• print • Apr/May 2012

    Species of Places

    Near the beginning of the third volume of photographer Robert Adams’s The Place We Live, a compilation containing nearly four hundred tritone plates (about half reproduced at full size), published to accompany a major traveling exhibition of Adams’s work (currently in Los Angeles), there are two images on facing pages, plus a brief caption signed “R. A.” The first photograph is of a cottonwood tree in a weedy field with a few buildings and another, different kind of tree further back toward the right-hand edge (the cottonwood itself is attended by two much smaller trees of another species);

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  • print • Apr/May 2012

    Illuminations

    Any student of silent cinema, critical theory, and the Frankfurt School, or film aesthetics and the avant-garde, will surely at one point or another have come into contact with the work of Miriam Hansen. Her groundbreaking study Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (1991) inspired a generation of film scholars to place greater emphasis on the ways in which film audiences constitute an alternative public sphere. Likewise, her trenchant essays published over the last few decades in New German Critique, on whose editorial board she served, Critical Inquiry, October, and elsewhere

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  • print • Apr/May 2012

    All That Litters

    There are two man-made objects visible from space. One is the Great Wall of China. The other is a newer addition: a massive garbage dump at Fresh Kills, New York, home to fifty years’ worth of New York City’s trash.

    In the age of global warming, peak oil, devastating droughts, and dying species, it might seem a bit quaint to make the case, as Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Edward Humes does in Garbology, that the United States—the world’s largest generator of trash—will soon confront a new crisis of garbage.

    But Humes’s argument isn’t a castigation of litterbugs. It’s a persuasive and

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  • print • Apr/May 2012

    Manifesto Destiny

    Author of The Soviet Novel, a classic analysis of socialist-realist fiction of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, and a professor of Slavic literature at Yale, Katerina Clark here reads the text of High Stalinism. In Moscow, the Fourth Rome—a series of linked essays following an adroitly plotted historical narrative—she recounts a scandalous episode in art history, while making a significant contribution to the understanding of 1930s European political culture and providing a lucid guide to the late-’30s period of mainly Soviet collective mania.

    Clark ranges from literature to cinema to theater to

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  • print • Apr/May 2012

    Point-Counterpoint

    I know how to sharpen pencils. I shove them into the electric pencil sharpener suction-cupped onto a corner of my desk. It growls so satisfyingly and provides a kind of smoke break for a nonsmoker—a perfect bit of procrastination. Some days I am committed to sharpening every pencil I can find before starting work—even though I do most of my work with a fountain pen.

    Anyway, this book has a great title. Surely, though, the name—to say nothing of the wider project of artisanal pencil sharpening—is some kind of a metaphor. Is this a self-help guide about learning to live life more simply or

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  • print • Apr/May 2012

    Pieces of a Man

    Years before he died last May at age 62, the legendary poet, novelist, and musician Gil Scott-Heron had been working on a memoir. Canongate Books, his publisher in Britain, announced plans to publish the book nearly a decade ago, and on the Canongate website there is a spectral recording from the early 1990s of Scott-Heron reading a chapter from an early draft of the manuscript. Now, the publication of The Last Holiday gives Heron the final word on an extraordinary life that has often been invoked as a prime example of artistic tragedy: a brilliant performer falling prey to drug addiction—the

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  • print • Apr/May 2012

    The Walking Cure

    “Nice just to walk and breathe and not worry about every goddamn thing. Nice, too, to know that when I return life will quickly become very different than it has been.”

    I wrote those words a decade ago, jotted them down in a marble-covered Mead composition book I’d brought with me to record my observations as I hiked a portion of Europe’s most popular pilgrimage route, the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. Reading the words now puts me back in Spanish hill towns and surprises me with nostalgia for a time in my life apparently so full of worry and so in need of change that walking through a

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  • print • Apr/May 2012

    Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama

    The graphic “novel” may be the ideal form for memoir. On the one hand, it offers immediacy, a fusing of reading time and narrative time: We can experience an epiphany at the same moment as the character in the frame, who may break suddenly into a wide-eyed look of surprise. On the other hand, it makes room for a polyphony of time and space and story: The text on a page may be paired with drawings of something else entirely, creating a visual metaphor or, in more discordant cases, mirroring the way the mind can think and feel multiple things simultaneously. And elaborate two-page spreads can

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  • print • Apr/May 2012

    The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice

    "Taylor has had many biographers. Yet their books often reveal more about their authors than her," observes M. G. Lord, author of Forever Barbie and this new meditation, The Accidental Feminist. "Some [biographers] dish," she writes, "some fawn." And some turn their targets into feminist teaching tools. An icon known for beauty, bling, and bridegrooms makes an unlikely women's libber. Yet Lord interweaves readings of Taylor and her roles to serve up a cultural history of femininity—its abuses and uses—that is at once amusing, wrenching, and inspiring.

    Starting with Virginia Woolf, whose Three

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  • print • Apr/May 2012

    Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature

    When Daniel Levin Becker was sixteen, he made a mixtape that included only songs and artists whose names did not contain the letter e. Soon after, he read Georges Perec’s La Disparition, a novel written entirely without the offending vowel. Levin Becker spent a good part of his formative years “making the numbers and letters on license plates into mathematically true statements,” so he was heartened to discover that he was “not alone in appreciating naturally occurring palindromes, or knowing a shorter sentence with all the letters in the alphabet than The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy

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  • print • Apr/May 2012

    Infra

    WHAT DOES NOT INITIALLY MEET THE EYE in Richard Mosse’s vivid photographs of cotton-candy hillsides, vamping child soldiers, and rose-hued rebels is the violence of their setting: the war-torn Kivu region of eastern Congo. Located near the border of Rwanda, Kivu has been ground zero for many of the worst atrocities of a civil war that has displaced millions and persisted intermittently for more than a decade. But Mosse, an Irish-born, Yale-educated photographer, has no interest in documenting the crisis from the sober vantage point of a war correspondent. Instead, he works with a wooden

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  • print • Apr/May 2012

    Wilhelm Sasnal

    LAST SEPTEMBER, shortly before the Whitechapel Gallery mounted an exhibition of Wilhelm Sasnal’s work, Phaidon’s website posted a list of songs the Polish artist listens to while painting. Many of the tracks are ominously monotone, uniform in mood, sound, or structure—there’s no resolution, no cure for what ails. Even Elvis’s “Blue Moon,” second on Sasnal’s list, omits Rodgers and Hart’s final verse, in which a lover appears and the blue moon turns gold; instead, the song remains steadfastly lovelorn.

    So does “Hollow Hills,” the Bauhaus track that inspired Sasnal to become an artist. He’d copy

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