June 30, 2006
Weekend reading: Thomas Crow on art history in America
The Spring 2006 issue of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, contains a strong, readable essay on the development of art history in America by Thomas Crow. It clocks in at 10,000 words, so I recommend picking up the magazine rather than reading it on-screen. I've selected a few teaser excerpts:
George Kubler (1912-1996), the great specialist in both colonial Spanish architecture and pre-Columbian art, was one of the rare American scholars of his generation to address the theoretical underpinnings of a discipline operating under this designation. He likened the gaze of the art historian to that of the astronomer, "concerned with appearances noted in the present but occurring in the past. . . . However fragmentary its condition, any work of art is actually a portion of an arrested happening, or an emanation of past time." The "initial commotion" entailed in the making of an art object survives--as does no other creative act--as a unique, physically sensible pattern.In comparison, the textual materials relied upon by the profession of history can seem, despite their profusion, thin and remote. The object of art, by contrast, allows its maker to speak in the present with the full vividness of an unforced creative act, one that can preserve a significant, if not absolutely complete, inventory of its particular traits and structural complexity. By this I do not mean to say that artists and craftsmen do not operate under a confining series of stipulations and constraints, but these are the standard conditions of all human activity, within which art production is exceptional in the scope it provides for nuanced emotional expression as part and parcel of its social utility.
The difficulty, it hardly needs stating, lies in interpreting this physical commotion from the past that arrives in our midst like a traveler through time.
[Much more after the jump.]
Continue reading "Weekend reading: Thomas Crow on art history in America"Posted in Art, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
June 29, 2006
Fall art-book preview
Last week the D.A.P. Fall/Winter '06 catalogue arrived in the mail, and, as usual, it offers a plethora of information; scanning its contents not only informs you about what might be worth reading in the coming months, but also rewards those who look closely with information about upcoming exhibitions. In particular, I'm looking forward to the exhibitions and their catalogues: MoMA's Brice Marden retrospective (catalogue); the Whitechapel's presentation of the Bellmer exhibition on view at the Pompidou last spring (catalogue); Katy Siegel's "High Times, Hard Times" (catalogue); the Moderna Museet's Paul McCarthy retrospective, "Head Shop/Shop Head" (catalogue); Karen Kilimnik (she'll have a fall 2007 show at the ICA Philadelphia). and, last but not least, Lecia Dole-Recio's first museum solo show, at MOCA (catalogue).
Other books of potential interest include Luis Pérez-Oramas's An Atlas of Drawings; Yearning for Beauty: The Wiener Werkstätte and the Stoclet House; Gordon Matta-Clark: Works and Collected Writings; Who Cares: 3 Dinners, 39 Artists, Curators, Writers, 1 Book; Institutional Critique and After; 0 to 9: The Complete Magazine, 1967-1969; Gerhard Richter: Paintings 2003-2005; Tony Smith: In Large Scale; Liam Gillick: Factories in the Snow; Anselm Reyle: Ars Nova (for the Bruce Hainley essay); Tom Burr: Extrospective.
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Around the web #14
- Dushko Petrovich writes about "ARTSTAR" for Slate
- The Brooklyn Rail transcribes an anecdotal lecture by art historian Leo Steinberg originally given at the 2002 CAA conference in Philadelphia
- "Talking Cities" is an exhibition, symposium, magazine, and more, all about "the micropolitics of urban space"
- My friends David and Stuart officially open their new design office and occasional bookstore, Dexter/Sinister, tomorrow evening
- 3QuarksDaily posts a two-part essay on Susan Sontag by S. Asad Raza; part one and part two
- Gregory Miller, art collector and onetime (and perhaps current?) head of the White Columns board of trustees, has started a book publishing firm, Gregory R. Miller & Co., which has just put its website online
- The current issue of the College Art Association's Art Bulletin has eight reviews of Art Since 1900; the Art History Newsletter has brief excerpts from each
Posted in Around the web. Found always via this permanent link.
