Fun with Patents by Kfir Luzzatto Ph.D., Pine Ten, LLC

Kfir Luzzatto Ph.D. has published a new book called “Fun with Patents”. It is subtitled “the irreverent guide for the investor, the entrepeneur and the inventor”.



I am none of the above (except for having a Ph.D. and being occassionally irreverent). That means to say, that not only am I not a Kfir, a Luzzatto or a new book, but I am also not an investor, entrepeneur or inventor so clearly I am not the target audience.

The book has a prominent disclaimer that it is not advice and for specific cases, the reader should consult with a patent attorney. Like other patent attorneys in private practice, I regularly give advice, sometimes gratis and sometimes for significant consultancy fees, to investors, entrepeneurs and inventors so am familiar with the target audience, and think that reading a book like this would be of immense value to them, whilst agreeing wholeheartedly with Kfir’s disclaimer that the book is not a substitute for specific advice and the reader should consult with a qualified patent attorney on specific matters.

What I can do, is compare the non-advice that Kfir offers with that which I dispense to a similar audience. In this regard I have not found any statements in the book that I dissagree with. The book is very readable and is packed with good advice based on the accumulated experience of a long career. Although the chapter order is not a conventional one, there is an index at the back that may help when referring to a topic again.

Kfir emphasizes the difference between being an inventor and owning a patent, and notes the importance of accurately determining the inventors, particularly in the US. He warns against filing insufficient disclosures in provisional applications and expecting to obtain a priority date for that not taught therein. He also warns against the inventor then talking about his invention wrongly assuming that they are protected. All this advice is correct and good. Luckily for Kfir, myself and other practitioners, the intended audience probably won’t read it, or will decide that the advice does not apply to them, and so there is likely to be plenty of work in trying to correct the self-inflicted damage that clients cause themselves by seeking professional advice too late.

Kfir is descended from Rennaisance men and I suspect likes to see and present himself as one. The book is resplendent with quotations from authors in different fields and gives the impression that Kfir is well read, or at least has access to good reference books. I particularly enjoyed the quote from the Ramchal, Kfir’s illustrious ancestor. Kfir describes himself as of the male persuasion, thereby justifying writing in the masculine instead of the tiresome he/she. Heowever, he then referred to sitting around on our fannies, which to this British ear, seemed totally innapropriate. Nevertheless, though informal by intent, and with the occasional odd grammatical error, the book is generally well written and makes an enjoyable read.

The book is somewhat similar to a volume he brought out in Hebrew a decade ago. That book was called “The World of Patents” and was based on a weekly column he had in Globes, one of Israel’s business newspapers. As Kfir himself mentions, each chapter is self-standing. This is not a merely a rework and translation of the earlier book as a lot has chnaged over the past decade. nevertheless, most chapters are fairly brief. This may create a problem in that the chapters are not comprehensive, and even after reading the entire book, the reader can only know about what is included and not about what is left out. For example, there is a chapter that describes various types of patents. It starts with legal definitions, such as provisional applications, PCT international applications, patents for devices and patents for processes, patents of addition, and continuations. Then it mentions multi-disciplinary patents that may require more than one patent attorney to draft and that this can lead to tension due to different approaches. This is certainly true, but it is not a type of patent in the same sense as the others. The chapter then goes on to discuss petty patents and designs, explaining that designs are not patents. There is no cler statement to the effect that aesthetic designs are called design patents by the USPTO. Plant patents are also not mentioned.

One of the early chapters discusses obviousness and comes to the conclusion that different patent offices around the world come to remarkably similar standards with regards to obviousness. The term obviousness is used interchangeably with inventive step. Certainly, and Kfir himself discusses in later chapters, the allowed claims in different jurisdictions may be different. so here is the criticism. The chapter precedes the one that mentions that a patent has to be novel and useful as well as inventive. There is no distinction made between the US concept of obviousness and the European concept of inventive step. The two are very similar in practice, but are based on different undrlining philosophies that go a long way to explain the difference in practice between the different authorities.

Sometimes, I dissagree to things intimated rather than spelled out. For example, when discussing IP managers, Kfir explains the type that is not good and then gives a list of pointers to be wary of. Kfir warns against the manager who finds ways to miracuously cut costs, and piously plagarizes Milton Friedman to inform us that in patents there is no such thing as a free lunch. True, we are only warned to look into this carefully. Neverthless, looking back over the past few years, there have been various IP developments that may save costs. The patent prosecution highways PPH and additional countries offering PCT international search reports, the changes in American patent law due to the American Invents Act have made first filing in local jurisdiction rather than filing provisional applications more popular, and more applicants are filing chapter 2 of the PCT, electing for preliminary examination. Globalization affects the patent industry and some tasks can be off-shored to countries with highly qualified lower waged staff. Some patents and designs that are being maintained should not be. I think that a good manager taking over a patent portfolio in a company that does things one way for historic reasons, may well make savings. I don’t think Kfir would dissagree. He also correctly warns against advisors with a one-size-fits-all strategy.

Sometimes Kfir is certainly correct, like when he notes that just because one hs been awarded a patent, that does not mean that one is not infringing one or more competitor’s patents. That said, a US litigator once noted that it is worth using the argument that your client was awarded a patent for his product, since although not relevant to the question of infringmeent, both juries and judges make this mistake. Sometimes Kfir gives specific advice like the importance of reviewing the art before bringing a product to market to make sure that one is not infringing competitor’s products. He does not, however, mention the triple damages in the US for intentional infringement. So despite advising them, I suspect that in some scenarios he would not advise clients to conduct extensive freedom to operate searches as it may be easier to deal with infringing issues if and when they come up. However, no book is comprehensive and this one does not even claim to be.

Taken as a whole, this is a useful book for those intending of using patents to read. As Professor Jeremy Phillips points out in the introduction, the book is not a guide to drafting and filing a patent without professional assistance, which he compares to surgically removing one’s appendix oneself, instead of checking into a hospital.

The Color the Road Not Taken Paperback – February 14, 2017 by Robert Frost (Author), Atif Toor (Illustrator),Thunder Bay Press

