Home Remedies

This sequence of seven essays ranges widely in its consideration of literary and artistic subjects: from French painters to English novelists to American dancers, classical mythology to Maxwell’s Demon. Pops is, at once, provocative and entertaining, serious in his enterprise yet playful in his style. “The American Fix” an introduction to contemporary malady and remedy, inscribes the comic despair of many American things: the space program, drugs, Pop art, jogging, Vitamin C. “In the Labyrinths,” by contrast, defines art as a game to play, not an environment in which to compete, a home remedy with examples from Mark Twain, Kafka, Borges, and the artist whose spirit of irony presides over these texts, Marcel Duchamp. An essay on Charles Olson analyzes Olson’s poetics of dancing-art for beauty and use-and “Sleeping Beauty Spurned” pursues some versions of modern and post-modern dance, from Isadora Duncan to Meredith Monk, in their effort to implicate the spectator. “Perpetual Motions” argues the inspiring metaphor of that impossible circumstance in regard to such writers as Dickens and Pynchon, whereas the next essay meditates upon the transformation of human waste into spirit-a comparatively unregarded subject. Like “In Labyrinths” and “Perpetual Motions,” this essay is rich in literary detail and in visual illustration. “The Museum. My Home Away from Home,” is a kind of coda to the…