Coming Clean: Readings, Confessions, Shortcuts

Abstract

This chapter recounts the convergence between remembrances of the writer’s early unintended and often unwanted experience as a gazer and his subsequent professional interests as a literary critic and cultural inquirer. It includes discussions of literary epiphany, the Judgment of Paris, and American popular songs, and treats work by range of painters, writers, and performers including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Rembrandt, William Glackens, Willa Cather, Sinclair Lewis, Elizabeth Bowen, Ingmar Bergman, Geoff Dyer, Andrew Wyeth, and Sarah Silverman. Subheadings: After and Before; Avant la Lettre; Invokers and Provokers; Humanities Gazer; The Uphill Cul-De-Sac—Pardon My French; Romantic Gestures; Rock of Gazes; Clowning vs. Gazing; The Limits of Reciprocity; As The Gazer Ages; Joint Custody; Attention/At-Ease.