Mending Walls
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing: 5
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made, 10
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go. 15
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them. 20
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across 25
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it 30
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, 35
That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. 40
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.” 45
Summary
A stone wall separates the speaker’s property from his neighbor’s. In spring, the two meet to walk the wall and jointly make repairs. The speaker sees no reason for the wall to be kept—there are no cows to be contained, just apple and pine trees. He does not believe in walls for the sake of walls. The neighbor resorts to an old adage: “Good fences make good neighbors.” The speaker remains unconvinced and mischievously presses the neighbor to look beyond the old-fashioned folly of such reasoning. His neighbor will not be swayed. The speaker envisions his neighbor as a holdover from a justifiably outmoded era, a living example of a dark-age mentality. But the neighbor simply repeats the adage.
Form
Blank verse is the baseline meter of this poem, but few of the lines march along in blank verse’s characteristic lock-step iambs, five abreast. Frost maintains five stressed syllables per line, but he varies the feet extensively to sustain the natural speech-like quality of the verse. There are no stanza breaks, obvious end-rhymes, or rhyming patterns, but many of the end-words share an assonance (e.g., wall, hill, balls, wall, and well sun, thing, stone,mean, line, and again or game, them, and him twice). Internal rhymes, too, are subtle, slanted, and conceivably coincidental. The vocabulary is all of a piece—no fancy words, all short (only one word, another, is of three syllables), all conversational—and this is perhaps why the words resonate so consummately with each other in sound and feel.
Commentary
I have a friend who, as a young girl, had to memorize this poem as punishment for some now-forgotten misbehavior. Forced memorization is never pleasant; still, this is a fine poem for recital. “Mending Wall” is sonorous, homey, wry—arch, even—yet serene; it is steeped in levels of meaning implied by its well-wrought metaphoric suggestions. These implications inspire numerous interpretations and make definitive readings suspect. Here are but a few things to think about as you reread the poem.
The image at the heart of “Mending Wall” is arresting: two men meeting on terms of civility and neighborliness to build a barrier between them. They do so out of tradition, out of habit. Yet the very earth conspires against them and makes their task Sisyphean. Sisyphus, you may recall, is the figure in Greek mythology condemned perpetually to push a boulder up a hill, only to have the boulder roll down again. These men push boulders back on top of the wall; yet just as inevitably, whether at the hand of hunters or sprites, or the frost and thaw of nature’s invisible hand, the boulders tumble down again. Still, the neighbors persist. The poem, thus, seems to meditate conventionally on three grand themes: barrier-building (segregation, in the broadest sense of the word), the doomed nature of this enterprise, and our persistence in this activity regardless.
But, as we so often see when we look closely at Frost’s best poems, what begins in folksy straightforwardness ends in complex ambiguity. The speaker would have us believe that there are two types of people: those who stubbornly insist on building superfluous walls (with clichés as their justification) and those who would dispense with this practice—wall-builders and wall-breakers. But are these impulses so easily separable? And what does the poem really say about the necessity of boundaries?
The speaker may scorn his neighbor’s obstinate wall-building, may observe the activity with humorous detachment, but he himself goes to the wall at all times of the year to mend the damage done by hunters; it is the speaker who contacts the neighbor at wall-mending time to set the annual appointment. Which person, then, is the real wall-builder? The speaker says he sees no need for a wall here, but this implies that there may be a need for a wall elsewhere— “where there are cows,” for example. Yet the speaker must derive something, some use, some satisfaction, out of the exercise of wall-building, or why would he initiate it here? There is something in him that does love a wall, or at least the act of making a wall.
This wall-building act seems ancient, for it is described in ritual terms. It involves “spells” to counteract the “elves,” and the neighbor appears a Stone-Age savage while he hoists and transports a boulder. Well, wall-building is ancient and enduring—the building of the first walls, both literal and figurative, marked the very foundation of society. Unless you are an absolute anarchist and do not mind livestock munching your lettuce, you probably recognize the need for literal boundaries. Figuratively, rules and laws are walls; justice is the process of wall-mending. The ritual of wall maintenance highlights the dual and complementary nature of human society: The rights of the individual (property boundaries, proper boundaries) are affirmed through the affirmation of other individuals’ rights. And it demonstrates another benefit of community; for this communal act, this civic “game,” offers a good excuse for the speaker to interact with his neighbor. Wall-building is social, both in the sense of “societal” and “sociable.” What seems an act of anti-social self-confinement can, thus, ironically, be interpreted as a great social gesture. Perhaps the speaker does believe that good fences make good neighbors— for again, it is he who initiates the wall-mending.
Of course, a little bit of mutual trust, communication, and goodwill would seem to achieve the same purpose between well-disposed neighbors—at least where there are no cows. And the poem says it twice: “something there is that does not love a wall.” There is some intent and value in wall-breaking, and there is some powerful tendency toward this destruction. Can it be simply that wall-breaking creates the conditions that facilitate wall-building? Are the groundswells a call to community- building—nature’s nudge toward concerted action? Or are they benevolent forces urging the demolition of traditional, small-minded boundaries? The poem does not resolve this question, and the narrator, who speaks for the groundswells but acts as a fence-builder, remains a contradiction.
Many of Frost’s poems can be reasonably interpreted as commenting on the creative process; “Mending Wall” is no exception. On the basic level, we can find here a discussion of the construction-disruption duality of creativity. Creation is a positive act—a mending or a building. Even the most destructive-seeming creativity results in a change, the building of some new state of being: If you tear down an edifice, you create a new view for the folks living in the house across the way. Yet creation is also disruptive: If nothing else, it disrupts the status quo. Stated another way, disruption is creative: It is the impetus that leads directly, mysteriously (as with the groundswells), to creation. Does the stone wall embody this duality? In any case, there is something about “walking the line”—and building it, mending it, balancing each stone with equal parts skill and spell—that evokes the mysterious and laborious act of making poetry.
On a level more specific to the author, the question of boundaries and their worth is directly applicable to Frost’s poetry. Barriers confine, but for some people they also encourage freedom and productivity by offering challenging frameworks within which to work. On principle, Frost did not write free verse. His creative process involved engaging poetic form (the rules, tradition, and boundaries—the walls—of the poetic world) and making it distinctly his own. By maintaining the tradition of formal poetry in unique ways, he was simultaneously a mender and breaker of walls.



The Road Not Taken

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth; 5

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same, 10

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back. 15

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference. 20


Few figures in American literature have suffered as strangely divided an afterlife as Robert Frost.

Even before his death in 1963, he was canonized as a rural sage, beloved by a public raised on poems of his like “Birches” and “The Road Not Taken.” But that image soon became shadowed by a darker one, stemming from a three-volume biography by his handpicked chronicler, Lawrance Thompson, who emerged from decades of assiduous note-taking with a portrait of the poet as a cruel, jealous megalomaniac — “a monster of egotism” who left behind “a wake of destroyed human lives,” as the critic Helen Vendler memorably put it on the cover of The New York Times Book Review in 1970.
Ever since, more sympathetic scholars have tried, with limited success, to counter Mr. Thompson’s portrait, which was echoed most recently in a short story by Joyce Carol Oates, published by Harper’s Magazine last fall, depicting Frost as repellent old man angrily rebutting a female interviewer’s charges of arrogance, racism and psychological brutality to his children.

But now, a new scholarly work may put an end to the “monster myth,” as Frost scholars call it, once and for all. Later this month, Harvard University Press will begin publishing “The Letters of Robert Frost,” a projected four-volume edition of all the poet’s known correspondence that promises to offer the most rounded, complete portrait to date.
“There’s been a kind of persistent sense of Frost as a hypocrite, as someone who showed one face to the public and another privately,” said Donald Sheehy, a professor at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania, who edited the letters with Mark Richardson and Robert Faggen.
“These letters will dispel all that,” Mr. Sheehy added. “Frost has his moods, his enemies, the things that set him off. But mostly what you see is a generosity of spirit.”

The Harvard edition, which will include more than 3,000 letters from nearly 100 archives and private collections, is not the first presentation of Frost’s correspondence. An edition of selected letters was rushed out by Mr. Thompson (with index entries for “Badness,” “Cowardice,” “Fears,” “Insanity” and “Self-Indulgence”) a year after the poet’s death, followed by several smaller collections, all of which have long been out of print.

But the complete correspondence, scholars say, will show Frost in full, revealing a complex man who juggled uncommon fame with an uncommonly difficult private life (including four children who died before him, one a suicide), a canny self-fashioner who may have cultivated the image of a birch-swinging rustic but was as much the modernist innovator as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.

“You see there are so many Frosts,” said Jay Parini, a Frostbiographer who was not involved with the project. “He moves among them, like everyone else, a wounded individual trying to make his way in the world.”
“The idea of Frost as a jealous, mean-spirited, misogynist career-builder,” he added, “is nothing short of nuts.”

The new collection contains hundreds of little seen or entirely unknown letters discovered languishing in poorly cataloged archives, tucked away in books or forgotten in attics. One cache of letters turned up in a desk donated to a thrift shop near Hanover, N.H., where they became the focus of a stolen property investigation.

The first volume begins in 1886, with a charming note from 12-year-old Frost to a childhood sweetheart, and follows him through marriage to his wife, Elinor; a hard decade as a farmer in New Hampshire; three years in England; and return home in 1915, when he became a late-blooming literary star with the success of his second collection, “North of Boston.”
It contains little family correspondence (no letters to Elinor are known to survive) and few letters that touch on difficult family matters. But it does vividly show Frost’s deep ambition and confidence — “To be perfectly frank with you I am one of the most notable craftsmen of my time,” he wrote in 1913 — along with a concern to protect his family from intrusions. (“I really like the least her mistakes about Elinor,” he wrote in response to an article by the poet Amy Lowell. “That’s an unpardonable attempt to do her as the conventional helpmeet of genius.”)

The letters show his pleasure in hard-earned fame, but also his resentment. “Twenty years ago I gave some of these people a chance,” he wrote in 1915, referring to his newfound admirers. “I wish I were rich and independent enough to tell them to go to hell.”
The full publication of the letters is the capstone of an arrangement between the Frost estate and Harvard to prepare scholarly editions of Frost’s primary material, in the hopes of inspiring research into a poet whose broad popularity has not always been matched by scholarly attention. The project has not gone entirely smoothly. The 2006 publication of Frost’s notebooks, filled with drafts, fragments and sometimes cryptic aphorisms, was hailed by some critics as the most important Frost release in years but soon came under fierce attackfrom two scholars charging Mr. Faggen, the volume’s editor, with thousands of transcription errors that turned the poet into a “dyslexic and deranged speller.”
(Harvard released a 2010 paperback making what Mr. Faggen, a professor at Claremont McKenna College, characterized in a recent email as “appropriate changes.”)

