayden Gallery. But “Skin + Bones” stands to attract, if not reconcile, two camps that rarely converge in a gallery: the followers of fashion, who prefer their nests feathered, and the austere draftsmen in Bauhaus glasses, who may privately relish the charms of a scarlet woman such as fashion but balk at entertaining her in polite company. “Ten years ago, I couldn’t have organized a show like this,” Hodge told me. “Many architects would have been leery of lending their work to it. They didn’t know what avant-garde designers were doing, or assumed that it was frivolous. But the younger generation tends to know more about fashion than designers know about architecture. They’ve grown up with its influence, and the question of legitimacy doesn’t arise.”

“Skin + Bones” starts with the unexceptional premise that fashion and architecture are, if not equals, cognates—related languages with a common root. They both translate a two-dimensional pattern of abstract shapes into a seamed, three-dimensional volume. It is probable that birds’ nests and spiders’ webs inspired the first weavers and thatchers, and most of the garments ever made have been fabricated from some sort of loomed or knitted textile. Their archaic function was to provide a substitute for the scales that mammals left on the shore. The clothing of early humans (and of many contemporary nomads)—skins draped over a bony frame—was a trimmer version of their tents, though almost anything we wear could be construed, as it is in this show, as a “portable shelter.” Bikinis and burkas, in that respect, both mediate between the public and private zones of a body the way that a wall or a screen does—inviting or denying access to strangers.

Durable edifices are rarely, at least in the West, constructed of fragile materials, but “hard” and “soft” are no longer the defining properties of either architecture or fashion. The British designer Alexander McQueen is represented in the catalogue by a one-piece molded “carapace” with a metallic pony-hair fringe that resembles a yurt. Shigeru Ban’s Curtain Wall House is literally that: a Tokyo residence with a curtain wall of white drapery. Carbon Tower, a high-rise by Peter Testa and Devyn Weiser, gifted partners based in Los Angeles, is still in the planning stage, but they hope to construct it from a braided, carbon-fibre helix, which resembles a fish-net stocking. Theirs is a cityscape made sensuous by technology, rather than brutalized by it, although nothing may be more old-fashioned about visionary architecture than its utopianism.

In nearly every culture that covers its nudity and lives under a roof, fashion and architecture are vested with the power to confer status and encode identity—services that, of late, they have performed conspicuously for each other. It is almost de rigueur for a big luxury clothing brand to commission a flagship store or corporate headquarters from an architect with a museum, civic monument, or Pritzker Prize on his résumé, and the competition among the would-be Medicis of fashion to outclass one another architecturally has come to resemble a medieval joust. The French mogul Bernard Arnault reportedly enlisted Frank Gehry to design the Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation’s contemporary-arts center after Karl Lagerfeld warned him that Tadao Ando, a knight high on Arnault’s list, had been tapped by an arch-rival, François Pinault, of P.P.R., which owns the Gucci Group. The Prada boutiques in SoHo and Beverly Hills were designed by OMA/Rem Koolhaas. But Prada, for its six-level emporium in Tokyo (don’t call it a department store; it’s an “epicenter”), jilted Koolhaas for the Swiss firm of Herzog & de Meuron. Their five-sided, diamond-faceted, nib-shaped edifice with “bubblewrap” windows has become a landmark in Tokyo’s Aoyama district, and Hodge includes it with two other starred attractions on a shopping tour of that city: Toyo Ito’s Mikimoto Tower and his retail space for Tod’s—a lyrical trellis of concrete and glass on Omotesando Avenue that mirrors the Japanese elms on the sidewalk. Architecture has bequeathed to fashion marketing the notion of an aesthetically coherent—though one might also say micromanaged—environment. It sometimes makes one nostalgic for the chaos of the souk.

The disparities between fashion and architecture are, if anything, heightened by proximity: one trades in ephemerality, the other in permanence; their cultural prestige is grossly unequal, but inversely proportional to the name recognition of their stars; a great building might take a decade to build, a great collection takes at most six months to make, and it isn’t paid for up front. Even the most cerebral garments in the show—Isabel Toledo’s ingenious, circular Packing Dress; the digitally designed origami Bellows dresses by Yoshiki Hishinuma; Junya Watanabe’s Objet collection; Ralph Rucci’s exquisite couture mosaics; the seamless sculptures by Miyake Issey and Nanni Strada (an undeservedly obscure Milanese industrial designer in her sixties who “loves fashion and hates the fashion world,” she told me)—are constructed by methods that a civilian can comprehend. But the distorted “oblique projections” that produced the elevations for Preston Scott Cohen’s dream-like Torus house, planned for Old Chatham, New York (“a doughnut shape generated by revolving a circle along a coplanar axis”), or the theory behind Peter Eisenman’s unbuilt Rebstockpark residential and commercial development in Frankfurt (based on “the idea of the ‘fold’ as set forth by the chaos-theorist René Thom and philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s examination of Gottfried Leibniz’s monad”), might as well be rocket science.

