May 15, 2008

A positive development

It was with great pleasure that I discovered Wyatt Mason's new blog, Sentences, on the Harper's website. Mason has in recent years become one of my favorite literary critics, and his first two posts, on Josiah Mitchell Morse and a historical precedent for the subtitle of Martin Amis's new essay collection, give me reason to hope this will become one of the better literary blogs on the web.

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

May 14, 2008

A dissent from Susan Jacoby

As Mike O'Connor notes in his post at the blog U.S. Intellectual History, many have praised Susan Jacoby for speaking hard truths in her new book, The Age of American Unreason, including his USIH blog colleagues. Yet he has his reservations:

I have two particular concerns with this book. The first is that Jacoby's ire is disproportionately aimed at conservative examples of "unreason." The first chapter, for example, is on the debasement of language in U.S. culture. Focusing particularly on the increased use of the term "folks," she notes that "there is no escaping the political meaning of this term when it is reverently invoked by public officials in twenty-first-century America." (3) The implication suggested by this way of speaking is, of course, that there are some of us who are "folks," and others--presumably intellectual and cultural elites--who are not. Yet the populist worldview articulated by this rhetorical trope is much more strongly representative of a conservative cultural orientation than a broader American one. By criticizing it, Jacoby comes across as taking sides in an argument rather than, as she intends, offering a criticism of the debate itself. Another example concerns what appears to be Jacoby's bête noire (it comes up repeatedly throughout the book): the fact that the settled scientific consensus over evolution can actually generate a controversy. This issue, she writes, "owes its existence not only to a renewed religious fundamentalism but to the widespread failing of American public education and the scientific illiteracy of much of the media." (22) Again, the challenge to evolution comes exclusively from the right. Criticizing it, therefore, clearly constitutes an argument against a specifically conservative form of anti-rationalism.

[...]

My second beef with the book is that many of Jacoby's own observations--often in the form of asides--are every bit as unreasoned as those found on a political blog or cable talk show. At one point she declares that "anyone who says that he or she was unmoved by Armstong's walk on the moon is either lying or was stoned at the time." (218)

This is of particular interest to me because I am fifty-odd pages in to Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, Jacoby's last book, and am enjoying it but discovering similar limitations to her pugnaciousness. To read the rest of O'Connor's post, which discusses The Age of American Unreason at some length and links to other commentary on the book, click here.

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

May 12, 2008

Weekend notes

- Arthur Danto's essay "Unlovable," in the May 26 issue of The Nation, discusses the 2008 Whitney Biennial:

There has been oddly little excitement, let alone controversy, surrounding the Whitney Biennial this year. No one told me that it must be seen, no one said how awful it was. People wondered if the show had become obsolete, especially in late March, when Europeans thronged to New York City to see the Armory show and its galaxy of satellite art fairs--Pulse, Red Dot, Bridge, Scope New York and the rest. Why would anyone leave the glitter of these seductive displays to visit what was generally understood to be a drab exhibition that billed itself as a survey of where American art stands today? In any case, there would be plenty of American artists at the fairs who had already made the cut at one commercial gallery or another. I knew but a small handful of the eighty-one artists listed in the Whitney's press release, and few of those I did know were near the top of my list of favorites. (Some of them were near the top of my list of artists to be avoided when possible.) I could tell that this was mainly to be a show of "emerging artists"--the kind sought by enterprising collectors, funding agencies, younger curators and galleries out to make a name for themselves. Since the fairs were full of emerged, emerging and about to emerge artists, many just hatched from their MFA shows, it was hard to figure out what could be special or different about Biennial 2008.

- Dan Barber, chef of Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, contributed an editorial to yesterday's New York Times titled "Change We Can Stomach":

For decades, environmentalists and small farmers have claimed that this is several kinds of madness. But industrial agriculture has simply responded that if we’re feeding more people more cheaply using less land, how terrible can our food system be?

Now that argument no longer holds true. With the price of oil at more than $120 a barrel (up from less than $30 for most of the last 50 years), small and midsize nonpolluting farms, the ones growing the healthiest and best-tasting food, are gaining a competitive advantage. They aren’t as reliant on oil, because they use fewer large machines and less pesticide and fertilizer.

In fact, small farms are the most productive on earth. A four-acre farm in the United States nets, on average, $1,400 per acre; a 1,364-acre farm nets $39 an acre.

- For those of you who read George F. Will's review of Rick Perlstein's new book, Nixonland, you may be interested to see a long excerpt that was published in the April-May Bookforum.

- Bill McKibben has published an editorial announcing his new 350.org campaign at TomDispatch.com:

There's a number -- a new number -- that makes this point most powerfully. It may now be the most important number on Earth: 350. As in parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

A few weeks ago, our foremost climatologist, NASA's Jim Hansen, submitted a paper to Science magazine with several co-authors. The abstract attached to it argued -- and I have never read stronger language in a scientific paper -- "if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm."

[...]

A few of us have just launched a new campaign, 350.org. Its only goal is to spread this number around the world in the next 18 months, via art and music and ruckuses of all kinds, in the hope that it will push those post-Kyoto negotiations in the direction of reality.

- In the Washington Post Book World, Michael Dirda reviewed Albert Camus's Notebooks, 1951–1959.

- There was a profile of Vanessa Beecroft, loosely pegged to the new documentary about her attempt to adopt Sudanese twins, in last week's Los Angeles Times Magazine.

- "Measure for Measure," an essay by Jonathan Gottschall in the Boston Globe Ideas section, argues "literary criticism could be one of our best tools for understanding the human condition. But first, it needs a radical change: embracing science." I disagree with its content fairly vehemently, which is one reason why it's worth reading.

- Lastly, photographs of a lightning-streaked thunderstorm intersecting with the ash in the sky above the Chaitén volcano, in Chile. When I saw this, all I could think of was Ghostbusters: "Zuuuuuuuull......"

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

April 30, 2008

Rules for Harvard Freshmen, 1741

The blog Boston 1775 has posted Harvard's rules for incoming class of 1741.

In the 1700s, ordinary schooling for Boston boys ran from about age seven to age thirteen or fourteen, if they lasted through the whole course. Therefore, the few boys who went on to college were still truly boys, only in their early teens. Usually they graduated college at eighteen, still years away from their legal majority.

The fact that college students were the age of high-school students now, and away from their families in an nearly all-male environment, helps to explain such traditions as these rules for Harvard’s incoming class in 1741.

1. No Freshman shall wear his hat in the College yard, except it rains, hails, or snows, he be on horseback, or hath both hands full.

2. No Freshman shall pass by his Senior, without pulling his hat off.

3. No Freshman shall be saucy to his Senior, or speak to him with his hat on.

4. No Freshman shall laugh in his Senior’s face.

5. No Freshman shall ask his Senior any impertinent question.

6. No Freshman shall intrude into his Senior’s company.

7. Freshmen are to take notice that a Senior Sophister can take a Freshman from a Sophimore, a Master from a Senior Sophister, and a Fellow from a Master.

