September 29, 2006

Weekend reading: Around the web #22

After a busy week at the office, I can think of few better ways to kick off the weekend than a long bike ride in the crisp autumn air. I ended up on the far side of Prospect Park, at Caton Ave. and Bedford Ave., before looping back home to Clinton Hill. Now, refreshed, here are a few weekend reading options:

- Large online archive of RealAudio author interviews conducted by Don Swaim for his long-running CBS show, "Book Beat." (via Critical Mass)

- Laila Lalami on writing fiction in a language other than ones own, published in the Boston Review

- "Why the graphic sex in Destricted is more than porn," at Slate.

- A long interview with historian Sean Wilentz, conducted by Robert Birnbaum

- One of the least raunchy but nonetheless funniest Overheard in New York posts I've read in some time.

- Marianne Moore's poem "Silence," at House of Mirth.

- Ada Louise Huxtable on Ground Zero, in the Wall Street Journal (via Culturegrrl)

- Unique GIS maps of New York (via Gothamist)

- Paul Myerscough on Philippe Parreno and Douglas Gordon's Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait at the London Review of Books (via Jenny Davidson):

We see the kick-off on a television monitor; but the film camera immediately draws nearer to pick out Zidane, who blurs and dissolves as the frame narrows still further; his gait and monk-pattern baldness are easy to recognise even as he fragments into countless green, red and blue pixels. The point is made: the galáctico, like any modern celebrity, is available to us only through his mediation, and the more pervasive his image, the more frustratedly we recognise that he remains finally opaque, unreachable. The film begins and ends with a neat ideogram, a superimposition of the letters of Zidane’s name: the effect of his total presence is to obscure him completely.

This may be the idea the film starts out with; it is not what makes it compelling. Watching Zidane at work in this way is an extraordinary experience.

- Lastly, the artist Ryan Gander, who I hold in high esteem, opened a nonprofit gallery this week in the space formerly housing STORE, the commercial gallery that represents him. It is called Associates, will remain open for one year, and will give 100% of its profits to the artists who exhibit there.

Posted in Around the web. Found always via this permanent link.

September 28, 2006

The grass is always greener

In lieu of a daytime post, and perhaps of any real post today at all, a quote from "Semba!: A Notebook," by W.S. Di Piero, published in the October issue of Poetry: "Some shy from putting prose out there because it's a giveaway. You can't fake it. It reveals quality of mind, for better or worse, in a culture where poems can be faked." Surely he must know how much, and how easily, prose is likewise faked, and how those of us who write it feel about the best poetry.

Elsewhere in the piece, Di Piero describes the Whitney Biennial as a "striptease of competing voguish infantilisms." I don't necessarily agree, but like the phrase. More later, perhaps tomorrow.

Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.

September 27, 2006

Kirk Varnedoe, Pictures of Nothing

I was going to post this later in the week, but decided to make today an all-Gopnik day.

Next month, Princeton University Press will publish Kirk Varnedoe's 2003 A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts as Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art Since Pollock. Earlier in September I skimmed through PDFs of its chapters, each of which hews closely to one of the six lectures delivered three summers ago. The volume is prefaced with a short appreciation by Adam Gopnik, Varnedoe's close friend, sometime collaborator, and an occasional visual-art critic. From that preface:

Working only with notes, though of course drawing on a lifetime's reservoir of looking and thinking, the seemingly crafted and pregnant sentences present on these pages really were improvised by the speaker in the course of an hour's talking.

It was not an irresponsible or offhand improvisation—he knew more or less what he wanted to say and had often rehearsed it, in his own mind and at length with listeners. (And, of course, he worked with an outline and a huge number of slides, which played a mnemonic role.) But the words came ringing out, every Sunday, fresh and unplanned, just as the reader meets them here. Much was premeditated but more was improvised: looking at the images almost always inspired an unexpected thought, instantly blended into the body of the argument, and here preserved. He supposed these lectures to be his last and intended them to be his most important work, his testaments of faith.

The transcribed lectures do indeed maintain fidelity to what I assume was Varnedoe's extemporaneous voice, a quality that, when combined with his unwillingness to stray too far from exegesis of the works themselves, give the book a refreshingly anachronistic feel. Here are a few excerpts from the opening lecture, in which he sets out a game plan:

For many people, who think and write about culture, this moment [the mid-1950s, ed.] marks an even larger watershed between the end of modernism and the inauguration of a postmodern world, a great divide between the world of, say, Henri Matisse and Picasso and that of contemporary art. I am not one of those people, however, and this dichotomy is not what I am here to talk about. [ . . . ] What we want to do is cut through the gas and grab the ideas that flow out of and drive us back toward such confusing, gritty particulars of experience, rather than the ideas that constantly and confidently blend such things into soupy generalities. [ . . . ] I take this topic ultimately because it seems to me one of the most legitimate and poorly addressed questions in modern art. Put another way, I want to ask whether there is any grounding for abstraction, a "logic of the situation," to borrow a term from E.H. Gombrich. [pp. 6-7, 8, 25]

Posted in Art, Books. Found always via this permanent link.

Gopnik on Proust's letters

Last Tuesday I listened to the New Yorker critics Joan Acocella and Alex Ross discuss criticism; last night I listened to the New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik discuss Marcel Proust’s letters. This took place at NYU’s Maison Francaise, and marked the republication, earlier this year, of The Letters of Marcel Proust, selected and translated by Mina Curtiss and introduced by Gopnik. Two actors read three-to-five-letter selections of missives in rough chronological order, displaying the novelist’s development from late-nineteenth-century aesthete and social butterfly to daring, “morally sound” commentator, a “caterpillar slowly working his way inch by inch across society and Western consciousness.” Gopnik’s lip curled upward, conspiratorially, at some of the rhetorical excesses and “almost sycophantic” flattery Proust bestowed upon those he beseeched.

Several of Gopnik’s comments stood out, though I’m sure some are variations on what he has written for the book’s introduction, which I have not read. He suggested that we read writers' letters for either love of their writing or out of fascination at the author’s winningness, placing Henry James in the former category (“I sometimes prefer his letters, which say ‘yes’ to perception and ‘no’ to tedious plots, to his late novels”) and Proust and Chekhov in the latter. He claimed that it was around 1907–08 that a “sharp conviction emerges” from the dandyish flattery of the earlier letters. He noted how courageous Proust’s position that “the only people who defend the French language are those who attack it,” expressed in a letter written around that time, must have been in that era, as it still holds a charge now.

Gopnik was, of course, asked when he first came to Proust, and expounded at length on reading Moncrieff’s translation—his favorite, “a masterpiece of English writing” and “the perfect balance between languages that draw from Shakespeare (English) and Racine (French)”—with his girlfriend (now his wife) in the summer of 1977. He also mentioned a “Talk of the Town” piece by John Updike about reading Proust in New York in the 1950s, which I came home to pull from the Complete New Yorker DVD archive but could not find. Nor could I find it by scanning the indices to Hugging the Shore and More Matter. Instead I offer, below the jump, one of Gopnik’s own “Talk” pieces, from the issue of September 17, 1990, that compares Proust’s house in Illiers to his co-op on Broome Street.

My favorite comment from the letters read last night: “I’m too lazy to write about things that bore me.” If only I had the fortune—or the will—to abide by that.

Continue reading "Gopnik on Proust's letters"

Posted in Books, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.

September 26, 2006

Guilty pleasure: Great Monasteries of Europe

&On Sunday afternoon I had the pleasure of visiting St. Patrick's Cathedral. I often spend time in churches, even though the joy I derive from them is, with my distanced, entirely secular appreciation of what they represent, limited to the aesthetic register. Perhaps "guilty," used in the title of this entry, isn't the right word to describe this pleasure. Either way, the visit caused me to spend time with Great Monasteries of Europe (Abbeville Press, 2004), a massive, lavishly illustrated volume that I recently came across. I admire the rigor of any disciplined life, including that of the men and women who cloister themsleves within monasteries' walls, but, given the sumptuous visual evidence in this book, it is plain that "monastic" does not necessarily equate to "ascetic." If you come across this book it's well worth flipping through; it's better than any shelter magazine. Below is the upper church, seen from the east, of San Francesco in Assisi, Italy.

Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.

Susie Linfield on "why photography critics hate photography"

In the September/October issue of Boston Review, Susie Linfield, a longtime contributor to the magazine and the associate director of the cultural reporting and criticism program at NYU, has published a provocative essay on “why photography critics hate photographs.” If you’re willing to accept her central conceit—that Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and, especially, Bertolt Brecht influenced late-twentieth-century photography critics’ understanding of the medium and its effects—it is an elegantly turned exposure of the limitations of writings on photography by Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, and John Berger as well as a humane call for a more syncretic approach to picture interpretation, one that allows for warmth and emotion. A few quotes:

[Contemporary photography] critics view emotional responses . . . not as something to be experienced and understood, but, rather, to be vigilantly guarded against: to these writers, criticism is a prophylactic against the virus of sentiment.

[ . . . ]

These critics denied that a scintilla of autonomy—for either photographer or viewer—was possible; denied, that is, that the photographer could ever offer, or the viewer could ever find, even a moment of surprise, originality, or insight through looking at a photograph.

[ . . . ]

A greater problem, for Brecht and his followers, is what photographs succeed in doing, which is to offer an immediate, emotional connection to the world. People don’t look at photographs to understand the inner contradictions of [the world].

