"Release from ideology is a painful experience. That’s why you need someone there to say, Fuck you, put glasses on!” Slavoj Žižek and Sophie Fiennes on The Pervert's Guide to Ideology

We are in an urban Los Angeles alleyway. A muscly man in plaid shirt and mullet tells a muscly man with no hair that he must either put on a pair of sunglasses or start eating from a trashcan. Suddenly a portly bearded man with a heavy accent—something akin to Dracula with a speech impediment—enters the scene. “I am already eating from the trashcan all the time,” he says. “The name of this trashcan is ideology.” This third man is sweaty Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, once famously dubbed “the Elvis of critical theory.” Whether you consider Žižek a truly great thinker or merely a great contrarian, his hyper-attentive, hyperactive, Lacanian approach to film analysis is undeniably compelling and sometimes eerily, uncomfortably persuasive. In the opening sequence of The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, director Sophie Fiennes deposits Žižek directly into a scene from John Carpenter’s They Live. As it was with Fiennes and Žižek’s previous collaboration, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, this is the film’s MO: rather than have Žižek sit in front of a library or something and pontificate about movies, insert Žižek, Zelig-like, right into the movies under consideration, whether they be The Sound of Music, Brazil, Titanic or Full Metal Jacket. It’s a great source of cheap laughs. It is also a way of making the viewer’s identification with movies complete—and reminding us exactly how ideology works on our consciousness.

The occasion of Zeitgeist’s release of The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology on DVD has finally given me the excuse to run the interview I conducted with Žižek and Fiennes during the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival. I’d met Žižek once before, and knew that anything resembling conversation with him would be challenging, not only because of his spastic garrulousness, but because it can be difficult to parse out his convictions from statements that sound like sheer, asinine provocation for provocation’s sake—especially those regarding gender, which creates a very odd tension when the other person attempting to interject is a woman. Of course, Fiennes and Žižek are clearly pals, but it’s not so much that these two finish each other’s sentences as that Žižek finishes everyone’s sentences within a two-mile radius. Anyway, I can’t deny that the following conversation was loads of fun.

director Sophie Fiennes

JB: Can I ask how you two first met?

Sophie Fiennes: I just reached into the ass of a cow and there he was.

Slavoj Žižek: It was some conference in London.

SF: It was Cambridge. A lecture. I’d wanted you to do an audio commentary on my film about religion.

SŽ: Unfortunately we couldn’t realize that idea.

SF: Fate had a greater collaboration in store.

Avatar

SŽ: [To me] Let’s talk about your fellow countryman, James Cameron, the ideal object of ideological analysis today. Superficially his movies can be read as model of Hollywood Marxism. Take Titanic. Upper-class bad, lower-class good. Ridiculous, no? But beneath this leftist surface you find a very reactionary myth sustaining it. It’s even more the case with Avatar. It’s clear that those jerks on that stupid planet are a kind of local indigenous population attacked by industrial American imperialist army, blah, blah. But, of course, you need a white man to save the natives.

SF: It’s an attempt to restore the marines who, even if crippled, will nonetheless win hearts and minds.

SŽ: It’s great that Avatar was up for Best Picture against Cameron’s ex-wife’s movie. Because Hurt Locker is maybe worse, though it has different ideology, one very popular now, this idea of limiting story to a narrow experience of the horrors of war. To make army life acceptable to public you have to remove all context and just focus on personal suffering. But, you know, I don’t want to dismiss Cameron altogether. What’s that one with Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, where they go down?

JB: The Abyss.

SŽ: Very nice movie.

JB: You mentioned how the Pervert’s films allow you to illustrate your ideas, but I wonder if the ideas themselves change once placed in this context that favours the visual over the textual.

SŽ: No. I’m very dogmatic. I think alone. I am not engaged. And I am in such a constant panic that I cannot be a cooperative, responsive actor.