June 27, 2006
A week of artist-curated exhibitions
This week marks the apotheosis (to date, at least) of a recent trend: artist-curated summer group exhibitions. The festivities kick off tonight with "A four-dimensional being writes poetry on a field with sculptures," curated by Charles Ray, at Matthew Marks. Marks popularized the trend, allowing his gallery artists Katharina Fritsch (2003), Nayland Blake (2002), Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin (2001), and—perhaps most notably, though I didn't see the show—Robert Gober (1999) curate shows for his 22nd St. space.
Other artists tapped for the job this week include Justine Kurland and Dan Torop ("A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts" at Mitchell-Innes & Nash), Arturo Herrera ("I'm Yours Now" at Sikkema Jenkins & Co.), Banks Violette ("War on .45 / My Mirrors Are Painted Black (For You)" at Bortolami Dayan), Rob Pruitt and Jonathan Horowitz (at Andrew Kreps), and Matthew Higgs ("Dereconstruction" at Gladstone Gallery), among others.
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This just in
A few magazines that have arrived in the last week:
FRIEZE #100
The anniversary issue is suitably thick, and certainly entertains with its long interviews and surveys. I wish, however, that the magazine had taken the opportunity to flex its editorial muscle and produce a number of long, insightful feature articles—something one can easily find in almost any other issue. The middle of the magazine consists of interviews with Tom Wolfe, Pierre Huyghe, Yvonne Rainer, and David Lamelas; a roundtable on "What criteria do we use to judge art?"; an updated version of Studio International's 1976 survey of art magazines; and, my favorite, a survey of the literary influences of thirty-five artists, writers, and curators that will send me to my bookshelves for weeks to come. Also of note, to me at least, is the first feature I've seen on artist Goshka Macuga.
032C #11
"Europe Endless," the eleventh issue of this terminally hip Berlin-based magazine, features its usual mix of art, style, politics, and fashion, including contributions from artist Matt Saunders (author of Artforum's Berlin "On the Ground" report last December); a huge full-color foldout history of Europe since WWII by Rem Koolhaas's research unit, AMO; a consideration of the Berlin Biennale by Niklas Maak; and a photo portfolio by Matthew Barney. British architect David Adjaye graces the cover. A must-read for fans of Purple.
PARKETT #76
The newest issue of this Zurich- and New York-based magazine is literally just in; I haven't had time to peruse all of its contents. The essays on Chinese filmmaker Yang Fudong look promising, and Johanna Burton's essay on Rachel Harrison usefully posits the artist's sculptures as "lava flows" in a short-but-sweet text. The other featured artists, with three articles apiece, are Julie Mehretu and Lucy McKenzie; Bill Arning and Matthias Haldemann contribute the regular "Cumulus" columns, from America and Europe respectively; and Canadian artist Steven Shearer presents a portfolio insert titled "Guys."
AFTERALL #13
This London- and Los Angeles-based biannual journal could most quickly be desscribed as a more academically inclined Parkett, and features ten essays on five artists, plus two contextualizing essays, in each issue. Lucky number thirteen includes my friend and colleague Michael Ned Holte writing about the Center for Land Use Interpretation, along with nine other writers considering CLUI, Sora Kim, Yayoi Kusama, Aïda Ruilova, and Taro Shinoda. It's rare for publications that do not specialize in Asian art to devote this much editorial space to contemporary Asian artists. Editor Thomas Lawson's forward, which discusses the Centre Pompidou's exhibition "Los Angeles 1955-1985" from the LA point of view, is also worth reading, as it reminds readers that much Los Angeles art from the second half of the twentieth century did not look to the art world's metropolitan centers in New York and Europe for inspiration, but across the Pacific, and that the exhibition, like any city-specific visual-art survey, is necessarily incomplete.
VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEW Vol. 82, No. 3
This magazine recently won two National Magazine Awards, and its summer issue features an all-star lineup of writers, including Charles Simic, Alice Munro, David Rieff, Marjane Satrapi, James Ellroy, and Tom Bissell. Simic and Rieff are two of three essayists considering "Serbia After Milosevic," and Munro contributes a short story on the occasion of a symposium about her work featuring ten other writers and a "literary history" of her work by by Marcela Valdes. Always worth reading.
