Neither should books like Shutterbabe. Most reviewers love it. They agree with author Deborah Copaken Kogan, a former photojournalist, that it's plucky and post-feminist to build your career by having sex with your colleagues. If your ambition were to move up the management ladder at WalMart, no no, of course not, bad woman! Slutty woman! But in the shit, in Afghanistan and Zimbabwe and Zurich (Zurich?), this petite woman fresh out of Harvard, as she is invariably described, fucks her way to some kind of swaggering self-actualization.

As the excellent essayist Nancy Mairs argues in "The Literature of Personal Disaster," the best of the genre transcends the events; it finds intimacy and resonance in the author's everyday experience. Kogan simply swings from tree to tree, yelling about how revolutionary she is. She isn't confiding anything. She's yelling in your ear at a bar.

It's not even good adventure writing. Body fluids drench Shuttersnatch's narrative. She's always menstruating or expectorating or urinating on her little bitty jeans. When monkeys in Zimbabwe break eggs on her head she spends half a page on a coy description of the spunky liquid. Not to mention the gallons of actual semen that she flings around like...oh! Photo chemicals! I get it. (Curiously, it's Lenscapbitch's overuse of the word "barf" that wears on me the most. She's that kind of unnuanced, lousy writer.)

Aperturehussy represents the latest in the appalling trend of well-promoted books by young, conservative, pseudo-hip harridans. In the end, of course, this one Chooses Life, just like heroin memoirist Ann Marlowe (see "I'm Reading as Fast as I Can," Hermenaut #16). Marries a Princeton grad. Has babies. Settles in New York and makes the best of stupid production work on "Dateline" (actually the least self-aggrandizing and most engaging part of the book). But Kogan's complacent new self gives way to the book's most egregious conceit: that she is somehow, swallow hard now, telling it to her toddler son as a bedtime story. Yes. The book ends, " 'Well, you see, Jacob, it's like this...' Then I open my mouth to begin."

Jacob, if he had any sense, popped open an umbrella. And I shut the book. And we all went night-night.

Up in Mabel's Room and Getting Gertie's Garterdirected by Allan Dwan (VCI Home Video)
review by Chris Fujiwara

Here are two farces, based on popular plays, that had first been filmed in the '20s and were dusted off in the last years of WWII to provide mildly ribald humor for servicemen. You won't have seen anything quite like these films: they must have struck their intended audience as both old-fashioned and wrong, like a confession of years-ago lechery gasped from a too-spry deathbed. Dwan knew exactly what he was up to. In Up in Mabel's Room, the more painful of the pair, a bunch of jerks weekending at a country house (which contains enough firearms for a small militia) climb in and out of windows, dive under beds, punch each other's faces, etc., all because fidgety Dennis O'Keefe will stop at nothing to avoid telling his bride (Marjorie Reynolds) that he once gave another woman (Gail Patrick) a slip with his name embroidered on it. It's risque by 1944 standards—the camera fairly licks its lips over the negligeed Reynolds in bed, and at several points O'Keefe and his loony accomplice (Mischa Auer) contemplate removing the famous slip by force from the wearer's body. The funniest scenes are those in which Auer speaks Russian to a baby and in which characters entering the house seem to be blown in by an Aleutian blizzard.

Getting Gertie's Garter, released a year later, has O'Keefe again and the same plot, but this time the object of the fuss is a garter instead of a slip. The film is wilder and much funnier than Up in Mabel's Room. It has more physical comedy, a better O'Keefe performance, a less threadbare production, a more likeable cast (replacing Gail Patrick with Marie "the Body" McDonald makes a world of difference, although it must be said that J. Carrol Naish is not an improvement on Mischa Auer), and a more fluid mise-en-scene, with excessive eavesdropping through windows. Early in the picture, there's a good anesthesia-induced nightmare sequence featuring a panel of scientists with flashing lights on their foreheads. The surrealism, instead of stopping there, keeps going until it has occupied every crevice of the film. Jerome Cowan mixes a drink called a "double somersault"; Sheila Ryan (who has to spend the last third of the film supposedly nude under a horse blanket) says of O'Keefe, "All of his experiments are so secretive," and pronounces it "se-CREET-ive." The repressed subtext of both films—that the O'Keefe character wants to sleep with his old flame—is closer to the surface in Gertie, so that more is at stake in the prurient-puritanical round-robin.

Snatch directed by Guy Ritchie (Columbia Pictures, 2000)
review by Clarke Cooper

Now even if you're going to restrict yourself to the single-word title realm there are obviously lots of things you can call a jewel-heist gangster comedy without making a vulgar pun, so if your title is a vulgar pun the safe assumption is that you meant it to be. But this movie is completely free of literal or figurative pussy—there aren't even any female characters—so the second meaning of the pun that they've intentionally used for the title is left dangling and all you've got is a pun-monopole. This whole movie is just like that—a big demi-entendre.

