March 2012
50 posts
19 tags
Voyeuristic Pleasures
Still from trailer for The Big Combo (1955) Allied Artists John Alton, Cinematographer
CULLEN GALLAGHER’s crime fiction column returns with books by Wallace Stroby, Alison Gaylin, Joe R. Lansdale, Hilary Davidson, Chris F. Holm, and Robert Silverberg. Wallace Stroby Kings of Midnight
Minotaur, April 2012. 304 pp. Kings of Midnight kicks off with a heist destined for the Hall of Fame....
8 tags
The Mastery of Non-Mastery
JENNIFER WALLACE
on Michael Taussig’s I Swear I Saw This. Photograph, Lisa Jane Persky Michael Taussig I Swear I Saw This: Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely My Own
University of Chicago Press, December 2011. 173 pp.
Six years ago, on a balmy afternoon, the anthropologist Michael Taussig was taking a cab ride in Medellín, Colombia’s second largest city. As the taxi sped into a...
LARB Recommends
Versace, Weiled Dress, El Mirage, 1990 Copyright Herb Ritts Foundation Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment. Thursday, March 29th: Eric Erlandson discusses and signs his book Letters To Kurt at Skylight Books beginning at 7:30 pm. Sneak preview and conversation with Thomas Demand about his film Pacific Sun at The Getty...
9 tags
Letter from Guatemala
AARON SHULMAN
on the problem of femicide. Image Courtesy of Fundacion Sobravivientes
On a sunny April morning in 2009, Norma Cruz sat at the prosecution’s table in a courtroom on the 15th floor of the Tower of Tribunals in Guatemala City. A petite, almost mousy woman of 47, she didn’t give the impression of someone accustomed to death threats or hunger strikes, yet as the director of La...
11 tags
Anti-Comprehension Pills
LEE KONSTANTINOU
on Ben Marcus’s The Flame Alphabet and the death of the reader. The Letter “P” © Victor Stabin, from Daedal Doodle Ben Marcus The Flame Alphabet
Knopf, January 2012. 304 pp.
In his 1967 essay “The Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes announced the revolutionary overthrow of the writer by the reader. Building on the idea that “it is language which speaks, not the author,”...
9 tags
Tales of Buffalo Billy
NOAH ISENBERG
on Billy Wilder (on the tenth anniversary of his passing). Photograph Thomas Hawk Noël Simsolo Masters of Cinema: Billy Wilder
Phaidon / Cahiers du Cinéma, June 2011. 104 pp.
“Every director has his own colors, like a painter,” observed Billy Wilder in 1962. “Some paint like Dufy, others are darker, like Soutine, say, but I’ve never wondered about whether I was bitter or cruel...
4 tags
Radar LARB
Angel’s Flight Park, Downtown LA by M Goetzman Diane Ackerman gets interpersonal: “The Brain on Love”: “When two people become a couple, the brain extends its idea of self to include the other; instead of the slender pronoun ‘I,’ a plural self emerges who can borrow some of the other’s assets and strengths. The brain knows who we are. The immune system knows who...
6 tags
In Her Fashion
ELI DINER
on a new biography of Coco Chanel. Lisa Chaney Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life
Viking Adult, November 2011. 464 pp.
A splendid list of accomplishments is frequently attributed to Coco Chanel: utility, ease of movement, the New Woman unburdened of corset. Masculinization! Casualization! Skirt suits, wool jerseys, sunbathing, sportswear, and the bob.
Never mind that Chanel was...
20 tags
Everything Happened
PHILLIP MACIAK on AMC’s Mad Men. Image courtesy AMC
Toward the end of “Tomorrowland,” the final episode of the fourth season of AMC’s Mad Men, Don Draper (the girl-, booze-, and epiphany-hound played to the nines by Jon Hamm) gazes with rapt wonder into the eyes of his newest lover. Something of a cut-to-the-chase lothario until this point, Draper’s googly candor is a bit surprising as he lays...
7 tags
Trampoline Heart
Image: Strata ©
Stanford Kay SUSAN SALTER REYNOLDS on Gail Jones’s Five Bells, Krys Lee’s Drifting House, and Lars Iyer’s Dogma.
