Smash Your Idols
Hank Kalet
It was 1980. Legend becomes myth. Left dead on a sidewalk, assassin’s bullet spilling blood. Like his mother, a lonely corpse misremembered, known but never really known, “you had me, but I never had you.”
I remember hearing the news while I was still at Penn State, winter break approaching. They collected outside his home in the days that followed, outside the Dakota. Genius remembered. Candles lit to his memory, our memory really. The stories we tell. He “beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved.” Admissions, perhaps. A son abandoned, a family in “bits and pieces,” and the bird sings and sings and sings. Sink into the sound, the high baritone, the phrasing. The words.
Make an offering. Smash your idols. They have no power at all.
2.
There is no denying the artistry. “They were doing things nobody was doing,” Dylan said. The soft sweep of their love songs. The drive of their rockers. “You think you know me but you haven't got a clue.” And like that, a new world. At 6, at 8, at 58. John singing to me from a broken space. “Yes, I’m lonely / want to die.” And later, alone at the piano. “Mother, you had me / but I never had you.” Never had him. Never knew him.
3.
John Lennon was a bully. He hit Cynthia, his first wife. Cheated on her. Ignored Julian, his son by Cynthia. Hit his second wife, Yoko Ono, treated her so terribly they split for a short time.
Lennon was a great artist, a trailblazer. An important influence on the way many of us think about music, language, art, politics. His political awakening at the height of his fame functions as a foundation for my own and, for many years, I allowed this part of his legacy to obscure Lennon’s very real flaws. I stood him up as a cardboard version of himself.
4.
It’s not just Lennon. Chuck Berry was jailed twice on Mann Act violations (transporting underage girls across state lines for the purposes of sex). Jerry Lee Lewis married his 14-year-old niece. David Bowie, Jimmie Page, and a host of Los Angeles rockers during the hedonistic days of the early 1970s bedded underage groupies, some as young as 13 or 14. Elvis. Michael Jackson. Tupac. Biggie. Junkies, perverts, violent jerks. Thieves, whores, gamblers. Artists.
We read Ezra Pound despite his fascism, T.S. Eliot despite his anti-Semitism. Robert Bly was a womanizing boor, Hayden Carruth a dismissive sexist, Pablo Picasso a violent mysoginist. Woody Allen is an alleged pedophile, Roman Polanski a convicted one. Louis C.K., Kevin Spacey. R. Kelly. Chris Brown. Bobbie Brown — the list of writers, artists, musicians, actors, directors who have produced art of lasting quality while being truly awful human beings is endless.
And yet, we listen, we read, we admire the art. We enrich these men (and nearly all are men), often to obscene and excessive levels, turn them into idols. Into gods. This is our failure. We equate art and commerce. Art and celebrity. Celebrity with goodness. These conflations are poison. They infect our judgement and paralyze us. We need to cleave the work from the men who produce it. See the men for what they are. Smash the idols.
5.
There is a story in the Midrash, the Hebrew book of Biblical commentary. Abraham, then a young man, is in his father’s idol shop in Ur. The Chaldeans were idol worshippers like so much of the ancient world. Abraham, however, was not. He saw the worship of stone and clay as incongruous with a faith based on logic, saw the worship of things as in consistent with worship of a larger power. One day, as the story goes, Abraham smashes the idols. When his father returns to the shop to discover the smashed statues, he questions Abraham. “What have you done?” “I have done nothing,” Abraham responds. He “claims that a large idol smashed others in order to take their grain offerings as his own.” His father demurs – it can’t be true. “After all, the idols aren’t alive!” Why then, Abraham responds, “worship the lifeless work of your own hands?”
6.
Abraham saw the idols as the embodiment of an old belief system. These idols were images of gods either defeated by the one true god of his belief system, or that had never existed. The worship of the idols was the worship of a lie. Abraham might be said to have struck a blow for modernity — but he also conflated art and artist, the work with the worship.
The idols were not just images for him, but in many ways the gods themselves, consistent with his moment in history, consistent with the commandments later handed down as the Israelites fled Egypt and its worship of “graven images,” of its many gods and their representations.
7.
But to object to the images is to misread the stories. To object to the art is to not see that it is the worship itself, the unthinking fealty to false gods represented by the idols, that is the great sin, and not the creation of art. Not the art, which should be properly understood as man honoring something more than himself.
