Category: Art Feature

Vacant (Facing the Tower) , a joint effort between Project: Motion and Loop Productions, played to a full house Saturday night. The theater was so full, in fact, that patrons crowded together, curling up on the stairs and squatting near the stage. At the showÕs start, the lights came up to reveal the entire cast quietly holding eggs. One dancer violently threw her egg to the ground, strongly suggesting we were in for an evening of angry, feminist propaganda. It was a fantastic sleight of hand by choreographer Louisa Koeppel as nothing could have been further from the truth. The piece ended with the exact same image, only the eggs had been replaced with white rubber balls which, much to the audienceÕs surprise, bounced into the crowd en masse. This kind of whimsy infused an otherwise predictable meditation on the nature of beauty with liberating lightness.

Using music ranging from recordings of Johnny Rotten to a live a cappella version of the gospel standard ÒIÕll Fly Away,Ó Vacant (Facing the Tower) told the story of a nightingale that fell asleep and became entangled in vines. After freeing herself the terrified bird never allowed herself to sleep again. Instead she kept awake by singing through the night. Koeppel, a dancer who, when she errs, tends to err on the side of beauty, made a star turn as the besieged nightingale. With the innocence of a child performing a magic show for doting parents, she flapped her wings and spun gracefully about the set, while the chorus questioned our collective ideas about what it means to be beautiful. The set, designed by Su Harruff, was a dazzling copper cage.

Some of That Jazz

Sadly enough, Warren LeightÕs award-winning play Sideman, a show deserving a much longer run, closed this past weekend at Playhouse on the Square. The show chronicles the lives of four jazz players after Elvis Presley arrived on the scene with his rock-and-roll song-bag and robbed them all of their livelihood. But Sideman is not about the decline of jazz. Sideman is a tragedy along the lines of Arthur MillerÕs Death of a Salesman. It is a tragedy of obscurity and neglect about a musician, who, obsessed with his music to the exclusion of all else, somnambulates through life leaving random bits of useless beauty here and there along the way.

Michael Detroit, in his strongest performance to date, was an ideal choice for Gene Glimmer, a trumpet player of tremendous sensitivity and total obliviousness. He blunders through his characterÕs rocky life unaware that his family is disintegrating. Guy Olivieri was equally effective as the narrator, Clifford Glimmer, and captured both the humor and frustration of a child forced by circumstance to raise his own parents. Lisa McCormick and Carla McDonald turned in a pair of noteworthy performances as, respectively, CliffordÕs alcoholic wife and a sassy-but-wise waitress who canÕt say no. Jonathon Lamer, Kyle W. Barnette, and Jason Craig brought to life a trio of brass players caught up in the midnight world of booze, dope, and groove. Craig, a performer who too easily sails over the top, was the portrait of restraint this time around, and his depiction of a gentle, world-wise junky was, without doubt, the eveningÕs high point.

Robots and Rhyme

The single most maddening thing about Memphis theater is its sick determination to play by the rules at every level. Generally speaking, and with a handful of notable exceptions, local fringe groups make low-budget versions of what could easily be main-stage productions. Where are the angry artists? Where are the eager youngsters determined to inform, enlighten, and entertain us in ways we have not yet imagined? Where is the spirit of reckless innovation that a youthful Tennessee Williams once described as Òsomething wildÓ? IÕll tell you where it is. ItÕs buried somewhere in the FlyerÕs After Dark listings. ItÕs masquerading as a band called AUTOMUSIC.

Taking their musical cues from German groups like Kraftwerk, the band responsible for songs like ÒPocket CalculatorÓ and ÒAutobahn,Ó AUTOMUSIC wants to make us all aware of our robot nature. They want us to see that all humans are robots but not all robots are human. Their immensely fun and eminently portable show is the most purely theatrical and visually exciting performance you are likely to encounter this side of Berlin, and if you donÕt go see them you have only yourself to blame.

Except for some occasional synthesizer pecking, all of AUTOMUSICÕs music is prerecorded on video, and the digital sound is fantastic. Wonderful animations, with imagery that would make any Soviet propagandist worth his salt mine burst with pride, enhance this trioÕs brilliantly stiff and mathematically precise choreography. They don old-fashioned hardhats, brandish tools, and chant, ÒMy hammer goes tink, tink, tink when I work, my hammer goes tink tink tink.Ó That particular song, appropriately titled ÒThe Industrial Worksong,Ó conjures images of old-school agitprop and concludes, ÒIf you have a hammer and you work very hard you will get very far like me, youÕll help to make a productive state and a strong economy.Ó And how can anyone resist songs like ÒEverything Is For the Baby,Ó where the group declares, ÒWhat a stupid stupid baby it cannot do math at all its politics do not impress me inane, banal, obtuse babyÓ?

AUTOMUSIC may think they are just a band, but allow me to be the first critic to rave theyÕre the best theater in town.

After much anticipation, the Art Museum of the University of Memphis and Delta Axis have unveiled “Max 2001: All About Paint,” an extravaganza of big, bold, slick, and sexy art that packs quite a visual wallop. No heavy agendas here; instead, one might say the emphasis is on fun and lightheartedness. Fuzzy textures, hard-edged graphics, and plenty of ooey-gooey lumps all appeal to the sensual, especially apparent in the abundance of eye-scorching pink. The show’s title may be a little misleading. Several hardcore painters are certainly featured, but curator Holly Block defines the subject of paint rather loosely to encompass sculpture, video, photography, performance, installation, and even conceptual art.

Block, the executive director of Art in General in Manhattan, has upped the ante with this Max, the third manifestation of the exhibit. “Max 1998” and “Max 1999,” curated by Kim Levin and Buzz Spector respectively, were exclusively regional affairs relying on slide images and studio visits to select artists — a course of action that resulted more or less in survey exhibits. Although she used a similar method of recruitment, Block brings to her theme of paint the works of artists from all over the nation and beyond, and these mix quite comfortably with regional offerings. Certainly this international roster of artists adds an air of prestige to the exhibit, especially when several have accumulated impressive résumés. More importantly, this fusion presents an opportunity to relate the art issues and practices of the region to a wider cultural context.