SF: I like the purity of Salvoj’s field of thinking. My job is to make it understandable as a movie. That transition from Brief Encounter to Brazil to Last Temptation of Christ, for example, is my attempt to connect Slavoj’s ideas in a way that is specific to the film’s train of thought.

Brazil

SŽ: Brazil is for me one of the mega-masterpieces. It’s kind of a pre-cog film. It guessed in advance what the new authoritarian society would be not the old-style fascist leader but a cynical and egalitarian society, a Berlusconian society.

JB: Closer to Kafka and the notion of self-regulation.

SŽ: Kafka says that our godless bureaucratic society is the only way to experience the divine. I love this story I recently heard about an old French lady who’s told that her identity card was stolen. She goes to the bureau and says, “There must be a mistake. I have my card here.” And the bureaucrat tells her, “No, your card was proclaimed lost. What you’re holding in your hand is an illegal document. Please destroy it and ask for a new one.” This is divine. This is the whole secret! In France they even have this thing called certificate existence, which means you get a document that confirms that you exist.

SF: Like a birth certificate.

SŽ: No, it’s much more specific! It says not only that you were born. It’s like friend from Greece told me. His father stopped getting retirement money. He wrote to the ministry to ask why he was no longer getting this pension. The reply was, “Sorry, sir, but I regret to inform you that according to our records you are dead. Could you please come to our office to prove that you are alive?”

SF: This sort of story brings to mind, say, Soviet era bureaucracy, yet something similar exists today, in the cloud, in virtual existence, in the illusion of freedom, the illusion that we have control over our lives when in fact we’ve gleefully hurled ourselves, without overt coercion, into another Kafkaesque network. People are petrified by the possibility that their digital footprint could be erased.

1984

SŽ: Yes and it’s not the simple humanist point of “Oh, we should return to the common sense reality.” We are not just criticising this in a naïve way. The big limitation of 1984, for example, is that fundamentally Orwell says, “Believe your eyes, use common sense, and so on.” You know what for me is the best thing in 1984? Okay, the film version: John Hurt asks Richard Burton, “Tell me, is the Big Brother a myth or does the Big Brother really exist?” And Richard Burton gives him the perfect answer. “It’s not that Big Brother doesn’t exist, what matters is that you don’t exist.” Totally correct answer. You know, I met a guy who wrote a book on George Roy Hill, the director. To make it he visited Paul Newman and Robert Redford, and Redford was all, “I’m so sorry, I don’t have time for you, I have to save the planet.” He told me that Newman was much more friendly.

JB: Huh.

SŽ: But listen, wouldn’t it be wonderful to make a reference guide to non-existent operas? That could be a fun sort of film.

JB: Like a Stanislaw Lem novel.

Solaris

SŽ: Ah, Lem. Take Solaris. I much prefer the novel, because Tarkovsky does spiritual mystification. In Tarkovsky film, the planet Solaris is just a screen for the inner journey of the hero. But in Lem’s novel, the problem is precisely the planet. Is it playing a game with us? It’s a case of how a very materialist, beautiful novel is ruined by this Russian sensibility. It’s maybe the same with Tarkovsky’s best film, Stalker. He pulls the same trick. Going to the Zone means encountering your truth. Whatever. I still think Tarkovsky was brilliant. Yet with Nostalgia he started making “Tarkovsky films,” in the sense of imitating himself a little bit.

SF: I feel like David Lynch is slipping into that.

SŽ: I have such a problem here. I love Lynch. But Inland Empire. Friends are telling me it’s so-so. I bought the DVD, but I’m afraid to watch.

SF: I like it, but it’s sort of falling back on titties.

SŽ: [To me] Do you like David Lynch?

SF: Laura Dern is brilliant.

SŽ: [To Fiennes] That’s a problem. She’s not fuckable for me. I’m a sexist.

JB: Maybe if you see the film you’ll change your mind.

SŽ: Really? Okay! Now we talk men-to-men. Ha, ha.

JB: Well…

SF: I love The Elephant Man.