Art — and I mean this broadly — flows from our humanity. It is meant to be viewed, and marveled at, but also studied and analyzed and questioned. It is central to who we are, reveals for us parts of ourselves we might not otherwise see. At its best, it is the opposite of idolatry.
8.
In his preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde argues that “To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim” or that “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.” Art, Wilde says, stands outside the ethical debates. The art, he says, stands on its own.
“No artist has ethical sympathies,” he writes. “An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style,” and while the “moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist,” it is subsumed within “the perfect use of an imperfect medium.” In the end, he adds, “No artist desires to prove anything” and “All art is quite useless” — a statement consistent with Abraham’s attack on the “worship (of) the lifeless work of your own hands.”
9.
Wilde’s claim, I think, contained an undercurrent of irony. After all, The Picture of Dorian Gray can be read as a moral allegory and, Wilde’s arguments to the contrary, can be read through the filter of the artist’s biography. Wilde was philosophically a hedonist and an artistic aesthete; he viewed pleasure as the primary goal of life and beauty as the goal of art.
Wilde had risen to the heights of popularity in the United Kingdom before being imprisoned on sodomy charges and cast from polite society and relegated to a temporary anonymity. He died penniless in exile in France, and it was only after his death that his reputation as a writer and thinker was rehabilitated. Dorian Gray arrives at the height of his popularity and is met with derision and disgust. The novel was called “‘effeminate,’ ‘unmanly,’ ‘leprous,’ and full of ‘esoteric prurience,’” writes Roger Luckhurst. It also contributed to his downfall — the book was “mined ... for prurient clues at his trial in 1895.”
Wilde, as Luckhurst writes, anticipated this in preface, which “was designed to catch out readers looking for secrets,” warning them not to “go beneath the surface” or “read the symbol.”
It is in this context that Wilde claims that “art is useless.”
10.
Context. W.H. Auden, in “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” states “Poetry makes nothing happen,” a line often used to argue that Auden had abandoned moral and ethical engagement. But as Robert Huddleston, writing in The Boston Review in 2015, points out, Auden’s comment “was a necessary reproof to an ideologically mandated culture of protest that had a chokehold on the literary left in the 1930s.” It was a response to a specific political moment in time and was not a signal that the poet was turning away from the engagement of his earlier work. In fact, he continued to write and publish works that were both subtly and explicitly political in their themes.
Auden, rather, is arguing that poetry “should not be instrumentalized for a political cause and is harmed by acceding to such uses” and the ultimate shape and direction of the art must be left to the artist. Huddleston writes that “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” claims “that poetry may partially transcend the flaws of its maker and the particular situation of its making.” Yeats is an “honored guest,” but a flawed one who might be in need of pardon for his views.
Auden excised several stanzas — ones that Huddleston says are the poem’s most political. Auden, he says, “questioned whether the greatness of Kipling’s or Claudel’s work—or Yeats’s for that matter—was separable from the lives and choices they had made.”
By removing them he was arguing, in effect, that it was not some infallible zeitgeist but poets themselves—including those with “bad” politics—who wrote poems. And sometimes men and women of reprehensible character or views wrote good or even great poems. In short, genius was not separable from human fallibility, even if great artists managed in their work if not in their lives to surpass ordinary limitations.
11.
Enter Pound. Fascist. Anti-Semite. Racist. Elitist. He had taken to Italian radio to support Mussolini, to hawk anti-Semitic and racist conspiracy theories, to praise Hitler, and so on. all his own.
“Pound had arrived at this vicious ideological position gradually,” writes Evan Kindley, in a review of The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics, and Madness of Ezra Pound, by Daniel Swift. But their seeds were evident from the beginning. “His early work,” Kindley writes,
while always concerned with the relations between art and society, had rarely been political per se. Over the years, though, his long poem The Cantos, started in 1915, had drifted from a preoccupation with mythological subjects to an investigation of economics and governance, influenced by heterodox economists like C.H. Douglas and Silvio Gesell. By the time the Second World War began, Pound had come to blame the practice of usury, propagated by a secret network of nefarious Jewish bankers, for all the evils afflicting the world.
Pound’s retreat into myth, into a past he viewed as better, as more heroic, than the compromised present he apparently believed he lived in, it was a political attitude that ultimately morphed into his passionate defense of Mussolini and his attacks on Jews and what he saw as a decaying West.
12.
But Pound’s reputation as an artist remains whole, his writing continues to be a part of the canon of American and world literature. His reputation as a writer and literary mentor has been written into the ledger in ink. Permanent.
