My favorite shelf in the home library is where Raymond Roussel, the Comte de Lautréamont, E.T. A. Hoffmann, Leonora Carrington and other writers form a brilliant phalanx of eccentricity and marvel. I turn to it like a five-hour energy drink, sampling a few pages of, say, Raymond Queneau or Heinrich von Kleist when in need of a shot of alternative reality (I’m waiting for cable to start producing surreality shows in which men and women practice automatic writing while in trances).
So what fun to add Paul Scheerbart and his perpetual motion machine to the line-up, an altogether delightful addition to the foule folle. A German writer who was born in the Prussian port of Danzig and lived in Berlin for much of his life, Scheerbart (1863-1915) was a jack of all genres — art critic, playwright, novelist, poet, etc. — with many muses.
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Photographer and photojournalist Alex MacNaughton’s latest book titled London Tattoos, is a lighthearted book of portraits featuring Londoners and their tattoos. Shooting his portraits in the studio against a neutral white background, reminiscent of white gallery walls, MacNaughton treats tattoos, and the bodies they are etched upon, like works of art. Showing only one image of each person fully covered in street clothes, MacNaughton crops and edits his photographs to show different parts and pieces of the body.
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LOS ANGELES — I hear it again and again in the art world. So many brilliant artists with great creative work, and yet so many of them tell me that they don’t have the first idea on how to start promoting their work and making sales. Enter The Profitable Artist.
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We all use social media. We tweet, Facebook, tumble and pin away, and some of us even make art on these platforms. Social media have been explored in countless talks and essays, as everyone from sociologists to artists to technologists have come together to explore just why these new media are so interesting, and what they mean about society.
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For the past week, White Fungus, a Taiwanese art magazine, was tucked under my arm as I frolicked and gallivanted through New York. I realize that some people love to sit at home, drink peppermint tea and read in bed. But I go out.
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Ever wondered what your childhood nightmares would look like if they met your adult nightmares? Well, take a peek at Monster, the latest installation of Providence, Rhode Island’s giant, horror-themed comic book.
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Once when I was breaking up with a girlfriend, she told me, “You act like a nice guy, but really you’re not.” Or maybe she said, “You pretend to be a nice guy,” I can’t quite remember. Anyway, I was taken aback. Would it be better to just habitually act like an asshole, rather than trying to do so as little as possible? Although I know my capacity for niceness is, like everyone else’s, limited, I try to cultivate my better qualities to the extent that I can. But then, what if, as a result, someone mistakenly comes to believe that I am nicer than I really am? Does that make me a bigger jerk than the guy who’s just self-evidently a jerk on the surface?
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When I read Witold Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke in the late 1980s the Soviet empire was beginning to totter and crack. An English version of the book, published in 1961 in the UK, had been re-issued in 1986 as part of Penguin’s Writers from the Other Europe series, edited by Philip Roth. The project aimed to disseminate Eastern European writers in the Anglophone world: a worthy endeavor, though judging from the cobbled-together edition of Ferdydurke — an offset duplication of the 1961 text, with a Czeslaw Milosz essay from another occasion tacked on as an introduction — one with a limited budget.
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Nightboat Books is, according to its website, “a nonprofit publishing company dedicated to printing original books of poetry and prose, and bringing out-of-print treasures back to life.” Bern Porter’s Found Poems, a collection previously published in 1972 by Dick Higgins’ Something Else Press, is surely one of those treasures, and we are fortunate now to have easy access to such a singular text.
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Varamo is only the sixth novel by the Argentinian writer César Aira to be made available in English, but the premise already sounds like an Aira-parody: one night in Panama in 1923, a government employee without a literary bone in his body composes a future masterpiece of Central American poetry and, as often happens, never writes another word again.
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