That typographical skirmish, however, was nothing compared with the uproar over Ms. Oates’s short story, which drew outrage from Frost family members and the tightknit world of Frost scholars, some of whom gather each year at an informal symposium organized by Lesley Lee Francis, one of the poet’s granddaughters. “It was just mean-spirited and pointless,” said Mr. Sheehy, who together with Mr. Richardson prepared a 14-page document challenging the story’s factual underpinnings.

Ms. Oates, via email, said that the story was “really about the sensation-mongering, ‘malicious’ personal and biographical accusations that are made against a poet” when “poetry and the life should have nothing to do with each other.” Her detractors, she suggested, “had misread the story in their eagerness to attack.”

But even some fellow Frost outsiders said the Oates story might give new life to some questionable notions first advanced by Mr. Thompson, including the claim that Frost cruelly quashed the poetic ambitions of his son Carol, who committed suicide in 1940.
“The letters to Carol are very poignant,” said the novelist Brian Hall, who was denied permission by the estate to quote from Frost’s copyrighted poetry in “Fall of Frost,” a 2008 fictionalization of the poet’s life. “You see him gently trying to push him in different directions but doing his parental best to be supportive.”

Those letters, along with the rest of the surviving family correspondence (including some that has not been published), will appear in future volumes. Those installments, expected to appear at two-year intervals, will touch on some of the most sensitive subjects in Frost biography, including the commitment of his daughter Irma to a psychiatric hospital in 1947 and his relationship with Kathleen Morrison, the married woman who became his secretary, protector, primary emotional focus and, some have argued, his mistress after Elinor’s death in 1938.
Taken together, “these letters will show very clearly that the caricature of Frost’s behavior toward his family is utterly without foundation,” said the co-editor Mr. Richardson, a professor at Doshisha University in Japan.
If there’s a true revelation in the first volume, the editors say, it’s the sheer intellectual firepower Frost brings even to a casual missive, the range of references that can wind playfully from George Bernard Shaw to Gothic architecture to Neolithic archaeology, all in a few hundred words.
“He’s never thought of as an intellectual poet, but that’s because he wears all his learning gracefully,” Mr. Sheehy said. “People may be surprised by just how smart he was.”

The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan by Sebastian Mallaby Penguin Press, 2016, 800 pp, $40.00 (hardcover).

Too much success can be a dangerous thing. That is perhaps the key takeaway from Sebastian Mallaby’s epic new biography of former U.S. Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan, The Man Who Knew. The central and (to this reviewer at least) somewhat shocking revelation of the book is that far from being a blind follower of “markets know best” efficiency theory, Greenspan was well aware that easy monetary policy and stock prices could create bubbles in the market—terribly damaging ones (he did a seminal paper on the topic in 1959). And yet, he allowed them to inflate anyway, believing this preferable to more dramatic government interference in the market. The great irony is that thanks in large part to Greenspan, central bankers themselves have become the major player in global markets—something that has introduced huge, unknown risks into our economy. Clearly, the man who knew didn’t know everything.

Despite this, many lessons in Greenspan’s legacy are relevant to today’s economic problems. For one, economics should move toward the empirical. Greenspan had what was arguably his biggest insight when he was deep in the weeds, tallying numbers rather than relying on ivory tower models. In the summer of 1996, there was a debate at the Fed about whether interest rates should be hiked to ward off overheating in the economy. Wages were rising, and the stock market was up 45 percent over the course of a year. Yet productivity figures seemed oddly weak, given the efficiency gains that businesses were seeing from globalization and new technologies. Solving the conundrum was crucial—if productivity was actually rising, then there was no reason to hike interest rates, since workers making more widgets could also be paid more without triggering inflation. Nearly every economic guru at the time—from Larry Summers to Janet Yellen—worried about inflation. But Greenspan insisted that Fed researchers go back and re-tally the numbers across 155 industries and four decades. The result? The maestro was right; low productivity in services was artificially lowering the overall rate.

The times that Greenspan—and as a result, the economy—faltered were usually when there was too little data and too much ego in the room. The praise and political power that came with his many lucky hunches—and some well-deserved policy home runs—made him less willing to rock the boat and raise interest rates, even when it was clear that this really was what was needed to derail a potential crash and recession. Once a staunch opponent of government bailouts he later supported bailouts of emerging markets like Mexico (whose debt was held by big U.S. banks—a crucial fact that the book underplays). He dismissed warnings by U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission chair Brooksley Born on derivatives, believing incorrectly that they weren’t as potentially damaging as she thought they might be, but also that it would be too politically tricky to push through regulation. He made sideways references to “irrational exuberance” by the late 1990s, but backed off on curbing it when the markets stabilized. Like most finance-friendly regulators, Greenspan didn’t want the music to stop. When it did, to his great credit, he issued a mea culpa, admitting there had been a “flaw” in his thinking. Mallaby—who wrote this book over five years with Greenspan’s cooperation while working as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations—believes it was mistake for him to do so, since ideologically, he had never bought totally into “rational” markets.

I disagree. Actions matter, and Greenspan took responsibility for his. While his “flaw” was less an intellectual one than a moral one, the fact that he admitted to making a mistake of any kind is one of the things that redeems him. Many others who played a part in the events leading up to the 2008 crisis and Great Recession failed to do so. What’s more, Greenspan’s admission marked an important departure from the fiction of the omniscient central banker (one that he helped craft). The world has come to depend far too much on central bankers being those “who know.” It’s time to demand more from the politicians we elect to run the real economy itself.

ABSURDISTAN By Gary Shteyngart. 333 pp. Random House. $24.95.

Russian Unorthodox .Why praise it first? Just quote from it -- at random. Just unbutton its shirt and let it bare its chest. Like a victorious wrestler, this novel is so immodestly vigorous, so burstingly sure of its barbaric excellence, that simply by breathing, sweating and standing upright it exalts itself.

"I stood there listening to my father's killers. Oleg and Zhora were of Papa's generation. All three had been made fatherless by the Great Patriotic War. All three had been raised by the men who had managed to avoid battle, the violent, dour, second-tier men their mothers had brought home with them out of brutal loneliness. Standing before the menfolk of my father's generation, I could do nothing. Before their rough hands and stale cigarette-vodka smells, I could only shudder and feel, along with fright and disgust, appeasement and complicity. These miscreants were our country's rulers. To survive in their world, one has to wear many hats -- perpetrator, victim, silent bystander. I could do a little of each."

The young writer supplying the lines is Gary Shteyngart, who moved to the United States from Russia when he was 7, while the young bereaved oligarch he's speaking through is Misha Vainberg, who attended college here but ended up marooned back in St. Petersburg. Misha is extraordinarily fat, ambivalently Jewish, unapologetically rich and -- as his homeland's best comic heroes often are -- infinitely thwarted. During his collegiate heyday, he gorged at the American buffet, slurping up rap music, psychotherapy and the sky's-the-limit complacent optimism that we take for granted as a birthright but that Misha sees for what it is: a glorious geo-historical accident.

All he needs to return to the party (and to Rouenna, his beloved trash-talking black girlfriend from the Bronx who asks him, while touring his native city, the grand imperial center of Czarist tradition, "Where the niggaz at?") is a visa from our consulate. Tough luck. As the heir to an ill-gotten bloody fortune in mobbed-up post-Soviet Russia, Misha can have anything he lusts for -- top-shelf liquor, pharmaceutical sedatives, human pyramids of prostitutes and multiple alcoholic servants -- but because of his murdered father's global misdeeds he can't have that stamp on his passport.Continue reading the main story



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He sulks and schemes. And Russia, in its wretched boom, sulks with him. "Let us be certain: the cold war was won by one side and lost by another." This epic collapse is continuing, we sense, inside the circus tent of smutty new money that Misha has. Shteyngart is a master panoramist who paints in just three tones: exhausted grays, despairing browns and superficial golds. When he mixes them, he gets moments like this one, which deserves to be reproduced at its full scale:

"The windswept Fontanka River, its crooked 19th-century skyline interrupted by the postapocalyptic wedge of the Sovietskaya Hotel, the hotel surrounded by symmetrical rows of yellowing, waterlogged apartment houses; the apartment houses, in turn, surrounded by corrugated shacks featuring, in no particular order, a bootleg CD emporium, the ad hoc Mississippi Casino ('America Is Far, but Mississippi Is Near'), a kiosk selling industrial-sized containers of crab salad, and the usual Syrian shawarma hut smelling invariably of spilled vodka, spoiled cabbage and some kind of vague, free-floating inhumanity."

