fascinations

When we say something "fascinates" us, we usually mean something benign: the thing we are looking at somehow attracts us. The Kardashians fascinate us, for example, as do car accidents and kidnappings. Historically, however, the word "fascination" has had much more ominous overtones: for the Greeks and Romans, it designated the evil eye, and in the Middle Ages, it was synonymous with witchcraft. There are clear connections, too, between classical and medieval understandings of fascination as an overpowering of the will and the pseudoscientific practices of mesmerism and hypnotism. Throughout history, in other words, to be fascinated has meant to be carried away by one's attention, to relinquish control of one's mind and body and give oneself over to the wills of others.

With fascinations, Patrick Kindig-both a poet and a leading cultural historian of fascination-offers a refreshingly strange account of what it means to master and be mastered by attention. Weaving together historical accounts of mesmerism and the evil eye, modern retellings of Greek myth and epic, and lyric meditations on the nature of fascination itself, Kindig explores those moments in which our attention is caught and irresistibly held, moments in which we are forced to look and keep looking against our will. Raising compelling questions about the way we maintain and fail to maintain bodily and psychic integrity in a world designed to do away with both, fascinations is a must-read collection for anyone interested in the science or magic of compulsive attention.