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July 20
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Matt
is currently reading:
Chaos: Making a New Science (Paperback)
by James Gleick
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Matt
gave
to:
Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination (Hardcover)
by Lynda Roscoe Hartigan
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Matt said:
"This book is incredibly difficult for me to assess in any objective light; it is the accompanying catalog to the Joseph Cornell retrospect which I saw in Boston last summer – perhaps the single most important museum exhibition in shaping my current...more
This book is incredibly difficult for me to assess in any objective light; it is the accompanying catalog to the Joseph Cornell retrospect which I saw in Boston last summer – perhaps the single most important museum exhibition in shaping my current thoughts on art. As a document of that experience, and a reference/catalog of Cornell's work, this book is invaluable.
As far as I'm concerned, the book has only one failing – seemingly minor, but unfortunate nonetheless: virtually all of Cornell's pieces on view in the catalog were shot against a white background. The images in Hardigan's earlier book, Shadowplay/Eterniday, were shot against black, and it does wonders in terms of preserving the mystery of Cornell's work (already so harder to capture in the reduction to two dimensions) – the boxes and collages glow like little jewels against the blackness. The white backgrounds are even more strange when set against the exhibition itself, which was deliberately dimly lit for exactly the reasons noted above. In the end, though, I'm simply grateful to have an artifact of an exhibition for which the personal importance cannot be overstated....less
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Matt
gave
to:
The Omnivore's Dilemma (Hardcover)
by Michael Pollan
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Matt said:
"I felt an odd connection reading this book after McLuhan's Understanding Media, because in some ways I felt they were about the same thing – the way in which the acceleration of technology is changing society. The Omnivore's Dilemma ...more
I felt an odd connection reading this book after McLuhan's Understanding Media, because in some ways I felt they were about the same thing – the way in which the acceleration of technology is changing society. The Omnivore's Dilemma could almost be a case study for McLuhan's book, as Pollan's book is very much about how the industrial system of agriculture is changing our relationship to food – and for Pollan, unsurprisingly, this change is an unmitigated disaster.
Pollan lays out his argument by tracing the development of four meals, each representing a different way of approaching agriculture: the industrial, the industrial-organic, the alternative/local, and the hunter/gatherer. As Pollan goes through these four meals, his ultimate thesis emerges: that we need to collapse the distance between ourselves and our meals. The more intermediaries our food goes through, the less our health, our enjoyment, or environmental stability become priorities of food producers. Pollan, of course, does not argue that we all need to become hunter/gatherers again (although he, with great difficulty, cooks an entirely hunted/gathered meal in order to understand what can be learned from such an experience) – but he does argue that we need to be a lot more conscious about where our food comes from.
It is a message that has become increasingly important to me – our wasteful consume-and-discard society is able to thrive, in a large part, on our own laziness. The Omnivore's Dilemma, is an absolutely necessary call for greater consciousness....less
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Matt
gave
to:
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Paperback)
by Marshall McLuhan, Lewis H. Lapham
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Matt said:
"Marshall McLuhan has suffered the fate of many quotable philosophers and critics – like Nietzsche's pronouncement that “God is dead,” McLuhan's statement that “the medium is the message” has been tossed around by a populace that often fail ...more
Marshall McLuhan has suffered the fate of many quotable philosophers and critics – like Nietzsche's pronouncement that “God is dead,” McLuhan's statement that “the medium is the message” has been tossed around by a populace that often fail to appreciate its full complexity. Having now read through the entirety of Understanding Media, it is clear that although McLuhan often takes his pronouncements to unnecessary extreme, he is equally often incredibly insightful, offering up a revolutionary way to analyze the effects of technology/media on culture, and moreover is occasionally stunningly prescient.