Revolutions in construction and fabric technology have made it possible for architects to incorporate techniques like folding, pleating, wrapping, printing, braiding, and draping, though none of these are new to fashion, and, with a few exceptions, the designers work with the traditional tools of tailoring and dressmaking, putting them to wildly playful or subversive use. Conventional high fashion appeals to a client who finds a designer’s style congenial to her body and her life. The clothing in “Skin + Bones” is perhaps most akin to architecture in its appropriation of the body as a site. On it or around it, the designer constructs a singular and demanding conceptual garment that attracts notice for its own unsettling distinction. You wear it less because it suits you than because you are proud to uphold—literally—its principles.

The architects and designers in the show represent twenty-four nationalities, though the Japanese are proportionally the largest contingent. Their prominence is not an accident. They are less beholden to Western canons of design, and their tradition doesn’t discriminate between the fine and the applied arts. Hodge began thinking about the parallels between the disciplines six years ago, when she organized an exhibition at Harvard of Rei Kawakubo’s radically warped and distressed work for Comme des Garçons. Kawakubo and the companion of her youth, Yohji Yamamoto, have never collaborated professionally, but they are the Eve and Adam from whose loins the contemporary fashion avant-garde was born. Their first shows in Paris, like Gehry’s buildings, changed the urban landscape—though in both cases you had to be in the right neighborhood to see them.

Most of the architects in “Skin + Bones” emerged at about the same time, the early nineteen-eighties—a period of experiments with “deconstruction.” Jacques Derrida coined the term in his writing on linguistics, and parallel essays in the show’s catalogue—on architecture, by Hodge, and on fashion, by Patricia Mears, of the Fashion Institute of Technology—treat that pliable theory as the show’s intellectual bridge. As Mears notes, references to “deconstructed” clothing appeared in fashion criticism in the early nineteen-nineties, to describe the next, and predominantly Belgian, wave of iconoclasm—in particular, Martin Margiela’s fusion of structure and ornament, and his mythical vestiary of mutant garments. Like Kawakubo, and, indeed, most of the participants in “Skin + Bones,” he dismantled, ruptured, fractured, or fragmented, then reconfigured, not only clothing or buildings but the traditional logic behind them, which suddenly ceased to seem inevitable.

For anyone who can’t get to Los Angeles between now and March, when the show closes, the catalogue, “Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture” (Thames & Hudson; $50) is worth the investment. Some graphic designers now call themselves “information architects,” though Tracey Shiffman, who laid out the catalogue, isn’t one of them. She deserves the title, however, if for nothing else than for giving such innovative thought to the ergonomics of reading. The text is set in parallel columns separated by a channel, where the footnotes and captions are printed in contrasting ink. It spares the eye tedious travel back and forth or up and down to fetch its references from a well. And the catalogue, like the show it documents, proposes a definition of shelter that includes a habitat for experiment where a family of ideas—unsimple and rivalrous, like all families—can dwell.

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles: SKIN + BONES: PARALLEL PRACTICES IN FASHION AND ARCHITECTURE

A Phone Call Leads the F.B.I. to a Stolen Goya (by Randy Kennedy, the New York Times)

J. M. Pastor/European Pressphoto Agency



A Phone Call Leads the F.B.I. to a Stolen Goya

By RANDY KENNEDY
Published: November 21, 2006

F.B.I. officials in Newark and Philadelphia said yesterday that they had recovered a Goya painting that was stolen from a truck this month while it was being transported from the collection of the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio to a major exhibition now on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan.

Officials said the painting was recovered unharmed Saturday in central New Jersey after a lawyer called the F.B.I. and told investigators where they could find it while saying that he could not tell them anything else about the theft.

As of late yesterday, no arrests had been made. Because the investigation remains active, officials would not say exactly where or how the painting had been found.

