Ghost in the Shell: Photography and the Human Soul, 1850–2000
Edited by Robert A. Sobieszek
LACSMA/MIT Press, 324 pp., $39.95 paper

"What persists of being human continues to be found embedded within, lurking behind, projected upon, or subsiding beneath the human face," writes Robert A. Sobieszek in his introduction to Ghost in the Shell, a fabulous cornucopia of photographs, from 19th-century daguerreotypes of hysterics and early prison mug shots to avant-garde and contemporary celebrity portraits. The accompanying text persuasively argues that what we look for in a face has changed enormously over the years.

Ghost is divided into three loosely connected parts. The fascinating first section centers on 19th-century clinical photographer Duchenne de Boulogne. Inspired by the craze for phrenology and physiognomy, he set out to create an atlas of emotions by photographing subjects while stimulating their facial muscles with electric shocks. (The Muscle of Sadness features an impossibly miserable man with three metal rods poking out of his head.) Somewhat more predictably, Andy Warhol dominates part two as the apotheosis of the 20th century's investment in surface, while Cindy Sherman is the figurehead for the final section on masquerade. Sobieszek has set himself an unwieldy task in corralling 150 years of photography into three chapters, and his leaps through time and space lead to some odd bedfellows. Still, this chronology-busting makes for some visually spectacular collisions as past and present, mainstream and marginal, face off.

Jennifer, the narrator of A.L. Kennedy's So I Am Glad, often sounds like a space alien, a creature with a masterful command of English who describes human beings as an unfamiliar and disturbing species: "Like an inadvertent Irish dancer tied up in a hot canvas sack, like a mad traffic policeman tangoing through ink, like a killer whale fighting

to open an envelope, I persevere in having sex." And in one particular respect she is alien: Jennifer Wilson has no feelings. Watching a news video of a child being "minced alive into small-bore meat," Jennifer and a friend find they are laughing, "in the absence of any more appropriate response." What's the difference, Kennedy seems to be asking throughout the novel, between Jennifer and the rest of us, saturated with violent images often to the point of indifference?

Well, for one thing, the ghost of Cyrano de Bergerac appears in Jennifer's guest bedroom, glowing in the dark. Jennifer's ghost is not the famous literary Cyrano, but the 17th-century Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac, who satirized Parisian society through chronicles of his imaginary visits to the sun and the moon. As a stand-in for the moon, Glasgow in the '90s disappoints Kennedy's Savinien: "You still have executions and hunger and madness snapping about your streets." On top of his eloquent social consciousness, Savinien writes love letters in archaic French and offers to fight Jennifer's roommate's deadbeat boyfriend in a duel; you can hardly blame her when, surreptitiously, Jennifer begins to feel.

It's a testament to the pleasurableness of Kennedy's invented world that you almost resent the eventual intrusion of Jennifer's chilling past, which offers a neat psychological explanation for her numbness, on the ghostly visitations of the novel's present. Kennedy's one of those novelists whose fantasy works in the same way a good metaphor does—it alienates the familiar, makes it new and strange: "We had the brightest bed in the world. I remember how quickly I caught his fire and the two of us burning and gleaming between electric sheets." As the novel progresses, Kennedy modulates her language. The strangeness of mad traffic policemen gives way to the understated beauty of a ghost who leaves glowing traces on everything he touches. What Kennedy has done is to take us, with Jennifer, from indifference to passionate, nail-biting investment in her characters, to unequivocal hope for the future of a relationship between a reformed alien and a bioluminescent ghost.
—Nell Freudenberger

Spider Jerusalem, the protagonist of the Transmetropolitan series, is comics writer Warren Ellis's finest creation: a bile-spitting, drug-pickled, semi-psychotic journalist trying to orient his ethical compass in a hysterically dystopian future mega-city. Collecting a 1998 serial, Year of the Bastard finds Jerusalem covering a presidential primary campaign, attempting to decide which opposition candidate is the lesser evil—the amoral, soulless "Smiler" or his pandering, not-so-crypto-Fascist opponent—and which one has the better chance of unseating the incumbent, who's even worse. Everyone's trying to sway Jerusalem and his constituency, "the new scum": the underclass of the city's information economy. Meanwhile, Spider's working overtime to make everyone despise him, dosing himself out of his mind, and waking up next to his assistant. When he throws his lot in with the only honest person he's met in politics, the book's vacuum-black satire starts down the track to pure horror. The lesser evil is still a nightmare, and what looks like a choice is nothing of the kind.

Practically a roman à clef about a race that hasn't happened yet (though it's unnerving to draw lines from its characters to the presidential hopefuls of the moment), Year of the Bastard is Primary Colors retooled by Philip K. Dick and Hunter S. Thompson. It's set at some unspecified point in the high-tech future, but that's mostly to pump up the jokes, like Spider's concentration aids of choice: "Packet of fresh baby seal eyes. Brain-of-Welshmen paté from the local Black Ops Deli. . . . And forty pictures of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas naked and feeding each other asparagus."

The nanotechnological marvels of Ellis's speculation only reinforce the existing social order, and Transmet's mise-en-scène is like Times Square on overdrive. It's deliberately tough on the eyes, drawn by Darick Robertson and Rodney Ramos with a knack for both its politicians' game-faced blandness and the city's chokingly thick, crass media smog (almost every page is stuffed with fragments of billboards, click-through ads, and broadcasts). They delight in an overflow of details: the moiré patterns of video screens, a lobbying group of Ladies Who Lunch, the pack of Carcinoma Angels cigs on Jerusalem's desk. Even at its funniest, the book's tone is blisteringly bitter and vulgar, but there's moral gravity at its center, pulling through the chaos of the political spectacle.
—Douglas Wolk

Imagine, if you will, that two of the world's most brilliant feminists are in a boxing ring, duking it out. On one side stands the notorious Judith Butler throwing, for punches, her thick philosophical ideas about the theater of the body. On the other side, then, is Anne Fausto-Sterling, who throws a very different sort of left hook, one full of rat experiments and lab coats. A feminist with a Ph.D. in biology, Fausto-Sterling is well-known for her 1993 Science article "The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough"—which reimagined intersexuals (a/k/a, sometimes, hermaphrodites) as unfreakish third, fourth, and fifth sexes. Bucking convention, Fausto-Sterling grounded her gender theories in a hard science of the body.

Filled with an enormous amount of fresh ideas and evidence, Fausto-Sterling's latest book, Sexing the Body, is bound to become a high-traffic feminist classic. Pointing her cannons both at gender theorists who want nothing to do with science and at biologists who still believe in scientific objectivity, she examines, one by one, the histories of scientific ideas about hormones, the "gay brain," and intersexuality.

Although a delightful set of Diane DiMassa cartoons accompanies difficult technical passages, it's not always clear what Fausto-Sterling's point is. She writes, for example, a fascinating account of how ideas about masculinity and femininity have misshaped our understanding of estrogen and testosterone—but leaves us alone to ask, "Yeah, so what?" As a result, you might get the impression that she's doing all these back flips just so she can call modern science sexist and homophobic. But really she wants to argue something far more controversial: that science is, as a result of its biases, often just dead wrong. Thankfully, this point occasionally shines through, especially when she's talking about her favorite subject, intersexuals. She writes a dazzlingly scientific critical condemnation of the awful, deceit-filled ways that physicians treat intersexed newborns—common medical practices, she explains, include the lopping off of "abnormally" long clitorises and the hiding of these medical records. Ding, ding, ding, Ms. Butler: round three.
—Rachel Mattson

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