1. David Levinthal and Garry Trudeau, Hitler Moves East: A Graphic Chronicle, 1941-1943 (Kansas City: Sheed Andrews & McMeel, 1977). Trudeau had just won the Pulitzer Prize. Levinthal, confident about the strength of his images, but timid in the collaboration with a friend who'd become so celebrated, felt he might have been riding on Trudeau's coattails.

2. Two hand-written diaries or journals of David Levinthal are rich sources for the many themes of love, loss, isolation, and estrangement in Modern Romance One dates from 18 February 1974 through 20 August 1977, pages unnumbered; the other dates from November 15, 1982, through September 16, 1991, 1-299 (written only on the odd-numbered sides, which contain stamped numbers). Hereafter, quotations will be cited as Journal with the entry date, as written. The entry containing this citation was noted on 4/24/83, 10 p.m., 7.

3. He passed a restroom with a friend, who remarked, "I'm shocked. You didn't go in." From conversations between the author and David Levinthal in New York, June 1999. Hereafter abbreviated "Conversations."

4. Ibid. "Art is timeless; we are not. We must ask about the family to know the individual. " Guy Davenport, "Micrographs, " in The Hunter Gracchus and Other Papers on Literature and Art (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1996), 301.

5. Conversations.

6. Ibid.

7. "I will always feel guilt at not being the obvious success that my family would like." Journal, May 3, 1984, 10:37 p.m., 105.

8. The stunning drawings and rapid-fire text are by veteran, popular draftsmen Stan Drake and Leonard Starr in Kelly Green, vol. 1, The Go-Between, 1982; vol. 2, One, Two, Three ... Die!, 1983; vol. 3, The Million Dollar Hit, 1983; vol. 4, The Blood Tapes, 1984 (New York: Dargaud International). David Levinthal owns these four "graphic novels," featuring the beautiful widow of a slain cop, "all cold and hard inside because of that," who "doesn't like gangsters too much; she doesn't like cops either . . . she blames them for her husband's death." From "Kelly Green ... Or Madame Bovary," prologue to vol. 1, pages unnumbered. Irish and dedicated to vengeance, her quick mouth, great body, and infinite social mobility clearly made her an eighties superwoman.

9. Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister (New York: Vintage Books, 1989; first published by Houghton Mifflin, 1949), 135. A copy belongs to the artist.

10. At the time he wrote in his Journal: "'Life without Linda,' perhaps that is not a bad name for the depressing series of photographs that I am envisioning," entry for 4.27.83, 10 p.m., 5. This may also refer to the White Series--monochromatic rooms with solitary females that he made nearly simultaneously with Modern Romance--which he regards as a kind of prelude to it. "I feel like dedicating the entire White series to her (Linda), or I could call it Loving and dedicate it to her knowing she would see the depression and the irony." Journal, May 27, 1983, 9:20 a.m. en route to NYC, 11.

11. "Nostalgia" is #TL236T, from J. R. Enterprises, a division of Novel Art Creations, New Jersey, copyright 1981. Many materials that David obtained for his sets were not only predestined for dollhouses but were titled to elicit notions of memory related to small-scale constructions.

12. Albert Camus, The Stranger, translated from the French by Stuart Gilbert (New York: Vintage Books, 1954), 28-29. Gallimard first published L'etranger in 1942.

13. The photographer's Modern Romance Sketchbook has 145 numbered pages. Dated and copyrighted 1984, it also contains notes and sketches, made a few years previously.

14. Conversations.

15. Modern Romance Sketchbook, passim.

16. Chandler, Little Sister, 50.

17. Called Bend-a-Lights, these small, malleable flashlights with a tiny lamp at one end could be shaped into any desired angle. They cost three dollars each.