Shteyngart and Misha, exuberant depressives, don't stint on the syntax or the verbiage when objects huge and rotten hulk into view. Their thick, overloaded style is what happens, though, when socialist realism decays into black comedy. This is the prose of heroic disappointment, faintly labored at moments but fitted to the task of shoveling up mountains of cultural debris. Hemingway's clean sentences wouldn't do here. A man needs commas, semicolons, adjectives. He requires linguistic heavy machinery.

Which Shteyngart operates with a light touch as his story gains speed, leaving behind the rubble of the past for the about-to-be rubble of the near-future. After being foiled in dull St. Petersburg, Misha lights out for flashy Absurdsvanï, an oil-blessed former Soviet republic where he hopes to finesse his visa problem. He flies there, accompanied by the only servant he hasn't pensioned off with petty cash and by an American college buddy who now runs a DVD business in Russia called ExcessHollywood (a name that, in another novel, would indicate a playful author but which, in this one, suggests a playful author and a numb society).

Quartered in a gleaming Hyatt, Misha is just days from freedom when Shteyngart starts turning back the hands on Absurdsvanï's political clock. Dictatorship looms like a thug in a cheap suit. The spirit of democracy strikes back with its hand-lettered cardboard sign. There are billions of petro-dollars at stake, which liquefy and ooze corruption on everyone. Misha is mired. As a Russian, that's his lot. Borders can be crossed, regimes replaced, economic systems re-engineered, but -- for Shteyngart -- identity persists. It's that frustrating last 10 pounds of history that folks can't seem to shed, no matter how much they modernize their diets.

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And it's a weight people cling to, the novel hints, to keep their souls from floating off into the bewildering thin air of purely notional internationalism. Misha is stuck with his inborn inertia as surely as if he'd sat down in wet cement. He's no match for the nimble, more Asiatic locals who can outfox him in their sleep. Meanwhile, over in the land of progress, his plucky ghetto girl is moving on up -- and into the clutches of her lecherous writing teacher. Misha's Nabokovian nemesis is an émigré poseur with a name resembling Shteyngart's and a novel on his résumé whose title pornographically alludes to Shteyngart's first effort, "The Russian Debutante's Handbook." He's a naturalized monster who trades on his own foreignness (or the aura of what's left of it) to scoop up chicks and critical attention.

There are a lot of stereotypes here and plenty of intellectually incorrect exercises in racial and group determinism. Shteyngart, via Misha, thinks in peoples, not just individuals. He jokes in peoples, too, and not only about Jews and Russians, as his heritage entitles him to, but about Muslims, Germans, Brooklynites and every other in-group he can outrage. One envies his sense of entitlement to biases, and his frank understanding of the fact that such crude distinctions make the world go round. Especially these days, when they're not supposed to. When, ostensibly, we're all United Nations blue.

It's self-consciousness that defines our species, though, and Shteyngart is hilariously aware that the selves we invent in order to be conscious of them can be based on almost any difference. Ours is the species that insists it's not one. How else could we justify warring for common resources? Absurdsvanï, for example, is divided between two ancient Christian traditions. The schismatic distinction is the tiny line that the sects draw through the bottoms of their crosses. One party's line slants up from left to right, the other's is angled in reverse. Sometimes the Absurdis laugh off the split, sometimes they fight about it. Almost always, though, some ambitious profiteer or maniac is plotting new ways to use it to his advantage.

Despite being jammed with charged references to Halliburton, Bechtel and other big-name players in the latest round of the great game, "Absurdistan" isn't a book of social issues or geopolitical controversies. It rides on top of them much as Huckleberry Finn rode atop his raft. Not surprisingly, considering the times, it rides them straight downstream, tugged by a bubbling current of worldly pessimism. Misha can't make much headway against such suction. He's sluggish. Obese. He's consumed his way into a corner. Shteyngart has built an apt hero in this respect: a self-defeating fatso globalist. His appetites drive the strife and fuel the tensions that provoke him to keep eating.

Compared with most young novelists his age, who tend toward cutesy involution, Shteyngart is a giant mounted on horseback. He ranges more widely, sees more sweepingly and gets where he's going with far more aplomb. His Absurdistan, to Americans, may seem amusingly far away at first, but the longer one spends there, hunkered down with Misha in a hotel room high above the rocket fire, the closer and more recognizable it gets. Absurdsvanï is far, but Absurdistan is near.

'Absurdistan,' by Gary Shteyngart Walter Kirn is a regular contributor to the Book Review. His most recent novel is "Mission to America."Continue reading the main story

Central Asia in Art: From Soviet Orientalism to the New Republics. Aliya Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen. IB Tauris. 2016

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Often a historian’s role is to act as a voice for the unheard or silenced, undoing the folded lies of propaganda and bias. Kazakh art historian Aliya Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen performs a rendition of this role, not so much in speaking out for the silenced but in dismantling the layered stereotypes and distorted images of Central Asia. Central Asia in Art: From Soviet Orientalism to the New Republics focuses primarily on Soviet approaches to portraying Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan in art. Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen’s book blends accessible art analysis and detailed historical context to create a thought-provoking exegesis of identity and the control of perceptions not just in Central Asia but in Russia too. The reader learns that the Central Asian countries’ inability to control the discourse surrounding them did not collapse with the Berlin Wall, but lives on in new guises such as Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat; interestingly though, where the USSR used selected images of Central Asia to buttress empire, Cohen’s Borat is used as an Other to critique the Western Self.

Much of Central Asia in Art concentrates on Socialist Realist art produced during Stalin’s stranglehold over the USSR. Socialist Realism was a homogenous supranational style developed to lionise Soviet values through realistic imagery, and was deployed in the Central Asian peripheries of the USSR to foster greater unity between Central Asian nations and Moscow. Paradoxically, this was done whilst trying to celebrate different national identities, albeit within tight constraints; indeed, as Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen asks: ‘why would a union of nations be celebrated through the persistent accentuation of difference?’ The USSR empire was a bizarre construction, as the author pithily notes, exerting a ‘constant demonstration of dominance and simultaneous denial of it’.

The book is comprised of large, beautifully detailed plates accompanied by Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen’s probing commentary, which, combined, give the reader a comprehensive, empathetic and encyclopaedic understanding of the featured artworks. This brings to life interesting leitmotifs, such as the Russian declaration of a civilising mission in Central Asia. For Russian audiences, artists would infantilise Central Asian nations by depicting young central Asian females ‘ready to be emancipated and which have been educated and pacified’. Frequently, whenever a painting shows Russians interacting with Central Asians, the former are often shown undertaking paternal activities, such as teaching chess or demonstrating their artistic skills. Interactions between Russian and Central Asian artistic subjects can be even more dynamic, such as in David Flekman’s Recovery of Sight (the very first image the reader sees on opening the book), in which a Russian nurse and doctor inspect a Kyrgyz woman after she has regained her vision. The painting bludgeons home Soviet messages of female and Kyrgyz national emancipation as well as Soviet modernisation.
Image Credit: Landscape as Art Exhibition 2009, Olivia Garnett’s 3-D model of Alexander Volkov, Caravan (University of Michigan School of Natural Resources and Environment CC BY 2.0)

Modernisation is a recurrent theme of Soviet Realism: the open steppes and virginal lands are portrayed as awaiting Soviet development. In Abylkhan Kasteev’s 1930s paintings, Haymaking and Collective Dairy Farm, lush verdant landscapes exude abundance and high yield whilst Kazakhs harmoniously working together on the collective farm. Equally, depictions of urban spaces are used to press home Soviet modernisation, where a point is made by Soviet artists of electricity, culture and permanent infrastructure to nations of more nomadic historical leanings. Yuri Zaitsev’s 1935 nighttime scene, Building Site in Balkhash, represents this economic rejuvenation well, glorifying a building site not only in depiction but also in medium. Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen points out that this medium brings the worksite to the plateau of high art, a ‘sacrifice for the creation of the new world’, destined to remain ‘eternal’ on a museum wall as opposed to transient press photographs.