[ . . . ]

[Contemporary photography critics] don’t need to spend such ferocious energy distancing us from images. In doing so, they have made it easy for us to deconstruct photographs but difficult to see them.

My only quibble, interestingly, is with the one passage in which she analyzes specific photographs. In discussing images reprinted in Witness Iraq: A War Journal February–April 2003, Linfield, perhaps somewhat bravely, admits to the frustration caused by an image of “helpless” women, in chadors, grieving for a son apparently killed when a bomb was dropped on an outdoor market in Baghdad in late March 2003. Linfield instead praises two Iraq War photographs that, perhaps by coincidence, feature children; one in which a Marine coddles a young girl whose arm is bleeding, and one that depicts a hooded detainee cradling his young son behind barbed wire. She praises the contradictory interpretations that naturally arise from these atypical war images; their irresolvable nature—Who is helping whom? Who is guilty? What forces put these children in these situations?—necessitates an open-ended (and open-minded) search for meaning.

It seems problematic that Linfield should offer commentary on the political situation of the women depicted in the first photograph at the same time that she praises a very different type of picture as being better able to evoke complex responses, both thoughtful and emotional. However admirable it is for Linfield to admit a controversial reaction to the image in question, hazarding commentary on the women’s political situation—“I doubt that such sorrows can even begin to abate until the women in the cemetery take off their veils . . . and enter into the modern world to begin making modern politics”—is compromised by her very own analysis of the flaws that thread through the picture’s aesthetic elegance and stark portrayal of grief.

The reason I bring this up is because there is a small hurdle that I wish Linfield had surpassed in the essay. She goes on to call for more images that “suggest—though do not explain—the strange incongruities of the Iraq war,” but neglects to account for the fact that these pictures are necessarily few and far between, and that to be properly equipped to respond to the floodtide of photographs in the world (or even those coming from this particular conflict) one must engage many of the “compromised” (my word, not hers) images, one of which caused such dubitable reactions even in someone with so keen an intelligence as Linfield obviously possesses. Is coming “to the photograph as full human beings” possible when the photograph in question is, by the standard expressed in her essay, somehow incomplete?

Related: Linfield on photographing cruelty, which I have not read, and on Sebald et al., which I read and enjoyed.

Posted in Art, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.

September 25, 2006

Municipal Art Society may move

According to this article tucked away in the city section of yesterday's paper, the Muncipal Art Society, the primary tenant of the "Urban Center" at Madison and 51st, may soon move. (The site is home to Urban Center Books, one of my favorite architecture-and-design bookstores, and an exhibition gallery.) I suspect that the space, if vacated, will likely only be affordable for private owners/developers, which is a shame. I rather enjoy walking through the small plaza created by the ring of six brownstones, which is animated by diners at a restaurant and which is just-enough removed from the bustle of Madison Ave. to seem tranquil, especially in the evenings, when it is lit up by hundreds of tiny lights. Ah, well.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

Two new MP3s: Kopernik

For the past week I have listened repeatedly to a self-titled album released in 2003 by Kopernik (record label link), a duo comprising Tim Delaney and Brad Lewis. The former plays upright bass, the latter works with a computer. It is strange music, melancholic, cinematic, and somewhat awkward; the compositions—they are defiantly not “songs”—occasionally sound as if they are about to collapse. Brad Lewis cossets the dirge-like bass with strings or a choir, buttresses it with an occasional drum beat, and sends it twisting and turning, eddying. I picture gunmetal-gray clouds when listening to these sounds. “Theme for Grace” is resolutely contemporary: The introductory notes are played by dropping the bow onto the bass strings and letting it bounce, and are accompanied by sweeping, hazy, synthesized washes of sound. And yet it feels otherworldly, timeless, sliding metronomically from low notes to high before fading out . . . gracefully. “The Sea and the Marsh Are One” opens with a man speaking the title’s words alongside a plaintive bass line and small string section playing ominous notes, which roil for nearly two minutes before being joined by an orchestral swell, including horns, and a choir offering heavenly, indiscernible words.

From the band's biography:

Lewis explains, "The pieces are slowly built up off of my initial abstracts of both organic and synthetic sounds, with an equally abstract narrative in mind. Then, Tim comes in and adds new melodies, chord stacks and strong but supple bass lines to the original themes and phrases. Finally, after adding a few highlights and accents, we both step back and strip the piece down in layers, sometimes revealing new simpler and chance discoveries . . . new colors."

There are other compositions on the album—“Faraday (Goodnight)” and “Kopernistan,” especially—that can be compared to other recent music, including the Chicago group Brokeback, whose album Field Recordings from the Cook County Water Table is quietly masterful. But the majority of Kopernik is unlike anything else I have heard, and I urge you to download the two MP3s at the bottom of the middle column. Remember to right-click and “Save As” instead of streaming it directly from my web server. Thank you.

Posted in Music. Found always via this permanent link.

Arieff's "Living Design" blog

Allison Arieff, longtime editor-in-chief of Dwell magazine, resigned abruptly last month, citing a "fundamental change in the magazine's mission and philosophy." I subscribed to Dwell for two years upon its publication, and am curious to see what Arieff does next. For now, she has just begun a blog, "Living Design," for the New York Times, although it is only available to TimesSelect users. So far she has posted entries about Bill Stumpf, Airstream trailers, and bad car-interior design; her neighborhood in San Francisco; and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum's new People's Design Award.

UPDATE, 9/26: Well, that was fast. Unbeige reports that Arieff has landed on her feet at IDEO, where she will be designer-in-residence.

Posted in Around the web, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.

"Consider the Wildebeest"

In yesterday's travel-theme issue of T, the New York Times' style magazine, Verlyn Klinkenborg, a superb writer (author of, most recently, Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile), has his "Consider the Lobster" moment in northwestern Tanzania. The occasion is a visit to Grumeti Reserves, a new, private reserve run by the American financier Paul Tudor Jones II. While not as introspective as David Foster Wallace's infamous August 2004 Gourmet essay (scroll down after clicking for a PDF of the article), "Your Own Private Africa" nonetheless offers a few glimpses around the carefully patrolled borders of the reserve:

One morning, Fuller and I were driving down the hill before dawn, slipping out of the woodland and into the open, a clear, blue day ahead. Fuller said, with satisfaction, “Just us and 140,000 hectares.” I knew exactly how he felt.

It was never really just us, of course. There were guests and staff at Sasakwa Lodge and its sister lodge, Sabora Plains Tented Camp, as well as a construction crew at a river camp being built at Grumeti called Faru Faru River Lodge. There were askaris (uniformed guards) in hidden observation posts all around us, armed with binoculars and two-way radios. Every day we saw antipoaching patrols coming and going, men crowded into the backs of Toyota pickups, waving as we passed. . . . But 140,000 hectares is about 346,000 acres, or more than 540 square miles, bigger than Grand Teton National Park and almost one-tenth the size of Serengeti proper. This is for the exclusive use of guests staying at Grumeti Reserves.

[ . . . ]

In the midst of all this is Sasakwa Lodge, a cluster of elegant colonial cottages with a spa and equestrian center on Sasakwa Hill. At $1,500 a night (part of which goes to the government as “hunting” revenue), Sasakwa is one of the most luxurious resorts in Africa. Which leaves only a few questions: Do you really need a pedicure after watching a cheetah with her cubs? And do you judge conservation solely by the good it does? Or do you judge it by the good it does, divided by the number of people who are able to witness and directly benefit from it?

What makes these questions more complicated is that Grumeti Reserves borders the fastest-growing human population anywhere around the Serengeti between the park and Lake Victoria. Some call it a “human fence.”

I do not suspect that this article will generate the controversy raised by Wallace's text (later the centerpiece of Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays), but it is somewhat heartening to see ethical questions raised in the midst of a magazine perhaps more known for genuflection. (To wit: "Sofia Coppola's Paris.")

Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.

Anecdotal Evidence

In my "Weekend Reading" post published Friday afternoon, I mentioned several new blogs that had been added to the right-hand column. Not long after, thanks to a link from Terry Teachout, I discovered Anecdotal Evidence. Written by Houston-based journalist Patrick Kurp, it is unfailingly sensible, literate, and attentive to unexpected convergences of thought. It is a “lit blog” only insofar as its subject is literature; it contains neither industry news nor, as far as I have read (the September and August archives), author interviews. It hews closer to primary texts, offering long passages from nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, poetry, and letters expounded upon simply (and occasionally anecdotally). Guy Davenport and Henry David Thoreau turn up regularly. Recent posts on the poet A.E. Housman, the act of taking photographs and the website Lost Films, William Gass, and Marianne Moore are especially worth reading.

Posted in Around the web. Found always via this permanent link.

September 22, 2006

Weekend reading: Around the web #21

- An essay by Jonathan Safran Foer that describes his "Empty Page Project." (via Conversational Reading)

- An interview, in the California Literary Review with Richard Lanham, author of The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information (via The Reading Experience)

- Waggish on the ecumenicality of the TLS (also via The Reading Experience)

- Toni Schlesinger, celebrated in the August issue of The Believer by Jenny Davidson (the only person who reads and links to more literary-review essays than me), popped up in this week's Observer with a small feature on Sarah Morris.

