December 2011
47 posts
13 tags
Object Relations
CAMERON SHAW
on making and showing art while black in Los Angeles. Untitled © David Hammons 1989 Courtesy Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Connie Rogers Tilton, Lindsay Charlwood, eds. L.A. Object & David Hammons Body Prints
Tilton Gallery, September 2011. 424 pp. Kellie Jones, ed. Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980
Hammer Museum, Delmonico Books, Prestel, October...
1 tag
A Spectacle and Nothing Strange
By Eve Fowler This summer I made 20 silkscreen posters, like the ones that are posted around LA advertising concerts, boxing matches and other events. The text on my posters came from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. I placed these posters in public spaces around Los Angeles. I have been working with this particular text in various ways for about a year. Some of the...
12 tags
Was Gertrude Stein a Collaborator?
RENATE STENDHAL on Gertrude Stein’s latest revival and the enduring questions about her wartime years. Gertrude Stein ©
by Carl Van Vechten 1934, Courtesy of Marquette University, Raynor Memorial Libraries Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories
Contemporary Jewish Museum
May 12 - September 6, 2011 The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde SFMOMA
May 21 -...
9 tags
Thoroughly Modern Elsa
BRIAN KIM STEFANS
on the rediscovery of a modernist innovator. Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (detail) by George Grantham Bain Courtesy of George Grantham Bain collection at the Library of Congress Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo, editors Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven
The MIT Press, October 2011. 440 pp.
The typical thumbnail portrait of the...
LARB Recommends
Los Angeles International Airport by Garry Winogrand featured at In Focus event on 12/20. Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment. Thursday, December 15th: Carson Mell will be reading from his new novel The Blue Bourbon Orchestra and signing copies at Family beginning at 7:30 pm. Slake at Chevalier’s Books featuring poet Luke Davies,...
4 tags
The Girl with the Father Tattoo
LARB Science Editor MICHELE PRIDMORE-BROWN on the changing nature of father-daughter alchemy. Profil en Face Herbert Bayer, 1929 Peggy Drexler Our Fathers, Ourselves: Daughters, Fathers, and the Changing American Family
Macmillan/Rodale Press, May 2011. 210pp. The Silas Marners and the Heidis
On a frigid winter’s night in the novelist George Eliot’s Silas Marner, a newly orphaned...
13 tags
The Right Fit
ROSTEN WOO
on how the spacesuit was made. Spaceman © Ed Emshwiller, courtesy of the Emshwiller family Nicholas de Monchaux Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo
The MIT Press, March 2011. 380 pp.
Not long ago, I spent an afternoon inside Biosphere II, a 3.14-acre vivarium designed as an experimental “self-contained” ecosystem. Biosphere II hosted two missions — the second aborted in 1994 — in which...
6 tags
The End of the Beginning
BEN EHRENREICH
on moving onward.
The Beginning is Near cc Alexandra Clotfelter (Some rights reserved)
Oh, the fickle hearts of elected officials. Like hummingbirds, only not pretty. To call a mayor or a city councilman slippery is to insult every smooth, wet stone that has ever graced a streambed. To call them faithless is an offense to all adulterers. To call them liars is, well, too...
10 tags
Pulp Nonfiction: An Interview with John Jeremiah...
by Michael Goetzman J. J. Sullivan, Skylight Books. November 15th, 2011Image by Michael Goetzman John Jeremiah Sullivan seems disconcerted when asked who’s most influenced his writing. There’s a long, pained pause. It’s an impressive silence — followed by a sigh, followed by an “I don’t know,” which, I realize, is probably an accurate answer. How could anyone know? Identifying one’s influences is...
4 tags
World-Shifting
CHARLES YU
on Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84. Image cc
Lisa Jane Persky Haruki Murakami 1Q84
Translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel
Alfred A. Knopf, October 2011. 925 pp.
Most people can’t, or at least don’t, read a 925-page book in a couple of nights. In fact, if you happen to have any of the following: (i) a television, (ii) access to the Internet, (iii) one or more...