McLuhan's central argument is that the function of media is an acceleration – in particular, an acceleration of a specific bodily sense function: the telephone as an extension/acceleration of speech, the phonograph as an extension/acceleration of the ear, etc. Yet the increased speed and reach of these particular media radically reorganize human interaction and communication, and therefore society at large. The first section of Understanding Media is spent presenting this overall idea – the second half of the book analyzes a multitude of case studies of media forms.
I find McLuhan's ultimate message that we have utterly failed to understand the way in which media have effected our lives strongly resonates, and unfortunately, seems to have changed little in the 40 yeas since Understanding Media was written. Much of what he predicted about the emergence of electronic media has come to pass (for example, the collapse of the physical newspaper with the advent of near-instantaneous news – although the Internet wasn't even a concept when Understanding Media was written), although not all (McLuhan also predicted that the instantaneous transmission of information would break the American reliance on the automobile, which unfortunately has not come to pass). In fact, the changes in media are happening at a greater pace now than ever before – yet our ignorance about how media is reshaping social interaction remains as strong as ever.
McLuhan's greatest weakness is his tendency to make huge proclamations without providing adequate evidence. Sometimes he presents strong anthropological, sociological, or literary evidence to back up his claims, but not always – sometimes the reader is left somewhat adrift, trying to process the veracity of some bold pronouncement. This is an important failure for a piece of cultural criticism, but the strength of McLuhan's ideas make Understanding Media an important read nonetheless....less
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Matt
gave
to:
Underworld (Paperback)
by Don DeLillo
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Matt said:
"The central metaphor in Underworld, as I saw it, revolves around trash. One of the main characters, Nick Shay, works for a waste-disposal company. No matter how many different recycling bins his family divides their waste into (seven and cou...more
The central metaphor in Underworld, as I saw it, revolves around trash. One of the main characters, Nick Shay, works for a waste-disposal company. No matter how many different recycling bins his family divides their waste into (seven and counting), it cannot all be reclaimed. The trash builds up – and what holds true for the physical also holds true for the personal and the historical. No matter how we might try to reprocess, recast,or ignore our history/memory, our past accumulates, and the weight of our mental and personal garbage is heavy.
An interesting twist that DeLillo works into Underworld, as I realized during a recent discussion with a friend, is that one of the characters, the painter Klara Sax, is able to find a sort of redemption. Yet the reader sees redemption at the beginning of the book, not the end – the book works backwards towards the trash and detritus of her past, leaving Klara, rather, at an seemingly insurmountable (although we, as readers, know better) low point.
One of the greatest successes of the book is the fluidity with which it moves between personal and cultural memories. The opening prologue of the book, in fact, starts off with an incredible recreation of the historic 1951 Dodgers/Giants playoff game – the earliest point, temporarily, in the whole book. When we then jump forward to the present, we meet the characters for the first time – and the rest of the book is spent working backwards, following the personal histories as they weave in and out of the cultural history we met at the beginning. The way in which DeLillo allows these two memories to inform and define each other is an unbelievable triumph, on par with the personal/cultural archives of Joseph Cornell's boxes, from half a century earlier....less
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Matt
gave
to:
Night (Paperback)
by Elie Wiesel
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Matt said:
"I think that Night has to be judged on two separate levels: as a work of literature and as a historical document. Oddly enough (especially given that Wiesel is narrating his own experience), I found the descriptions of the horrors of the conc...more
I think that Night has to be judged on two separate levels: as a work of literature and as a historical document. Oddly enough (especially given that Wiesel is narrating his own experience), I found the descriptions of the horrors of the concentration camps both less emotionally direct and less informative than other, more contemporary accounts of the holocaust, such as Art Spiegleman's Maus and Maus II. This may be a fault of Wiesel's closeness to the experience – his desire for the reader to feel everything as deeply as he did causes him to occasionally lapse into hyperbole (“Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.”). In contrast, the almost documentary approach in Maus allows the horrors to read all the more directly; we are presented with nothing but the cold, hard reality of the situation.
