IT FEELS RIGHT TO START WITH A THUMBNAIL HISTORY from Valerie Wilmer, the British photographer and writer who published As Serious as Your Life in 1977, one of the first book-length attempts to document a music with as many names as heroes.
RACHEL AVIV’S STRANGERS TO OURSELVES: UNSETTLED MINDS AND THE STORIES THAT MAKE US is a book about psychiatry, but it is also a book about the self, “the facets of identity that our theories of the mind fail to capture,” one written with an astonishing amount of attention and care. Since Westerners tend to conflate the self with the mind—or at least locate the former inside the latter—behavioral science is a field that implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) presumes to explain why we are the way we are, which is also to say why we are who we are: our chemistry is imbalanced,
I SUSPECT EVERYONE WHO KEEPS A DIARY of wanting it to be found. What you write depends on what you allow yourself to see, and how you want to be seen. It’s a common thought—Susan Sontag famously said, “A journal or diary is precisely to be read furtively by other people”—and points to a basic contradictory principle of the unconscious. Self-admission is always tied to self-betrayal.
THE PUNCH LINE OF ACADEMIC THEORY IS A REDESCRIPTION OF THE THING WE ALREADY KNOW, so that we might know it once more, with feeling. In Lauren Berlant’s words, heuristics don’t start revolutions, but “they do spark blocks that are inconvenient to a thing’s reproduction.” Berlant’s new book, On the Inconvenience of Other People, arriving just a little over a year after their death, is a study in just that. Inconvenience serves as a sequel of sorts to Cruel Optimism (2011), the work that guaranteed Berlant’s fame beyond the academy. Berlant, the literary scholar of national sentiment, affect, the ordinary
FORMIDABLE HARDWICK! Most writers are soon forgotten after their deaths. Yet Elizabeth Hardwick, since her death in 2007, has achieved a rare transfiguration. Having left behind the indignities of mortal life—hangovers, rashes, insomnia, unwritten lectures, misplaced hearing aids—she has been enshrined as an intellectual totem. Publishers have brought out not just a Collected Essays, as one might expect, but an Uncollected Essays, foraging through back issues of Mademoiselle and House & Garden for every glittering fragment. Other literary productions have whetted, not sated, the readerly appetite for all things Hardwickian. The Dolphin Letters, published in 2019, assembled, among other material,
I REMEMBER seeing the cover of B. S. Johnson’s book Aren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs? in a bookstore when I was eighteen. (Johnson was thirty-nine, had only a few months to live then, and his book is not in fact a memoir.) That title stayed with me for years and haunted me whenever I’d think of writing anything concerning my own life. The proper time to write a memoir was one’s sunset years, when one had retired from the hustle and bustle and could sit by the window in quiet contemplation. One’s task in the intervening
Nicole Miller, Michael in Black, 2018, patinated bronze, 42 x 15 1/2 x 22″. Courtesy the artist and Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles NICOLE MILLER’S Michael in Black is a monograph-as-moodboard, dedicated to the artist’s eponymous bronze sculpture of Michael Jackson kneeling, which was produced from a mold live-cast for a scene in the 1988 video […]
![*Sonia Delaunay, _Robes simultanées (Trois femmes, formes, couleurs)_ (Simultaneous Dresses [Three Women, Shapes, Colors]), 1925,* oil on canvas, 57 1/2 x 44 7/8". © PRACUSA S.A./Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid](https://images.bookforum.com/uploads/upload.000/id25075/featured00_landscape.jpg)
Sonia Delaunay, Robes simultanées (Trois femmes, formes, couleurs) (Simultaneous Dresses [Three Women, Shapes, Colors]), 1925, oil on canvas, 57 1/2 x 44 7/8″. © PRACUSA S.A./Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid IN 1913, Sonia Delaunay appeared in a Parisian ballroom wearing a dress she had designed. A Cubist patchwork of vivid colors, the garment inspired enthusiastic reactions […]
Welcome to the Sep/Oct/Nov 2022 issue of Bookforum! In this edition, read: Meghan O’Rourke on Lynne Tillman’s new memoir about the challenges of looking after a sick parent; Lucy Sante on Emmanuel Carrère’s latest, which the author intended to be a short best-seller about a yoga retreat but instead ended up being about his mental breakdown; Moira Donegan on a pre-Roe abortion service run by Chicago activists; Charlie Tyson on Darryl Pinckney’s coming-of-age memoir that doubles as a tribute to Elizabeth Hardwick; an interview with Namwali Serpell about storytelling, grief, and experiential fiction; Beatrice Loayza on French film critic Serge Daney’s restless,
