July 14, 2006
Hiatus
It's time for one of this site's intermittent, regular-reader-alienating periods of inactivity. Back soon.
Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
July 13, 2006
Alberto Manguel on conversation in the TLS
This week's Times Literary Supplement includes writer Alberto Manguel reviewing Stephen Miller's Conversation: A history of a declining art (Yale University Press), which I've dipped into occasionally over the past few months. It begins with a pair of personal anecdotes—a requisite for long-format reviews of popular non-fiction books, it seems. The first reads:
For many years, Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo got together in the evenings to talk. In the mid-1960s, through a series of trivial circumstances, I became the lucky witness to many of these conversations. For hours on end, over a dismal meal of boiled vegetables and overcooked rice, in Bioy’s vast and dilapidated Buenos Aires flat, the three would discuss an infinite number of subjects with intelligence, lightly carried erudition and wit. Listening to the three friends talking was like listening to a chamber orchestra playing an improvised concerto. One voice would suggest a theme, the others would pick it up and play on it, then abandon it in order to simultaneously attack several others, the whole peppered with quotations, anecdotes, tidbits of esoteric information and jokes. Bioy once made a list of the subjects he remembered they had discussed: it is three pages long and ends with “the autobiographical books of George Moore, Victor Hugo, Housman’s poems, Toulet’s contrerimes, and the formulation of ethical principles”. Whoever attended the dinner was forced either to enter the conversation according to implicit rules of subject and tone, or to drown in the flow of words. A third possibility (which I timidly chose) was merely to sit and listen.
To find out how Manguel himself comes across as an interlocuter, take a look at this long conversation conducted by diehard literary interviewer Robert Birnbaum. This also marks a good occasion to note that I've added Jenny Davidson to the blogroll, under "Miscellaneous" in the right-hand column. (She linked to the article here.)
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
July 12, 2006
Andrew O'Hagan on Michael Jackson
When asked recently to list my favorite London Review of Books contributors, I immediately named Andrew O'Hagan, thinking of this essay on surveillance technology (full article available only to subscribers). Lately he has maintained a low profile in the paper, perhaps because he was putting the finishing touches on Be Near Me (Faber & Faber), a novel due to be published in the UK next month. But I just read, in the current issue, a review-essay about Michael Jackson, which is as entertaining as O'Hagan's best work. There is a very alluring (to me) LRB style—wearing one's intelligence very lightly, as if thinking out loud—and this essay, like the work of Jenny Diski, Adam Phillips, et al, exemplifies it perfectly. Three brief excerpts:
What explains Jackson’s journey from cute little black boy with immense talent and optimism to a mutilated gender fiasco who busies himself impersonating Elizabeth Taylor in Butterfield 8? Jackson is a protean idea of a person, rather confused, rather desperate, but complete in his devotion to self-authorship. His every move shows him to be a modern conundrum about race and identity and selfhood. He might make us laugh, but he might also frighten us into recognising the excesses we demand of those we choose to entertain us.
Later:
We could . . . suggest that our tabloid media have a paedophile element to their subconscious, a child-abusing energy at the heart of their own anger. The British tabloid newspapers demonstrate this every day, with their talk of ‘our tots’ and their enthusiastic ‘revelations’ about suspected child abusers and child murderers. You can’t read the British papers without feeling polluted, not only by the stories but by the degree to which the writers and editors of those stories appear to want them to be true, even before the evidence has proved it. Beyond this, a carnival of sensationalism vies with a deadly prurience, matched by a creepy populist appeal to the ‘common decency’ of the mob. You feel that the hacks are getting off on the horrors they ascribe, getting high on the pseudo-democratic vengeance their stories might excite
And:
What is it about fame that can make people unbearable to themselves? In the right conditions—the wrong conditions—a dreamy and over-watched person of sizeable talent can turn steadily into a tragic being, as vulnerable to the psychically destructive forces of the age as the great heroines of the 19th-century novel or the doomed figures of Romantic opera. Moral captives such as Emma Bovary and Tess Durbeyfield have destruction written into their code of happiness, as does Cio-Cio-San or Verdi’s Desdemona, suffocated by bad men or bourgeois custom but most effectively by a public (an audience) that loves to be complicit in the undoing of women and the aestheticising of their pain. Once you get to Judy Garland or Marilyn Monroe or Billie Holiday or Lena Zavaroni, the thrill has become a fetish, and you can see how self-change and death-throes have become in a rather naked way the bigger part of their performance. Michael Jackson has all of that by rote . . .
