In a letter dated May 31, 1960, Flannery O’Connor, the author best known for her classic story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (listen to her read the story here) penned a letter to her friend, the playwright Maryat Lee. It begins rather abruptly, likely because it’s responding to something Maryat said in a previous letter:
I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.
O’Connor’s critical appraisal of Ayn Rand’s books is pretty straightforward. But here’s one factoid worth knowing. Mickey Spillane (referenced in O’Connor’s letter) was a hugely popular mystery writer, who sold some 225 million books during his lifetime. According to his Washington Post obit, “his specialty was tight-fisted, sadistic revenge stories, often featuring his alcoholic gumshoe Mike Hammer and a cast of evildoers.” Critics, appalled by the sex and violence in his books, dismissed his writing. But Ayn Rand defended him. In public, she said that Spillane was underrated. In her bookThe Romantic Manifesto, Rand put Spillane in some unexpected company when she wrote: “[Victor] Hugo gives me the feeling of entering a cathedral–Dostoevsky gives me the feeling of entering a chamber of horrors, but with a powerful guide–Spillane gives me the feeling of listening to a military band in a public park–Tolstoy gives me the feeling of an unsanitary backyard which I do not care to enter.” All of which goes to show that Ayn Rand’s literary taste was no better than her literature.
The Disney Channel aired Tim Burton’s Hansel and Gretel only once, on Halloween night in 1983, but it must have given those few who saw the broadcast much to ponder over the following three decades. For all that time, the 35-minute adaptation of that old German folktale stood as perhaps the hardest-to-see item in the Edward Scissorhands and The Nightmare Before Christmas auteur’s catalog. Of course, back in 1983, the 25-year-old Burton hadn’t yet made either of those movies, nor any of the other belovedly askew features for which we know him today. He had to his name only a couple of animated shorts made at CalArts and a stop-motion homage to his hero Vincent Price. Still, that added up to enough to land him this project, his first live-action film made as an adult, which he used as an outlet for his fascination with Japan.
Using an all-Japanese cast, shooting with the 16-millimeter aesthetic of old martial arts movies, and taking a special-effects technique or two from the Godzilla manual, Burton’s Hansel and Gretel looks (and sounds) like no version of the story you’ve seen before, or will likely ever see again. But at least you can now watch it as often as you like, owing to its recent sudden appearance on Youtube after that long absence from public viewability, broken only by screenings at the Museum of Modern Art and the Cinémathèque Française. In it we expereince the intersection of the grotesque as represented by Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the grotesque as represented by the Burtonian sensibility, the new and strange freedom of early cable television, and the sheer audacity of a young filmmaker — not to mention a heck of a hand-to-hand combat session between Hansel, Gretel, and the Witch who would make them dinner. Her dinner, that is.
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Feelings about James Joyce’s Ulysses tend to fall roughly into one of two camps: the religiously reverent or the exasperated/bored/overwhelmed. As popular examples of the former, we have the many thousand celebrants of Bloomsday—June 16th, the date on which the novel is set in 1904. These revelries approach the level of saints’ days, with re-enactments and pilgrimages to important Dublin sites. On the other side, we have the reactions of Virginia Woolf, say, or certain friends of mine who left wry comments on Bloomsday posts about picking up something more “readable” to celebrate. (A third category, the scandalized, has more or less died off, as scatology, blasphemy, and cuckoldry have become the stuff of sitcoms.) Another famous reader, Carl Jung, seems at first to damn the novel with some faint praise and much scathing criticism in a 1932 essay for Europäische Revue, but ends up, despite himself, writing about the book in the language of a true believer.
A great many readers of Jung’s essay may perhaps nod their heads at sentences like “Yes, I admit I feel I have been made a fool of” and “one should never rub the reader’s nose into his own stupidity, but that is just what Ulysses does.” To illustrate his boredom with the novel, he quotes “an old uncle,” who says “’Do you know how the devil tortures souls in hell? […] He keeps them waiting.’” This remark, Jung writes, “occurred to me when I was plowing through Ulysses for the first time. Every sentence raises an expectation which is not fulfilled; finally, out of sheer resignation, you come to expect nothing any longer.” But while Jung’s critique may validate certain hasty readers’ hatred of Joyce’s nearly unavoidable 20th century masterwork, it also probes deeply into why the novel resonates.