- I'm more than a week late on this one, but if you haven't read Caleb Crain's piece about Mass Observation in the September 11 issue of the New Yorker, I recommend it. Crain posted additional information to his blog. Grayson Perry's September 13 Times column coincidentally touched on Humphrey Jennings, one of the Mass Observation protagonists.

- Mark Thwaite offers a note about Gabriel Josipovici's Everything Passes, a brief (fifty-eight page) novella out from Carcanet in the US on October 28.

- Streetsblog alerted me yesterday to the presence of an "International Park(ing) Day" intervention in New York, and so I trekked over from the office at lunchtime and enjoyed the sunshine. Here's the proof.

- An interview with Julio Cortazar, conducted in 1973

Lastly, I've recently added a number of sites to the blogroll in the right-hand column, including ArtFagCity; photographer Alec Soth's blog; Diacritical, ArtsJournal founder Doug McLennan's new blog; the History News Network's Cliopatria blog; and Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise. All are worth perusing.

Have a good weekend.

Posted in Around the web. Found always via this permanent link.

Running numbers

In this week's Village Voice, Jerry Saltz once again points out the gender disparity in the number of solo shows at contemporary galleries and museums in New York. A quote:

If this summer's Documenta and Venice Biennale were 50-50 men/women, neither would be better or worse than usual. That said, no one is more self-righteous, dogmatic, and moralistic than a quota queen. Art isn't democratic. Shows shouldn't be regulated.

It's a pernicious double bind: If only 24 percent of the shows are by women, how can 50 percent of the shows you preview, review, buy, or sell be by women? Art historian Griselda Pollock has written about "women's struggle for meaning"; whatever we call this struggle, it needs to be seen as a failure of the imagination that amounts to apartheid. We all have to feel threatened by the bias. We must see it as a moral emergency.

A very rough count of online archives of my own writing nets me the following figures: 35% of the one- or two-person exhibitions I have reviewed for Artforum.com featured women artists; 31% of the solo exhibitions I have reviewed in Artforum have featured women. (This number is 33% if one takes into account two reviews written but not yet published.) I admit to being conscious of the number of women artists that I write about, though I don't go too far out of my way to redress the systematic imbalance.

In response to a question asked of me last week at Parsons, I counted the number of writers with whom I work, and found that 56 out of 100 are women. This number isn't always reflected accurately on the Artforum website, as some are in touch only occasionally, some write more than others, etc., but there you go.

Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.

Two new MP3s

The weather turned this week, and the crisp air has led me to quieter precincts of my record crates and iTunes library. The two new MP3s just uploaded reflect that. The Max Richter composition is from is 2004 album Blue Notebooks, released on a FatCat Records subsidiary named 130701. Richter, who plays and composes for piano, wrote these pieces for piano, violin, cello, viola, and electronic instrumentation. The record is inspired by Kafka, and quotes from the writer's Blue Notebooks read by the actress Tilda Swinton are interspersed throughout, though thankfully not too frequently.

The other track is by Portland, OR–based musician Matthew Cooper, who records for Temporary Residence under the name Eluvium. This track is from his 2005 release "Talk Amongst the Trees" (another track off the record is available at that link), and captures succinctly my mood when on the beach in northern California. (See picture above.)

As always, please right-click and "Save As" rather than stream the songs from my web server. Thank you.

UPDATE, 5:55PM: An apropos quote, via About Last Night:

There comes a day, in the ripe maturity of late summer, when you first detect a suggestion of the season to come; often as subtle as a play of evening light against familiar bricks, or the drift of a few brown leaves descending, it signals imminent release from savage heat and intemperate growth. You anticipate cool, misty days, and a slow, comely decadence in the order of the natural. Such a day now dawned; and my pale northern soul, in its pale northern breast, quietly exulted as the earth slowly turned its face from the sun. — Patrick McGrath, "The Angel"

Posted in Music. Found always via this permanent link.

September 21, 2006

From the Archives: 1975 Marcel Broodthaers text

Today's "From the Archives" entry comes from October 42, published in 1987, which contained a selection of writings, interviews, and photographs by the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers. This prose piece, translated by Paul Schmidt, is titled, "To be bien pensant . . . or not to be. To be blind." It was published in 1975; Broodthaers passed away in January 1976. After the jump, I've reprinted the first two paragraphs of Benjamin H.D. Buchloh's introduction to the portfolio. (Buchloh's essay on Broodthaers in Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 remains the best English-language text on Broodthaers's work that I have encountered.)

What is Art? Ever since the nineteenth century the question has been posed incessantly to the artist, to the museum director, to the art lover alike. I doubt, in fact, that it is possible to give a serious definition of Art, unless we examine the question in terms of a constant, I mean the transformation of art into merchandise. This process is accelerated nowadays to the point where artistic and commercial values have become superimposed. If we are concerned with the phenomenon of reification, then Art is a particular representation of the phenomenon—a form of tautology. We could then justify it as affirmation, and at the same time carve out for it a dubious existence. We would then have to consider what such a definition might be worth. One fact is certain: commentaries on Art are the result of shifts in the economy. It seems doubtful to us that such commentaries can be described as political.

Art is a prisoner of its phantasms and its function as magic; it hangs on our bourgeois walls as a sign of power, it flickers along the peripeties of our history like a shadow-play—but is it artistic? To read the Byzantine writing on the subject reminds us of the sex of angels, of Rabelais, or of debates at the Sorbonne. At the moment, inopportune linguistic investigations all end in a single gloss, which its authors like to call criticism. Art and literature . . . which of the moon's faces is hidden? And how many clouds and fleeting visions there are.

I have discovered nothing here, not even America. I choose to consider Art as a useless labor, apolitical and of little moral significance. Urged on by some base inspiration, I confess I would experience a kind of pleasure at being proved wrong. A guilty pleasure, since it would be at the expense of the victims, those who thought I was right.

Monsieur de la Palice is one of my customers.* He loves novelties, and he, who makes other people laugh, finds my alphabet a pretext for his own laughter. My alphabet is painted.

All of this is quite obscure. The reader is invited to enter into this darkness to decipher a theory or to experience feelings of fraternity, those feelings that unite all men, and particularly the blind.

* Monsieur de la Palice is the character of a French folk song who pronounces truisms. A typical lapalissade would be "Two hours before his death, he was still alive."—ed.

Continue reading "From the Archives: 1975 Marcel Broodthaers text"

Posted in From the Archives. Found always via this permanent link.

Concerning War: A Critical Reader

Further to my post about the book I coedited, today I came across Concerning War: A Critical Reader, published by BAK, basis voor actuele kunst (Utrecht) and Revolver (Frankfurt am Main). From its publicity copy:

Concerning War . . . presents new and anthologized texts by artists and writers who analyze the possibilities for critical artistic responses to the contemporary world as a site of global war. [. . .] This is the first publication in the BAK Critical Reader Series.

The book, a pocket-size paperback edited by Maria Hlavajova and Jill Winder, contains the following essays: an introduction from the editors; Ross Birrell, "The Gift of Terror: Suicide-Bombing as Potlatch"; Boris Buden, "Let's Do Nothing: On the Limits of Public Activism"; Jordan Crandall, "Unmanned"; Bregje van Eekelen, "Words, War and Imagination: On the Political Trajectories of Everyday Vocabulary"; Boris Groys, "The Fate of Art in the Age of Terror"; Viktor Misiano, "The War in Chechnya Did Not Take Place"; Irit Rogoff, "Engendering Terror"; A discussion between Martha Rosler and Maria Hlavajova, "Deconstructing the Allegories"; Sean Snyder, "Some Byproducts: Thoughts on the Visual Rhetoric of PSYOP"; and Hito Steyerl, "The Violence of Images: Documentarism and Documentality."

Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.

Diana Athill on . . . sketching nude models?

Having just read Doug McLennan's paean to the Guardian's arts coverage (in his new blog, Diacritical), with which I largely agree, I must admit to being puzzled to find, among today's stories, famed nonagenarian editor Diana Athill discussing the difficulties and pleasures of drawing the human form. A somewhat absurd pretense for an article by her, but it's engagingly written. It begins:

Twice—once during my 70s, once in my 80s—I went to evening classes in "drawing from life". In both classes I was the only student whose aim was to reproduce the appearance of the model. What the other, much younger, students appeared to aim at was marks on paper that gave what they hoped was the effect of modern art, for which an accurate representation would not do. To them my attempts must have seemed boring and fogeyish; to me, their efforts appeared an absurd waste of time.

I still think I was right. This may well be because I am old, but being old doesn't necessarily make one wrong. I would like to examine why I think that, and why I am unable to regard as art anything that does not involve the mastery of a skill.

I point to it is not only because it is well written (and how different from my own "style," such as it is), but also because it affords me the opportunity to mention Stet: An Editor's Life, her winning memoir, which was published a few years ago. Here is the promotional copy on the back of my paperback edition:

Diana Athill's Stet is "a beautifully written, hardheaded, and generally insightful look back at the heyday of postwar London publishing by a woman who was at its center for nearly half a century" (The Washington Times). Stet is a must-read for the literarily curious, who will revel in her keenly observed, devilishly funny, and always compassionate portraits of such great literary figures as Jean Rhys, V.S. Naipaul, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Modecai Richler, and others . . .

