On Diane Arbus

 books  Comments Off
Jul 262011
 

Sean O’Hagan wrote a great article on Diane Arbus for the Guardian to commemorate the ever evasive American photographer on the 40th anniversary of her death.

Arbus may have felt an enormous empathy with the people she photographed, but she was not one of them, however much she identified with their outsider status. She had her own troubles, but they were of a different order. The work she left behind remains powerful not just because of its dark formal beauty or its stark vision, but because it asks questions of the viewer about the limits of looking, about the vicariousness and predatory nature of photography, and about our complicity in all of this.

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4 interviews

 life in the bookshop  Comments Off
Jul 262011
 

 

 

This morning I blinkblonked through 3:AM Magazine’s missing links. Always a great way to start a day. I’ve read an interview with Slavoj Žižek (nothing particularly new or interesting there), an interview with Jean-Luc Godard (great!) and an interview with Alan Moore (good insights about iPads and book industry). And then a bit later Vuk stopped by and I watched his interview (he talks about Eli Pariser’s new book Filter Bubble and he mentiones one cosy little neighbourhood bookshop : )

 

Beauty and Consolation

 art  Comments Off
Jul 242011
 

It rains today. Cold day. The world has been sad this week. Young people shooting, and shooting up. In a rare interview, some time ago, George Steiner said a very touching thing. It keeps coming back to me. He said, listening to the music of Schubert, “Because there was a Schubert, maybe, maybe somewhere there is an excuse for the rest of us.” The interview became a documentary with a soothing title, Beauty and Consolation. Today is a good day for beauty and consolation.

This was Alessandro Marcello’s Oboe Concerto in D Minor, 2 used in a peculiar little Japanese animated film called A Journey through Fairyland. Marcello’s composition was later transcribed by Bach for the harpischord, and Bach’s transcription has recently been interpreted by Ryuichi Sakamoto on his magical piano. Beauty goes places. Somewhere, maybe …

Field Notes on Science and Nature

 books, nature  Comments Off
Jul 142011
 

Harvard University Press published this little gem earlier this summer.

coverbook

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Essentially, the book is a collection of sketches and notes various anthropologists, botanists, paleontologists, ornithologists, and other notable watchmen of nature took while working on the field. It guides the reader into the variety of their observational methods and of their keen impressions.

I am perpetually moved by what seems to be in people an intrinsic meticulous wonder, devoted curiosity, and a wild drive to explore, observe and discover. Asking always, what else is there? Always also just barely being able to bear the weighty ambiguity of the question. This is a rare consolation.

lynxbook

 Posted by at 10:42 am

Getting Inside The Outsider

 books  Comments Off
Jul 052011
 

Getting Inside The Outsider, House of Illustration and The Folio Society’s Inaugural Book Illustration Competition was launched in October 2010, and asked entrants to produce a series of illustrations for The Folio Society’s new edition of the The Outsider by Albert Camus. The competition is now closed and a winner pronounced. It’s Matthew Richardson:

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I find the works of all the shortlisted finalists striking. Here are two more!

Chungwoon Choi:

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Alenka Sottler:

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You can see the rest here.