Shanghai: Day One

Considering the obscene time difference, I woke up at the rather respectable hour of 9:30, when I heard Josh and Lynn padding around the living room in their slippers (I was also immediately given slippers upon my arrival; street shoes stay by the door). Breakfast was tea and slices of watermelon, which I sucked at greedily, not realizing that lunch would be soon. My mouth was still swollen, but it didn’t hurt anymore; I merely looked like a victim of Botox. Josh went off to work (he teaches at English First!; we would later go spy on him through the windows of his classroom, the only word on the board: “commercialization”— advanced class!) and after dallying a bit, we set off as well.

As usual, I have been a lazy traveler and have not so much as cracked the guidebook I checked out of the library weeks ago. Luckily, Lynn has planned a five item itinerary for each day, complete with restaurant choices (I’d admitted that I liked to eat, and only wanted to eat local cuisine, when she mentioned that Josh mostly liked to eat Western food). And so, we got on a bus, and went to Cheng Cheng’s Art Salon, a restaurant modeled on Old Shanghai, with big red booths and green glass lamps, baskets hanging from the ceilings and WWII-era tchotchkas scattered around the tables. We were the only diners, perhaps because it was early, perhaps because it was Sunday, or perhaps because of the holiday (Chinese New Year celebrations go on for nine days). But the food was delicious. There was some kind of ground green vegetable mixed with finely minced tofu; served cold, it had a mild, nutty flavor. Then came a giant bowl filled with murky brown liquid with an inch-thick floater of clear oil. “Sesame oil,” Lynn explained. Inside the bowl, eel, in rich, sweet sauce. Shanghainese cuisine is known for being two things: sweet and oily; this doesn’t necessarily sound good, but it is. We were also brought a giant crab meatball swimming in juices, a dish of chewy gluten with spongy tomatoes and more of that juicy green loofah, bowls of plump, sweet rice, and a pot of delicate floral tea.

Walking to our next destination, I admitted again that I liked to eat, and Lynn pointed out that there is really no other good reason to visit Shanghai—it’s not very pretty, not very cultural (except, she noted, for the fact that it’s a different culture), and food is perhaps the best thing the city has to offer. Looking around at the concrete landscape around me—ugly towers built quickly to house lots of people, power lines thick enough to create an outdoor ceiling, roads so wide and choked with traffic that the only way to cross is by concrete overpass—complete with escalator up!, and laundry hanging from every balcony, I had to agree. All of Shanghai smells like stale cigarettes (though I haven’t seen that many smokers), and the air quality keeps all of us blowing phlegm from our throats and noses all day. This is really an ugly city, the skyline draped in smoggy mist (not so bad as New Delhi, but something like it), the entire thing under constant construction, this time in preparation for the 2010 World Expo. Everywhere, tiny broken down kiosks filled with fruit or gutted fish huddle in the shadows of climbing condos, but even the new construction looks dated and dusty, as if the project had been started twenty years ago and left unfinished.


We walked and walked and walked and walked, until we came to Taikang Lu, a tiny enclave of quaint, twisting streets and low stone buildings. Hung with bird cages, the alley’s dead ends housed rusty bicycles, the walls papered with fading pictures. Though this looked more like the old city I was expecting, the experience was partly constructed; the shops were all high-end, selling handcrafted jewelry, scarves, and candles one would find at any American seaside resort town. I took pictures, but bought nothing.


We walked more, and then took the subway, an ultra modern transit system so clean and safe as to make New York’s subway seem unimproved since the late 1970s. The tracks (free of both foul water and litter) are protected from the platform by plexi-glass walls that slide open only when the train has arrived. Once on the train, one can move freely between cars because they are completely open to each other. We went only one stop, to Raffles City, where Lynn promised “all the young people are.”

And it was true—while the city’s streets are filled with elderly Chinese people in button-down padded jackets, curled hair, metal glasses, tottering along the sidewalk with canes and standing in front of their doorways doing “exercises,” the mall is where I finally found the city: Chinese youth, not unlike Americans, congregate in this circular high rise filled with sparkling lights, innocuous pop music, bare-torsoed underwear ads, raucous food courts, and overpriced merchandise (which no one seemed to be buying).