I remember being particularly engaged by her story of visiting Jean Rhys late in the author's life, and the (relative) destitution and mental incapacity into which Rhys had fallen. So too with her stories of André Deutsch and their early years together at his eponymous publishing company. It's a quick read, and recommended.

Posted in Books, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.

September 20, 2006

Robert Hullot-Kentor's new book of essays on Adorno

I first heard about Robert Hullot-Kentor's forthcoming book, Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno (Columbia University Press) a few months ago, both from a friend at the office and also a reading group I had briefly joined. It comprises over twenty years' worth of the philosopher and translator's essays on Adorno's work. Word earlier this week from another friend, an artist who knows Adorno's writing very well, reminded me of its imminent publication, and, by coincidence, I came across a copy yesterday. (I love how things come into one's field of vision not long after one opens one's eyes.) I skimmed it before and after last night's lecture, and found much to make me want to plunge in earnest into Adorno's writings, something I am rather sheepish about admitting I haven't done. From the introduction and the few essays I scanned, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life and Negative Dialectics seem most closely related to issues with which I am regularly engaged. Is there a better "first book" to read if one is embarking on an Adorno odyssey?

The first Hullot-Kentor essay I turned to is titled "Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Recovery of the Public World," which was originally delivered as a lecture in 1995. At the very end of the text, he makes an assertion that throws into question a lot of my thinking about recent art that I'm drawn to: “The aesthetics of this cultural moment is a postmodernism that shuns the forming of a critical microcosm by preference for a form of montage that never gets beyond juxtaposition.” Before that, however, is this brief passage ("Section IV"), which I'll reproduce in full:

The need for the recovery of the public world is in a sense obvious. But if such a recovery means reaching back to what was lost, it is credulously retrospective. The public world has always served as a façade for economic manipulation. Ever since the French Revolution institutionally established the division of the individual into citoyen and bourgeois, the former’s ostensibly equal political rights have served to justify the latter’s right to unequal economic prerogative. Even in those exceptional periods—well documented by Habermas—in which a public world did flourish, when a degree of tact did exist between private interest and the plausible role of the citizen, this has cloaked the fact that equal exchange has always been a violent act of unequal accumulation. And, even when it is not invoked by name, the idea of the public readily functions to mask actual tensions.

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"Criticism and the Arts" panel (a longish report)

Given past experience with panel discussions, and common assumptions one brings to them, I didn’t have the highest hopes for one titled “Criticism and the Arts,” held last night at Hunter College. It featured Joan Acocella (of the New Yorker, Greil Marcus (author, most recently, of The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice, Alex Ross (of the New Yorker and the weblog and forthcoming book The Rest Is Noise), and Mark Stevens (of New York magazine), four eminent critics one must respect no matter one’s opinion of their opinions. Thankfully, the panel was moderated adroitly by Wendy Lesser (of the Threepenny Review), and the brisk pace—two questions from Lesser to all four panelists; two more questions thrown open to them generally; three or four questions from the audience—engaged until the end, when it was “time for wine and fizzy water, so you’ll feel this is more of a conversation than an opportunity for us to talk at you.”

I found it somewhat surprising that I generally agreed with what all four critics said, though whether that surprise is rooted in disappointment that I’m affected by the same factors that influence their work (and no longer am independent firebrand, however self-styled) or pride that I can claim similar methodological concerns remains to be determined. Acocella came off as the seen-it-all chronicler (an aside: I've been particularly taken with her recent writing on books, notably this introduction to Stefan Zweig's Beware of Pity; Ross the obsessive stylist and last-ditch proselytizer for an increasingly marginalized art form; Marcus the storyteller who sneaks autobiography into each ruminative, "mystical" association; and Stevens the skeptic—both about the use of an institutional “we” and attendant overidentification with one’s platform and an art market seemingly out of control. There were few insights about criticism in the abstract, but plenty about these writers’ practice.

Continue reading ""Criticism and the Arts" panel (a longish report)"

Posted in Art, Books, Miscellaneous, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.

Good news: Boston Review Books

Yesterday MIT PressLog announced that the press will be working with the Boston Review to publish a series of books titled, simply enough, Boston Review Books. From the announcement:

Boston Review Books are accessible, short books that really take ideas serioiusly. They are animated by hope, committed to equality, and convinced that the imagination eludes political categories. The editors aim to establish a public space in which people can loosen the hold of conventional preconceptions and start to reason together across the lines others are so busily drawing.

The first two books are out, and more, including "a searing indictment of the American penal system and an encouraging account about the potential foreign aid has in reducing poverty" are to come. I've read the Boston Review for seven or eight years, since my time in Boston, and maintain my subscription. Perhaps its focus on politics is part of the reason why I neglected to renew my subscription to the NYRB, as I mentioned in a post yesterday. (I should add that since mentioning it I've thought about resubscribing as a birthday gift, despite having access to its full contents online; there's something about holding the paper in your hand . . .)

Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.

September 19, 2006

Anish Kapoor's Sky Mirror at Rockefeller Center

My attempts to photograph the construction of Anish Kapoor's Sky Mirror at Rockefeller Center were thwarted by rain, but the sculpture is now officially on view, so I trekked up to midtown this morning to take a few pictures.

The work was, by 9AM, generating all kinds of tourist-like activity, even among those who were obviously New Yorkers. The spectacle is, of course, a necessary part of any intervention into this site. The sculpture, perhaps thirty feet tall and set into a specially built concrete plinth, achieves different effects on its two sides: Its convex surface, pointing outward toward the sidewalk, is a mirror that will draw the narcissism out of Fifth Ave. passersby; its concave surface, pointed up toward the tower of 30 Rockefeller Center, is noticeably more complex, reflecting—as the above picture and the title indicate—the shifting sky and the tops of nearby buildings. (What's interesting is that the computer renderings at the Public Art Fund website indicate a far more distorted view of the street life, akin to what one encounters when standing close to Cloud Gate, Kapoor's enormously popular sculpture for Millenium Park in Chicago.)

I need to return to the plaza and watch the public's behavior around the sculpture, but in the meantime wanted to share these two pictures with you. Ten more can be found in this Flickr set.

UPDATE, 9/20: Gothamist is on the case with plenty of links to other photographs.

UPDATE, 9/23: Simon Hattenstone files a profile of Kapoor in today's Guardian.

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

McElheny, Sikander, and Saunders win "genius" grants

Josiah McElheny and Shahzia Sikander are the visual artists among this year's MacArthur Fellows, otherwise known as the "genius grants." Short-story writer George Saunders and musician John Zorn also won the award, which takes the form of a no-strings-attached grant of $100,000 a year for five consecutive years. See the full list here and read the New York Times article here.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

September 18, 2006

James Atlas on the post–Barbara Epstein NYRB in New York

In this week's New York, survivor-of-middle-age James Atlas visits the offices of the New York Review of Books, at W. 56th and Broadway, to see how Robert Silvers is managing without Barbara Epstein:

I myself knew her only from literary cocktail parties, but Luc Sante’s portrait brings her back: “She was funny, mischievous, infectiously enthusiastic, occasionally prodigal, sometimes incorrigibly teenaged, the best sort of company. The world is a much lonelier place without her.”

So is the masthead, which now contains, after editor, the single name Robert B. Silvers. Magazines are not, by nature, co-edited: Their identities depend upon the imposition of a single voice and sensibility. Paris Review was the expression of George Plimpton; Granta was the expression of Bill Buford. But The New York Review of Books was the co-expression of Silvers and Epstein, two strikingly original people who managed to speak with one editorial voice. The question being asked these days by the magazine’s loyal readers and contributors is, can it survive under the editorship of a 76-year-old literary widower who, however robust, hardworking, and determined, will now have to grapple with the burden of going it alone?

But, of course, there are larger issues at stake as well:

A typical Review piece runs to 4,000 or 5,000 words, is pitched to readers who often have several advanced degrees, and may contain footnotes. Its intellectual and physical heft—the “Fall Books” issue came in at 100 pages—requires the kind of attention that becomes harder and harder to sustain with every new technological gadget we hitch to our belts or curl around our ears. The audience that grew up reading the Review is now in its fifties or older. Will the Review find a new audience with a younger demographic, or will it wither away like the state in Friedrich Engels’s prophecy, to be supplanted by new vessels of intellectual content?

I am just shy of twenty-seven, fairly curious about the world, and a devoted magazine fan; perhaps the ideal NYRB reader. And yet I recently let my subscription lapse after three years on the wagon. I still read almost all of the articles the journal makes available for free on its website, and contrive to read a few that it doesn't, and yet I can't quite make the cost-benefit analysis I apply to resubscribing work in the NYRB's favor. Nor, for that matter, do I ever see anyone else remotely close to my age reading it on the subway.

UPDATE, 11:20 AM: See also Scott Sherman's article, "The Rebirth of the NYRB," originally published in The Nation in June 2004.

Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.

T.H. White quote

The best thing for being sad . . . is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake listening to the disorder in your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. —T.H. White, The Once and Future King

(via The Morning News)

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Lynne Tillman interviewed by Geoffrey O'Brien in Bomb

I picked up the new issue of Bomb at the Brooklyn Book Festival on Saturday, and immediately flipped to the interview with Lynne Tillman, which focuses on her new novel, American Genius, A Comedy (Soft Skull Press). The conversation is conducted by Geoffrey O'Brien, himself a superb writer and the editor of the Library of America. An excerpt:

LT: American Genius, A Comedy is purposefully more abstract. I also wanted to write about America now. I have an intense interest in American history, which pops up in a number of my books, but in this I wanted to go for it, fully write about who and where we are—or, even, how to think about being an American now.

