on Serendipity: The Afterlife of the Object by Carol Mavor
My friend Tony laments that young people have little interest in vintage objects. He runs an “antique mall” in a house in southeastern Massachusetts. “It used to be many people were collectors,” he says. “You went searching for enamelware or plastic wristwatches or Boston Braves baseball cards or Bakelite bracelets. Now that you can find an image of anything on your phone, the objects as objects have lost their appeal.” I remember encountering the apothecary bottle that inaugurated my collection of drugstore ephemera, and though I can’t quite describe what I recognized upon seeing it, I know it had something to do with resisting the arrogance of the present.
Carol Mavor’s Serendipity: The Afterlife of the Object includes collecting among its interests, but Mavor is mainly tuned into our moments of discovery, “by accident and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of,” and later, of “finding something that you did not exactly know you were looking for until you found it.” A widely published professor of art history, Mavor experiences serendipitous moments while gazing at artworks and artifacts, and while writing allusive, bounding essays about creative thought. So when she considers Caravaggio’s The Inspiration of St. Matthew (1602) and the angel hovering over the startled saint who is trying to write something, the angel who passes freely between two worlds, she is also enacting the role of the angel, a liminal “middle voice” between writer and reader, the past and the now.
She works in the Barthesian mode “where who is writing what becomes muddled.” This involves hits and misses, since while she leaps about attaching this to that, seeing this aspect in that one, the exercise is speculative. Citing Saussure (the arbitrariness of language) and Sartre (the arbitrariness of existence), she lands on Proust and “the impossibility of a fully recovered meaning as, in fact, the most meaningful kind of meaning.”
In Mavor’s Blue Mythologies: Reflections on Colour (2013), the 18th century writer and historian Horace Walpole appears not only as an avid collector but also as the coiner of the term “serendipity.” Walpole turns up again in Serendipity, extolling “the chance observation falling on a receptive eye.” The first time Mavor encountered Walpole as neologist, it must have seemed serendipitous – but what about recycling him for the new book in almost identical prose? At times she wavers between thrilling (or indulging) herself and enlightening us (or squeezing our arm) – but when the two urges and gestures merge, one may feel that spectral shiver of recognition.
One of my favorites pieces here is “Lolita’s Gray Eyes,” an essay that behaves like a tour of Lolita memorabilia, regarding various aspects of the Lolita figure in the context of the color “gray” (Nabokov: “Her dream-gray gaze never flinches”). Lolita in “film, fashion and hearsay – where her afterlife is imagined as juicy, beautiful, delicious, shiny and fresh.” And then, on to personal narrative: “Lolita, I am gray like you, but with my own particular palette.” There is the Japanese Lolita in a kimono and a sash depicting two rabbits in a garden. As for gray: “Gray is mostly too undecided to be a pure symbol, save for ageing. Gray is not direct, is between black and white, like an adolescent between adult and child.” Gray also supplies the book’s cover image – Doug and Mike Starn’s photograph “Attracted to Light B,” a picture of a moth fixed beneath the strings wrapping a package. She asks us to consider the serendipitous appearance of two moths fluttering above the and to the left of the figure of a gowned girl in Whistler’s Harmony in Grey and Green: Miss Cicely Alexander (1872-4) and the painter’s habit of forming his signature on canvas in the shape of a butterfly.
In her essay on diaries – Anne Frank’s, Chantal Akerman’s and her own mother’s – Mavor recalls that her mother cared for her daughter’s well-being, “but I have no memories of my mother playing dolls with me, imagining with me, even reading to me.” Objects, she tells us, help a child to cope with and then enjoy aloneness. “As [Donald] Winnecott teaches us, play enables the child ton thrive and is the first entry into spiritual life, creative life.” Serendipity impresses me as a spirit-amplifying, thought-triggering plaything comprising lifelong desires: “We need to make transitional objects as babies and throughout our lives.” The angel of uncertainty is the angel of serendipity.