For a writer whose most visible work, Dictée, brims with saints and martyrdom and the possibilities of productive anguish, it’s fitting that Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s disparate uncollected writings—everything from artists’ books to typewritten disjecta membra—should give off the refulgent glow of relics set against plain white cloth. Since there will be no new writing from the late author, every word counts. Indeed, for an artist so committed to permutations of language—to literally mincing words, teasing meanings from amputations, one character at a time—every letter counts. Is a crossed-out line or seeming typo in fact some intimation of wordplay, language
There is a funny paradox in American culture. The nation began in revolt against British sovereignty and defined itself for generations against UK ruling-class values of crown, empire, and tradition. And yet in the Golden Age of Hollywood, on the run-up to American hegemony, the ideology of empire reentered the American bloodstream, adapted for mass society and a technocratic state. The medieval term translatio imperii, which once described the divine succession of emperors, later named the westward drift of power. It mutated into a doctrine of manifest destiny for aspirational American settlers. Back in the midcentury, Americans were able to
In 2012, the British magazine Sight and Sound polled the film critics of the world to name “the best picture ever made,” and the result, that year, was Hitchcock’s Vertigo. David Thomson has described the film as a “piercing dream,” but, possibly challenging common sense, I am not going to explicate the full plot of the film at length here, or make a claim for it, in case the reader has never seen it. I will simply say that in this movie, a detective is asked to follow a beautiful, glamorous woman who is thought to be suicidal. Notice that
Baseball: “Inning Eight: A Whole New Ballgame” (PBS; 1994) The Mets don’t make an appearance in Ken Burns’s epic documentary Baseball until the eighth part, but they storm the scene like only they can, charting a wild ride in the 1960s from the cellar to the penthouse. Burns gives ample time to the ill-fated and slapstick-y Casey Stengel era, but the climax of the story is of course the arrival of ace Tom Seaver and the team’s world-shaking 1969 championship run. Doc Darryl (ESPN; 2016) For this entry in ESPN’s 30 for 30 series, Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio staged
LORD LET ME
I HAVE REACHED a shocking conclusion after paging through the exhibition catalogue Sporting Fashion: Outdoor Girls 1800 to 1960 (American Federation of Arts/DelMonico Books, $60).
ONE DAY IN MARCH 1948, a twenty-five-year-old clerk in the French colonial administration in Ivory Coast experienced a transformative vision. He reported that the sky opened and “seven colored suns described a circle of beauty around their ‘Mother-Sun’” and that he was then called upon to be “the Revealer.” This divine command would set Frédéric Bruly Bouabré on an investigative path deep into the folklore, language, and religion of his people, the Bété, an undertaking that produced voluminous texts and thousands of drawings, all aimed at elucidating his cultural heritage as the foundation of a universal cosmology. Accompanying a current
IN THE UNRULY ANNALS of twentieth-century American art, Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009) carved a quiet place for himself as a chronicler of clapboard fronts and windswept fields in the shadeless stretches of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and, later, Maine. The artist imbued his portraits and landscapes with a kind of sacred plainness, his drybrush paintings capturing the specific dust-in-the-water melancholia of Middle America.
Like a mixtape, a Steve Keene painting is meant to be passed hand to hand, with affection. He’s been giving them away, or selling them for a song, going on thirty years. Keene, an artist who estimates 300,000 works to his name, came up indie-rock adjacent, pals with Pavement. Like that band’s best albums, Keene’s […]
IN A RECENT PIECE FOR GAWKER, “Gary Indiana Hates in Order to Love,” Paul McAdory looked at how the writer makes affective intensities cooperate. “Indiana’s greatness,” McAdory wrote, “rests partly on his ability to fling aside the sheer curtains partitioning love from hate and extract a superior pleasure from their mixture.” It may be bad form to quote a parallel review of the book I’m looking at—Fire Season, a collection of essays stretching back to 1991—or maybe it’s just confusing to do so without going into attack mode. Sorry, odiophiliacs! I want to simply agree with McAdory’s essay and say
IN 1974, Elaine Sturtevant slipped out of the art world to play tennis with a man whose serve she couldn’t return. She said little about her decade-long departure from art, either about why she left or what she did during that period—“I was writing, thinking, playing tennis, and carrying on.” The American artist, best known for “repeating” major works by major men, had already proven herself a genius in the game of doubles. Let them catch up, she said, and switched to a game with different rules but similar design.