SŽ: There is this eternal question. Do you dare to tell, a little bit, a film where you cried watching? I’ll tell you where. You remember this scene near the end, where the French freaks help him to go to the boat? Listen, are you a Lynch fan?

JB: Very much so.

Dune

SŽ: Let’s test you. Reactionary fascist revisionists claim Twin Peaks is good, but only the first half. No! You have to stick it to the end. Now, Dune. Supposed to be bad, but there is something very naïvely, beautifully powerful here. Let’s not be seduced by liberal propaganda. You have totems like Leader, Discipline, Sacrifice, Common Good. Liberals say, “Oh, this is proto-fascist.” No! There is nothing fascist in the idea of discipline and sacrifice. Fascism is fascism because it includes such notions within a framework of anti-Semitism, certain variations on capitalism, etc. I like Dune. But my friends think that when I praise 300 as progressive, this was going far. My last revisionism: I quite liked—and I know this is the lowest of the lowest—the last two seasons of 24. You have Jack Bauer torturing, blah, blah, and you have Alison Taylor, good liberal president. They both got in the bad luck and break down. It shows very honestly how, within today’s universe, there is no way to be noble.

SF: You make me want to see it now.

SŽ: It’s not that good, I have to tell you. Life is too short. Fuck, even if you count out the publicity, it’s 24 times 45 minutes! Unless you are freak with nothing but time, it’s just too much.

JB: To get back to Lynch, I find it interesting that you’re singling out the productions in which he was working for a major studio. Could we consider that external influence as Lynch’s “Big Other?”

SŽ: But I am here, very concrete, always resisting simple demonization of Hollywood. Take Godfather. I think, unfortunately, that first one is still the best. From there, it goes down because Coppola was given too much freedom. Hollywood, of course, I hate the usual machinery, blah, blah, but listen, how often did they produce wonders? Take one who, I think, after Hitchcock, should be rehabilitated: Ernst Lubitsch.

SF: I love Lubitsch.

JB: Everybody loves Lubitsch. I mean, if they’ve seen his films.

SŽ: But there are no good theories!

SF: Thing is, in the studios now, the blockbuster idea has just so thoroughly taken over everything. I remember back when Ralph [Fiennes, Sophie’s brother] was doing Strange Days.

SŽ: Good film.

SF: Steven Jaffe was the producer. He also produced Ghost. 

SŽ: I hate Ghost.

SF: I saw Steven again in L.A. about a year ago and he was telling me that the studios won’t fund anything other than huge blockbusters. He’s a real cinephile, and there have traditionally always been such people in Hollywood, but in the last seven years especially there’s just an endless hunt for blockbusters with no middle range left.

The Sweet Hereafter

SŽ: I am naïve, but you ask me great films of the last few decades: Altman Short Cuts, Ang Lee Ice Storm, or here, your guy, Egoyan’s Sweet Hereafter.

JB: Really?

SŽ: I like it.

SF: Really?

SŽ: What’s your problem? You ask me as if I am some hoodlum, as if I am saying I only like women over 80.

JB: There is, for example, the romanticization of incest in that film. The barn full of candles.

SŽ: This is for me obvious. What I like is the court scene, this small lie this girl says that ruins everything. I don’t like other Egoyans. As American reactionaries like to say against intellectuals, this Egoyan is “too bright for his own good.” But your other guy…

JB: Cronenberg.

SŽ: Many of his films I don’t like, but you know which one I do. It’s flawed.

JB: Let me guess. M. Butterfly.

M. Butterfly

SŽ: Only now do I get how to read these films, M. Butterfly and The Crying Game. Why do you have this shock when the guy discovers that his sex partner is a man? Because he discovers his own fundamental fantasy. Real heterosexual love, where you truly accept that your partner is a woman: I think this is very rare. Only in true love. Very romantic.

SF: Yes. I find it really interesting in Mulholland Drive, for example, how much men love this woman who looks so much like a transvestite.

SŽ: Not Naomi Watts!?

