From the Foster text (which is decidedly not a review):

Serra decided on plates 17 metres high and four metres wide; absolutely vertical, they are anchored only shallowly in the ground, and nothing supports them at the surface. This size turned out to be an excellent match of technical necessity – the plates are about the largest that can now be milled – and aesthetic scale: at just under half the height of the nave, they hold their own against the architecture but do not overwhelm the viewer (only about 15 centimetres thick, they appear almost elegant). Yet this resolution of size still left the questions of number and placement, and there could be no trial run. Serra calculated that 100 feet might be the right interval to create a rhythm that would at once articulate the architecture and motivate the viewer; more plates might interfere with the former and/or intimidate the latter, while fewer might make the ground feel a little arid. This formula makes for five plates over the 200 metres of the nave, with one placed directly under the cupola, and this is what Promenade consists in.

The particulars of placement remained, however, and here Serra was cued by the axis of the nave, to which all the plates are strictly perpendicular. To scatter the plates would be to lose the power of this strong line; to overlap them would be to destroy the centre in another way. So Serra decided to set the plates at a very slight angle (1.69 degrees) from the axis: some are positioned on the central line at the bottom and 20 inches away at the top, while others are 20 inches off the central line at the bottom and plumb at the top. These deviations create, with simple means, a great tension; one feels drawn through the piece as through a slalom course. Yet this energy might feel forced if the rhythm were only one of alternation, so here again Serra mixed things up: from the Champs Elysées side to the Seine side, the pattern of lean vis-à-vis the centre is in-in-away-away-in.

Eagleton begins his piece thusly:

All literary works are anonymous, but some are more anonymous than others. It is in the nature of a piece of writing that it is able to stand free of its begetter, and can dispense with his or her physical presence. In this sense, writing is more like an adolescent than a toddler. I might pass you a note at a meeting, but a note is only a note if it can function in my absence. Writing, unlike speech, is meaning that has come adrift from its source. Some bits of writing – theatre tickets or notes to the milkman, for example – are more closely tied to their original contexts than Paradise Lost or War and Peace. Fiction (since it is imaginary) has no real-life original context at all, and hermeneutically speaking can therefore circulate a lot more freely than a shopping list or a bus ticket. Literary works are peculiarly portable. They can be lifted from one interpretative situation to another, and may change their meaning in the course of this migration. Waiting for Godot as performed in San Quentin prison is not quite the same play as Peter Hall’s first London production. We cannot simply put Auschwitz out of our minds while watching The Merchant of Venice. Writerly meaning does not always trump readerly meaning.

Kopelson's playful ramble ends up by asking, "Have I become, then, Grover Cleveland?"

I am constantly asked if architecture is an art, and the desire seems to be less for enlightenment than for denial. The idea has never been popular with anyone but the architects themselves, who are always seeking to extend their aesthetic boundaries. The virtue of a folly is that it provides the freedom to explore without rules. Mr. Gehry's sensibilities are as sculptural as they are structural, and although some find the union disturbing in the way it transcends accepted definitions, he makes legitimate, brilliant architecture of the alliance. And yes, it is art, and there is no great architecture without it.

Clueless value engineers who define design as dollars (they will all get their due in some bean-counters' hell) do their best to remove the art from architecture, but you can't take the artist out of the architect. Le Corbusier painted. Richard Meier makes sculpture. Michael Graves is a fine colorist and collagist. Steven Holl designs in delicate watercolors. Frank Lloyd Wright called architecture the mother of the arts. All art is the product of an innate, visceral sense of balance, proportion, form and line, a feeling for surface, texture, color and contrast, an understanding of materials and their expressive potential that cannot be taught. The architect alone has the ability to visualize space multidimensionally and in scale; only the architect has mastered the complexity of its uses and interactions. But this is an art that must serve and satisfy real programs, costs and needs; it must engage with the real world. In the lovely, useless folly, art trumps reality for a moment of pure delight.

To read the rest, click here.

From the "reconsideration":

Banfield understood that cities exist in a remarkably fluid urban system. Cities are filled with poor people, not because cities are bad for poor people, but because “the city attracts the poor” by “offering better conditions of life.” When government policies make cities better places for the poor, then more poor people will come to cities. This argument does not imply that spending on urban poverty is a mistake, but that the impact of anti-poverty spending may be to increase, rather than decrease, urban poverty.

The most hotly debated part of “The Unheavenly City” was Banfield’s sociological depiction of urban poverty and his link between social class and time horizons. According to Banfield, upper-class people think of their historic legacy, and middle-class people plan for retirement, but lower-class people live for the moment. Impatience, not impecuniousness, is the key characteristic of the lower classes.

