Bookforum.com

print • June/July/Aug 2014

Post Modern

How Ray Johnson’s contrarian sensibility inspired mail art • Albert Mobilio

From our current vantage, it’s not hard to acknowledge that one of the presiding spirits of early-twenty-first-century art is Ray Johnson’s. Collagist, painter, poet, and the originator of mail art, Johnson took up the appropriative strategies of Marcel Duchamp and Jasper Johns, infused them with John Cage’s ideas about Zen and chance, and energized the mix with his own brand of deadpan Conceptualism. The art he made beginning in the early 1950s until his death in 1995 purposefully merged artist, artmaking, and art object in ways that were once disquieting but are now considered routine. The

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print • June/July/Aug 2014

The Pleasure of the Text

Hervé Guibert’s unbridled eroticism • Wayne Koestenbaum

In a somber essay I wrote in 1989 and haven’t reread in twenty-five years, a piece whose heavyhearted title was “Speaking in the Shadow of AIDS,” I concluded: “The motive behind this brief inquiry into AIDS and language has been an attempt, perhaps immodest, to mold words into something stainless. AIDS has made me watch my speech, as if my words were a second, more easily monitored body, less liable than the first to the whimsy of a virus. . . . Bodies have always wanted only one thing, to be aimless: or so I say, knowing that bodies, and always, and aimless, are among the most seductive, and

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print • June/July/Aug 2014

Hannah Höch

Shelley Rice

ARTIST HANNAH H�–CH began clipping and assembling pictures when she was a child, and the practice of placing different, even clashing, images next to one another persisted into her adult work—giving Dada one of its most enduring techniques. There’s a fascinating glimpse into her process in 1934’s Album, a scrapbook of media images that Höch used as source material for her photomontages, much of which is reproduced in this new monograph published to coincide with an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery. On one black-and-white spread, we see a jarring variety of found photographs: an aerial view

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print • June/July/Aug 2014

Seeing Stars

James Harvey’s ode to screen mystique • Melissa Anderson

Not all stars have star presence, and those with star presence don’t always become stars. It’s easier to quantify stardom—through box-office receipts, salary per picture, dressing-room size—than it is to qualify star presence. Richard Dyer, the British scholar who helped establish star studies roughly thirty years ago, helped pin down this elusive, almost ineffable term when he wrote, with bracing simplicity, in 1993, “Stars are things that shine brightly in the darkness.” But even the more useful, concrete descriptors of star presence that Dyer’s formulation points to—luminosity, transcendence—are

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print • June/July/Aug 2014

Saul Leiter: Early Black and White

Albert Mobilio

UNTIL RECENTLY, Saul Leiter was rarely named among the first rank of photographers (Garry Winogrand, Helen Levitt, Weegee) who roamed New York’s streets recording the extraordinary ordinariness of life in the big city. When he died last fall at the age of eighty-nine, notice had just begun to be paid—exhibitions and books were followed by Tomas Leach’s well-received documentary, In No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter. The photographer’s relative obscurity was owed, in part, to his inclinations—in the film, Leiter asks, “What makes anyone think that I’m any good? I’m not carried

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print • June/July/Aug 2014

Tower of Song

A new biography retraces Leonard Cohen’s longings for the flesh and spirit • Rhett Miller

“So what is the prophet Cohen telling us? And why do we listen so intently?” Liel Leibovitz asks at the outset of A Broken Hallelujah, his moving portrait of the songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen. The author pursues the answers to these questions with the diligence and reverence of a religious scholar. Thank God. But Leibovitz recognizes that Cohen deserves more than mere rock biography, and so he structures A Broken Hallelujah around the premise that his subject is, indeed, a modern-day prophet.

Leibovitz’s account abounds with proof of this assertion, even as it charts the many other personae

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print • June/July/Aug 2014

Unchained Melody

An engaging memoir sketches the rediscovery of a lapsed musical passion • Robin Marantz Henig

If I chose to look at my life through a particularly self-critical lens, my personal narrative would boil down to the story of a woman who spent her entire adulthood trying to get good at something, anything. Beginning in my twenties and with no noticeable talent besides writing, I took classes in a string of leisure-time activities that I hoped would turn into something to love. I have no natural grace, but I tried clogging, then folk dancing, then swing dancing, then tap. I’m not especially artistic, but I took pottery classes and quilting classes. I tried learning Spanish, I tried learning

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review • May 28, 2014

Beowulf translated by J. R. Tolkien

Joan Acocella

The plot is simple and exalted. Beowulf is a prince of the Geats, a tribe living in what is now southern Sweden. He is peerlessly noble, brave, and strong. Each of his hands has a grip equal to that of thirty men. He is alone in the world; he was an orphan, and he never acquires a wife or children. Partly for that reason—because he has no one to behave toward in an intimate way—he has no real psychology.

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review • May 23, 2014

Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China by Leta Hong Fincher

Audrea Lim

In China, any unmarried woman over twenty-seven is considered a spinster, or a “leftover woman,” to translate the Chinese phrase more literally. “Do Leftover Women Really Deserve Our Sympathy?” asked the headline of an article that went up on the website of the All-China Women’s Federation shortly after International Women’s Day in 2011. “Pretty girls don’t need a lot of education to marry into a rich and powerful family, but girls with an average or ugly appearance will find it difficult,” the piece read. “These kinds of girls hope to further their education in order to increase their

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review • May 21, 2014

Lost for Words by Edward St. Aubyn

Alexander Benaim

Edward St. Aubyn wrote his first novel shirtless, drenched in psychological sweat. In Never Mind, the fruit of that strain, we meet a number of characters, but only one or two—side characters—who don’t seem doomed. A father rapes his son. The same father murders a helpless injured person, and his friends don’t disapprove. One imagines a harrowed publicist gamely trying taglines: Why read a novel when you can read a drill? At the same time, St. Aubyn’s prose is so harsh and pretty, so funny and apt, that one reads helplessly on, reaching thickets of trauma less and less bearable.

In the ensuing

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review • May 19, 2014

Land of No Rain by Amjad Nasser

Ursula Lindsey

In Land of No Rain, the first novel by the Jordanian poet Amjad Nasser, an exiled middle-aged Arab writer and editor (not unlike Nasser, who lives in London and works as an editor at a pan-Arab newspaper) finally returns to his homeland. Twenty years ago, Adham Jaber was a poet and revolutionary who participated in an assassination attempt on one of the line of “ginger-haired” generals ruling his country (the fictional Hamiya) and was forced, with other members of his leftist organization, to flee. When the book opens he is still living in London, “a grey-skied Babel crowned with the gold of

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review • May 13, 2014

In the Light of What We Know by Zia Haider Rahman

James Wood

Although Zia Haider Rahman's debut novel is full of knowledge, it is never merely knowing. It wears its knowledge heavily, as a burden, a crisis, an injury. This is because Rahman is interested in the possession of knowledge, and in the politics of that possession.

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