GO: How did we get to this place, to this moment?

LT: Many of us are just miserable and scared about what's happening now. There's a sense we're trapped in something out of control or out of our control.

GO: The idea of control in fact seems central to the book. To what extent can this person be said to control her life or control any aspect of her life, even though clearly she devotes a lot of energy to doing just that? The image of the frontier, when that comes up in the discussion of Frederick Jackson Turner's theory of the role of the frontier in American history, seems to fit perfectly with everything else that is going on at this residence. It's as if the people staying here have reached the end of the frontier.

LT: I wanted to, as you say, indicate boundarylessness. Things drift and flow—how do you write consciousness, get it on the page; how do you mark events, objects, merging into each other? When you're thinking, there are thoughts you're not thinking, too; you're making connections you're unaware of.

Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.

September 15, 2006

Weekend reading: Around the web #20

Slightly shorter this week, as I had less time to browse the web myself . . .

- Dubwise Sound System, a very good reggae, dub, and dancehall monthly podcast

- "Gang of Four and Pop Music as Marxist Critical Theory"

- Martin Amis's much-discussed three-part essay on "horrorism" in the Guardian; Laila Lalami's response at the Guardian's Comment Is Free site

- George Saunders on "The Cats of 9/11"

- John Mavroudis on the concept behind the New Yorker's 9/11-five-years-later cover

- An interview from November 2005 with Benjamin Kunkel (via James Tata, who thinks we aren't still reading!)

- CultureSpace on Godard's Breathless (via Conversational Reading)

Posted in Around the web. Found always via this permanent link.

Congratulations to two friends

Two friends who work as curators at midwestern museums open their first big shows this weekend. "So the Story Goes," featuring Tina Barney, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Nan Goldin, Sally Mann, and Larry Sultan and curated by Katherine Bussard, opens tomorrow at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she is Assistant Curator of Photography. Yale University Press is co-publishing the exhibition catalogue. Just a few hours down I-55, tonight the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis opens "Janaina Tschape: Melantropics," organized by Andrea Green, curatorial assistant at the museum. The catalogue for Andrea's show will be distributed by D.A.P.

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

A considered response to my talk

One attendee of my talk yesterday offered a lengthy consideration of what I said. Among other points was this, which I feel is worth sharing and which he kindly allowed me to post:

You suggested "one should live by the creed of verbs", and even that "doing so flattens out the implicit hierarchies lodged in the terms, even potentially opening up the opportunity for radical—and instructive—role switching." The problem with these statements is that they fail to account for the hierarchy implicit in their own articulation, a hierarchy made all the more acute when such statements arrive from the other side of a lectern. What one has said here is "i renounce my own authority", and yet one performs this renunciation from the very position of authority that one seeks to renounce, and all the while retains ones symbolic title. Here the success of a renunciation of authority depends in advance both on the listeners belief in your authority to make this renunciation, and their granting you the space in which to perform it. However instructive such a gesture might be, and indeed your efforts to be forthcoming were, i think, honest and instructive, it falls far short of being 'radical.' Rather, such a gesture is more or less in keeping with the ambivalent attitude necessary to "get by" (your own words) in an art world where "to develop small communities is about the best we can hope for." Doubtless, this regrettable state will persist, until we are truly prepared to "live by the creed of verbs" and unequivocally assume positions of social antagonism, inviting the risks that come with them, not only in the hope of someday achieving something better, but in the belief that, in acting now, we will have already done so.

And here is the part of my response that pertains to the above:

This too is well stated, and true. Knowledge of this is perhaps why I threw in a last-minute "take everything I say with a grain of salt." It's usually a point I try to make at the beginning of a talk, but, as I did mention at the outset, I was deliberately getting around my comfort zone yesterday. The only thing I can really say is that by "performing" my ambivalence I can show people who aren't necessarily as ensconced in art-world institutions just how difficult it can be to move among them. I don't claim ultimate radicality for this move, but I suspect, given how many lectures I've attended, that it is nonetheless rare. I really do wish that I had been warned (so to speak) about these things five or eight years ago, when I was just starting out or in school. The corollary to this is that I hope what it is I do outside the space of the lecture—the zine-making, the sharing of resources, even engaging in conversations like this one—will help the community in a way that could be perceived as "radical" when placed in the context of the art world at large. As you note, no doubt I'll have to continue playing the game. There are two reasons: It's only by doing so that I have the privilege of speaking to a group such as the one yesterday, and it's also the only way I know (right now, at least) of making a living. So I do a lot of work, and admit that that work holds up a number of institutions that I think should be reformed, and in the meantime create as much of what the writer Gregory Sholette calls "dark matter"—essentially noninstitutional creativity and production—as possible. Until I'm more able to commit to that "dark matter," which will take a combination of fiscal security and, for lack of a better word, chutzpah, this is the state I am in.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

September 14, 2006

From the Archives: Los Angeles Times review of Warhol's first solo show

Today's "From the Archives" entry is the local paper's review of Andy Warhol's first solo exhibition, held at the legendary Ferus Gallery in the summer of 1962. The review, written by one Jack Smith (how fortuitous!), was published on July 23. It's worth reading in full, as the author can't quite believe his eyes, gets quotes from Irving Blum (in a review!), makes a discovery down the street, and then, as he initially suspects of Warhol, plants his tongue "firmly in his cheek."

My search for understanding in our times led me the other morning to the Ferus Art Gallery on La Cienega Blvd., in Beverly Hills, to examine the exhibit there of the work of the young New York artist, Andy Warhol, in the field of Campbell's Soup.

Mr. Warhol's one-man show consists of 32 paintings of cans of this veneral company's familiar product. The paintings appear to be uncompromisingly faithful to detail.

Mr. Warhol's painting, "Turkey Vegetable," for example, is the twin of his equally honest "Chicken Noodle," except for the words "turkey vegetable" and "chicken noodle."

The total effect, I thought, was one of seeing perhaps more paintings of soup cans than one might care to see. I suspected for a moment, even, that Mr. Warhol might have had his tongue in his cheek.

But Irving Blum, the proprietor of the gallery, assured me that this was not the case.

This young fellow is deadline serious," said Blum of the artist. "And fresh as this moment."

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Keller and Remnick in Moscow

It's easy to retroactively mythologize, especially when the protagonists are now the editors of the New Yorker and the New York Times, but the situation outlined in this New York magazine article, in which David Remnick and Bill Keller were both star reporters filing Pulitzer Prize–worthy stories from Moscow as Communism collapsed, certainly sounds exciting.

In Moscow, Keller worked sixteen-hour days. Among his friends there was David Remnick, then a Washington Post reporter and now editor of The New Yorker. When Remnick arrived in Moscow in 1988, he sized up his chief competitor. “To watch him work, there’s a certain kind of cool intelligence to his bearing,” Remnick says. At Remnick’s first press conference, he noticed that Keller asked no questions and barely took notes. Reading the next day’s paper, he realized Keller had “already been to everybody’s kitchen and sewn the thing up.”

Keller and Remnick had one of the great journalistic opportunities of the twentieth century, witnessing the fall of the Soviet Union, and they both produced spectacular work. Barringer says Keller’s journalism was straighter, Remnick’s more soulful. Taubman compares their competition to “a heavyweight championship match.”

Further warm-and-fuzzy feelings (in the mind of a workaholic, at least) come from this profile of Remnick in last Sunday's Observer (London) magazine:

[Michael] Specter says he'd like some sort of atomic clock so he could 'divide 24 by Remnick time' and work out how he fits everything in. (Remnick himself has minted the immortal dictum: 'There are only 30 hours in the day—and that's if you're lucky enough to change time zones.') It's not just the work: he has a family too. Remnick and Esther Fein have two teenage sons and a seven-year-old daughter. He does his fair share of ferrying to music lessons and little league games. Asked to explain how he manages to balance these things, Remnick shrugs and says he doesn't do anything other than spend time with his family and work. 'It's not like I build toy ships, or travel to Tahiti. I don't go surfing. I don't know: what do people do?'

Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.

September 13, 2006

A few words

I had the pleasure of speaking to a fairly large audience at Parsons today. Here is one paragraph from my talk:

Instead, one should live by the creed of verbs—to review, to write criticism, to make art—rather than nouns. I have taken recently to saying that I “write about art” rather than “I’m an art critic.” Doing so flattens out the implicit hierarchies lodged in the terms, even potentially opening up the opportunity for radical—and instructive—role switching. Doing so likewise creates a situation in which one must apply oneself fully to each task, because there are no laurels to rest on. I have published several hundred pieces of writing about art in the past three and a half years, but having done so neither guarantees that what I write next will be mind-opening, authoritative, or even factually correct—alongside working as an editor, I work with and rely on editors, too—nor does it grant me intrinsic authority over any of you in the field of “art criticism,” much less in the art world at large. Perfect evidence of this lies in the fact that it’s quite possible that some of you, even knowing that I was coming to speak today, have never read anything that I have written.