18. Conversations. He thought of Hopper's work at the beginning of the Modern Romance project. But this soon passed, for as he generated the sets for his pictures, he began wrestling with memories he couldn't name or definitively identify that prevented any direct or sustained influence from the painter. That they shared the mood and period-look of Hopper's pictures, he says, was completely coincidental. In a relatively recent publication on the painter, The Poetry of Solitude: A Tribute to Edward Hopper, poems collected and introduced by Gail Levin (New York: Universe Publishing, 1995), twenty-seven contributors respond in thirty-three poems to Hopper's work. The poets' contemplations of the paintings, rather than the paintings themselves, more closely parallel the spaces and lonely solitaries created by Levinthal more than ten years before. Compare, for example, David Ray's "Automat": "It's quite classic-- / separate tables / brass glistens on, / polished spittoons / and reflected lights / a highway out to hell, / black as hell. / Extent of human reach, nihil, / and loneliness burning loud / like lamps left on," 54; or W. R. Elton's "Hopper: In the Cafe": "who are these people / moved by what dream / actors hired for the scene / papier-mache," 57. As for Walker Evans, in 1974, after David was a graduate student in photography at Yale, his roommate and former classmate, Jerry Thompson, befriended the older photographer, then teaching at the university, who became something of a "fixture" in the apartment of the two young men. Evans's passion for collecting parts of old cars and other American detritus had turned their place into a virtual way station before the treasures were taken to Evans's house in Old Lyme, Connecticut. At the time, Evans was enjoying new renown with the rediscovery of his work, but David sensed he was too angry and bitter to benefit from the attention. As for David's receptivity to Evans's photography: "I never liked it as much as I thought I was supposed to." Conversations. Later in this essay, we shall see that when David Levinthal finally photographed his fabricated sets for Modern Romance, he deliberately eradicated any traces of the descriptive completeness associated with Hopper's versions of alienation, choosing instead obliteration with shadows. Needless to say, the prototypical detailing of store-front or street imagery that earmark Evans's classic documentary style didn't interest him, as such.

19. Conversations.

20. Love and passion were "All to no avail. Sometimes I feel like I am a dispassionate observer of myself." Journal, 4/27/83, 10 p.m., 7. "Why is it that want Blake to love me? It has certainly propelled me forward with my idea for the Blake book. It will be like a personal version of Sartre. That there is a hopelessness in personal relationships the crushing of the romantic spirit." Journal, May 1, 1984, 10:33 p.m.

21. Modern Romance Sketchbook, 113.

22. Geoffrey O'Brien, "Jim Thompson, Dimestore Dostoevsky," afterward to A Swell-Looking Babe, by Jim Thompson (Berkeley: Black Lizard Books, 1986), pages unnumbered. David considers the psycho-pathological world of Thompson one of his most important sources.

23. Chandler, Little Sister, 81.

24. From telephone conversations between the author and David Levinthal, August-October 1999. David insists that the story is accurate, though he suspects his family might not remember the details. Hereafter abbreviated Telephone Conversations.

25. Journal, Feb. 18, 1974, 9:55 p.m., pages unnumbered.

26. Chandler, Little Sister, 21.

27. James M. Cain, Cloud Nine (New York: Mysterious Press, 1984), 83. The novel, with its atypical happy ending, was written in the 1960s, when Cain was seventy-five. David owns a copy of this book.

28. Author unidentified, "The Art of Kissing," Young Romance 22, no. 180 (March 1972): page unnumbered. His sister gave him her old magazines, but the photographer added others to his collection.

29. William P. McGivern, The Big Heat (New York: Berkley Books, 1987; first published by Dodd Mead, 1953), 78. David owns a copy of this book.

