January 31, 2006
Keillor on Lévy
In Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, Garrison Keillor did not review Bernard-Henry Levi’s new book. Instead, his article used American Vertigo as a prop in what amounted to an appeal to the self-righteousness of his Lake Wobegone constituency. One can understand commissioning a just-the-folks commentator to respond to an assessment of America in 2005 by a French “rockstar intellectual,” but one would also expect that the editors would curb his most flagrant and unsustained attacks. The blatantly antagonistic tone, evident from the second sentence, is nowhere backed up by nuanced criticism. At one point Keillor writes, “Lévy is quite comfortable with phrases like ‘as always in America.’ Bombast comes naturally to him . . . As always with French writers, Lévy is short on the facts, long on conclusions.” The parallelism does little to remove Keillor’s foot from his mouth or leaven the arrogance of his statement. I’m surprised that there has not been more comment about this piece on weblogs—it's had me in a tizzy since Saturday morning—and wonder if any letters to the editor will turn up in next week’s NYTBR.
UPDATE (2/10): After I posted this I came across plenty of condemnations of Keillor's review, including this piece in the current New Republic.
Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.
January 24, 2006
Books read in 2005
Thinking about Hilary Spurling's Matisse biography (and all the other books released last year that I haven't yet read) led me to try and reconstruct—from memory—a list of all the books I did read last year. Here is what I came up with:
Diana Athill, Stet
Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Ann Patchett, Truth & Beauty
Michael Kimmelman, The Accidental Masterpiece (review here)
Carl Andre, Cuts: Selected Writings 1959-2004 (review here)
Jonathan Ames, Wake Up, Sir!
Benjamin Kunkel, Indecision
Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road
John Haskell, I Am Not Jackson Pollock
Peter Schjeldahl, The Hydrogen Jukebox (quote here)
Aleksander Hemon, Nowhere Man
Paul Berman, Power and the Idealists (comments here)
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
At barely more than a book a month, it's not the most impressive list. Already twenty-four days have passed in 2006 and I've yet to finish anything I've picked up, putting aside three or four selections after no more than a few chapters.
Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.
Hilary Spurling's Matisse biography wins Whitbread award
Not that anyone's looking to this site for breaking news (or, at the moment, looking at it for any news), but the second volume of Hilary Spurling's biography of Henri Matisse has just won the prestigious £30,000 Whitbread Award. Click here for the details from the Guardian.
Posted in Art, Books. Found always via this permanent link.
January 19, 2006
Adam Phillips on Diane Arbus
As far as I can tell, British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips is considered a public intellectual in England, where he is well known for books such as On Flirtation, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored, and, most recently, Going Sane; as a wide-ranging essayist; and as the editor of a new series of translations of Sigmund Freud. Going Sane received a bit of a media push when it was published Stateside last October, and I hope it will draw to him a larger audience on this side of the Atlantic. (So far I haven't seen his name pop up in US-based journals, though of course these things take time.) I appreciate his essays, which I've read in the London Review of Books for the past few years, for the plain fact that he not attempt to become what he isn't (an art critic, a literary critic); his recent review of Bret Easton Ellis's Lunar Park was among the oddest, and most fascinating, I read. In the current issue he has published an essay (unfortunately only fully accessible online to subscribers) on Diane Arbus's motives that closely follows her writings rather than her photographs. It doesn't serve well as art criticism, but nonetheless is a nice coda to the Arbusmania that gripped New York at the time of her exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum last spring. A few excerpts:
When Arbus speaks of her work she often enough talks of photography as a form of sociability: ‘Some pictures are tentative forays without your even knowing it.’ The camera gives the photographer something to do with other people, and it is like a safe lead, a ‘licence’ as she calls it, into the unpredictable. Who you can and can’t be with for Arbus is bound up with what you can and can’t know about people. As a certain kind of modern artist she thinks of intentions as passwords that get you what you never expected; and she locates the mystery that matters most to her in the unfamiliar (the family being the place where unfamiliarity begins) . . .Continue reading "Adam Phillips on Diane Arbus"
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
January 13, 2006
A good idea takes root a second time
Top: Zoe Leonard, Tree, 1997. Two installation views at Paula Cooper Gallery. (Photo: ArtSeenSoho.com) Bottom: Anya Gallacio, One Art, 2006. Installation view at SculptureCenter. (Photo: G. Paul Burnett/the New York Times)
Though the exhibition took place before I came to New York, images of Zoe Leonard's 1997 show at Paula Cooper's gallery have left an indelible impression on my mind. Now London-based artist Anya Gallacio has recapitulated the idea (albeit on a larger scale) in an exhibition that just opened at SculptureCenter in Long Island City. One can't assume that Gallacio knew of Leonard's work before conceiving her own, but the resemblance is even more uncanny than those "copies" that do raise hackles among art world cognoscenti, which makes it all the more surprising that neither Ken Johnson, in his otherwise thoughtful review of Gallacio's exhibition in today's Times, nor the SculptureCenter employee I spoke with last Friday knew of Leonard's project. I'll admit that Leonard is known more for her photographs than her sculptures, but has this (seemingly spectacular) '97 sculpture sunk from collective memory? (Holland Cotter did mention in in two Times "Art Guide" columns in September of that year.) It would seem to me a shame, as it has always held a prominent place on my "shows I wish I had seen" list.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
Harmonic Convergence
If you widely read enough, connections start popping up in the unlikeliest of places. To wit, a quote from this article in Slate:
Shrimp is, in fact, the most-consumed seafood in the United States. According to the National Fisheries Institute, the average American ate 4.2 pounds of the curved critters in 2004, up from to 2.2 pounds in 1990. How did shrimp surpass canned tuna, the longtime seafood champ, and become the nation's favorite marine nibble?
Koerner goes on to credit a "shrimp-farming revolution." There is one factor, however, that he neglects to credit. See this article in the New York Post:
A wacky "flying shrimp" stunt a Long Island woman claims killed her husband was inspired by a Jackie Chan comedy, a court heard yesterday in the opening of a $10 million lawsuit against the famed Benihana restaurant chain.Toru Hasegawa, the head chef of a Munsey Park branch in Nassau County, said his staff began the popular practice of winging hot shrimp into diners' mouths after the release of the Chan flick "Mr. Nice Guy" in 1998.
Obviously the fact that we no longer take the time to put shrimp on plates has led to our ability to consume ever-increasing amounts of the decapod crustacean.