May 2011
43 posts
3 tags
Posthumous
CHRIS KRAUS
Simone Weil‘s 1935 factory identification photo. “A modern factory reaches perhaps almost the limit of horror. Everybody in it is constantly harassed and kept on edge by the interference of extraneous wills while the soul is left in cold and desolate misery. What man needs is silence and warmth; what he is given is an icy pandemonium.” Palle Yourgrau Simone Weil
Reaktion Books,...
A Week of Culture
As a group of Los Angeles locals deeply invested in the art world, we decided to compile a weekly list of events happening in and near Los Angeles. This list will include literary readings, movie screenings, concerts, and anything else we hear of around town. If there are any events you would like us to know about, please send us an email at lareviewofbooks@gmail.com. Without further ado: May...
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The City Life
Casey Walker reviews two new books on cities today. Over at The Browser, Edward Glaeser picks five great books on urban economics.
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Keys to the City
CASEY WALKER City Girl © David Trulli
Edward Glaeser The Triumph of the City
Penguin, February 2011. 352 pp. John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay Aerotropolis
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, March 2011. 480 pp.
Consider the problems which beset the frenetic mega-city of your choice — not just New York or Los Angeles, but places like Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, Cairo. Each has its slums, its...
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Van the Man
The legendary Van Dyke Parks — the only LARB Contributing Editor to have collaborated with both Brian Wilson and Joanna Newsom, unless Franco’s keeping something from us — has launched a website for his new “vanity label” (his words) Bananastan. Among the exciting plans he’s announcing there are a tour of Australia, a forthcoming CD of his astounding arrangements for other...
L.A. Weekend Book Adventure
NEW! Notes on Fulford’s RAISING FROGS FOR $ $ $ A new study guide to Jason Fulford’s classic photo book Raising Frogs for $ $ $ Book launch event details below ARTBOOK @ Paper Chase and The Ice Plant invite you to the third installment of THE MUSHROOM COLLECTION Two events happening this week in Los Angeles: Evening of Friday, May 27 Lecture & book signing from 7:00...
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Jump Up, Jump Up (I Say)
An amazing music video for JW and Blaze’s “Palance,” mentioned in Joshua Jelly-Schapiro’s wonderful Letter from Trinidad today: And here’s Beyoncé Palancing at her Port of Spain concert (warning: may be too bootylicious for some viewers):
Letter from Trinidad
JOSHUA JELLY-SCHAPIRO Beyoncé in Trinidad, February 18, 2010. Photo © Stuart Patrick
Beyoncé is gold. Gold like the burnt grass of the Queen’s Park Savannah at dry season in Port of Spain, Trinidad’s capital city. Like the lamé costumes and corded locks of the masquerade band which, two days before she performed here, strode around this same park to claim top honors during Trinidad’s...
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Artist Profile: Daniel Gonzalez
On the Los Angeles Review of Books today you’ll see the extraordinary art of Daniel Gonzalez, along with a terrific review by Stephanie Elizondo Griest of Ed Vulliamy’s Amexica: War Along the Borderline. I first worked with Daniel on the Los Angeles Loteria Project for Aardvark Letterpress. He developed his contribution to the letterpress project as an homage to Boyle Heights:...
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Narcocorridos
STEPHANIE ELIZONDO GRIEST Image: “Yo soy la desintegracíon” © Daniel Gonzalez
Ed Vulliamy Amexica: War Along the Borderline
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. 368 pp.
It starts with a headless body dangling from an underpass called Bridge of Dreams. A bed sheet unfurls beside it, sending a message from one drug cartel to another. Hours before firemen come to cut down the corpse, venerated...
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Give Paris One More Chance
LARB Senior Editor Matthew Specktor writes a culture diary for the Paris Review Daily. Update: Part Two is now live.
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The Middle Years
JANET FITCH A Meditation on By Nightfall A Short History of Modernist Painting (detail) © Mark Tansey
Michael Cunningham By Nightfall
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. 256 pp.
Ah, Middle Age. Ye despised state. So sadly and yet accurately coupled with such terms as spread, crazy and despair. Middle-age is the arena of Michael Cunningham’s new novel, By Nightfall, which follows a...
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Cervantes via Kipen: Two dogs walk into a bar...
“For crying out loud, shut up already and get on with your story.” “How can I continue my story if I shut up?” “I mean get to the point, and quit pinning so many extra tails on your story that it looks like an octopus.” - Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, translated by David Kipen LARB’s Extremely Short Excerpts series seeks to connect current, relevant and...
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Social Darwinism
MICHELE PRIDMORE-BROWN Image ©
Lisa Jane Persky Robin Dunbar How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Dunbar’s Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks
Harvard University Press, 2010. 312 pp.
In May 1846, a year and a half before gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill, several extended families and quite a few unattached males headed with their caravans from Illinois to California....