JB: No, Laura Harring, the Mexican.

Mulholland Drive

SŽ: Naomi Watts, she is really beautiful. I like women when they abandon their goal to act in fatally beautiful roles. Did you see this totally stupid supernatural hero movie, Hancock? Charlize Theron plays an ordinary housewife. She wants to be an ordinary woman, and it makes her so much more attractive. It’s the same with Scarlett Johansson. She was okay in Lost in Translation as ordinary girl. But the moment she wants to become femme fatale, horrible.

SF: Again, it’s this whole thing about a woman that’s a man.

SŽ: Yes, femme fatale is woman that’s a man.

JB: That’s also what made Nicole Kidman’s career so much more interesting, when she broke away from the token sex-pot roles and made films like, say, The Others, in which she can use her iciness and neuroses.

SŽ: Didn’t she make the fourth or fifth version of Invasion of the Boyd Snatchers? It’s not so bad.

JB: There is something about that story’s malleability.

SŽ: [To Fiennes] This is his polite way of saying, “Bullshit!” I like the Philip Kaufman version, with Donald Sutherland. The ending, when the world is already occupied by body snatchers, you remember how the snatchers react when they see still humans? [Imitates Donald Sutherland’s gaping jaw howl] For years it became fashion among my friends to greet each other like this.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

JB: I want to ask you about something the film leaves us with. What does it really mean to “dream differently?”

SŽ: It’s a very Stalinist notion that I took from my friend, Alain Badiou. What really identifies us with a certain ideological field is not just the explicit statements or whatever. True change is change in your dreams. In the case of Seconds, that wonderful film by Frankenheimer, the problem with Rock Hudson is that he didn’t change his dreams. He changed his life, but he remained with old dreams. It can seem relatively easy to break from society, yet you remain trapped in its dreams.

JB: If you want to truly release yourself from ideology you have to accept that you are going to fundamentally, even unconsciously change.

SŽ: Absolutely! That’s the whole point! Which brings us back to They Live. Release from ideology is a painful experience. That’s why you need someone there to say, “Fuck you, put glasses on!” Anti-ideology stories are nearly always about taking the glasses off to see things how they really are. No! You need glasses for ideology! This is why sometimes in psychoanalytic process, just before it ends, you usually have a depression, maybe even want suicide—because you realize that you’re losing your dreams.

      

TIFF '12: Sound and visions

I’m walking down a very long, almost intestinal, amber-lit, fully carpeted, labyrinthine corridor in Toronto’s Fairmont Royal York Hotel, built in 1929, though there’s been some sort of hotel on that site since 1843. (“…you’ve always been here, Mr. Torrance.”) It’s an old place by Canadian standards, creaky, trance-inducing, seemingly out of time while you wander its quietest, windowless passages. And an ideal place to meet with Rodney Ascher and Tim Kirk, director and producer, respectively, of Room 237, the new essay film that explores a multitude of deep readings, some verging on conspiracy theories, of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. The film is very fun, nerdy and obsessive, ridiculous and compelling; in some ways feels to me like a parody of film criticism at its most niggling and caffeinated. The film made a big splash at Sundance and Cannes and is now a major highlight at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival, which as I finally sit down to write something on it is just a few days from closing.

Museum Hours

Room 237 is essentially constructed from a combination of intricate visual montage, music and voice-over, which, at least in terms of form, makes the experience of it not entirely dissimilar to that of some other notable TIFF ’12 titles, such as Miguel Gomes’ selectively soundtracked Tabu, a gorgeous, spellbinding film that’s at once a work of romantic cinema and a critique of romantic cinema, or Jem Cohen’s lovely Museum Hours, with its many moving passages of voice-over monologue from a Viennese museum guard who befriends Montrealer Mary Margaret O’Hara, in town to visit a comatose cousin, or Sophie Fiennes’ The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, which once again deposits sweaty Slovenian critical theorist Slavoj Žižek into myriad movies and lets him talk and talk and talk, or Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder, which even more than Tree of Life feels like a fluid palimpsest of collective memories: I know there were some scenes of actual dialogue in the film, but the overall impression it left me with was one of a stream of internal voices asking questions, images of fingers brushing walls, trees, objects and bodies, of landscapes and music and drifting emotional states. It’s a good thing, I think, that Malick is working more steadily these days, making more films with more manageable runtimes (ie: under two hours), so that every new Malick movie is less of a monumental cinema event, so that something like To the Wonder can simply be regarded as another step in this singular director’s path, part of a larger whole, an ongoing exploration. Flawed or not, I’d still rather enter into any of Malick’s cinema spaces than I would watch most normal movies.