Gail Jones Five Bells
Picador, February 2012. 213 pp.
Some books are strong on plot, some on characters, others on setting or voice. Very few hit all targets equally well. In Five Bells, Gail Jones creates four characters that may never...
11 tags
Details, Details
JONATHAN CRISMAN on architect Edward R. Ford’s grand obsession. The Lawn University of Virginia Charlottesville by Frances Benjamin Johnston Edward R. Ford The Architectural Detail
Princeton Architectural Press, November 2011, 328 pp.
“Obsession is the single most wasteful human activity,” Norman Mailer once said in an interview with the fabulously named Divina Infusino for the in-flight...
LARB Recommends
Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment. Thursday, March 22nd: A special one man performance featuring author Mark Salzman at the Mark Taper Auditorium beginning at 7:00 pm. Westside connections 2 featuring Jonathan Gold and Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra at The Broad Stage beginning at 7:30 pm. Night Papers...
6 tags
About a Genre: John D'Agata and the Essay
by Colin Dickey Much of the reaction to The Lifespan of a Fact, a book composed of an epic dialogue/debate/battle between essayist John D’Agata and fact-checker Jim Fingal, has been distinctly hostile towards D’Agata: for his arrogance, and his blasé attitude toward the role of “fact” in the nonfiction essay. It may be a little too easy to hate D’Agata, who, to many readers, comes across as...
11 tags
Virtual Violence
SHAUN RANDOL
on war at a distance. Harun Farocki Installation view, Images of War (at a Distance), MoMA, 2011
Top: Serious Games II: Three Dead (Video still)
Bottom: Serious Games I: Watson is Down (Video still)
Courtesy the Artist and Greene Naftali, New York
Photograph: Jonathan Muzikar Harun Farocki Images of War (at a Distance)
Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City....
2 tags
History in the Making: A Literary Road Guide
by C.P. HeiserThese days, L.A.’s literary tradition is in the books, so to speak. There is no questioning its breadth and wide-ranging influence, thanks in large part to the contributions of our current literary elite — a crop that includes Joan Didion, Wanda Coleman, Mike Davis, Luis Rodriguez, James Ellroy, Walter Mosley, and Mona Simpson, among many others. Our writers exist...
4 tags
Pulsing Jewels: Edward St. Aubyn’s At Last
EMILY GREEN with a quick word on ennui and tree frogs. Edward St. Aubyn At Last
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, January 2012. 272 pp.
First, what a lovely painting of roses by British surgeon and artist Sir Roy Calne decorates the dust jacket of Edward St Aubyn’s new novel At Last.
Second, what fine filling there is between the covers. Others have written about the desolation, wit, and clawed...
11 tags
Words for Remembering
LAUREN EGGERT-CROWE on the complicated relationship between love and shame. Highland Park, Illinois © Frank Caird Peter Orner Love and Shame and Love
Little, Brown and Co., November 2011. 448 pp.
I’ve seen Peter Orner read from his new novel, Love and Shame and Love, twice. The first time was in San Francisco, at the Booksmith. It wasn’t until a few weeks later that I saw how Orner had...
7 tags
Damages
MINDY FARABEE on Michelle Latiolais’s art of bereavement. Michelle Latiolais Widow
Bellevue Literary Press, February 2011. 192 pp.
Michelle Latiolais’s characters know a thing or two about grief and loss, and about the painful journey of self-healing. In Latiolais’s first novel Even Now, an adolescent gets caught between the warring of her narcissistic parents; in her follow-up, A...
4 tags
Protest Fictions: Mike Daisey, Jason Russell, and...
by Briallen HopperIllustration for Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Hammatt Billings, 1853 It’s been a rough week for the well-intentioned. Consider the cases of Mike Daisey, the anti-Apple monologist who made up some of his monologue, and Jason Russell, the anti-Ugandan-warlord filmmaker who radically simplified a complex conflict and, depending on who you ask, recommended either way too much...
7 tags
The Skeptical Gaze
ANDER MONSON
on John D’Agata and Jim Fingal’s The Lifespan of a Fact. And What About The Truth, 2004 (red and blue neon, changing color daily) © Maurizio Nannucci John D’Agata and Jim Fingal The Lifespan of a Fact
W.W. Norton & Company, February 2012. 128 pp.
