{"id":64356,"date":"2014-01-03T16:36:00","date_gmt":"2014-01-03T21:36:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=64356"},"modified":"2014-02-12T16:03:55","modified_gmt":"2014-02-12T21:03:55","slug":"what-were-loving-adventures-in-silhouette-red-sauce-whiskey-and-snow-the-narcissistic-hypocrisy-at-the-center-of-human-nature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/01\/03\/what-were-loving-adventures-in-silhouette-red-sauce-whiskey-and-snow-the-narcissistic-hypocrisy-at-the-center-of-human-nature\/","title":{"rendered":"What We\u2019re Loving: Adventures in Silhouette; Red Sauce, Whiskey, and Snow; the Narcissistic Hypocrisy at the Center of Human Nature"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Lotte<\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019m embarrassed to admit that I barely touched a book over the holidays (besides 84, Charing Cross Road<\/i>, which I\u2019m in the habit of rereading most years around Christmastime), but I did see a spectacular movie whose imagery I can\u2019t get out of my head. In 1923, a talented artist named Lotte Reiniger was approached by a banker looking to make an investment. He suggested that Reiniger parlay her particular skill\u2014cutting delicate silhouette art\u2014into making a feature-length animated film. Three years and over 250,000 hand-cut images later,\u00a0The Adventures of Prince Achmed<\/i>\u00a0premiered in Berlin. The story is a m\u00e9lange of tales from the Thousand and One Nights<\/i>, but good luck paying attention to the plot; the visuals are so arresting that they\u2019ll keep you from focusing on more than one character or bit of pattern during any given scene. The original print of Prince Achmed<\/i>\u00a0is lost\u2014a casualty of the Battle of Berlin, in 1945\u2014but thanks to a restoration project completed a little over ten years ago, a fully colorized (and scored!) version is available on DVD from Milestone Films<\/a>. \u2014Clare Fentress<\/b><\/p>\n

I\u2019m a sucker for culinary memoirs by authors who aren\u2019t primarily considered \u201cfood writers\u201d\u2014a genre that includes work by such varied names as A.\u2009J. Liebling, Laurie Colwin, and Jim Harrison. (The Pat Conroy Cookbook<\/i> and The Roald Dahl Cookbook<\/i>, respectively, also deserve honorable mentions.) Jason Epstein is best known as a publisher and cofounder of The New York Review of Books<\/i>, but he\u2019s also an accomplished cook and gourmet. Eating<\/i><\/a>, the 2009 collection of Epstein\u2019s food essays, covers family recipes, his days working as a professional cook, and, of course, the memorable meals he has shared with various literary luminaries. Although Eating<\/i> is by no means gossipy or indiscreet (the only one who comes under the knife is Roy Cohn, with whom Epstein once lunched at 21), it\u2019s filled with terrific vignettes; one could do worse than lunch, on a ship, with Edmund Wilson and Buster Keaton\u2014\u201clobster over linguine with a bottle of Chablis beneath a perfect sky.\u201d \u2014Sadie O. Stein<\/b><\/p>\n

Not long ago\u2014but long enough that I\u2019ve forgotten how it happened\u2014I asked you to explain why exactly the rediscovery of Aristotle, from Arabic sources, mattered so much to medieval theologians. You recommended \u00c9tienne Gilson\u2019s 1938 classic primer\u00a0Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages<\/i>. Over the vacation a copy arrived at my house from a used bookstore, without any note. I\u2019ve read Gilson\u2019s lectures with great pleasure, and a keen sense of intellectual relief,\u00a0but I can\u2019t think who you are<\/i>.\u00a0Who are you? \u2014Lorin Stein<\/b> <\/p>\n

Having thrilled to a certain louche Scorsese film (starts with W<\/i>, ends with olf of Wall Street<\/i>), I decided to watch After Hours<\/i>, his 1985 comedy, set in a Soho lousy with neon and ne\u2019er-do-wells. Griffin Dunne stars as Paul Hackett, a word processor (!) whose odd first date crumbles into a delirious picaresque. As the night wears on, Paul encounters more denizens of the old downtown\u2014no Dean & DeLuca here\u2014and the dream logic turns nightmarish; a plaster of Paris bagel and cream cheese is employed to chilling effect. Of the film\u2019s unanimously strong ensemble, pay special attention to Rosanna Arquette, as a tragic na\u00eff whose husband has a Wizard of Oz<\/i> fetish. \u201cWhen he came, he would scream out, \u2018Surrender Dorothy!\u2019 That\u2019s all. Just \u2018Surrender Dorothy!\u2019\u201d \u2014Dan Piepenbring<\/b><\/p>\n

Just before the holidays I went to see the terrific Twelfth Night<\/i> now on Broadway. The production comes from the Globe in London, and they\u2019re doing things the old-fashioned way: period costumes, live music, and males playing all the parts (which means, in the case of Viola, that you have a boy playing a girl playing a boy and saying \u201cI swear, I am not that I play\u201d). To mimic conditions at the Globe, they also have some seating on stage. The night I went, during the first scene between Viola and Olivia, an elderly gentlemen in one of these seats fell off his chair in an apparent faint. It was a scary moment. Several members of the audience clambered on stage and the man was taken to an ambulance (we later learned that all was well). Mark Rylance, who played the funniest Olivia I\u2019ve ever seen, was motionless during the entire emergency. When it was over he turned to the house and observed, still in female falsetto, how lucky we were to have so many fine doctors in Illyria; then he proposed a short break. The rest of the performance was wonderful, but I\u2019ll chiefly remember that moment of grace and professionalism under pressure.\u00a0\u2014Robyn Creswell<\/b><\/p>\n