We wandered in and out of a few shops, making our way to the top floor to rest for awhile over coffee at Charme, a posh Hong-Kong style eatery where the waitstaff brings a piece of cloth to drape over the coat on your chair so that it doesn’t get accidentally splashed. But don’t think that means that the waitstaff was attentive—tipping is uncommon in China, and the wait time for a menu, for your order, for the check, quickly demonstrates the purpose behind this Western practice. Again, Lynn ordered (although the menu was in enough English that I ordered my own drink—mostly out of curiosity—“Hong Kong style mix of tea and coffee with milk.” Once I added a lot of sugar, it was rather drinkable. We had a giant plate of thin fried noodles with shrimp and onions (mind you, we’d only lunched four hours ago) and the specialty of the house: a desert loaf I saw on every table. “Everyone orders it,” she said. “Yes, everyone orders it, but why doesn’t anyone eat it?” I asked, looking around at the brown bread cubes on every table. “You eat the inside!” she laughed at me, and oh, yes, you do. This is probably the least healthy thing I’ve had thus far: a warm quarter loaf of spongy, super-sweet white bread, cut inside into bite-sized cubes, and topped with a generous scoop of butter. We devoured it, even peeling up the bottom and tearing sweet, white swaths from the inside of the hard, brown exterior fortress once it was clearly all gone.


We strolled into People’s Park, where old men gathered around stone tables playing cards.


A lone man walked too close by us and whispered “Acid!” He proceeded to follow us until Lynn got the willies, while I guided her to the part of the park where a few unhappy children played on forlorn, washed out fair rides, fished half-dead goldfish from a pond, and sat at picnic tables painting pictures. We made our way to the Shanghai MOCA, a tiny museum with an innocuous exhibition of “Couple’s Art,” most of it dreadful, with the exception of some fiberglass nude sculptures by Xiang Jing—slightly reminiscent of those by Ron Mueck, a bit more alienesque, a bit more emotive.


The best part of the show was the hysterical wall text, the beginning of which read: “Marriage and family can be listed as the most important civilization achievements in the evolutionary theory of mankind, with the relationship between spouses as the ultimate relationship between the two genders, said anthropologists.” Which anthropologists?! This was only one of many paragraphs ripe for deconstruction. I proposed the China’s paternalist government has effectively defanged the country’s artists. Lynn agreed, adding that Chinese artists have a less than complete understanding of irony as it functions in the Western art world because they weren’t exposed to any Western art until a few years ago.

And then, we walked some more. Lynn was killing time until it got dark. We went into a shop where I bought some gifts—notebooks with amusing Engrish captions (“Two People’s Happiness: We are the best friend. We take a walk together, cry together, and share all happiness together. We can’t lose other.”), teacups, a pencil box. We went to another mall, where I bought a stuffed doll, and a display was advertising an alarm clock for children. I tried on some sweaters for which my arms were far, far, far too fat, being an overfed American. And then it was dark.


We walked along Nanjing Lu, which Lynn explained was once illegal for Chinese people to walk along. Now, it’s filled with them, riding along in trolleys, taking pictures in front of the golden ox set up for the New Year, going in and out of department stores. The street burns with neon characters and flashing lights, a kind of extruded Times Square, much more beautiful in a language I cannot penetrate. I took a million blurry pictures, and we walked until the end.


Then we took the subway to the swanky Haiku, the number one sushi restaurant in Shanghai, where we had a small meal: two bottles of exquisite sparkling sake (as pink and sweet as Tab up front, with that delicate lingering of sake at the end—dangerously drinkable), live scallops rolled with red and white tuna, and elegant stacks of seared salmon and tuna with avocado, topped with radish slices. The flavors were very mild but the fish was excellent. We dawdled, spying on the other patrons and discussing whether or not the bathroom entrance is the right place for a restaurant to be subversive (I had gone, for the second time, into the wrong one, and been corrected by a glowering attendant; the first time this happened, at People 7, the doorknobs were all affixed to the hinge side of the door, so that trying each one, they seemed locked, until the surly attendant pushed one open for me from the other side; here, the two doors had the men/women logos on them, but with the universal sign for “no”—the red circle with a bar through it—so that the women’s room was marked “no men,” and the men’s room “no women.” Of course, I went into the men’s room).


A taxi took us home where we filled empty jugs with water at the vending machine in front of Lynn’s building (tap water here is non-potable). Josh came home while we were doing this, and after some chit-chat about the day, we all crashed out.