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
Leon Wieseltier and Jed Perl discuss inflicting "deep damage"
The Beiderbecke Affair has posted an excerpt of a conversation between The New Republic's Leon Wieseltier and Jed Perl, held earlier this year at the 92nd St. Y and reprinted in Columbia Magazine. Here is the first part of that excerpt:
Leon Wieseltier: I think that if a critic discovers a book or a show that he finds pernicious, it is his solemn responsibility to try to do as much damage to the fortunes of that as he possibly can.Jed Perl: Totally. But the damage needs to be deep damage. It has to be damage that has an intellectual complexity to it. It’s not the kind of damage necessarily that knocks a book or a show out that day. It’s the kind of damage that even people who totally disagree are worrying about six months or six years later.
LW: I’ve always found that the really valuable attacks by critics only look like attacks. In fact, they’re defenses of things the critic believes have been attacked. They are responses to attacks.
JP: One of the things people forget or simply don’t understand is that the hardest thing a critic can do is write an extended attack on something you really and truly don’t like. It is awful to do. It’s hard. Very, very difficult. You have to think about he people you don’t agree with and what they think. You have to get into their minds. You have to develop arguments that are compelling. It’s much more fun to celebrate.
LW: I think that’s true, but there’s a lot of very empty praise out there—to the point where there are very few critics of any art form that I would trust about buying a book or going to see a ballet. Too many people are nice to too many people.
JP: That’s completely true, which means that it’s all the more important, when one wants to praise something, to praise it in a complex, substantial way. I’m not against attacks. I’ve done my share.
But one of the central obligations of the critic is to develop, over a period of time, a kind of verbal authenticity. I’m talking about a critical voice that tells the reader who this human being, who this critic, really is . . .
Click the first link above to read the rest, as well as instances of Wieseltier putting this theory into action.
Posted in Around the web. Found always via this permanent link.
July 10, 2006
Louis Menand on John Dewey (from The Metaphysical Club)
The "Reflex Arc" paper ["The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology," 1896] is the essential expression of Dewey's particular mode of intelligence. It is the strategy he followed in approaching every problem: expose a tacit hierarchy in the terms in which people conventionally think about it. We think that a response follows a stimulus; Dewey taught that there is a stimulus only because there is already a response. We think that first there are individuals and then there is society; Dewey taught that there is no such thing as an individual without society. We think we know in order to do; Dewey taught that doing is why there is knowing.
Dewey was not reversing the priority of the terms he identified in these analyses. Invidiousness was precisely what he wished always to avoid. In condemning (as he did) the elevation of thinking over doing as a reflection of class bias ([Thorsten] Veblen would have said that philosophical speculation if a form of conspicuous consumption: it shows we can afford not to work with our hands), Dewey was not proposing to elevate doing over thinking instead. He was only applying the idea [Jane] Addams was trying to explain to him when she said that antagonism is unreal: he was showing that "doing" and "thinking," like "stimulus" and "response," are just practical distinctions we make when tensions arise in the process of adjustment between the organism and its world.
Dewey was not reversing the priority of the terms he identified in these analyses. Invidiousness was precisely what he wished always to avoid. In condemning (as he did) the elevation of thinking over doing as a reflection of class bias ([Thorsten] Veblen would have said that philosophical speculation if a form of conspicuous consumption: it shows we can afford not to work with our hands), Dewey was not proposing to elevate doing over thinking instead. He was only applying the idea [Jane] Addams was trying to explain to him when she said that antagonism is unreal: he was showing that "doing" and "thinking," like "stimulus" and "response," are just practical distinctions we make when tensions arise in the process of adjustment between the organism and its world.
The quote comes from The Metaphysical Club (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2001), Menand's Pulitzer Prize-winning study of American intellectual life from Emerson to W.E.B. DuBois, abolitionism to cultural pluralism. The book focuses on four figures: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, and Charles Sanders Peirce, three members of the informal, short-lived, Cambridge-based discussion group that gives the book its name, and John Dewey, whose contributions to education theory and philosophy came a little later. Despite a somewhat knotty section concerning the meetings between and overlapping influences on the various Metaphysical Club members, the book is a great, brisk read, drawn largely from the protagonists' own words.
Though I haven't read it, I suspect that Edmund Wilson's Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (W.W. Norton) would make a very good companion to The Metaphysical Club.
Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.
Cacti in a greenhouse at Wave Hill
Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
James Hopkins
BrianSholis.com was updated over the weekend; I uploaded an essay about the British artist James Hopkins that I wrote for Max Wigram Gallery.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
July 7, 2006
Weekend reading: Around the web #15
&
Here's a doozy of an around-the-web update. Hopefully you can find something to print out and read over the weekend.
