What Would Lynne Tillman Do? Read online

  LT: Of floating.

  PD: Of being homeless somehow. Everybody has to find out how to deal with this, how to get around it.

  LT: When you’re painting the glass each day, do you feel in a place? Or do you feel like you’re floating with it?

  PD: It’s very funny to say, it’s the only place and the only hours in my life when I really feel quiet. Maybe I don’t make the impression of being unquiet, but I am.

  LT: You’re anxiety-ridden?

  PD: Yes.

  LT: You’ve had many shows in Germany, and since ’74, this is what you’ve exhibited. What’s the response been?

  PD: At the first show, I saw people come in, and they looked around for half-a-minute, and said, “Oh, it’s all the same.” I remember a story the director of the Baden Baden Kunsthalle told me about a very famous German art critic, who came in and said to him, “Do you want to cheat me? Make fun of me?” That was 1975. But, at the same time, half of the people came and stayed three hours, looking at the work. When they left, they said, “I have to return tomorrow.” These are the two reactions. And from art critics—I really never had bad criticism. I don’t know why. Germans understand it somehow if they are familiar with art, opera, philosophy, ideas, and so on.

  LT: You’re going against the grain of what other painters of your generation do and have done. How does that feel, to you?

  PD: To me? It makes me happy.

  LT: You don’t feel the need for their approval?

  PD: No, but I have it from some. At my opening here, for instance. Wolfgang Laib came. He’s a very good artist. I was very happy he was here, because he’s the person who’s possibly closest to my ideas. He’s doing something else, though. By doing what I do, I have the distance to be friends with lots of artists, because we don’t touch each other. I really like seeing the work of other painters, other artists, my students, discussing, learning what they’re thinking about art. I’m very happy because I’m like a frog to them.

  LT: A frog?

  PD: A frog, or a dog, or something…

  LT: Just a sort of odd creature to them.

  PD: I saw a film of a Zen Buddhist master. The interviewer asked him, “What is your task?” He said, “To become a dog.” I think that’s a great idea. Because a dog has no intention of influencing anybody. I think you know what I mean.

  LT: Yes, I do. There’s a joke going around: “In cyberspace, nobody knows if you’re a dog.”

  PD: Today I told Lucio Pozzi a story of “the frog who fell into the milk.” The frog was afraid to drown. He was working with his feet, very fast, to keep his head above the milk. So he made butter and then he had an island he could sit on. That’s what we, I, do.

  LT: I’m still fascinated by the idea that you paint the glass every day.

  PD: 14 days after I began the glass, I got in contact with a woman who was very familiar with Zen Buddhism. She lived in a Zen cloister in Japan for three years. She told me that a tape I’d recorded off the radio was a Zen Buddhist ceremony. She told me exactly what it meant, and what she told me—it was like coming home. I’m not a Buddhist. I’m a Christian. But these ideas made me very happy—I learned that there are thoughts in the world which try to express what I try to express with the painting of the glass.

  LT: The idea of doing a simple thing that shows you’re in the world, doing something every day, not more, not less?

  PD: The Buddhists say everything has the same value. The grass and the king. I say, “That’s right. I feel that too.” But also, if you do it again and again and again, it’s worth the same, and the thing is new every day. It’s as worthwhile as anything else, but—it’s difficult for me to express—it’s also worthwhile to look at it again and again and again. The glass is the glass is the glass is the glass. Gertrude Stein!

  LT: Why don’t you consider yourself a Buddhist?

  PD: I’m European. I’d like to be a Buddhist, but it’s not my culture, it’s not my heritage. When I lived in New York in 1980, I thought I’d find the sources of Pop Art, and on every corner would be Pop Artists; I’d meet Warhol, which I could have, but I didn’t. When I was here, I realized I’m a European. I can do what I want to, but I will never be a New Yorker. I will never learn how to think like a New Yorker. I have to deal with that. There’s something else I wanted to tell you. Do you know the German painter Otto Dix?

  LT: Yes, I do.