The reader learns that the creation of art was not a one-way street for Russian artists and audiences, but rather an exercise to reconcile Russian identity too. Russian Orientalism portraying Central Asians through stereotypes, such as with watermelons and attached to the land, helped Russians situate themselves in their limbo position between the East and the West. An interesting medley of the Russian Self and Asian Other is Alexander Volkov: born in Turkestan (the former name of the Central Asian territories) and educated in St Petersburg and Kiev, he immersed himself in Central Asian culture for many decades far from the reach of Moscow. His work stands out as not being concerned with a unity of nations or modernisation, but rather for that rare thing other Soviet artists were unprepared to show: the effort and associated stresses incurred by Central Asian labour to propel modernisation. The works do not ‘openly talk about the Soviet nature’ of the exertion; but even acknowledging such toil sets him apart from many other Soviet artists. As the author points out, in art history a special mindset is required for judging artists in a totalitarian environment: usually an artist is judged by what they did, but in totalitarian states it is about what they did not do.

Despite the title implying a longer time span, the book is focused mostly on art developments during Stalin’s leadership. Few pages are devoted to art post-Khrushchev and the interesting times of independence. This is a shame as the few pages the author devotes to the 1990s and 2000s are filled with astute analysis of Central Asia grappling with identity in the midst of Borat and a globalised world. Given the author’s forensic analysis of Soviet history throughout the twentieth century, it is surprising that she has little to say about the effects of present political control by autocratic regimes in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan on contemporary art (the current ‘strongman’ leader of Kazakhstan has wielded power since 1991, whilst his Uzbek equivalent who ruled for the same time died in September of this year).

The book, however, is a visual feast and cerebral stimulant recommended to art historians, USSR specialists and dilettantes alike. It is at the forefront of an increasing historical art focus on the relationship between Central Asia and Russia, whilst building on major critiques of Socialist Realism by the likes of Boris Groys (Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin and Art Power) and Gleb Prokhorov (Art under Socialist Realism: Soviet Painting, 1930-1950). Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen’s work is profound and empathetic; combined with a scholar’s comprehensiveness, this is most aptly displayed in her poignant analysis of one of the most famous pieces of Soviet art: A Daughter of Soviet Kyrgyzia by Semion Chuikov. Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen dissects the painting in great detail, showing the forward motion of the girl in the painting striding proudly towards the future and away from an imperialist past. With allusions to the present and Central Asia, Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen notes sagaciously:

The girl in Chuikov’s painting is forever young. The model for his painting has, however, aged. It seems that her schooling, if it took place at all, brought the Communist utopia into the village, rather than the young girl into the future [the girl never left the village]. The girl was allowed to look ahead but never managed to walk out of the village she was born in.

Steven Spielberg: A Life in Films by Molly Haskell Yale University Press,224pgs, $25

Universal/Everett Collection
Steven Spielberg and Henry Thomas on the set of E.T., 1982

The short biography of Steven Spielberg that Molly Haskell has written for Yale’s Jewish Lives series is subtitled A Life in Films for reasons that soon become clear. Where else finally but in his films would you look for the intimate reality of this curiously enigmatic figure, a man who in the midst of his worldwide fame manages to hide in plain sight? The Spielberg who has surfaced in videotaped interviews or televised awards ceremonies wears the mask of the regular forthright guy, good-humored, matter-of-fact, self-deprecating where appropriate. This affable public persona seems designed to deflect attention from whatever might lie in back of it, the force that roams and shapes the domains from which his films emerge.

There are filmmakers whose lives have been adventures in themselves (Simon Callow has needed three volumes to tell Orson Welles’s story, and isn’t done yet), others with careers battered in complicated ways by the turmoil of war and politics or by the explosions of their own domestic lives. In Spielberg’s case there is little in the way of flamboyant or traumatic public episodes for a writer to catch hold of—he is not an agent of chaos—and the private life has been well guarded by a man wary of revealing too much of himself. (He does not, for instance, give interviews to biographers.) This is after all someone whose own mother—herself described as a nonconformist—would say of him: “The conventional always appealed to Steven.”

From the outside he can seem as much institution as individual, and it is a daunting institution. His résumé encompasses, beyond the thirty feature films to date that he directed himself (including three that enjoyed, in turn, the status of all-time top grosser), many more on which he served as producer. For a decade, before DreamWorks was sold to Viacom, he was a mogul with his own studio. As if with the left hand he has branched out into television production and the development of video games. A prominent supporter of liberal and humanitarian causes, he channeled the profits from Schindler’s List toward the establishment of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.

In short, with a name comparable only to Disney as an entertainment industry brand, he is something of an anthology of superlatives—the richest, most famous, most precociously successful, and, for some, the most gifted of filmmakers—a walking lifetime achievement award. As Haskell notes at the outset, a tally has shown that the two names most often cited in Academy Awards thank-you speeches are Spielberg and God, with Spielberg leading God by a considerable margin. For others the very scale and pervasiveness of his success makes him a predictable object of skepticism if not mistrust.

Haskell acknowledges her own early resistance to the spirit of Spielberg’s films:


I had never been an ardent fan…. He always wanted his films to “arrive” someplace. But brooding ambiguities, unresolved longings, things left unsaid, and the erotic transactions of men and women are the very things that drew me to movies in the first place. His great subjects—children, adolescents—and genres—science fiction, fantasy, horror, action-adventure—were stay-away zones for me.

She emphasizes his “rarely if ever featuring an interesting complex woman at the fore or even an adult sexual relationship”—although she is careful to note that this hardly makes him singular among his generation of male film directors.

Her resistance gives all the more credibility to her nuanced and often deeply sympathetic accounts of his films. She is alert, for instance, to the intensity of the erotic energy that, however rarely, comes to the surface, whether in the kiss exchanged by two women in The Color Purple (which “may be the most sensual scene in all of Spielberg”) or the scene (the saving grace of Always) where Holly Hunter dances accompanied by Richard Dreyfuss as the unseen ghost of her lover. In what is on screen Haskell discerns the essential matter of a life story that might otherwise be reduced to the most fragmentary evidence: some childhood anecdotes, a good number of tales (some undoubtedly apocryphal) about how he got into the movie business, the vagaries of his marital and professional life as far as they can be gleaned from the public press (a couple of marriages, an expensive divorce, many children, an assortment of business deals and lawsuits and hobbies and residences), the usual more or less reliable bits of scattered rumor and recollection.

Much surmise has to go into filling out a portrait of the man. One thinks of the shot in Citizen Kane of the partly obscured view through a fence of the aging and secluded Kane, captured by an intruding news photographer. Not that, for all his extraordinary wealth and influence, there seems to be anything especially Kane-like about Spielberg—he is too much the family man to be likened to Welles’s isolated plutocrat—even if he did manage to acquire the Rosebud sled for his private collection, and even if Haskell does suggest that in recent years he has become “more and more withdrawn and secretive, even paranoid,” and, after some disturbing threats and stalker incidents, “extremely security conscious.”

For Haskell, the crucial starting point is a reckoning with Spielberg’s childhood fears. Born in Cincinnati in 1946 but moving at an early age to Camden, New Jersey, where his father worked in the emerging field of transistor technology, young Steven was from an early age a chronic nail-biter, consumed by anxieties set off by everything from Disney’s Pinocchio to the storm-whipped maple tree waving outside his window. He knelt with his face against the television set, listening to voices he heard calling to him amid the static.

His father’s workaholic tendencies meant that Spielberg was raised essentially among women, his artistically inclined mother Leah (“more coconspirator than parent,” in Spielberg’s words) and his three sisters. In Haskell’s account the restless and fearful boy turned at times into a mischievous, borderline sadistic prankster, locking his sisters in closets and terrifying them with a plastic skull. (Later he would pelt the guests at his bar mitzvah with oranges from a rooftop.)

