Marcel Duchamp by Octavio Paz
Critics who loved Duchamp’s ‘Large Glass’ laughed and scoffed when they saw ‘Given’ unveiled after his death in 1969. The ‘Large Glass’ was esoteric and encoded while ‘Given’ was like a carny freak show equipped with a peephole, a naked female body and fake edenic…
Mimesis; the Representation of Reality in Western Literature by Erich Auerbach
(2nd reading) ‘Auerbach’s genius is his ability to both engage his texts in close, illuminating and rigorous analysis and to make these text speak for entire epochs, showing how people define themselves and their concerns.’ I wrote that after completing Mimesis seven years ago. While…
The Benjamin Files by Fredric Jameson
Last year I read Benjamin’s ‘One-Way Street’ and understood only a fraction of it. I had read Jameson’s ‘Postmodernism’ which while stimulating was a difficult slog and when I saw ‘The Benjamin Files’ I grabbed it. I’m not sure what made me turn to a…
Marcel Duchamp, The Afternoon Interviews by Calvin Tomkins
This slight volume takes less than an hour to read but my Duchamp obsession knows no bounds so I snatched it up greedily. The interviewer Calvin Tomkins wrote the definitive biography on Duchamp and it is definitely worth reading. There are obvious gems here but…
Marcel Duchamp and the Art of Life by Jacquelynn Baas
Recently an art critic for the Washington Post wrote glowingly of Duchamp’s ‘Nude Descending’ that he painted in 1912. However, this critic then said it was the last thing Duchamp painted and implied that this served as the end of his career as an artist…
Poetry Notebook by Clive James
Clive James who died in 2019 had a long period of terminal illness which is reflected in this book published in 2014. I picked this book up at ‘Word after Word,’ an amazingly good bookstore for a town the size and nature of Truckee. I…
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Sanders
I have read ‘Lincoln at the Bardo’ and several story collections by George Sanders and find him an astute observer, a writer of vivid and perverse imagination sprinkled with a compassion and kindness that makes him stand apart from most writers who at the very…
One-Way Street by Walter Benjamin
Benjamin life had a tragic end. A German Jew who got out of Germany before Hitler took power fleeing to Paris but France falling into Nazi hands in 1940 put him in precarious place. Still he was almost safe across the Spanish border when word…
Hopper by Mark Strand
This book could serve as meditation prompts because the focus of both the paintings poet Mark Strand chooses and his essays is to, ‘locate the viewer in a virtual space.’ He isn’t interested in the social and cultural aspect of Hopper’s work but in how…
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin
This short essay packs a punch because Benjamin isolates the essence of both the uniqueness of a work of art and also the particular characteristic that technology brings to reproduction. For example, a photo of a painting may convey more detail than what the human…
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