January 2012
48 posts
12 tags
The Teacher of the Future
XUJUN EBERLEIN
on two accounts of the great Chinese famine. Image: Murri via Ralph Magazine Yang Jisheng Tombstone
Cosmos Books, 2008. 950 pp. Frank Dikötter Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962
Walker & Company, September 2010. 448 pp. 1.
In July 2011, Frank Dikötter’s Mao’s Great Famine won the BBC’s Samuel Johnson...
Radar LARB
Palms © C.P. Heiser From James Murray’s The Evolution of English Lexicography, published in 1900: “The English Dictionary, like the English Constitution, is the creation of no one man, and of no one age; it is a growth that has slowly developed itself down the ages; its beginnings lie far back in times almost pre-historic. And these beginnings themselves, although the English...
23 tags
Never Again, Again
LEE KONSTANTINOU
on Art Spiegelman’s ghosts. Anja and Vladek for Art’s bar mitzvah album, 1961 Art Spiegelman MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic, Maus
Pantheon, October 2011. 300 pp.
In the 1991 second volume of his classic graphic novel Maus, published five years after the first, Art Spiegelman briefly — and dramatically — drops the conceit for which his book is so famous. For...
5 tags
LARB Podcast #3: Art Spiegelman
ART SPIEGELMAN, author of MetaMaus,
interviewed by VAN DYKE PARKS
Click here for the third episode of the new Los Angeles Review of Books podcast series (soon to be available on iTunes — watch this space). We hope these podcasts will go beyond the standard promotional Q&A pleasantries and promote genuine intellectual and philosophical discussion. Today we present an interview with legendary...
3 tags
An Appreciation for James Hillman (1926-2011)
Image © Paul Bausch onfocus.com http://bit.ly/rESKHY Trauma rearranges us. We know that. But so, sometimes, does reading. In this piece, Louise Steinman reflects on both, and pays tribute to a writer who had a deep impact on many of us, directly and indirectly. — Tom Lutz LOUISE STEINMAN
Crete Spring
During the seventies and eighties my longtime friend, a painter, lived in...
15 tags
Cronenberg
JONATHAN PENNER David Cronenberg © Ian Welch, Welchtoons.com David Cronenberg arrived on the world’s cinema screens with a viscous splash. His unmistakable Cartesian horror films Shivers, Rabid, The Brood, Scanners, Videodrome, and Existenz were extraordinary meditations on making the mental physical, and made Cronenberg one of the most admired auteurs of the late seventies and early eighties. ...
8 tags
True Story
JONATHAN ZIMMERMAN
on the mythology of film school. Steve Boman Film School: The True Story of a Midwestern Family Man Who Went to the World’s Most Famous Film School, Fell Flat on His Face, Had a Stroke, and Sold a Television Series to CBS
Benbella Books, November 2011. 352 pp. “Life … at 24 frames per second.” — Tagline for Film School Confidential
OPEN ON: a smoldering,...
27 tags
Inch By Column Inch
MORT PERSKY
on the art of the newspaper column. Photograph by Ralph Schoenstein via Smithsonian.com John Avlon, Jesse Angelo, and Errol Louis Deadline Artists: America’s Greatest Newspaper Columnists
Overlook Press, September 2011. 432 pp.
A mere 60 years ago, at the front end of my love-hate affair with the published word, I went to work for my first “real” newspaper, an actual evening...
5 tags
Unpacking Music Man Murray: My visit with one of...
by C.P. Heiser Murray and the collection © C.P. Heiser Turning to his record player and switching to a 78 stylus, Murray lets drop a scarce test pressing of a Valentino recording, circa 1923. “Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar…” he croons, the voice on key and sure, if only a little brittle. Meanwhile, the door into the collection is open, and I see just a hint of it: a glimpse of the...
9 tags
The Incomplete Cain
BORIS DRALYUK on the grim hardness of a neglected noir master.
Photograph of Paul Cain from back inside flap of Fast One’s first edition (1933) Photographer Unknown
Paul Cain The Complete Slayers: Fast One and the Complete Short Stories of Paul Cain Centipede Press, February 2012. 300 pp.
Coleman said: “Eight ball in the corner.” There was soft click of ball against ball and then...