Paul Henry Ramirez of Mexico sets the festive tone of this exhibit with a goliath scroll painting. Spread II perches majestically above the ensemble of art objects in the main gallery, unfurling down the wall into a heap on the floor — a pretty brash way to mount a painting. The imagery is even more indelicate: A fractured diagram of flesh, hair, and squirting bodily fluids is rendered with a taut graphic style that seems to revel in lavish ornament, while large pools of flat color outlined by svelte ribbons of black heighten the architectonic qualities of the picture. Ramirez is enjoying a growing reputation for his art; one of his paintings even graces the cover of the current issue of Art Papers, reflecting the art world’s love affair these days with all things beautiful. “Max 2001,” as a whole, is likewise tinged with this pervasive sentiment.

If any paintings in this exhibit can hold their own next to Ramirez’s extroverted image, they are Hamlett Dobbins’ two luscious offerings nearby. It is paint that is Dobbins’ passion, and looking at the striped Glimpse, one is swept up in the excitement of his piquant palette of neutral pinks, yellows, and beige. The artist has never been one to scrimp on paint, and he likewise lays it on thick here, but do I dare detect a newfound deliberateness in its application that borders on the slick? For HH (the stillness of skin) is a delightful pink-on-pink affair — not rose, not mauve but the pinks of pink Cadillacs, Double-Bubble, and Pepto-Bismol. Pink Panther pink. This painting looks delicious enough to eat.

A bead or two of dribbled paint greets one at the entrance to the building and then follows a path to the museum inside, terminating with a leaky can of paint stuck to the gallery wall. A label beside the affixed can and runny trickle says that this is a work of art from the oeuvre of Francis Alÿs. Titled The Leak, it undoubtedly springs from the artist’s past performances in which he took short treks carrying an upturned, punctured can of paint, marking a path that concludes where it begins. Alÿs could not come to Memphis to do the piece himself, so Block was the stand-in for a proxy performance. The notion of purposely spilling pigment from a ruptured vessel while following someone else’s prescribed scheme, no matter how meaningful the intent, seems both ludicrous and pretentious, especially when its most enduring consequence will likely be what’s left on the carpet after the show is over. Besides that, speaking as an aspiring Pollock myself, not just anybody can drip paint.

It might seem unusual to include photographs in an exhibit about paint but not when you’re talking about the work of Phillip Andrew Lewis and Martina Shenal, two artists who utilize the medium with a painter’s perspective. Shenal exhibits images from her recent show with Lewis at the Second Floor Contemporary Gallery, but it’s never too soon to once again admire these beautifully austere images of objects veiled by scrim. Lewis breaks out a new triad of images of the Mississippi River floodplain, transforming the horizontal bands of the landscape into a sensuous gradient of azure, in which form is dissipated into pure radiant color.

When I heard that Roxy Paine was going to be in “Max 2001,” my jaw dropped. I couldn’t believe it. I had seen his contribution to “010101: Art in Technological Times” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) just a few weeks prior. Paine’s Scumak seems well-suited to that exhibit’s theme of exploring the integration of art and technology, because one literally walks into a computer-operated sculpture factory. A high-tech machine slowly oozes a viscous mass into a lazy lump on a conveyor belt then sends it down the line to an accumulating stockpile of similar soft sculptures, with the production’s limited set of variables all handled by a lil’ laptop computer. Ironically, the only humans necessary are the ones guarding the merchandise and fancy hardware.

It is something of an anticlimax to see Paine’s lumps at “Max 2001” sans the spectacle of the SFMOMA installation. Scumak (4) is a nice enough set of specimens from the production, with that characteristic shape somewhat akin to a lava flow or soft-serve ice cream. Perhaps part of the disappointment lies in the objects themselves. Because in the context of witnessing their origin, one’s attention is fixed upon the manner of production, while the objects themselves are ephemeral, a remnant, one as valid (or not) as the next. As art objects, they’re delightfully indulgent, tactually inviting yet mind-numbingly arbitrary.

Gee, there is so much other remarkable work and so little space left. Arturo Herrera’s stunning Say Seven is a bolt of brown felt meticulously cut into a shape that resembles a splash of chocolate syrup dripping off the wall. Les Christensen, who was in the last Max, offers her 100 Maidens (Nuptial Shield) and 100 Widows (Death Shield), funky spirals constructed from the heels of women’s shoes. Meikle Gardner unleashes his Ab-Ex tendencies with a couple of his slash-and-drip paintings. And there’s even more.

Get out the Kool-Aid and lemon cookies. Although a happenstance, Emily Walls’ installation in the adjacent Artlab gallery fits right in with the insouciant revelry of “Max 2001,” as it is a twisted re-creation of prepubescent art-making. The artist has painted murals throughout the gallery with cheerful colors and anamorphic forms of preschool life. Populating the room are all manner of mutated doll, in every conceivable color, texture, and form, shoved into corners and dangling from the ceiling. Kitsch is Walls’ ongoing obsession, and the inventiveness and industriousness of this effort is impressive. But ultimately, the installation offers a pastiche of the Playskool experience that is not too dissimilar from the original.

Through July 21st.

Just in time to kick off the steamy season, a sexy exhibit at the Cooper-Young Gallery pairs the bathhouse eroticism of Bryan Blankenship with the delicacies of irises and lilies found in the work of Nancy Bickerest.

Bickerest is among several artists in the region exploring nonobjective photography to one degree or another, pushing the medium beyond the realm of documentation into the ephemeral world of light and color. Originally trained as a painter, the artist took up photography to gather resource images but soon discovered that the medium had much to offer in its own right. Bickerest uses a macro lens to capture the minutiae of budding flowers, rich in supple forms and imbued with pungent primary and secondary hues.

The artist is particularly fond of the drama gained from a shallow depth of field, in which details, such as the serrated edge of a flower petal in hibiscus syricus, emerge from a nebulous blur of saturated hues. Gladiolus transports the viewer into a microcosmic domain resembling a fractal image; out of a sea of orange, lemon, eggplant, and lime, the stamen juts into the focal plane. This method heightens the carnal aspect, especially in works like iris prismatic, in which the focal point is the particulars of the openings, folds, and crevices of the subject, cast in a radiant yellow and luscious blue light.

Bickerest displays her C-prints standard-issue: double-mat, black ribbon frame, under glass. Perhaps I have been spoiled by offerings in which the conventional mount has been abandoned in favor of methods that contextualize nonobjective photographs more as paintings. The mats and frames around Bickerest’s work seem an ill fit. The glass is especially troublesome in one of several photos titled lilium ‘star gazer,’ a beautiful image of a flower emerging from a black ground — if only one can find the angle at which the bric-a-brac from the next room is not reflected across its surface.

That being said, the images are captivating in color and form, and one can linger for quite some time on these landscapes, which are just a few centimeters deep.