Shanghai: Day Zero (Arrival)

My preemptive strike against jetlag was successful (I slept a mere hour the night before my 7:00 AM flight to Shanghai via San Francisco, so that the miserable eighteen hours of economy seating would pass in a medicated haze of tea with lemon, wet peas and carrots, and melted cheese on processed turkey and heat storage-hardened bread). Upon landing at Pudong airport around nightfall, I procured my luggage and swished out to the taxi stand, having already changed currencies at Travelex when my flight landed an hour early in nostalgic San Francisco (whose brown hills I could only stare at wistfully from floor-to-ceiling windows, hearing the voices of my parents on the phone only fifteen minutes away, all sealed away from touch by the TSA). I showed the driver the Chinese characters Lynn had sent me via PDF, but unlike most of New York’s foreign cabbies, he was only partially literate in a language clearly not his own. Four an hour on the highway, there was nothing to see but enormous billboards advertising Mercedes and BMWs. Finally, we exited onto city streets, and thanks to some photographs of the building Lynn had emailed me, we found it. I went up seventeen stories in the cold, stale elevator, onto a cold, dark, concrete landing. Lynn lives in a bunker.

When she opened the door in leather motorcycle jacket and straight bangs, first we had a big hug, and then I looked around with some surprise. Inside the bunker, one doesn’t know that one is in a bunker; the walls are paneled with inlaid wood; the sofas are brown and white gingham. The ceilings have swirling panels built in with recessed lighting and enormous, flagellate light fixtures. It looks a bit like the eighties, and my bedroom has pink and white polka-dot wallpaper with a Mini Mouse runner through the middle. Lynn, the artist, the world citizen, looks very out of place here, but the apartment is her grandmother’s and so, we are here. I am just grateful to have a place to stay.

It was still early, though I was in a bit of a daze—uncertain whether I was hungry or not, tired or not, or whether my feet were even on the ground for certain—but I took a hot shower and we went out. Lynn brought me to the kind of bar that one finds all over lower Manhattan, complete with a secret mode of entry (the heavy iron door slides open when one puts one’s hand in the correct part of the relief logo—nine circles forming a square). The drinks menu gave cocktail names in English, but the descriptions were all in Chinese, so while Lynn drank chilled sake, I ordered something that came flaming: a tiny glass with floating layers of Kahlua, Bailey’s, and Vodka, the clear alcohol at the top cushioning the pale blue plasma that I quickly puffed out. After one drink, we proceeded to a restaurant quite the opposite: Charmant, a Taiwanese comfort-food joint littered with white expats and Chinese locals alike (so that I could have just as easily been back in the Bay Area). Again, the menu was daunting (with English descriptions of dishes that appeared rather suspicious), so I told Lynn to order. It seems most restaurants here serve family-style anyway—in fact often only bringing one menu to the table—and so this has become the dining program while I’m here.

The food began to come out: a cold dish of fat, translucent noodles in watery peanut sauce, a pot of bony chicken nodules in a rich, hot, sweet barbecue sauce, with whole cloves of garlic and liberal shavings of ginger root, tiny clams in a salty broth with a wet green vegetable Lynn called loofah, a heaping plate of sautéed greens, sturdier than spinach but not as sturdy as kale, and a broth swimming with dumplings (soup here served last, unlike in the states). The restaurant, though, is known for its desserts, and so we had to order it: a disturbingly tall and narrow tower of shaved ice, dripping with a sort of mung bean syrup (a milky, pasty, only mildly sweet thing), and dotted with chewy pink cubes and black balls at the bottom (taro and milk pearls). Strange, but not unpleasant.

Back home, Josh had come back from work, and so we all chatted a bit before going to bed. My mouth felt terribly tingly, and washing up in the bathroom, I saw why; my lower lip had swollen to thrice its normal proportion. “Perhaps,” I told Lynn, “I am allergic to clams?” Without much more worry, I put some ointment on it and went to bed. Although the apartment was terribly cold (concrete walls don’t make for cozy nests), I slept and slept and slept.

Books: Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl

I started this book expecting to hate it; I have a disposition against female authors, and this one in particular, judging by her jacket photo, was younger and prettier than I, in addition to being, of course, a more accomplished writer. The flap’s synopsis looked insipid (a high school heroine named Blue?!), and the table of contents gimmicky (each chapter is named after a classic). The pages were even littered with coy illustrations. Having just come off of The Emperor’s Children, I thought that this would be another girly dud.

But once I started reading, I fell for it instantly. Blue Van Meer is an over-read, under-socialized girl starting her senior year of high school. She’s been raised by her father, a traveling professor of all things revolutionary, and has attended countless schools in as many US states, often moving every semester, getting the bulk of her education on lengthy cross-country drives with dad, forced to read aloud from old Hollywood biographies and recite Romantic poetry and Transcendental quotations from memory. Suddenly, she finds herself fixed, for an entire year, at a prestigious and pricey private high school, struggling to navigate a confusing social scenario, in which the most popular set is forced to include her at their pet teacher’s behest.