Berberian Sound Studio

Heightening tension between sound and image feels to me like a running theme this year. In Peter Strickland’s wonderfully paranoid and funny, eerie and elegantly crafted Berberian Sound Studio Toby Jones plays a late ’70s sound mixer who travels to Rome to work on a trashy Giallo film and gradually seems to be sucked into some wormhole hybrid of the fictive aural realm he’s cutting and pasting together and his own personal world of quiet English despair. In Pablo Berger’s Blancanieves, Snow White is transferred to the milieu of bullfighting in 1920s Spain, rendered as a black and white, silent melodrama brimming with bold music, some of it flamenco-inspired, all of it totally overcooked. Every scene is belaboured; Berger makes a self-congratulatory meal of every variation on the familiar tale; for all its ostensible large-scale emotions Blancenieves feels like an utterly academic formalist exercise, a parade of impeccably shot and edited clichés. The final scenes are almost great, until a single teardrop contaminates everything with faux ambiguity and supposed depth.

Interrogating images: Lacan at the Scene

If the title alone doesn’t grab you, let me offer the premise of Lacan at the Scene (MIT Press, $28.95) as a best-chance hook. Author Henry Bond’s opening statement is sufficiently clear and concise as to dissuade me from any fumbling paraphrasing. It asks: “what if Jacques Lacan—the brilliant and eccentric Parisian psychoanalyst—had left his home in the early 1950s in order to travel to England and work as a police detective? How might he have applied his theories in order to solve crime?” It sounds like the prompt for a work of speculative fiction, but what this book actually is—a study of an under-examined use of photography; a method of de-mystifying an ostensibly inscrutable body of work; a series of case studies intended for practical use in homicide investigations—probably makes for a richer and more satisfying read, if a tough slog for the squeamish. Considering how appalling some of the subject matter in Lacan at the Scene is, and how brutal are some of its images, I’m almost embarrassed to admit how utterly compelling I found it to be. But I digress—this post isn’t about my personal neuroses. Okay, at least not more than any other.

In developing his proposition, Bond—a London-based writer and photographer whose author photo suggests a guy suffering from chronic insomnia—became a regular visitor to the National Archive in order to study extant materials pertaining to murders that took place in England between 1955 and 1970. He was surely regarded by the more judgmental clerks with some suspicion. He offers an anecdote in which he requested to re-examine a case file he’d already looked over only to find that it had since been deemed unfit for public inspection. When he made inquiries he was escorted by a senior archivist through hidden doors and down a long corridor into a conference room where three men waited for him, the closed case file box resting on a table between them. These men explained that Bond’s previous access to the file was granted only by accident—the file was in fact still under a sort of quarantine. “Such material is not withheld for a logistical reason,” writes Bond, “…it is simply too contagious to release.” This assessment seems intended less as a way of poking fun at Archive policy or its cabalistic culture as much as to emphasize just how taboo the perusal of images of violent crimes is. Which goes some distance toward explaining why, despite the wealth of superb writing out there covering photography in myriad forms, the critical writing on crime scene photography remains undernourished. It is, nevertheless, the cornerstone of Bond’s thesis.