This "magazine," the newest arrival in this roundup, was released on Friday night at a launch party on the Lower East Side. I couldn't make it due to other obligations, but a friend kindly agreed to pick up a copy on my behalf. I didn't want to cut into the blue tape that sealed the box containing this year's multiples and interviews, but when I did I was immediately greeted by three small, foam, cube-shaped SpongeBob SquarePants toys. Also inside are a bar of "Arctic Breeze"-scented soap; a postcard of a photograph by my friend Melanie Schiff; a fragrance sample by Lisa Kirk; posters by Anne Collier, Enrico David, and Jacob Kolding; prints by Lorenzo de Los Angeles III, Matthew Brannon, and Shannon Ebner; a unique print by Patrick Hill; a DVD by Ronnie Bass; and a CD of music by Robot, a band featuring Takuji Kogo and John Miller. All for $35. Need I say more?
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June 26, 2006
Lines I wish I wrote, #5
Near the end of a thoughtful negative review of John Updike's new novel, the critic James Wood offers a textbook example of damning with faint praise:
"He is not especially interested in questions of faith or doubt, because aesthetics can always be wheeled in to solve such questions: the world is uncomplicatedly God's, and it exists to be lyrically praised. This has not always been a weakness in his long and varied career. It licenses what is best in his writing—his strong will to thank God for His creation by attending carefully to all its surfaces, from fridges to vaginas." [Emphasis added]
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PSA: Yale University Press summer sale
Yale University Press just announced a fifty-percent discount on a wide range of its titles, including many exhibition catalogues produced in conjunction with museums like the Metropolitan in New York. Though the sale runs until September 30, the books are offered on a first-come, first-sold basis.
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"Uncertain States of America" at Bard (2 of 2) (warning: long post)
(The audience five minutes before the panel began.)
On Saturday afternoon I participated in a panel discussion at the opening of “Uncertain States of America” (see pictures two posts below), along with Yean Fee Quay, head of the exhibition department at the Reykjavik Art Museum (a future venue for the show), P.S. 1’s Bob Nickas, the Whitney’s Chrissie Iles, independent curator Molly Nesbit, and Trevor Smith, a curator at the New Museum. I was the youngest person on the dais by a fair margin; many more people whose work I respect sat in the audience; everyone offered pointed criticism and spirited defenses, and expressed themselves rather candidly—at least more so than at any other panel discussion I have participated in. I spoke third, after Iles and Nesbit, and was a little too nervous to phrase my thoughts very well. So this is a (hopefully) more coherent recapitulation of what I said.
The exhibition’s title has undeniable rhetorical force, and it’s probably fair to say that by substituting the word “uncertain” for “united,” a majority of those visiting the show will expect it to include artworks that comment explicitly on political or social-justice issues—to explicate the ambiguity, disunity, and precariousness implied by the title. While some artworks do elucidate aspects of this “complicated, fucked-up moment” (to use Nickas’s words), most do so obliquely, if at all. As Kori Newkirk stated during the artists’ panel that preceded our discussion, “I want my work to seduce first. The ‘political’ content can come in through the side door or window.” Tom Eccles’s elegant installation of the exhibition at Bard emphasizes this seductiveness. The suavity of the presentation and assuredness of the artists’ works—admirable traits in almost any exhibition—here suppress the uncertainty promised in the title and the political turn outlined in the rhetoric surrounding the show. There is a noticeable disconnect between what one expects and what one sees.
Instead, the uncertainty seems to be built into the curatorial process. European curators, no matter how familiar with America and American artists, will inevitably miss or misunderstand shades of complexity in art made here—and in its relationship to broader issues in American culture. (This runs both ways, as exemplified by the insipid, frequently diagrammatic politics in “The American Effect,” Larry Rinder’s 2003 exhibition.) Additionally, Birnbaum admitted at the panel that he and his cocurators, Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Gunnar Kvaran, chose “artists, not artworks,” and that much of the work on view was created specifically for the show—always a gamble.