Should it be? Few, as Evan Kindley writes, would deny that “Pound was a fascist, a racist, and an anti-Semite.” But “what’s harder to accept is that his political views are not incidental but central to the poetic project that constituted his life’s work.” Kindley quotes Swift: “The grand bad faith of the Cantos—its pomposity, its anger—is a constant, running line after line.”
This is about more than “just literary reputation,” Kindley writes. Pound’s views were not unusual – are not unusual – though “he is the only one who engaged with the extreme right of the postwar era.” Pound’s “particular blend of economic populism, conspiracy thinking, and overt racism, far from seeming eccentric and anachronistic,” today, “is disturbingly contemporary. We hardly need reminding, in these days of resurgent white nationalism, that many of the noxious ideas Pound advocated are far from extinct.”
The art, then, lives beyond the life of the artist, its noxious, vitriolic elements, its virulent elitism that manifests in anti-Semitic and racist tropes, echoes into the artist’s future – our present – and makes its claims on the larger society.
13.
“There is a common attack on art that thinks it is a defense,” writes Rebecca Solnit.
It is the argument that art has no impact on our lives; that art is not dangerous, and therefore all art is beyond reproach; that we have no grounds to object to any of it, and any objection is censorship.
Art, as Solnit, writes in “Men Explain Lolita to Me,” is dangerous because “Photographs and essays and novels and the rest can change your life.”
Referencing the critic Arthur C. Danto, she points out that “art can inflict moral harm and often does, just as other books do good.” A canonical work like Lolita, because it asks the reader to identify with the pedophile Humbert Humbert, contributes to a larger cultural marginalizing of women. Other canonical works do the same.
“You read enough books in which people like you are disposable, or are dirt, or are silent, absent, or worthless, and it makes an impact on you,” she says. “Because art makes the world, because it matters, because it makes us. Or breaks us.”
14.
Solnit stays focused on the art, leaving the morality of the creators to the side. Art, she says, carries intrinsic ethical coding, and
there is a canonical body of literature in which women’s stories are taken away from them, in which all we get are men’s stories. And that these are sometimes books that not only don’t describe the world from a woman’s point of view but inculcate denigration and degradation of women as cool things to do.
Pound’s art, then, as remarkable as much of it is, also poses a threat. But it is not a direct threat, not one that should be met with censorship, or banishment, or erasure. That’s not Solnit’s argument. Rather, she is raising important questions about where art comes from and what effects it has on real people who see and read and watch work that fits the narrowly constructed canon of Western art.
15.
This is the context. This is the history. But it is history as his story. There are the nudes, the bodies left vulnerable in oils. On canvas. “This nakedness,” writes Berger, is a “sign of her submission.” Balthus at the Met. Therese, a child, her near-sexual pose. “Western art is often very exploitative.”
14.
This is where we begin. “Women are depicted in a quite different way from men – not because the feminine is different from the masculine – but because the ‘ideal’ spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him.”
15.
“Guernica” is canon. Hangs in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the national museum in Madrid. “Guernica” captures the fracturing of society in the wake of war, caused by war. For many, it is Pablo Picasso’s greatest work. But Picasso also painted “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon,” also canon. The painting presents women stripped bare. They are masked. Are somehow less than human. Prostitutes, they dance and sell themselves, and we watch. Picasso implicates us in his voyeurism, his cruelty.
This is Picasso, on canvas and in life. A violent mysoginist. “Women are machines for suffering,” Picasso told Françoise Gilot, his mistress. “There are only two kinds of women: goddesses and doormats.” Cast in paint. The broad canvases of his soul. Darkness. A blackness there, rendered public. The art is breathtaking, and terrifying. “He submitted (women) to his animal sexuality, tamed them, bewitched them, ingested them, and crushed them onto his canvas,” his daughter says. “After he had spent many nights extracting their essence, once they were bled dry, he would dispose of them” (Paris Review).
16.
This goes beyond the gaze, but is connected to the gaze to the “canonical body of literature” Solnit describes. Nabokov. Kerouac. Brett Easton Ellis. It goes beyond the literature into the culture at large. It is Donald Trump proclaiming he could “grab them by the pussy” and still getting elected. Or the critiques of Kamala Harris on Facebook that accuse her of sleeping her way to the top or more generally of putting American government under the spell of a monthly hormonal surge.