For all of his frustration with the book—his sense that it “always gives the reader an irritating sense of inferiority”—Jung nonetheless bestows upon it the highest praise, comparing Joyce to other prophetic European writers of earlier ages like Goethe and Nietzsche. “It seems to me now,” he writes, “that all that is negative in Joyce’s work, all that is cold-blooded, bizarre and banal, grotesque and devilish, is a positive virtue for which it deserves praise.”Ulysses is “a devotional book for the object-besotted white man,” a “spiritual exercise, an aesthetic discipline, an agonizing ritual, an arcane procedure, eighteen alchemical alembics piled on top of one another […] a world has passed away, and is made new.” He ends the essay by quoting the novel’s entire final paragraph. (Find longer excerpts of Jung’s essay here and here.)
Jung not only wrote what may be the most critically honest yet also glowing response to the novel, but he also took it upon himself in September of 1932 to send a copy of the essay to the author along with the letter below. Letters of Note tells us that Joyce “was both annoyed and proud,” a fittingly divided response to such an ambivalent review.
Dear Sir,
Your Ulysses has presented the world such an upsetting psychological problem that repeatedly I have been called in as a supposed authority on psychological matters.
Ulysses proved to be an exceedingly hard nut and it has forced my mind not only to most unusual efforts, but also to rather extravagant peregrinations (speaking from the standpoint of a scientist). Your book as a whole has given me no end of trouble and I was brooding over it for about three years until I succeeded to put myself into it. But I must tell you that I’m profoundly grateful to yourself as well as to your gigantic opus, because I learned a great deal from it. I shall probably never be quite sure whether I did enjoy it, because it meant too much grinding of nerves and of grey matter. I also don’t know whether you will enjoy what I have written about Ulysses because I couldn’t help telling the world how much I was bored, how I grumbled, how I cursed and how I admired. The 40 pages of non stop run at the end is a string of veritable psychological peaches. I suppose the devil’s grandmother knows so much about the real psychology of a woman, I didn’t.
Well, I just try to recommend my little essay to you, as an amusing attempt of a perfect stranger that went astray in the labyrinth of your Ulysses and happened to get out of it again by sheer good luck. At all events you may gather from my article what Ulysses has done to a supposedly balanced psychologist.
With the expression of my deepest appreciation, I remain, dear Sir,
Yours faithfully,
C. G. Jung
With this letter of introduction, Jung was “a perfect stranger” to Joyce no longer. In fact, two years later, Joyce would call on the psychologist to treat his daughter Lucia, who suffered from schizophrenia, a tragic story told in Carol Loeb Schloss’s biography of the novelist’s famously troubled child. For his care of Lucia and his careful attention to Ulysses, Joyce would inscribe Jung’s copy of the book: “To Dr. C.G. Jung, with grateful appreciation of his aid and counsel. James Joyce. Xmas 1934, Zurich.”
Words like “adorable” and “cute” don’t come readily to mind when talking about Danish director Lars von Trier, but that’s exactly how you can describe the stop motion animated film he made when he was 11 years old. Sure, you can also describe the two-minute short — Turen til Squashland: En Super Pølse Film (The Trip to Squash Land: A Super Sausage Film) — as creepy and vaguely unsettling, adjectives much more commonly applied to the filmmaker.
Von Trier is, of course, cinema’s reigning bad boy. His Antichrist is a scarring descent into madness filled with bad sex, talking foxes and horrifically graphic self-mutilation. Anyone who’s seen the movie will never look at a pair of scissors in the same way. His 2011 movie Melancholia is a glorious ode to depression and global annihilation; a beautiful anti-revelry on how much everything in the world sucks. And his most recent movie, Nymphomaniac, is a 4‑hour long movie — divided in two, Kill Bill style — featuring some of the most joyless unsimulated onscreen couplings this side of the Paris Hilton sex tape.
Turen til Squashland, on the other hand, is about a sentient sausage who rides a black whale to rescue a bunny rabbit. The film was shot by the tweenaged Trier (he added the ‘von’ to his name in film school) on his Super 8mm camera in 1967. In terms of technique and design, it is shockingly good. The short has a naïve sweetness that Wes Anderson often aspires to while having the uncanny dream-like quality of an early David Lynch movie.
It’s tempting to parse Turen til Squashland to gain some insight into von Trier’s later auteurist obsessions. Does von Trier’s tendency to place the vulnerable and the loveable in the clutches of a cruel and heartless villain start here? While the ever-adorable Björk ends up dangling from the end of a rope in Dancer in the Dark, the bunny in this movie thankfully makes it out alive. Castration is another reoccurring theme in von Trier’s work. Does that have anything to do with the free-range sausage protagonist? And does the talking fox in Antichrist have its origins in this movie’s trio of head spinning rabbits?
The one element, however, that has no connection to his later work is the short’s end, which shows a placard reading “Slut.” That has nothing to do with his latest movie or von Trier’s complicated relationship with women. The word “slut” means “The End” in Danish.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.