  PD: The Nazis didn’t allow him to paint his social satires, so he had to paint landscapes, and he said, “I look to the landscape like a cow.” That’s good. I would say, “I look to the cat like a dog.” I try. I’m not good enough to really do it, but I try.

  V is for Virtual

  The Virtual President

  Ordinary people get the news, they don’t make it. Mediacs report, repeat, spin, repeat and pummel non-ordinaries with self-serving rhetorical questions, and, except for dead people and “undecideds,” or the living dead, Americans are addicted. Media junkies, by definition, can’t stop: They need more of that blah-blah powder. Obama himself, the public recently learned, had to go cold turkey off his BlackBerry—and the world sympathized. He too needs instantaneity, to be connected, like most 21st-century characters.

  Once the dramatic presidential race reached its historic conclusion, the news was suddenly less tantalizing. Instant by instant, the yawning gap widened. O’Reilly, Matthews, Olbermann, Blitzer et al. chewed over Obama’s cabinet picks, happily eviscerating Hillary Clinton again, but their hyperbole only exacerbated the emptiness left at election’s end. Like Bush, the mediacs had become lame ducks too.

  The man who had just won the globe’s most visible job dominated America’s attention. President-elect Barack Obama: Intelligent, witty, knowledgeable, eloquent, telegenic, photogenic, aurally pleasing. Gone, the faulty neologisms of the past eight years. Gone, the irrationality of God-directed foreign policy. Gone, the ramblings and the wacky syntax.

  Obama’s timely intervention into the abyss began on November 15, just 11 days after the election, when he streamed on YouTube from his website. The video opened on a modified version of the presidential seal, zooming out to reveal the words change.gov (his website’s handle), and underneath, the office of the president-elect. Then it scrolled down to the approximated presidential seal again, with these words beneath: Your weekly address from the president-elect. November 15th, 2008.

  This “weekly” address was in fact Obama’s very first, but enjoining “weekly” creates a faux continuity: Past activities fuse with future ones. And by issuing the podcast as the president-elect, Obama created a new, unprecedented, even extraconstitutional, national office. Still, his screen presence felt familiar, comforting. He played a role that corresponds to ones Americans have long watched on TV—from Robert Young in Father Knows Best to Sam Waterston in Law & Order (or, even more apt, Waterston in his TV ads for TD Ameritrade). The role requires unflappability, which Obama exudes like Verbena cologne, and it is his aim, in this video, to quiet America’s erratic pulse, its arrhythmic financial markets, its frightened workers, its bankrupt home owners.

  The president-elect is seated behind a desk on a black leather chair, his head cushioned against its back. He’s in medium shot and part of a cozy composition; nothing seems out of place. He almost appears tucked into the image, which divides into discrete elements. On the left, an American flag hangs the length of the frame, the one and only element taller than he. The background is a medium-brown wood-paneled wall. To the left of Obama, shoulder-high, three dark-blue volumes: Public Papers of the Presidents: John F. Kennedy (1961–1963). The tomes lend a somberness to the image, representing the popular, fallen president, while associating JFK’s New Frontier with Obama’s upcoming variation on the New Deal. On the far right, also shoulder height, another volume, its title blurred, and a basketball, like a Pop art sculpture, signed by Lenny Wilkens of the US Olympic basketball team. A plant’s green leaves drape over the ball.

  Though it’s video, it’s basically a stil
l image. Obama wears a dark red tie and a flag pin on his gray lapel. His head moves up and down gently, for emphasis, and occasionally it subtly shifts from side to side. His expression is serious, sober, nearly unchanging, and the new gray at his temples does no harm. The sonorous Obama voice stays steady, on course, with none of the rise and fall heard in his campaign speeches, but he doesn’t shy away from unsettling language, like “the greatest economic challenge of our times.” Still, he’s not running anymore, so he’s transmuted his stump speech into a Fireside Chat, in which the screen is the hearth and his voice the melody in the air. “I know that we can steer ourselves out of this crisis. . . . I am more hopeful than ever that America will rise once again.” He has checked his radiant smile, since these are not happy times, but he reassures the American public that happy days are here to come.