[Published by Reaktion Books on December 25, 2024, 192 pages, $$35.00 hardcover. Distributed by the University of Chicago Press]
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on A Woman I Once Knew, photographs and text by Rosalind Fox Solomon
One version of the life of Rosalind Fox Solomon tells of her sudden emergence as a photographer at age 53 upon her divorce in 1984. This liberating leap into artistry seems to be reinforced in her own statements: “At age fifty-three I have left behind the social, political and business worlds I knew / My attractions lead me away from family and friends.” The spare, incisive text accompanying her photographs in The Woman I Once Knew sometimes speaks acerbically about her youth and marriage, portraying both as punishing. There is this remembrance from growing up in suburban Highland Park, Illinois, where she was born in 1930:
The Wagner sisters are my best friends in grammar school
They do not sit at a formal dining table Their mother leaves out
sandwiches on the kitchen table and they eat whenever they are hungry
I wish that our family could live like the Wagners
When I tell Mother this, she warns me never to say it again
One morning before I leave for school, I forget and say,
I wish we could live like the Wagners
When I come home from school, Mother meets me at the back door
And hands me a suitcase, saying,
Here are your clothes Go live with the Wagners
Then she closes and locks the back door
I run to the front
I run to the terrace
I run to the garden shed
All the doors are locked
I dream of running away to live with the gypsies, but I don’t know where to find them
At age 23, after marrying Jay Solomon, she bore two children, was active in her community as a civil rights activist and supporter of other liberal causes, and worked with a summer abroad program organizer that offered her a job as nation al PR director. This job would have required travel twice a month — but her husband said, “No wife of mine is ever going to work.” And then, the story sometimes goes, in 1984 upon her divorce and Jay’s death, she began her itinerant routine as a photographer.
In fact, she gave up her community work in 1968 at age 38, during what may have been her first psychotic break. She signed up to work for a cultural exchange organization and bought a camera to use during a trip to Japan. She has said that at the time, she knew of only two photographers by name, Ansel Adams and Diane Arbus. She began shooting in her Chattanooga, Tennessee neighborhood. Then, in the early 1970’s, she was introduced to Lisette Model at a photo processing lab in New York City (she had accompanied her husband on one of his business trips). Model, who had been Arbus’ mentor, reviewed Rosalind’s work and took her on as a tutee; they would meet a few times a year during the husband’s trips to Manhattan. Rosalind was thus active through the 1970s. Jimmy Carter (whom Rosalind photographed before he became president) hired her husband as head of the General Services Administration, and when he traveled, such as to the Deep South, she went along with her camera. Her book Liberty Theater (2018) collects photos from that period and later trips. In 1980, her work was shown at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington. She was traveling and shooting around the world. In 1986, MoMA hosted her first major solo exhibit.
But in truth, what-happened-when intrigues me less than the psychological turmoil underlying the self-portraits in A Woman I Once Knew, and expressed through the shards of memoir. “She writes, “Psychiatrists told me that because my mother loved me only when I was needy, I feared that everyone would abandon me if I were successful. Since childhood my therapists had tried and failed to pull me out of my repeated self-destruction.” And: “The unknown attracts me more than the known / I have always been an outsider on the inside / An outsider in my family and at school / During my late teenage years I had the veneer of an insider, but I felt masked and in turmoil / Family values conflicted with my serious nature.” In the 46 short pieces that accompany the pictures, she never refers to her motive for shooting herself unclothed, as if the reason for doing so must be obvious. But if “the unknown attracts me more than the known,” then perhaps she is both honoring and displaying the form of a mystery in these photos. Her parents had badgered her about conforming to their notions of femininity and delicacy; so now the child displays her belly fat and cracked toenails.
A Woman I Once Knew is also – and, I think, mainly — a chronicle about aging. The photographs aren’t dated (nor are the indoor and outdoor locations noted) though they seem to advance from late midlife to senior citizenship. In some shots, masking tape has been applied to the body. It may not be a coincidence that the nude self-portraits were begun (or so I calculate) after she had worked on Women With AIDS for Vogue, which appeared in the wake of her Portraits in a Time of AIDS. She had photographed women stricken with an insidious illness, women who were willing to be exposed as images. Rosalind’s self-portraits, made in so many different locations and postures, suggest repetitive chances to ask the question “who and what am I”? Almost all of the images are black-and-whites, shot via a two-and-a-quarter-inch square film format.