Henry Bond, looking a little more rested

Bond takes Lacan’s tripartite model of mental functioning—the categories of perverse, psychotic and neurotic—and meticulously “reads” a series of murder crime scene photos in order to uncover evidence as to under which model the killer could be classified. Bond also makes frequent use of Roland Barthes’ two categories of photographic observation, studium and punctum—respectively, the details that appear obviously relevant to an image’s context or meaning, and those that strike the viewer on a purely instinctive level—as laid out in Camera Lucida, so as to interrogate his own process of looking. Given that psychoanalysis urges us to regard the seemingly incidental as potentially significant, there’s a whole lot of punctum being heeded here, and fruitfully so. Bond suggests an apparent order in the chaotic disarray left in the wake of a psychotic murder, for example. Whether or not this methodology signals any sort of innovation in the established standards of police investigations I have no idea. But to the layman, especially one with a special interest in photography, psychoanalysis or both, Bond’s theorizing is both fascinating and enlightening. We may enter into each of these studies with only a certain morbid, perhaps guilt-ridden interest in the sick or tawdry aspects of their implied narratives, but in every case Bond goes deeper into the psychological ramifications implicit in these vestiges of murder than you’re likely to find in Faces of Death, a Weegee compilation, or whatever equally lurid work of exploitation—or, to be generous, exploitation art—you might find yourself compulsively surveying.

The perverse killer is found in a case where a woman is killed in her back garden, in full, almost theatrically staged view of a window, or potential witness. The psychotic killer is found in a confession that explains how murder was necessitated by mortal danger emanating from a bar of soap. The neurotic killer is found in a crime scene where beside a neatly piled column of books there lies both a confession to the killing of the corpse left behind and a polite request that these books be returned to the appropriate library before they’re overdue. The neurotic impulse to “undo” violent acts is further exemplified by a case in which the killer murders the victim and subsequently places a pillow under the victim’s head and a glass of water by the victim’s side. Imaginatively citing the writings of J.G. Ballard, William Burroughs, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Slavoj Zizek—who also happens to be the curator of the series to which Lacan at the Scene belongs—and the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Michael Powell, Michelangelo Antonioni, David Lynch and Christopher Nolan, among many others, Bond offers numerous points of reference through which to contextualize his investigatory process. Straddling fact and fiction, the established and the untested theoretical, using language that is always to the point without being excessively cold or alienating, he takes the reader through a labyrinth of nightmare to gain wider insight into how our minds betray us, and how we can understand the residue of trauma. It might even help you understand non-homicidal behaviour a little better.

Manic repression: Sentimental Exorcisms

There are forms of oppression so subtle, draconian, and fully incorporated into our shared way of living as to press their hoary bulk upon us only in guises of kindness, invitation, and concern. The stifling embrace of altruism. Trevor Spate offers a curious case study. He’s a market analyst having some sex problems at home, which is to say he’s having a tough time working up the energy to perform the sex act with his wife Gillian. Gillian wants a baby, which, requiring sex, only increases the pressure. Trevor takes to visiting a peeler bar to get him in the mood, but his gallant efforts to defend the dignity of an ungrateful waitress—who not coincidentally resembles Gillian, at least from a certain distance—yield nothing but troubles. He’s forced to take a leave of absence, coerced into going into analysis as part of his legal defense, urged to visit his sister and brother-in-law and their wriggling new child in Tofino, of all places. Next thing you know he’s trapped with a self-described reformed rapist with a ponytail who co-opts Neil Young to justify his own neuroses and plies Trevor with experimental drugs that ostensibly produce only “positive emotions” and the most tender-loving desires. Trevor has fallen victim to the “tyranny of sympathy.”