Contrary to earlier law enforcement theories that the theft was carried out by insiders, they did say it appeared that the thieves probably had no idea what kind of art-historical loot they had stumbled upon when they broke into the truck overnight in a parking lot at a Howard Johnson Inn near Bartonsville, Pa.

“This time of year, close to Christmas, they probably thought they’d found a truck filled with PlayStations and broke in and started looking for the biggest-looking box,” said Steve Siegel, an F.B.I. agent who serves as the spokesman for the bureau’s Newark office. “Basically, it’s a target-of-opportunity typical New Jersey cargo theft. There are literally predators — for lack of a better word — who when they see a tractor-trailer or a cargo vehicle parked for any length of time start snooping around.”

Officials at the Toledo Museum of Art said the painting, which was insured for $1 million, would not be included as a late entry in the Guggenheim show, “Spanish Painting From El Greco to Picasso: Time, Truth and History,” a sprawling exhibition of some 135 paintings by Spanish masters that opened Friday. Instead, the work, painted in 1778 and titled “Children With a Cart,” will be returned to Toledo.

“We are ecstatic that the painting has been recovered, and we look forward to bringing the Goya home and sharing it again with our community,” Don Bacigalupi, the director of the Toledo Museum of Art, said in a written statement.

Lisa Dennison, the director of the Guggenheim, said the museum would have liked to put the painting into the show but added that it was “understandable that the Toledo Museum would want to bring the stolen painting back to its home after this nerve-racking experience.” She pointed out that the show includes 21 other works by Goya.

The crated painting was stolen either late on the night of Nov. 7 or early on Nov. 8 from a shipping container in the truck while it was parked in an unlighted lot near the Howard Johnson motel. The two drivers checked around 11 p.m. on Nov. 7, according to the motel manager, Faizal Bhimani. He said the white midsize truck was left in a lot adjacent to the hotel, out of sight of the motel’s rooms and the main office.

Law enforcement officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that when the drivers returned to the truck about 6:30 a.m. on Nov. 8, the locks had been broken and the painting was gone. Neither the two museums nor the investigators have identified the shipping company responsible for transporting the painting.

Federal investigators had first said they believed that thieves armed with detailed shipping information were behind the theft.

While that theory appears to have been wrong, other law enforcement officials cautioned that it was not yet known definitively that the thief or thieves had no information about the shipment of the painting.

While Mr. Siegel would not say exactly where the painting was recovered or provide details about how the agents had found it, he did say that it was recovered without a search warrant. He added that several people had been interviewed about the theft, but he provided no details.

Officials declined to identity the lawyer who alerted the investigators and would not say how he learned of the painting’s whereabouts. Nor would they say whether the lawyer was connected with anyone involved in the theft or whether he would be paid the $50,000 reward offered by an insurer.

It was not known whether the authorities had learned the identities of the thieves.

One law enforcement official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said charges in the case could be filed as early as next week in United States District Court in Newark. Possible crimes could include interstate transportation of stolen property and theft of major artwork, each carrying a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.

William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting from New York and David Johnston from Washington.

For a World of Woes, We Blame Cookie Monsters (by Gina Kolata, the New York Times)

Corrections Appended

FIRST we said they were ruining their health with their bad habit, and they should just quit.

Then we said they were repulsive and we didn’t want to be around them. Then we said they were costing us loads of money — maybe they should pay extra taxes. Other Americans, after all, do not share their dissolute ways.

Cigarette smokers? No, the obese.

Last week the list of ills attributable to obesity grew: fat people cause global warming.

This latest contribution to the obesity debate comes in an article by Sheldon H. Jacobson of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and his doctoral student, Laura McLay. Their paper, published in the current issue of The Engineering Economist, calculates how much extra gasoline is used to transport Americans now that they have grown fatter. The answer, they said, is a billion gallons a year.

Their conclusion is in the same vein as a letter published last year in The American Journal of Public Health. Its authors, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, did a sort of back-of-the-envelope calculation of how much extra fuel airlines spend hauling around fatter Americans. The answer, they wrote, based on the extra 10 pounds the average American gained in the 1990’s, is 350 million gallons, which means an extra 3.8 million tons of carbon dioxide.

“People are out scouring the landscape for things that make obese people look bad,” said Kelly Brownell, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale.