\u201cHuman nature is such that when we are suddenly taken up by someone whom we consider superior and admirable, we accept his attentions calmly, whereas when we are dropped we cannot rest until we feel we have got to the bottom of the person\u2019s profound irrationality.\u201d\u00a0In the Freud Archives<\/i><\/a>,\u00a0Janet Malcolm\u2019s 1983 account of historians at war over the origins of psychoanalysis, finds everyone blinded and betrayed by his own wounded self-love. The Freudian scholar Kurt Eissler overlooks the obvious sleaziness of his disciple Jeffrey Masson; Masson blabs so egregiously to Malcolm that he\u2019d eventually sue her for misquoting him (he lost); even Freud seems to expose a love affair by \u201chiding\u201d the evidence in a case study. As usual in Malcolm\u2019s work, everyone fights to supply a master narrative, but\u2014again, as usual\u2014Malcolm alone achieves mastery. Her character judgments ring out like ultimate truths.\u00a0What makes\u00a0In the Freud Archives<\/i>\u00a0so addictive is the thrilling suspicion that Malcolm may have blind spots of her own: her skepticism is contagious, and in her stylish quest for truth she plants the seeds of doubt. \u2014L.S.<\/b><\/p>\n

When I was in film school, one of the first classes I took was an introduction to sound. I fondly remember making a run to the nearby Morton Williams to pick up a watermelon that my production group quickly destroyed with a chopping knife and mallet to invoke a murder scene in our radio play. Our inspiration was the giallo<\/em> cinema of the seventies and eighties, gory masterpieces made on the cheap by such directors as Dario Argento and Mario Bava, stockpiled with sex, Satanism, and human sacrifice. Peter Strickland\u2019s fever dream of a film\u00a0Berberian Sound Studio<\/a><\/i>\u00a0is a beautiful tribute to this genre as well as to the old-school sound mixers and Foley artists from cinema\u2019s post\u2014dub-craze era. While the film within the film being produced, The Equestrian Vortex<\/i>, is a gory mess, there is no actual violence or sex in Strickland\u2019s claustrophobic Foley studio, and, like the best work of Ingmar Bergman and David Lynch, the film chooses atmosphere over action while exploring the limits of identity and sanity. \u2014Justin Alvarez<\/b><\/p>\n

I\u2019m reminded this morning of August Kleinzahler\u2019s poem \u201cRed Sauce, Whiskey, and Snow<\/a>.\u201d There\u2019s the snug feeling of being home on a snowy day, tucked inside one\u2019s warm kitchen, as Kleinzahler is\u2014the toasty tones of \u201ccinnabar and gold,\u201d the amber light, and the titular sauce\u2019s hearty heat. His nip of whiskey unfastens \u201ca tap of the base of the skull.\u201d That activity\u2014in the warmth of the house, in the back of the brain\u2014contrasts so crisply with the quiet rush of blowing white outside Kleinzahler\u2019s window, and outside mine as well. Snow\u2019s blankness, the nothingness that covers everything, makes indoors feel particularly interior. \u2014Nicole Rudick<\/b><\/p>\n

Out with the old? That transition is rarely elegant. In my own nebbishy attempt to catch up with an LRB<\/em> subscription, I ended the year on Joshua Cohen\u2019s November diatribe<\/a> against Franzen, popularity, and HBO (\u201cNo one hates him more\u201d). The piece refers to a\u00a0panoply of Oedipus complexes (we have Kraus, Heine, Franzen, Wallace \u2026 and Cohen). For a less genealogically worrisome Teutonic-themed character assassination, I went to Sebald\u2019s Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea<\/i>, printed by Notting Hill Editions<\/a>. It\u2019s about Alfred Andersch, an ex\u2013Mouson Lavendel advertising man cum racial hygienist cum writer, who composed his own blurbs and rebranded his politics to get ahead. In one mesmerizing portrait, Aldersch looks cross, and stuck, and desperate for a cry. \u2014Lucie Elven<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m embarrassed to admit that I barely touched a book over the holidays (besides 84, Charing Cross Road, which I\u2019m in the habit of rereading most years around Christmastime), but I did see a spectacular movie whose imagery I can\u2019t get out of my head. In 1923, a talented artist named Lotte Reiniger was approached […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[438],"tags":[12463,8585,207,42,1807,1327,12461,6208,12464,12462,3078],"class_list":["post-64356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-after-hours","tag-august-kleinzahler","tag-freud","tag-janet-malcolm","tag-jason-epstein","tag-joshua-cohen","tag-lotte-reiniger","tag-martin-scorcese","tag-peter-strickland","tag-the-adventures-of-prince-achmed","tag-twelfth-night"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhat We\u2019re Loving: Adventures in Silhouette; Red Sauce, Whiskey, and Snow; the Narcissistic Hypocrisy at the Center of Human Nature by The Paris Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"January 3, 2014 \u2013 I\u2019m embarrassed to admit that I barely touched a book over the holidays (besides 84, Charing Cross Road, which I\u2019m in the habit of rereading most years\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/01\/03\/what-were-loving-adventures-in-silhouette-red-sauce-whiskey-and-snow-the-narcissistic-hypocrisy-at-the-center-of-human-nature\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What We\u2019re Loving: Adventures in Silhouette; 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