Among the many intriguing titles from Knopf this fall are V.S. Naipaul's "Masque of Africa' where he mostlikely, (as he did in "Among the Believers" and his volumes on India,)will savage the belief in animism, Christianity, Islam, the cult of leadership and mythology. His "travel" tomes are every bit as, if not more engaging than his brilliant fictional portraits, and leave an indelible imprint in the minds of even the most cynical as well as thoughtful observers of the interplay between local culture and the global mise en scene.
Then there is another novel from Tom McCarthy, following his "Remainder" as well as Thomas Power's "The Killimg of Crazy Horse" We hope to read and review at length the three of these soon.
Notwithstanding the conglomeratization of publishing, it is plain that Random House continues, through its various imprints, including Doubleday, Crown, and Pantheon, to bring out high quality product. The fact that an author as talented as David Mitchell (his The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet comes out next month)continues to publish with RH is itself a shot in the arm for sustained literary success in American trade book publishing.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Sunday, June 13, 2010
New Bookshop, Book Expo and Other Tales of Inspiration
Rumors of the death of independent bookselling are not quite being borne out by developments. Last month, at 66 Avenue A, there opened a brand new used bookshop selling high quality titles. We visited there Saturday night- it has yet to be titled, and were impressed with the clean layout as well as the emphasis on photographic, film and art books, along with a good selection of fiction,poetry, and cult crit. et al. Brian, the owner, previously worked at Mercer St Books, and has assembled a first rate collection of very reasonably priced materials.
This is a terrific addition to a neighborhood already crawling with intelligent upscale people who can easily afford to keep an establishment of this quality in business for a long long time( we hope we hope we hope).
The emphasis on photography, by the way, reminds me again of the brilliant photographic bookstore Dashwood Books, open now a few years , which specializes in imports of wonderful (often signed) photographic works, and occupies a niche in the upper echelons of photographic book collecting, which has become a sport for the rich in the last few years.
A totally different and wonderful store where one views titles from Europe and Japan, and then can go down the street from the store at 33 Bond St to grab lunch at Il Buco,if his or her pocketbook can stand the denting.
Book Expo 2010
Contrary to reports received, BEA was not the disaster that some had expected it to be. Despite the fact that the show only rented the third floor at the Javits Center in New York,and took no space on floor 2, which in past years had housed the children's booksellers, miscellaneous vendors and the traditional autographing, and the fact that the main trade houses have stopped giving out proofs on anything resembling the scale they used to, there was enough pleasure for this reviewer to imbibe, particularly in the areas of small presses and university publishers.
Among the titles we are looking forward to reviewing are ,from Counterpoint, "Are We There Yet:A Zen Journal Through Space and Time by acclaimed naturalist and fiction writer Peter Maryo Matthiessen, who is never mentioned for, but probably deserves the Nobel Prize as much as any other American writer for his multifaried contributions.
Also from the same publisher is "The Etiquette of Freedom and the Practice of the Wild" by Gary Snyder and Jim Harrison.
Inner Traditions has a significant number of provocative titles, including The Pot Book,and"High Society: The Central Role of Mind-Altering Drugs in History,Science and Culture" by Mike Jay.
New Directions is publishing more Bolano- why not- but also bringing out new editions of Pound and Tennessee Williams,Julian Rios' inventive "The House of Ulysses" and a new collection of stories by vastly underappreciated 'Joseph McElroy, whose oeuvre ,from "A Smuggler's Bible" to "Women and Men" is remarkable.Kudos again to Barbara Epler and staff for another great fall list.
And then there is Odyssey House, the Hong-Kong based publisher of armchair and actual scholarly, beautifully illustrated travel books, encompassing wide-ranging discussions of history and culture on some of the most interesting remote areas of the world. Some of their fall new titles include the second edition of Afghanistan, a volume on Oman,Jewel of the Arabian Gulf,one on Iran,and "Asia Overland:Tales of Travel on the Trans-Siberian and Silk Road."This line of books is of the highest quality intellectually and aesthetically and I am looking forward to review allof the volumes.
More forthcoming titles in the next blog later this week.
This is a terrific addition to a neighborhood already crawling with intelligent upscale people who can easily afford to keep an establishment of this quality in business for a long long time( we hope we hope we hope).
The emphasis on photography, by the way, reminds me again of the brilliant photographic bookstore Dashwood Books, open now a few years , which specializes in imports of wonderful (often signed) photographic works, and occupies a niche in the upper echelons of photographic book collecting, which has become a sport for the rich in the last few years.
A totally different and wonderful store where one views titles from Europe and Japan, and then can go down the street from the store at 33 Bond St to grab lunch at Il Buco,if his or her pocketbook can stand the denting.
Book Expo 2010
Contrary to reports received, BEA was not the disaster that some had expected it to be. Despite the fact that the show only rented the third floor at the Javits Center in New York,and took no space on floor 2, which in past years had housed the children's booksellers, miscellaneous vendors and the traditional autographing, and the fact that the main trade houses have stopped giving out proofs on anything resembling the scale they used to, there was enough pleasure for this reviewer to imbibe, particularly in the areas of small presses and university publishers.
Among the titles we are looking forward to reviewing are ,from Counterpoint, "Are We There Yet:A Zen Journal Through Space and Time by acclaimed naturalist and fiction writer Peter Maryo Matthiessen, who is never mentioned for, but probably deserves the Nobel Prize as much as any other American writer for his multifaried contributions.
Also from the same publisher is "The Etiquette of Freedom and the Practice of the Wild" by Gary Snyder and Jim Harrison.