The movie's primary wish is to be violent and comedic like those popular Tarantino movies are, so to do that it has gangsters and ethnics in it—it's not actually about gangstery or ethnicity or anything. There's a story about the assorted ethnics all wanting a big diamond to provide complication, and there's a story about the fixing of illegal boxing matches to provide tension. But Tarantino's movies are comedic because they're about ways we can think about the world; that's not present here, so instead of comedy there's only funniness. Since Ritchie doesn't have a comedic structure for his funniness, about two thirds of the way through he doesn't know what to do with it anymore so he has to change the thing into an after-reform-school special about underdogs winning in the end, and that's when it turns into the same story as the Harry Potter books.

I liked Brad Pitt. It was the first time I had; maybe it was because his lines were supposed to be unintelligible. He did a good garble and was affably scrappy.

Reading 1922: a Return to the Scene of the Modern by Michael North (Oxford University Press, 1999)
review by Matthew Battles

By all accounts, 1922 was a pretty good year. For one thing, it was the birthyear of literary modernism, in which both Ulysses and The Waste Land saw publication. It was this year, as the triumphalist story of Modernism has it, that saw the emergence of the "world text"—that sophisticated confection of notorious alienation, linguistic interpenetration, and deep mytho-historical awareness—in rebuttal to the petty values and vulgar culture of philistines and aesthetic reactionaries.

What else was in the bookstores that year? Charlie Chaplin's My Trip Abroad was, for one—a book which, while avowedly popular in its appeal, shows its author exhibiting rootlessness and high alienation that are the hallmarks of High Modernist Experience. In Reading 1922, Michael North shows how profound the connections are between Modernism and the mass culture it allegedly antagonized. While this may not surprise Hermenaut readers, North rightly expects academic theorists—so fond of dichotomy—to be troubled by his view.

In his compelling study, North takes us on a virtual tour of the bookshops of 1922 in which Eliot and Joyce first made their splash. After all, he reminds us, such a "bookstore would have also included newspapers and magazines, not to mention popular novels like Zane Grey's The Wanderer of the Wasteland, which a reader could have taken home along with Eliot to get a different view on wandering in the desert..." Along the way, North points up connections between Modernism and, for example, Edward Bernay's invention of public relations. And the expatriate condition, considered one of the emancipatory techniques of Modernism, has its precedent in the well-traveled condition of immigrants, laborers, soldiers, and subalterns in America and the British Empire.

Ultimately, North is interested not so much in the origins of works of art, but in their reception—a view currently enjoying a minor vogue in academic circles under the guise of "reception theory." Well, I hope the vogue continues; perhaps the academy will follow the lead of North and others, get a clue, and stop treating culture in such a taxonomized fashion. For now, apart from studies like North's, the high and the low remain separate—whether the low is excoriated or sanitized, it remains understood as fundamentally different from, and opposed to, the high. This condition has its uses, both commercial and ideological; they're well documented here and elsewhere. Hats off to North for troubling that condition in the very place of its justification.

House of Mirth directed by Terence Davies (Sony Pictures Classics, 2000)
review by Gloria Fisk

At the beginning of the twentieth century, when Henry James urged Edith Wharton to forget Europe and "do New York" instead, Wharton took it as a challenge: to represent her contemporaries as a "society of irresponsible pleasure-seekers," and yet, not to write an irresponsible, pleasure-seeking novel just for them. A new adaptation of The House of Mirth illustrates just how well she succeeded—as directed by English filmmaker Terence Davies, most well known for The Long Day Closes—Wharton's cautionary tale warns against gluttony in the New Economy as well as in the old. The X-Files's Gillian Anderson plays the orphaned heroine, Lily Bart, who is bred to be a lady but unable to afford it. Redolent in her ruffles, Lily lives in a logically impossible position: she can't make money because all she knows is idleness, but she can't be idle because she has no money. To stave off the consequences of that tautology, she concocts one money-making scheme after another—courting the favors of wealthy men and even investing in the stock market—which lead inexorably to her downfall. Davies pares down that plot to foreground its financial themes, but in the twenty-first century, their metonymic terms trade places. Lily's straitened finances once spoke to the generally tenuous status of ladies. But while the Nasdaq slips and falls on tech stocks, the sentence becomes easier to read the other way around—suggesting that Lily's lovely tremors refer to faultlines in the economy.