8. When a Freshman is sent of an errand, he shall not loiter by the way, but shall make haste, and give a direct answer if asked who he is going for.

To read the final thirteen rules, click here. (Link via Blog 4 History)

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

April 29, 2008

Peter Singer looks for signs of humanity's moral progress

In a column for Project Syndicate, Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton University, ponders whether humanity can be said to be making moral progress in the light of the succession of atrocities perpetrated in recent decades. "There is more to the question than extreme cases of moral breakdown. ... In response to the crimes committed during World War II, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights sought to establish the principle that everyone is entitled to the same basic rights, irrespective of race, color, sex, language, religion, or other status. So, perhaps we can judge moral progress by asking how well we have done in combating racism and sexism. ... Recent polls by WorldPublicOpinion.org shed some indirect light on this question. ... Overall, it seems likely that these opinions reflect real changes, and thus are signs of moral progress toward a world in which people are not denied rights on the basis of race, ethnicity, or sex."

(Via euro|topics)

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

April 22, 2008

Against Argument

Five days ago, Stephen Burt, an associate professor of English at Harvard, published a brief post at the Columbia University Press blog titled "Against Argument." Here's the opening:

The academy thrives on argument, at least in the traditional humanities: arguments get us noticed. Travel guides and scientific discoveries may both sell books, but to get attention within the realms of the arts and the humanities now, one almost has to make an extended argument: to take issue with some dominant view, to explain why what we already knew was wrong, or (especially in literary studies) to demonstrate some big connection between features within some literature, and features of history or (more rarely) philosophy or natural science outside it.

There’s nothing wrong with making extended arguments, of course, and I spend much of my time (at least during the school year) teaching our students how to do just that. Yet our sustained interest in arguments might be making us keep at arm’s length, or under a cloud, the reasons why we care for the arts at all, the smaller-scale features that distinguish works of art from one another, the features which help us explain (if it can be explained—can it?) why we care for this one, not that one.

The post has been noticed widely around the literary blogosphere, and has generated a lengthy and interesting discussion at The Valve. I find that Burt's claim, being rooted in how academics get noticed, is related to the opinions advanced by Harvard University Press editor Lindsay Waters regarding the "publish or perish dictum" in academia. Quantity and differentiation now seem prerequisites for moving up the tenure-track ladder, yet both can be antithetical to genuine insight into the effects works of art have upon those who experience them.

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

April 21, 2008

On the artist-gallery relationship

On Friday, the dealer and prolific blogger Ed Winkleman noted recently two published items, one in the New York Times and one on an artist's blog, that discuss the severing of artist-dealer relationship. He added his own commentary:

"Every dealer knows each of his/her artists personally, and the good ones do feel sorry when things don't work out and try to ease the transition as best they can. Every artist understands that leaving their gallery will be difficult for them (it will can cause the gallery to have very unhappy collectors who were on waiting lists and lots of unpleasant questions to answer all the way around), and the considerate artists do leave as gently as they can. Believe me, this is much more humane than the way such partings are handled in other businesses, and that fact that it is such a big deal (as evidenced by the two pieces noted above) reflects well on the way business is done in general in the art industry in my opinion."

The comments thread has now reached 100 posts. Click here to read it.

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

April 20, 2008

New Granta, new website

This review in The Guardian tipped me off to the presence of the new issue of Granta, the first to be published under the direction of new editor Jason Cowley. "In his editor's letter, [Cowley] writes of broadening Granta's view - it will publish 'new writing in whichever form or genre it chooses'. It will be 'more internationalist', there will be more photography and more reportage." The magazine features a new design (by Graphic Thought Facility), and with it also comes a new website (by Apt). The latter is of particular interest, as it seems like it will publish a fair amount of online-only content. The next issue, due out this summer, is titled "The New Nature Writing." To return to the Guardian review of the current issue: "While there are failures - Granta should be strongest in new British fiction, so it seems odd that the offerings are all American, from Annie Proulx, Rick Moody and Joshua Ferris - Cowley has emerged from his trial with plenty to be proud of. He is offering a promising future for an important magazine."

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

April 14, 2008

An interview with Tad Friend

MediaBistro's "So What Do You Do?" series occasionally snags interesting interview subjects, and this week's respondent is the New Yorker's Tad Friend. An excerpt:

How many people do you typically interview for a profile?

For a long piece, I probably have 60 to 100 conversations.

Are you serious? Wow. And a lot of that is just background -- people you're not even going to quote?

Yeah, a lot of it. I over-report so that I feel confident, when I sit down to write, that I know what I'm talking about. That confidence may be misplaced, of course, but I need to feel it. We have a bit of a luxury at The New Yorker in that you can take some time -- two to three months -- with certain kinds of stories and try to be authoritative.

How do you figure out who to talk to?

At the end of an interview, I always say, "Who else should I talk to?" And then they tell you two people and then those people tell you two people, and at a certain point everyone's telling you the same people you've already talked to and you think, "OK, I've kind of got it." Or everyone's telling you things you already know, which is comforting. You could probably write a profile that's three-quarters as good about two weeks in, but I like the feeling of knowing more, of giving myself more choices and collecting the little nuance-y details that encourage the reader to relax and trust you as a guide and companion. There is also the possibility that I'm just neurotic.

(Link via Emdashes)

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

April 10, 2008

Interview with Thomas Bender about American Higher Education Transformed

Inside Higher Ed publishes a brief interview with the historian Thomas Bender, whose essay collection Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals In the United States (Johns Hopkins, 1992) impressed me greatly when I first read it several months ago. Now he has edited, with Wilson Smith, a collection of documents relating to American higher education (one of his academic specialties). The interview's introduction:

The history of American higher education since 1940 is full of dramatic changes — the growth of the modern scientific enterprise, desegregation, the impact of the GI bill, the campus unrest of the 60s, and so forth. Wilson Smith and Thomas Bender set out to tell that story with documents — from both establishment figures and their critics — in American Higher Education Transformed, 1940-2005, just published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. The book is a sequel to earlier work by Smith and Richard Hofstadter examining earlier periods in the history of American higher education. The new volume includes the Supreme Court decisions that upheld affirmative action and that dealt blows to faculty and graduate student unions; essays by Adrienne Rich and Lani Guinier; the Port Huron Statement; Allan Bloom and his critics; and the presidential report that led to the growth of community colleges.

And one of the questions:

Q: How did the tone of documents change during the period you studied?

A: This is an interesting question. I would say that there was a sense of anticipation at the beginning, looking forward to new challenges related to the position of the U.S. after the war. Their sense was that higher education would (and should) be moving to the center of American society. Hence it must be modernized, democratized, and expanded to meet that challenge. This is clear in both the curricular documents (“The Red Book”) and in the President’s Commission on Higher Education, which was concerned about exclusion based on race and class, or Vannevar Bush’s vision for science. Midway the complexity and tensions, contests and constraints produced a very different tone. There is little self-confidence toward the end of the story, the result of a sense of being displaced from the center.