While the fertile subject matter of flowers is by its very nature sensual, nothing suggests that Bickerest intended to make erotic images. On the other hand, Bryan Blankenship’s tongue is thrust squarely in his cheek for his “receptacle” series. What appear at first glance to be innocent geometric abstractions are in fact symbolic fetishes signifying gender-specific body parts. But what really drives up the temperature is that the artist uses the vernacular of a decaying bathhouse, replete with trompe l’oeil mildew stains, mineral deposits, grimy porcelain, and yellowed grout. The resulting mixed-media works are equal parts Rauschenberg raunch, bathroom humor, and Home Depot know-how.

One such, um, piece is receptacle #3, a rectangular composition that incorporates shoddy paneling, faux stained and yellowed tile, and other signs of mucky decay with an inset panel containing a slit above a drain hole. If not careful, one is likely to miss, among the yuk-yuks, the absolute command that Blankenship has over his materials. His use of encaustic here is delightful, creating an equivalent to the look of glazed bathroom tile, in a dated minty green. Looking at Blankenship’s convincing rendition of decomposition and swelter reminds me of Greg Haller’s stint making unbelievably realistic pictures depicting wretched brick walls, complete with graffiti and dirty windows.

Of course, Blankenship is not simply interested in memorializing decomposing facades; rather a seediness is exaggerated by the combination of tactile sensation and (not so subtly) veiled crotch humor. In the aforementioned receptacle #3, the artist goes for the gold as a yellow bead of beeswax drains out of the slit and crawls down the concave orifice below it (nasty boy). The work next to it, receptacle #4, is obviously its, er, mate, as similar elements have been combined to create an iconic phallus.

Just so you know, Blankenship is not completely obsessed with you-know-what. Untitled offers sanctuary from the sexual innuendo but is still very much interested in decay. It also uses trompe l’oeil sleight of hand to create a balloon pattern one might find in a toddler’s room, except this happy motif is mired by rows of dripping stains and soiled wallpaper. One gets the idea that this paradoxical juxtaposition represents innocence sullied.

If you are not prudish, the works are a delight to behold. But if you are, Blankenship is also exhibiting some very innocuous pottery with not a crease or crevice that’s the least bit suggestive. But I can’t go into that, as I could use a cold shower.

Through June 16th.

You’re likely to see most anything in Huger Foote’s photographs. Lush green foliage scaling a prickly chain-link fence. A woman’s feet clad in orange sandals, picking their way through scattered droppings of cabbage, carrots, and cauliflower. A small girl, seen through a plate-glass window, huddled against a laundromat.

For sure you’ll see light, dappling over a leopard-print sofa in a cluttered, cheerful room; dancing off a car outside a Texaco station; bathing a tree, a dog, a dumpster with mysterious significance.

And to Huger Foote – a native Memphian now living in London, son of historian and author Shelby Foote, and a self-professed voyeur who considers his photographs “gifts to me” – all these minutiae of everyday life are more than significant. They’re extraordinary.

“If my book could speak,” he says, referring to a published collection of his works that was released in fall 2000, “it would say, ‘Look!’ Exclamation point! I guess I want everybody to take another look at the world.”

Foote isn’t sure why he titled the book My Friend from Memphis. “I guess I just liked it,” he says during a phone interview from his home in London’s Notting Hill. “It’s not logical. Who is the friend? I don’t know.”

What he does know is that Memphis holds a powerful attraction for him and that at least half of the 87 photographs in the book were shot here during the mid 1990s. “There’s a part of me that I think I bottle up when I’m away from Memphis,” says the 39-year-old Foote, who has also lived in New York and Paris and has had exhibitions at London’s prestigious Hamiltons Gallery, which has also represented the likes of Richard Avedon and Irving Penn. “My heart is always pulling me there. Going home wakes up the oldest part of me. There I can get reconnected to my old true self.”

And it was in Memphis, in 1994, that a near-death experience taught him the discipline that comes with solitude and gave fresh inspiration to his work.Ê

Foote – whose first name was passed down from his great-grandfather and is pronounced “U.G.,” though most folks simply call him Huggie – is the only child of Shelby and Gwyn Foote, who raised him to revere the arts. “Literature, painting, photography, these were and are my father’s gods,” says Foote. When he was 16, his father gave him a list of “99 Best Books” – including Silas Marner, Ulysses, The Idiot – “works that changed me and opened my mind to the big world,” he adds.

Foote can hardly remember a time when he wasn’t taking pictures. He started out around the age of 10, first with an old Polaroid, then with an Argus that his father fished out of an old shoebox. “It was a proper 35 millimeter,” he recalls, “and I was very excited.” His early shots included “lots of photos of my dog,” a bull terrier named Rattler, and “whatever happened to be around.”

As a student at Memphis University School, he won a photography contest for a photo he called Boy Upside Down. “I was standing at the top of some steps and he was below me leaning back, just a kid in the neighborhood,” says Foote. “Those are the kinds of things I started out shooting and have ended up shooting.”

But Foote’s life has hardly come a neat full circle; he’s made some dips and detours along the way. As a rebellious, angry teen, “resenting the self-righteous when they tried to impose themselves on me,” Foote wound up being expelled from MUS in his freshman year. “I was smoking grass with some other guys by the tennis courts and one of the coaches came bounding over the hedge and collared us,” he recalls with a smile in his voice. “The next thing I knew I was in Connecticut, meeting people in another part of the country, experiencing the crazy environment of boarding school.” Although he admits his stint at Pomfret School was “one of the best things in the world for me,” it didn’t snuff his rebellion; he hung out in girls’ dorms, left campus while on restriction, and was ultimately booted out for “cumulative offenses.”Ê

Back in Memphis, the good times kept rolling. He’d sneak out of the house at night and go partying with adults who’d buy him all the Stingers he could drink, then get picked up on the streets by friends who’d drop him off at home before dawn. “Memphis in the ’70s was such a fantastic, bizarre, bohemian community,” he recalls. “The drugs, the late nights – I would snooze through school. But my grades were always good and I graduated from MUS. I started doing adult things and I’m so glad I was in Memphis for that.” While he has no regrets about that period of his life, he’s relieved to be rid of the anger. “I like to think I’ve stopped fighting anyone. It’s a waste of time and spirit.”