None of this amounts outwardly to extreme drama. A reconstruction of the secret lives of the children of the 1950s would yield a myriad of such pictures. How many children were not at some point terrified by storms or gnarled trees, especially children exposed to the influence of such a terrifying film as Pinocchio, a work easily as unsettling as Jaws? The small-scale juvenile cruelties of suburban life likewise would make for an endless chronicle. Those voices in the television set—later replicated, along with the scary tree, in Poltergeist (1982)—are more suggestive. The sense of being addressed directly by unknown entities might offer some clue to the air of certainty that marks every early step of his career and that serves as a counterweight to all that unappeasably restless nervous energy that he has admitted as an ongoing impetus: “Yes, I’ve always had shpilkes. I have it now. I had it then. It is my fuel, basically.”

From a certain angle one can see Spielberg as one of those archetypal children of the mythic suburbs, cheery on the outside and nervewracked on the inside, a myth on which his own films have worked variations time and again. So much of his early trajectory feels so generic: “his mind was permanently blown” by Destination Moon; he watched Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier; he developed an obsessive interest in dinosaurs; he joined the Boy Scouts. He can be seen as the awkward haunted child observing the adults around him while inwardly keeping his distance from them and the history they bring with them. They include his Odessa-born maternal grandfather, a gregarious singer and storyteller who was also a strictly observant Orthodox Jew; his father, an army veteran deeply involved in the work that gave him an inside view of world-changing developments in computer science; his mother, “the anything-goes mom, the fairy godmother, who grants her son his every wish,” who would shock more conventional neighbors and eventually leave her husband for another man.

His parents’ divorce took years of increasingly vociferous domestic argument before coming to a head in his last year of high school. The split was evidently momentous for him, both by Spielberg’s accounts and by the evidence of his movies with their recurrent theme of broken families. Haskell reads much of his work as a symbolic coming to terms with a parental drama that for a long time he misunderstood, wrongly blaming his father for the marriage’s collapse.

The young Spielberg seems a picture of an unsettled personality darting about internally in search of its own borders. He was a brilliant child whose intellectual curiosity did not motivate him to be more than a desultory student; a nerd who shunned athletics and the outdoor life yet found his greatest social fulfillment in the Boy Scouts; a Jewish kid uncomfortable with his identity, fantasizing about the communal joys of Christmas. He yearned, apparently, for the mainstream American life evoked by the paintings of Norman Rockwell (of whom Spielberg would become a major collector) and from which his Jewish identity seemed to exclude him. “Being a Jew meant that I was not normal,” he would explain, “I was not like everybody else. I just wanted to be accepted. Not for who I was. I wanted to be accepted for who everybody else was.”

The sense of a barrier was heightened by the communities in which he found himself living—especially after his family moved to Arizona when he was nine, to a suburb on the edge of the desert, an environment of (in Spielberg’s words) “kitchen windows facing kitchen windows facing kitchen windows,” precisely analogous to the freshly built development so thoroughly devastated by the angry dead at the climax of Poltergeist (a film, written and produced but not, at least officially, directed by Spielberg, that as Haskell notes serves as a repository for some of his darkest fantasies).

Not long after the move to Arizona his father gave him an 8-millimeter movie camera, and a life still nebulous came abruptly into focus. At first he took over responsibility for filming the family’s vacations, complete with retakes and carefully elaborated setups, and discovered that “staging real life was so much more fun than just recording it.” By the age of twelve his ambition as a filmmaker was fully formulated, and with it the conscious construction of his own legend. Filmmaking defined his social life, reinforcing his ties with his fellow Boy Scouts and classmates, as he roped everyone in his circle (including of course his parents) into increasingly complex projects.

The intensity of this precocious professionalism prefigures the relentless energy of his subsequent career. One gets the impression that he did not so much express his personality by means of filmmaking as construct his personality through the very act of filming. Not just filming: he was already aware of the ancillary requirements of exhibiting and marketing and even market research. (He would screen movies and then quiz the spectators about their reactions.) At seventeen, still in high school, he wrote, directed, and exhibited a feature-length movie—a UFO story prefiguring Close Encounters of the Third Kind—at a movie theater in Phoenix. After what seem to have been some very casual studies at California State College in Long Beach, he made his way rapidly as a director.

This was in the mid-1960s, but for Spielberg there were no lost years of self-searching, no eccentric vagabondage, no inclination for the psychotropic indulgences of his contemporaries. At twenty he already had a precise sense of the kind of filmmaker he would be, telling a student journalist: “I don’t want to make films like Antonioni or Fellini. I don’t want just the elite. I want everybody to enjoy my films.” Art house fare had never been his thing. His primal movie experience in childhood was Cecil B. DeMille’s all-star Technicolor circus extravaganza The Greatest Show on Earth, and the title alone may have given him a clue to what he wanted to offer his audience. He has said that his first venture into filmmaking was an attempt to replicate DeMille’s train wreck sequence with his Lionel train set.

The deepest stratum of Spielberg’s work was being formed: filmmaking as preservation of childhood, a means of ensuring that the enchanted world of rocket ships and dinosaurs and toy trains could endure in a perpetually habitable parallel life—analogous perhaps to the post-human existence of the androids in A.I. If Spielberg’s childhood and early youth occupy so much of his biographer’s attention, it is because they are never quite done with; as Haskell moves through his career film by film, she constantly draws attention to the ineradicable uncertainties from those years that persist even in works whose ostensible subjects are far removed from his own circumstances. (“E.T. assembling a phone,” she writes, “is the amateur son’s playful rebuke to the engineer father,” while in Schindler’s List “the stories his grandparents had told were finally connecting in a painful, visceral way.”) She argues for Spielberg being, obliquely but profoundly, a most autobiographical filmmaker, marked by “his compulsion to insert versions of his own family drama into the more ritualized conventions of genres where family ordinarily took a back seat.”

Indeed, given the early age at which he absorbed the techniques of filmmaking, it’s as if those techniques became themselves a tangible continuation of childhood, a way to stay directly in contact with a certain rapt pleasure. Technical problems are never just technical; the result is the peculiar sense of intimacy he can impart even when filming—as he has so often done—the equivalent of a train wreck. In his later films, as he has moved beyond train wrecks into the larger catastrophes of history, the intimacy is still there, imbued now with a terrifying vulnerability. His reenactments of storm trooper raids or the slave trade, or, in Empire of the Sun, the wartime chaos in which a boy is separated from his parents—these scenes of ultimate dispossession—were all the more brutal in effect for being filmed as excitingly as the action highlights of Raiders of the Lost Ark or Jurassic Park, as if one had been lured into an amusement park in order to be initiated into hitherto unrevealed horrors.

He made his transition into professional filmmaking with the help of Amblin’, an extremely low-budget twenty-five-minute short imbued with hippie-ish late-1960s imagery of hitchhiking and pot-smoking far removed from Spielberg’s own way of life. It is a slight but undeniably proficient piece of work, and in short order he was put under contract as a television director at Universal. A year later he was directing Joan Crawford in an hour-long episode of Night Gallery, after Bette Davis walked out rather than take direction from someone so young. In a production still reproduced in the book, the twenty-two-year-old director, a viewfinder dangling from his neck, stands slightly hunched in front of the seated Crawford, his gaze fixed on the star as if she were some slightly forbidding foreign material he must find a way to work with. The poise and unwavering focus of his stance give him the air of a dancer—or perhaps of a seabird preparing to swoop.

Spielberg might have restricted himself to being the director who defined a new era of popular filmmaking with Jaws (1975), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), and E.T. the Extra Terrestrial (1982). He was typed early on as the master of cinematic roller-coaster rides—his first feature, Duel (1971), with its nearly abstract depiction of a hapless commuter stalked by a murderous truck, was already a flawless demonstration of action reduced to its purest, almost wordless terms—and then, with the triumphs of Close Encounters and E.T., of cosmic mystery and childhood wonder. He has not hesitated to build on the success of earlier films, with multiple sequels in the Indiana Jones series (a fifth entry is in the works) and a follow-up to his 1993 dinosaur extravaganza Jurassic Park.