9 tags
Outing the Inside: Memoirs by Annie Proulx and...
RITA WILLIAMS watches ANNIE PROULX build a house.
DUFF BRENNA admires the way JAMES BROWN hits rewind.
Bingo, Gordon Matta-Clark
Annie Proulx Bird Cloud: A Memoir
Scribner, January 2011. 256 pp. James Brown This River: A Memoir
Counterpoint, 2011. 178 pp. DON’T FENCE HER IN
Rita Williams
A few years ago at a reading in Los Angeles, I asked Annie Proulx if she was ever bedeviled...
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Letters to the Editors
The Los Angeles Review of Books will publish letters to the editors on Saturdays. Jan Reymond, La Thésarbre, photo by timtom.ch.
This week, three letters and one blog post discussing Mark McGurl’s “The MFA Octopus,” as well as a note from Juan Felipe Herrera. ¤
To the Editors:
I very much enjoyed reading Mark McGurl’s “The MFA Octopus: Four Questions About...
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Hot Dystopic: Orwell and Huxley at the Shanghai...
JEFFREY WASSERSTROM Collage by Lisa Jane Persky Who, we sometimes ask, at the dinners and debates of the intelligentsia, was the 20th century’s more insightful prophet — Aldous Huxley or George Orwell? Each is best known for his dystopian fantasy — Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s 1984 — and both feared where modern technology might lead, for authorities and individuals...
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Jubilation
The Los Angeles Review of Books is proud to be participating in the 2011 Silver Lake Jubilee at Sunset Junction this weekend. On Saturday, May 21st at 1:30 on the PEN Lit Stage, we will be sponsoring a panel on “The Electrocution of the Book: Reading, Writing, and Publishing in a Post-Print Culture,” moderated by our own Tom Lutz and featuring once and future LARB contributors...
Where the Action Was
BEN LERNER TWO VERSIONS OF THE SUBLIME
Top: Photo: Yarrow Dunham; Bottom: Barnett Newman and an unidentified viewer with Cathedra in Newman’s studio, 1958. Photo: Peter A. Juley Abstract Expressionist New York
The Museum of Modern Art
October 3, 2010—April 25, 2011
New York City I
After the first room of late-Surrealist and still vaguely figurative paintings at the Abstract...
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Stephen Potter: Life Among the Acquaintances
ELLIS WEINER
The world is divided, not into two kinds of people, but three: friends and loved ones (however occasionally hateful), social and professional acquaintances, and complete strangers. The first group is the smallest and the third, which comprises essentially all of humanity, is the largest. But the second is where the action is—if, by “action,” we mean competition, rivalry, and an...
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Channeling Georg Trakl
MARJORIE PERLOFF Fighting Forms by Franz Marc Christian Hawkey Ventrakl
Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010. 149pp.
Mystery, lyric intensity, strangeness, animism: no poet embodied these qualities more than did the early twentieth-century Austrian poet Georg Trakl. Poor, drug-addicted from an early age, and possibly involved in an incestuous union with his sister Margarete, Trakl enlisted in the...
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"We are the tension-collecting animals"
Ray Bradbury, one of the stars of Lisa Jane Persky’s “Skin Deep,” interviewed by the CBC in 1969. (See also the Paris Review’s interview with Bradbury, from the late 70s.)
Skin Deep
Lisa Jane Persky Collage ©
Lisa Jane Persky Ray Bradbury The Illustrated Man
William Morrow, 1997 (1951). 288 pp.
Eva Talmadge and Justin Taylor The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide
Harper Perennial, October 2010. 192 pp.
Katherine Von Drachenburg The Tattoo Chronicles
Harper Design, October 2010. 240 pp.
Let me say it right up front: I’ve got a tattoo....
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Enter the Elephant
A further stir of the pot. D.G. Myers responds to Mark McGurl’s “The MFA Octopus.” Update: Seth Abramson supplies some hard data.
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Sign of the Times
A brief glimpse of the Hollywood sign c. 1930s (with amusingly anachronistic music) to accompany today’s review.
Signs and Wonders
Joy Horowitz Leo Braudy The Hollywood Sign: Fantasy and Reality of an American Icon
Yale University Press, March 2011. 215 pp. Kevin Starr Golden Gate: The Life and Times of America’s Greatest Bridge
Bloomsbury Press, July 2010. 215 pp.
If you’ve ever tried to get up close and personal with the Hollywood sign, as I did the other day, then you’ve participated in a slightly...
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It's Good to Be King
CHRISTOPHER RICE Amygdala © Aaron Bornstein Stephen King Full Dark, No Stars
Scribner, November 2010. 384 pp.
