Books
Reader’s Diary: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s ‘The Long Road of Sand’
Sometimes you get to know writers best in their minor works; a commissioned text can disclose more than an obsessively personal project.
Books
Books
Reader’s Diary: Bernadette Mayer’s 'Sonnets'
My editors asked me for notes on books I’d been reading — about three hundred words. I’ve already figured out that it’s not in me to be quite that concise.
Books
Plumage of the Saints: Aztec Feather Art in the Age of Colonialism
In a 16th-century triptych of the crucifixion at the Musée National de la Renaissance, north of Paris, Christ has wings. In fact the whole piece is made of feathers.
Books
The Beauty of Moldy Photos
For most archivists, finding mold among collections represents the beginning of one's worst nightmares.
Books
Reader’s Diary: Jaimy Gordon’s 'Lord of Misrule'
Jaimy Gordon passed through my field of vision some time in the early 1980s.
Books
Susan Bee and Johanna Drucker Tell the Real Life Stories of Fabulous Females
In the tradition of Lives of the Saints and, even more pointedly, Laura (Riding) Jackson’s Lives of Wives, visual artist Susan Bee and book artist Johanna Drucker have created a wonderful new “picture” book, Fabulas Feminae or fables of women.
Books
The Origins of Eero Saarinen's TWA Terminal in a One-Legged Chair
When the TWA Flight Center opened in 1962 at New York's JFK Airport, its swooping form seemed to embody flight itself, with its two white wings rising from the tarmac.
Books
Supercharged Sex and Corporate Control in a Queer Erotic Novel
In My Wet Hot Drone Summer, anti-surveillance activists defeating corporate overlords is strangely sexy.
Books
America’s Secret Societies: A New Book Probes Their Art and Mysteries
What is more titillating — knowing that someone is guarding a delicious secret you might never be invited to share, or being charged with protecting some precious confidence of your own?
Books
The Kimono, Examined: A New Book and a Definitive Collection
In the West, is there any garment more elegant than a tuxedo, one that makes its wearer, no matter what size or age, almost always look (and feel) great? In the East — specifically, in Japan — the kimono may be a similar, inestimable costume.
Books
Quiet Drawings from a Life Lost in Mental Institutions
In one of the drawings discovered in a well-worn album, fished out of the trash in 1970 by a teenager in Springfield, Missouri, a wide-eyed woman points to a bouquet of flowers below the words "ECTLECTRC PENCIL."
Books
The Rose-Washed Past: Ron Haviv’s 'Lost Rolls'
I’ve long been fascinated by the various filters for Instagram and other digital camera apps whose names are simply years: 1969, 1972, 1977.