Inner Traditions has a significant number of provocative titles, including The Pot Book,and"High Society: The Central Role of Mind-Altering Drugs in History,Science and Culture" by Mike Jay.
New Directions is publishing more Bolano- why not- but also bringing out new editions of Pound and Tennessee Williams,Julian Rios' inventive "The House of Ulysses" and a new collection of stories by vastly underappreciated 'Joseph McElroy, whose oeuvre ,from "A Smuggler's Bible" to "Women and Men" is remarkable.Kudos again to Barbara Epler and staff for another great fall list.
And then there is Odyssey House, the Hong-Kong based publisher of armchair and actual scholarly, beautifully illustrated travel books, encompassing wide-ranging discussions of history and culture on some of the most interesting remote areas of the world. Some of their fall new titles include the second edition of Afghanistan, a volume on Oman,Jewel of the Arabian Gulf,one on Iran,and "Asia Overland:Tales of Travel on the Trans-Siberian and Silk Road."This line of books is of the highest quality intellectually and aesthetically and I am looking forward to review allof the volumes.
More forthcoming titles in the next blog later this week.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Insectopedia by Hugh Raffles
I had the privilege two weeks ago to spend Friday evening in Gowanus (between Carroll Gardens and Park Slope) at a book and film party sponsored by Cabinet Magazine for Insectopedia, the brilliant a-z encyclopedia of essays in Entomology by Hugh Raffles, who teaches anthropology at the New School and is the kind of omnivorous scholar we sadly see so little of today in publishing. The Insectopedia ,published by Pantheon Books, offers a diverse entertainment on subjects as unusual as locusts in the Sahel, sex and animal crush videos(just found legal by the US Supreme Court on first amendment grounds),Kafka, the communication systems of bees, and the treatment by the Nazis of Jews as "lice"and the Holocaust to be as merely a delousing of society.
The evening was punctuated by video and aural displays and by Mr. Raffles' presiding over one hour of filmstrips, going back to animated Russian strips in 1912 dealing with an adulterous affair between a grasshopper and and a beetle,an award -winning educational French filmstrip in the 1940's, where the producer pointedly speaks of those who"suck on others being sucked in turn by their own parasites".
Then there was an experimental Stan Brakhage strip on moths and light and a Catherine Chalmers piece "Safari' with stunning close-ups of the bug eat world of some of our favorite insects. (By this time, my thorax was really acting up)
Chalmers is also the award winning author of a book on cockroaches showing some of them executed as if on death row. A commentary on capital punishment from across the species as it were.
All in all, a great evening,one that leaves one even more fascinated to read Edward O. Wilson's latest non fiction tract on the Superorganisms, those societies of ants and others,which operate for the benefit of the social system over individual lives (and whose decision points in their daily lives are governed by algorithyms parallel to the self -organizing pronciples of computers, since what their genes prescribe is not a literal life cycle, but as the author puts it, a program that is more like a molecular operating manual by which the colony asserts itself)
Bugs and computers- a nice combination- cockroaches can survive a nuclear blast and computers are anaerobic....
Which brings me to the last four lines of the famous story by the late Edward Gorey- discussing the disappearance of young Millicent Frastley-
They stunned her, and stripped off her garments, and lastly
They stuffed her inside a kind of pod,
And then it was that Millicent Frastley
was sacrificed to the Insect God.
ps -don't put borax in my thorax!
The evening was punctuated by video and aural displays and by Mr. Raffles' presiding over one hour of filmstrips, going back to animated Russian strips in 1912 dealing with an adulterous affair between a grasshopper and and a beetle,an award -winning educational French filmstrip in the 1940's, where the producer pointedly speaks of those who"suck on others being sucked in turn by their own parasites".
Then there was an experimental Stan Brakhage strip on moths and light and a Catherine Chalmers piece "Safari' with stunning close-ups of the bug eat world of some of our favorite insects. (By this time, my thorax was really acting up)
Chalmers is also the award winning author of a book on cockroaches showing some of them executed as if on death row. A commentary on capital punishment from across the species as it were.
All in all, a great evening,one that leaves one even more fascinated to read Edward O. Wilson's latest non fiction tract on the Superorganisms, those societies of ants and others,which operate for the benefit of the social system over individual lives (and whose decision points in their daily lives are governed by algorithyms parallel to the self -organizing pronciples of computers, since what their genes prescribe is not a literal life cycle, but as the author puts it, a program that is more like a molecular operating manual by which the colony asserts itself)
Bugs and computers- a nice combination- cockroaches can survive a nuclear blast and computers are anaerobic....
Which brings me to the last four lines of the famous story by the late Edward Gorey- discussing the disappearance of young Millicent Frastley-
They stunned her, and stripped off her garments, and lastly
They stuffed her inside a kind of pod,
And then it was that Millicent Frastley
was sacrificed to the Insect God.
ps -don't put borax in my thorax!
Monday, May 10, 2010
Secret History,and PEN Forum
Secret Histories, by Justin Spring,is the first major biography of the academic/novelist turned tattoo artist and gay male erotic writer Samuel Steward(1909-1993).Steward was an exceptionally brilliant man who taught in several western colleges at a time when to disclose one's sexuality would have been cause for immediate termination. He wound up at Loyola University in Chicago where he had a good career at the same time he began an epistolary relationship with Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas that ultimately resulted in their meeting in Europe on several occasions;he also had a number of interesting liaisons, including with Thornton Wilder.