More pronounced, though, has been the energy with which, beginning with The Color Purple in 1985, he has pushed in other directions, in the impressive array of films as ambitious and varied as Empire of the Sun (1987), Schindler’s List (1993), Amistad (1997), Saving Private Ryan (1998), A.I. (2001), Minority Report (2002), Catch Me If You Can (2002), The Terminal (2004), Munich (2005), Lincoln (2012), and Bridge of Spies (2015). However public the themes, there is nothing impersonal about these films. He remains the same filmmaker regardless of genre. His early admirer Pauline Kael was effusive in praise of The Sugarland Express (1974), suggesting that Spielberg might be “that rarity among directors—a born entertainer” truly endowed with “movie sense”—but worrying that “he may be so full of it that he doesn’t have much else.” Kael later decided that in taking on conventionally humanistic themes Spielberg had betrayed his gifts and become a bad director.

If you wanted evidence that Spielberg had nothing to say, you could turn to his follow-up to Close Encounters, the excruciating epic slapstick comedy 1941 (1979) set in L.A. just after Pearl Harbor, a demonstration of technical mastery dedicated to creating a live-action cartoon on a Wagnerian scale, demoniacally efficient and utterly dispiriting, an ode to the void. 1941 is founded on an aesthetic of total assault. There is no breathing room for the spectator, no escape from the next heavy object falling from its mooring: a fighter plane crash-landing on Hollywood Boulevard; an unanchored ferris wheel rolling off a pier. In this Spielberg is a true child of the 1950s, the age of CinemaScope and 3-D, of flying saucers and atomic monsters and marauding Vikings and anything else calculated to amaze the audience with something they had never seen before. For the children of that time, if not necessarily for their more skeptical elders, the big-screen attractions had the authoritative presence of Mount Everest or the Grand Canyon: everything was brighter, gaudier, louder, more passionate, realer than real.

Spielberg is the child who has fully understood the power of that screen and seized control of it, acquiring daunting gifts: to reconfigure fantasy life and rewrite history, not just for himself but for everyone. At some point, however, the rapture of the boy playing with his toys is interrupted by a disturbing sense of the horrors and dangers in which even these games are implicated. In his grand historical set pieces—the Japanese occupation of Shanghai in Empire of the Sun, the emptying of the Kraków ghetto in Schindler’s List, the slave mutiny in Amistad, the D-Day landing in Saving Private Ryan—he takes it upon himself to surpass those earlier epic spectacles by achieving something not only more lifelike but more truthful. The fine points of the truth of any of these depictions can be and has been argued endlessly; but if Spielberg is not a historian he should be acknowledged as an extraordinary and quite conscientious history painter.

It is not surprising that he should have moved in this direction. He has shown a particular gift for clarifying the essential form of complex action, notably in the tumult of crowds, from the panicked beachgoers of Jaws through the violently dispossessed of Shanghai and Kraków and the invaders of Omaha Beach: one could string all those scenes of mass movement into an endless diorama of humans packed together, flung against each other, clustering together to gaze at a public spectacle, looking for a way out, pressing forward in attack, attempting to scatter in flight, driven to destruction.

He has often been accused of sentimentality, of allowing the swelling orchestral accents of John Williams’s music to sweep away every other consideration, and there is no doubt that he shares a talent for the emotional climax with the classic Hollywood directors he so much admires. That talent is coupled, however, with an analytical precision that has come increasingly to the fore. The analysis may be precisely of the implications of the persuasive force of his own film language. The dramatic emotions he evokes with such force play out within resilient rational structures diagrammed with detached precision, whether the futuristic cyberpolice operations of Minority Report or the businesslike subterranean networks of terrorists and intelligence agents in Munich or the immense military machine set in motion in the World War I saga War Horse. Even the warmer comic touches of The Terminal are offset by the hierarchical labyrinth of the airport where almost the whole film takes place, with its bureaucratic barriers and banks of spy cameras.

The determination of Spielberg’s protagonists to resist or break free leads to seeming victories that stir the emotions—the exile Tom Hanks finally makes it out of the airport, the boy in War Horse finds his way back to his village, the Mossad agent in Munich is reunited with his family—but the eyes continue to look clearly at what is going on, and to register with dry clarity an awareness of unresolved contradictions and decidedly mixed outcomes. The surges of feeling no matter how expertly elicited do not erase the world.

That analysis of systems draws him to themes of linguistic incomprehension, between species in Close Encounters and E.T., between nations in Amistad and The Terminal. The mechanisms of law and negotiation become dominant subjects of Amistad and Lincoln and Bridge of Spies. Always the emphasis is on how to effect a translation between mutually incompatible discourses, a translation that may be only partial or tentative, forgivably so if it serves its purpose, bridges the gap, achieves the transfer.

In Amistad, Anthony Hopkins as the aging John Quincy Adams remarks: “In a courtroom, whoever tells the best story wins.” This is not a matter of falling back on easy resolutions, but of pragmatically seeking out the argument or configuration that can prevail, at least tentatively or in part, over forces of destruction. Mastery of technique, even the technique of deception, might prove an indispensable weapon. Catch Me If You Can—perhaps the most blatantly personal of Spielberg’s films—hinges crucially on a con man’s forgery. It is after all the expert forger who is most qualified to detect falsification.

Central Asia in Art: From Soviet Orientalism to the New Republics. Aliya Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen. IB Tauris. 2016.

Often a historian’s role is to act as a voice for the unheard or silenced, undoing the folded lies of propaganda and bias. Kazakh art historian Aliya Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen performs a rendition of this role, not so much in speaking out for the silenced but in dismantling the layered stereotypes and distorted images of Central Asia. Central Asia in Art: From Soviet Orientalism to the New Republics focuses primarily on Soviet approaches to portraying Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan in art. Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen’s book blends accessible art analysis and detailed historical context to create a thought-provoking exegesis of identity and the control of perceptions not just in Central Asia but in Russia too. The reader learns that the Central Asian countries’ inability to control the discourse surrounding them did not collapse with the Berlin Wall, but lives on in new guises such as Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat; interestingly though, where the USSR used selected images of Central Asia to buttress empire, Cohen’s Borat is used as an Other to critique the Western Self.

Much of Central Asia in Art concentrates on Socialist Realist art produced during Stalin’s stranglehold over the USSR. Socialist Realism was a homogenous supranational style developed to lionise Soviet values through realistic imagery, and was deployed in the Central Asian peripheries of the USSR to foster greater unity between Central Asian nations and Moscow. Paradoxically, this was done whilst trying to celebrate different national identities, albeit within tight constraints; indeed, as Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen asks: ‘why would a union of nations be celebrated through the persistent accentuation of difference?’ The USSR empire was a bizarre construction, as the author pithily notes, exerting a ‘constant demonstration of dominance and simultaneous denial of it’.

The book is comprised of large, beautifully detailed plates accompanied by Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen’s probing commentary, which, combined, give the reader a comprehensive, empathetic and encyclopaedic understanding of the featured artworks. This brings to life interesting leitmotifs, such as the Russian declaration of a civilising mission in Central Asia. For Russian audiences, artists would infantilise Central Asian nations by depicting young central Asian females ‘ready to be emancipated and which have been educated and pacified’. Frequently, whenever a painting shows Russians interacting with Central Asians, the former are often shown undertaking paternal activities, such as teaching chess or demonstrating their artistic skills. Interactions between Russian and Central Asian artistic subjects can be even more dynamic, such as in David Flekman’s Recovery of Sight (the very first image the reader sees on opening the book), in which a Russian nurse and doctor inspect a Kyrgyz woman after she has regained her vision. The painting bludgeons home Soviet messages of female and Kyrgyz national emancipation as well as Soviet modernisation.

Image Credit: Landscape as Art Exhibition 2009, Olivia Garnett’s 3-D model of Alexander Volkov, Caravan (University of Michigan School of Natural Resources and Environment CC BY 2.0)

Modernisation is a recurrent theme of Soviet Realism: the open steppes and virginal lands are portrayed as awaiting Soviet development. In Abylkhan Kasteev’s 1930s paintings, Haymaking and Collective Dairy Farm, lush verdant landscapes exude abundance and high yield whilst Kazakhs harmoniously working together on the collective farm. Equally, depictions of urban spaces are used to press home Soviet modernisation, where a point is made by Soviet artists of electricity, culture and permanent infrastructure to nations of more nomadic historical leanings. Yuri Zaitsev’s 1935 nighttime scene, Building Site in Balkhash, represents this economic rejuvenation well, glorifying a building site not only in depiction but also in medium. Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen points out that this medium brings the worksite to the plateau of high art, a ‘sacrifice for the creation of the new world’, destined to remain ‘eternal’ on a museum wall as opposed to transient press photographs.