As I finished reading The Lifespan of a Fact I was aloft, jouncing about in the very top layer of cloud cover, on the...
4 tags
The Lifespan of a Myth
by Jeffrey Wasserstrom Last week was a very good one for a good friend (and one of my favorite China-based journalists), Marketplace’s Rob Schmitz, and a lousy one for one of my favorite radio shows, WBEZ’s This American Life. The reason for this is what some on Twitter (e.g., Kaiser Kuo of the Sinica Podcast) have taken to calling L’Affaire Daisey. Here’s a quick recap (that builds...
Radar LARB
LARB’s staff picks for weekly reading: Madeline Lane-McKinley’s politicized reading of Curb Your Enthusiasm: “Larry’s situation in Curb mirrors that from which Adorno produced Minima Moralia — a Jew in exile in Los Angeles — though Larry is escaping from Seinfeld, not the Nazis. To arrive at a politicized reading of Curb, Adorno nevertheless lends an ideal starting point. In...
24 tags
Doing A D’Agata
LEE GUTKIND
on John D’Agata and Jim Fingal’s The Lifespan of a Fact. Blackboard courtesy of Nieman Journalism Lab A project of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard
John D’Agata and Jim Fingal The Lifespan of a Fact
W.W. Norton & Company, February 2012. 128 pp.
A writer colleague, referring to a document she had written, confessed: “I totally D’Agata’d this.” I couldn’t help...
8 tags
Los Angeles Review of Books Radio
Our inaugural broadcast on KCRW.
Click here or on the image above to go to KCRW and listen or download.
7 tags
The Lyrical Essay
Image ©
Paul Bausch onfocus.com John D’Agata’s latest book, The Lifespan of a Fact, has caused quite a fuss. We’ll be running a couple of interesting pieces about the book and the kerfuffle this week: one tomorrow by Creative Nonfiction founder and editor Lee Gutkind, and one the next day by Ander Monson, author of Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir and other books.
The questions at the center...
9 tags
Another 100,000 Galleys
Image
© Paul Bausch The famous Library at Alexandria, at its largest, housed perhaps as many as 500,000 scrolls, or the equivalent of some 25,000 books. A quaint number: ten years ago, we were publishing, in the U.S., around ten times that a year. Now, we publish that many every two and a half days.
Anyone with access to a networked computer can publish a book, or ten, or a hundred. Anyone...
3 tags
The Return of the Baffler: An Interview with John...
by Evan KindleyThe Baffler was founded in 1988 in Charlottesville, Virginia by Thomas Frank and Keith White and quickly established itself as a leading fifth column in the ongoing culture wars. Abjuring both abstruse academic specialization and mainstream harmlessness, The Baffler sought to carry on the grand tradition of viciously satirical populist cultural critics like H.L. Mencken, Edmund...
20 tags
The American Aftershock
ERIC BEEN talks to THOMAS FRANK about his new book, Pity the Billionaire. Photo: Lisa Jane Persky When Thomas Frank co-founded The Baffler in 1988, according to the introduction of the recently relaunched opinion journal’s first anthology, Commodify Your Dissent, its crucial mission was to “restore a sense of outrage and urgency to the Literature of the Left.” [Click here to read an interview...
10 tags
The End of Mourning
JESS ROW
on Tony Kushner and 21st century Marxism. Lazy Boy, 2005 From the series “East of Eden” © Pipo Nguyen-Duy
Courtesy Sam Lee Gallery, Los Angeles Tony Kushner The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Communism With a Key to the Scriptures
Produced at the Public Theater, New York, May-June 2011
It was Kierkegaard who said that life must be lived forward,...
5 tags
Unmistakably Irish: Recalling Beckett's Godot
by Kelly Candaele In the play Waiting for Godot – Samuel Beckett’s best known work, now playing at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles – the main characters Vladimir and Estragon are stuck in a ruined landscape where they bicker, contemplate suicide, and observe a ritual of degradation enacted by two visitors, Pozzo and his underling Lucky. They wait for the mysterious Godot who just might...