In the cranky “Afterword” to Full Dark, No Stars, his latest collection of short works (the paperback arrives next week), Stephen King asserts that the four preceding tales are his best attempts to record “what people might actually do, and how they might behave, under certain dire...
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The MFA Octopus: Four Questions About Creative...
MARK MCGURL Frank Conroy © Bruce Davidson 1. Why do people hate creative writing programs so much?
Well they don’t really, not everyone, or there wouldn’t be so many of them—hundreds. From modest beginnings in Iowa in the 1930’s, MFA programs have spread out across the land, coast to coast, sinking roots in the soil like an improbably invasive species of corn. Now, leaping the oceans,...
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Bugged Driving Up and Down
Via Doom and Gloom from the Tomb.
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Marilynalia
JOCELYN HEANEY
Image: Eve Arnold, 1955 From Eve Arnold, Marilyn Monroe (2005) Marilyn Monroe Fragments
Edited by Stanley Buchthal and Bernard Comment
Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 2010. 256 pp.
On a summer day in 1955, Marilyn Monroe sits on the edge of a merry-go-round in Amagansett, New York, intently reading the final pages of Ulysses. The tan hardcover creates a somber contrast to...
14 tags
One Inch above the Ground
MICHAEL TOLKIN
Louis Auchincloss A Voice from Old New York: A Memoir of My Youth
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010. 203 pp.
He dies a few times every week now, and you can read about him in the paid Death Notices in the New York Times. He’s in his late eighties or nineties, born on the East Coast, educated at a famous prep school, then either Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, usually...
Every Force Evolves A Form
Three weeks into our preview site’s existence, we’re still scratching the surface of what we have planned, and of the wealth we’ve amassed from our contributors. Delighted as we are by both the essays we’ve run and the warm response they’ve received, we remain still more excited by the possibilities that are opening up. Pieces like David Shields’ “Life is Short; Art is Shorter” and Richard...
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A Malaise Deeper than Shopping
ROB LATHAM
Installation Study - War Games by Richard Hamilton
J.G. Ballard Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton: An Autobiography
Harper Collins, 2008. 288 pp.
Kingdom Come
Harper Perennial, 2007. 304 pp.
The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard
W.W. Norton, 2009. 1216 pp.
British author J.G. Ballard died on April 19, 2009 of an inoperable cancer that had spread from his prostate to...
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Hanging on Sunset Strip
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Heart of Stone
GREIL MARCUS Keith Richards © Henry Diltz Courtesy of the photographer. Prints may be purchased through Morrison Hotel Gallery. Keith Richards with James Fox Life
Little, Brown, October 2010. 576 pp.
The autobiography of Keith Richards—founding guitarist of the Rolling Stones, through the late 1960s and the 1970s at once a notorious and celebrated heroin addict and one of the most dynamic and...
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At the LA Times Festival of Books last weekend, we overheard plenty of talk about Jonathan Franzen’s recent New Yorker article. Much of it was pretty damning, suggesting Franzen may have suffered a breakdown in perspective while attempting to braid travel narrative, reflection on David Foster Wallace’s suicide, a thumbnail history of the novel along with a number of other things into...
Freedom, Revisited
MATTHEW SPECKTOR says we’re sick of JONATHAN FRANZEN. JOSHUA HARDINA says we’re just afraid of what he’s telling us.
Painting by Lisa Jane Persky From photographs by Jakub Mosur and Stuart Ramson Jonathan Franzen Freedom
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September 2010. 576 pp. MR. SUBLIMATION
Matthew Specktor
By now we are tired of thinking about Freedom. The book blew...
Hollywood Boulevard
Saving Folks, Solving Mysteries
MARGARET STOHL Farm Family © William H. Johnson 1940 Victoria Bond and T.R. Simon Zora and Me
Candlewick, 2010. 192 pp.
“What the grown men to do around these parts if little girls gone be the ones saving folks?” So ask grown men like Mr. Slayton the first time the “mighty deserving” fourth grader Zora acts as a “deputy” to the local Marshal, Joe Clarke, in the mysterious case of Old Lady...
The Balloonist: drifting off
http://kevinh.blogspot.com/2011/04/drifting-off.html
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From the Editor's Easychair
I love William Dean Howells. He ran major magazines, read an enormous number of books in several languages, reviewed an enormous number of them, and published one or two books every year of his life. This picture is from the one moment he ever relaxed. Many of the people we think of as worth reading were first published by him during his tenure as an editor or first noticed by him as a critic or...
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Life is Short; Art is Shorter
David Shields Daughter of the Circus © Michael Garlington 1.
Real Life
At a very early age I knew I wanted to be a writer. At six or seven, I wrote stories about dancing hot dogs (paging Dr. Freud …). For a long time, being a writer meant being a journalist. My parents, both freelance journalists, were anti-models. I saw them as “frustrated writers”; hope deferred maketh the heart...