I also spoke about understanding one's own limits and not presuming to take up more resources (in the art world, that is) than one can properly use and maintaining a sense of community in the face of all kinds of forces that would tear them apart. It seemed to go over well. Here's a quote that I was inspired by as I was planning the talk:

What with the fairs and the steroidal explosion of Chelsea, it’s no wonder that even the New York Times realizes that the current model of success for many artists is monetary. Can the interest in [Lee] Lozano be anything but the flip side of this coin? It’s up to us to heed Lozano’s cautionary quip, “Win first don’t last.” But the oxymoronic “Win last don’t care” is worth taking to heart as well. In the face of an autocratic regime bent on totalizing knowledge and war, many feminists have called for explorations of failure—as the only viable form of practice under today’s political and market conditions. Lozano offers a model not of failure per se but of a very particular form of achievement, in which when you win last and don’t care, you are capable of become a tool that transforms the rules of the game. — Helen Molesworth, from a review of “Lee Lozano,” Artforum, September 2006

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

Sontag, Didion, and intellectual crushes

Perhaps I’m flogging a dead horse here, what with my earlier mention of Sontag’s journal entries published in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, but now that I’ve actually read them, I wanted to pull out the aphoristic sentences that caught my eye, either because the made me think anew or because they resonate with my own experience. I also was reminded yesterday (via Maud Newton) that Joan Didion’s collected nonfiction—all 1,160 pages of it, under the title We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live—will be published next month by Everyman’s Library. I have great affection for both of them as writers, which of course comes out in public as a kind of fanboy crush, not unlike the ones admitted to by Craig Seligman in his book Sontag and Kael: Opposites Attract Me, one of my favorite nonfiction books of 2004.

So, those aperçus:

On Keeping a Journal. Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one's private, secret thoughts—like a confidante who is deaf, dumb and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself.

The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather—in many cases—offers an alternative to it.

[ . . . ]

Till now I have felt that the only persons I could know in depth, or really love, were duplicates or versions of my own wretched self. (My intellectual and sexual feelings have always been incestuous.)

[ . . . ]

The writer must be four people:
1) the nut, the obsédé
2) the moron
3) the stylist
4) the critic

1) supplies the material
2) lets it come out
3) is taste
4) is intelligence

a great writer has all 4—but you can still be a good writer with only 1) and 2); they're most important

Continue reading "Sontag, Didion, and intellectual crushes"

Posted in Books, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.

Two more MP3s

At the bottom of the middle column you'll notice that I have uploaded two new MP3s. The first is the opening track off of Tortoise's 2001 album Standards; the second is the penultimate track off of Convocation Of's album Pyramid Technology, released the same year. Both have a kind of swagger: The former that of its musicians' consummate technique, and the freedom that gives them (especially drummer John Herndon, whose beat here is stupendous and forceful), the latter that of its' players harder-to-pin-down bravado, something I would almost describe as a macho-ness were that not a term freighted with negative connotations. The title gets it right: "Walk Like a Panther." Both are great songs.

As always, the files linked at the bottom of the middle column are big, so I ask (as always) that you please right-click, "Save As," and play them from your computer rather than stream them directly from my web server.

Posted in Music. Found always via this permanent link.

September 12, 2006

First impressions

Over the weekend I penned three short "Critics' Picks" for artforum.com, and the first two were published today. (I'm still waiting for an image to run alongside the third, but will update this post when it is published.) Here they are, with teasers:

Alice Könitz at HudsonFranklin: "The unwieldy title of Los Angeles–based artist Alice Könitz’s second New York solo show not only hints at a narrative that might animate these more-or-less abstract sculptures and collages but also indicates that, in a pendular swing between private and public concerns (her last solo, in LA, was titled 'Public Sculpture'), Könitz has returned to the intimate scale of the domestic."

Greg Bogin at Leo Koenig, Inc.: "The paintings in New York–based artist Greg Bogin’s current exhibition, nominally about science-fiction optimism, are so seductively empty that one can’t help but paper over their anonymous beauty with references to other visual phenomena."

Yang Fudong at Marian Goodman Gallery: "No Snow on the Broken Bridge, 2006, an eleven-minute black-and-white work that premiered last spring at Parasol Unit in London, is Fudong's inaugural foray into multichannel presentation."

Links to the gallery websites can be found in the "Worth Seeing" section of the middle column.

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

September in Frieze

Lauren beat me to this post, but since I’ve been planning it for a week, here goes: After a somewhat disappointing one-hundredth issue, dedicated to the state of art criticism but loaded with interviews and surveys in the place of feature-length articles and essays, Frieze returns with another theme: “Art schools then and now.” The writers have returned, and the magazine remains an at-times-fascinating read. I like that it has broadened its focus, publishing more reviews of performances and events, music, and books; as with the features, however, I yearn from them to be longer, deeper engagements with their subjects.

The articles of greatest interest to me included columns by Stephan Dillemuth and Irit Rogoff that succinctly outline the varying pressures art schools in Germany and the UK, respectively, are facing; Jan Verwoert’s longish essay on Joseph Beuys’s pedagogical techniques; and Alex Farquharson’s essay on ‘90s-era independent curators’ infiltration of European kunsthalles and other institutions. There are, however, no full-length features on contemporary artists in the issue, only four one-pagers under the title "focus."

From Verwoert, in a passage that brings to mind the controversy surrounding a student at UCLA and Chris Burden’s departure from that school’s faculty:

Likewise, Petra Richter observes that Beuys’ position towards the anarchy that his students began to create with increasing intensity towards the end of the 1960s was also ambivalent. He supported the political agitation of Jörg Immendorff and Chris Reinicke, whose activities with the ‘Lidl-academy’ led to a police intervention and the temporary closure of the Dusseldorf academy in 1969. But apparently he strongly disapproved of actions by students who sought cathartic release through pure destruction.

Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.

September 11, 2006

Iain Sinclair on Primitive London

Iain Sinclair, a favorite writer-psychogeographer, in the Guardian:

Reporters don't come more detached than that salaried sleepwalker, Marcello Mastroianni, in La Dolce Vita. Fellini's 1960 portrait of Rome—loving tribute masquerading as exposé—was unpunctuated, informal. But the melancholy Italian matinee idol didn't translate into London, looking - when brought to Notting Hill for John Boorman's Leo the Last in 1969—jet-lagged, traumatised. Absent. Like the shabby stucco of the alien territory he was visiting. A performance phoned in from another country.

Rome was old, queeny, a museum insulted by traffic. The Paris of Jean-Luc Godard was a newsreel, with accidental poetry, captured by that dynamic camera-sniper, the Indo-China veteran Raoul Coutard. Los Angeles showed its underbelly, its toxic spread, in a mix of documentary and polemic fiction known as The Savage Eye, shot by Ben Maddow, Sidney Meyers and Joseph Strick in 1959.

But film in London was always a difficulty . . .

Posted in Film, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.

United Nations Plaza in Berlin

Last week, Anton Vidolke, one of the three curators of Manifesta 6, the ill-fated experimental school that was to open in Nicosia, Cyprus, sent a note out advising friends that the concept was being ported to Berlin. Today, e-flux makes public more details about the yearlong venture. Its initial program is a conference titled "Histories of Productive Failures: From the French Revolution to Manifesta VI." (One could certainly quibble with the equivalence the title implies.) Speakers include Vidolke and others in conversation about Manifesta 6, Liam Gillick, Maria Lind, Diedrich "The Best Name in Cultural Criticism" Diederichsen, Tirdad Zolghadr, and Vasif Kortun.

One can eventually check the website for more information about upcoming programming.

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

"Do you remember this photograph?"

The resistance to the image—to the images—started early, started immediately, started on the ground. A mother whispering to her distraught child a consoling lie: "Maybe they're just birds, honey." Bill Feehan, second in command at the fire department, chasing a bystander who was panning the jumpers with his video camera, demanding that he turn it off, bellowing, "Don't you have any human decency?" before dying himself when the building came down. In the most photographed and videotaped day in the history of the world, the images of people jumping were the only images that became, by consensus, taboo—the only images from which Americans were proud to avert their eyes. All over the world, people saw the human stream debouch from the top of the North Tower, but here in the United States, we saw these images only until the networks decided not to allow such a harrowing view, out of respect for the families of those so publicly dying. At CNN, the footage was shown live, before people working in the newsroom knew what was happening; then, after what Walter Isaacson, who was then chairman of the network's news bureau, calls "agonized discussions" with the "standards guy," it was shown only if people in it were blurred and unidentifiable; then it was not shown at all.

And so it went. In 9/11, the documentary extracted from videotape shot by French brothers Jules and Gedeon Naudet, the filmmakers included a sonic sampling of the booming, rattling explosions the jumpers made upon impact but edited out the most disturbing thing about the sounds: the sheer frequency with which they occurred. In Rudy, the docudrama starring James Woods in the role of Mayor Giuliani, archival footage of the jumpers was first included, then cut out. In "Here Is New York," an extensive exhibition of 9/11 images culled from the work of photographers both amateur and professional, there was, in the section titled "Victims," but one picture of the jumpers, taken at a respectful distance; attached to it, on the "Here Is New York" Web site, a visitor offers this commentary: "This image is what made me glad for censuring [sic] in the endless pursuant media coverage." More and more, the jumpers—and their images—were relegated to the Internet underbelly, where they became the provenance of the shock sites that also traffic in the autopsy photos of Nicole Brown Simpson and the videotape of Daniel Pearl's execution, and where it is impossible to look at them without attendant feelings of shame and guilt. In a nation of voyeurs, the desire to face the most disturbing aspects of our most disturbing day was somehow ascribed to voyeurism, as though the jumpers' experience, instead of being central to the horror, was tangential to it, a sideshow best forgotten.