The reader learns that the creation of art was not a one-way street for Russian artists and audiences, but rather an exercise to reconcile Russian identity too. Russian Orientalism portraying Central Asians through stereotypes, such as with watermelons and attached to the land, helped Russians situate themselves in their limbo position between the East and the West. An interesting medley of the Russian Self and Asian Other is Alexander Volkov: born in Turkestan (the former name of the Central Asian territories) and educated in St Petersburg and Kiev, he immersed himself in Central Asian culture for many decades far from the reach of Moscow. His work stands out as not being concerned with a unity of nations or modernisation, but rather for that rare thing other Soviet artists were unprepared to show: the effort and associated stresses incurred by Central Asian labour to propel modernisation. The works do not ‘openly talk about the Soviet nature’ of the exertion; but even acknowledging such toil sets him apart from many other Soviet artists. As the author points out, in art history a special mindset is required for judging artists in a totalitarian environment: usually an artist is judged by what they did, but in totalitarian states it is about what they did not do.

Despite the title implying a longer time span, the book is focused mostly on art developments during Stalin’s leadership. Few pages are devoted to art post-Khrushchev and the interesting times of independence. This is a shame as the few pages the author devotes to the 1990s and 2000s are filled with astute analysis of Central Asia grappling with identity in the midst of Borat and a globalised world. Given the author’s forensic analysis of Soviet history throughout the twentieth century, it is surprising that she has little to say about the effects of present political control by autocratic regimes in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan on contemporary art (the current ‘strongman’ leader of Kazakhstan has wielded power since 1991, whilst his Uzbek equivalent who ruled for the same time died in September of this year).

The book, however, is a visual feast and cerebral stimulant recommended to art historians, USSR specialists and dilettantes alike. It is at the forefront of an increasing historical art focus on the relationship between Central Asia and Russia, whilst building on major critiques of Socialist Realism by the likes of Boris Groys (Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin and Art Power) and Gleb Prokhorov (Art under Socialist Realism: Soviet Painting, 1930-1950). Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen’s work is profound and empathetic; combined with a scholar’s comprehensiveness, this is most aptly displayed in her poignant analysis of one of the most famous pieces of Soviet art: A Daughter of Soviet Kyrgyzia by Semion Chuikov. Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen dissects the painting in great detail, showing the forward motion of the girl in the painting striding proudly towards the future and away from an imperialist past. With allusions to the present and Central Asia, Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen notes sagaciously:

The girl in Chuikov’s painting is forever young. The model for his painting has, however, aged. It seems that her schooling, if it took place at all, brought the Communist utopia into the village, rather than the young girl into the future [the girl never left the village]. The girl was allowed to look ahead but never managed to walk out of the village she was born in.

Great Houses, Modern Aristocrats by James Reginato, Rizzoli New York, 2016

“An aristocracy in a republic,” observed the writer Nancy Mitford, “is like a chicken whose head has been cut off; it may run about in a lively way, but in fact it is dead.”


The new book Great Houses, Modern Aristocrats by Vanity Fair contributor James Reginato has ostensibly been created to refute Mitford’s claim.

“Though many of these subjects were hardly young,” Reginato writes in the book’s introduction, “I came to see how modern they were, in fact, as they came to adapt themselves to changing times and changing concepts of country-house ownership.”



That doesn’t quite come across in the book’s coverage of 16 magnificent, centuries-old houses and their owners. Reginato recounts struggling scions forced to open their homes to endless tour groups and a woman with more titles than the Queen of England who moved from a Georgian mansion into a farmhouse. Another homeowner, John Crichton Stuart, the 7th Marquess of Bute, was unable to sustain Dumfries House, an 18th century Palladian villa in Ayrshire, Scotland, in addition to his other estate, a gothic-revival mansion set on 38,000 acres; only the intervention of Charles, Prince of Wales, kept the house and its interiors from hitting the market. “The auction was called off,” Reginato writes. “And several truckloads of treasure already en route to London were returned home.”


The Large Library at Goodwood House in West Sussex.

But would that really have been so bad?

From the perspective of a Downton Abbey-loving public, these lords, ladies, marquesses, and earls are engaged in a noble, perhaps even quixotic struggle to maintain the brilliance and beauty of their families’ estates. From a more republican perspective, Reginato has documented a small group of people yoked by their own volition to a collection of unsustainably large mansions. Few would pity the great-granddaughter of an investment banker who struggles to maintain her family vacation home on Long Island; take a broad view, and the plight of these “modern aristocrats” isn’t so different. They’ve just been doing it longer.


Luggala, a house in County Wicklow, Ireland, owned by an heir to the Guiness brewing fortune.

The majority of the houses Reginato features are in the United Kingdom, and the bulk of those houses’ owners belong to a landowning class whose money and power began to wane with the onset of the industrial rev

olution. By the time the World War I rolled around and the sons of England’s landed gentry were massacred (1,157 Eton graduates died in battle from 1914 to 1918), the great houses of U.K. were in a state of disrepair. Only canny moves such as advantageous marriages kept the houses running. (Blenheim, the colossal mansion near Oxford, was “saved” by a loveless marriage between the 9th Duke of Marlborough and the massively wealthy American heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt.)

Even the Rothschild family, whose banking interests made them relatively immune to the British economy’s changing landscape, gave up Waddesdon Manor, their spectacularly ornate house in Buckinghamshire. “After the Second World War,” writes Reginato, “Waddesdon became too much even for a Rothschild to maintain.” The house, its contents, and 165 acres were bequeathed to the National Trust.



Waddesdon Manor, which the Rothschild family donated to the National Trust.

The list goes on. The Fiennes family, who has owned Broughton Castle since 1377, lives in the “private side” of the house; the rest is open to the public, which pays a 9 pound entrance fee. Members of the family, Reginato writes, occasionally man the cash register at the house’s gift shop.

Lord Edward Manners, the second son of the 10th Duke of Rutland, inherited a manor house in Derbyshire; he turned one of its outbuildings into an inn (“The Peacock”) and admits tourists into the staterooms of the manor house in the summer. Reginato notes that “while some might see taking over a large and old estate as a burden, Manners calls it ‘a wonderful lifetime project.”

All these people are aristocrats, in other words, but they are not a reigning class. Hedge fund managers, in contrast, don’t have to charge an entrance fee to their living rooms.


The Third State Room at Blenheim Palace.

There are some exceptions.

Two homes owned by the immensely wealthy Cavendish family are featured in Great Houses. One of the residences is a relatively modest cottage once occupied by the late Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, who left her 297-room Chatsworth House when her son took over her husband’s dukedom. Reginato quotes her as being delighted by the cottages’ petite charms.

“The luxury of having everything so small—it’s simply amazing!” the Duchess says. The other Cavendish house in the book is Lismore Castle in County Waterford, Ireland, which Reginato euphemistically de


The late Deborah Vivien Freeman-Mitford Cavendish, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, in her cottage, which is known as The Old Vicarage.

Perhaps the most magnificent of the Great Houses is owned by royalty of a more recent sort. Dudley House, the London residence of the Qatari Sheikh Hamad bin Abdullah Al-Thani, spans about 44,000 square feet and includes 17 bedrooms and a 50-foot-long ballroom; its estimated value is about $400 million. When Queen Elizabeth visited the residence, she reportedly remarked drily that it "… makes Buckingham Palace look rather dull."



An interior of Dudley House in central London.

And while this might be a backhanded compliment from one royal to another, it speaks to the fundamental truth that the perception of “true” aristocracy in the European mold has come to imply a sort of faded glory, the likes of which is seen in page after glossy page of Reginato’s beautiful book. What is conveniently forgotten, amid this valorization and nostalgia for an ancient, gracious time gone by, is that when each of the featured homes were constructed, they were the McMansions of their day: gaudy, ostentatious piles meant to telegraph wealth, power, and prestige. Similarly, today's true aristocrats build houses for the same reasons; it's just that our nobility's titles are awarded by a board of directors, not the queen.