(Link via Cliopatria)

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

April 8, 2008

Scientists Unveil High-Res Map of US Carbon Footprint

From Wired online:

A team of scientists has completed a carbon dioxide emissions inventory of the United States plotted down to 100-square-kilometer chunks.

That means that the NASA- and Department of Energy-funded scientists can detail emissions across all 9 million square kilometers that compose the United States. For a full explanation, check out the video that Purdue's Kevin Gurney put together, which features a number of other excellent CO2 visualizations. Andy Revkin, the New York Times' environment-beat writer, put a memorable headline on a post about the video, calling it, "Breath of a Nation."

The work, known as The Vulcan Project, has already yielded a significant discovery: Previous CO2 estimates that used population as a proxy for emissions overestimated the Northeast's greenhouse-gas generation, while underestimating the coal-heavy Southeast's contribution.

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

April 2, 2008

Artspeak

On his blog, Time magazine critic Richard Lacayo bemoans the state of curatorial writing about visual art:

Why is so much curatorial writing so dreadful? Why is it so clogged with the decrepit formulations of academic artspeak? Why does so much of it sound like it was written by an anxious schoolkid delivering a labored term paper?

My first assumption is that there's a generation of curators who went to college and grad school in the 1980s and '90s, when the congested language of Deconstruction, Critical Studies and so on still seemed important, intrepid and even a little glamorous. I get the impression that even if a budding art writer wasn't commited to those lines of inquiry, the turgid writing those produced infected the academy in all directions.

But the industrial-strength bad writing so common now in the artworld is also, I suspect, a defense against anxiety by curators and catalogue writers afraid simply to say out loud and in plain English what they suppose the work might be getting at

Click through to read the rest, including the five words Lacayo would ban from museum catalogues.

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

April 1, 2008

"The Varieties of Intellectual Experience"

In a post published last week at the U.S. Intellectual History blog, Tim Lacy writes:

Most past works of U.S. intellectual history have focused on public and private figures, institutions, and books that could in some sense be considered "canonical." I refuse to dismiss all the historians who did that work, in blanket fashion, as caring only about the elites of U.S. history. Rather, I submit to you that those historians explored, in a considered conservative fashion, what they believed others could not question as topics of inquiry. This is not to deny that race, class, and gender did not factor into those choices, but rather that definitions of what constituted regular intellectual activity affected their work. It seems to me, then, that too much consistency has been sought from historical intellectual agents by intellectual historians.

The essay continues at some length, eventually calling for an "event-based intellectual history," and is worth reading.

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

March 31, 2008

Minor Milestone

This evening I published on Artforum.com a "Critics' Pick" review of Daan van Golden's exhibition at Greene Naftali Gallery. It is my one-hundredth review for the Artforum website, a minor milestone I couldn't have imagined reaching when Elizabeth Schambelan, now my longtime colleague, invited me to begin contributing to the site in late 2003. Here's to one hundred more. The review begins:

Art historian Svetlana Alpers’s observation about golden-age painters, that “it is hard to trace stylistic development, as we are trained to call it, in the work of Dutch artists,” applies to reclusive septuagenarian artist Daan van Golden. This exhibition, his first US solo presentation despite his being greatly esteemed in Europe, surveys canvases made in the last fifteen years but is representative of an extremely focused practice that has lasted over four decades.

Click here to read the rest.

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

Platform for Pedagogy

Platform for Pedagogy is a weekly e-mail newsletter listing an interdisciplinary mix of lectures in New York City. According to its website:

Platform for Pedagogy is an initiative to advance a culture of cross-disciplinary public lecture attendance and to develop the lecture as practice. We deal exclusively with public lectures. The determinate characteristic of the public lecture is form: the geographically bracketed transmission of knowledge by a privileged individual or group of individuals to an unsolicited public of mixed backgrounds and experiences. Donald M. Scott has written on the birth of the public lecture in mid-nineteenth century America as a form of supplementary instruction distinct from the sermon, speech or oration—and yet borrowing formally from all three—in that the lecture is mandated and shaped by the public's desire for a certain knowledge. These public lecture attendees sought to expand the trajectory of education typically confined to their formal or professional training by accessing these platforms for pedagogy.

For two years I have maintained an elaborate, iCal-based calendar of lectures, panels, symposia, screenings, and performances by artists and writers. This seems similar in spirit, and I hope that it proves a successful venture.

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

December 2, 2007

"What's wrong with the American essay"

Truthdig.com has published an essay by Cristina Nehring, nominally a review of the 2007 edition of “The Best American Essays” series, under the heading “what’s wrong with the American essay.” The text has made its way rapidly across the web (see this Technorati search, or this Google Blog search); I came to it via this post on Anecdotal Evidence, Patrick Kurp’s blog. Describing the contemporary essay as “an apologetic imitation of the short story,” Nehring, who contributes regularly to The Atlantic, Harper’s, and the London Review of Books, says that the problem extends far beyond the middling prose and limited ambition of our essayists:

The problem, of course, is not merely our essayists; it’s our culture. We have grown terribly—if somewhat hypocritically—weary of larger truths. The smarter and more intellectual we count ourselves, the more adamantly we insist that there is no such thing as truth, no such thing as general human experience, that everything is plural and relative and therefore undiscussable. Of course, everything is plural, everything is arguable, and there are limits to what we can know about other persons, other cultures, other genders. But there is also a limit to such humility; there is a point at which it becomes narcissism of a most myopic sort, a simple excuse to talk only about one’s own case, only about one’s own small area of specialization. Montaigne thought it the essayist’s duty to cross boundaries, to write not as a specialist (even in himself) but as a generalist, to speak out of turn, to assume, to presume, to provoke. “Where I have least knowledge,” said the blithe Montaigne, “there do I use my judgment most readily.” And how salutary the result; how enjoyable to read—and to spar with—Montaigne’s by turns outrageous and incisive conclusions about humankind. That everything is arguable goes right to the heart of the matter.

Kurp adds: “Well, yes and no. Argument, without wit or style, is tiresome.” In recent reviews of art exhibitions and books, I’ve found myself praising outsize ambition, even if it leads to errors or other shortcomings. As Nehring writes:

Today’s essayists need to be emboldened, and to embolden one another, to move away from timid autobiographical anecdote and to embrace—as their predecessors did—big theories, useful verities, daring pronouncements. We need to destigmatize generalization, aphorism and what used to be called wisdom. We must rehabilitate the notion of truth—however provisional it might be. As long as persons with intellectual aspirations are counted idiots for attempting to formulate a wider point, they will not do so, and even if they dared, most editors would not publish them and most critics would not praise them.