The exhibition, as it moves from venue to venue, will “evolve” organically, with new works substituted for those already shown, new artists added, an ongoing series of performances and discussions, and additional publications (one of which I will help compile). The curators and artists spoke of the potential for future collaborations—and of the development of an “Uncertain States” community—as the exhibition lumbers from museum to museum. Considering that the exhibition itself cannot conceivably represent America, or even American art, it may be that this extra-art activity holds the greatest potential for “political” content, to create relationships that could have a potentially transformative effect on the communities visited by the show and in the communities in which the artists live and work. The forty-two artists (and artist teams) in Bard’s presentation are smart, dedicated, and good at what they do (no matter one’s opinion of their work); pairing them with the infrastructure of Bard College and the museum opens a very broad, if short-lived, horizon of possibility. Rodney McMillan’s re-presentation of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” speech, which was originally delivered at the University of Michigan’s May 1964 commencement ceremony, to my mind best fulfilled this potential among the art on view, and the implications of the performance will surely stick in my mind for some time to come. But for me, meeting some of the exhibition’s artists and initiating what will hopefully be long and fruitful discussions with them may in the long run hold greater value. If the extra-art activity that spins off from the exhibition fulfills the mandate generated by the show’s title and supporting rhetoric, and the show doesn’t, where does this leave the exhibition?
Lastly, I want to clarify an initial statement, given in response to a question from Birnbaum. When I said that including artists from “second-tier” American cities (Miami, Minneapolis, Portland) inevitably draws them out of their communities and into the globalized network of the art-world’s metropolitan centers, I was not rendering judgment, but simply stating plain fact. By virtue of the imprimatur granted their work by their inclusion in this exhibition, these artists will inevitably gain momentum that will bring them toward New York, Los Angeles, London, etc. A question that I think is worth asking: What does this do to the autonomy and sense of community in the cities from which these artists come? To attempt an answer is obviously beyond the curators’ responsibility—they need not make reparations to these art communities for plucking individuals from them—but what (if anything) can be done to ensure the continued flourishing of the art scene in, say, Houston? Is there anything that can be instituted systematically to ensure that the traffic in artistic talent heads two ways?
UPDATE (7/7): Roberta Smith reviews the exhibition in today's Times.
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June 25, 2006
Four interviews
- A 2004 interview with Polish poet and critic Adam Zagajewski, at AGNI (link via 3 Quarks Daily)
- An interview with the literary critic James Wood, at the Kenyon Review
- An interview with the short-story writer Alice Munro (part of a portfolio about the writer that contains these short appreciations), at the Virginia Quarterly Review (original link via BookSlut)
- An interview with the novelist and short-story writer Haruki Murakami, at the Sydney Morning Herald (link via the Literary Saloon)
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"Uncertain States of America" at Bard (1 of 2)
A few pictures of the "Uncertain States of America" exhibition that opened Saturday at Bard's Center for Curatorial Studies Museum.
Installation view featuring work by Frank Benson (foreground) and Karl Haendal (background).
Installation view showing work by Mika Tajima.
There are four more pictures after the cutoff.
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June 23, 2006
A few new art books
Last night, at the small book party for Daniel Birnbaum's Chronology (Lukas & Sternberg), artist Paul Chan asked Birnbaum a few questions about the book's use of philosophical conceptions of time to discuss time-based contemporary art. In the question-and-answer session that followed, Chan brought up Paul Virilio, "theorist of speed" (he's even pictured with a "crotch rocket" motorcycle on his publisher's author page), and his idea that, in the ultranetworked "first world," the ubiquity and simultaneity of presence is a kind of pollution. As someone who "nervously fingers [his] BlackBerry like worry beads on trains, in airport lounges, and street corners"—to use Daniel Gross's phrase—I can appreciate this concept of mental contamination. I'm unsure which of Virilio's books contains the most concise elaboration of this concept, since ideas, endlessly tweaked, roll from one volume to the next, but this interview with Wired magazine seems to offer a good one-line prècis: "Interactivity is to real space what radioactivity is to the atmosphere." Anyway, something to consider.