- "Calvino and His Cities," a reminiscence by longtime Italo Calvino translator William Weaver (Link via James Marcus's House of Mirth)
- As a budding book reviewer, I took particular interest in the National Book Critics Circle's ";a href="http://www.bookcritics.org/?go=tips" target="_new">Tips for Book Reviewing," which offers suggestions that seem sound based on my experience as a writer and editor of art reviews
- On Tuesday, the Magazine Reader column at the Washington Post discussed Shock, a new title that has plastered ads (featuring photos of a female boxer being punched in the face and a US soldier holding a bloodied child) all across New York. (Link via Bookslut)
- An essay about Susan Sontag (warning: PDF link) that hangs on a lecture she gave at a small school in southeastern Virginia (Link via PoliticalTheory.info)
- An interview with writer Gary Lutz in the current issue of Bookslut. In April, I mentioned another interview with Lutz, and included excerpts and links to other pieces he has written.
- In The Guardian, a profile of artist Gillian Wearing
- In the Boston Review, John Palattella weighs in with a review-essay about the recent edition of Elizabeth Bishop's uncollected poetry, as well as the controversy that surrounded its publication:
Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box does shine a bright light on Bishop’s unpublished work, but it is not a harsh one. It reveals a poet often concerned with dramatizing the unfolding of a sense of stupefaction—of astonishment as well as bewilderment.[ . . . ]
Publishing these works isn’t wrong. But it is weird, since their very persistence seems to defy one of Bishop’s key insights: “so many things seem filled with the intent / to be lost that their loss is no disaster.” These lines fall at the end of the first stanza of “One Art,” but the sentiment they express—the relinquishment of the desire for mastery in the face of change and loss—recurs throughout Bishop’s poetry and prose.
- In the Guardian, Tim Adams writes an admiring profile of Bill Buford, former editor of Granta and fiction editor of the New Yorker, on the occasion of the publication of Heat (Knopf). Adams worked for Buford in the '80s, and offers a picture of his boss that I think all of us who work in publishing can appreciate:
Buford believed that the ingredients of a quarterly magazine were a combustible amount of pent-up frustration, many late nights and sudden bursts of adrenaline: he sought to engender this in his writers, his staff and, mostly, himself. The only way of getting any release was to get him to read something or to edit something or to phone someone or to write something, and as each of these demanded telling him what to do, which was invariably a process of cajoling and apology and silence and procrastination, the tension mounted. In the time I worked there, the office was generally tormented by a single question, 'Where is Bill?' and its inevitable supplementary, 'What do you think he is doing?'
- New York Times art critic Roberta Smith offers a tour of Basel's museums that briefly discusses some of the shows you didn't see while there for the art fair
- Further to my post below about museum library websites, you can also glean information from gallery websites. This page on Matthew Marks's site lets viewers know that next year's show at Schaulager (described in Roberta Smith's article) will be a retrospective of gallery artist Robert Gober—a fact not yet publicized by Schaulager.
- Culture Space offers congratulations to Zadie Smith on winning the Orange Prize for Fiction
- ReadySteadyBook notes the publication of A Companion to the Works of Thomas Bernhard, and links to a PDF of the book's introduction
- The publication one year ago of the first volume of John Haffenden's monumnetal biography of literary critic William Empson, Among the Mandarins, caused quite a flurry of review coverage. Now, Stefan Collini reviews, in this week's Times Literary Supplement, Empson's Selected Letters (Oxford University Press)
- Last, but not least, Jed Perl weighs in on curator Mia Fineman's Susan Sontag-tribute exhibition at the Met (a link to my review is listed under "Worth Seeing" in the middle column)
Phew. Have a good weekend.
Posted in Around the web. Found always via this permanent link.
July 6, 2006
A Talese twofer
By coincidence, Michelle at NY Brain Terrain posts an interview with publisher and editor Nan A. Talese on the same day that The Morning News publishes Robert Birnbaum's interview with her husband, writer Gay Talese.
Posted in Around the web. Found always via this permanent link.
Richard Serra interview in the Brooklyn Rail
This FishBowlNY post, which comments on a New York Sun article lamenting the demise of several Brooklyn-based magazines, led me to peruse the Brooklyn Rail website. Currently featured in the site's art section is an interview with artist Richard Serra, conducted by Phong Bui and published in the paper's June issue. After glancing at it while at work yesterday afternoon, I returned and read it closely last night, when 3 Quarks Daily linked to it. It's a long, fascinating talk, covering Serra's time at Yale, early influences, and paintings; "the problem with today's art"; his criticism of some contemporary architects; the "given" conditions for sculpture; his "Stop Bush" image and its presence in the Whitney Biennial; and his brother, a lawyer who defended Huey Newton, among others. A few excerpts:
[In Albers's class, we] had to find ways to enable form to distinguish itself from matter. Basically, it was an open-ended experiment. What I came to realize is that matter imposes its own form on form. Working your way through a problem with a specific material is not theoretical. For me the choice of material is subjective and accounts for one’s sensibility and intuition.[ . . . ]
The problem with a lot of work today is its predictability. Its only allusion is to something we already know; it reframes, or re-references the known over and over again. It can’t possibly give us the same kind of inventive diversity and fulfillment and complex evolution of the formal language of art that invention can provide.