In “Painting Myself,” an essay published this month in the New York Review of Books, Celia Paul says that she drew some self-portraits in her early 20’s, but “thirty years passed before I felt free enough to represent myself in an ambitiously new way.” In 2013, she made a series of five self-portraits about which she says, “With each one I began by looking in the mirror, and then I turned away and dreamed up the image of myself. My dreaming self-portrait was psychologically truer than my reflected image … When I look in the mirror, I can’t see myself.” Paul may assert that “the main danger of painting self-portraits is, of course, the possibility of becoming a narcissist,” but it seems unlikely to me that this pitfall has ever occurred to Rosalind Fox Solomon. Now at age 94, she confronts us with A Woman I Once Knew.
[Published by Mack Books on August 5, 2024, 264 pages, large format soft c0ver. Images appear here with permission of the press.]
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on Gliff, a novel by Ali Smith
Gliff is Ali Smith’s thirteenth novel and her first to depict a dystopian world. Here, a person is either a conforming, functional worker or “unverifiable.” There are two children – the teenage narrator Briar and their younger sister Rose – who ride by train accompanied by Leif, their mother’s partner, to an abandoned house in a town’s declining neighborhood, presumably for temporary safekeeping while the children’s mother takes on a waitressing job. The state had sent a machine called a “supera bounder” to paint a red line around their house – signaling demolition. Leif provides the children with enough canned goods and supplies to last a few days; he says he will return with the mother to retrieve them.
“So I’ve spent the last five years of my life not letting myself think any of this,” says Briar after we’ve observed the children surviving alone. Smith leaves us to wonder why the memories of the past, to which we then return, have been banished from Briar’s mind for five years. Inspired by their mother to probe the world for what is actual, the nonbinary Briar (or Brice, or Bri) is engrossed by language and the meaning of words, while their restless and stubborn sister, Rose, is the first to ask aloud if Leif will ever return. Briar: “I reached and slid a finger along one of the spaces between the [floor]boards. If you could take these boards up and look at what had ended up down there in that under-the-boards space it’d look like just dirt and grime. But you’d not just have DNA galore, you’d have the actual matter of what was left of those people and their times. This was a completely different sort of matter, the kind people say doesn’t matter when they talk about what history is.”
When the children discover seven horses living on “scrubland” just beyond their house, Rose devotes her attention to a grey horse. When Briar leaves the house to buy food, she meets a 79-year old activist named Oona who is protesting the presence of a “supera bounder” on their street. And when Briar returns to the house, they and Rose meet a boy named Colon, renamed Colin by them, whose father owns the grey horse, named Gliff by Rose. Interactions, small gestures, and supposition are not only what matter in the telling of this story, but attain sharp profiles in contrast to the dystopian surround. Rescuing language from its servile usages is the novel’s essential occurrence – including the removal of right-hand justification, as if the text itself demands its liberation from literary convention. The children’s mother, appearing in a flashback chapter, says to Briar, “It takes a lifetime, sometimes, to work out what anything you’re doing’s go to do with the real realities of living.” She’s an advocate for unmediated experience. Briar is approaching that moment when they will have to decide how to persist within the unrealities of the state.
Oona lives with other homeless people in a shuttered school building nearby, and the two children and Gliff spend time there. But the situation is abruptly disrupted. We next hear from Briar at age 18 where they work at the Packing Belt in the Delivery Level of a factory. It has been five years since Briar and Rose lived in the abandoned house. As the novel’s conclusion lay ahead, I stopped to imagine Smith making a crucial decision – will she create a way out of bondage for Briar, or will she portray the state as undefeatable? It turns out that Briar resembles us – we advocate for humanistic values while paying taxes to fund the state’s misadventures and repressions. If Smith ends her story by leaving Briar to contemplate that division in themself, then we confront a disquieting truth. If she devises a salvific conclusion, then we feel that release, however much an improbability, in ourselves.
