Years later, in 2014, Dederer learned about the events on March 10, 1977, which led to Polanski’s indictment on six criminal charges, including sodomy and furnishing a controlled substance to a minor. When Dederer was a young film critic in the nineties, it was impossible to avoid his influence, and she considered him a genius. “Monsters” was incited by a confrontation with the monster lurking in her own artistic canon, the disgraced auteur Roman Polanski, whose films she worshipped. “Can we make love to the rhythms of ‘a little early Miles’ when he may have spent the morning of the day he recorded the music slapping one of our sisters in the mouth?” she asks in “Mad at Miles.” “Can we continue to celebrate the genius in the face of the monster?”Ĭlaire Dederer takes up Cleage’s question in her excellent third book, “ Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma.” Dederer is a memoirist, the author of “ Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses” (2010) and, in 2017, “ Love and Trouble: A Midlife Reckoning,” a riveting account of her erotic reawakening in her forties. “But that didn’t work.” The inner conflict led her to make her own art in an attempt to express her rage and grief through writing. “I tried to just forget about it,” she said, of the disturbing facts in Davis’s book. The revelation of Davis’s abuse made Cleage want to “break his albums, burn his tapes and scratch up his CDs.” But embedded in the tracks of that album was Cleage’s past self, a self forged over intimate nights during which “Kind of Blue” had reminded her what kind of woman she wanted to be. Ten years later, in 1989, Davis published an autobiography in which he openly admitted to violently abusing more than one woman. During this “frantic phase,” she “spent many memorable evenings sending messages of great personal passion through the intricate improvisations of Kind of Blue.” Davis’s music “became a permanent part of the seduction ritual,” and Cleage built a new self on the foundation of his songs. She was “in need of a current vision of who and what and why I am,” and Davis’s music, she wrote in the title essay of her 1990 collection, “ Mad at Miles,” promised that its listener was “a woman with the possibility of an interesting past, and the probability of an interesting future.” “Kind of Blue” helped Cleage redefine herself. After a late introduction to Miles Davis’s famous album “Kind of Blue,” she started playing the record on dates. In 1979, the feminist writer and activist Pearl Cleage was thirty, newly divorced, and dating for the first time in more than a decade.
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