After high school, Foote headed for Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, and spent his senior year in Paris. Serendipity, as he calls it, guided him to a job that launched his career in photography. After graduating in 1984 he decided to stay in Paris and was looking for work when he heard about a new photography studio that was hiring.Ê

Soon he’d landed a job as personal assistant to famed fashion photographer Pamela Hansen. “It was a great training ground,” Foote recalls, “an endless amount of film, models, a working environment with major magazines.” After about four years of assisting various photographers, including Annie Lebovitz, Foote came to a realization. “I wanted to be a photographer in my own right.”

Although he set out to shoot fashion, his works revealed as much about the individual as they did the clothes. “I started getting a lot of half-fashion, half-portrait work assignments, including shots of blues artists Aaron Neville and John Lee Hooker,” says Foote, who by this time in the mid-1980s had moved from Paris to New York. “I was New York-based but was always attracted back to the South, to home, and the great subjects there.”Ê

Among these subjects was Foote’s mentor, and fellow Memphian William Eggleston, the first artist to exhibit color photographs at the Museum of Modern Art. Foote’s portrait of Eggleston – dressed in riding clothes, fondling a shotgun, looking at once elegant and dangerous – appeared in the October 1991 issue of Vanity Fair.Ê

In the introduction that Eggleston wrote for My Friend from Memphis, he zeroes in on Foote’s talent: “Over the years I’ve watched Huger get better and better: Delightful thing, his way of looking around. Sometimes, one of the best ways to take pictures is to forget what the subject is . . . and compose a fine image of whatever’s out there. . . . That’s something you can’t teach, something you somehow pick up.”

As it turned out, fate compelled Foote to sharpen his skill of “looking around” and granted him plenty of time to do it. In the spring of 1994, during a two-week visit to Memphis, he was shot at pointblank range with a double-barreled shotgun in an attempted carjacking. “It was random,” he says. “[The shooter] was aiming at my head. I held my arm up, ducked, and the gun went off.” Left for dead, he managed to drive himself to the hospital. “Shock is a weird thing,” says Foote. “I wasn’t scared. Just blissfully floating.” But he sustained serious injuries to his left arm that required several surgeries and an extended convalescence in Memphis, which after the Big Apple seemed “awfully quiet and full of empty hours to fill.”

During recuperation, a large box arrived from a friend in New York, the sculptor Richard Serra. In the box were gifts that helped Foote learn to savor solitude – the journals of Edward Weston, a photographer who retreated from New York to live out West. The journals held a message for Foote about living in isolation. “I knew I needed to listen to this man.”

Soon Foote was spending his long afternoons taking “Memphis safaris.” He’d pack a couple of Leicas in the car and just drive, down Summer Avenue, through neighborhoods he’d never seen, and stop to record the details of life – parking lots and light poles, wisteria blooms and watermelon stands, a lemon peel lying beside a water meter. The next thing he knew it was five o’clock; he’d drop the film off to be developed and edit it the next morning.Ê

Certain photos spoke to him. One was taken while poking around an antiques mall on Union Avenue. “I made a composition of various elements,” – a book, a table, a picture frame, a blur of blue – “but I wasn’t really looking at the subject matter. It was just an abstraction.” says Foote. When some-one told him that the blur of blue was a glass bird called the bluebird of happiness, a self-revelation dawned. “I knew that I was happier and more inspired photographically and more alive than I had been for a long time,” he says. “The message was, ‘Just go with this. Stop worrying and keep shooting these pictures.’ ”

He not only kept shooting but started gluing pictures into books, gradually replacing weaker works with stronger ones. “But I had no intention of showing them in galleries at that time. They were for my own pleasure, or friends and family.”

In 1995, David Lusk and Baylor Ledbetter, who at the time were starting Ledbetter-Lusk Gallery, happened to see one of the photographs. Intrigued, they asked if they could come and look at Foote’s other work.

“I was nervous,” recalls Foote, his voice cracking a little at the memory. “I didn’t know what they were going to think.” Later that day the gallery partners called and said they wanted to represent Foote and display a group of his photographs as their gallery’s first exhibition. Laughing with delight, Foote says now, “Can you imagine my surprise? That show just boggled my mind. The thought that I would make money on these pictures never even occurred to me.”

After that show, titled “Thirty Photographs,” a representative with the Gallery of Contemporary Photography in Santa Monica called, saying she’d heard of Foote’s work and asking him to send her a portfolio. He shipped her 10 pictures, all of which she sold, and she gave him a solo exhibition that spring.

After that, more shows followed. Over the past five years, Foote’s works – which now start at about $2,000 and are available in the dye-transfer and pigment-transfer method of printing – have been displayed in some 30 group or solo exhibitions in galleries from Memphis and Chattanooga to New York and London. Last year the Brussels Art Fair, Sotheby’s in London, and The Armory in New York featured his photography, and David Lusk Gallery in Memphis and Hamiltons Gallery in London gave him solo shows. Foote’s works also hang in the private collections of singer Elton John, model Christy Turlington, and Microsoft founder Bill Gates.Ê

In 1997, wanderlust struck and Foote headed for London with only a suitcase of clothes and a portfolio, planning to stay a month or so to see how he liked it. “Within a month, everything fell into place,” he says, “the most important being I signed with Hamiltons Gallery. It’s like a fantasy place, like being in the halls of splendor, right in the middle of Mayfair in London.”Ê

Within Foote’s photographs, some critics see a paradoxical world of joy and pain, innocence and menace. Foote’s friend, novelist Susan Minot, writes in My Friend from Memphis, “In all the work there’s a festive celebratory atmosphere and hidden within, something wrenching.”Ê

Yet others, including Hamiltons Gallery’s Tim Jeffries, consider Foote’s works more sanguine. “It always seems to be summer in his photographs,” Jeffries told British Vogue. And Edward Booth-Clibborn, whose company Booth-Clibborn Editions published My Friend from Memphis, writes, “. . . there is something unusual about this photography, with such brightness, such clear primary colours . . . I could see the light of Memphis in all his work.”

Foote himself says that Minot’s description of his photography – festive yet wrenching – sums it up. Perhaps the wrenching comes from his sense that each moment is fleeting and that a camera’s lens can only capture so much. “Having stared death in the face makes every detail more alive for me,” he says. “It’s like I suddenly woke up to the incredible magic, the extraordinary beauty, of everything around me.”