And is that a bad thing? Dr. Jacobson doesn’t think so. “We felt that beyond public health, being overweight has many other socioeconomic implications,” he said, which was why he was drawn to calculating the gasoline costs of added weight.

The idea of using economic incentives to help people shed pounds comes up in the periodic calls for taxes on junk food. Martin B. Schmidt, an economist at the College of William and Mary, suggests a tax on food bought at drive-through windows. Describing his theory in a recent Op-Ed article in The New York Times, Dr. Schmidt said people would expend more calories if they had to get out of their cars to pick up their food.

“We tax cigarettes in part because of their health cost,” he wrote. “Similarly, the individual’s decision to lead a sedentary lifestyle will end up costing taxpayers.”

Eric Oliver, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, said his first instinct was to laugh at the gas and drive-through arguments. But such claims often get wide attention, he says, and take on a life of their own.

“This is like, let’s find another reason to scapegoat fat people,” Dr. Oliver says.

At an annual meeting of the Obesity Society, one talk correlated obesity with deaths in car accidents, and another correlated obesity with suicides. Dr. Oliver, who attended, said no one in the crowd of at least 200 questioned whether the correlations were really cause and effect. “The funny thing was that everyone took it seriously,” he said.

Katherine Flegal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also wryly cautions against being quick to link cause and effect. “Yes, obesity is to blame for all the evils of modern life, except somehow, weirdly, it is not killing people enough,” she said. “In fact that’s why there are all these fat people around. They just won’t die.”

The message in the blame-obesity approach, said James Morone, a political science professor at Brown University, is that it is so important to persuade fat people to lose weight that common sense disappears.

“Anything we can say to persuade you, we will say,” Dr. Morone added.

So is it working?

It doesn’t seem to be. Fat people are more reviled than ever, researchers find, even as more people become fat. When smokers and heavy drinkers turned pariah, rates of smoking and drinking went down. Won’t fat people, in time, follow suit?

Research suggests that the stigma of being fat leads to more eating, not less. And if reducing the stigma suggests a solution, that’s not working either.

“One hypothesis about getting rid of stigma is having more contact with the stigmatized group,” Dr. Brownell says. But with obesity, the stigma seems to be growing along with the national girth.

He cites a famous study in the 1960’s in which children were shown drawings of children with and without disabilities, as well as a drawing of a fat child. Who, they were asked, would you want for your friend? The fat child was picked last.

Now, three researchers have repeated the study, this time with college students. Once again, almost no one, not even fat people, liked the fat person. “Obesity was highly stigmatized,” wrote the researchers, Janet D. Latner of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, Albert J. Stunkard of the University of Pennsylvania and C. Terence Wilson of Rutgers University, in the July 2005 issue of Obesity Research.

One problem with blaming people for being fat, obesity researchers say, is that getting thin is not like quitting smoking. People struggle to stop smoking, but many, in the end, succeed. Obesity is different. It’s not that the obese don’t care. Instead, as science has shown over and over, they have limited personal control over their weight. Genes play a significant role, the science says.

That is not a popular message, Dr. Brownell says. And the notion that anyone can be thin with a little effort has consequences. “Once weight is due to a personal failing, a lot of things follow,” he said. There’s the attitude that if you are fat, you deserve to be stigmatized. Maybe it will motivate you to lose weight. The opposite happens.

In a paper published Oct. 10 in Obesity, Dr. Brownell and his colleagues studied more than 3,000 fat people, asking them about their experiences of stigmatization and discrimination and how they responded.

Almost everyone said they ate more.

Corrections: Nov. 5, 2006

An article last Sunday about a tendency to blame obesity for a range of problems misattributed the journal that published a letter about how much extra fuel airlines use carrying fatter Americans. It was the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, not The American Journal of Public Health. The article also misspelled the name of a Brown University political science professor who commented that the intent of such studies is to persuade the obese to lose weight. He is James Morone, not Marone.

Feminism vs. femininity (by Laura Miller, the Salon.com)

Feminism vs. femininity

In the impressive follow-up to her anti-monogamy polemic, Laura Kipnis explains why we feel a little uneasy when the possessor of a brand-new boob job proclaims, "I did it for myself."