  From this initial video message to his preinauguration press conferences to more recent YouTube clips and weekly talks, Obama has transformed the function of the president-elect, just as he transfigured the presidential campaign into an Internet phenomenon. Streaming from the Office of the President-Elect, a nonplace or anyplace, Obama proclaims his virtual presidency. The easy acceptance by the public and the media of this novel authority—after some initial “Where’s the president?” “Nowhere”—attests to the way people live today, in online encounters and communities. They connect as if they were face-to-face.

  Barack Obama keeps making history. He has now also affected the English language, specifically the word virtual. Through his prestidigitations, he has helped along a linguistic shift: Virtual is the new actual. And, in that sense, Obama is president, news maker and commentator. He can explain himself, by himself. Since he knows what he’s thinking—and why—before the mediacs do, he scoops them effortlessly. In comparison with his skills, their responses seem increasingly thin, redundant, more obviously ill-informed and excruciatingly superficial. Obama’s capacity to think and answer should force the “cult of personality” pundits to stop shouting and start reading. But it won’t

  W is for Wharton

  A Mole in the House of the Modern

  Edith Wharton’s passion for architecture was foundational, evidenced by her very first book, The Decoration of Houses, a work of notification. Wharton disdained the merely decorative in rooms and buildings, as she disdained it in her fiction. Her writing is severe, deliberate in its attacks and restraints, and lives in every detail and in the structure. Wharton’s novels and stories move from small moments to big ones (she manages to merge the two), from openness of opportunity and hope, to inhibition and tragic limitation, from life’s transitory pleasures and possibilities, to its dull and sharp pains and immobilizations. Traps and entrapment, psychological and societal, life’s dead ends become the anxious terminals for Wharton’s literary search for freedom and pleasure. (In her book, pleasure is freedom’s affect.)

  The architect Wharton is always conscious of the larger structure, with her meaning central in each scene. She meticulously furnishes a room, so that all the pieces and lines in it function as emotional or psychological props, conditions or obstacles. Like cages or containers, her interiors keep characters in a place, often an internalized place. They enter rooms, meet, sit, talk, then Wharton lets them find the walls, the limits. She observes them in houses or on the street in chance meetings, and they fix each other—the gaze is her métier—to a moment in time, to a truth (about the other or themselves), to a seat in the social theater. Everything that happens with effect, building her edifice. Wharton selected her words with a scalpel, as if with or without them her patient would live, die; she was precise in her renderings, otherwise the construction might fall, and other such metaphors. Her writing is never labored, though. Yet nothing’s simple, or simply an object, and never just an ornament. The ornament is redolent and may even be causal. (Think of “The Bunner Sisters,” thse poor women whose fate hung on the repair of a timepiece. A twisted tale, but then Wharton is perverse, and sophisticated and surprising in her perverseness.)

  Wharton’s stately, measured rhythms let the reader linger over a sentence, then move along languidly. One may be stopped dead by some piece of psychological astuteness, a blunt idea by brutal clarity, or staggered by an almost excessive, because perfect, image. Slowly, Wharton draws beautiful portraits, deceptive pictures. (I sometimes wonder if Wharton ever felt rushed by anything, then I remember Morton Fullerton and her love letters to him, that rush late in her life). Beautiful language serves—like tea, an elegant service—ironic and difficult ends. It lures one into a network of sinister complications and, transformed, beauty leads to dreariness and viciousness. The reader will be torn by the loss of that plenitude, by failure, by hopelessness.

  But Wharton is economical about elegance, stringent about lushness, display, every embellishment. Rarely extravagant. Maybe it’s because she understood position and space, knew she didn’t really have much room, no room for profligacy. She couldn’t run from reality, even if she wanted to (and I think she did), so she had no room to waste, certainly no words to waste. The inessential might obscure the clarity she sought. She wouldn’t let herself go, let her writing go. She understood the danger, she understood any form of complicity. Her often privileged protagonists fatally conspire with society against themselves, become common prey to its dictates, helpless to disown or resist what they despise in themselves and in it. Wharton was profoundly aware that, seen by others, she was free to do what she pleased, a privileged woman, perhaps explained early on in The House of Mirth. Lily Bart “was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate” (I, 1, 8).

