Long overdue

My LA Times review of a not-so-good book. I like that I'm special to the LA Times. It's nice to be special.

Sign of the End-times

I always believed that America was a Christian nation.

Proof that it is or proof that it isn't?

Hannah Höch

Read this.

Justine Kurland

Vice has posted my interview with Justine Kurland, as part of their July photography issue. They've included a nice selection of images, too, though not my favorite, so I've put that one below.

Alix Cleo Roubaud

Thought Catalog has just posted my article on Alix Cleo Roubaud's journals. Read it here. Don't delay.

My New Yorker blurb

Since Drawn & Quarterly has pointed to this ad on their blog, I'll indulge myself and do it here. Their ad for Dan Clowes's Wilson in which I am blurbed:

Birgit Jürgenssen

My consideration of Austrian feminist artist Birgit Jürgenssen is up at Thought Catalog. I even have a bio pic!

Dan Clowes

My interview with Dan Clowes, years in the making, is in the latest issue of The Believer. It's not available online, so you'll have to spring for a copy. So worth it!

Jeremy Blake

Three videos by Jeremy Blake on UbuWeb (I love UbuWeb!). Thanks to lesmistons.

Today Is All About Me (Apparently)

The Rudicks make their Drawn & Quarterly blog debut. (It's a scroll down.)

Review-a-Day

My review of Rebecca Jo Plant's Mom was Powell's Review-a-Day pick yesterday!

White House ladies love Chuck

Dr. Jill wore her high-tops to Haiti today, and last year, Michelle wore purple low-tops. Great footwear AND a health-care overhaul?

Just bloggin'

My first post at Comics Comics! With comments!

RIP Richard Stites

Somehow I missed Russian historian Richard Stites's death March 7 and the obit than ran in the New York Times two weeks ago, but the Washington Post has an obit up as of today. I have a number of his books, and his cultural histories were always a pleasure to read.

Mom

My review of Rebecca Jo Plant's new book, Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America, is up now at The Millions. Read it here. Do it now.

If the Guggenheim were a bookshelf

Dezeen features an amazing translucent white bookshelf spiraling up a two-story staircase. It holds 6,000 books. The house belonged to a nineteenth-century Portuguese poet and was recently converted into a literary center.

Stereoscopes

The Boat Lullabies has posted a series of animated stereoscopic pictures from the 1940s. Try looking at them with one eye closed, then switch eyes. Way cooler than Avatar.

Dubravka Ugresic

I have a review of her latest book, Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, in the new issue of Time Out New York. It's online here.

Harry Smith Colonoscopy

I knew Harry Smith was dead, but this headline caught my eye:

Harry Smith Colonoscopy to Air on 'Early Show'

Turns out one of the show's anchors is named Harry Smith, which I didn't know, since I find TV news repellent.

HOWEVER

This makes a great excuse to watch some animation by the real deal.

Tony Judt in 'New York Magazine'

The latest issue of New York Magazine has a profile of Tony Judt, also available online. Judt, the author, most recently, of the brilliant Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, was diagnosed with ALS, or Lou Gehring's disease, in 2008 and has since lost the use of his body. Though the disease inexplicably stopped short of destroying his ability to speak (he does so with the aid of a microphone) and eat, he's essentially left with only his mental faculties intact. But what a mind. Judt is an aggressive, provocative, and stimulating thinker. He's also widely criticized, not least for his views on Israel. He's made enemies of friends, but I greatly admire his fearlessness and his belief in the intellectual's responsibility to stand apart and, often, alone.

“I think intellectuals have a primary duty to dissent not from the conventional wisdom of the age (though that too) but, and above all, from the consensus of their own community. . . . So liberals should look especially hard at the uninterrogated assumptions of liberalism. Otherwise we are just hacks for a party line. If I have an Archimedean ethical standpoint, it really just consists of telling the truth as I see it even if I don’t much care for the implications, or if it offends my friends and my political allies.”

The magazine has judiciously let stand lengthy, unbroken passages of Judt speaking, and it makes for great reading:

One thing I always felt very strongly empathetic about in my reading of [the Italian chemist and Holocaust diarist] Primo Levi was his absolutely clearheaded sense that none of what had happened to him in the camps had any meaning. You might draw lessons from it in terms of experience, you certainly might draw political lessons. But at the existential level of one man’s life, it had no meaning. This has no meaning. What I do with it is up to me.

Ikea does manga

Ikea has introduced a new line of fabrics inspired by Japanese manga and ukiyo-e (and even a little oragami). Called the "Charlotta" line, it's designed by Swedish mangaka Åsa Ekström (interview here). The US site has five patterns on the theme "Japan Meets Scandinavia." I like them all, though the one at right is my favorite. Nothing beats manga's angsty, absurd melodrama. (Plus: Gojira v. Stockholm.)

Also great for tea cozies!

Why the lapse?

Where have I been, lo these many days? Really I have no idea. But I have been reading some good books. I'm still working my way through Patti's Smith's memoir of Robert Mapplethorpe. (I'm actually reading it to my son at his bedtime. Smith writes with such dreamy language, that it's strangely appropriate.) As though the story of Smith and Mapplethorpe together during their early years isn't incredible enough, they move into the Chelsea Hotel and run into everyone, notably developing relationships with Harry Smith, Allen Ginsburg (Smith's first encounter with him has been one of the book's highlights), and William Burroughs.

