I came across a mention of this book after I finished Cruddy, more specifically a mention of the story about Barry’s relationship with Ira Glass entitled “Head Lice and My Worst Boyfriend.” The hilarity potential was irresistible.
One Hundred Demons was inspired by a Zen painting exercise; each of the stories represents some kind of demon she’s battled with, usually imbued with the sort of nostalgic reflection that brings the word “poignant” to mind. Except Barry’s raucous sense of humor keeps the cloying possibility under control.
There’s something strangely straightforward and matter-of-fact about this story of a girl who grows up on an island in Maine and then takes an internship in New York where she experiences her “sexual awakening” (as a back-cover quote describes it). In many books there are moments that feel vaguely out of context for either the character or the progression of the storyline, but this book seems to be a string of such events.
The protagonist Miranda lives a very sheltered life and when she does start to break out of it, she approaches everything with an odd, blasé manner. I can’t even it see it as an effective, detached Mainer attitude. It just feels unbelievable, though the story itself has a lot of potential as almost memoir-style fiction. Or maybe it’s just, as this review in the Washington Post describes it, a “post-gay” novel where a girl can come out, and it’s no big whoop.
The story is also fraught with strange continuity awkwardness. Like describing the characters in a van taking the exit off the highway when they were never placed on the highway. I found myself stopping to skim back a few times, feeling like I must have missed a paragraph somewhere. Wait, there’s a fish tank? Why are they going to look at a fish tank?
I’m not totally sure about the title either, it doesn’t seem to fit into Miranda’s voice or the context of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The four section titles refer to his description of the four ages of the world’s development, each one bringing more problems and grief to mankind. The metaphor doesn’t even fit.
I guess that’s what weirds me out about it all. Miranda is a teenager without a hint of angst.
In my attempts to make full use of the library, I often forget to hunt out the nice art books I’d buy if I had that much money to throw around and the strength to haul the hefty tomes around every time I move house. Cartier-Bresson is perhaps the photographer I am most likely to browse.
This book was published on the occasion of an exhibition organized by Agnès Sire of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris, which also came to the International Center of Photography in New York:
At the beginning of World War II, Cartier-Bresson was captured and held in a German prisoner of war camp for three years before he escaped in 1943. To the outside world, Cartier-Bresson was presumed dead, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York was preparing a memorial exhibition (which ultimately took place in 1947). When Cartier-Bresson emerged, alive, he joined the efforts to assemble this retrospective. He selected and personally printed over 300 examples of his best works—including many that had never printed before. Upon his arrival in New York in April 1946, he bought a scrapbook into which he meticulously glued all the prints in chronological order.
Though the actual scrapbook was falling apart and mostly dismantled in the 1990s, a few of the original pages were kept, with their browned pages and handwritten negative numbers. Sire’s essay questions why Cartier-Bresson’s photos of the Liberation of Paris were not included in the scrapbook without a definite answer. Cartier-Bresson himself didn’t come across them again until years later
I didn’t expect this book to be quite as violent as it is. Yet somehow the teenage heroine’s strange sense of humor and the dark, smudgy illustrations make it seem like no big deal. This is one of those stories that progresses in the present while skipping back to the past, maintaining two plot lines that come together near the end seamlessly.
I first came across Kilgallen’s work in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, though I didn’t note her name at the time. It was a somewhat unexciting show, and the Village Voice referred to her piece as “a rare high point.” It wasn’t until a year or so later than her name came up again and I put them together.
This book documented a retrospective exhibition at REDCAT two years ago, but I just came across it recently. The installations unfortunately lose much of their impact on the small pages, but the sketchbook studies and most of the paintings are well-suited to the intimate format. Interspersed between the art are several essays and interviews printed in gray and red on creamy uncoated paper. I especially love her folky, hand-drawn typography.