All this while writing several fairly well- received, if not blockbuster hit novels.Steward also worked closely with Alfred Kinsey on his sex research , but it was his early 1960's decision to abandon the world of academia for a postion as tattoo artist in one of the rougher sections of Chicago under the name Phil Sparrow, as well as his beginning to write erotic novels with an S& M theme under the name Phil Andros,while still publishing under the name Samuel Steward , that goes to the core of this book.
Although Steward in some sense resembled his literary hero J Huysmans, the author of Against the Grain,La-Bas, and several other richly ornate novels of 19h century French decadence,Steward himself ultimately rejected the decadent and mystical in favor ofa forthright, no- nonsense acknowledgement of his own sexuality. It was this confessional honesty and his search for the healing power of truth, believes the author, that sets him apart from others.
Steward died in semi-obscurity in a shabby overcrowded bungalow in Oakland, Californa.surrounded by vast quantities of material in boxes on the floor.,
This book should ideally be read in conjunction with the one volume introductory autobiographical work penned by Steward, and perhaps his Phil Andros novels.
The World PEN author festival concluded a few weeks ago, a marvellous assemblage of talent with only a few missing,because of volcanic ash.Unfortunately, one of our favorites, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, the great Gogolian Hungarian author,was not able to make the trip.
At a session on the Future of Reading after Twitter, blogs and Kindle, Sergei Sokolovskiy, A Russina poet/essayist, gave his own slant on just what the future holds for us. His POV: that 100 years from now humans may no longer be the dominant species on the planet.Instead, that distinction may belong to sapient bacteria, who as of this juncture, are not known for their reading habits.
NB As of this date, according to the latest sscientific criterai, bacteria occupy a larger portion of the biomass of the earth than we do.With a right-leaningand property -oriented Supreme Court, could they use the power of eminent domain to evict our unicellular friends from the biomass?
Don't think too long on this one.
All this while writing several fairly well- received, if not blockbuster hit novels.Steward also worked closely with Alfred Kinsey on his sex research , but it was his early 1960's decision to abandon the world of academia for a postion as tattoo artist in one of the rougher sections of Chicago under the name Phil Sparrow, as well as his beginning to write erotic novels with an S& M theme under the name Phil Andros,while still publishing under the name Samuel Steward , that goes to the core of this book.
Although Steward in some sense resembled his literary hero J Huysmans, the author of Against the Grain,La-Bas, and several other richly ornate novels of 19h century French decadence,Steward himself ultimately rejected the decadent and mystical in favor ofa forthright, no- nonsense acknowledgement of his own sexuality. It was this confessional honesty and his search for the healing power of truth, believes the author, that sets him apart from others.
Steward died in semi-obscurity in a shabby overcrowded bungalow in Oakland, Californa.surrounded by vast quantities of material in boxes on the floor.,
This book should ideally be read in conjunction with the one volume introductory autobiographical work penned by Steward, and perhaps his Phil Andros novels.
The World PEN author festival concluded a few weeks ago, a marvellous assemblage of talent with only a few missing,because of volcanic ash.Unfortunately, one of our favorites, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, the great Gogolian Hungarian author,was not able to make the trip.
At a session on the Future of Reading after Twitter, blogs and Kindle, Sergei Sokolovskiy, A Russina poet/essayist, gave his own slant on just what the future holds for us. His POV: that 100 years from now humans may no longer be the dominant species on the planet.Instead, that distinction may belong to sapient bacteria, who as of this juncture, are not known for their reading habits.
NB As of this date, according to the latest sscientific criterai, bacteria occupy a larger portion of the biomass of the earth than we do.With a right-leaningand property -oriented Supreme Court, could they use the power of eminent domain to evict our unicellular friends from the biomass?
Don't think too long on this one.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Charles Bowden,Lock-Picking, Slavoj Zizek, and Manuel Rivas
Charles Bowden, who lives in Tucson, a few miles from the Mexican border, and who writes, as one publicity piece pretty accurately puts it, about living a moral life in a culture of death, is a Thoreauian crank nature writer, essayist ,scribe of memoirs on the hazardous but beautiful life on the Mexican border and teller of true tales of drug- dealing and beautiful death in Chihuahua and Ciudad Juarez. Altogether a brilliant scribe of the dark side of life.
He has written several books on the southwest desert, a piece on Edward Abbey, numerous essays and now a multiple series on Juarez, culminating this year in Murder City, published by Holt and Dreamland, with black and white graphic drawings by Alice Leora Briggs, published by the University of Texas Press in Austin. He was recently in town to accept at an art gallery in Chelsea the Orion magazine award for book of the year, for Some of the Dead are Still Breathing, published in 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
In this book, there are a number of excellent essays, but my favorite is an essay called "Serpent" in which he describes his life with a blacktail rattlesnake named Beulah that coiled up one day and settled next to Bowden on his porch rocking chair.
"I am clumsy...she can see that with her eyes, though she hardly relies on sight.And I am warm... I become a shape with a field of temperatures of different intensities, one so finely felt that she can perfectly target any part of my body. And I am irrelevant unless I get too close- She will ignore me if I stay six feet away. She will ignore me if I become motionless for 180 seconds.
If I violate the rules of her culture, she will work through a sequence of four tactics. First, she wil pretend to be invisible and hope I do not see her.If that fails, she will try to flee.If that fails, she will rattle in hope of frightening me away. And finally, if I am completely ignorant of simple courtesy and get within a foot or so of her, she will attack me.
...She herself is cultured. In her lifetime, she will attack maybe thirty or forty times.She will never attack a member of her own species. She will never be cruel. She is incapable of evil."
