January 13, 2004
Holiday bounty
I have been blessed with reading material in the past month. Here is a list of books that I have either purchased or received since December 23, when I left New York for a week-long vacation in Chicago.
Janet Kraynak, editor. Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman's Words
Slavoj Zizek. The Puppet and the Dwarf
Marc Augé. In the Metro
Brian O'Connor, editor. The Adorno Reader
Lynne Tillman. This Is Not It
Lydia Chukovskaya. The Akhmatova Journals, Vol. 1 (1938-1941)
Michael Ignatieff. Isaiah Berlin: A Life
George Quasha, editor. The Station Hill Blanchot Reader: Fiction & Literary Essays
Paul Schimmel, editor. Robert Gober (1997 MOCA Los Angeles catalogue)
Maurice Berger, editor. Postmodernism: A Virtual Discussion
Marjorie Garber. Quotation Marks
Victor Buchli, editor. The Material Culture Reader
Charity Scribner. Requiem for Communism
Alison Pearlman. Unpackaging: Art of the 1980s
Jonathan Watkins and Jeremy Millar. Graham Gussin
James Rondeau and Olga Viso. Robert Gober, the United States Pavilion, 49th Venice Biennale
Brigitte Kolle, editor. Portikus, Frankfurt am Main, 1987-1997
Giuliana Bruno. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film
Daniel Buren. Daniel Buren: Erscheinen, Scheinen, Verschwinden
Rudi Fuchs and Gloria Moure. Jan Dibbets: Interior Light
Daniel Richter. Hirn
David Summers. Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western modernism
George Nelson. How to See
Elisabeth Sussman, editor. Eva Hesse
Suzanna Héman, Jurrie Poot, and Hripsimé Visser, editors. Conceptual art in the Netherlands and Belgium 1965-1975
Roni Horn. Rare Spellings: Selected Drawings 1985-1992
Emanuela Belloni, editor. Vanished Paths: Crisis of Representation and Destruction in the Arts from the 1950s to the End of the Century
Ben Kinmont. Prospectus: Thirty-one works by Ben Kinmont (two copies)
BANK
Isaiah Berlin. The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays
Fanny Howe. The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life
Knut Hamsun. Hunger
J.M. Coetzee. Stranger Shores: Literary Essays 1986-1999
Gilles Deleuze. Desert Islands and Other Texts
Carl Schorske. Thinking with History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism
Judith E. Zimmerman. Midpassage: Alexander Herzen and European Revolution, 1847-1852
Cynthia Ozick. Quarrel & Quandary
I feel a bit crazy to buy or receive this many books in a year, much less in a period of three and a half weeks. Someone recently called me an "information eater," which I think is an apt description of the obsessive way I acquire books. Here's how it worked for some of the above aqcuisitions:
I appreciated the way Cynthia Ozick reviewed the new John Updike short story collection in the New York Times, so when I found her book half off at Strand, I bought it. I received the Isaiah Berlin anthology for Christmas from my parents: it contains an essay called "The Counter-Enlightenment" that traces an intellectual line through Giambattista Vico, J.G. Herder, and Alexander Herzen, so I bought Zimmerman's book (also at half-price) on Herzen. And the Berlin anthology inspired me to buy the Ignatieff biography of Berlin. Berlin's appreciation of Akhmatova (and, in the same piece, Boris Pasternak), combined with Joseph Brodsky's essay about the female poet, led me to buy Chukovskaya's journals, which actually document Akhmatova's life during the years in question and includes a few dozen poems. Speaking of Brodsky, I bought the Coetzee collection for five bucks because it includes an essay about Brodsky's essays. (Is that what they mean by "meta"?) The MIT Press titles come from a friend who works there; many of the exhibition catalogues came to me via steep discount at the Dia Bookshop's closing sale this past week.
Books pile around me like stalagmites growing out of every available horizontal surface. I read the tables of contents, introductions, and usually one or two essays/chapters immediately, then they work their way down from the top of the piles to be occasionally brought out for perusal in bed before sleep or used for reference when writing. It's an entirely organic process, aided by the fact that I have a large built-in bookshelf in another room. What does all this say about me? That I need to read more fiction?