The origins of circumcision remain unclear. According to this online essay, a stele (carving on stone) from the 23rd century B.C.E. suggests that an author named “Uha” was circumcised in a mass ritual. He wrote:
“When I was circumcised, together with one hundred and twenty men, there was none thereof who hit out, there was none thereof who was hit, and there was none thereof who scratched and there was none thereof who was scratched.”
By the time you get to 4,000 B.C.E., you start to find exhumed Egyptian bodies that show signs of circumcision. And then come the artistic depictions. The Sakkara depiction comes with the perhaps helpful written warning,“Hold him and do not allow him to faint.”
My first exposure to Pink Floyd’s rock opera The Wall left me feeling nothing less than astonishment. And though I never had the chance to see the outrageous stage show, with its very literal wall and giant inflatable pig, the film has always struck me as a suitably dark piece of psychodrama. Over a great many subsequent listens, the melodramatic double-album can still blow my mind, but I’ve come to feel that some of the strongest material are those songs penned jointly by Roger Waters and David Gilmour, and those are relatively few. (Mark Blake quotes Gilmour as saying “things like ‘Comfortably Numb’ were the last embers of mine and Roger’s ability to work collaboratively together.) The bulk of the album belongs to Waters, its autobiographical details and personal themes, and the album and film can sometimes feel as stifled and claustrophobic as its protagonist does. This is either a creative failing or a brilliant melding of form and content.
Inspired by an incident in which an exasperated Waters spat on a rowdy fan at a stadium show in Montreal during the band’s 1977 “In the Flesh Tour,” The Wall documents the painful rise and even more painful fall of a fictive rock star named, of course, Pink (played by Bob Geldof in the film version), whose life closely parallels Waters’, down to the spitting. It has always seemed an odd irony that Waters responded to the alienation of touring massive stadiums by creating a stadium show bigger than anything the band had yet done, but it speaks to the bassist and singer’s grandiose personality and obsessive desire to turn his angst into theater. Oftentimes the results were spectacular, other times bombastic and confusing (at least to critics, some of whom are easily confused). The recording of the album, as many well know, strained the band almost to breaking, and by many accounts, Waters’ imperiousness didn’t help matters, to say the least.
All of the behind-the-scenes drama may or may not eclipse the drama of the album itself, depending on your level of fandom and interest in Pink Floyd biography. Lovers of Waters’ epic rock dramaturgy will find edification at the extensive online critical commentary Pink Floyd The Wall: A Complete Analysis, an online work in progress that delivers on its title. For a very brief account of the story behind the story, co-producer Bob Ezrin’s interview with Grammy.com offers perspective from someone involved in the project who wasn’t a member of what came to seem like The Roger Waters’ Band. Ezrin describes The Wall as “Roger’s own project and not a group effort,” and his own role as “a kind of referee between him and the rest of the band.”
In the beginning we had a very long demo that Roger had written. We started to separate out the pieces, and when we looked at the storyline we realized what we needed was a through line, something to get us from start to finish.
Ezrin recounts that he “closed [his] eyes and wrote out the movie that would become The Wall,” handed the script out to the band, and marked songs missing from Waters’ demo as “’TBW’—‘to be written.’” (Among those songs was “Comfortably Numb.”)
The recordings at the top of the post—which surfaced in 2001 with the title Under Construction—represent a step in The Wall’s evolutionary development between Waters’ rudimentary demos (short excerpts above) and the completed album. (See the Youtube pagefor a complete tracklist. Contrary to the uploader’s description, Roger Waters certainly does not play all the instruments.) While Under Construction has generally been referred to as a “demo,” Rick Karhu of Pink Floyd fanzine Spare Bricks expresses his doubts about the use of a term he takes to denote “a fairly polished recording”: “Demos are not rough recordings or works-in-progress […]. I doubt very much that Under Construction is a demo of The Wall.”
It’s too rough around the edges—at times shockingly so—to be strictly considered a demo recording. At points, things are haphazardly edited together. Songs cut off abruptly, fade unexpectedly or drop out entirely for a moment as if someone at the mixing desk hit the wrong button at some point. Vocal tracks peak-out, often causing anguish to the listener’s ear drums. Some instrument lines (mostly the bass guitar) meander through the background as if the person playing is making up the part as they go. Equalization is nonexistent on most tracks. Overall, most of it sounds like a 4‑track recording by a band who has only the vaguest notion of how the equipment works.