This is a wonderful essay on, as Bowden puts it, a man trying to get outside the cage of his DNA by living with a snake.Highly recommended.
"A Casual Introduction to Lock-Picking" was the title of one of the workshops at the 4th Annual Anarchist Bookfair, held last week on the premises of the Judson Church in Greenwich Village, which has served as a beacon light for civil rights for almost two hundred years now. I missed this intriguing course, sandwiched between the usual offerings dealing with globalization, radical parenting,the politics of disaster and other choice offerings. In fact, I missed all the workshops and only managed to attend the bookfair itself, which some have described as a "good knock-off" of the annual San Francisco anarchist book event, although somewhat smaller in scope.But I was intrigued by the course description-which reads in part:
"We will.. explore the mechanical components of pin tumbler locks in order to develop
an understanding of how subtle mechanical imperfections in the meshing of the components can be manipulated so as to bypass the need for a key."
Whoever wrote this could graduate to the course catalogue at Oberlin or Swarthmore Colleges , to be sure, or certainly the Advanced program for a Masters Degree in Pickpocketing, said to be taught in several Southern Hemispheric port cities. And ,one might add,surely coming to our own semi-depressed Northern climes soon as well.
Slavoj Zizek is by now the most famous cultural critic and philosopher in the Western world. A native originally of Slovenia, he now divides his time between academic assignments in London and in Ljubljana. His writings are the most prolific in virtually any corner of the arts and aciences, barring only Joyce Carol Oates. And on top of that, to see him in person, this unreconstructed mix of Hegel, Marx and Jacques Lacan,is to watch an inferno of a mind in operation.
His books are worth the price alone for their sizzling and unexpectedly wide -ranging criques of film and the popular culture, let alone politics and religion. There's a new one out from Verso,Living in the End Times - and I have already made the plunge into its endlessly fascinating pages.
Manuel Rivas is Galicia's most famous novelist, and northwest Spain's candidate for some serious literary prizes. Three of his works of fiction, beginning with Carpenter's Pencil, a brilliant novel of the Spanish Civil War, and two other works containing much folkloric poetic content, have been published here by Overlook Press. But his latest-"Books Burn Badly", just out from Harvill Secker in London, has been almost uniformly praised as a masterpiece- with comparisons in brilliance to Joyce and Marquez- But here is a writer who combines skillful prose on the day the Falangists burned libraries in Galicia - August 19, 1936, and also executed Garcia Lorca- with a poetically brilliant style of writing on the peoples and life of urban and village Galicia.
Here is a sample:
"Things spoke and fell quiet.Here were two perceptions that made a picture or a poem special.One speaking of things.Capturing the speaking of things, their expansive aura,their meaning and translating it into the language of light or sounds.The other, the falling quiet of things.Their hiding.Their being absent. Their emptying.Their loss.Relating or relecting that was another shudder.The first caused a frontal shudder. The second, a lumbar tremor."
We'll have more to say on Rivas, but this is a writer still comparatively unknown in this country, although his writings have been translated into many languages.Pay him heed and be uncommonly rewarded-the latest book is just delicious.
He has written several books on the southwest desert, a piece on Edward Abbey, numerous essays and now a multiple series on Juarez, culminating this year in Murder City, published by Holt and Dreamland, with black and white graphic drawings by Alice Leora Briggs, published by the University of Texas Press in Austin. He was recently in town to accept at an art gallery in Chelsea the Orion magazine award for book of the year, for Some of the Dead are Still Breathing, published in 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
In this book, there are a number of excellent essays, but my favorite is an essay called "Serpent" in which he describes his life with a blacktail rattlesnake named Beulah that coiled up one day and settled next to Bowden on his porch rocking chair.
"I am clumsy...she can see that with her eyes, though she hardly relies on sight.And I am warm... I become a shape with a field of temperatures of different intensities, one so finely felt that she can perfectly target any part of my body. And I am irrelevant unless I get too close- She will ignore me if I stay six feet away. She will ignore me if I become motionless for 180 seconds.
If I violate the rules of her culture, she will work through a sequence of four tactics. First, she wil pretend to be invisible and hope I do not see her.If that fails, she will try to flee.If that fails, she will rattle in hope of frightening me away. And finally, if I am completely ignorant of simple courtesy and get within a foot or so of her, she will attack me.
...She herself is cultured. In her lifetime, she will attack maybe thirty or forty times.She will never attack a member of her own species. She will never be cruel. She is incapable of evil."
This is a wonderful essay on, as Bowden puts it, a man trying to get outside the cage of his DNA by living with a snake.Highly recommended.
"A Casual Introduction to Lock-Picking" was the title of one of the workshops at the 4th Annual Anarchist Bookfair, held last week on the premises of the Judson Church in Greenwich Village, which has served as a beacon light for civil rights for almost two hundred years now. I missed this intriguing course, sandwiched between the usual offerings dealing with globalization, radical parenting,the politics of disaster and other choice offerings. In fact, I missed all the workshops and only managed to attend the bookfair itself, which some have described as a "good knock-off" of the annual San Francisco anarchist book event, although somewhat smaller in scope.But I was intrigued by the course description-which reads in part:
"We will.. explore the mechanical components of pin tumbler locks in order to develop
an understanding of how subtle mechanical imperfections in the meshing of the components can be manipulated so as to bypass the need for a key."
Whoever wrote this could graduate to the course catalogue at Oberlin or Swarthmore Colleges , to be sure, or certainly the Advanced program for a Masters Degree in Pickpocketing, said to be taught in several Southern Hemispheric port cities. And ,one might add,surely coming to our own semi-depressed Northern climes soon as well.