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

September 20, 2007

CJR panel discussion now available as podcast

On Tuesday evening I attended the Columbia Journalism Review’s panel discussion convened to explore the topic presented in Steve Wasserman’s September/October issue cover story, “Goodbye to All That”: The case of the vanishing (newspaper) book review. It was among the most lively panel discussions I’ve attended in months, with the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Carlin Romano and Wasserman butting heads over how to reach a mass audience—and what should be expected of them once you’ve done so. Wasserman’s original essay was discussed briefly in this earlier post, and the panel was summed up nicely (with video!) by James Marcus at House of Mirth. Now CJR has made available a podcast of the discussion. Kudos to the magazine for being both tech savvy and timely.

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

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 25, 2006

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.

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.

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.

September 11, 2006

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 8, 2006

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

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.

September 1, 2006

Weekend reading: Around the web #18

This one's long and diverse. Bless them internets.

- I missed the chance to link to any stories about Günter Grass's revelations about being drafted by the Waffen-SS during WWII, but here's something somewhat related: "The burden of history and the trap of memory," an essay by Philipp Ther, originally published in German in the journal Transit, translated by Simon Garnett and posted to Eurozine. A description:

"Erzwungene Wege" ["Forced Journeys"] is the title of the newly opened exhibition at the German Historical Museum in Berlin on the history of forced migration in Europe. It has been organized by the German League of Expellees, which represents Germans forced to migrate after WWII, and is a step towards the League's goal to set up a permanent exhibition in the German capital. The exhibition has been the source of ongoing diplomatic conflict between Germany and its eastern neighbours—above all Poland—since the League called on Poland to pay compensation to former German owners of Polish property and even opposed Poland's accession to the EU. Philipp Ther outlines the background of the historical conflict between Germany and Poland, the reasons behind the paradigm shift from culprit to victim in the German view of its history, and the enduring and very different memory in Poland of the German occupation.

- A profile of Lemonheads singer Evan Dando, the man responsible for It's a Shame About Ray, to my mind one of the best pop albums of the '90s. It contains this hilarious and startling admission:

Dando made no records for six years, between 1996 and 2003: how did he get by? "It should have killed me, right?" He laughs. "But I made quite a bit investing. I got out right before the tech stocks crashed. I have people working for me. Every three months I would give this person 100 grand I would have spent on coke, so when my music income ran out I still had $700,000.

- This essay about tennis star Roger Federer by David Foster Wallace generated a lot of talk when it was published August 20. I enjoyed it primarily for its virtuosic descriptions of Federer's kinetic grace. Equally lovely, to me at least, are the opening paragraphs of "Give and Go," an essay by Diane Ackerman, about an anonymous soccer star and the author's/protagonist's obsession with him, in the current issue of the biannual journal Conjunctions.

- Via Stereogum: La Blogothèque's "Concerts a Emporter" series, featuring videos of bands playing (often acoustic) mini-concerts while walking the streets of Paris. The Stereogum link contains a video of Canadian avant-pop idols Islands playing one of two songs; the Blogothèque link has more; YouTube has the rest.

- Jackson Pollock by Miltos Manetas. (via Wooster Collective)

- Part II of Emdashes' "Ask the [New Yorker] Librarians" feature, featuring "Countries with one subscriber, the mysterious appearance of the T.O.C., 'When New York Was Really Wicked,'" and more. (via Maud Newton)

- An appreciation of Helmut Kron by Michael Beirut at DesignObserver

- Frank Kermode gets curmudgeonly in this Guardian interview, but what fascinates me most is this sentence: "With fellow Manxman Randolph Quirk (they were at school together on the island) he devised the so-called 'New Syllabus' at UCL, the most elegant and challenging course of undergraduate study ever assembled." I want a description of this syllabus!

- Doug Harvey writes a paean to Matthew Coolidge and the Center for Land Use Interpretation in the LA Weekly:

CLUI, headquartered immediately adjacent to the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City (and embodying a fearfully symmetrical extrovert doppelgänger to the Jurassic’s trance-inducing interiority complex—one of the earliest and most inspired of CLUI’s site-specific interventions), is a cultural project that mimics the structure and aesthetics of large—essentially governmental—bureaucracies. But instead of delivering some pat critique of those unwieldy psychic parasites (or, worse yet, arbitrarily bestowing institutional authority on more Art), the center pursues a mission that seems like something the government should have been doing all along, if it had balls and a sense of humor.

Basically, CLUI is a relentless curiosity machine focused on the intersection of humans and the Earth’s surface, particularly in America since the Industrial Revolution.

- Quick hits: Steven Shaviro on Shelley Jackson's Half Life: A Novel; Laila Lalami on Naguib Mahfouz on The Nation's website; pop philosopher Alain de Botton talks about his home and slags off Shepherd's Bush; and pictures of Chiho Aoshima's City Glow, Mountain Whisper mural (via WalkerBlogs).

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

August 22, 2006

Around the web #17

- Here's the video of a great version of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," played on a ukelele in Central Park. No kidding.

- The New Yorker's Nick Paumgarten follows Sonnabend Gallery artist Clifford Ross around Central Park while he tests out his new super-high-res digital camera.

- Mazen Kerbaj, a Lebanese trumpeter, improvised live alongside Israel bombs on the night of July 15. Click here to listen to the haunting result. (Thanks, Anthony.)

- Jason Kottke used Photoshop to color-correct several World War II–era photographs included in "Bound for Glory," a Library of Congress exhibition. (Via blog.

- Images from the Practical Encyclopedia of Good Decorating and Home Improvement that I can't help but imagine with Martha Rosler–like interventions. (Via The Morning News)

- An article in Der Spiegel about a band of "adbusters" in Berlin who cut people out of billboard- and mural-size advertisements. (Via PoliticalTheory.info)

- A post on Momus's blog with links to videos of Look Around You, a series of funny, short mockumentaries, and to "Birds of Britain," perhaps an even funnier video short (imagine Jack Handey narrating an after-school special about birding).

- Make it past the gratuitous, self-congratulatory introduction (start at paragraph ten and you'll be OK), and this goodbye letter from Deyan Sudic, written as he surrenders his column at The Observer in order to become director of the Design Museum in London, is a fairly interesting essay on contemporary architecture.

- Also in The Observer, a long profile of Joan Didion and a shorter one of Claire Messud, whose new novel The Emperor's Children I'm quite eager to read.

Lastly, will someone from London please explain to me the relationship between The Guardian and The Observer? Is the latter the former's weekly magazine (à la the New York Times Sunday Magazine)? If so, why isn't it just named The Guardian Magazine? Because I read both online, where occasionally the same article will pop up under both the Guardian and Observer headings, I have never been able to figure this out . . .

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

August 15, 2006

Around the web #16

- New York Sun book critic Adam Kirsch reviews Walter Benjamin's On Hashish (Harvard University Press), and uses the opportunity to discourse on Benjamin's, er, Marxism, in this week's New Yorker:

But when Benjamin started to put “The Arcades Project” in something like publishable form, sending Theodor Adorno an essay titled “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” he was in for a shock. Although he was eager to embrace Marxist terminology, his use of it proved far too clumsy for a subtle theorist like Adorno. Instead of sharpening his vision of Paris, Marxism had settled over it like a fog, reducing Benjamin to crude clichés.