"A frivolous society," Wharton wrote, "gains significance through what it destroys." The House of Mirth offers Lily Bart as Exhibit A. It smothers her in fancy furnishings as her opportunities—for happiness at best and survival at least—are closed off one by one. Beautiful and charming, Lily is also single and no longer young, so she knows she must marry quickly. She refers to this nuptial effort as "the business," and acknowledges that it is not going well. Her ability to secure a rich husband is jeopardized by her growing reputation as a woman who desperately wants one, so she does public relations like a pro. Muffling her ambition, she plays the church-going non-smoker (she is neither) in the company of prudish by wealthy men, and the perfect wife-to-be in the company of anybody. Knowing that her future security depends upon her value as it is percieved, she publicly offers herself as a very good investment.

But her efforts to stay on message are consistently undermined by her love interest, Lawrence Selden, who wants her to find real happiness but is too poor to buy it for her himself. Played by Eric Stolz, Selden shows little interest in petty society and everything else, except Lily. "I just want to see what you will do," he says, watching her like TV, and he fails to be amused when she matches herself unequally. As she surrounds herself with people of dimwit, dubious morality, and large bank accounts, he urges her to shirk the stupid company she keeps and "be true to herself." Lily envies him his naiveté, which she considers a luxury, like the bachelor's apartment he takes for granted. "What is truth?" she scoffs, "Where a woman's concerned, it's the story that's easiest to believe."

X-Files viewers will appreciate the effect when that blasphemy against empiricism escapes Scully's (smiling, finally) lips. But, relativism and ruffles notwithstanding, Lily Bart is as rational as a federal agent doing an autopsy in a power suit. She pursues her object without sentiment or hazy logic, even when her object is love or something like it. She is doomed in that pursuit, not because she reasons poorly, but because good reason gets her nowhere; she is too overdetermined to determine her course herself. Her value depends entirely on others for its existence—just like those slipping tech stocks', with no solid numbers to secure their future. Lily's lack of revenues—like every start-up company's—don't prevent her from believing that she should lead a life of luxury. If her white-globed lamps had come from Restoration Hardware and her flouncy sitting room was a lofty space in Soho, she'd be an overvalued stock—a damselindistress.com.

Hermenaut also recommends:

Holes by Louis Sachar (Bantam Doubleday Dell Books for Young Readers, 2000) Innocent of the crime which landed him there, Stanley Yelnats takes his family curse—in which he doesn't believe, of course—to a juvenile detention center called Camp Green Lake. Well, there's no lake there, nor anything remotely green. The mysterious warden makes her charges spend their days digging enormous holes in the dry desert lakebed. It's apparent she's looking for something—something that proves to be more closely tied to Stanley's "curse" than he could have imagined. Brilliant storytelling, full of fabular flights and vernacular mythopoesis. For kids, supposedly—it won the 1998 National Book Award for young people's literature. So buy it for that sullen twelve year-old nephew, and read it on the train home. —MB

In the Air by The Handsome Family (Carrot Top Records, 2000) Country music as Kafka would have written it. Chicago-based Brett and Ronnie Sparks mingle Hank Williams and Leonard Cohen with a poxy red splash of Edgar Allen Poe; a kind of nervy magic results, definitely not your pappy's alt.country.—MB

Suspense directed by Lois Weber (1913) This terrific silent short narrativizes three new technologies: the telephone, the automobile, and split screen. Weber uses speed and time to compress the story of a woman who confronts a burglar and gives it meaning with her superb sense of domestic containment.—IS

The Mole (NBC, Tuesday, 8 pm) Honestly. I love this show. Recast it with people you know from work; it's easy and fun! The producers love those helmet-cams that make the wearer's eyes look really big and scared, which will make you feel like you're watching a geeky porno.—IS

Masashi Harada Condanction Ensemble (Emanem, 2000) Don't call it jazz. It's generative improvisation. I must warn you (I've been tipped off) that soon you won't even be able to call it improvised; it's just generated. Or generative. Call it anything or don't call it, it's an imaginative work of arresting gorgeousness from some of the Boston area's premier creative musicians.—CF

The Films of Eric Rohmer (New York Film Forum, 2001) New York's Film Forum is in the midst of a retrospective of 22 films by Eric Rohmer, of which a smaller selection will travel to the provinces. They're all great; see as many as you can. If you can see only five, let them be My Night at Maud's, Chloe in the Afternoon, The Marquise of O, The Aviator's Wife, and Summer. Or see La Collectionneuse, in which the narrator (Patrick Bauchau), setting the experimental moral tone characteristic of Rohmer's work, declares: "Having thus for the first time in ten years nothing at all to do anymore, I had undertaken to really do nothing, that is, to push idleness to a degree never before attained in my existence."—CF

The New Place Under The Stairs (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY) With the old supporting brickwork left in place this catacomby space displays some Byzantine tapestries and carvings in a way that just about gives you the idea that there might have been some people around at the time who made and lived with this stuff. It connects the two flanking galleries of Byzantine jewelry and things which you otherwise hurry past on your way to something else, and encourages the objects to seem less like ancient dusty stuffed owls.—CC