Slavoj Zizek is by now the most famous cultural critic and philosopher in the Western world. A native originally of Slovenia, he now divides his time between academic assignments in London and in Ljubljana. His writings are the most prolific in virtually any corner of the arts and aciences, barring only Joyce Carol Oates. And on top of that, to see him in person, this unreconstructed mix of Hegel, Marx and Jacques Lacan,is to watch an inferno of a mind in operation.
His books are worth the price alone for their sizzling and unexpectedly wide -ranging criques of film and the popular culture, let alone politics and religion. There's a new one out from Verso,Living in the End Times - and I have already made the plunge into its endlessly fascinating pages.
Manuel Rivas is Galicia's most famous novelist, and northwest Spain's candidate for some serious literary prizes. Three of his works of fiction, beginning with Carpenter's Pencil, a brilliant novel of the Spanish Civil War, and two other works containing much folkloric poetic content, have been published here by Overlook Press. But his latest-"Books Burn Badly", just out from Harvill Secker in London, has been almost uniformly praised as a masterpiece- with comparisons in brilliance to Joyce and Marquez- But here is a writer who combines skillful prose on the day the Falangists burned libraries in Galicia - August 19, 1936, and also executed Garcia Lorca- with a poetically brilliant style of writing on the peoples and life of urban and village Galicia.
Here is a sample:
"Things spoke and fell quiet.Here were two perceptions that made a picture or a poem special.One speaking of things.Capturing the speaking of things, their expansive aura,their meaning and translating it into the language of light or sounds.The other, the falling quiet of things.Their hiding.Their being absent. Their emptying.Their loss.Relating or relecting that was another shudder.The first caused a frontal shudder. The second, a lumbar tremor."
We'll have more to say on Rivas, but this is a writer still comparatively unknown in this country, although his writings have been translated into many languages.Pay him heed and be uncommonly rewarded-the latest book is just delicious.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
David Remnick, Robert Coover and Charles Bowden
Lots to report- David Remnick's THE BRIDGE:THE LIFE AND RISE OF BARACK OBAMA" is the best political biography out perhaps since Robert Caro's trilogy(so far) on Lyndon Johnson. It traces the history of our 44th President up to his election, and is an in-depth study of how this uniquely talented individual created an ethnic identity for himself as well as political roots in Chicago out of a background as the product of an absent African father and somewhat absent but loving white mother, growing up in the more racially tolerant community of Hawaii.This biography may not please his most unthinking followers or detractors, because it is so well- researched,nuanced and well written. But it conveys the first fuller picture of Obama's youth and college and law school experience which were only touched upon in the famous DREAMS FROM MY FATHER.
Remnick's book, which begins with Selma, Alabama, and Obama's speech there in 2007, is filled with flashbacks and in depth analysis of the civil rights struggle as well as America's continuing journey to make itself a "more perfect union", as our President is given to say from time to time.
Remnick wrote it, amazingly, in only one year while continuing as editor of the New Yorker- a tribute,given all the interviewing(the ground for which was laid by his duly acknowledged researchers)and writing that had to be done to produce a 600 page text.
I have very few gripes about this tome- it replaced 5 equally worthy literary offerings I have been reading-and you know how good a book The Bridge is when you awaken at 330 am on the weekend, and push the other volumes on your king sized bed closer to the floor, grab the eponymous volume in question and bite off another 50 or so pages before drooling back to sleep.
Hardly any gripes here- except the use of "conspiracy theory' as an unthinking term to tarnish the Daniel Corsi's(Obamanation) of the world as well as the Jeremiah Wrights(AIDS was caused by the Govt asa plot against blacks)
Let's be careful we do not succumb to putting some of the other events in history, which were real conspiracies,like the Gulf of Tonkin, Watergate, and the Kennedy assassination, (guilt for the latter now having admitted by three dead Mafia leaders and in E Howard Hunt's confession)-- in the same basket with the loony tunes space aliens or Glenn-Beck invented stuff. As Peter Dale Scott points out in his epochal study- Deep Politics- there is a level of parapolitical activity that goes on in politics that the media does not prefer to report, and even less so these days given the lack of real investigative reporting and the conversion of TV newschannels into 24 hour tabloid entertainment channels.
But overall, kudos for Mr Remnick, though his magazine would be the last to blow the lid off the truth of the seamiest undersides of American politics, as compared to its continued good reporting but from the inside by the well-motivated but highly connected Sy Hershes of the world.
Robert Coover, who has now published 18 or 19 novels, one loses count, has scribed another gem of black humor- NOIR- in which this sage Professor of Lit at Brown University and master of the post-modern send-up, having skewered westerns in Ghost Town, now does the favor for noir mysteries.It's a terrific read. Sample this- when the endangered private eye,one Mr Noir,(one can't use "" more than once in any piece) observes two yakuza opponents, fighting not with bullets but for tattoo space with the body of a prostitute being used as a message board and one tattoo being overwritten by another-
Or check out this passage where the alky dick blames all his troubles on the amorphous City-and how She,that targeted anonymous urban entity counterattacks:
"So whenever I got juiced,I'd start railing crazily at her,calling her every dirty name I could think of at the top of my voice so everyone would know.'.....The one night I stumbled over a loosened manhole cover and fell and skinned my nose and that threw me into a violent rage and I strted screaming at her from there where I was lying.You did that on purpose! I yelled.There were noxious vapors belching out of the hole with the filthy cover, so along with all the other filthy things I called her,I cussed her out as a fucking steaming bottomless cunt,and as soon as I said that I knew I had the hots for her,and I knew she was hot for me.That sounds crazy, it was crazy, I WAS crazy, I've said that.But I had to have her and I knew she wanted it.It was all I could think about,to the extent I could think about anything at all.