  ***

  I have sometimes thought that a women’s nature is like a great house full of rooms; there is the hall, through which everyone passes in going in and out; the drawing room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting room, where the members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a doorstep that never comes. —The Fullness of Life (1891)

  In Wharton’s scheme, Lily Bart’s fate was to be beautiful, to become poor and unmarriageable, and to die a suicide, a tragic heroine. Like bread crumbs, Wharton scatters clues to Lily’s predicament. “[S]he likes being good and I like being happy,” Lily says of poor Gerty Farish to Lawrence Selden. Some of the clues correspond to Selden’s grand idea, proposed once to Lily, that there is a “republic of the spirit” she might enter. Lily’s conflict—her wish for freedom but her sense “that I never had any choice”—conspires to keep her from the independent or idiosyncratic life Selden represents. (His republic of the spirit is an imaginary structure, perhaps the house of mirth itself.)

  Wharton’s use of architecture operates in the traditional way—as built structure, as expression of the symbolic order, as place, as evidence of the hierarchical order—but it is exercised for fictive ends. The novel begins in a terminal, Grand Central Station, and terminates in a rented room. The “house” is first a capacious, modern public building, a place anyone may enter and pass through, and last a cramped space open to the public but required only by the poor. Lily journeys, like Richard II, from bigness to smallness, from a magnificent building that seems infinite—kingdom, modern world—to small rented room of desperate finitude—cell, deathbed. Space and place change with Lily Bart, or change her.

  ***

  Lawrence Selden makes Lily happy or sad whenever they meet. It is Selden whom Lily encounters by chance in Grand Central Station, and it’s Selden who finds Lily dead at the novel’s end. His presence frames Lily’s life, ghosts and subverts it, as the rooms, scenes and encounters Wharton sets Lily in structure it. What the reader knows of Lily’s thoughts about her impossible position is gleaned primarily in her discussions with Selden, he
r foil and confidante. Selden is a fitting comrade, a modern flawed hero or antihero. He arouses the dubious sprite fortune and its reversals, and with its partner hope and possibility, plagues Lily. No one underwrites Lily’s placelessness, or lovelessness, more than Selden.

  Wharton had a keen interest in ghost stores and the supernatural, and Selden flits through The House of Mirth as if it were a Gothic tale and he were its elusive hero. Selden is a haunted and haunting figure who magnifies Lily’s unfitness and increasing inappropriateness whenever he appears. Her double in drag, he even impedes her so-called progress with other suitors, fulfilling his double-agent, phantom-lover mission as the budding star in a magnificent sense of plot points. His last appearance at Lily’s bedside makes her death more pointedly tragic and beautiful, since we see her through his shattered vision. At that deadly moment Selden becomes a character—or an ornament—Wharton might have borrowed from Poe.

  The House of Mirth was originally titled “A Moment’s Ornament.” Lily Bart could have been its temporary decoration. Though from Lily’s point of view, the occasional ornament could have been Selden. But then Wharton enjoyed symmetries. Her house, the Mount in Lenox Massachusetts, which she designed and had built, has three front doors, one of them fake; Wharton wanted the façade to be symmetrical. Selden is symmetrical to Lily and does balance her even as he unbalances her. (Symmetry to Wharton, “the answering of one part to another, may be defined as the sanity of decoration” [Decoration, 7].) The uncoupled couple, the two-faced couple, articulates Wharton’s comprehension of how women’s changed, conflictual desires are met by changed, conflicted men. Both are, in a way, misfits, though Selden’s eccentricity and inappropriateness, including his bachelorhood, have value while Lily’s spinsterhood and virginity daily lose theirs.