Dear Barrie,
Spiegelman, ie, a man of mirrors, has a
theory about "neosincerity"? I wonder what that means.
Mirrors don't lie, but quite often those who
look at their reflections continue to hold the image they keep in their mind,
like Kinbote in his triptych of "bottomless light" signed by Sudarg of
Bokay. Why would women in Genesis have to look
beautiful? (feminists should complain about that to H.Bloom!) I always
thought people in Genesis would appear like any other native,
although healthily vegetarian of course.
By the way, in "Pale Fire" there are references
to peacock-herls (alders) and to a Mount Peacock, but the dressing gown Kinbote
gave to John Shade, as a birthday present, is not described as having the same
color that Wild's blue one displays when he drops from a swing into a brambled
ditch...
In PF, Kinbote ponders on "the awful decrepitude of his breakfast attire;
had playfully measured my arm against his; and had bought for him in Washington
an utterly gorgeous silk dressing gown, a veritable dragon skin of oriental
chromas, fit for a samurai."
In
TOoL, after Wild climbs on the old swing he "was hurled...into a ditch full of brambles which ripped off a
piece of the peacock blue dressing
down..."
Jansy
..........................................................................................................................
Fascinating discussion about cruelty and art.
Some obliquely-related items,
perhaps—
The rendering in Art
Spiegelman's Maus. Regarding same author's recent Book of
Genesis—I read the excerpt in The New Yorker earlier this
year and loved it (it was just a few pages). I sought some
reviews and one by Harold Bloom simply dismissed and disparaged the book
because he said the women in Genesis are posed to be beautiful and he did
not think Art Spiegelman's women in his Genesis were beautiful.
Some of us thought Spiegelman succeeded in commenting
on certain received ideas of beauty and that his women are beautiful, and that
Bloom’s view is sheer rigid prejudice. Other feminists
objected to all of Spiegelman's women and some to all of his
work. Also interesting are Spiegelman’s
ideas about “neosincerity,” about which I heard him speak with
Alex Melamid (formerly of Komar & Melamid—take a
look at their art) and in re the Danish cartoons debates in
recent years...