Kirsch does bring it back around, though, beginning with this passage:

Where does hashish fit into this parable of persecuted genius? A reader who turns to “On Hashish” for a clear answer may be disappointed. Like a small-scale version of “The Arcades Project,” it is the placeholder for a book he could never finish, a ruin occupying the site where he planned a monument, and, as such, it has to be carefully interpreted. This is entirely fitting, since Benjamin himself believed that “all human knowledge, if it can be justified, must take on no other form than that of interpretation.”

- EuroZine reprints an interview with Jacques Ranciere originally published in Le Monde Diplomatique. In it, the French philosopher discusses "aesthetics, his distinction between 'being political' and the 'police order,' the media as arena of liberation, the Internet, his film interests, and about those who today are excluded, those who cannot make their voices heard." (Via PoliticalTheory.info)

- Tom Coates discusses the design of American state flags at PlasticBag.org

- Michael Beirut on the value of protesting White House invitations

- J. Hoberman on Andy Warhol's Screen Tests in the London Review of Books (full article only available to subscribers, unfortunately):

The Screen Tests established an aristocracy of hipness. These were the cool kids, those who were able to make the scene (only a few subjects—Marcel Duchamp, Bob Dylan—could be considered stars, and Dylan is one of only very few to sit for his portrait wearing shades). At the same time, however, the camera’s fixed stare effectively democratised and reified celebrity in the sense epitomised by Warhol’s most famous koan: ‘In the future everyone will be famous . . . for 15 minutes.’ A fair number of Screen Test subjects are identified only by their first names and some just as ‘Boy’ or ‘Guy’. More than a few are hustlers or teeny-boppers who—for one reason or another—wandered into the Factory for an afternoon and afterwards disappeared, leaving only this photographic trace.

- Sophie Ratcliffe, in the TLS, on "what to read and how (not) to write"; Francine Prose, interviewed in The Atlantic, on "creativity, literary craftsmanship, and her new book, Reading Like a Writer (HarperCollins)

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

From "Narcissists 'R' Us?"

A reassessment of Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism at In These Times:

The path toward a more meaningful, collective-oriented future has to begin with an introspective re-evaluation of how narcissism has skewed our personal, social and political lives. Many of us have, consciously or subconsciously, rejected a society that requires incessant self-promotion for economic survival by refusing to center our existences around publicity-seeking approaches to our life and work. In that act of rejection we can find a bit of shelter from the dangers of a hyperinflated ego.

But in the absence of a cohesive framework that helps us understand exactly what we’ve rejected (and why), many of us simply retreat from public engagement in what Commonsense Rebellion author and psychologist Bruce Levine characterizes as a “passive-aggressive rebellion against a society that demands we be incessantly self-promoting narcissists in order to survive.”

Perhaps the hope, then, lies in a fuller understanding of what we are reacting to, and a healthier, more humane sense of what we’d rather embrace, including seemingly antiquated notions of honesty, humility, collectivism, ethical conduct and moderation in material possessions.

(Link via PoliticalTheory.info)

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

July 12, 2006

Leon Wieseltier and Jed Perl discuss inflicting "deep damage"

The Beiderbecke Affair has posted an excerpt of a conversation between The New Republic's Leon Wieseltier and Jed Perl, held earlier this year at the 92nd St. Y and reprinted in Columbia Magazine. Here is the first part of that excerpt:

Leon Wieseltier: I think that if a critic discovers a book or a show that he finds pernicious, it is his solemn responsibility to try to do as much damage to the fortunes of that as he possibly can.

Jed Perl: Totally. But the damage needs to be deep damage. It has to be damage that has an intellectual complexity to it. It’s not the kind of damage necessarily that knocks a book or a show out that day. It’s the kind of damage that even people who totally disagree are worrying about six months or six years later.

LW: I’ve always found that the really valuable attacks by critics only look like attacks. In fact, they’re defenses of things the critic believes have been attacked. They are responses to attacks.

JP: One of the things people forget or simply don’t understand is that the hardest thing a critic can do is write an extended attack on something you really and truly don’t like. It is awful to do. It’s hard. Very, very difficult. You have to think about he people you don’t agree with and what they think. You have to get into their minds. You have to develop arguments that are compelling. It’s much more fun to celebrate.

LW: I think that’s true, but there’s a lot of very empty praise out there—to the point where there are very few critics of any art form that I would trust about buying a book or going to see a ballet. Too many people are nice to too many people.

JP: That’s completely true, which means that it’s all the more important, when one wants to praise something, to praise it in a complex, substantial way. I’m not against attacks. I’ve done my share.

But one of the central obligations of the critic is to develop, over a period of time, a kind of verbal authenticity. I’m talking about a critical voice that tells the reader who this human being, who this critic, really is . . .

Click the first link above to read the rest, as well as instances of Wieseltier putting this theory into action.

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

July 7, 2006

Weekend reading: Around the web #15

&

Here's a doozy of an around-the-web update. Hopefully you can find something to print out and read over the weekend.

- "Calvino and His Cities," a reminiscence by longtime Italo Calvino translator William Weaver (Link via James Marcus's House of Mirth)

- As a budding book reviewer, I took particular interest in the National Book Critics Circle's ";a href="http://www.bookcritics.org/?go=tips" target="_new">Tips for Book Reviewing," which offers suggestions that seem sound based on my experience as a writer and editor of art reviews

- On Tuesday, the Magazine Reader column at the Washington Post discussed Shock, a new title that has plastered ads (featuring photos of a female boxer being punched in the face and a US soldier holding a bloodied child) all across New York. (Link via Bookslut)

- An essay about Susan Sontag (warning: PDF link) that hangs on a lecture she gave at a small school in southeastern Virginia (Link via PoliticalTheory.info)

- An interview with writer Gary Lutz in the current issue of Bookslut. In April, I mentioned another interview with Lutz, and included excerpts and links to other pieces he has written.

- In The Guardian, a profile of artist Gillian Wearing

- In the Boston Review, John Palattella weighs in with a review-essay about the recent edition of Elizabeth Bishop's uncollected poetry, as well as the controversy that surrounded its publication:

Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box does shine a bright light on Bishop’s unpublished work, but it is not a harsh one. It reveals a poet often concerned with dramatizing the unfolding of a sense of stupefaction—of astonishment as well as bewilderment.

[ . . . ]

Publishing these works isn’t wrong. But it is weird, since their very persistence seems to defy one of Bishop’s key insights: “so many things seem filled with the intent / to be lost that their loss is no disaster.” These lines fall at the end of the first stanza of “One Art,” but the sentiment they express—the relinquishment of the desire for mastery in the face of change and loss—recurs throughout Bishop’s poetry and prose.