From Tom Junod's essay in the September 2003 Esquire, reprinted online here.

See also "The Hole in the City's Heart," Deborah Sontag's article for the New York Times.

Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.

Can art change the world . . . or speak to world-changing events?

If not outright apples-and-oranges, I acknowledge that this comparison is at least Granny Smith–and–Red Delicious, but I couldn’t help but be somewhat struck by the fact that right after I read Jerry Saltz’s “holistic theory” of art’s ability to change the world, I came across this article on Slate, in which nineteen individuals (including two art critics and one photographer) were asked “What work of art or literature has helped you make sense of the attacks and the world after them?” and only one visual artist or artwork was mentioned.

Saltz:

Can art change the world?

Most art world denizens would instinctively say yes. But if by "change" you mean, can art on its own change global warming, stop Iran's president from denying the Holocaust, or halt the spread of AIDS, the answer, I'm afraid, is no.

In concert with other things, however, art can change the world incrementally and by osmosis. This is because art is part of a universal force. It has no less purpose or meaning than science, religion, philosophy, politics, or any other discipline, and is as much a form of intelligence or knowing as a first kiss, a last goodbye, or an algebraic equation. Art is an energy source that helps make change possible; it sees things in clusters and constellations rather than rigid systems.

Art is a bridge to a new vision and the vision itself, a medium or matrix through which one sees the world, and that grants that pleasure is an important form of knowledge. Art is not optional; it is necessary. It is part of the whole ball of wax.

The writer Gish Jen, in the Slate article:

I found myself unexpectedly put in mind of 9/11 by the Brancusi exhibit at the Guggenheim two years ago. It was impossible not to admire the ineffability of certain pieces, and their ambition to capture a human essence beyond history and culture, without feeling how diminished we are today—in our hopes for peace, of course, but also in our hopes for fundamental understanding.

Posted in Around the web, Art. Found always via this permanent link.

September 10, 2006

Weekend picture: Jim Lambie sculpture at Anton Kern

I plan to upload a picture or two each weekend as a relief from the torrent of text that seems to fill up this site each week. It'll be an arwork I've seen (or hope to), a picture I've taken, or something in the news or on the web that caught my eye . . .

By now I've seen somewhere north of fifty gallery exhibitions since Thursday, and this sculpture, an as-yet-untitled work from Jim Lambie's "Byrds" series now installed at Anton Kern Gallery and on view until October 14, is the most joy-inducing single artwork I've come across. I like Lambie's art, but, upon seeing this four-sculpture installation, even detractors would have to admit that he's on overdrive; the space visually hums. The bird (one of six designs) is a Scottish knick-knack that the artist sent to ceramicists in Mexico, who scaled it up; after the paint was dripped on, the piece was set on top of a ring of spray-paint cans that emptied themselves under pressure from the weight and created the rainbow halo on the floor (which is covered in black tape).

The last time this little nook looked this good was a little more than a year ago, when Kern hung an Edward Krasinski blue-tape-and-mirror installation—not long after the legendary Polish conceptual artist died. Back to Lambie: I wrote a brief review of the artist's spring 2005 solo exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ in London. He also has one of his signature "Zobop" tape pieces on view until October 2 at the Hirshhorn in Washington, DC, and the museum has a great time-lapse Quicktime video of the installation on its website.

UPDATE, 9/12: The sculpture is called Dawn Chorus, and my colleague David Velasco has written a "Critics' Pick" review of the exhibition for artforum.com.

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

September 8, 2006

The Uncertain States of America Reader

(Detail view of cover of mock-up made by designers)

As I publish this entry the Serpentine Gallery is celebrating the opening of "Uncertain States of America," curated by Daniel Birnbaum, Gunnar B. Kvaran, and Hans Ulrich Obrist. As I mentioned in a parenthetical aside in this entry in June, I was asked by the three of them as well as Serpentine Gallery director Julia Peyton-Jones to edit an anthology of recent writing about contemporary art, politics, and the current cultural climate in the United States. The first of two editions of that volume, called The Uncertain States of America Reader, is being released tonight to coincide with the exhibition. (A second, expanded version will be published later this autumn by Sternberg Press.) This edition contains seventeen texts, is designed (by my friends Stuart and David of Dexter Sinister) to feel like an academic reader, and can be obtained now at the Serpentine Gallery, soon at the Walther König bookshop, and, a little bit later, in a few other locations around Europe for an intentionally low price—£6, I think. (The Sternberg Press version will be more widely distributed.)

Quickly realizing the scope of the project after I was initially invited to undertake it, I asked Noah Horowitz, who was hired by the Serpentine as an exhibition organizer and is a PhD candidate at the Courtauld Institute of Art, to coedit the anthology with me. Here is a brief excerpt from our coauthored introduction, which is available in full at BrianSholis.com:

In recent years, many have noted the fashionableness of art that addresses its broader social context. The translation of Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics into English in 2002 and the ongoing debate about this set of essays is one prominent example of this tendency. Others pertain to the intensification of discussion about the Internet’s (virtual) social power and the agency of extra-gallery/museum practices, the latter of which inspired "The Interventionists," an exhibition curated by Nato Thompson and presented at MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts, in the summer of 2004. What has perhaps changed since the re-election later that autumn of George W. Bush is the zeroing in of (primarily European) interest in American art and artists. One could cite "Uncertain States of America," "USA Today" at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, "This Is America: Visions of the American Dream" at the Centraal Museum, Utrecht, The Netherlands, and even "Day for Night," the 2006 Whitney Biennial (curated by Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne, Europeans now ensconced in American institutions), as evidence of this trend.

This is undoubtedly a moment marked by a serious interest in the actions America is taking on the world stage—actions that have been described as cause for "grave concern." We do not attempt to authoritatively engage these concerns here, but we do think that this sampling of discourse by and about a country’s visual artists leads to insights about its politics and society not gained elsewhere. [ . . . ] At the very least, it gives a sense of what it is like to live in the United States now, and it occasions some inspired debate.

(Table of contents of mock-up made by designers)

This edition of the book reprints the following texts:

"From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique" by Andrea Fraser

"Eric Buell, Art Mover" in John Bowe, Marisa Bowe and Sabin Streeter, eds., Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs

"Boundary Issues: The Art World Under the Sign of Globalism" by Pamela M. Lee

"Itinerant Artists" by Miwon Kwon (excerpt from One Place After Another)

"Tent Community: On Art Fair Art" by Jack Bankowsky

"American Mutt Barks in the Yard" by David Barringer (excerpt)

"Was ist Los?" by Seth Price

"When Procedures Become Market Tools," Johanna Burton and Isabelle Graw in conversation

"New Live Queer Art" by Matt Wolf

"Renigged" by Hamza Walker

"Sublime Humility" by Paul Chan

"When Thought Becomes Crime" by the Critical Art Ensemble

"Startling and Effective: Writing Art and Politics After 9/11" by Alan Gilbert

"The State, Spectacle, and September 11" by Retort (excerpt from Afflicted Powers)

"Torture Culture: Lynching Photographs and the Images of Abu Ghraib" by Dora Apel

"Notes from New York" by Molly Nesbit

Trisha Donnelly, 2006

Also from our introduction: "The present volume is not a ‘portrait of the exhibition’s artists in text’ (an early, and mightily optimistic, vision). Nor is it a top-down survey of all that is novel and noteworthy in today’s art world. Cognisant of this exhibition’s ambitious modus operandi, to represent ‘a “new” vision in American contemporary art,’ we realize, of course, that some may view this publication as nothing but such a list, a currency-enhancing invocation of already-prevalent curatorial/critical interests. And we understand that such a publication indelibly sanctifies its content, that it operates as a value filter or, as Isabelle Graw observes in these pages, a ‘“sound bite” in order to underline claims for art historical importance or theoretical erudition’. Yet it is our underlying hope that this Reader belies such a roll-call of erudite endorsements, and that its contents engage audiences in unanticipated and fundamentally informative manners."

So, I hope that if your travels take you to London or wherever else this volume may be sold, you'll consider looking it over and purchasing a copy. I'll be sure to post a notice when the expanded version is available later this autumn.

UPDATE, 9/12: Adrian Searle reviews the exhibition in the Guardian:

The overall tenor is sophisticated, charmless, disaffected and at times deliberately damaged. The collision of artists and works is also often incomprehensible. The pile-up of stuff might be, in part, collaborative, but the effect is merely wearying, a sub-Kippenberger-ish turn-off. [ . . . ] But does any of this tell us very much about America? To coincide with the exhibition, the Serpentine is publishing The Uncertain States of America Reader, a number of recent essays on art theory, the art market, 9/11, Abu Ghraib and the war on terror.

But the book has more heft than most of the art in the show. In the end there's too much here that is silly, opaque and, to be honest, immature. How seriously should we take Uncertain States of America?

Well, at least he says something nice about the book, if you consider "heft" a good quality in a reader. Phew.

Posted in Art, Books. Found always via this permanent link.