What is important, though, is that Maus could never have been written without Night, and that is Wiesel's lasting contribution. When he set down to write his description of his own experience through Auschwitz and Buchenwald, such topics were completely taboo. Therefore, it makes sense that Wiesel won not the Nobel prize for Literature, but the Nobel Peace Prize. The writing of Night broke a long silence, and for that alone Wiesel deserves all his accolades. ...less
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Matt
gave
to:
Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing (Hardcover)
by Emma Dexter
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Matt said:
"While Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing doesn't suffer from the same over-defensiveness of Vitamin P, it also doesn't quite have its diversity of forms. Many contemporary artists have taken the directness of drawing as permission ...more
While Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing doesn't suffer from the same over-defensiveness of Vitamin P, it also doesn't quite have its diversity of forms. Many contemporary artists have taken the directness of drawing as permission to adopt the faux-naive drawing style, an overly-cartoony form of hipster drawing I find boring even when it's done at it's best. Nonetheless, there are some real treasures hidden in this collection – one just has to dig a little deeper than in its sister book.
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Matt
gave
to:
Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting (Paperback)
by Barry Schwabsky (Goodreads author!)
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Matt said:
"This may be an odd book about which to write a review, since 90% of its page space goes to pictures. But I take my art books as seriously as the rest of my collection, and took the time to go through this one cover-to-cover, so I figured I might as ...more
This may be an odd book about which to write a review, since 90% of its page space goes to pictures. But I take my art books as seriously as the rest of my collection, and took the time to go through this one cover-to-cover, so I figured I might as well write down my thoughts. As a collection of contemporary painters, this book is fantastic – the breadth of forms and techniques present is truly astounding, and even the most up-to-date art lover is bound to encounter the work of a painter they’d never heard of before (in my case, the disturbingly empty suburban landscapes of British painter George Shaw). Of course, any survey of art, especially contemporary art, is bound to be uneven – there’s plenty of awful art flooding the market right now. The overall high quality and diversity of works on display, however, make this a minor shortcoming.
What is harder to forgive, however, is the defensiveness of the accompanying text. Each artist’s work is shown with a two-three paragraph explication of their work, and more than 50% of these feel the need to assert, either subtly or overtly, that this particular artist is an example that “painting isn’t dead.” Besides being repetitive, this insistence on the resurrection of painting is unnecessary – no one, at least no one of any consequence, has claimed that painting was dead since the late 1970s. The very existence of this book should support that fact – the need for these curators to pound the table and scream about the importance of painting ends up weakening their case, not strengthening it....less
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Matt
gave
to:
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Paperback)
by Dave Eggers
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Matt said:
"This book summarizes everything that’s wrong with hipster 20-something culture. It’s overly ironic, self-absorbed, and unintelligently self-referential. I’m reasonably stunned by the literary accolades it garnered upon release – even the NY...more
This book summarizes everything that’s wrong with hipster 20-something culture. It’s overly ironic, self-absorbed, and unintelligently self-referential. I’m reasonably stunned by the literary accolades it garnered upon release – even the NY Times book review went on at length about it’s insight, pathos, and humor. As far as I’m concerned, draping Narcissism in sarcasm and weak literary allusion doesn’t make it any less narcissistic. Blech....less
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Matt
gave
to:
Snow Country (Paperback)
by Yasunari Kawabata
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Matt said:
"Kowabata’s Snow Country has many beautiful passages, but I often found it suffering from the same problem as The Unbearable Lightness of Being: a tendency to over-explain the characters. The book was most interesting when it had a so...more
Kowabata’s Snow Country has many beautiful passages, but I often found it suffering from the same problem as The Unbearable Lightness of Being: a tendency to over-explain the characters. The book was most interesting when it had a solitary character wandering through a town or landscape – I found most of the interactions to be too bogged down in the thoughts of the characters to be particularly compelling. I could see the austerity of Kowabata’s prose functioning better in different circumstances – one in which he lets the environments and the actions speak more for themselves....less
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