Refreshingly upbeat, well-grounded, and grateful, with a charming streak of Southern gentility, Foote hasn’t let success go to his head. And while comments about the “extraordinary beauty” of life might come across as sappy from someone else, from Foote they ring with genuine joy and awe. He speaks with respectful fondness of his family, who, he says, “stood by me and encouraged me through thick and thin.” From his father he learned discipline. “Seeing him work in his office eight hours a day, five days a week, I saw what adults did,” says Foote. “By example and advice he’d keep reminding me, ‘The most important thing is your work,’ and if I’d get sidetracked, by women or whatever, he’d say, ‘Son, you need to remember what’s important.’ ”

Perhaps the highest compliment he’s received came from his mother. “She said, ‘After I looked at your book, I walked around and the world looked like one of your pictures.’ And that really was just what I was hoping,” says Foote. “Somewhere deep down that really is probably why I felt this urge to show them to people.”

My Friend from Memphis (Booth-Clibborn Editions) is available at several local bookstores, including Burke’s and Davis-Kidd Booksellers, and at David Lusk Gallery.

[This story originally appeared in the May issue of Memphis magazine.]

Scheherazade Goes West:

Different Cultures, Different Harems

By Fatema Mernissi

Washington Square Press, 220 pp., $25.95

Once upon a time there was a fairy tale that began, as any good fairy tale must, as a tale of tragedy, and it went like this:

Good King Shahzaman, the happy ruler of “The Land of Samarcand,” returns to his palace one day only to find his wife in the arms of a kitchen boy. Enraged, Shahzaman kills them both then sets out for the Persian kingdom of his older and wiser brother, good King Shahrayar. One morning, however, Shahzaman, with that habit of being in the right place at the wrong time, happens to look out onto Shahrayar’s harem garden only to look in on still more monkey business: Shahrayar’s lady of the house in cahoots with a slave freshly swung from a tree and her retinue of slave girls magically transformed into 10 swinging couples up to their own business. Shahrayar gets wind of it, kills the whole unfaithful lot, then goes several steps (and heads) further by marrying then decapitating in revenge every virgin in sight. Except for one: daughter of the king’s vizier, Scheherazade, who keeps her head by filling the king’s with some tales of her own, the body of which we know as The Thousand and One Nights.

This makes Scheherazade, in the mind of Fatema Mernissi in the pages of Scheherazade Goes West, the one thing not one Westerner, she’s convinced, wants Scheherazade in truth to be: a political hero and self-liberator and on the following three fronts: knowledge, which would mean she’s an intellectual; words, which would mean she’s a cunning strategist; and cold blood, which would mean she’s a cool cookie. The very opposite, in other words, of what Western ideas and art — from Kant to Ingres to Delacroix to Matisse to Picasso to Diaghilev to Hollywood — have taken harem insiders in general to be, which, Mernissi argues, is basically ready, willing, and able, dumb-struck before the “male gaze” and stark naked while we’re at it. Why the misunderstanding? First, some understanding, from the Islamic point of view and to wit:

Muslim men expect their women to be “highly aware of the inequality inherent in the harem system” and, by extension, aware of the inequities in conduct and dress prescribed by present-day and fundamentalist Islamic societies. Background insight: Muslim men fundamentally fear women. Reason: Muslim men are full of self-doubt. Why? Because Islam, as a legal and cultural system, “is imbued with the idea that the feminine is an uncontrollable power — and therefore the unknowable ‘other.’” Again because: It’s not the men who do the penetrating where it ultimately counts — the brain Ñ but the women, what with their capacity to outthink and outwit men, which is, to men, the “essence” of sexual attraction. A man in love risks slavery, therefore locking women up makes rejection impossible. The Muslim fantasy in art nonetheless: “self-assertive, strong-minded, uncontrollable, and mobile women.” Evidence: the story of Harun Ar-Rachid, “the sexy caliph,” born 766; the Muslim tradition in secular painting as propounded by Empress Nur-Jahan of India in the 16th century. Mernissi makes all these points and cases clear but only until she finds space to get to them and only after she dispenses a lot of chitchat, the ultimate mark reached when she discovers that she cannot fit into a size 6 skirt and blames Western mankind for it.

And what of the West’s historical response to Scheherazade? Kill her off, according to Edgar Allen Poe, who plainly feared her in his short story “The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade.” Beauty plus brains? A philosophical contradiction, according to Kant. Ingres’ La Grande Odalisque? “By spending months painting a beautiful woman,” Mernissi confidently concludes, “Ingres was declaring daily to his wife that she was ugly!” Matisse? His passive odalisques “did not exist in the Orient!” And poor Hollywood? Maria Montez, Mernissi disposes of as a low-budget burlesque queen, and Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra Mernissi cannot even bring herself to openly name as Montez’s high-end offspring. Muslim men at least have an inkling; Western men, we learn, haven’t a clue, until, that is, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu publicly put the stamp on the “symbolic violence” perpetrated on women’s bodies and Naomi Wolf in The Beauty Myth ran with the idea.

Other ideas in Scheherazade Goes West it’s up to you to run from. As in, in the author’s words: “Scheherazade’s passive submission to her own death [in Poe’s story] upset me so much that I could hardly carry on with the book promotion tour when I arrived in Paris.” Or: “I would have to see a doctor about my heart palpitations. It would be such a hassle to have a heart attack in France. É “

One idea, though, is way off the register. To talk herself down from the upset of a heart attack in France, Mernissi, a Moroccan sociologist best known for her book Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood, puts herself through what she calls “Arab psychotherapy,” which means “you keep talking nonstop about your obsessions, even if people don’t listen or care. One day, someone will give you a sensible observation or answer, and save you the trouble and expense of checking yourself into a psychiatric hospital. The only problem with this technique is that you lose a lot of friends.”

East may still be East; West, West. But on this centuries-tested and cross-cultural method of losing friends (never mind the attention of readers), there is no divide.

“It’s going to be a good spring,” so says writer and native Memphian Hampton Sides, and for good reason. Make that two good reasons.

One: Next month his anthology Why Moths Hate Thomas Edison: And Other Urgent Inquiries Into the Odd Nature of Nature (Outside Books), based on a popular question-and-answer column he wrote or edited for Outside magazine, will hit bookstores. Two: This month a project perhaps nearer his heart and called Ghost Soldiers (Doubleday) lands in stores, lands its author on the Today show (May 25th), and lands the book a full-page ad (with kind words from the likes of David Halberstam and Jon Krakauer) in the May 18th New York Times.

These aren’t Sides’ first forays into publishing. His first job was at Memphis magazine as a college intern from Yale and his first book, Stomping Grounds: A Pilgrim’s Progress Through Eight American Subcultures, he admits “didn’t go anywhere” (except out of print). But with this spring’s two titles Sides may be about to make it big-time and with built-in audiences.

