In the beginning....(or, late last night)

Last night I fell asleep reading Laocoön, subtitled "an essay on the limits of painting and poetry" by the 18th century German critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing; this is one of those books that has been surfacing as a citation in essays on art history and visual culture studies, so when I saw it on the shelves on The Title Page (the used bookstore in Bryn Mawr that is holding its own right across the parking lot of the massive Borders) earlier this summer, I picked it up, basking in the proprietor's approval of this particular purchase.

I think this helped counterbalance the fact that I am a known buyer of Stephenie Meyer books, having picked up Eclipse there last summer as part of a haul that included Mark Doty's Still Life with Oysters and Lemons and a huge volume of essays on feminist art in the 1970s -- which, truth be told, stayed unread until very recently when I was looking for something on Judy Chicago's and Miriam Schapiro's "Womanhouse" project. It is now safely in the hands of a friend who is planning to organize some choreographers to present work in an abandoned squash court - wondering if abandoned squash courts will be the architectural legacy of the 1970s and 1980s, as old knitting and mattress factories are for the 1870s and 1880s, and if architects ever go into a project knowing that some day the structure will be repurposed as an arts space.

Lessing is actually very funny and piquant in his observations, which I wasn't expecting since I was going into the book with a sense of duty rather than of anticipation; he notes at the outset that "We Germans suffer from no lack of systematic books. We know better than any other nation in the world how to deduce anything we want in the most beautiful order from a few postulated definitions" which makes me think that we could probably trace a direct aesthetic genealogy from Lessing to Anthony Lane, who has been the reason I had been justifying a subscription to The New Yorker since I usually flip directly to the back of each issue to see if there is a film review from him.

And I must admit that I was reading Laocoön primarily because I couldn't find my copy of M. T. Anderson's Feed, a young adult novel about a dystopian future in which about three quarters of North Americans have information feeds directly implanted into their brains; this came in the mail from Powell's earlier this week, along with three copies (I hit the wrong button on the on-line ordering system and couldn't figure out how to rectify my error without canceling my whole order; luckily, they were on deep discount and there are several recent and impending births in my circle of friends) of Helen Oxenbury and Mem Fox's Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes.

I have a sentimental attachment to Helen Oxenbury books because they were a great favorite of Sam's when he was much younger, and love the fact that Mem Fox's illustrations of the babies' splayed toes look like Dorothea Lange's photo of her own gnarly feet, which is making me think of Tobin Sieber's book on the aesthetics of disability which compels me to view Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes, as beautiful as it is, as a celebration of corporeal normativity. So I'm wondering if any package of books for a new baby should also include some Charles Addams - thinking of the comic in which the parents are cooing over an infant's supernumery digits -- or of a collection of Lucille Clifton poems.

Here is a Lucille Clifton poem from homage to mine collected in good woman: poems and a memoir 1969-1980:

i was born with twelve fingers
like my mother and my daughter
each of us
born wearing strange black gloves
extra baby fingers hanging over the sides of our cribs and dipping into the milk.
somebody was afraid we would learn to cast spells
and our wonders were cut off
but they didn't understand
the powerful memory of ghosts. now
we take what we want
with invisible fingers
and we connect
my dead mother my live daughter and me
through our terrible shadowy hands.