30. One of these is Walthers HO 1999: Model Railroad Reference Book, available from P.O. Box 3039, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 53201-3039, 936 pages, with thousands of illustrations in black-and-white and color. See "Instant Horizons," 318-20; "Bums," 322; "Mourners and cemetery graves," 350. A section of this omnibus, in miniature, called "Welcome to the Magic of Model Railroading," shows color photographs of model trains placed in miniature, true-to-life dioramas, achieved by a variety of amateur designers using Walthers's products. The catalogue features some who have photographed their tableaus as undisputed successes. The images are staggeringly realistic, enhanced by accompanying tests that sentimentally evoke a simpler American life of fifty years ago. More important, dramatically, we are there, enthralled by a nostalgic world of the small. In a "Model and Photo by William Kupiec," showing a way freight rolling past a "Crow River Crawford Notch station," the test reads: "The fireman has been keeping a close eye on his fire as his train rumbles into town. Seems there have been a lot of complaints from townspeople about cinders ruining laundry. You can bet somewhere along the run, there's an inspector just waiting to catch an unwary fireman. But with the smoke almost pure white from the stack, it will be someone else who gets caught today. . . . Peddlers have arrived from the country with truckloads of fresh vegetables and kids are reluctantly heading for school. Who can blame them on a beautiful day like this?" (581). Other color photographs of such spectacles, including those of "Magic" award winners, appear on 582-600. Not a few of these use nocturnal lighting, suggesting the effects of David Levinthal's own settings. Of the thousands of products offered in this tome of miniature railroading, David informed me that he ordered, built, and painted the "Fishing Pier," including, with the pier, a ramp and a float (466). As a prop for Modern Romance it is much too complete and detailed, consisting of hundreds of pieces. Nonetheless, it reveals that the photographer's commitment to miniature allowed him to submit to the discipline of such minute assembling, confirming that the simplicity of figures and settings in Modern Romance was a deliberate dramatic choice rather than a lack of technical competence.

31. "Oh, the world appears to work smoothly enough, like a toy town where the only business is the constant shifting of goods and wastes, If that were all, how easy to live--buy your food, put out your garbage. But the toys and models and dolls and the world's looks are treacherous. They teach children it will be easy. The real problems . . . are nothing like what children are led to suspect." Josephine Humphreys, Dreams of Sleep (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), 4, 5.

32. Chandler, Little Sister, 79.

33. Camus, Stranger, 42.

34. "What is lacking in the suicide scene is realism. I am trying to get too much information into the picture ... too much obvious information. . . . What makes the White Series so successful is the implied and unstated feelings." Journal, May 27, 1983, 9:20 am, en route to NYC, 11.

35. "I want to have several scenes going on simultaneously. The bedroom, the outside, the interiors and stairways, which I shall draw a sketch of so that I can begin construction." Ibid., entry for December 2, 1983, 5:52 p.m., 15.

36. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 6.

37. Gaston Bachelard, "The 'Cogito' of the Dreamer," in The Poetics of Reverie, Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos, translated from the French by Daniel Russell (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 166. Bachelard is quoting an unnamed German author.

38. Ibid., 167.

39. Chandler, Little Sister, 21.

40. McGivern, Big Heat, 112.

41. Victor Wild, How to Take and Sell Erotic Photographs: Secrets of the Masters (Carpinteria: California, Wildfire Publishing), 1981, 7. David Levinthal owns this book. He may have followed its precepts. More likely he collected it because the techniques confirmed what he'd evolved instinctively.

42. Ibid., 19.

43. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, translated from the French by Maria Jolas, foreword by Etienne Gilson (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 57-58.

44. Humphreys, Dreams, 2.

45. Preiser, Miniaturfiguren, Automodelle. Zubehor fur Modellbahnanlagen, published by (Keinkunst-Werkstatten, Paul M. Preiser GmbH D- 91628 Steinsfeld. Haus Nr. 60, Postanschrift: Postfach 1233 D-91534 Rothenburg o.d.T., Federal Republic of Germany, catalogue PK 22, 1996-1997, text from inside cover.

46. Ibid., passim.

47. Bachelard, "'Cogito,'" 166.

48. He continued, "Being with her makes me feel happy, not alone." Journal, September 11, 1977, 10:23 p.m., page unnumbered.