[ . . . ]
There are certain conditions that are a given and that you can rely on. In sculpture gravity is undeniable. Sculptural form must necessarily confront gravity. I am interested in process and matter, in construction, in how to open up the field. The problem for me is to address within a work circulation or movement that is outside of all representation; that is to make movement itself the subject which generates or constitutes the work.
Posted in Art, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
Edmund White
Edmund White's essay on the current gay-fiction renaissance in last week's Voice reminded me that just a few weeks ago I came across a chapter of his memoir My Lives (Ecco) in the New Yorker. It is titled "My Women" and is one of the best pieces of memoir writing I've come across in a while; this post exists solely so that I can encourage you to read it.
Posted in Books, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
July 5, 2006
Museum library websites
My job requires that I find out about art-world exhibitions and events happening well into the future, and my interests encourage me to find out about those that I missed. Occasionally I am asked how I stay on top of what's going on. The simple answer is that I have put my name and e-mail address in just about every contemporary-art gallery guestbook I have set foot into, and consequently receive innumerable press releases; I have subscribed to the e-mail lists maintained by e-flux, ArtCal, Art Cards, and other valuable information clearinghouses; and I talk constantly with a wide network of critics, curators, dealers, and artists, all of whom like to discuss their current projects. This is all, perhaps, obvious. It's a bit more difficult to discover information about exhibitions one never hears about or misses. One habit I've found worth adopting is glancing at artist biographies whenever I'm at galleries, even if it's someone whose work I'm not particularly enthusiastic about. A less obvious answer, however, is to take advantage of museum library websites. If an exhibition generated some kind of publication, there is a good chance that the document ends up in the library at MoMA, the Whitney, the Tate, or elsewhere. Several of these museums make their research collections accessible online. The Whitney, for example, allows you to peruse a list of its recent acquisitions. While browsing recently, I discovered not only that a group show of New York artists whose work I follow had taken place, but that some kind of publication was printed to accompany it, and I was able to request a copy. In another case, the description of a book created by Philippe Parreno makes it seem related to (and reminds me of) a giveaway DVD presented during a recent New York solo exhibition.
After one amasses a certain amount of information, one can also attempt to read the tea leaves, so to speak, and draw conclusions from even the smallest scrap of data. This hard-to-find Gordon Matta-Clark catalogue, also recently acquired by the Whitney's library, is currently checked out, which reminded me that next year the museum will present a retrospective of the artist's work (which was mentioned in this September 2005 exhibition review by Michael Kimmelman).
Now is perhaps an odd time to mention this resource, as both the Whitney and MoMA libraries are currently closed, but getting into the habit of checking their collections online is one way (among many) to lessen the number of interesting exhibitions and artists that slip past one's radar.
Posted in Around the web, Art. Found always via this permanent link.
A quote
“Memories are always eager to match themselves seamlessly to the things and places of a revisited past.” John Banville, The Sea
Posted in Quotes. Found always via this permanent link.
Guilty pleasures: Traffic/tourist webcams and street-fashion photo blogs
I suspect that everyone has guilty web-surfing pleasures, and mine are traffic/tourist webcams and street-fashion photo blogs, both of which give me a peek at life elsewhere, whether from the sky or on the ground. (One needs something to break up the cavalcade of exhibition and book reviews, essays, and text-heavy weblog posts one reads, right?)
Several years ago I put together a bookmark folder with cameras pointed at popular spots in twenty-plus cities. Here are a few favorites: the BBC Jam Cams in London; two city government-sponsored webcams in Vienna; a weather cam in Dublin; a street corner in Milan; the Tokyo "riverside skyline"; seven views of Moscow; traffic cams in Barcelona; fifteen cameras in Paris; a view over the Madrid skyline. Here is a world map with links to even more.
More recently, I've taken an interest in sites that post pictures of people randomly encountered on the street. (I don't have the guts to stop someone and ask to take their picture.) The first I came across was Hel Looks, based in Helsinki; then The Sartorialist here in New York; FaceHunter in Paris; stilinberlin; Moscow Street Fashion; the Clothes Project in Singapore; and Visions of Warsaw.
I hope these links help someone pass the time.