Chan is featured on the cover of the summer Artforum. He is also one of the subjects of a new series of slim, paperback "conversations" published by a.r.t. press. (Some more info is here.) His conversation with Martha Rosler, which I read on a train from Philadelphia two weeks ago, is somewhat adversarial: not an argument, per se, but a long talk between two people who use the differences in thought between them to better delimit their own practices. Or, as Rosler put it, it's "an old fart talking to a young fart." I haven't read the other book so far published in the series—a conversation between Lawrence Weiner and Liam Gillick—but the format seems promising, and they are attractively designed. (One can't help but wonder, however, whether simultaneously publishing these kinds of conversations as PDFs might be more effective in extending their reach.)
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Another delicious irony
I'm sure literary editor Leon Wieseltier would claim this as a scheduling coincidence, but a reader can't help but notice that Harvey C. Mansfield's "Good and Happy," a review of two new books on happiness, comes one week after Martha Nussbaum's evisceration of Mansfield's new book, Manliness (Yale University Press), in the same pages of the New Republic. (Even better, they are currently back-to-back in the "Books & the Arts" page of the magazine's website.)
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June 22, 2006
"In the Footsteps of Walter Benjamin"
Found, of all places, in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Michael D. Jackson's travel essay about re-tracing Walter Benjamin's final footsteps on the border of France and Spain is quite a good read. Two excerpts, both taken from a little more than halfway through the text:
And so I began the hardest part of my journey. The wind was now so strong that at times I was almost knocked off my feet or could make little headway walking into it. I chose to hug the rockface rather than walk along the outer edge of the road, even though there were few places where I could safely step aside while cars passed. But as I approached the ridge, I could see that the road doubled back, presumably descending from that point on into Spain. I passed a sign warning of Paravent Violent, cut across the corner of the road, and was immediately in sight of the Douane—a narrow building around which the downhill road flowed like a stream. Its offices were devoid of furniture; there was no indication that it was still in use; and I felt a momentary pang of disappointment that I could simply walk past this point where the fate of so many desperate travelers had been decided by the caprice or greed of a frontier guard, a cable from Madrid, or even the hour of the day. Perhaps nothing defines the plight of the refugee more than this overwhelming sense that one's life is no longer in one's own hands, that one is totally dependent on the goodwill of others, and yet utterly ignorant of what the future holds. I therefore found it poignant to recall that one of Benjamin's last published essays had been a commentary on Bertold Brecht's great poem Legend of the Origin of the Book Tao Te Ching on Lao Tzu's Way into Exile, in which he pointed out that an act of pure friendship between a customs officer and the 70-year-old sage, going into exile on an ox, was the only reason that Lao Tzu's inimitable work survived, to be passed down through the centuries to us. It is thus a reminder that the one hope we have in this world is that compassion will triumph over indifference.
And then:
What affinity drew me to Benjamin?And then it occurred to me that this affinity had less to do with the inspiration I had drawn from Benjamin's ideas of allegory and narratively coherent experience (erfahrung), or from the notion that the form of our writing may imitate the "natural" or spontaneous forms in which the world appears to us; it came mostly from the way I have taken heart, for many years, from his example, and come to see that the maverick life of a thinker, arcane and obsolete though it is nowadays seen to be, is as legitimate as any other vocation. Although our backgrounds and upbringing were utterly unlike, and he died the year I was born, had I not, from the beginning, been attracted to the life of the mind, only to find that such an existence had little value in the country where I was raised? But in contrast to Benjamin, I did not aspire to intellectual greatness. This was not because I embraced the anti-intellectualism of my native culture, or, like Pierre Bourdieu, felt ashamed of thought; it was because I had always been convinced that thought and language were profoundly inadequate to the world, and could neither save nor redeem us. It may not have been Benjamin's intellectuality that made him so maladroit. But it did offer him a kind of magical bolthole where he could avoid taking action, and console himself that the world was safe and secure as long as he could make it appear so in what he thought and wrote.