49. Cain, Cloud Nine, 59.

50. Wild, How to Take and Sell Erotic Photographs, 19.

51. Modern Romance Sketchbook, passim.

52. McGivern, Big Heat, 30.

53. "I have only my small private world of work that exists here and here alone. . . . I suppose it is . . . my lack of confidence that leads me (I was going to say forces me, but it is not force but a choice) to lead a life of dreams and fantasies. Maybe this is why I photograph what I do. A world of my control where I can revenge myself on . . . cruelty and coldness. . . . Walk away from the fantasy of dreams. Like the dreams of the girl in the elevator, or the girl in the corridor. They are beautiful but what I dream of will never happen, or it will happen only if I don't dream of it happening." Journal, April 21, 1984, 73, 75, 79.

54. Conversations.

55. The modus operandi has assumed near-mythic proportions regarding this artist: "What do you say to people who ask, 'Why do you play with toys?'" "You mean after I've told them . . . that it's a lot of fun?" David Levinthal: Work from 1975-1996, exhibition catalogue, essays and interview by Charles Stainback and Richard B. Woodward (New York: International Center of Photography, 1997), pages unnumbered.

56. Which leads to great distortions by those who hope to explain him. David Corey's essay in the exhibition catalogue of David Levinthal's photographs, Small Wonder: Worlds in a Box (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1996), 7-25, epitomizes the guileless response of a critic trying, valiantly, to provide a context for the work but ends up reducing it to a trivial pursuit. Completely disregarding the photographs in question, Corey's post-modernist hodgepodge of American media events, including the history of Marx toys and play sets, is offered, newsreel fashion, as if to imitate, in writing, the postmodernist media blitz that shaped Levinthal into the deft media-blitz manipulator that he is. Corey says of play sets: "We are grateful for these quick reads on where we came from and what we are about" (7) Levinthal may seem deceptively simple, but "quick reads" are not what keep us returning to his work. Such writing, meant to enrich our experience, reverses the effect in making the pictures, by association, seem as emotionally bankrupt as their sources. Also, it unwittingly implies that Levinthal, himself, is equally so.

57. See Schjeldahl's vitriolic response to Levinthal's retrospective exhibition, David Levinthal: Work from 1975-1996. "Down in Flames," Village Voice 42, no. 5 (February 4, 1997): 90, is an example of the degree to which this artist's methods can be mistaken for intentions. Schjeldahl, a postmodernist camp follower, shows confusion and rage when he notices one of his artists behaving in ways that don't fit the art-historical category he has created for him, Insisting on Levinthal's work, above all, as "hip child's play," when the photographer used toys to treat the Holocaust in Mein Kampf, Schjeldahl saw "an artistic disaster." Without "a consistently maintained, compelling fiction in the photographs' apparent point of view . . . there seems reason to doubt that he ever fully knew what he was doing." Stuck with his original characterization of Levinthal's hip moves, Schjeldahl curdles when he detects the betraying odor of "sincere" feeling in the work. Since he never saw it in the first place, he won't let Levinthal "exalt ... personal (middle-class, chickenshit) fears, angers, and self-loathings." It doesn't fit. The photographer can't have "his cake of effrontery and upchuck it too." That the photographer has always taken deep-play and all the contradictions and responsibilities that it implies seriously seems to have escaped the critic entirely.

58. Garry Trudeau, "Afterward," in Mein Kampf, David Levinthal (Santa Fe: Twin Palms Publishers, 1996), 84. Trudeau's statement, appearing in a work that would be received with much ambivalence, was prescient. See Schjeldahl, "Down in Flames," quoting Mel Brooks's The Producers ("Talk about bad taste!)," 90. When Trudeau wrote, "The child-artist with his toys expects the rest of us to act like grown-ups," he wasn't excluding critics.