LARB Recommends
Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment. Thursday, March 15th: From the Outside Looking In: Writers Finding Their Place in Los Angeles featuring Bernard Cooper, Joyce Farmer, Lynell George, Marisela Norte, and Michael Tolkin at Mark Taper Auditorium beginning at 7:00 pm. Ben Ryder Howe discusses and signs My Korean...
11 tags
Cinematic
SWATI PANDEY
on Roger Ebert’s Life Itself. Roger Ebert Life Itself
Grand Central Publishing, September 2011. 448 pp.
For many people, Roger Ebert was, is, and always will be a television personality. Television images are hard to shake, particularly when they’re nationally syndicated. Ebert’s show — co-hosted first, and most famously, with Gene Siskel, and later with Richard Roeper —...
19 tags
The Hand That Feeds
MALCOLM HARRIS
on Olivier Zunz’s Philanthropy in America. American Philosophical Society, Non-commercial, educational use only Olivier Zunz Philanthropy in America: A History
Princeton University Press, October 2011. 396 pp.
In his new book, University of Virginia history professor Olivier Zunz seeks to shape snippets of biography, a constellation of financial records, and selected...
1 tag
Radar LARB
Gas pump sticker © C.P. Heiser LARB’s staff picks for weekly reading: Evan Hughes on Saul Bellow the cuckold: “[Bellow’s friend] Ludwig wrote sports books and derivative novels in the Bellow-Roth mode that have fallen out of print — Atlas calls him ‘painfully short of talent’ — and perhaps he acted out of resentment that he needed Bellow to carry him through...
15 tags
In Medias Ars
DOMENICK AMMIRATI and CÉCILE ALDUY
on Michel Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory. Plot (I) Detail, 2010 map, acrylic, pins, adhesive, paper © Shannon Rankin All rights reserved http://bit.ly/xG8DzV DOMENICK AMMIRATI From Cocks to Corpses Michel Houellebecq The Map and the Territory
Transl. by Gavin Bowd
Knopf, January 2012. 288 pp.
While Michel Houellebecq has inveighed against...
7 tags
The Wrong Marlowe
CHARLES KELLY
on an amnesiac pulp writer in L.A. “You don’t deserve it, but I’ll give you a choice,” I said. “I was going to leave you out here, with the heat and the mosquitoes and the bugs and the snakes and the alligators. You’ll never make it in. I doubt if I could myself.” His whole face was wet as he stared at me. “You won’t go easy if you stay, so I’ll give you the choice. Stay, or...
LARB Recommends
Photograph by Robert Adams featured at March 11th photo exhibit. Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment. Friday, March 9th: Ashley Ream reads and signs her novel Losing Clementine at Skylight Books beginning at 7:30 pm. Saturday, March 10th: Fifth installment of This is Your Library featuring John Salley, Sonja...
6 tags
Dissent
GORDON FELLMAN
on Liu Xiaobo’s No Enemies, No Hatred. Liu Xiaobo No Enemies, No Hatred: Selected Essays and Poems
Edited by Tienchi Martin-Liao, Liu Xia, and Perry Link.
Harvard University Press, January 2012. 400 pp.
The 20th century was marked by near-absolute totalitarian political systems in massive industrial societies. It was also a time for dissidents to rise and broadcast...
10 tags
Church and State
ALBERT WU on Liao Yiwu’s oral histories and the new Christian martyrs in the Chinese heartland. The Ladder of Paradise icon described by St. John Climacus http://bit.ly/yzi4GR Liao Yiwu God is Red: The Secret Story of How Christianity Survived and Flourished in Communist China
Translated by Wenguang Huang
HarperOne, September 2011. 256 pp. _____. The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories:...
5 tags
People Who Eat People
STEVEN SHAPIN
on Cătălin Avramescu’s Intellectual History of Cannibalism. Brazilians cook human flesh … ©
(1671) From Nieuwe en onbekende wereld by A. Montanus, Courtesy of New York Public Library Collection Cătălin Avramescu An Intellectual History of Cannibalism
Translated from the Romanian by Alistair Ian Blyth
Princeton University Press, August 2011 (originally published 2003)....