Harvard University Press has done a great job of publishing English translations of Benjamin's writing. In April the press added two titles to its Benjamin list, Berlin Childhood around 1900 and On Hashish.
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"Reading in abeyance"
Giles Foden, deputy literary editor of The Guardian, writes in the one-hundredth issue of Frieze:
Problems arise when the key, as explained by the critic, takes up more room than the map in the reader's head. This is a real issue in universities these days, with students often paying more attention to works of criticism than to the literature that criticism is intended to elucidate. My friend Ian Sansom, who has inhabited all of these worlds—a former don, he is now a novelist and book reviewer—has coined the phrase "reading in abeyance" to describe this process.Reading in abeyance of another view . . . it's not reading at all, really. Nothing human comes of literature until one is able to read properly oneself. There is something idolatrous about raising criticism to too high a level.
Perhaps I'm given a partial waiver because I practice criticism, and therefore reading it is, in a way, reading a "primary text." But I am definitely guilty of "reading in abeyance": From reviews, I can recount the plots of all six 2006 Man Booker-prize shortlisted novels, but have only read one half of one. One of my resolutions for this year was to read fewer magazine articles and more books. So far, not so good: I have read perhaps ten of the latter, while consuming fifty books' worth of the former.
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June 21, 2006
Random connection: Susan Sontag, Cynthia Ozick
This morning I trekked up to the Metropolitan at 9:30 to take another look at "On Photography: A Tribute to Susan Sontag," an exhibition of photographs drawn from the museum's collection, then ventured back downtown, stopping at a few galleries along the way, to finish my brief review of the show for the Artforum website.
Later, I made my usual Wednesday lunchtime visit to the New York Observer webpage to check out this week's cultural coverage, and found this tough but respectful review of Cynthia Ozick's new collection, The Din in the Head. It mentions that the preface to the book is itself a tribute (of sorts) to Sontag, which I then found online here (via the Complete Review). I've enjoyed several of Ozick's essay collections, including Quarrel & Quandary and Metaphor & Memory, and am looking forward to reading the new volume.
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A chance encounter
Taken at the corner of 52nd & 5th.
Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
A quote
"To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic." George Santayana, The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy
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June 20, 2006
"Dada": two critics, one conclusion
Jed Perl, writing in the New Repbulic:
Like so many atheists, the Dadaists were true believers of a sort. Late in life, when Arp was carving blocks of marble into classical forms that somehow still embodied a Dadaist's doubts, he reminisced about the Dada years. "The important thing about Dada, it seems to me, is that the Dadaists despised what is commonly regarded as art, but put the whole universe on the lofty throne of art," he wrote, "we declared that everything that comes into being or is made by man is art. Art can be evil, boring, wild, sweet, dangerous, euphonious, ugly, or a feast to the eyes. The whole earth is art. To draw well is art . . . . The nightingale is a great artist. Michelangelo's Moses: Bravo! But at the sight of an inspired snow man, the Dadaist also cried bravo." Put this way, the Dadaist creed is quite simply a celebration of the open-mindedness of the avant-garde, and most of the artists I know would agree with a good deal of what Arp has to say. Not the least of the strengths of Dickerman's exhibition is that one may leave it believing that Arp, not Duchamp, is the essential Dadaist hero. Arp's youthful Dadaist optimism puts Duchamp's withering skepticism in its rightful place—not an entirely dishonorable place in twentieth-century art, but a very small place. Dada deserves better than Duchamp.
Peter Schjehldal, writing in the New Yorker:
[Dada] revelled in novel styles and in popular media—Cubist and Futurist pastiche, collage, assemblage, film, theatre, photography, noise music, sound poetry, puppetry, wild typography, magazines—basically for the hell of it, despite the odd skew, mostly in seething postwar Germany, toward political agitation. Some forms, such as abstraction and machine aesthetics, informed later art; but, as a phenomenon, Dada foretold nothing so much as the marketing of youth fashions. Though hardly commercial, it anticipated a byword of modern advertising: forget the steak, sell the sizzle. The first artist who springs to mind when Dada is mentioned, Marcel Duchamp, would constitute an exception, but he really wasn’t a Dadaist. He had already conceived many of his signature “readymades”—common objects, such as a bottle rack and a snow shovel, presented as art—and his magnum opus, “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even,” was under way before he had heard of the movement. Apart from accessory japes, like the mustachioed “Mona Lisa” (1919), his relations with Dada were more diplomatic than creative. A vital order of business, in clarifying Dada, is to pry Duchamp from its clutch.
