Just about a year ago, I got less than a hundred pages into The Savage Detectives before I could go no further (and turned to Valley of the Dolls as a cleanser). Initially I didn't think I'd follow up on a suggestion to try this novella instead, but it wound up there on my hold list.
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—Read more…Although photography generates works that can be called art — it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure — photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made. Out of language, one can make scientific discourse, bureaucratic memoranda, love letters, grocery lists, and Balzac's Paris. Out of photography, one can make passport pictures, weather photographs, pornographic pictures, X-rays, wedding pictures, and Atget's Paris.
Maybe you saw these when they were posted as Maira Kalman's blog on nytimes.com and now it's only available as this book, which is not such a bad thing. It's kind of a comic of paintings while also somewhat of a general elegy on the finiteness of life. People who have died are a recurring theme; even some of the people she mentions visiting back in 2006 have since passed on — Louise Bourgeois, Helen Levitt. But her sense of humor particularly tickles me. I read half of it before bed and the rest with breakfast.
—Read more…![Image of No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage's 4'33" (Icons of America)](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51IYlCzsmwL._SL160_.jpg "No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage's 4'33" (Icons of America)")
—Read more…John Cage's 4'33" is one of the most misunderstood pieces of music ever written and yet, at times, one of the the avant-garde's best understood as well. Many presume that the piece's purpose was deliberate provocation, an attempt to insult, or get a reaction from, the audience. For others, though, it was a logical turning point to which other musical developments had inevitably led, and from which new ones would spring.
The gorgeous art in this collection of stories would make this worth checking out on its own, but the stories are at times vaguely unsettling, examining the fantastically surreal edges of an otherwise banal world, while also remaining playful. In the end, it's something kids would find entertaining, while adults may more appreciate the darker elements.
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A memoir for anyone who gets a little romantic about New York City in the 1960s and 1970s, Smith sketches out her early years in the city and her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe. Early on they were lovers, but for most of their time together (and up until Mapplethorpe's death from AIDS in 1989), they had what could be called an artistic partnership. They shared their early, struggling years, both knowing they wanted to be artists but not knowing exactly how to go about it.
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After Anne Carson won me over at her Nox reading, I finally put this collection of poetry and essays on hold. It seems like several people have noted it as their favorite volume of hers. Right now I was drawn more to her essays than the various sections of verse, especially the two pilgrammages within "The Anthropology of Water." But there was also this afterword to "Canicula di Anna":
—Read more…I don't read many books concerning web design since the web is always changing and often I can find out what I need to know straight from the source, which seems more appropriate anyway. But A List Apart is one of the best (and most attractive) resources I refer to online, and this is their first printed piece, published under the moniker A Book Apart.
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It has been quite a long time since I read any James Baldwin, which seems like a pretty serious oversight suddenly. This may not be one of his best novels, but I liked it more than Mario Puzo did in his review for the New York Times when the book was published in 1968.
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—Read more…I wanted to fill my elegy with light of all kinds. But death makes us stingy.
