In some of the pictures, perverse self-portraits lunge towards cutouts of suburban women in court shoes and buttoned-up tweed coats, the shape of things to come.
Jemma Phillips, the main character in Cammie McGovern's first novel, is, like Arbus, a photographer drawn to shooting the isolated and perverse, taking portraits of her mother's autistic students and candid shots of actors on the set of a movie in which her older sister, the winsome teenage actress Rozzie, is appearing.
I first read Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure when I was 17, and I was captivated by his portrait of this perverse, free-thinking, vacillating, highly emotional, highly intelligent and ill-fated woman.
The albums that followed it, from the wilfully perverse easy listening of Self Portrait (1970) to the mildly intriguing Planet Waves (1974), seemed designed, first and foremost, to confound the very idea of Bob Dylan.
Though its portrait of a polymorphously perverse antihero (who would happily have sex with a tree) is unlikely to shock audiences today as it did in the 1920s, "Baal" still has the potential to electrify.
When we look at the face of Commodus in this eerie portrait, we are staring into the eyes of unhinged, utterly perverse tyranny.
But even in these last uneven bits of prose, layers slide across layers, and what starts as a portrait of a hack writer becomes a surprisingly modern lens for looking at Hollywood's perverse way of managing creativity.
Then there was his cultivated look — the russet-colored hair and the enormous flashing eyes that brought to mind that perverse fantasist Daddy Carroll, from Gus Van Sant's 1991 film, "My Own Private Idaho," or Cecil Beaton's portraits of the British aesthete Stephen Tennant, who spent much of the latter part of his life in bed, for no reason other than that he preferred it.