Pet teacher? Yes—this is one of those very special teachers whom students idolize (she teaches only one class: Film). This teacher invites her favorite six students to her house for weekly dinners, outlandish affairs with wine, show tunes, and globe-trotting menus. She takes them on camping trips. One might think it strange—if not a bit disconcerting—that a teacher would develop such close relationships with her students (it’s even intimated that she might have had a sexual affair with one of the boys, who is particularly attached).

And it does become disconcerting, when she takes them on a camping trip and—holy cannoli—commits suicide by hanging herself, right there for Blue Van Meer to discover her. The girl's social life is wrecked when the popular set then turns against her. Things get worse when Blue’s father disappears, after she tells him about some research she has done, linking both him and the mysterious teacher to a group of urban terrorists active in the 1960s.

It was at this point that I fell out of love with the book, racing to finish it and untangle the mystery. I felt cheap about doing so. I was no longer reading for the pleasure of the prose, but for a simple answer. The pages caught fire.

And so, it turns out, Pessl is just another Messud. Her voice is younger, smarter—more precocious, and more prone to fantasy, but engaged in the same scheme: creating a literary page-burner. The prose is littered with allusions and quotations, and the savvy, well-read and well-cultured reader picks up on these and delights in them, but is ultimately driven by the juicy, gossip-filled plot: will Blue lose her virginity to the mysterious Black, on whom she crushes? Is the mysterious teacher having a secret affair with Blue’s father? We know at the start to expect something bad, because the entire novel is written in flashback, from Blue’s dorm room at Harvard, where she can’t stop seeing the specter of two dead feet dangling in the air. And so we wait for that bad thing to happen, deliciously nervous, racing through page after page.

Is this bad? I don’t know. I felt let down at the end, as though Pessl assumed I needed a fantastic twist to keep me engaged in an otherwise perfectly good coming-of-age tale. As an epilogue, though, she includes a quiz (including multiple choice and an essay question), the questions of which imply that Blue may simply be an over-imaginative, over-read teenage girl, that the surprise ending may be nothing more than a fantasy she has constructed to protect herself from the truth (that the beloved teacher actually did commit suicide, rather than being silenced by a murderer in the dark). This possibility sits better with me—ambiguity is always a safe haven for uncertain writers.

Dance: Douglas Lee's Lifecasting at the New York City Ballet

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Movies: A Pervert's Guide to Cinema

Last year, I’d never heard of Sophie Fiennes, and now I’ve seen two of her documentaries in one month. She unquestionably knows what she’s doing, both in finding interesting subjects and filming them in the appropriate way. A Pervert’s Guide to the Cinema is a lengthy lecture from philosopher and critic Slavoj Žižek, filled with delicious illustrative clips of movies (mostly Hitchcock and Lynch). Žižek speaks to us sometimes from a white soundstage, where he seems pasted onto the screen, a dark, kinetic speck surrounded by blinding light, but mostly, he lectures from within the scenes of the movies he’s describing: the hotel toilet bowl from The Conversation, the rowboat from The Birds, the chair where Neo must choose between red and blue pills in The Matrix. It’s a little unsettling, but so is his thesis.

In the past, I’ve only dipped a toe in Žižek and other psychoanalytic film criticism, when I took a Hitchcock class at UC Berkeley with DA Miller, shocked to discover that all of Hitchcock’s oeuvre centers around the anus, and our obsession with keeping it clean. That felt mostly like Miller’s own obsession as a standard-issue, leather wearing, Bay Area gay man. Žižek, a bearded Eastern European who talks to quickly he spits, frantically waving his hands, as if he were my mother trapped in my father’s body (he really does look awfully like my dad. . .) doesn’t seem to have much personally invested in what he argues, which makes him slightly more believable. He’s actually incredibly convincing, even though, once out of the theatre, one is slightly stunned by what he’s convinced one to believe.

Žižek’s first premise about the cinema is that it teaches us what and how to desire. He illustrates this nicely with a scene from a 1930s movie in which a woman walks down the street and stops so that a train can pass by; each of the train’s lit windows becomes a movie screen, offering up fantasies of the romantic love she had just arranged to encounter later that night. But Žižek has an even more compelling premise about the cinema, which is that it enables us to act out drives that we cannot safely act out in the actual world, the primary one being, of course, to kill the father (please, no Freudian readings about Žižek looking like my father, and taunting me from the cinema screen.) Of course, he’s no fan of the mother either, blaming the birds on Mitch’s mother, who does not want Mitch to engage in a romantic liaison with another woman.