And from the review of The Endless City:

As you’d expect from a book produced by more than 30 contributors — among them lawyers, activists, architects, politicians, planners, sociologists, and historians — “The Endless City” runs the gamut from the dazzlingly insightful to the depressingly hackneyed. At its heart is a close look at six global cities: New York, Shanghai, London, Mexico City, Johannesburg, and Berlin. Perhaps the most entertaining aspect of the book is its use of clever metrics to show how similar and, more often, how different these cities really are — by comparing, for example, the amount of green space in New York (14%) and Berlin (35.6%), or the daily commute in London (1 hour and 24 minutes) and Mexico City (2 hours and 30 minutes).

So if these cities are so different, one has to wonder: What can they possibly have in common? Drawing on the work of Saskia Sassen, one of the book’s contributors, “The Endless City” defines a global city as a major metropolis that dominates what you might call the key command functions of the global economy. Yes, globalization means that capital and even labor are hyper-mobile, but face-to-face interaction still counts. The leadership class has to actually live somewhere, and they tend to cluster with others like themselves. Armies of hangers-on and aspiring somebodies follow, whether we’re talking about gentrifying Brooklyn or the slums of Soweto.

On Kawara, Monday, Dec. 17, 1979, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 18 1/4 x 24 3/8". Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2008 On Kawara.

Success greeted the Japanese author Shotaro Yasuoka, now nearly 90, immediately upon the publication of the short stories that make up The Glass Slipper and Other Stories. With frugal, occasionally lyrical prose (translated by Royall Tyler), these works, from the early 1950s, prize emotional and psychological depth over narrative propulsion, and feature hapless, illness-prone, passive narrators. "Like someone who's just fallen asleep," muses one, "I was drawn along through the empty city as if by an irresistible force."

The city is Tokyo, emptied out by the ravages of World War II, and Yasuoka's misfits glide through it in search of a decent job or some other sense of direction.

The whole review is only twice as long as this teaser; to read the rest, click here (and scroll down; it is the last of four short pieces).

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.

How sudden and decisive these steel plates feel, as if they had been stabbed into the concrete floor the moment we walked in. It takes a while to apprehend how mysteriously they choreograph the space, and our movements through it. As much as Serra deals with gravity, mass, weight, presence, a sense of the commanding and the impending, he also deals with duration, mental space and the unfolding of the physical experience in time and distance. But with the midday sun streaming through the roof, the whole space is a dazzle of light and shadow. It is difficult at first to comprehend what I am looking at: the walls, the floor and Serra's steel planes are zebra-striped in a camouflage of light and shadow. It feels like being trapped inside the gears of a solar clock. The iron art nouveau stairs and balcony writhe on one side. Later in the afternoon, when the sun is off the roof, the tension between the sculptural elements and the building reveal themselves and intensify. The skin of oxide on the milled corten steel softens to a grayish purplish glow. People down the other end of the building seem tiny, like the far-off figures in a Canaletto. Somewhere on the floor, dancers are rehearsing. Couples amble or walk apart pensively. Parents take photos of infants propped against tons of steel. Voices echo from far away.

The piece rambles on, with a quote from Serra about "when Obama becomes president," mentions the New Museum's "Unmonumental exhibition," and discusses how Searle's relationship to Serra's art has changed as he aged. To read the rest, click here.

We passed into a large salon. The ceiling was well over fifteen feet high. Facing me, on the other side of the room, were floor-to-ceiling glass doors overlooking a terrace and gardens. The room itself and another, somewhat smaller, to my left, were filled with the same kind of overflowing accumulation of Picasso's work that I had encountered as soon as I crossed the threshold into the hall. It seemed a little bit like playing Ali Baba in modern dress. My eyes were racing from one corner to another trying to take it all in at once. Then I heard Jacqueline say, "Et voici Picasso." I turned and, across a distance of perhaps two feet, found myself looking down into Picasso's eyes -- as bright and penetrating as ever. He looked vigorous yet relaxed, and a long way from seventy-five. He was wearing saffron-colored duck slacks and a burgundy woolen shirt with a dark-brown sleeveless sweater over it; on his feet, a pair of canvas espadrilles. He led me into the dining room to our right, pulled up a chair for me near the head of the table, then settled his wiry, rugged little frame into a wicker seat beside me. Jacqueline sat down on the other side of him, facing me and completing a kind of semicircle. Picasso lighted a cigarette and looked over at me.