The gaze has been embedded — in music, in film, in poetry. The male love song – and I know I’m being reductive here – more often than not focuses on desire, on lust, and treats the woman as an object to be owned, to be taken care of, to be placed on a pedestal. “You’re sixteen / You’re beautiful / And you’re mine.” Mine. All mine.
“I'd rather see you dead, little girl / Than to be with another man.”
17.
The female love song has traditionally been about longing, about dreams of the future. The exceptions, as the saying goes, prove the rule. Songs like Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Were Made for Walking” and Tammy Wynette’s “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” are memorable because they were outliers. Because they fight back. Because they reclaim power.
This is where we start, with women as objects, with women’s identities filtered through the lens of men. Ingrid Bergmann as the muse of powerful men, lacking her own agency in Casablanca. Lauren Bacall awakening Bogart in To Have and Have Not. Ann Bancroft educating Dustin Hoffman’s Ben in the ways of passion.
18.
Dustin Hoffman. Framed through her bent knee. “Mrs. Robinson, are you trying to seduce me?” Off screen, year’s later. A dropped towel, a daughter’s friend. “Some people try to pick up girls / And they get called an asshole” Watch him. Them. Listen. The art is the art, but. Eliot. Pound. But.
19.
Images of The Beatle lying on the sidewalk in front of the Dakota, of vigils that follow. Crystalization. “Lennon the martyr, Lennon the super genius, Lennon the real talent behind the Beatles, Lennon the man who saw through everything, Lennon the avant garde artist and Lennon the gentle, peace loving guy who prayed for the world.” Lennon. Lennon. Lennon.
Icon. Image on a t-shirt (I own several), shorthand for the politically motivated artist. Bigger than. Separate from. The Beatles.
20.
Lennon plays in the background, a song of apology sung in plaintive falsetto. “Jealous Guy” is an odd song, serves as an answer to some of his earlier lyrics – the brutal, misogynistic “Run for Your Life,” with its sense of ownership of the “little girl” and its threatened violence. Like “Getting Better,” from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” “Jealous Guy” reads like an attempt to come to grips with and atone for the related sins of pride, jealousy and domestic abuse. And, like “Getting Better,” its success as a great pop song obscures a darkness that remains at the song’s core, an unwillingness to fully accept the blame for the bad things the singer has done.
“Jealous Guy” offers a series of apologies for the singer’s behavior: for losing control and making his love object cry, for lashing out, for playing the fool. He sings in the first person, makes his proclamation, his falsetto riding atop the piano, and we get the pain, the fear. We experience it along with the singer – it is his voice and his story.
But the song is not truly an apology. It is a collection of excuses. He didn’t mean to hurt her, but he was losing control, was insecure, “swallowing his pain” as she “tried to hide.” “Just a jealous guy,” he sings. “Just.” His behavior was out of his control. It was instinctual, almost genetic. He is the spider, carried by the frog across the water to safety, unable to escape his nature. It is a brilliant evocation of a mindset, but still one that prioritizes the needs of the male speaker. It acknowledges personal failures, asks us to consider the details of his biography, the darker parts of his psyche, but makes no moves toward actually changing the dynamics.
21.
“Jealous Guy” was released in 1971 on Imagine, his second post-Beatles record, which hit no. 1 in both the U.S. and U.K. It was covered several times – by Bryan Ferry both with Roxy Music and as a solo artist, by Donny Hathaway, by Rod Stewart. Domestic abuse, which Lennon’s song recounts, remained a private matter, as Catherine Jacquet has pointed out. “Police and medical practitioners alike were reluctant to intervene into ‘private affairs,’ or what was then deemed ‘matters between a husband and his wife.’” And the public – in the jokes of stand-up comedians, in advertising, film, on TV, in general conversation – likely saw the physical imposition of power by men over women as the norm. Lennon’s apology song arrives into this context and makes few waves. Lennon and Ono temporarily separate in ‘73, two years later, a split that would last about 18 months.
22.
Real change apparently does happen. Much later. Lennon would retire in 1975 to play house dad. As the story goes, he submerges his male ego, adverts the male gaze, changes the dynamics of his marriage and his life. He returns to the studio in 1980 a different man, softer, less confrontational, less aggrieved, to record what would be the final album released during his lifetime. (Milk and Honey, much of which was record during this period, would be released several years later.)