Lest we take this description as disparagement, Karhu clarifies: “It is precisely for those reasons […] that I love them dearly and consider them one of the most valuable, unauthorized Floyd recordings to be unearthed. Ever.” Many Youtube commenters agree, some even arguing that these rough sketches are superior to the final polished product. It’s a debate I won’t weigh in on, though I will say that like Karhu, I enjoy the lo-fi raggedness of this version of The Wall. It seems to convey the emotionally frayed edges of these songs in a way the slick production of the studio album may not at times. Either as a mere document of the album’s early history or an alternate, fragmented—and hence more traumatized—take on The Wall, this unofficial version is haunting and strange. Does it perhaps better represent Waters’ desire to make his psychic unease into art? We invite you to judge for yourselves. And if, like me, you can listen to “Comfortably Numb” (and that incredible guitar solo) on repeat for hours on end, you may be interested to hear David Gilmour discuss the song’s composition in the interview below.
Freud and Jung. Jung and Freud. History has closely associated these two who did so much examination of the mind in early 20th-century Europe, but the simple connection of their names belies a much more complicated relationship between the men themselves. At the top of the post, you can see the letter that Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis, wrote to Carl Gustav Jung, founder of analytical psychology, in order to end that relationship entirely. “At first Freud saw in Jung a successor who might lead the psychoanalytic movement into the future,” say the curator’s comments at the Library of Congress’ web site, “but by 1913 relations between the two men had soured.
While Freud claims in his letter that it is ‘demonstrably untrue’ that he treats his followers as patients, in the very same letter we find him alluding to Jung’s ‘illness.’ ” Freud calls it “a convention among us analysts that none of us need feel ashamed of his own neurosis. But one [meaning Jung] who while behaving abnormally keeps shouting that he is normal gives ground for the suspicion that he lacks insight into his illness. Accordingly, I propose that we abandon our personal relations entirely.”
“I shall lose nothing by it,” he continues, “for my only emotional tie with you has been a long thin thread — the lingering effect of past disappointments — and you have everything to gain, in view of the remark you recently made to the effect that an intimate relationship with a man inhibited your scientific freedom.” This relationship, writes Lionel Trilling in a review of The Correspondence Between Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung, “had its bright beginning in 1906 and came to its embittered end in 1913,” when Freud wrote this letter. “Freud and Jung were not good for one another; their connection made them susceptible to false attitudes and ambiguous tones. [ … ] The intellectual and professional differences between the two men, profound as these eventually became, would perhaps not of themselves have brought about a break so drastic as did take place had not their alienating tendency been reinforced by personal conflicts.” Only a comparative study of Freud and Jung’s methods would yield a complete understanding of their roles in the struggle for the soul of psychoanalysis. But on a more basic level, this hardly counts as the first nor the last collapse, in any field of human endeavor, of a perhaps overdetermined succession between an eminence and his would-be protege — though it may count as one of the most eloquently documented ones.
“When I got off the boat from France years ago, the first person I met was Salvador Dalí, and I realized I was born surrealist,” said Isabelle Collin Dufresne, better known by her artistic nom-de-plume Ultra Violet. Dufresne died Saturday in New York City after years of battling cancer. She may have been inspired by Dalí, but she was also a legitimate artist in her own right.
Though perhaps not as well known as other “superstars” linked to Andy Warhol such as Edie Sedgwick or the Velvet Underground, Ultra Violet worked in a similar pop style. Her creations were symbolic, approachable and vibrant. Of course, she associated strongly with the color in her namesake—violet was one of the most important colors in her palette.
“It’s in my color, my signature, but it’s also in the color of mourning, the royal color,” she said of a violet memoriam to the events of September 11.
A New Yorker by choice, Ultra Violet was one of probably thousands to create art after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. “IXXI” was distinctly non-political. It neither attacks nor defends; it only memorializes. It portrays the Roman numerals for nine and 11. A palindrome, she noted.
Once allegedly “exorcised” in her hometown in France, Dufresne grew up in a conservative, religious household. It wasn’t until she came to the United States that she became a serious participant in the art world.
The youthful energy around many of the Factory artists didn’t always age well. As an older woman, Ultra Violet sometimes looked strange with her violet hair and flamboyant clothing, and she was sometimes criticized for producing sloppy work instead of developing a tighter style with age.
Pieces like 2007’s “Electric Love Chair” even reference the glory days of Pop Art, but Ultra Violet spent most of her life experimenting with new ideas and technologies for the production of art.
“I’m interested more in the future than in the past,” she told Ernie Manouse in a 2005 interview.
This is a guest post from Zach Lindsey, an English as a Second Language Teacher living in Austin, Texas. He’s written about artists’ muses before, for Lehigh Valley Style and Be About It.
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