Trevor’s one of several such protagonists inhabiting Sentimental Exorcisms (Coach House Books, $18.95), Toronto author David Derry’s eloquently titled debut, a collection of blackly comic stories in which the Victorian era lives on in the collective unconscious of the white Canadian middleclass male. Stories in which no man is allowed to tend the garden of their own repressed impulses in peace. Stories of men with thorny mom and dad issues, neighbour issues, spouse issues, workplace issues, poo issues. In some cases organized transgression becomes a form of self-medication, but unforgiving society seems unable to appreciate such valiant efforts to take matters into one’s own hands. In Derry’s taut, arrestingly witty opening tale “one of the University of Toronto’s top English undergrads,” employing perfectly sound solipsistic logic, arrives at the conclusion that the only way to fully realize his inherent and sturdy normalcy is to extinguish his compulsion to peep through peeping. “Attainment is annihilation,” he explains. He buys a ladder and a painting suit. He limits his technically criminal therapy to two nights a week. If only he could just manage to see a woman sodomized then surely he would revert to the pristinely well-adjusted individual he and his looming parents know him to be. (In a sly bit of detail, Derry has his protagonist alternately studying The Portrait of Dorian Gray and ‘The Turn of the Screw,’ both being works not only involving sexual repression, but more importantly, looking.)

David Derry, photo by Shannon Bramer

The risk with this sort of material is that the author inevitably condescends to his characters, smugly stacking their often-tormented psyches with so much fodder for gags cheap or otherwise. Derry largely avoids this through writing in the first-person and stressing identification through sheer desperation and what would appear to be a large number of characteristics shared by both the author and his creations. Only a short piece that takes the amusing form of a letter addressed to real-life author Austin Clarke—written by a lawyer convinced that two of Clarke’s stories were based on true events in which the lawyer himself played an instrumental role—seems to stumble through an awkward balance of exposition and the narrator’s somewhat tiring, pedantic tone. Yet the most sympathetic protagonist in Sentimental Exorcisms turns out to inhabit Derry’s only tale written in the third-person. The eponymous hero of ‘The Eventual Eponymization of Tim Pine’ is a Polish-Canadian stamp collector whose washroom experiences epitomize that horror of the log that won’t drown so often described by Slavoj Zizek. I mean it as no small compliment when I say that Derry really knows how to write shit. In the story of Tim Pine Derry transforms an innocent bowel movement into a form of disaster fiction. Here’s a sample:

The aforementioned swirls suggested heavy use, but the water had been clear, and he’s noticed nothing unusual in his advance flush. This time the contents gurgled and started to rise. Back up against the door, he fumbled the lock open, eye on the bowl, and twisted out of the stall with his belt still undone, as the soiled, matted surface paused at the rim before overflowing, just a trickle.

Coach House’s lovely packaging of Sentimental Exorcisms features reproductions of paintings by Greg Denton excerpted from a series entitled Out of Date: 365 Self Portraits. Denton himself joins Austin Clarke by playing an actual role in one of Derry’s stories. In ‘Greg Denton Dons Golden Threads in Anticipation’ a 42-year-old stockbroker unexpectedly becomes one of several subjects—all of them named Greg Denton—to be painted by Denton. The irony that drives the story emerges from the protagonist feeling singled-out and redeemed by an invitation received explicitly for no other reason than his bearing an apparently very common name. Yet, come to think of it, our titular Greg Denton does prove himself a unique individual as the story reaches its conclusion by clothing himself in what reads as one flamboyantly ugly motherfucking suit.

Well, there may be a lot of Greg Dentons in the world, but there was surely only one Raymond Carver. Or was there? Controversy still lingers around the degree of authorship shared between the late Carver and his devoted editor Gordon Lish, crediting with having excised massive chunks of Carver’s most beloved stories and even changing endings, titles and names of characters. My friend Salvador insists that Lish was responsible for what he refers to as “the Carver twist.” (Salvador always places finger and thumb in close proximity and then flips his hand over whenever he says "twist.") I’m not so sure. But it does make you wonder about how many people can claim some part of the person we all know as Raymond Carver. Also, according to Wikipedia there’s also a famous darts player with the same name.

In any case, the Library of America has recently published Raymond Carver: Collected Stories ($50), which offers the whole canon between two covers. These stories remain some of the most influential and enduring in modern American letters, and the nicely packaged collection should make a superb Xmas gift for completists.