59. Schjeldahl, "Down in Flames," 90.

60. "Today I shall tour the stores . . . more books and toys for inspiration." Journal, March 22, 1984, 10:05 a.m., 45. The journals, full of self-recrimination, reflected on his need for toys well after Modern Romance was completed, not surprisingly, since all the subsequent projects included them as well. "I wonder how much I could do if I ever tried working all the time, building models or otherwise trying to be productive. Perhaps that is why I am constantly buying new toys; it is a way of feeling alive. Journal, August 26, 1991, Northampton, 285.

61. Charles Baudelaire, "A Philosophy of Toys," The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, translated and edited by Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1964), 199. Richard B. Woodward was the first to explore the philosophical connection between the ideas of the French poet and the seriously playful activities of this photographer in "Toy Stories: David Levinthal and the Uncertainty Principle," in David Levinthal, 34-44.

62. Conversations.

63. Ibid.

64. Ibid.

65. Despite his New York-Jewish origins, he insists that he comes from a "mixed marriage": that is, when his mother, Rhoda Arons, married Elliott Levinthal, "Central Park West joined Flatbush Avenue." Telephone Conversations. According to a friend, his mother named him David Lawrence (Levinthal) so that if he became a writer he could drop his surname. Conversation with Elizabeth Glassman, September 1999, Santa Fe.

66. Once, at Allied Trains, a model-railroad store in Los Angeles, David noticed a little boy staring at him as he made his selections--he was buying a lot. The child turned to his father and said, "That's what I want to be when I grow up!" Conversations.

67. Johan Huizinga, "Nature and Significance of Play," in Homo Ludens: A Study of the Ploy-Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 8-9. This classic treatment contains many considerations that effectively illuminate the philosophy behind David Levinthal's intentions and working methods.

68. Eighty of these essays in articles, books, and catalogues are listed in the "Selected Bibliography," David Levinthal.

69. Baudelaire, "Philosophy of Toys," 199.

70. About making such images, David said, "Once the soldiers were down on the floor, I felt an explosion that hit a visceral nerve. I was carried away. Thought left me entirely." Conversations.

71. Huizinga elaborates this in "Play and War," in Homo Ludens, 89-104. See also Roger Rosenblatt's introductory essay, "Levinthal's Camp," in Mein Kampf, 6-7. Mein Kampf, which explores the atrocities of Hitler through toys and lighting, is the legatee of his experiments in Modern Romance. Rosenblatt states, "Until Levinthal created Mein Kampf I never understood how his toy figures operated. They toy with us.... [T]hey present moral and aesthetic problems. In a way they are united against us. They needle us, as if to say, 'We are the figures, but you have to figure it out'" (7). Implicit in Levinthal's Mein Kampf is the kind of summation that Guy Davenport describes in "Civilization and Its Opposite in the 1940s," in The Hunter Gracchus, 76-102. "There was a public forties in the history of the arts, and there was a secret forties" (94).

72. Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life," in Painter of Modern Life, 8. Based on an essay written in 1859 and 1860, it was first published in late 1863.

73. Baudelaire, "Philosophy of Toys," 198. His emphasis.

74. Conversations.

75. Ibid.

76. He attended Yale from 1971 to 1973. Accepted in the spring of 1971, he began bleeding heavily and had to be hospitalized. For the next thirty years he was medicated for colitis with two cortisone enemas a day.

77. Painter-printmaker Philip Taaffe, in an interview with film-maker Stan Brakhage, in Philip Taaffe: Composite Nature (New York: Peter Blum Edition, 1998). Brakhage prefaces the remark with, "The arts need it to bust open into new areas, just like people need the embarrassment of their teenage years." Both statements are on page 65.