But Smith is too deeply invested in the eccentricities of perception and language to settle for either of my hypothetical plot conclusions. Smith manages and heightens both the ominous aura of dystopia and the persistence of the spirit. And more is to follow in a forthcoming novel that will unfurl another story hidden within Gliff.
[Published by Pantheon on February 4, 2025, 272 pages, $28.00 hardcover]
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on Your Steps on the Stairs, a novel by Antonio Muñoz Molina, translated from the Spanish by Curtis Bauer
It is estimated that between 10,000 and 15,000 ex-pat Americans are living in Lisbon, and more are on the way. One travel blogger, listing the negatives of the city, writes, “You will hate the noise from the planes.” That brings us to Bruno, the narrator of Your Steps on the Stairs, though his name appears just five pages from the end. He has come to Lisbon from New York to arrange things in a new apartment, anticipating the arrival of his wife Cecilia, a neurological researcher who will work nearby. After 9/11, the couple had been disturbed by the sound of jet engines, and now Bruno’s composure is shaken by the planes over Lisbon. But there is an even more disquieting obsession. The first sentence of the novel reads, “I’ve moved to this city to wait for the end of the world.”
Bruno frequently cites his wife’s insights when commenting on his own thinking. At the outset, he notices similarities between his former New York apartment and his newly decorated Lisbon place, saying, “Most of our decisive mental operations take place in the brain without our consciousness being aware of them, Cecilia says.” Settling comfortably into this private monologue, we listen as Bruno describes the comings and goings of a contractor named Alexis who makes expeditious improvements to the unit. We are, in effect, taking Cecilia’s place as Bruno’s intimate partner – and thus, as he reveals more about himself, we begin dimly to perceive the parameters of their relationship – and to sense a growing gap between Bruno’s notion of “being aware” and our own assessment of exactly what’s going on.
This is the shrewd allure of the narration — one is drawn into the view from Bruno’s observant eye — the arrangement of the apartment, the charm of his neighborhood, his benign interactions, the sharpness of his memory, and his apparent commitment to Cecilia — and then also, Molina’s careful management of incremental revelation and our desire to know exactly what is motivating the telling.
We learn, for instance, that even in New York, Bruno would “make up excuses to stay home all day. I needed to devote all my time and attention to waiting for her” to arrive home. Ultimately, he was fired, and now would like to spend his pension in Lisbon with “a feeling of modest opulence.” Bruno is a great reader who has brought his book collection to Lisbon, a “stockpile of provisions for waiting for the end of the world, for the long confinement that will come sooner or later” – and he is fixated on Admiral Richard Byrd’s memoir “about his six-month confinement in an underground cabin in Antarctica.” He says that his favorite scene in “that movie, The Shining, is when the old cook is showing Shelley Duvall each of the storerooms with all the supplies that she and her family will need.” Yes, and we also recall (though he doesn’t mention) the harsh antagonism between Nicholson’s character and Duval’s.
“This neighborhood, this entire city, is a good vantage point to wait for something to appear in the distance,” he says, referring to the Tagus River and its sea merchant history. It’s the kind of statement that Molina uses to create a shiver of expectation in the reader – just what is coming? Is Cecilia about to arrive? Molina limns Bruno’s fear-ridden but intensely devoted psyche with great dexterity, managing to attach us to and even identify with Bruno’s often disquieted state of mind, even as we become increasingly uncomfortable with being confined within his narrative boundary. Towards the end of the story, Bruno attends a soiree (as a guest of Alexis) where a cultural “guru,” giving a talk, says, “Chaos theory is becoming more and more significant than ever. In principle, minor and local disturbances can lead to a series of feedback loop and unpredictable circumstances.” This statement could pass as a technician’s analysis of Your Steps on the Stairs.
[Published on April 8, 2025 by Other Press, 298 pages, $18.00 US/$24.99 CAN paperback]