The 1920s in Russia weren’t exactly what people had hoped they would be. After the 1917 Russian Revolution brought down the old regime and the Soviets took over, there was a swelling sense of hope in a potential egalitarian Communist future. Yet only a few years later, censorship was curtailing art and free expression. Fortunately, no one was paying much attention to the children’s books.
Category: Books
Posted inBooks
The Harshly Lit Darkness of Lucian Freud
Lucian Freud, as presented in the gossipy new biography, Breakfast with Lucian by Geordie Grieg, lived for 88 years entirely guilt-free, which is a remarkable bit of pathology in itself, but especially so for the grandson of the man who tagged guilt as the glue holding civilization together.
Posted inBooks
The Art of the Hustle
“Is this relationship built on trust?” Nigel Nolan asks in a caption directed at FeD, one of his “Argentine boys for sale.” The relationship in question is structured on commodity exchange: FeD’s image in exchange for a cut of the sales from it. Argentine Boys for Sale, a 500-page ebook with accompanying soundtrack by Xiu Xiu, documents a three-year-long project in which Nolan shared a home with five young men in Buenos Aires
Posted inBooks
From Lucky Magazine to Lyrical Sonnets
CHICAGO — Simone de Beauvoir once said, “Buying is a profound pleasure.” To shop, to consume, to purchase a new look even if it’s temporary — an air of satisfaction accompanies that moment of credit card swiping, or handing over that stack of Ben Franklins.
Posted inBooks
Why I Am a Member of the Ron Padgett Fan Club
One mind-stumping sensation a reader is likely to glean from Ron Padgett’s Collected Poems (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2013) is that the poems wrote themselves, and that he just happened to be in the room when they showed up. There is even a substantial section in Collected Poems that Padgett titled: POEMS I GUESS I WROTE (2001).
Posted inBooks
“Eye-Voices, a Choir”: New Translations of Paul Celan
The Romanian-born, German-speaking Paul Celan is one of the most translated poets in recent decades, and we’re still not through with him.
Posted inBooks
Angels and the Dead: Reviving Occult Manuals
It seems like every few decades there is a mainstream revival for the occult and esoteric. Not that it ever fades away, but there is a periodic surge in fascination with the unknowable, the rites, rituals, and art that make up its history.
Posted inBooks
Is Pizza Box Art the Most Underappreciated Art?
How much time do you spend looking at the art on a pizza box?
Posted inBooks
Alan McMonagle’s “Psychotic Episodes”: “I’ve a feeling we’re not in [Old] Ireland anymore”
“Being born in Scotland carries with it certain responsibilities.”
That observation, made by Derek Taylor, the Liverpool-born newspaperman who became the Beatles’ press officer, was irreverently included on the back cover of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s record album The Plastic One Band/Live Peace in Toronto 1969.
Posted inBooks
Geography Lesson: Lytle Shaw’s Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics
Lytle Shaw’s Fieldworks is a big and ambitious study that is a welcome addition to the dense, unruly, and relatively unmapped field called “postwar poetics.”
Posted inBooks
Break Through the Lines with Artist-Designed Coloring Books
For anyone soothed by the careful filling in of white space or enthused by wrecking it all with random slashes of color and unconventional hues, there’s been a recent influx of coloring books created by artists.
Posted inBooks
The Mobius Strip Melding Sci-fi and Architecture
The futures that are built through architecture and the futures that are constructed through science fiction aren’t always galaxies apart.