"Well," he said with a grin, "you've got me. Now what are you going to do with me?"

The profile is a long, informal, engaging read; there are many personal details. To read the rest, click here. To see the other articles in this "Flashback," here.

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......"

Rail: What are the issues at stake when a historian becomes a critic? Reading your essay about using art criticism to build a historical narrative, “On Criticism Handling History,” was the thing that made me want to be an art historian, but now the formula seems more pressing when reversed. So many historians have begun to dabble in the contemporary, but oddly don’t seem to bring historical skill or perspectives to the task.

Shiff: If my writing on living artists has a distinctive character, it would be for two reasons (no doubt shared with at least some other writers, but probably not many)—first, I’ve always got the long view of history in mind and probably see better than most of my peers that a great deal of what goes on now isn’t particularly unprecedented or innovative (the nineteenth century had its share of people who took a postmodernist stance toward the fundamentals of modernist practice—for every true believer, there was an ironic deconstructionist, but they didn’t have the word then). At the same time, I would fault many of my contemporaries for romanticizing the present by seeing it through moments of past history. They either understand the past era better, or, more likely, have simply romanticized it by identifying it with a figure they wish were right beside them in the present time. Walter Benjamin is a critical writer I myself admire for his remarkable acumen, but I wouldn’t apply his politics to the politics of our own time—it won’t work.

Rail: I am very interested in what you say about the way your peers think about the past and see the present through romantic versions of certain past moments. This seems particularly true about 1968. Could you talk a bit about that?

Shiff: The ideas of 1960s radical groups will not work now, so we have to be careful about how much we romanticize 1968. Yet, because significant elements of the social structures associated with modernity may not have changed all that much over the past two hundred years, understanding art of a century ago or two centuries ago helps us to discern what’s truly different about now and what isn’t. I don’t need to translate our time now into the Paris of 1914, the Berlin of 1939, or the Paris of 1968 just to function as a historically sensitive critic. Some of my peers seem to be in the habit of transposing historical moments, oversimplifying what they see as the social and political crises of the relatively recent past. They seem to think that history repeats itself. I don’t.

Rail: People are still talking about the “failure of utopia” and the “disappointments of modernism” as if events of the ‘20s and ‘30s are still uppermost in the minds of thirty-year-old artists. How do we connect our history to the past without mistaking it for the present? Do we in fact need to connect to the past?

Shiff: It seems pointless to note the failure to attain some kind of social utopia if the critic does no more than denounce the implied utopian promises of certain forms of art. Those promises tended to be made by critical interpreters more than by artists, so, at the very least, let’s not hold the artists and their art responsible for political fantasies that were the creation of the writers who were promoting the art. And, of course, a technique or an image that had a certain connotative value in the past may have a very different one now. A critic ought to be sufficiently sensitive to history to identify which aspects of traditional practice are being resisted, ignored, or actively discarded. Do techniques, subjects, and aesthetic attitudes change because the needs they once served no longer exist, or do they change because of an overriding ideological principle, such as (obviously) change for the sake of change? This can be a fruitful path of questioning but you can’t proceed down it if you have little understanding of the dynamics of past art within its own society.

Shiff goes on to discuss his new book, Doubt, what distinguishes artists, critics, and historians, the trouble with theory, the "tychic" element in reading and writing, and much else besides. To read the rest, click here.

Q: You identify your work on Richard Rorty not as a biography, or even as a work of intellectual history, but rather as an empirical case study in “the new sociology of ideas.” What is that? What tools does a sociologist bring to the job that an intellectual historian wouldn’t?

A: Sociology is a diverse field, but if I had to offer a generalization, I’d say that most sociologists these days aim to identify the often hidden social mechanisms, or cascading causal processes, that help to explain interesting, important, or counterintuitive outcomes or events in the social world. How and why do some movements for social change succeed in realizing their goals when others fail to get off the ground? Why isn’t there more social mobility? What exactly is the connection between neighborhood poverty and crime? Few sociologists think anymore that universal, law-like answers to such questions can be found, but they do think it possible to isolate the role played by more or less general mechanisms.

Sociologists of ideas are interested in identifying the hidden social processes that can help explain the content of intellectuals’ ideas and account for patterns in the dissemination of those ideas. My book attempts to make a theoretical contribution to this subfield. I challenge the approaches taken by two of the leading figures in the area — Pierre Bourdieu and Randall Collins — and propose a new approach. I think that the best sociological theory, however, has strong empirical grounding, so I decided to develop my theoretical contribution and illustrate its value by deeply immersing myself in an empirical case: the development of the main lines of Richard Rorty’s philosophy....