By Laura Miller

Oct. 18, 2006 | Feminist punditry has long had a style problem. From the first, it's had a hard time separating how things ought to be from how they really are, which has undermined not only its credibility but its confidence. We all know that "no" does not always mean no, and to have to keep insisting it does over and over erodes even the speaker's faith in herself; stridency is usually a way of sounding more convinced than you actually feel, and it doesn't fool anyone. Then there's the matter of dancing through the eggshell-littered territory of contemporary feminist thinking, knowing that legions of your putative sisters are poised to thrash you for the slightest variation from their (sometimes mutually contradicting) positions. If you anger them, chances are your own life will be dragged out for intensive and merciless scrutiny. If you don't, most likely your caution has made you fatally dull.

On the other hand, for feminism's critics, every day is a field day. Whether it's a nondenominational bomb-thrower like Camille Paglia, a right-wing mouth-frother like Rush Limbaugh or a bargain-bin attack dog like Christina Hoff Sommers, it's hard not to sound like a fearless iconoclast when you're up against such mincing, mealy-mouthed good girls. Whether the good girls have a point or not becomes immaterial. Propriety, which is what too much of feminism has become, is the natural target of humor, too, and if you're funny enough often enough at feminism's expense, you can even get away with never making a coherent argument: case in point being the career of Caitlin Flanagan.

Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University best known for her provocative defense of adultery, "Against Love: A Polemic," does an impressive job of finessing this impasse in her new book, "The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability." Despite the subtitle of her first book, "The Female Thing" is not the work of a polemicist -- nor does it put forth any especially innovative thoughts. Kipnis is like the intelligent woman's version of whatever Carrie Bradshaw was supposed to be on "Sex and the City." You've encountered most of the ideas in "The Female Thing" before, but Kipnis has a way of distilling them down to a well-turned sentence or two that's very pleasing. Hers isn't a gift to be taken lightly, since in the process she makes it clear how untenable many of those ideas are.

Kipnis' knack for epigrammatic sentences fills "The Female Thing" with what amount to some very high-nutrition one-liners. An example: "When it comes to murder, you're actually more than twice as likely to kill yourself as to be killed by someone else, giving weight to the old truism that you're your own worst enemy." She can be acutely funny, though (ironically) the less so the harder she tries to hit that Carrie Bradshaw sweet spot. If you read the four linked essays in this book in order -- and who are we trying to kid; you're going to read the one titled "Sex" first, like everyone else -- you'll have to cruise past a few wince-inducing references to Manolo Blahniks and terms like "the gal set," but don't let that deter you. There's plenty of steak in there, underneath the less convincing attempts at sizzle.

As Kipnis sees it, the situation that educated, middle-class Western women find themselves in is fundamentally absurd. To say so -- rather than pretending the solutions are obvious -- takes nerve. To say so with both humor and sang-froid -- unlike the legions of ethically tormented personal essayists or the pratfalling clones of Bridget Jones -- takes panache.

The absurdity comes from the disparity between our rapidly changing social landscape (including the advances of feminism) and the recalcitrant internal map Kipnis calls "the female psyche." Feminism, she writes, has collided with "an unanticipated opponent: the inner woman." The four essays in "The Female Thing" center on some of the most stubborn aspects of the inner woman, the impulses and irrational passions that suddenly rise up and swamp us despite our best efforts to stick to the designated feminist path. In fact, this rising up and swamping has happened so much in the past 30 years, and women have tried so diligently to redirect the path around the various trouble spots where it does, that by now the path itself is hopelessly muddled. It's like getting lost in the woods and following one promising little trail after another only to see it peter out in an impenetrable thicket.

Kipnis takes a modified Freudian view of this dilemma, which makes her exquisitely attuned to paradoxes. The strongest essay in the book -- "Vulnerability," which is about both sexual abuse and the fear of it -- contains two gemlike analyses of recent confessional writings by Naomi Wolf and the late Andrea Dworkin. Wolf recently favored the readers of New York magazine with a histrionic account of how, 20 years earlier, when she was one of his students at Yale, Harold Bloom put his hand on her thigh after a drunken dinner party. She presented this event -- and the refusal of Yale to address the matter when she finally decided to do something about it years later -- as a deep psychic wound.