4 tags
Dream State: Speaking an Endangered Language with...
by Ben Rodkin Artwork © Demian Flores; courtesy the Language Activists project. LA-based artists David Shook and Ben Rodkin are collaborating to document the lives of poets and artists in the Zapotec Isthmus of Oaxaca, México. At the heart of the project is the lingering pulse of Diixda-Zapotec, the indigenous tongue these language activists are refusing to concede. Poet Víctor Terán is central to...
10 tags
Living with Linsanity
OLIVER WANG
on the Jeremy Lin phenomenon. Day 1, February 4th: Going into this night’s game, both the New York Knicks and New Jersey Nets are sub.-500, their seasons already foundering in failed expectations. In New York especially, all the focus is on football, since the local Giants are on the eve of their second Superbowl of the past four seasons. Maybe because the stakes feel low, maybe...
4 tags
Radar LARB
Smile © C.P. Heiser Our staff picks for weekly reading: Charlotte Brontë’s French homework from March 16th, 1842, discovered by Brian Bracken: “Un Rat, las de la vie des villes, et des cours; (car il avait joué son rôle aux palais des rois et aux salons des grand seigneurs) un rat, que l’expérience avait rendu sage, enfin, un rat qui de courtisan était devenu philosophe, s’était retiré à sa...
4 tags
Harrowing Idealism
PAWEL FRELIK on Steve Erickson’s These Dreams of You, “the first true Obama novel.”
The Wonders of Imitation (Video) ©
Rebecca B. Bennett, All rights reserved MonsterArtist.com http://bit.ly/AEJbNd Steve Erickson These Dreams of You
Europa Editions, February 2012. 309 pp.
After eight novels, two nonfiction books and a vast body of journalism, Steve Erickson ought to be...
9 tags
Russia's New Time of Troubles
MARTIN SIXSMITH
on Russia, then and now. Bookseller, St. Petersburg
The line dividing memory from history is a thin one. The latter hinges on reportage, reconstruction, and, inevitably, speculation; the former is personal, immediate and in some cases dramatic. It is twenty years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, but my memories of it are sharp. Waking up in Moscow to the news of the...
9 tags
Understated Turmoil
DAVID FREEMAN
The late English novelist Beryl Bainbridge was a favorite among writers. That’s a lovely honor but not quite a ticket to popular success. Bainbridge had two distinct periods. In the first she wrote about young women and the trials of their working lives and the men they never quite understood and who never quite understood them. Those books often open as conventional comedies...
8 tags
Feeding the Poor
Image
© Paul Bausch Jeff Dietrich’s Broken and Shared: Food, Dignity and the Poor on Los Angeles’ Skid Row is a collection of reports from a life of activism. It begins (after forewords by Dietrich, Martin Sheen, and Daniel Berrigan), with letters from county jail in 1979, where Dietrich was serving six months for protesting a military electronics show in Anaheim, one of his forty trips...
The Week that Was
Ukrainian kids, 2010 cc Tom Lutz [click on quote to go] UKRAINE, CZECHOSLOVAKIA “Štyrský’s photographs seem to say: Decay is one of the ways in which dead things live. In Schulz’s stories, too, it’s the main way. Things breathe their own air and persist past their obsolescence.”
CHINA
“‘This place is more American than America,’ I observe candidly to my student...
10 tags
Decay is the Way Dead Things Live
JACOB MIKANOWSKI
on Bruno Schulz, Jindřich Štyrský, and other modernist masters of matter. Dream of Butterflies, Jindřich Štyrský from Dreamverse (Twisted Spoon)
The fiction of Bruno Schulz is alive with dead things. His stories all take place in the narrow landscape of his childhood: the small, provincial town of Drohobycz in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire and is now western...
7 tags
Dreaming in Chinese
RICHARD WOLIN
on a recent trip to China.
“This place is more American than America,” I observe candidly to my student minder on the taxi ride toward downtown Shanghai, sorely sleep-deprived following my 13-hour flight from New York. “It makes Manhattan look provincial.” One’s first sighting of Shanghai is unforgettable. Perhaps nowhere else in the world today does one find such a massive...