That final album, Double Fantasy, remains the most difficult to listen to of Lennon’s records. This is due in part to Yoko Ono’s contribution – which is at times harsh and painfully atonal and at others somehow surprising – but also because it is a record of almost painful bliss released just weeks before Lennon’s death. It is impossible now to listen without that knowledge. The simple love song that stood as the record/s thesis statement, “(Just Like) Starting Over” sags under the weight of unintended irony, under the realization that the new start was an aborted one that raises questions about where Lennon might have taken his art in the years to come.
23.
Double Fantasy is a strange record, both overrated and underrated. Robert Christgau, known as the dean of rock critics, called the music a “minor miracle,” praising “its rich, precise song, its command of readymades from New Orleans R&B to James Brown funk, and from magical mystery dynamics to detonating synthesizers.” The album was both slight and memorable – Christgau’s words – and it ran up the charts, but only after Lennon’s death.
As Christgau points out, most of the initial reviews were harsh, and were withheld after Lennon’s death. Ultimately, Christgau quotes from one – his Village Voice colleague Geoffrey Stokes, who saw Double Fantasy as “a concept album on a ‘basically misogynist’ theme: ‘vampire-woman-sucks-life-out-of-man-who-enjoys-every-minute-of-his-destruction.’" It is an album that “celebrates a love ‘so all-fired powerful it exists without (present) pain, without conflict.’ Even worse, it celebrates a love that doesn't involve, or permit, ‘a functioning, adult John Lennon.’"
Stokes argues that the album’s failure is that Lennon is absent. The anger that has driven his best work. But Stokes argues from a place of male privilege. He presents us with Lennon-the-castrate. One-dimensional, consistent with the image of the fallen Beatle, consistent with the argument still in force blaming Ono for the Beatles’ dissolution. Lennon relieved of accountability.
Lennon the saint.
24.
The loving Lennon, the peaceful Lennon – this is who is remembered in Strawberry Fields, the Central Park memorial across the street from the Dakota, from the site of his assassination. This is the Lennon who dominates the 20/20 special, John Lennon: His Life — Legacy — Last Days. Lennon was more – he was peacenik and bully, loving father and distant one, misogynist and feminist, political activist and selfish capitalist, avant garde artist and pop singer. He contains multitudes, as does his art.
25.
Here’s the question: Should it matter to our judgment of the work? Does the fact that Pound and the other artists and intellectuals, musicians and actors, were not just imperfect but often awful matter? The answer is difficult. Kareem Abdul Jabbar, writing in the Hollywood Reporter (via The Medium) about his friend and mentor Bill Cosby shortly after Cosby was convicted of sexual assault, says that “what we’re all wrestling with is what constitutes an offense great enough to condemn the art along with the artist.” Fans of Michael Jackson, R. Kelly, James Brown, and others wrestle with this — or should. It is a difficult question to answer, but a necessary one to ask.
Religious conservatives have their answer, built upon a misreading of Abraham’s smashing of idols, a misunderstanding of what art is and what its role should be. They — Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jew — see the smashed idols as a defense of religion, see art that is critical or asks questions as nothing more than blasphemy. They desire erasure — an act attached in the public mind of 2020 with liberals, but that has long been the province of the right.
26.
Jabbar struggles with the question, says “shunning art for the actions of the artist opens a door to the kind of malevolent censorship that undermines democracy.”
I agree. Mostly. Or don’t. I’m torn. The art is separate from the artist, except that the artist is a human being and creates the art. They are both separate and indelibly linked. Solnit, points to Danto, who questions the “worldview of those who assert there is an apartheid system between art and life,” that, in Danto’s words, the “very tough membrane” we assume exists between literature and life, art and life, the hard rules we create “insures the incapacity of the artist to inflict moral harm so long as it is recognized that what he is doing is art” is a lie. Danto, says Solnit, is arguing that “art can inflict moral harm and often does.”
27.
I’m back to where I started. The art and the artist are separate, but also inextricably linked. Art and the artist’s life should be judged independently, except when they can’t be, when they are intertwined.
Works Cited
Abdul-Jabbar, Kareem. “My Bill Cosby Friendship and When Bad People Make Good Art.” Hollywood Reporter via The Medium. 9 April 2018. https://medium.com/the-hollywood-reporter/kareem-abdul-jabbar-my-bill-cosby-friendship-and-when-bad-people-make-good-art-4c478d6e8980. Accessed 10 April 2018.
Auden, W.H. “In Memory of W.B. Yeats.” Selected Poems, ed. By Edward Mendelson. Vintage International, 1989. pp. 80-83.
The Beatles. “Getting Better.” Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Apple, 1967.
The Beatles. “Hey Bulldog.” Yellow Submarine, Apple, 1999.