That’s especially true in the case of Ghost Soldiers, which tracks the lives of the men who, having survived the infamous Bataan Death March in the Philippines in 1942, went on to become POWs of the Japanese inside the largest continuously-running prisoner of war camp in Asia. That camp, outside the city of Cabanatuan, was also the largest American POW camp ever established on foreign soil, with an estimated 12,000 U.S. soldiers passing through its gates and a full quarter of them buried beyond its barbed wire. The daring rescue of the roughly 500 sick and starving men still inside the camp in January 1945 — a surprise rescue engineered by the U.S. Army Sixth Ranger Battalion under the leadership of Colonel Henry A. Mucci, with equal help from a band of Filipino guerrillas — makes it, as the book’s subtitle declares, “The Forgotten Epic Story of World War II’s Most Dramatic Mission.”

Dramatic? Without question, according to Sides’ expert rendering of the challenges facing the rescuers at every stage of the operation. Forgotten? No, if we mean the men who survived Cabanatuan’s horrendous conditions; yes, if we mean generations since the war who know the phrase “Bataan Death March” and not much more. Sides knows this because, before launching into this three-year project, he was among the latter.

“I knew that Bataan was somewhere over in Asia, and it was something horrible,” Sides, 39, explained in an interview from his home in Santa Fe. “But I honestly didn’t know if it involved Americans or Brits or Australians or what.”

Having made the decision to write about Bataan, however, he quickly realized that the Death March alone would not make a whole book. “Where were the men marched to?” the author had to ask himself. “A lot of people have the idea, well, it was over, not realizing that the march was really just the beginning,” Sides said. “The men had to get through three years of the camp, and the deaths just kept coming. If anything, the deaths got worse. But I couldn’t figure out how to end the thing. How did these men get out? I couldn’t just leave them in this dire situation. Then someone said, ‘Well, there’s the raid on Cabanatuan.’ And I said, ‘The what?’ I could not believe this wasn’t a famous piece of American history, like Teddy Roosevelt and Cuba, or the Alamo.”

Sides doesn’t describe himself as a war buff “at all,” and in Ghost Soldiers he doesn’t pretend to be one. A “general-interest person” is more his line but a person with a specific interest in the question of survival.

“Here I was at Outside magazine writing and editing stories about all sorts of bizarre adventures and esoteric human-endurance stories — what I call ‘synthetic suffering’: people concocting bizarre ways to put themselves through trials and tribulations. Crossing deserts and oceans. Pogo-sticking up Mt. Everest without oxygen. But Ghost Soldiers is a human-endurance story that’s authentic. Men thrown into a situation with a huge scope, on a huge scale. I came into this story interested in who survives, who doesn’t, and why, more than I did with any great interest in military history.” (Military histories being by and large, in Sides’ words, “a genre full of hacks, bad storytellers, or really technical writing.”)

But how to explain the disappearance of the Cabanatuan camp and the rescue of its prisoners from the minds of most Americans?

“When this raid happened, it got a lot of press for about two weeks,” Sides said. “And then Iwo Jima happened, and then Okinawa, and then Hiroshima. It just got overshadowed by larger events in World War II.”

Overshadowed at the time too by the very real fear that American forces imprisoned elsewhere in Asia could become targets of further mistreatment by the Japanese. Or is it more a matter of generations?

“People didn’t like to talk about horrible things they went through in war situations. The men themselves didn’t like to talk about it much,” Sides said. “Not because it was horrible but because of a generational tendency toward reticence. I kept running into this with all these guys I interviewed. You go through the most amazing stories with them, and they say, ‘You don’t want to know about that.’ And I’d say, ‘No, I do! I really do!’ Whereas maybe the Vietnam generation talked too much.”

Hampton Sides, for his part, intends to talk, just as he listened to Cabanatuan survivors, their rescuers, and the Japanese themselves.

Among those rescuers was a Memphian, Robert Anderson (“an amazing guy,” according to Sides), whose war record and remembrances form the cover story in this month’s Memphis magazine. And among the Filipino rescuers there was critical help from guerrilla captains Juan Pajota and Edwardo Joson. I asked the author if he talked to them too.

“No, they’re both dead,” Sides said. “Pajota particularly bore the brunt of the fighting and was really kind of the unsung hero of this raid. There was a lot of publicity immediately after it — in The New York Times and through the AP, The Times of London, and Time, Life, Newsweek. I went back and dug up all that stuff. The guerrillas aren’t even mentioned. It was like rah-rah America, we kicked ass, but we couldn’t have done it, on any level, without the help of the guerrillas, the civilians they mustered, and the water buffalo carts they were able to get and pieces of intelligence they provided. I don’t know if you’d call it racist, but it was a sign of the times: The people who probably helped the most weren’t even mentioned.”

But mention Cabanatuan in today’s Japan and what do you get? Sides, who won a fellowship to Japan in the course of his research, found the Japanese willing to talk but still somewhat perplexed by his emphasis on America’s experience in the war.

“I’d been talking to a lot of American veterans, and they were almost uniformly skeptical of my trip: ‘They won’t even talk to you. No way! They don’t even know [Cabanatuan] happened.’ But, no, the Japanese talk about the war all the time. It’s a little bit like the Civil War in the South.

“This is a war that took over 2 million Japanese lives. It rearranged the floor plans, the architecture of every major city. The war affected every Japanese person in a way the Second World War didn’t come close to affecting us. So of course they talk about it. It just takes them a while to get started. It’s an uncomfortable conversation, but it’s lurking just underneath.”

And the atrocities committed by the Japanese military during the war? “When the Japanese talk about war crimes they tend to focus most of their energy on China because even before we got into the war they’d been fighting in China for 10 years,” Sides explained. “The scale and the enormity of the atrocities that were perpetrated in China dwarf anything that happened to Americans or Brits. So when you come as an American and talk to the Japanese about war crimes, they’re a little bit confused. They almost forget Bataan, the prisoner-of-war camps. China doesn’t let them forget. But for an American to say, Well, you know, there was this thing called the Death March in Bataan and what about the way you treated American POWs, it’s just sort of barely on their radar screens. It’s almost blind-siding them.”

Ghost Soldiers could remedy that, even if, as its own author admits, his pages on life inside Cabanatuan can be “grotesque.”