78. According to American collector Alex Shear, "If you want an evocative depiction of our culture at this stage in our history ... don't go to an art museum--look in your refrigerator." See David Owen's profile of Shear, "The Sultan of Stuff," New Yorker, July 19, 1999, 61. Gathered for over thirty-five years, among Shear's holdings, in "more than twelve hundred categories," are "'station-wagon memorabilia,' 'folk-art roller skate carrying cases,' 'generator flash-lights,' and 'occupational hats'" (52). David Levinthal's extensive collections of models, toys, etc. often determine what he photographs. The amassment, while nowhere as vast as Shear's, relates to a similar obsession, as Owen observes, "to give a recognizable shape to a yearning that wasn't fully comprehensible even to him" (55).

79. In a recommendation. Conversations.

80. "How Do I Love Thee?" in My Love (New York: Marvel Comics Group, November 1973): 1, no. 26, pages unnumbered. Collection David Levinthal.

81. Kiss Me Deadly, 1955, produced and directed by Robert Aldrich, starring Ralph Meeker as Mickey Spillane's detective, Mike Hammer. See Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style, edited by Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward, co-edited by Carl Macek and Robert Porfirio (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1979), 156-58. David Levinthal owns this encyclopedia.

82. Conversations.

83. Rather than citing the paintings of Hopper as anguished prototypes for Levinthal's scenes of Modern Romance, it is more useful to consider works like T. S. Eliot's "Rhapsody on a Windy Night," from Prufrock and Other Observations (1917). In the poem's meditations on a dark street past midnight, where "every street lamp ... / Beats like a fatalistic drum," the words' twisted grimace of modernism highlight the layered psychological complexity intended by the photographer. See T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: Prufrock and Other Poems (New York: Dover Publications, 1998), 10-12.

84. Advertisement in My Love, November 1973, pages unnumbered.

85. Eliot, Waste Land, 10.

86. "Pocket Theater," in A Wedding in Hell: Poems, by Charles Simic (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 37. Born in Yugoslavia in 1938, and now living in New Hampshire, Simic has explored his many experiences of popular culture in poetry. He has also pursued aspects of American art that parallel his own temperament. See Dimestore Alchemy (Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco Press, 1992), poems devoted to the work of Joseph Cornell. Simic's peculiar love of the sinister-small undoubtedly originated during his wartime experiences in Europe before settling in the United States. Space does not permit anything more than the citation of "Pocket Theater," here, but the poetic miniatures throughout his large body of work--from toy soldiers, to dolls, to walls and rooms and the eros of streets and stores--meaningfully parallel David Levinthal's working methods and imagery.

87. The dramatic theory behind this is an old one. Appearing in the mid-eighteenth-century writings of Denis Diderot, it posed, through the complete absorption of a painted figure or figures, in various actions, activities, and states of mind," the "supreme fiction of the beholder's non-existence." Paradoxically, the figures, in seeming to be alone without needing to be seen to establish this, grant greater intimacy to their drama. To be known in a work of art, of course, they had to be seen by someone. But there is the impression, in certain pictures that Diderot viewed and commented upon, for example, by Greuze or Chardin, that their greatest possible effect doesn't depend on the viewer's gaze to complete their story. Rather by involuntarily, even helplessly, receiving the action or inaction, the viewer internalizes its emotion, thereby surrendering his own self-awareness. See Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 108-9. David wasn't thinking of Diderot or Fried. But the Modern Romance images convey a similar impression of the viewer not merely standing at a distance, but crossing the barrier between art and life, mysteriously absorbed into the scene of absorption itself. Fried quotes Diderot: "The immobility of beings, the solitude of a place, its profound silence" that suspends time; "time no longer exists, nothing measures it, man becomes as if eternal" (125).

88. Camus, source uncited, in Film Noir, 4.

89. He's seen scores of these movies and owns many on tape, as well as Film Noir, which catalogues and describes over three hundred of them, plus several books on the subject of film noir. See Rosetta Brooks's essay, "Shadowlands," in American Beauties: David Levinthal, exhibition catalogue (Santa Monica: Pence Gallery; and New York: Laurence Miller Gallery), 1990, 1-5, for a brief but perceptive attempt to characterize the effect of film on his work.