- In the Guardian, Tim Adams writes an admiring profile of Bill Buford, former editor of Granta and fiction editor of the New Yorker, on the occasion of the publication of Heat (Knopf). Adams worked for Buford in the '80s, and offers a picture of his boss that I think all of us who work in publishing can appreciate:

Buford believed that the ingredients of a quarterly magazine were a combustible amount of pent-up frustration, many late nights and sudden bursts of adrenaline: he sought to engender this in his writers, his staff and, mostly, himself. The only way of getting any release was to get him to read something or to edit something or to phone someone or to write something, and as each of these demanded telling him what to do, which was invariably a process of cajoling and apology and silence and procrastination, the tension mounted. In the time I worked there, the office was generally tormented by a single question, 'Where is Bill?' and its inevitable supplementary, 'What do you think he is doing?'

- New York Times art critic Roberta Smith offers a tour of Basel's museums that briefly discusses some of the shows you didn't see while there for the art fair

- Further to my post below about museum library websites, you can also glean information from gallery websites. This page on Matthew Marks's site lets viewers know that next year's show at Schaulager (described in Roberta Smith's article) will be a retrospective of gallery artist Robert Gober—a fact not yet publicized by Schaulager.

- Culture Space offers congratulations to Zadie Smith on winning the Orange Prize for Fiction

- ReadySteadyBook notes the publication of A Companion to the Works of Thomas Bernhard, and links to a PDF of the book's introduction

- The publication one year ago of the first volume of John Haffenden's monumnetal biography of literary critic William Empson, Among the Mandarins, caused quite a flurry of review coverage. Now, Stefan Collini reviews, in this week's Times Literary Supplement, Empson's Selected Letters (Oxford University Press)

- Last, but not least, Jed Perl weighs in on curator Mia Fineman's Susan Sontag-tribute exhibition at the Met (a link to my review is listed under "Worth Seeing" in the middle column)

Phew. Have a good weekend.

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

July 6, 2006

A Talese twofer

By coincidence, Michelle at NY Brain Terrain posts an interview with publisher and editor Nan A. Talese on the same day that The Morning News publishes Robert Birnbaum's interview with her husband, writer Gay Talese.

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

July 5, 2006

Museum library websites

My job requires that I find out about art-world exhibitions and events happening well into the future, and my interests encourage me to find out about those that I missed. Occasionally I am asked how I stay on top of what's going on. The simple answer is that I have put my name and e-mail address in just about every contemporary-art gallery guestbook I have set foot into, and consequently receive innumerable press releases; I have subscribed to the e-mail lists maintained by e-flux, ArtCal, Art Cards, and other valuable information clearinghouses; and I talk constantly with a wide network of critics, curators, dealers, and artists, all of whom like to discuss their current projects. This is all, perhaps, obvious. It's a bit more difficult to discover information about exhibitions one never hears about or misses. One habit I've found worth adopting is glancing at artist biographies whenever I'm at galleries, even if it's someone whose work I'm not particularly enthusiastic about. A less obvious answer, however, is to take advantage of museum library websites. If an exhibition generated some kind of publication, there is a good chance that the document ends up in the library at MoMA, the Whitney, the Tate, or elsewhere. Several of these museums make their research collections accessible online. The Whitney, for example, allows you to peruse a list of its recent acquisitions. While browsing recently, I discovered not only that a group show of New York artists whose work I follow had taken place, but that some kind of publication was printed to accompany it, and I was able to request a copy. In another case, the description of a book created by Philippe Parreno makes it seem related to (and reminds me of) a giveaway DVD presented during a recent New York solo exhibition.

After one amasses a certain amount of information, one can also attempt to read the tea leaves, so to speak, and draw conclusions from even the smallest scrap of data. This hard-to-find Gordon Matta-Clark catalogue, also recently acquired by the Whitney's library, is currently checked out, which reminded me that next year the museum will present a retrospective of the artist's work (which was mentioned in this September 2005 exhibition review by Michael Kimmelman).

Now is perhaps an odd time to mention this resource, as both the Whitney and MoMA libraries are currently closed, but getting into the habit of checking their collections online is one way (among many) to lessen the number of interesting exhibitions and artists that slip past one's radar.

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

Guilty pleasures: Traffic/tourist webcams and street-fashion photo blogs

I suspect that everyone has guilty web-surfing pleasures, and mine are traffic/tourist webcams and street-fashion photo blogs, both of which give me a peek at life elsewhere, whether from the sky or on the ground. (One needs something to break up the cavalcade of exhibition and book reviews, essays, and text-heavy weblog posts one reads, right?)

Several years ago I put together a bookmark folder with cameras pointed at popular spots in twenty-plus cities. Here are a few favorites: the BBC Jam Cams in London; two city government-sponsored webcams in Vienna; a weather cam in Dublin; a street corner in Milan; the Tokyo "riverside skyline"; seven views of Moscow; traffic cams in Barcelona; fifteen cameras in Paris; a view over the Madrid skyline. Here is a world map with links to even more.

More recently, I've taken an interest in sites that post pictures of people randomly encountered on the street. (I don't have the guts to stop someone and ask to take their picture.) The first I came across was Hel Looks, based in Helsinki; then The Sartorialist here in New York; FaceHunter in Paris; stilinberlin; Moscow Street Fashion; the Clothes Project in Singapore; and Visions of Warsaw.

I hope these links help someone pass the time.

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

June 29, 2006

Around the web #14

- Dushko Petrovich writes about "ARTSTAR" for Slate

- The Brooklyn Rail transcribes an anecdotal lecture by art historian Leo Steinberg originally given at the 2002 CAA conference in Philadelphia

- "Talking Cities" is an exhibition, symposium, magazine, and more, all about "the micropolitics of urban space"

- My friends David and Stuart officially open their new design office and occasional bookstore, Dexter/Sinister, tomorrow evening

- 3QuarksDaily posts a two-part essay on Susan Sontag by S. Asad Raza; part one and part two

- Gregory Miller, art collector and onetime (and perhaps current?) head of the White Columns board of trustees, has started a book publishing firm, Gregory R. Miller & Co., which has just put its website online

- The current issue of the College Art Association's Art Bulletin has eight reviews of Art Since 1900; the Art History Newsletter has brief excerpts from each

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

June 25, 2006

Four interviews

- A 2004 interview with Polish poet and critic Adam Zagajewski, at AGNI (link via 3 Quarks Daily)

- An interview with the literary critic James Wood, at the Kenyon Review

- An interview with the short-story writer Alice Munro (part of a portfolio about the writer that contains these short appreciations), at the Virginia Quarterly Review (original link via BookSlut)

- An interview with the novelist and short-story writer Haruki Murakami, at the Sydney Morning Herald (link via the Literary Saloon)

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

May 17, 2006

Wes Anderson, My Life, My Card

After reading this piece on Slate.com about Wes Anderson's new, immensely enjoyable two-minute film—a commercial for American Express—I waited for a second article to appear so that I would have an excuse to link to it. Well, Slate.com itself answered my wishes, publishing this piece on Monday evening:

Wes Anderson's new film is a lustrous widescreen ode to moviemaking. It's an ultimate movie-movie, a cinephile's wet dream that is, actually, a spoof of François Truffaut's 1973 movie about movies, Day for Night. In fact, Anderson's film is better than Day for Night: It's more complex because it doesn't just fetishize movies the way that Truffaut did. Plus, it's shorter.