New MP3s: The Rapture, Ted Leo

My apologies to anyone who tried to download the Keith Jarrett MP3 that sat on this site for the last thirty-six hours. Apparently the file doesn't work, and caused some people's browsers to freeze or crash. I've substitutued the first track off the new Rapture album, mentioned yesterday, and a song off of Ted Leo's fantastic 2001 album The Tyranny of Distance.

Below is the post I'd written to accompany the Jarrett track:

I've uploaded a thirty-eight-minute long performance by Keith Jarrett as the newest MP3 of the moment. It was recorded in Paris on October 17, 1988, and it is my favorite of his live recordings. He has himself suggested that a concert at La Scala is his greatest work of improvisation, and by consensus his fans have anointed the Köln Concert as their favorite. Yet there is something about the Paris recording, more classical (Baroque, specifically) in its orientation, that grabs at me, especially the quieter passage that begins at about 17:15 and runs until about the 21:30 mark. It also contains some of the longest single-note, drone-like passages of any of his concert recordings, many of which I've been able to borrow from the New York Public Library, import to my computer, and spend excessive amounts of time listening to.

Seeing Jarrett live last September at Carnegie Hall (New York Times review here), which was his first solo performance in New York in a decade and perhaps the best birthday gift I have ever received, was absolutely fantastic; each of the five encores was entirely earned.

I'm relatively new to Jarrett fandom, having only come across his music in Ellen B.'s apartment in Berlin in early 2005. One night, while alone, I slipped in five of the six discs documenting Jarrett's 1976 "Sun Bear" concerts in Japan and was mesmerized. I'd consider some of the music from those sessions to be my favorite, but I know that I'm letting the ideal situation of my first listening experience color my opinion of the music.

Anyway, the files linked at the bottom of the middle column are big, so I ask (as always) that you please right-click, "Save As," and play it from your computer rather than stream it directly from my web server.

Posted in Music. Found always via this permanent link.

Weekend reading: Around the web #19

Last night's tally: Fourteen openings, one dinner, one party, and four recommended exhibitions added to the middle column of this page. Needless to say, all this activity occasioned an art-world dream. It was set in wildly disparate venues, including a wooded campus of low-slung buildings and a hotel high-rise in front of which a coworker was having a heated cell-phone conversation, and involved what can only be described as a heroic quest for . . . a bathroom. It's good to be back and have art to look at. Now, for your weekend browsing:

- Burrito french toast. Really.

- In the September Believer (which has not yet made it to my door, sadly), Christopher H. Beha spends a weekend at an OULIPO conference. (Via 3QD)

- The New Republic canceled Lee Siegel's blog, but just launched Open University to take its place.

- Here is the introduction to Amartya Sen's new book, Identity and Violence. (Via 3QD)

- Slavoj Zizek on "why pragmatic politics are doomed to fail in the Middle East." (Via PoliticalTheory.info)

- At openDemocracy, an interview with Wole Soyinka.

- A profile of Ian Jack, editor of Granta (Via Emdashes)

- Gerhard Richter's design for a stained-glass window.

- Play in Traffic Productions has an eight-minute video documenting "Rumble Through the Bronx III," a recent alleycat race. Not as much traffic as other footage I've seen recently, but still fun to watch. (Via Razorapple)

Posted in Around the web. Found always via this permanent link.

September 7, 2006

Kay Rosen answers a question

At the invitation of Matthew Higgs, I submitted a question—one of twenty, each submitted by a different person—to the artist Kay Rosen, whose last New York exhibition I reviewed in the September 2005 Artforum. It was for one of his "20 Questions" projects, and the Indiana-based artist's answers have been printed in a small book published by Yvon Lambert Gallery to accompany her new exhibition, which opens a week from today. It was surprisingly difficult to come up with just one question, and so I ended up choosing one that weighed heavily on my mind at the time:

BRIAN SHOLIS: What do we do when language fails?

KAY ROSEN: My work has always attempted to demonstrate that language doesn't fail, that readers, viewers, and listeners can construct meaning out of the most meager fragments. In a 1990 essay I discussed the issue of how to rescue language from a collapsed system (which I had devised through blocking out huge chunks of letters). "In the absence of a linguistic system, meaning appears to be thwarted and blocked, but the pieces actually attempt to function as re-signifiers of meaning rather than as de-signifiers. Instead of hampering reading, they intend to redirect it, forcing the viewers through another non-linguistic process of 'reading.'" In the new sparsely populated work Exterior, Interior, one might approach the four letters E ER R in both a linguistic and non-linguistic way. Through the title or through their powers of observation and deduction, viewers might conclude that it has something to do with inside and outside and how coincidental and amazing it is that in this word structure corroborates meaning. That in EXTERIOR there is an exterior E-R and an interior E-R, that both are the same except for their location, and that the word is a construction that contains aspects of other physical constructions, like buildings and bodies.

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

Fall arts previews

Speaking of the new season, this week the local periodicals have published their fall arts previews. Here are the lists from TimeOut New York and New York magazine; the Times has yet to publish its big fall preview, but did publish a list of museum exhibitions around the New York region. There are also many festivals, including ones titled European Dream 06, the Impact Festival, conflux, the Starbucks Salon (I know, I know), and the oy!hoo festival. Lastly, don't forget to keep an eye on the NYC Litscape Calendar, which, despite its name, seems to encompass far more than literary events, and which I've begun helping Michelle of NY Brain Terrain keep up-to-date.

If I had to pick what I was most looking forward to, I'd probably say "Brice Marden: A Retrospective of Paintings and Drawings" at MoMA; Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan; the "Northern Lights" jazz series at Lincoln Center (part of the European Dream festival); The View from Castle Rock, Alice Munro's new short-story collection; the second albums from TV on the Radio (Return to Cookie Mountain) and The Rapture (Pieces of the People We Love); Cormac McCarthy's new novel, The Road; and Andrew Bujalski's second film, Mutual Appreciation (which my friend Lauren wrote about here). I'd mention more visual art exhibitions, but want to play those cards close to my chest, so to speak.

UPDATE, 9/10: The New York Times preview is here.

Posted in Around the web, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.

I'm ready

On Tuesday, Edward Winkleman asked, "R U Ready to Rumble?" He was referring, of course, to this evening's onslaught of opening receptions. Unlike the past few years, this time I'm ready. Last week's trip to San Francisco and the redwood forest was perfectly timed, rejuvenating me before I could begin having minor panic attacks about how much art I will see (and attempt to process) in the coming weeks. I even played hooky from the office for ninety minutes yesterday afternoon to get a head start on shows opening yesterday evening. Let's hope that my sixth season in the New York art world is one to remember.

Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.

September 6, 2006

One last Sontag collection, and more books coming early next year

I had heard rumors that FSG was to publish one last Sontag essay collection, and the Winter 2007 catalogue, which arrived in my office mailbox over the weekend, has proof. It arrives in February (January according to the FSG website, January 23 according to Amazon), will be 224 pages, and is called At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches:

"A writer is someone who pays attention to the world," Susan Sontag said in her 2003 acceptance speech for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, and no one exemplified this definition more than she. Sontag’s incisive intelligence, expressive brilliance, and deep curiosity about art, politics, and the writer’s responsibility to bear witness have secured her place as one of the most important thinkers and writers of the twentieth century. At the Same Time gathers sixteen essays and addresses written in the last years of Sontag’s life, when her work was being honored on the international stage, that reflect on the personally liberating nature of literature, her deepest commitment, and on political activism and resistance to injustice as an ethical duty. She considers the works of writers from the little-known Soviet novelist Leonid Tsypkin, who struggled and eventually succeeded in publishing his only book days before his death; to the greats, such as Nadine Gordimer, who enlarge our capacity for moral judgment. Sontag also fearlessly addresses the dilemmas of post-9/11 America, from the degradation of our political rhetoric to the appalling torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib. At the Same Time, which includes a foreword by her son, David Rieff, is a passionate, compelling work from an American writer at the height of her powers, who always saw literature "as a passport to enter a larger life, the zone of freedom."

Other books of personal interest in the catalogue include John Armstrong's biography of Goethe, even though I flinch from the life-lessons aspect of its title, Love, Life, Goethe: Lessons from the Imagination from the Great German Poet (it was published earlier this year by Allen Lane in the UK); Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives, translated by Natasha Wimmer; Neck Deep and Other Predicaments by Ander Monson (published by Graywolf Press), about whom I have lately heard so much yet read so little—he owes his agent a thank-you card; and, last but not least, Kathleen Jamie's Findings (Graywolf).

Oddly, I've had a copy of Jamie's book in PDF form for a while, which I found on the Sort Of Books website after reading this Guardian profile of the Scottish poet and essayist. She has written for the Guardian frequently, as this search result attests. The most recent piece I've read, about a boating trip gone awry, was published as a "Diary" in the August 3 issue of the LRB. I filed a quote from Findings in my commonplace book under "Attention": “Isn't that a kind of prayer? The care and maintenance of the web of our noticing, the paying heed?”

UPDATE, 9/6, 11PM: It's not yet available online, but I just found out that this Sunday the New York Times Magazine will publish a piece by Sontag titled "On Self: Notebooks and diaries, 1958-1967." That link will work sometime Friday night, when the Times usually uploads the content of its magazine.

Posted in