The Beatles. “I’m Lonely.” The Beatles, Apple, 1968.
The Beatles. “Run for Your Life.” Rubber Soul, Capital/EMI, 1965.
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing, Penguin, 1977.
Christgau, Robert. “Symbolic Comrades.” Robert Christgau: The Dean of American Rock Critics. N.d. (Originally published in The Village Voice, 20 Jan. 1981) http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/rock/lennon-81.php. Accessed 10 April 2018.
Connolly, Ray. “I remember the real John Lennon, not the one airbrushed by history.” Telegraph (UK). 4 Dec. 2010. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/the-beatles/8179356/I-remember-the-real-John-Lennon-not-the-one-airbrushed-by-history.html Accessed 10 April 2018.
Frank, Priscilla. “In The #MeToo Era, Do These Paintings Still Belong In A Museum?” Huffington Post. 14 Dec. 2017. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/museums-me-too-sexual-harassment-art_us_5a2ae382e4b0a290f0507176. Accessed 10 April 2018.
Huddleston, Robert. “‘Poetry Makes Nothing Happen’: W. H. Auden’s Struggle with Politics.” Boston Review, 25 Feb. 2015, http://bostonreview.net/poetry/robert-huddleston-wh-auden-struggle-politics. Accessed 19 Nov. 2020.
Jacquet, Catherine. “Domestic Violence in the 1970s.” Circulating Now. U.S. National Library of Medicine. 15 Oct. 2015. https://circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov/2015/10/15/domestic-violence-in-the-1970s/. Accessed 10 April 2018.
“John Lennon: His Life — Legacy — Last Days.” 20/20, produced by Maddy Cunningham, ABC News, 17 Oct. 2020. https://abc.com/shows/2020/episode-guide/2020-10/16-john-lennon-his-life-legacy-last-days Accessed 19 Nov. 2020.
Kindley, Evan. “Coming to Terms with Ezra Pound’s Politics.” The Nation, e-edition. 28 March 2018. https://www.thenation.com/article/coming-to-terms-with-ezra-pounds-politics/. Accessed 10 April 2018.
Lennon, John. “Jealous Guy.” Imagine, Capital/EMI, 1971.
Lennon, John. “Mother.” Plastic Ono Band, Capital/EMI, 1970.
Luckhurst, Roger. “Perversion and degeneracy in The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Discovering Literature: Romantics & Victorians, British Library, 15 May 2014, https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/perversion-and-degeneracy-in-the-picture-of-dorian-gray. Accessed 19 Nov. 2020.
Picasso, Marina. Interview by Cody Delistraty. “How Picasso Bled the Women in His Life for Art.” Paris Review. 9 Nov. 2017. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/11/09/how-picasso-bled-the-women-in-his-life-for-art/. Accessed 10 April 2018.
Rossetter, Kathryn. “New Dustin Hoffman Accuser Claims Harassment and Physical Violation on Broadway (Guest Column).” Hollywood Reporter. 8 Dec. 2017. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/new-dustin-hoffman-accuser-claims-harassment-physical-violation-broadway-guest-column-1062349. Accessed 10 April 2018.
Scaduot, Anthony. Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography, Grosset & Dunlap, 1971.
Solnit, Rebecca. “Men Explain Lolita to Me.” The Mother of All Questions, e-book, Haymarket Books, 2017.
Solomin, Rabbi Rachel M. “Stories of Our Ancestors.” My Jewish Learning. N.d. https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/stories-of-our-ancestors/ Accessed 5 Jan. 2018.
Thomas, Trisha. “Playwright alleges misconduct by Hoffman when she was 16.” Associated Press. 15 Dec. 2017. https://apnews.com/8da3ddc565c14f10814041f99d6ad9ba. Accessed 10 April 2018.
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray, e-book, Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., n.d.
Hank Kalet lives in New Jersey, with his wife Annie and their dogs. He’s a poet, essayist, and journalist, and author most recently of As an Alien in a Land of Promise, a collaboration with photographer Sherry Rubel. His work has appeared in The Progressive, In These Times, Main Street Rag, Serving House Journal, TLS (online). This Broken Shore, Adelaide, the Journal of New Jersey Poets, numerous anthologies, and elsewhere. His essay, “The Philosopher’s Stone,” was shortlisted for the Adelaide Literary Award Best Essay in 2019. He teaches journalism at Rutgers and freshman composition at several community colleges.