This is as good a time as any to mention that the two books accompanying this show—its catalogue, edited by exhibition curator Leah Dickerman, and The Dada Seminars, both published by DAP and the National Gallery of Art—are a fantastic resource and are beautifully designed.
Elsewhere, Tyler Green posted a two-part interview with Dickerman (part one here; part two here).
Posted in Art, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
June 19, 2006
A reading list
After I spoke last week at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a friend who attended the lecture (and who is currently enrolled in the University of Chicago's School of Social Service Administration) e-mailed me a reading list so that we could continue our discussion of themes in my speech that overlap with his interests and practice. I thought I'd share his suggestions:
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977
Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis
Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner, eds., Culture/Power/History
Does this selection hint at the topic of my discussion?
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Around the web #13
I foolishly keep links and notes for potential posts in my computer's e-mail program as a drafted message, and late last week I lost nearly a month's worth of material. Here are a few links I've cobbled together since:
- Momus laments the folding of Relax, a magazine that I purchased and enjoyed for years despite not being able to read a word in it.
- At Beatrice, Jeff Chang and Simon Reynolds—responsible for Can't Stop Won't Stop and Rip It Up and Start Again, two of the best music books of 2005—discuss their books and much more. Here's part one; here's part two.
- At n+1, Paul Maliszewski offers an appreciation of the writer Gilbert Sorrentino, who died May 18.
- Todd at From the Floor asks whether or not we really need video guides for art exhibitions, and I can't help but laugh at the fact that the exhibition in question is titled "Remote Viewing."
- In response to Christian Keathley's Cinephilia and History, Girish Shambu offers three "cinephiliac moments" off the top of his head.
- This weekend, while catching up with magazines I was too busy to get to when they landed in my mailbox, I came across this engaging Adam Gopnik essay on William Dean Howells.
Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
June 17, 2006
Alistair Cooke on FDR's death
Today The Guardian prints an extract of Alistair Cooke's memoir about journeying across America in 1942, found not long before his death in 2004. (More on Cooke here.) The published section is about the public reaction to the news of Roosevelt's death, and is strikingly evocative and well-written. My favorite bit:
Through the Friday night, the president's train went up from Georgia to Washington, and to those who accompanied it, or saw it pass, no journey they knew of had been so sombre. The coincidence of Lincoln's lonesome train was so pressing that spontaneously, without benefit of a press association cue, newspapers many hundreds of miles apart remembered or reprinted Walt Whitman's poem of 1865. In thus identifying with a single great voice of unashamed expressiveness and power, there was the rare revelation of a country reaching for its essential style. Other nations have at such times the art of irony or decorum. And the citizens of those nations have always to restrain the ache to see America conform to their own notions of taste and propriety. But in echoing Whitman, Americans were for once true to a power that is uniquely theirs, the full-volumed resonance of an emotion that is untidy, unabashed, violent, and grievous. Every sort of southerner walked or scrambled to the small stations, many tenant farmers dressing their children in all they had, hundreds of families standing in the warm night in freight-yards, at stations, and in the fields standing by the "lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west" to watch the black train slide north. In Washington, in a dreary light, six white horses drew the casket through the streets. The newsreels of these watching crowds are among the most direct expressions I have seen of human beings with their defences down.
The rest is equally worth reading, and the book it comes from, Alistair Cooke's American Journey: Life on the Home Front in the Second World War, is published June 29 in the UK.
UPDATE (6/17): The book appears to have been published in the US in late April, under the title The American Home Front: 1941-42.