Come and get me big boy, I seemed to hear her say that. But how do you fuck a city?
The only thing I could come up with was to jerk off over a subway entrance,but when I tried to do that it just made her madder.Maybe she felt insulted or demeaned or just not satisfied,but after that she really got vicious,.Mean streets?? Until then I had no idea.What before had been a subtle sleight of hand became more like an out-of-control-merry-go-round.Whenever I stood up, I got knocked down again.The streets and sidewalks buckled and rolled like a storm at sea, pitched me round,reared up and smacked me in the face.Who knows, maybe I was driving her wild with desire and those were just love commotions of a kind,but they were killing me and I no longer had amorous ambitions.Stroking her when I was down seemed to help,but whenever I tried to stand, she started in on me again.Ever get hit by a runaway building?You don't want that to happen to you.That's when I knew I had to get off the sauce."
Of course, this is not a totally uncommon theme- look at the cover of Rem Koolhaas' Delirious New York, with two of the City's skyscrapers going to bed with each other.Or Art Spiegelman's City of Terror trading cards, enclosed with Raw Magazine no2, with the latest installmentthen published of MAUS, one of which wasa drawing of a man entitled Chased by Buidings.Or consider the bizarre piece I once read in the tabloid Weekly World News, where an Australian chap was alleged to have sex with a manhole cover- because he found the city life so maddeningly erotic. Well there!
This is a theme worthy of more exploration. When I was a little boy- and some say I still am- I ventured forth into the City on the train from the burbs, and was terrified the tallest buildings would fall on me.Little did I know......
This writing is all reminiscent of the great rant, or as it was known in the 19th century, "brag' a la Davy Crockett and the river men of the Mississippi as well as Walt Whitman, that is echoed in The Public Burning of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Coover's brillaint send up- written in the late 1970's- of our would-be American Empire(how we fail to listen to our wisest voices).
In that tome, which I had the distinct pleasure of reading for libel pre-publication, the main character is a literary then VP Richard Nixon, and other chaptersare written by Time Magazine as The National Poet laureate et al. Check this passge out from our own beloved symbol Uncle Sam, recast as Sam Slick the Yankee Pedlar:
"Who-Who-Whoop-Who'll come gouge with me-who'll come bite with me?In the name of the Great Jehovah,and the Continental Congress,I have passed the Rubicon, sink or swim live or die,survive or perish,I'm in for a fight,I'll go to my death in a fight,-..You hear me over there, you washed-up varmints?This is the hope of the world talking to you-I am Sam Slick the Yankee Pedlar- I can ride on a flash of lightnin',catch a thunderbolt in my fist,swallow[savages] whole,raw or cooked,slip without a scratch down a honey locust,whup my weight in wildcats and redcoats,squeeze blood out of a turnip and cold cash out of a parson,and out-inscrutabulize the heathen Chinee-...Yuppee- I'm wild and woolly and full'a fleas,never been curried beneath the knees,so if you want to avoid foreign collision you better abandon the ocean,women and children first!For we hold these truths to be self-evident-that God helps them what helps themselves,it's a mere matter of marchin',that idleness is emptiness and he who lives on hope will die with his foot in his mouth,that no nation was ever ruint by trade,and that nothin' is sartin' but death, taxes,God's glowin' Covenant,enlightened self-interest,certain unalienated rights,and woods woods woods as far as the world extends."
Coover is a master writer. Read his books, all of them!
Stay tuned in the next day or so for a discussion of the great Charles Bowden , Tucson- based Thoreauian crank chronicler of the Southwest Desert and the Mexican border, with all its deaths and drugs thrown in. A great naturalist and essayist as well.
Remnick's book, which begins with Selma, Alabama, and Obama's speech there in 2007, is filled with flashbacks and in depth analysis of the civil rights struggle as well as America's continuing journey to make itself a "more perfect union", as our President is given to say from time to time.
Remnick wrote it, amazingly, in only one year while continuing as editor of the New Yorker- a tribute,given all the interviewing(the ground for which was laid by his duly acknowledged researchers)and writing that had to be done to produce a 600 page text.
I have very few gripes about this tome- it replaced 5 equally worthy literary offerings I have been reading-and you know how good a book The Bridge is when you awaken at 330 am on the weekend, and push the other volumes on your king sized bed closer to the floor, grab the eponymous volume in question and bite off another 50 or so pages before drooling back to sleep.
Hardly any gripes here- except the use of "conspiracy theory' as an unthinking term to tarnish the Daniel Corsi's(Obamanation) of the world as well as the Jeremiah Wrights(AIDS was caused by the Govt asa plot against blacks)
Let's be careful we do not succumb to putting some of the other events in history, which were real conspiracies,like the Gulf of Tonkin, Watergate, and the Kennedy assassination, (guilt for the latter now having admitted by three dead Mafia leaders and in E Howard Hunt's confession)-- in the same basket with the loony tunes space aliens or Glenn-Beck invented stuff. As Peter Dale Scott points out in his epochal study- Deep Politics- there is a level of parapolitical activity that goes on in politics that the media does not prefer to report, and even less so these days given the lack of real investigative reporting and the conversion of TV newschannels into 24 hour tabloid entertainment channels.