To read the rest, click here.

If the idea of appropriate limitation seems unacceptable to us, that may be because, like Marlow's Faustus and Milton's Satan, we confuse limits with confinement. But that, as I think Marlow and Milton and others were trying to tell us, is a great and potentially a fatal mistake. Satan's fault, as Milton understood it and perhaps with some sympathy, was precisely that he could not tolerate his proper limitation; he could not subordinate himself to anything whatever. Faustus's error was his unwillingness to remain "Faustus, and a man." In our age of the world it is not rare to find writers, critics, and teachers of literature, as well as scientists and technicians, who regard Satan's and Faustus's defiance as salutary and heroic.

On the contrary, our human and earthly limits, properly understood, are not confinements but rather inducements to formal elaboration and elegance, to fullness of relationship and meaning. Perhaps our most serious cultural loss in recent centuries is the knowledge that some things, though limited, are inexhaustible. For example, an ecosystem, even that of a working forest or farm, so long as it remains ecologically intact, can provide opportunities of work and learning, and a fund of beauty, solace, and pleasure—in addition to its difficulties—that cannot be exhausted in a lifetime or in generations.

And:

It is the artists, not the scientists, who have dealt unremittingly with the problem of limits. A painting, however large, must finally be bounded by a frame or a wall. A composer or playwright must reckon, at a minimum, with the capacity of an audience to sit still and pay attention. A story, once begun, must end somewhere within the limits of the writer's and the reader's memory. And of course the arts characteristically impose limits that are artificial: the five acts of a play, or the fourteen lines of a sonnet. Within these limits artists achieve elaborations of pattern, of sustaining relationships of parts with one another and with the whole, that may be astonishingly complex. And probably most of us can name a painting, a piece of music, a poem or play or story that still grows in meaning and remains fresh after many years of familiarity.

To read the rest (the link may be subscriber-only), click here.

FICTION
1. Richard Price, Lush Life, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
2. Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth, Knopf
3. Steven Millhauser, Dangerous Laughter, Knopf

1. Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke: The Beginning of World War II, The End of Civilization, Simon & Schuster
2. Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, Knopf
3. Mark Harris, Pictures at the Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, Penguin Press

POETRY

1. Grace Paley, Fidelity, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
2. Frank Bidart, Watching the Spring Festival, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
3. Eric Gansworth, A Half-life of Cardio-pulmonary Function, Syracuse University Press

To read the rest, click here.

The other day I was in the post office when a man in line in front of me bought one of those U.S. Postal Service boxes. Then he moved down the counter a few inches to assemble his package while the clerk waited on the next person. But the man soon discovered that the books he wanted to mail were going to rattle around in the box, so he interrupted the clerk to tell her his problem. She offered to sell him a roll of bubble wrap, but he told her that he had already paid $2.79 for the box, and that was a lot for a box—he could have gotten a box for free at the liquor store—and what was he going to do with a whole roll of bubble wrap? Carry it around all day? The clerk shrugged. Then the man spotted a copy of the Village Voice on the counter and laid hold of it to use it for stuffing. "No!" said the clerk. "That's my Voice." Annoyed, the man put it back and looked around helplessly. Now a woman in line behind me said she'd give him the sections of her New York Times that she didn't want, and she began going through the paper. "Real estate? You can have real estate. Sports? Here, take sports." But the real estate section was all the man needed. He separated the pages, stuffed them in the box and proceeded to the taping process (interrupting the clerk once again). Another man in line asked the woman if he could have the sports section, since she didn't want it. She gave it to him, and so finally everything was settled.

This was an interesting show, to which you could have a wide range of reactions. Why didn't the box man bring some stuffing? If the clerk hadn't finished her Village Voice, why did she leave it on the counter? And so on. In any case, the scene sufficed to fill up those boring minutes in line—or, I should add, to annoy the people who just wanted to read their newspaper in peace instead of being exposed to the man's postal adventure. I won't say this could happen only in New York, but I believe that the probability is much greater here.

Why are New Yorkers like this? It goes against psychological principles. Psychologists tell us that the more stimuli people are bombarded with, the more they will recede into themselves and ignore others. So why is it that New Yorkers, who are certainly confronted with enough stimuli, do the opposite? I have already given a few possible answers, but here's one more: the special difficulties of life in New York—the small apartments, the struggle for a seat on the bus or a table at a restaurant—seem to breed a sense of common cause.

To read the rest, which is gentle and entertaining, click here.