“But there’s no other way to tell it,” said Sides. “Some of what these people were going through is so bleak.” Which led the author to alternate his chapters on camp conditions with hour-by-hour, then minute-by-minute preparations for the release of its prisoners, an action tale “to ventilate” the grim depiction of prison life. Otherwise, according to Sides, “it would be hard for readers to get through it. It would be hard for me to get through it if I were reading it cold.”

“This isn’t a chipper book by any means,” he added, “but something I’m going to talk about on my book tour is something every one of these POWs told me: that what they think got them through is a sense of humor. Little pranks. Ways of striking back in amusing ways. Even as difficult as this book is to get through, the humor that these people were able to find, some of it gallows humor … it was important. Maybe in some cases the most important factor in their survival.”

Sides may have felt he was “steering a 747” during the composition of Ghost Soldiers, the first of his books with a true narrative, a beginning, middle, and end, but it’s one he found “ungainly,” “complicated,” “a little hard on the spirit.”

That was then, however. This is now, meaning his upcoming book tour, but as Sides said, “This is going to be an easy book for me to promote, because I believe everybody should know what these guys went through and how they got out of it. It’s an aspect of the war that was given short shrift.

“We Americans like to think of ourselves as invincible. We don’t lose wars, we don’t even lose battles. We don’t give up. We don’t surrender. Here’s a case where we did surrender, and we went through horrors. … When people think of World War II they tend to think of a few battles in Asia, but certainly the limelight has been trained on Europe. And for whatever reasons, this is a part of the story of the war that kind of got swept aside. It’s the story within the story of the Philippines that got buried over the years. … I say it’s their, the men’s story. I just threaded it together.”

Something also says that Sides’ former teacher and late mentor at Yale, John Hersey, author of the World War II classic Hiroshima and author of a book (Men On Bataan) unknown even to Sides when he embarked on Ghost Soldiers, the same Hersey who was in the Philippines right up to America’s evacuation, would understand.

Hampton Sides

Signing copies of Ghost Soldiers

Burke’s Book Store

Monday, May 21st, 5-6:30 p.m.

Life’s Only Promise

By Sid Kara

PublishAmerica, 269 pp., $19.95 (paper)

sid Kara’s debut novel, Life’s Only Promise, is clearly a labor of love; a passionate cry against injustice by a young and idealistic writer.

Set in the Mississippi of the early 1900s, Kara’s book details the hollow promises of Emancipation and how they have already turned sour a few decades after the Civil War. Just as novels such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved depicted the harrowing, brutal world of slavery, Kara’s novel takes us into the harsh, subterranean world of chain gangs and forced labor.

Weaving historical fact with fiction, Life’s Only Promise tells the story of a black sharecropper named Fulton Chapman who leaves his home in 1905 in the hopes of finding a better life for himself and his young daughter, whom he leaves behind while he goes to find work on the railroad. A series of mishaps results in Fulton being wrongly convicted and leased to Parchman Farm, where he and the other “gunmen” are to pick cotton for the state.

Brutalized by the guards, tormented by the merciless Mississippi summers, weakened by the wretched living conditions and scarcity of food, Fulton endures the surrealness of his new surroundings. For a long time, only the memory of his old home and his waiting daughter sustain him. But as year piles upon year, the memories and hopes of reuniting with his family dim.

An aborted escape kills the last iota of hope in Fulton. The prisoners are tracked down by militiamen. Fulton jinxes his own escape by coming to the rescue of his beloved old friend, Moondog. Many of the recaptured prisoners die of their wounds and many others are lynched. Watching Moondog’s lynching freezes something inside Fulton’s heart and he spends the next several years in total silence. The squalor, violence, and brutality of Parchman have taken the energetic, hopeful young man that Fulton was when he entered the plantation and turned him into a dull, deadened, middle-aged zombie.

Kara, a native of Memphis, is particularly effective in describing the attitudes of a racist South in the first half of the 20th century. The sheer worthlessness of black life is made amply clear, as is the racial superiority and economic avarice that allowed places like Parchman to exist.

His portrayal of J.K. Vardaman, the racist governor of Mississippi, is particularly effective. Kara captures the combination of prejudice, malice, connivance, and populist bluster that elected Vardaman to the state’s highest office. And he shows how racism requires the collusion between politics and business interests in order to survive.

But Life’s Only Promise does not treat its black characters as one- dimensional victims. Over and over again, we see Fulton’s friends, such as Moondog and Corliss, display a fighting spirit. Much as their slave ancestors did during the slave rebellions, the gunmen refuse to go gently into the night and indeed go to their deaths with dignity and defiance. We also see that the yearning for freedom is as intrinsic as hunger or thirst and that this yearning propels Fulton and the others through their darkest hours.

Some of the passages in the novel that describe the treatment of the gunmen are so graphic and blood-splattered that they make the reader flinch. Occasionally, the violence borders on gratuitous but then one remembers that violence was the story of black men’s lives. Still, in the hands of a more mature writer, these passages could have been handled with more sophistication and sensitivity.

Kara’s youth comes through in the writing. For every passage that is smooth and direct, there is another where the writing is wordy, bombastic, and over-the-top. The phrase “unfulfilled dreams” pops up at least three times. Flowery sentences like “He felt the schism between his selves begin to buckle under the force of his memories, and he felt that he was losing control over the architecture of his being” are distressingly common and take away from the trajectory and emotional heft of the novel. Kara could have clearly benefited from a strict editor.

On the other hand, Kara has a good ear for dialogue. The rural Southern dialect and colloquialisms are realistic and never strained. They go a long way toward giving the novel its depth.

Kara, who graduated from MUS and Duke University (in 1996), apparently gave up a career as an investment banker in order to finish this novel. He is already working on a second book that deals with the international trafficking in women. These are serious subjects for a young author to be tackling, and it is heartening to see that Sid Kara has avoided the pitfalls that besiege many a young writer: He has avoided the temptation of his first novel being a coming-of-age, thinly veiled autobiography.

Most European countries have long, rich film traditions. But while nations such as France, Germany, and even Denmark have made formidable contributions to world cinema, the Low Countries’ role has been more sketchy. According to Robert Sklar’s Film: An International History of the Medium, however, one of the most important proto-cinematic innovations has roots in the Netherlands, this year’s Memphis in May honored country. In the mid-17th century, Dutch inventors devised a way to project painted images through a lens using light (either the sun or candlelight). This development led to the first self-contained projectors — Magic Lanterns — which included a light source, image, and lens all in one apparatus.