It's titled, "Dear Wes Anderson, Why does it take you so long to make a movie?" and goes on to analyze the (relative) slowness of the "American Eccentrics" (Anderson, Spike Jonze, David O. Russell, Sofia Coppola, etc.), who only make a new movie every few years. Make what you will of the author's argument, but be sure to enjoy the short film.

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

May 16, 2006

Three interviews with Philip Roth

The response to Philip Roth's Everyman, officially published last week but on bookstore shelves for almost a month, has been almost universally rhapsodic. I've never read Roth, embarrassingly enough, and have begun Portnoy's Complaint to begin my education. To mark the occasion, here are links to three interviews with the writer, at the Los Angeles Times (April 30), on NPR's "All Things Considered" (May 2) and on Terry Gross's "Fresh Air" (May8).

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

April 27, 2006

Around the web #12

A brief roundup of stories, reviews, and blog entries that have caught my eye since the last "Around the web" post:

- Jane Jacobs, whose book The Death and Life of Great American Cities remains as important to me now as it was when I first read it, ten or so years ago, died this week, aged 89. The New York Times published a very thorough appreciation/obituary in yesterday's paper; the New Yorker has made available online a "Talk of the Town" piece about her from 2004; the Virginia Quarterly Review has made available an essay she contributed to their Spring 2004 issue; and Gothamist rounds up a few more notices.

- An interview with Rem Koolhaas in the German paper Der Spiegel, titled "Evil Can also Be Beautiful," in which the architect discusses his plan to enter politics as a socialist and a 1974 film script he wrote for Russ Meyer.

- On the occasion of the publication of Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, by Allie Angell, Anthony Haden-Guest writes about the "original King of Pop" (to use a colleague's phrase) for The Guardian.

- A gallery of poster designs by Josef Müller-Brockmann.

- More from The Guardian: Robert Hughes on Goya's last works, happily crotchety Jonathan Jones on Marc Quinn's portrait of Kate Moss, and Adrian Searle on the 4th Berlin Biennale and on Yang Fudong.

- The newly expanded Poetry Foundation website has a feature article on Polish poet and critic Adam Zagajewski, whose book of essays titled A Defense of Ardor possesses one of my favorite recent book jacket designs.

- NEWSgrist features an interview with artist and activist Paul Chan about "My own private Alexandria (v.1)," a collection of audio recordings of influential texts, available for free download at his website, www.nationalphilistine.com.

- This year's Reading the World website is now online, featuring books in translation from ten different publishers. Look for a special display at independent bookstores next month.

- Lastly, Dan Green has posted an appreciation of the fiction reviews published in the Financial Times by Jonathan Derbyshire, who just announced on his own blog that they are no longer behind a pay-for-access wall at the paper's site. I've only read two so far, but I also like what I see.

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

April 12, 2006

Anderson on Fukuyama completes a circle (for me)

In this week's Nation, New Left Review editor Perry Anderson reviews Francis Fukuyama's America at the Crossroads, and provides what is perhaps the most careful explication of the genesis of Fukuyama's break with neoconservatives and the most sweeping critique of its limitations yet published. A few excerpts:

In the tripartite structure of America at the Crossroads—capsule history of neoconservatism; critique of the way it went awry in Iraq; proposals for a rectified version—the crux of the argument lies in the middle section. Fukuyama's account of the milieu to which he belonged, and its role in the run-up to the war, is level-headed and informative. But it is a view from within that contains a revealing optical illusion. Everything happens as if neoconservatives were the basic driving force behind the march to Baghdad, and it is their ideas that must be cured if America is to get back on track . . . In reality, the front of opinion that pressed for an assault on Iraq was far broader than a particular Republican faction. It included many a liberal and Democrat.

And later:

[Fukuyama's] judgment [that Islamic terrorists have little chance of inflicting serious damage on American society] takes us back to the logic of his larger work as a whole. The celebrated argument of The End of History and the Last Man was that with the defeat of Communism, following that of Fascism, no improvement on liberal capitalism as a form of society was any longer imaginable. The world was still full of conflicts, which would continue to generate unexpected events, but they would not alter this verdict. There was no guarantee of a rapid voyage of humanity from every corner of the earth to the destination of a prosperous, peaceful democracy based on private property, free markets and regular elections, but these institutions were the terminus of historical development. The closure of social evolution now in view could not be regarded as altogether a blessing. For with it would inevitably come a lowering of ideal tension, perhaps even a certain tedium vitae. Nostalgia for more hazardous and heroic times could be foreseen.

Then, the damning critique:

Fukuyama remains fully committed to the American mission of spreading democracy round the world, and the use of all effective means at the disposal of Washington to do so. His criticism of the Bush Administration is that its policies in the Middle East have been not only ineffective but counterproductive. The promotion of internal regime change by the right mixture of economic and political pressures is one thing. Military action to enforce it externally is another, conducive to misfortune. In reality, there is no sharp dividing line between the two in the imperial repertory . . . There is not the faintest suggestion in these pages of any basic change in the staggering accumulation of military bases around the world, or the grip of the United States on the Middle East, let alone symbiosis with Israel. Everything that brought the country to 9/11 remains in place.

Anderson goes on to cite "The Israel Lobby," John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's essay in a recent issue of the London Review of Books, as a more thoroughgoing and useful critique of American foreign policy. While I haven't read the Fukuyama book, the excerpt printed in the February 19 New York Times Magazine leads me to believe that Anderson may very well be right.

Here's where the web of connections fostered by random reading is filled in. Anderson has been a prominent political theorist for forty years, but it was only recently, with the release an essay collection titled Spectrum (which incidentally features a lovely Morris Louis painting on its cover), that I became familiar with him. The book inspired Christopher Hitchens to sober his tone long enough to provide a cogent review in the March Atlantic. Elsewhere in his Nation review, Anderson makes reference to Paul Berman as an example of a pre-Iraq-war hawkish liberal. Berman reviewed Fukuyama's book for the New York Times Book Review and, lo and behold, Berman—for those three of you who read this site regularly, and the two of you who've made it this far into this post—came up in a post here in late December. There's no point to this promiscuous linking beyond pointing you to various reviews, books, and articles that are of interest, and to that end I'll add two more. The first is Julian Stallabrass's "Spectacle and Terror," the second of a two-part reckoning with Retort's Afflicted Powers in Anderson's New Left Review; the second is Michael Hardt's review and (separate) short feature about Afflicted Powers in the October 2005 Artforum. Phew.

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

April 10, 2006

Around the web #11

More time than usual has transpired since the last "Around the Web," and consequently there are far more links to articles and blog posts that have caught my eye.