LARB Recommends
Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment. Thursday, January 26th: Héctor Tobar in conversation with journalist Jesse Katz at Central Library beginning at 7:00 pm. Literary Death Match featuring LARB’s Matthew Specktor, Edan Lepucki, Ben Loory, and Natashia Deon plus a trio of all-star judges at Busby’s East beginning at...
11 tags
Art Therapy
SHARON MIZOTA
on Yayoi Kusama’s autobiography. Stars Infinity (A.B.C), 2003 © Yayoi Kusama Courtesy Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery Yayoi Kusama Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama
Translated by Ralph McCarty
University of Chicago Press, January 2012. 256 pp.
Discussions of Yayoi Kusama must inevitably reckon with the state of the artist’s mental health. The 82-year-old Japanese icon,...
6 tags
Reading about Moscow (With Beijing on My Mind)
by Jeffrey Wasserstrom Collage © Lisa Jane Persky Once upon a time, specialists in Chinese studies, like me, felt we had a lot in common with scholars who focused on Russia. We each shared an interest in large countries that had command economies and Leninist systems of rule. We each struggled to make sense of comparably opaque and often misleading official pronouncements. And when it came to...
30 tags
The Music Lovers
FRANKLIN BRUNO on 19th century musicking
and SARA JAFFE on punk’s racial politics. First Appearance of Jenny Lind in America, September 11, 1850 FRANKLIN BRUNO Gilded Age Fan Club Daniel Cavicchi Listening and Longing: Music Lovers in the Age of Barnum
Wesleyan University Press, November 2011. 256 pp.
In 1869, Patrick Gilmore, the former Union army bandleader, who wrote the lyrics to...
Radar LARB
Image: M. Goetzman Literature and Sport from Ford to Foster Wallace by Jason Cowley: “I used to think that a choice had to be made between sport and literature; that you couldn’t be both a sportsman and a book man. They represented two separate and distinct cultures, the life of the mind and the life of action, and there was no connecting bridge between them… I was wrong, of course,...
12 tags
Beautiful Equations
GREGORY LEON MILLER and WALTON MUYUMBA
on the recent work of Percival Everett. Illustration of Percival Everett © Joe Linton GREGORY LEON MILLER Identity Crisis Percival Everett Assumption
Graywolf Press, October 2011. 225 pp. Percival Everett Erasure
Graywolf Press, October 2011 (orig. 2001). 272 pp.
Over the course of more than 20 books, Percival Everett has produced as rich a body of...
10 tags
Hell, Hurt, Blood, and Rapture
Still from trailer for The Big Combo (1955) Allied Artists John Alton, Cinematographer
Our monthly crime fiction column by CULLEN GALLAGHER.
This month, books by Jake Hinkson, John Rector, Reed Farrel Coleman, Alan Glynn, and Harry Whittington. Jake Hinkson Hell on Church Street
New Pulp Press, December 2011. 198 pp.
Is this noir enough for you? “The story of my life is I lived, I fucked up,...
8 tags
Gardens
Image: Strata ©
Stanford Kay SUSAN SALTER REYNOLDS on Trea Martyn’s Queen Elizabeth in the Garden, Clyde Phillip Wachsberger’s Into the Garden with Charles, and Christian McEwen’s World Enough & Time.
Trea Martyn Queen Elizabeth in the Garden: A Story of Love, Rivalry, and Spectacular Gardens
Bluebridge, January 2012. 336 pp.
Imagine a time when, to win a...
26 tags
Anticipation and Absorption
JEFF CHANG on Catherine Opie’s Inauguration and BRENDAN BOYLE on Michael Fried’s Four Honest Outlaws. Catherine Opie, Untitled #1 (Inauguration 2009) JEFF CHANG
The Future Belongs To Crowds Catherine Opie Inauguration
Gregory R. Miller & Co, September 2011. 124 pp.
In 2008, Newsweek art critic Peter Plagens asked if the photographer Catherine Opie had become too safe. Opie made...
14 tags
Thinking and Thanking
PETER CAMPION on Carol Muske-Dukes
and ANGE MLINKO on Susan Stewart. Satellite view of the Mississippi River shows riverbank land-use patterns. Image courtesy of NASA PETER CAMPION
Find Yourself A City To Live In Carol Muske-Dukes Twin Cities
Penguin, May 2011. 96 pp.
You wake up in a new city, but you don’t know which one it is. Before the rational part of your mind kicks in, while the...