But since that crucial contribution to cinema’s prehistory, discussion of Dutch film is usually limited to two names — Joris Ivens and Paul Verhoeven. Ivens was an early political documentarian with roots in the Soviet style who, despite his own roots, made films all over the world, including the U.S. and China. Likewise, Verhoeven left the Netherlands for work elsewhere. Most Americans are familiar with his extreme (if often misunderstood) blockbusters RoboCop and Starship Troopers, but Verhoeven made many well-regarded films in his native Netherlands during the ‘70s and early ‘80s, including Soldier of Orange and The Fourth Man.

But the Netherlands’ film scene also gained a bit of international exposure a few years ago when director Mike van Diem’s severe but emotional Karakter (Character in the U.S.) won the 1998 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Karakter will be shown this week at Malco’s Bartlett Cinema Ten as part of Memphis in May.

Visually, Karakter is a harsh but striking blend of black, brown, and white — black suits, brown offices, and white snow. Set in Rotterdam during the early 1900s, the film opens with an aging court bailiff, Dreverhaven (Jan Decleir), found dead and a young lawyer held under suspicion of murder. The film is told in flashbacks as Katadreuffe (Fedja Van Huet), the lawyer, defends his innocence and describes to the police his relationship with Dreverhaven.

Dreverhaven, it turns out, is a vicious, heartless official who takes joy in ruthlessly evicting poor families. Katadreuffe, who we learn is Dreverhaven’s illegitimate son, describes him as “law without compassion, the curse of the poor.” Katadreuffe is conceived when Dreverhaven forces himself on his servant Joba (Betty Schuurman). Joba decides to flee rather than accept Dreverhaven’s marriage proposal and raises Katadreuffe in poverty. Katadreuffe grows up taunted by schoolmates as a bastard and, after learning the identity of his father, develops a hardened hatred for him.

But Dreverhaven watches his son’s growth from afar, inflicting what may be cruelty and what may be tough love. “Why don’t you leave our boy in peace,” Joba asks Dreverhaven during one of their rare meetings. “I’ll strangle him for nine-tenths, and the last tenth will make him strong,” the old man responds.

Karakter is based on a 1938 novel by Ferdinand Bordwijk that was a major bestseller in the Netherlands, and the film has a Dickensian feel. It is essentially a dark, spite-driven Horatio Alger tale: Poor Katadreuffe learns English (and much more) from an incomplete set of encyclopedias he finds abandoned in a new apartment his mother rents and works his way through bankruptcy to become a lawyer. But his largely unspoken family feud is never far from the surface of his life, culminating in the dramatic confrontation that bookends the film.

Karakter is a fine film, but viewers shouldn’t read too much into that Oscar win. The Best Foreign Language Film Oscar rarely rewards the most exciting international cinema. And it’s hard to say how much the period piece has to say about life in the Netherlands today. But quibbles aside, Karakter is still an accomplished film that’s worthy of this week’s big-screen showcase.

Monstruary

by Julian Rios

Knopf, 225 pp., $25

Imagine for a moment that through some strange rift in reality you have been physically transported to the absurd, unnatural, and harrowing world of a Hieronymous Bosch painting, but you’re blindfolded. What you hear is disquieting. What you smell is nauseating. Since you can’t see, providing narration for every terrible and nonsensical sight encountered is your disturbingly alliterative and alarmingly articulate guide Julian Rios, author of Monstruary.

Rios’ most recent book, masterfully translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman, is nigh Joycean in its labyrinthine linguistic complexity, though you most likely can decipher its prose — unlike some of Joyce’s — albeit a bit dense and breathless.

Monstruary is the tale of Emil, our writer/artist/narrator, and his exceptionally gifted cadre of friends and acquaintances, who are all caught up in a world of high-octane art and bad-luck love. The title of the book comes from Emil’s friend Mons’ painting-series-in-progress, a number of works with many different recurring themes but one thing in common: chilling imagery, which Emil is all too happy to relate to his audience in horrific detail.

It seems Mons must first have a drunken nightmarish vision a la Bosch before his brush touches canvas:

The trampling angel with the body of curling clouds who plunges

ahead on petrified pillar legs that shoot fire like muskets and

make the earth tremble to the rhythm of a pile driver.

Ill-assorted multitudes of human figures with the heads of animals, vertebrate and invertebrate, and all kinds of beasts and insects

with the heads of men and women and mutants, semihuman masses

that swarm like ant colonies, surge like cresting waves, spill

like avalanches into chasms of darkness. …

A giant starling straddled by a naked Lilliputian. …

A tightrope walker with the head of a goldfinch.

A carp with the head of a duck.

A beetle with the gaunt, dissipated face of a young man.

Fish with human arms, men and women with fishtails …

Admittedly, this is a very odd book. While we learn the details of the characters’ lives and loves, we’re intermittently taken on descriptive roller-coaster rides regarding paintings and sculptures, the life of the mind of several artists, mysterious journals full of automatic writing penned by unaware mediums of dead wives (each almost indecipherable phrase rife with possible meanings), et cetera. And this roller coaster starts on page one.

Somewhat pretentious is the narrator’s ubiquitous plays on words, obscure puns, and alliterative phrases — that poor exhausted translator! — of which there have to be at least 20 on every single page. (Every character is a latent linguist.) No phrase is left unskewed by double entendre, no pun is left unpunned, and rarely is a sentence left in which every word does not echo another with the same sound or series of letters. Chew on this: “That delirious architecture seemed to spring from the opium visions of De Quincey and Coleridge, semisymmetries in a chaotic kaleidoscope where dromedary domes rose beneath the cupola of night, mad truncated caracole staircases against unsalvageable walls, lofty basalt rising over the abyss, pilasters soaring to the stars and splintered plinths and prostrate rostrate columns, the sharp beaked peaks of their rostrums earthbound, and alligators astride astragals in the black sun of melancholy.”

For many readers this will be too much to deal with. They’ll lose interest immediately, or, if intrigued, will simply be worn out by the sentence strata they have to constantly dig through to get at meaning. But there are plenty of masochist members of the intelligentsia who relish a very challenging book like this, obstinately difficult in its narrative bent. You just have to be a word junkie. You have to enjoy it like others enjoy puzzles. The meaning’s there, but you’ve got to know what to look for to get it.

Don’t get me wrong. I recommend Monstruary, especially if you love art and literature. But don’t eat too many pronto pups and cotton candy before you get on the ride, and for God’s sake keep your hands inside the car at all times.