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Kissing the Mask by William T. Vollmann

By William T. Vollmann

From the nationwide ebook Award-winning writer of Europe imperative comes an enthralling, evocative and piercing exam of an historical jap culture and the keys it holds to our smooth realizing of beauty....

What is a lady? To what volume is femininity a functionality? Writing with the extraordin-ary expertise and never-ending interest that experience outlined his complete oeuvre, William T. Vollmann takes an in-depth look at the japanese craft of Noh theater, utilizing the medium as a prism to bare the notion of attractiveness itself.

Sweeping readers from the dressing room of 1 of Japan's most renowned Noh actors to a transvestite bar within the red-light district of Kabukicho, Kissing the masks explores the enigma surrounding Noh theater and the traditions that experience made it intrinsic to jap tradition for hundreds of years. Vollmann then widens his scope to surround such sleek artists of charm and loss as Mishima, Kawabata or even Andrew Wyeth. From previous Norse poetry to Greek cult statues, from Japan's such a lot elite geisha dancers to American make-up artists, from Serbia to India, Vollmann works to extract the secrets and techniques of staged femininity and the secret of perceived and expressed good looks, together with explorations of gender at a transgendered group in la and with Kabuki lady impersonators.

Kissing the masks is illustrated with many evocative sketches and pictures via the writer.

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Where they can be trained to a profitable intercourse with nature’ (1984: 191). 22 As may be imagined, the argument did not go down well. Wordsworth, though past his radical prime, still saw himself as somehow aligned with the common people against the avaricious entrepreneurs and was genuinely hurt by the suggestion that he argued out of self-interest: that having found his idyll, he just wanted to keep the noisy masses out. But it was impossible to make the case for conservation in these aesthetic terms without coming hard up against a popular democratic impulse which the railway entrepreneurs had firmly on their side.

The circulation of traffic demands the straight line; it is the proper thing for the heart of a city. The curve is ruinous, difficult and dangerous; it is a paralysing thing. 29 Le Corbusier’s bile against Sitte’s rather nostalgic celebration of the charms of the irregular is consistent with his polemical style – as is the high moral tone adopted. But his obsession with geometry, with the straight line and the right angle – which was eventually to pass30 – are less important than his conflation of rationality and order with functionality.

Soon after midday. After which, the city will empty as though by a deep breath’ (1971: 191). Although Le Corbusier has been characterized as applying Taylorism to architecture (Mcleod, 1983), in a curious way his attitude to capitalist labour-time is not unlike Arthur Seaton’s. The necessity of work is something simply, ineluctably, inertly there at the core of our social existence: an activity to be expedited quickly and efficiently, rather than criticized, after which we can go quickly home to enjoy ‘the hours of repose’.

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