"All this is a shade self-dramatizing," Kipnis writes, "but can we say that it's self-dramatizing in a particularly feminine way? The idioms employed have that feminist ring, but it's a genre of feminism dedicated to revivifying an utterly traditional femininity: wounded bird femininity, to borrow Joan Didion's useful formulation." Wolf's drama only makes sense (to the extent that it does make sense) when you understand that she regarded Bloom as so exalted an authority figure that she became "sick with excitement" at the prospect of meeting him, and that she expected nothing less than perfect satisfaction from Yale two decades after she failed to register a complaint. Kipnis' verdict: "this massive overinvestment in paternal figures and institutions has such an Oedipal flavor. The contradiction of Wolf-style devoted daughter feminism is its thralldom to the phallic mythos it's also so deeply offended by." That's very nicely put indeed, so well formulated that if it's not a new interpretation of this minor scandal, it might as well be. In wrestling with Dworkin's writings equating heterosexual intercourse with subjugation -- a more challenging task -- Kipnis is equally astute. "Dworkin didn't read the culture wrong: it's entirely true that all the idioms for penetration -- 'getting fucked,' 'screwed over' -- are about humiliation and exploitation. Which does make it hard to see how anyone can avoid a certain duality about the experience, even when it's pleasurable, as it often is! Dworkin is the great case study in the ambivalence of femininity: after all, she's hardly indifferent about penetration." As Kipnis notes earlier, Dworkin's key work, "Intercourse," hinged around her "wonderfully inflamed" indictment of the practice. "But," Kipnis goes on, "can there really be this much aversion without some corner of desire? The opposite of desire isn't aversion, it's indifference."

As you can see, Kipnis is a great parser of ambivalence -- and she views ambivalence as the defining condition of modern womanhood. In her essay on "Dirt" -- or, rather, about housework -- she reads a passage from Alison Pearson's novel "I Don't Know How She Does It," in which the heroine, a hedge fund executive, resentfully cleans the family kitchen at 2 a.m. after returning from a business trip. Kipnis wonders why so many women obsessively pursue a standard of cleanliness that no one else in the household considers essential. (Despite what such women will tell you, she notes, definitions of what's clean and what's not are neither universal nor unchanging.) "How is it," she writes, "that women have managed to over throw the shackles of chastity -- to cite another rather significant vestige of traditional femininity -- more easily than bondage to the vacuum cleaner?"

She suspects that at the root of this preoccupation lies the buried, primitive association of women's bodies -- and especially menstruation -- with dirt. Kipnis blames this on "the human symbolic imagination, that archaic thing, which isn't fully in sync with external realities like social progress. Maybe some day it will catch up." It probably won't if most of us remain largely unaware of its subterranean influence. "If women didn't have vaginas," Kipnis goes on to speculate, "would we take fewer bubble baths, be less susceptible to the newest cleaning product marketing campaign, let up on the cleaning standards (for those prone to occupying the household enforcer role), and simply not do more than 50 percent of the housework?" Since the vaginas are non-negotiable, the implication is it's time for an overhaul of the symbolic imagination.

In the essay on "Sex," Kipnis mostly focuses on the "erotically mismatched world we've inherited" -- at least for the heterosexual heirs. The lamentable truth is that "the procreative act" -- that is, heterosexual intercourse -- seldom results in orgasm for the female partner, only 20 to 24 percent of the time according to surveys. Kipnis cites the "feminist evolutionary biologist" Elisabeth Lloyd, who has discovered the even worse news that studies of sexual response don't distinguish between women who reach orgasm by intercourse alone and those who need additional stimulation of the clitoris as a "final push." When you subtract those women who (sorry) need a hand, "orgasm-attainment figures are so stunningly low that they seem to imply that reaching orgasm during intercourse isn't normal for the female of the species."

Kipnis compares this situation, hilariously, to "owning one of those hybrid cars that still have a few kinks to work out as your sole source of transport: the engine shuts down unexpectedly, though even when the engine's revved, it can't always be relied upon to get you where you want to go." Combined with the sexual inhibitions most cultures instill in their female members, this leads to a whopping "orgasm gap."

Even the supposedly gone-wild younger generation falls prey to this inequity. Kipnis writes that young women have described themselves as "participating enthusiastically in hookup culture -- one-night stands and booty calls," then complain that "the men involved 'don't care if you're getting off or not.' Yet these girls keep hooking up with them! Without even getting dinner for it! Welcome to the new femininity -- at least under the old femininity, you got taken to dinner." In response to reports from sex researcher Shere Hite, who has interviewed women claiming to enjoy "'emotional orgasm ... an intense emotional peak' followed by feelings of closeness," Kipnis quips, "There's a name for someone who would call that an orgasm: female."