This kind of analysis may be a bit heavy for Hitchcock, whose better films can be enjoyed on a purely cinematic level. But when considering Lynch, a cult favorite in my set whom I’ve always tried to watch, the analysis is more helpful. I’ve tried to watch Lynch’s films, but I’ve been trapped in a strange no-man’s land (much like the Zone in the Tarchovsky movie that Žižek also considers, alongside its inversion, Solyaris): half horrified, half incredulous (the incredulity likely a mechanism my intellect uses to protect me from that incredible fear). Now I’d like to take a full-semester course on Lynch, taught by Žižek, because the thing missing from this film is a transcript. The man talks so quickly, and says so much, that, particularly for someone like me with very little background in psychoanalysis, important things are hard to catch. And he makes me want to catch them.

Books: Cigarettes, by Harry Mathews

Because this book is so much more comprehensible than TheConversions, I expected that Harry Mathews had written it first. In fact, Cigarettes is his fourth novel, The Conversions his first. While it’s strange to see an author grow less experimental with age (wait, is it? Now I am unsure. . .) I’m not ashamed to admit that I liked this later book much more than the confounding Conversions.

Mathews is clever (and cruel) enough that Cigarettes might not be as simple as it seems, but in spite of my fascination with the nesting Russian Doll effect in postmodern fiction, I remain a sucker for good, straightforward storytelling. Cigarettes, which is a series of interlocking vignettes, love stories of the amorous and familial kind, that together comprise a novel, contains no mysteries that it doesn’t solve, no conspiracies threatening the hermetically-sealed setting (an idealized summer resort town a few hours outside of New York City, with moneyed artists and insurances salesmen for residents). The only remotely postmodern thing about the book is that the stories are told out of chronological order, so that we find ourselves shuttling between the sixties and the thirties, watching parents meet and fall in love after we’ve already seen their children do so.

This episodic, interlocking technique, particularly given the melodramatic sexual and familial intrigues, smacks of soap (the book was published in 1987, perhaps the very height of the televisual genre). One sister is given a greater inheritance than another; a man is banished from his house by his wife and his lover, now possibly lovers themselves. A young gay man fascinated by masochism, and watches his lover die from a heart attack while he’s trapped in a cast of concrete, unable to reach the phone. His sister, a young girl who’s moved to the City on her own, wastes away to near death because of a mistreated thyroid condition, driven mad by an angry voice inside her head she terms “the squawk box.” And so, the book is incredibly readable, in that indulgent, romance novel with big words kind of way. If something here is deeper than simple character study (a sketchbook, really, in words), I was too seduced to notice.

Dance: NYCB Emerging Choreographers at the Guggenheim's Works & Process

Works & Process couldn’t have chosen two more different choreographers to showcase for their New York City Ballet’s Emerging Choreographers program. Unfortunately, the difference was not merely in style, but also in quality, a choice that served only to embarrass the immature Melissa Barak, whose silly dance looked like the winter recital of a small-town ballet academy compared to the awe-inspiring, fiercely seething work offered by the more self-possessed Douglas Lee.

Works & Process offers a protean format in which works are rarely shown in full. Instead, a choreographer might choose to show a long series of snippets, discoursing on each in between, or to stage a 90 minute rehearsal or demonstration for the audience, the dancers never actually “performing” the work as it will eventually be set for stage. This night’s program began with a lengthy rehearsal staged by Barak, followed by a preview from Lee’s new ballet (LifeCasting, which premieres at NYCB on the 22nd), followed by a performance of the sections earlier rehearsed by Barak and her dancers.

Unfortunately, this granted the bulk of the program to the nattering Barak, whose youth is of course forgivable, but whose inarticulateness is not. (Perhaps it would be more fair to blame moderator Ellen Sorrin for both inane and immaterial questions and an unwillingness to cut off the meandering Barak, or to blame the program’s creator for giving the bulk of discussion and performance time to the less interesting of the two speakers and creators.) Barak’s compositional concerns, it seems, remain entrenched in the child’s dream of growing up and becoming a ballerina. During the rehearsal, each of her decisions were made with the comment, “Oh, that looks pretty. Let’s do it that way.” I do believe she even encouraged her dancers to be “more cutesy.” She invoked the dual gods of frippery—George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins—who have equally contributed to the dated wreckage that is the NYCB.