But overall, kudos for Mr Remnick, though his magazine would be the last to blow the lid off the truth of the seamiest undersides of American politics, as compared to its continued good reporting but from the inside by the well-motivated but highly connected Sy Hershes of the world.
Robert Coover, who has now published 18 or 19 novels, one loses count, has scribed another gem of black humor- NOIR- in which this sage Professor of Lit at Brown University and master of the post-modern send-up, having skewered westerns in Ghost Town, now does the favor for noir mysteries.It's a terrific read. Sample this- when the endangered private eye,one Mr Noir,(one can't use "" more than once in any piece) observes two yakuza opponents, fighting not with bullets but for tattoo space with the body of a prostitute being used as a message board and one tattoo being overwritten by another-
Or check out this passage where the alky dick blames all his troubles on the amorphous City-and how She,that targeted anonymous urban entity counterattacks:
"So whenever I got juiced,I'd start railing crazily at her,calling her every dirty name I could think of at the top of my voice so everyone would know.'.....The one night I stumbled over a loosened manhole cover and fell and skinned my nose and that threw me into a violent rage and I strted screaming at her from there where I was lying.You did that on purpose! I yelled.There were noxious vapors belching out of the hole with the filthy cover, so along with all the other filthy things I called her,I cussed her out as a fucking steaming bottomless cunt,and as soon as I said that I knew I had the hots for her,and I knew she was hot for me.That sounds crazy, it was crazy, I WAS crazy, I've said that.But I had to have her and I knew she wanted it.It was all I could think about,to the extent I could think about anything at all.
Come and get me big boy, I seemed to hear her say that. But how do you fuck a city?
The only thing I could come up with was to jerk off over a subway entrance,but when I tried to do that it just made her madder.Maybe she felt insulted or demeaned or just not satisfied,but after that she really got vicious,.Mean streets?? Until then I had no idea.What before had been a subtle sleight of hand became more like an out-of-control-merry-go-round.Whenever I stood up, I got knocked down again.The streets and sidewalks buckled and rolled like a storm at sea, pitched me round,reared up and smacked me in the face.Who knows, maybe I was driving her wild with desire and those were just love commotions of a kind,but they were killing me and I no longer had amorous ambitions.Stroking her when I was down seemed to help,but whenever I tried to stand, she started in on me again.Ever get hit by a runaway building?You don't want that to happen to you.That's when I knew I had to get off the sauce."
Of course, this is not a totally uncommon theme- look at the cover of Rem Koolhaas' Delirious New York, with two of the City's skyscrapers going to bed with each other.Or Art Spiegelman's City of Terror trading cards, enclosed with Raw Magazine no2, with the latest installmentthen published of MAUS, one of which wasa drawing of a man entitled Chased by Buidings.Or consider the bizarre piece I once read in the tabloid Weekly World News, where an Australian chap was alleged to have sex with a manhole cover- because he found the city life so maddeningly erotic. Well there!
This is a theme worthy of more exploration. When I was a little boy- and some say I still am- I ventured forth into the City on the train from the burbs, and was terrified the tallest buildings would fall on me.Little did I know......
This writing is all reminiscent of the great rant, or as it was known in the 19th century, "brag' a la Davy Crockett and the river men of the Mississippi as well as Walt Whitman, that is echoed in The Public Burning of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Coover's brillaint send up- written in the late 1970's- of our would-be American Empire(how we fail to listen to our wisest voices).
In that tome, which I had the distinct pleasure of reading for libel pre-publication, the main character is a literary then VP Richard Nixon, and other chaptersare written by Time Magazine as The National Poet laureate et al. Check this passge out from our own beloved symbol Uncle Sam, recast as Sam Slick the Yankee Pedlar:
"Who-Who-Whoop-Who'll come gouge with me-who'll come bite with me?In the name of the Great Jehovah,and the Continental Congress,I have passed the Rubicon, sink or swim live or die,survive or perish,I'm in for a fight,I'll go to my death in a fight,-..You hear me over there, you washed-up varmints?This is the hope of the world talking to you-I am Sam Slick the Yankee Pedlar- I can ride on a flash of lightnin',catch a thunderbolt in my fist,swallow[savages] whole,raw or cooked,slip without a scratch down a honey locust,whup my weight in wildcats and redcoats,squeeze blood out of a turnip and cold cash out of a parson,and out-inscrutabulize the heathen Chinee-...Yuppee- I'm wild and woolly and full'a fleas,never been curried beneath the knees,so if you want to avoid foreign collision you better abandon the ocean,women and children first!For we hold these truths to be self-evident-that God helps them what helps themselves,it's a mere matter of marchin',that idleness is emptiness and he who lives on hope will die with his foot in his mouth,that no nation was ever ruint by trade,and that nothin' is sartin' but death, taxes,God's glowin' Covenant,enlightened self-interest,certain unalienated rights,and woods woods woods as far as the world extends."
Coover is a master writer. Read his books, all of them!
Stay tuned in the next day or so for a discussion of the great Charles Bowden , Tucson- based Thoreauian crank chronicler of the Southwest Desert and the Mexican border, with all its deaths and drugs thrown in. A great naturalist and essayist as well.
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Marina Abramovic;Jose Carlos Somoza
Marina Abramovic, the 63 year-old Serbian born performance artist, who has been at the vanguard of this form of conceptual art,will have the first MOMA retrospective dedicated to a single performance artist, commencing March 14.