Kipnis sees the current mommy wars as an echo of the old "vaginal-orgasm-versus-clitoral-orgasm dichotomy," in which women who could only climax with clitoral stimulation were told they were insufficiently adapted to their true, natural role as women. "To begin with," she writes, "we have the same cast of characters: the womanly other-directed type versus the masculine-identified striving autonomous type. And in both cases, a socially organized choice masquerades as a natural one, manufacturing a big dilemma where one doesn't really have to exist."

For although Kipnis is willing to admit that some parts of the female psyche have proven ferociously resistant to change, she doesn't think that the situation is intractable. For all her puncturing of feminism's sanguine notions about the malleability of human nature, she doesn't believe that the deep layers of the "symbolic imagination" are hard-wired. Sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists may be "the go-to guys of the moment when it comes to thorny questions about human nature and gender roles," but they've yet to come up with a convincing justification for the perverse configuration of the female orgasm, for instance. "This is the crowd," she writes, "who likes to tell us how men and women got to be who they are (and will remain for all eternity) by supplying colorful stories about the mating habits of our hominid ancestors and selected members of the animal kingdom," making the usual comparison to Rudyard Kipling's "Just So Stories" -- fables about how the leopard got his spots, and so on.

Kipnis' is an exceptionally sensible voice at a time when people seem to believe that any long-standing cultural norm that can't be completely overhauled in a single generation must therefore be indelibly carved on the stone tablets handed down to Charles Darwin at the foundation of the modern world. And for all her low-key Freudianism, she knows when it's time to follow the money instead of the unconscious. During all the foofaraw about the "opt-out revolution" -- those young, Ivy-League women who are now abandoning the career track to be stay-home moms -- haven't you been wishing someone would say exactly this: "Somehow, as highly educated as these girls are, they don't seem to have heard about the 50 percent divorce rate! Somehow, they imagine that their husbands' incomes -- and loyalties -- come with lifetime guarantees, thus no contingency plans for self-sufficiency will prove necessary ... Somewhere Betty Freidan must be cackling..."

In the first essay, "Envy" -- which is not about catfights, but rather about all the things that men have and women want -- Kipnis asks us to consider the slowly closing gender gap when it comes to pay equity. If you look carefully, she points out, you'll see that "women's wages are up to 80 percent of men's because male wages are down, which evens things out. It looks as though the dirty little secret of the last 30 years is that the job market played women off against men to depress pay." While the sexes rage at each other about dating ethics and dirty socks, somebody (probably that little Monopoly guy with the top hat and cigar) has been laughing all the way to the bank.

Perhaps the most daring statement in "The Female Thing" comes in this first essay. Kipnis observes that even so acclaimed a feminist spokesperson as Eve Ensler, creator of "The Vagina Monologues," can turn around and do an entire stage show about how much she hates her belly. "Ensler works herself into intellectual knots trying to come to terms with these painful body insecurities," Kipnis writes, "but there's a simple explanation for the dilemma she can't quite decipher, which is that feminism and femininity just aren't reconcilable." Think about that one for a moment and consider how much an entire school of tortured female rumination hangs on the avoidance of this insight. "Though if internal gymnastics burned calories," Kipnis adds, "we could all have flatter stomachs, with far fewer hours at the fucking gym."

Femininity -- which Kipnis defines as "tactical: a way of securing resources and positioning women as advantageously as possible on an uneven playing field, given the historical inequalities and anatomical disparities that make up the wonderful female condition" -- seeks to ameliorate all these disadvantages by "doing what it took to form strategic alliances with men." But that means that femininity "hinges on sustaining an underlying sense of female inadequacy," which puts it in opposition to the goals of feminism. No wonder we feel a little uneasy when the possessor of a brand new boob job proclaims, "I did it for myself." I believe this is what Marx called false consciousness.

Scolding other women for failing to embody (literally) an appropriately feminist outlook has never really worked, and Kipnis doesn't seem the type to interrupt yet another rousing chorus of "I Enjoy Being a Girl," even if she felt like it. (I don't think she does.) Instead, she's suggesting that we stop lying to ourselves by pretending we can run with the rabbits and hunt with the hounds. No girl should ever be surprised upon finding herself in that archetypal Carrie Bradshaw position of realizing that with all the cash she spent on ruinously expensive and joint-grinding high heels she could instead have bought a roof to put over her head. (That's the revelation that comes right before you learn you need knee surgery.) Don't say nobody ever warned you.