90. Conversations.

91. Film Noir, 77-78.

92. Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie, 145.

93. Film Noir, 4.

94. Ibid., 5.

95. "Go-Between," 7.

96. Film Noir, 4.

97. Dialogue, not credited with a reference, and attributed to its film in the text or in an endnote, derives from the author's notes, taken during "Film Noir 99," a festival in Santa Fe, New Mexico, July 9-15, 1999.

98. The Asphalt Jungle (1950).

99. Ibid.

100. Kiss Me Deadly (1955).

101. They Live by Night (948).

102. Murder My Sweet (944).

103. Out of the Past (947).

104. They Live by Night (948).

105. Out of the Past (1947).

106. Umberto Eco is explaining the necessarily precarious structure of films that become cult favorites in "Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage," in Travels in Hyperreality, translated from the Italian by William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 198.

107. Ibid., 209.

108. Advertisement in My Love, November 1973, pages unnumbered.

109. David Levinthal, 106. While constructing the setups for Modern Romance, he kept the Modern Romance sketchbook beside the T.V. and recorded motifs he liked from films viewed on the VCR. They are a postmodern mix of film noir and other kinds of movies. American Graffiti, Sorry Wrong Number, American Gigolo, I Want You Back Again, Strangers on a Train, Murder My Sweet, The Hustler, Desert Fury, Diner, and Taxi Driver, specifically, are noted as sources. See Modern Romance Sketchbook, passim.

110. Journal, April 20 [1984], 10:54 p.m., 71.

111. Conversations.

112. ". . . ideal material for an analysis of all the possible variants of the modern world." Jean Baudrillard, America, translated from the French by Chris Turner (London: Versa, 1989), 29.

113. Conversations.

114. "How Do I Love Thee," My Love, November 1973, pages unnumbered.

115. Journal, April 20, 1984, 4:49 p.m., 69.

116. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1857, vol. 1, translated from the French by Carol Cosman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 32, 35.

117. Ibid., 33.

118. His mother has a dry sense of humor. Telephone Conversations.

119. Journal, April 21, 1984, 9:53 a.m., 73.

120. Philip Roth, The Anatomy Lesson (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1983), 144.

121. Ibid., 132.

122. See Barbie Millicent Roberts: An Original, photographs by David Levinthal, preface by Valerie Steele (New York: Random House, 1998), 5. David's faithful renditions of these dolls' glamour in no way diverges from the determination of the book's compilers to document the story of Barbie without any critical comment whatsoever. The very perfection of the images offers a vision of Barbie as a figure beyond herself.

123. See Manthia Diawara, "The Blackface Stereotype," in David Levinthal: Blackface (Santa Fe: Arena Editions, 1999), 7-17. Diawara later concedes, but not without a hint of sarcasm. Concluding the piece, he describes an instance where his son shows him a picture of two laughing white kids holding slices of watermelon, as if directly mocking the black stereotype: "By bringing the image to my attention, my son made that much of an association. But his act is also challenging me to stop being the custodian of these stereotypes, to distance myself from them, and to begin to enjoy the humor in them. Only then will I, like him, become an individual and modern" (17).

124. "I am a lover in many respects." Conversations.

125. The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, edited and with an introduction by Lawrence Sutin (New York: Random House, 1995), 291

126. "But she is beautiful." Journal, June 30 1989, 3:03 a.m., 221.

127, Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief Myth and Art (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998), 353-54. In the enclosed quote, Hyde is quoting from Maxine Hong Kingston's novel Tripmaster Monkey (1989), 137. To explore the implications of what is only touched upon here would turn this long essay into a tract. Let us say, simply, that like those of Bachelard and Huizinga, Hyde's text provides the richest and most resonant context through which to understand the work of David Levinthal, especially as it moves into darker and darker realms.