Abramovic, who was born the daughter of two war heroes in Yugoslavia, has been working her magic for 40 years now; her performances often in various states of undress, have varied from a 6 hour session in Naples-"Rhythm 0", in which she placed 72 objects upon a table in a Naples art gallery, including a gun loaded with one bullet, an axe and a knife, and stated she would resist nothing. This performance reprised and extended Yoko Ono's in 1964 when as a member of the avant- garde group Fluxus, she let others cut away her clothes.It ended ,miraculously, with the artist safe but witha lot of gray hairs, and after a close call when one person put the gun in her hand and tried to manipulate her fingers.
Abramovic had a partner Ulay(Uwe Laysiepen) for many years and to whom she appeared at times to be a karmic and Tantric twin. They ended their professional and personal relationship in 1988 by each starting a solitary walk at opposite ends of the Great Wall in China and months later meeting in the middle.
Abramovic, represented in NY by the Sean Kelly Gallery, where she has perfomed in recent years, also did a show at the Guggenheim In November 2005, reprising seven famous works of herself and others over a two week period.
It was entitled 7 Easy Pieces, and was mind blowung, to put it mildly.
Two new books are being published in connection with the show at MOMA to add to the already extensive oeuvre on Ms Abramovic- a biography of her by James Westcott, who was allowed access to her archives ,and the MOMA book, The Artist is Present, a wonderful series of essays , photos of performances, and descriptions by Abramovic, accompanied by an audio CD by the artist.
Marina Abramovic is an amazing artist of iron discipline and questing intelligence, Questioned about whether, in the aftermath of her divorce from her third husband, she would remarry, she replied, in a NYT piece this week, no never--my life is my life's work "I am too much woman for one man."
Abramovic will be present each day for the MOMA show seated at a table at which presumably members of the audience may wish to sit across from her for periods of time. Both the books and the MOMA exhibition are highly recommended,it goes without saying.
On a related subject, Jose Carlos Somoza is a Cuban born resident of Spain and a psychiatrist. He has written several mystery novels, two of which, including the Athenian Murders , have been punlished here.
His book "The Art of Murder", however, published in English only in the UK, is an astounding meditation on art and life. It concerns a form of art he calls hyperdramatism,in which actual human beings are the artworks themselves, and are painted and installed in galleries and in the homes of owners. They receive very high pay for a life of controlled non-movement that seems at first blush to be a variant of salvery. There are also those human ornaments, those who serve as food trays or lamps, sometimes illegally, and debauched affairs termed "art shocks" where the private guests of the owner and the subject of the painting may interact in a fashion that can be quite depraved if not dangerous.
The book is a decent thriller, but even more so, an exquisite meditation on the role of art and commerce ,if not exploitation, as well as the interface between human values and those of the governing aesthetic, especially where life and death issues are literally involved. What does it matter some would muse if the art survives-and the subject perishes..?
An amazingly provocative read.
Abramovic, who was born the daughter of two war heroes in Yugoslavia, has been working her magic for 40 years now; her performances often in various states of undress, have varied from a 6 hour session in Naples-"Rhythm 0", in which she placed 72 objects upon a table in a Naples art gallery, including a gun loaded with one bullet, an axe and a knife, and stated she would resist nothing. This performance reprised and extended Yoko Ono's in 1964 when as a member of the avant- garde group Fluxus, she let others cut away her clothes.It ended ,miraculously, with the artist safe but witha lot of gray hairs, and after a close call when one person put the gun in her hand and tried to manipulate her fingers.
Abramovic had a partner Ulay(Uwe Laysiepen) for many years and to whom she appeared at times to be a karmic and Tantric twin. They ended their professional and personal relationship in 1988 by each starting a solitary walk at opposite ends of the Great Wall in China and months later meeting in the middle.
Abramovic, represented in NY by the Sean Kelly Gallery, where she has perfomed in recent years, also did a show at the Guggenheim In November 2005, reprising seven famous works of herself and others over a two week period.
It was entitled 7 Easy Pieces, and was mind blowung, to put it mildly.
Two new books are being published in connection with the show at MOMA to add to the already extensive oeuvre on Ms Abramovic- a biography of her by James Westcott, who was allowed access to her archives ,and the MOMA book, The Artist is Present, a wonderful series of essays , photos of performances, and descriptions by Abramovic, accompanied by an audio CD by the artist.
Marina Abramovic is an amazing artist of iron discipline and questing intelligence, Questioned about whether, in the aftermath of her divorce from her third husband, she would remarry, she replied, in a NYT piece this week, no never--my life is my life's work "I am too much woman for one man."
Abramovic will be present each day for the MOMA show seated at a table at which presumably members of the audience may wish to sit across from her for periods of time. Both the books and the MOMA exhibition are highly recommended,it goes without saying.
On a related subject, Jose Carlos Somoza is a Cuban born resident of Spain and a psychiatrist. He has written several mystery novels, two of which, including the Athenian Murders , have been punlished here.
His book "The Art of Murder", however, published in English only in the UK, is an astounding meditation on art and life. It concerns a form of art he calls hyperdramatism,in which actual human beings are the artworks themselves, and are painted and installed in galleries and in the homes of owners. They receive very high pay for a life of controlled non-movement that seems at first blush to be a variant of salvery. There are also those human ornaments, those who serve as food trays or lamps, sometimes illegally, and debauched affairs termed "art shocks" where the private guests of the owner and the subject of the painting may interact in a fashion that can be quite depraved if not dangerous.
The book is a decent thriller, but even more so, an exquisite meditation on the role of art and commerce ,if not exploitation, as well as the interface between human values and those of the governing aesthetic, especially where life and death issues are literally involved. What does it matter some would muse if the art survives-and the subject perishes..?
An amazingly provocative read.
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