The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers My rating: 5 of 5 stars McCullers adopts an omniscient author pose as completely as the anonymous teller of fairy or folk tale, her sentences as rhythmic, martial, unequivocal as their subjects are opaque, suggestive, unnerving. They get inside your mind-corners like sand into your clothes… Continue reading Genius frustrated
Black Style by Carol Tulloch My rating: 5 of 5 stars I ordered this online and I wasn’t expecting the content to be so great (fashion books can be so much marshmallow). My only complaint is that it’s such a slim volume, though its lack of heft did make it easier to read in bed… Continue reading arts & spirits of cloth
No Place to Call Home: Gypsies, Travellers, and the Road Beyond Dale Farm by Katharine Quarmby My rating: 4 of 5 stars Quarmby discusses the history of GRT* persecution drawing heavily on the work of Romani academic Ian Hancock and other historians. British legal history includes waves of hostility towards ‘vagrants’ and ‘itinerants’ and Gypsies… Continue reading A really important book
Against Interpretation and Other Essays by Susan Sontag My rating: 3 of 5 stars None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew what it did. From now to… Continue reading Critique on Critique on Critique
Japan Portraits by Carl Randall My rating: 4 of 5 stars This book has a foreword by zoologist Desmond Morris, whose book The Naked Ape made me very angry. He talks about ‘bizarre’ Zen gardens (oh those crazy Japanese!!) and ‘mentally blinkered citizens isolated in a personal cocoon amidst the swarm of humanity’. Characteristically unromantic,… Continue reading Against the interpreters
New York Vertical Portable Format Edition by Horst Hamann My rating: 3 of 5 stars The premise of this book is that New York is markedly vertical and thus is interestingly captured when a vertical perspective is adopted. As is customary in photography books there is nothing much written. The preface mentions a few topics… Continue reading New York disembodied
Andre Kertesz by Noel Bourcier My rating: 5 of 5 stars Noel Bourcier, who has written the biography and commentary for this beautifully designed little volume, says that having gone off to war, Kertesz recognised himself as a ‘peace-loving, romantic young man’. This is exactly the appeal of Kertesz! Not that particular young man, not… Continue reading Photography monographs II
Ralph Eugene Meatyard by Judith Keller My rating: 3 of 5 stars This is a beautifully designed edition, with superb commentary on Meatyard’s complex, intellectual images. He is often associated with the writers of Beat literature, his contemporaries, with whom he shared an interest in spiritual themes (I’m indebted to my friend Loni Reynolds whose… Continue reading Photography monographs I
Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography by Roland Barthes My rating: 4 of 5 stars I’d never thought much about Barthes method until I read Sara Ahmed’s book Queer Phenomenology in which she draws attention to the labour that enables Husserl to sit and think at his table; the work of childcare and table clearing performed,… Continue reading divided gazes
Sita’s Ramayana by Samhita Arni My rating: 5 of 5 stars For a thousand years the Dandaka forest slept. And then Sita arrives with her tale, and the solemn-eyed flowers listen. Beginning here, in a plea for shelter and help, I hold my breath, and feel the forest embrace me with the beautiful queen of… Continue reading War is kind to men
(I am because you are) 