Lee, however, who comes to us from the Stuttgart Ballet, promises that there is indeed a future for ballet, on a fast trajectory away from pomp, priss, and paint-by-number emotions. While his ballet features four solos by the extraordinary Robert Fairchild (who dances like a raging phantom made simultaneously of steam and steel), a principal with the NYCB, Lee includes more pas-de-troix than pas-de-deux, searing combinations of bodies that tangle in and out of each other, and rarely, if ever, places any action center-stage, using space as equitably as he uses bodies—it is hard to tell which, of his eleven dancers, are principals, soloists, etc. There is, thankfully, no prolish corps de ballets. Lee seems to have taken this lesson, along with the lesson of the mobile torso, from modern dance. And yet, Lee’s work doesn’t feel exactly contemporary. Pointe shoes preserve a dramatic line; the work recalls the stylized angst of German Expressionist painters’ portraits: terrified eyes, extenuated limbs, balanced asymmetry. I cannot wait to see the work in its entirety.

In conversation, Lee was politely dismissive of Barak, barely acknowledging her outright. She mentioned, when asked about her choice to become a choreographer, that she more fell into it, and still considered herself primarily a dancer (she danced with NYCB for nine years, and now dances with the Los Angeles Ballet). When asked a similar question, Lee made a point of calling himself a choreographer who also dances (he is a principal with the Stuttgart), rather than the reverse. Perhaps if Barak one day makes the same transition, she will emerge from Balanchine’s skirts and create something more relevant.

Movies: Dance of the Enchantress

Though I’m not certain what I expected, Dance of the Enchantress did not meet my expectations. Not a full-length recording of a single performance, nor an instructive documentary, the film serves more as a meandering touchstone, shifting from shot to shot of varying Mohiniyattam rehearsals and performances, cut with the occasional shot of rain or still pond, and a dancer’s wistful eyes, intimating, but never offering, narration. The film’s subtitles provide translation of the music’s lyrics, which narrate a rudimentary bur surprisingly ardent love story, but one without the depth or continuity to keep the audience engaged. The dancers are not given time on screen to differentiate themselves from each other so that, in their matching consumes and gestures, they become disappointingly interchangeable. And so, our focus shifts from and back to the film, our eyes constantly following the women’s measured movements, our imaginations wandering. We learn little, feel less, and have been lulled into a kind of pleasant stupor by the time it’s over.

Books: La Maison de Rendez-Vous, by Alain Robbe-Grillet

I’ve considered myself a Robbe-Grillet fan for years; though I’ve only ever read Jealousy, that book was astonishing enough to lodge its author permanently in my pantheon. Watching Last Year at Marienbad, for which he wrote the screenplay, only reconfirmed his place. Reading La Maison de Rendez-Vous, though, might have shaken me out of my certainty. Robbe-Grillet is known for his circularity—repeated, slightly changing sentences and scenes that play and replay with minor adjustments—and he uses that method consistently to construct a mystery where there oughtn’t be one, delaying the gratifying realization to the last pages (or, in a film, the last minutes), often so suddenly that one who wasn’t paying attention (and it’s easy to forget to pay attention, given the repetition) misses it.

In La Maison, the mystery surrounds a group of ex-patriots in Asia, who circle around a debaucherous estate: perhaps a place where the lady Ava simply holds black-tie parties, complete with nightly performances, or perhaps a brothel—those performances seem to include a strip tease in which a trained dog slowly removes the clothing from a lissome Asian model with his teeth. On the night in question, an envelope stuffed with sachets of powder—drugs, likely—is delivered, and a Eurasian girl named Kim—or is it her twin sister?—walks the streets with a giant dog on a leash. Everything seems to be in dream-state; does the girl walk with a dog, or is that only a mannequin in a shop window? Has a man been murdered, or is that only the plot of the play? (You may remember that the play at the beginning of Marienbad mirrors the film’s plot in a similar way.)

The best method, I think, for reading (or watching) Robbe-Grillet is to refrain from fighting—to move through, let the words wash around you, and absorb what you can without trying too hard—a kind of passive osmosis. If you don’t fully absorb what has happened in the first reading, the book can be started again without to strong a shake, the repetitiousness simply repeating. I may have even read Jealousy twice back then—I can’t quite remember. But I haven’t time to read La Maison again, and I’m not terribly compelled to—the difference between this book and the other.

Dance: DD Dorvillier's Choreography, a Prologue to the Apocalypse of Understanding, Get Ready! at Dance Theatre Workshop

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