- Terry Eagleton on Beckett in The Guardian

- Charles Simic on Elizabeth Bishop in the current New York Review of Books (link via Maud Newton)

- A profile, now password-protected, of poet and musician David Berman published March 20 in the New York Sun (link via Bookslut)

- A Q&A with Francine du Plessix Gray in the Boston Globe

- Last Monday, 2006 Whitney Biennial curators Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne spoke at the Walker Art Center, promising to "respond directly to some of the published criticism of the show." Here is a link to a Walker blog post that will point you to the event's details, an archive of the event's webcast, and an interview with Iles and Vergne.

- Also at the Walker: Sunn0))) and Boris are playing at the museum on May 25. More information here. I'll see Boris in Philadelphia on June 5; Artforum has just published a column by Jan Tumlir on Sunn0))), which is available online here.

- An essay about the nature of creativity by Adam Phillips, who I've mentioned on the site several times, was published on March 12 in the Guardian; Edward Winkleman responded with "Is Inspiration Unexploitable?" on his weblog.

- For those who can't afford the Jeff Koons "Bunny" necklaces produced in collaboration with the designer Stella McCartney (seen in T: The New York Times Style Magazine and elswhere), Grace at design*sponge points out that a $45 laser-cut version is available at the Whitney Museum shop online.

- M.S. Smith at CultureSpace writes about William Gass's new essay collection, A Temple of Texts.

- The Art History Newsletter blog points to a newly published book-length overview of Harald Szeeman's career and a review of it in the Frankfurter Rundschau.

- An interview with Matthew Barney at IndieWire

- Graphic designer William Drenttel visits the Tadao Ando-designed Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis and writes about his "unique, distinctive, personal" experience at DesignObserver.

- The Telegraph publishes "Why architects get it wrong," an excerpt of pop philosopher Alain de Botton's new book, The Architecture of Happiness.

- Olga Grushin, whose novel The Dream Life of Sukhanov has received incredibly wide review attention, is disappointed by Elaine Feinstein's new biography of Anna Akhmatova, and says so in the New York Times Book Review.

- Jill at Inhabitat posts about Elizabeth Demaray's design of a light-weight plastic shell for hermit crabs, which are facing a "massive housing shortage."

- Heart As Arena points to a video of Marillyn Minter's film Food Porn, which aired on Arsenio Hall, Nightline, and other programs in 1989 and 1990.

- At Slate, Ben Yagoda picks apart Michiko Kakutani's reviewing style on the occasion of her twenty-fifth anniversary as critic at the Times. Some present!

"Utterly devoid … wonderfully acute observations … debut novel … savvy social and psychological insights … cringe-making … embarrassing new low": Virtually every word or phrase is a cliché, or at best shopworn and lifeless, and evidence of Kakutani's solid tin ear. (She has justly been called out for her near-obsessive use of "lugubrious" and "limn," words that probably have never been said aloud in the history of English.) That's what can happen to a writer when she merely praises and merely blames. Kakutani appears incapable of engaging with language, either playfully or seriously, which puts her at a painful disadvantage when she is supposed to be evaluating writers who can and do.

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

March 16, 2006

Around the web #10

- Two smart review-essays about Franz Kafka's life have appeared this month. The first, by Robert Alter, ran in the New Republic and is reprinted online at Powells.com. The second, by Jeff Fort, is in the current issue of The Believer. Their respective first lines: "There is a tantalizing gap between our increasingly detailed knowledge of Kafka's life and our imperfect understanding of his achievement as a writer"; "Franz Kafka’s greatest wish was to disappear."

- Morgan Meis, at 3 Quarks Daily, uses R. Kelly's Trapped in the Closet to muse on Homer, Tacitus, and the differences between (and intertwining of) parataxis and hypotaxis. It's more engaging than it sounds, just like Kelly's epic tale.

- The Los Angeles Times runs a story on musical Minimalism on the occasion of the LA Philharmonic's "Minimalist Jukebox" series, running from this Saturday through April 2 at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. If I could attend only one event in the program—and I'm very upset that I cannot attend any—it would be "Hallucination City," which features Glenn Branca conducting his Symphony No. 13 for 100 Guitars, on Wednesday, March 29.

- A few art links: An interview with Arthur Danto at KultureFlash; the Art History Newsletter points to Donald Kuspit's "A Critical History of 20th Century Art," which is being serialized at Artnet, and to Doug Harvey's LA Weekly column from last year, called "The End of Donald Kuspit"; in January, Artforum hosted a panel discussion called "Curating the Biennial," and the RealAudio webcast is now online (direct link to RA file); and Adrian Searle, writing for the Guardian, does a better job of reviewing Hilma af Klint's exhibition at the Camden Arts Centre than he did the Tate Triennial.

- Pankaj Mishra published an eminently sensible review of David Foster Wallace's new essay collection in last Sunday's NYTBR.

- The wild card: WFMU's Beware of the Blog posts seven video clips from Kure Kura Takora (Gimme Gimme Octopus), an early '70s Japanese children's television show. The clips must be seen to be believed.

- I have been on the fence about subscribing to the Virginia Quarterly Review, a literary journal, but yesterday's announcement that it was nominated for six National Magazine Awards, more than any other publication except The Atlantic, pushed me over the fence. See the other nominees here.

- Continuing my writing-about-writing theme started with the mention of Kevin Kopelson's book a few posts below this one, here is an ode to an Olympia typewriter by Michael Erard, published at The Morning news.

- Last, but not least: I had coffee the other day with my friend Mirjam Varadinis, who is a curator at the Kunsthaus Zurich and the proprietor of A-Z Public Limited Editions, which publishes "limited edition" artworks as downloadable PDF files. AZPLE's first edition, by the artist Annelise Coste, is only online through the weekend, so download while you can; the next artwork will be posted on March 20.

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

March 15, 2006

Gabriel Josipovici interview

ReadySteadyBook has just published an interview with the novelist and critic Gabriel Josipovici. Mark Thwaite, the site's proprietor, is an ardent fan of Josipovici's work, and his advocacy led me to pay special attention for Josipovici's name (I especially enjoyed his review-essay on Grimm's fairy tales in the TLS last summer) and to purchase a used copy of The World and the Book, which I've skimmed and also enjoyed. An excerpt:

MT: In [England] we tend to see literary novels as ‘heavy’ and popular fiction as ‘light’. Yet you have referred to the ‘lightness’ of The Iliad. What is this quality exactly? Are there modern novels that are light in this way?

GJ: There may be two or three different issues here. I find contemporary works that take themselves terribly seriously a pain, as I’ve said. I’d much rather read a good thriller or a good comic novel than one that is bidding to become a Booker prize-winner (and often succeeding). Unfortunately even thriller writers—especially American ones—these days want to show they are ‘important’ writers, which is a disaster for their work. But there is also a large historical issue. For complex reasons art before the Romantics could be both profound and ‘light’. Homer’s and Shakespeare’s plays are cases in point. After the onset of Romanticism it’s as if depth had to entail solemnity, weightiness. Contrast Mozart and Beethoven, Pope and Wordsworth, Fielding and George Eliot. I love many works written after 1800, but I wish it were lighter. And I ca