Next up: Dubravka Ugresic's installment in Canongate's myth series. (Review forthcoming.) She's not for everyone, but I find her writing very clever. I particularly like her because she writes with a biting, agitated style that is missing from American and British literature. She's often angry or critical (as she is in this new book), and she lets it show, but it never detracts from her narrative. Rather, it feeds the story's success. Her style is indicative of a form of personal, introspective writing, more often found in Eastern European fiction, that is also politically engaged. I think, for instance, of Vedrana Rudan's Night, a novel that consists solely of one woman's rant about personal and political travails. Even with limited narrative expanses, books such as these manage to appeal to a wider frame of reference, a wider context, and their heroines—never passive—write their own stories. It's more daring than much of what is published in the US.

And: I'm also enjoying Elif Batuman's essays in The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. She's a gifted storyteller, with a great comic timing.

wutzatrker

What? On the new Rope and Pulley release? Why, yes, that is me gliding down the stairs of the Hermitage, imitating the climactic final scene of Andrei Sokurov's Russian Ark. Thank you for asking.

Buy it/Watch it

The Guild's third season is available for purchase in iTunes and will be selling on Amazon next weekend. If you're not watching this web show, you should be. It's Felicia Day! Remember?

Cute one on the far right? She helped save the world once, so at least you could watch her show. Plus, she later starred with this guy, so she's clearly doing something right.

Axe Cop

Axe Cop! A webcomic (now in its sixth awesome episode) drawn by Ethan Nicolle and his five-year-old brother. AXE COP!

Sarah Doyle

Animated watercolors, titled Dancehall Danceoff, by artist Sarah Doyle. (Great, minus the soundtrack.)

Dancehall Danceoff from Sarah Doyle on Vimeo.

Memoirs

I'm not one for memoirs. I've read very few, though I have just cracked open Patti Smith's new one, Just Kids, which, so far, is an exquisitely written book. That said, I enjoyed Mary Karr's interview in the latest issue of the Paris Review. It marks the first installment of the journal's "The Art of Memoir," a complement to their long-running "The Art of Fiction" interviews.

On why she doesn't pray everyday, despite knowing it would make her a happier person:

I think it's because my big smart mind likes the idea that it's running the show, and any conscious contact with God plugs me into my own radical powerlessness.

And on the recent rise in memoir-writing:

In the forties, the memoir was akin to history, which was absolute. One reason for a surge in memoir is the gradual erosion of objective truth, which makes stuff like assembled dialogue seem more acceptable. We mistrust the old forms of authority—the church and politicians, even science. The subjective has power now.

Poe Toaster

I love the story that's been making the rounds since last Wednesday, the day after the Edgar Allen Poe's 201st birthday, about the mystery fan who failed to show at the poet's Baltimore gravesite, after having left roses and cognac there for the past sixty years. The numerous "nevermore" puns are hard to take, but the fact that dozens of people from all over the country flock to his grave in the middle of the night to pay tribute is awfully nice.

Ilf & Petrov

My LA Times review of The Golden Calf by Ilf & Petrov, published by Open Letter.

Frank O'Hara

The New Republic's book blog features a video of Frank O'Hara, one of my favorite poets, reading "Having a Coke with You," one of my favorite poems. The film is from 1966. He died later that year.

The Samsonadzes

The Georgian version of The Simpsons. Eek. The full story here.

Umida Akhmedova

Some terrific images by Uzbek documentary photographer Umida Akhmedova, who is facing prosecution for insulting the Uzbek people. (Via)

RZA makes (art) history

The RZA makes his visual art debut with Victory or Death. I'm all for ninja oarsmen, but I think the website trumps the painting. Can't go wrong with Carmina Burana. Each version contains a number of hidden Wu-Tang elements, and if you stare at it long enough, you can see Shaolin.

RIP Gumby

Art Clokey, creator of Gumby, died Friday. I remember watching his other show, Davey and Goliath, as a kid, because it was the only animated show that aired on Sunday mornings. It was often tough to decide whether the need for television entertainment outweighed the Godly lessons. So hard to be a nonreligious Jewish kid in Texas.

The kingdom of the abstract

I've just begun reading an advance galley of Juliet Koss's Modernism After Wagner, which the always-excellent University of Minnesota is publishing, and came across a passage in the introduction about abstraction's early aspirations toward a universal language. She later ties this idea to theories of spectatorship (and, interestingly, cinema), but she starts with a terrific quote from Kandinsky, taken from his 1911 book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art.

The more abstract form is, the more clear and direct its appeal. The more an artist uses these abstract forms, the deeper and more confidently will he advance into the kingdom of the abstract. And after him will follow the viewer . . . who will also have gradually acquired a greater familiarity with the language of that kingdom.

Fine Print

The Etcht Miniature Monthly Magazine. Tiniest books ever.

Tiny Houses

The LA Times has a slideshow of homes that are 1,000-square feet or less, photographed for Mimi Zeigler's book, Tiny Houses. The Walden, an homage to Thoreau, looks like a Joseph Cornell box.

Does the spareness of this design make you contemplate how much stuff you really need? Me, I like my stuff.