Radar LARB
Cirocco Dunlap’s “Literary Genre Translations”: “Original Text: ‘I ate a sandwich and looked out the window.’ Sci Fi text: ‘I placed the allotted nutrition capsules on my tongue bed and looked to the Nahin VI-8373 space podhole.’” Adam Penenberg on “The Next Great Media Form”: “The MP3 of journalism may be the “live...
5 tags
Literary Transactions and Their Vicissitudes
E. C. McCARTHY and LISA C. HICKMAN
respond to Glen David Gold’s piece about William Faulkner and Joan Williams [“On Not Rolling the Log (Transactions along the Mississippi Delta)”] Joan Williams. Courtesy Lisa C. Hickman E. C. MCCARTHY Sucker Punch
Glen David Gold is a heartbreaker.
The first few paragraphs of this piece [On Not Rolling the Log] hooked me: writers and...
9 tags
CHRISTOPHER MERRILL, NATHANIEL PHILBRICK, ROBERT...
Image: Strata ©
Stanford Kay SUSAN SALTER REYNOLDS
on three exceptional works of nonfiction.
Christopher Merrill The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War
Milkweed, October 2011. 305 pp.
Christopher Merrill has always believed in quests. Over many years and many books he has traveled out, confronting fear, admiring the courage and conviction of others, standing on the shoulders...
12 tags
A Singer's Singer
GAYLE WALD
on a new biography of soul legend Little Willie John. Little Willie John
Courtesy Universal Attractions Susan Whitall with Kevin John Fever: Little Willie John: A Fast Life, Mysterious Death and the Birth of Soul
Titan Books, June 2011. 352 pp.
Little Willie John was a small man with a big voice, an outsized talent who could croon and growl, sing ballads and rhythm and blues,...
6 tags
Fail Better: After Recent Occupy Evictions, Jack...
“Oh, Lol0”: Heavily-favored Lolo Jones doesn’t live up to expectations in Atlanta. Hope is fried. Change is burned out. Sentimental, noncommittal, notional: Messieurs Hope and Change have proven to be as disappointing as their historic standard-bearer, the current President of the United States. As we speak, they are likely pacing shabby cages—gaunt shadows of their former,...
11 tags
The Return of the Gods
ARNE DE BOEVER
on Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly’s polytheistic philosophy. “The European” ©
Keith Sonnier Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age
Free Press, August 2011. 272 pp.
Last August, I traveled to France to participate in a reenactment of Plato’s banquet at the house of...
LARB Recommends
Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment. Thursday, December 8th: Slake After Dark presents Ben Ehrenreich and Triple Chicken Foot at Atwater Crossing beginning at 7:00 pm. OR Books and the Los Angeles Review of Books celebrate the publication of Alive Inside the Wreck by Joe Woodward at the L.A. Press Club beginning at...
5 tags
Southpaw Grammar
DAVID YOURDON
on life among the left-handed. Detail from Saint John of the Cross ca.1675 © National Gallery of Art, Washington Francisco Antonio Gijón and unknown painter (possibly Domingo Mejías) Rik Smits The Puzzle of Left-handedness
Reaktion Books, October 2011. 381 pp.
Being left-handed is nothing special, as much as left-handers (of which I’m one) might like to believe otherwise....
4 tags
Genghis Khan's DNA
INGRID NORTON on Steven Pinker’s history of violence. Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd “Non Violence” 1985 Malmö Photograph by ϟ†Σ © Some rights reserved Steven Pinker The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Viking, October 2011. 802 pp.
“The Past,” Steven Pinker declares, “is a place where a person had a high chance of coming to bodily harm.” In 13th century Eurasia, the...
8 tags
The Pump You Pump the Water From
SVEN BIRKERTS
on writer’s block. Image: cc Lisa Jane Persky When I come upon a bad assonance or a repetition in my sentences, I’m sure I’m floundering in the false. By searching I find the proper expression, which was always the only one, and which is also harmonious. The word is never lacking when one possesses the idea. Is there not, in this precise fitting of parts, something eternal,...
