Category Archives: Arts & Literature
Books: The New York Times Book Review – Oct 23, 2022
Cormac McCarthy’s New Novel: Two Lives, Two Ways of Seeing
Ken Burns Wishes More People Would Call Willa Cather a Great American Novelist
“What about ‘O Pioneers!’ or ‘My Ántonia’?” asks the documentarian and author of the forthcoming photo book “Our America.” “For that matter, what about Gabriel García Márquez? We do not have a copyright on the word ‘American.’”
Paul Newman’s Humanity and Star Power
When the actor appeared in the movie version of “Nobody’s Fool,” Richard Russo saw another side of him.
Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’
This week: we talk to Emma Brown of Just Stop Oil about why the group targeted Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in the National Gallery, London, for its climate emergency protest.
Stacy Boldrick, assistant professor of museum studies at the University of Leicester, discusses the climate protests in the context of the long history of iconoclasm and attacks on works of art. The first version of Paris+, Art Basel’s fair in the French capital, opened this week, and we ask Melanie Gerlis, a columnist for the Financial Times and The Art Newspaper, how it compares to Paris’s previous fair, Fiac, and to the Frieze fairs in London last week.
And this episode’s Work of the Week is Frank Bowling’s Suncrush (1976), which features in an exhibition of the Guyana-born artist’s work at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Reto Thüring, the curator of the show, tells us about the painting and Bowling’s 10-year stay in America in the 1960s and 1970s.
Links:juststopoil.orgStacy Boldrick, Iconoclasm and the Museum, Routledge, 212pp, £27.99, $35.96 (pb)Paris+, until 23 October.Melanie Gerlis, The Art Fair Story: a Rollercoaster Ride, Lund Humphries, 104pp, £19.99, $34.99 (hb)Frank Bowling’s Americas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 22 October-9 April 2023; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 13 May-10 September next year. Related shows: Equals 6: A Sum Effect of Frank Bowling’s 5+1, University Hall Gallery, UMass Boston, 14 November-18 February 2023; Revisiting 5+1, Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery, Staller Center for the Arts, Stony Brook University, 10 November-23 February 2023.
Top New Exhibitions: ‘The Tudors – Art And Majesty In Renaissance England’
The Tudor courts were truly cosmopolitan, boasting the work of Florentine sculptors, German painters, Flemish weavers, and Europe’s best armorers, goldsmiths, and printers, while also contributing to the emergence of a distinctly English style. Join Elizabeth Cleland, Curator in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, and Adam Eaker, Associate Curator in the Department of European Paintings, to explore The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England, which traces the transformation of the arts in Tudor England through more than 100 objects—including iconic portraits, spectacular tapestries, manuscripts, sculpture, and armor—from both The Met collection and international lenders.
Learn more here: https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions…
Top New Art Exhibitions: ‘PARIS+ Par Art Basel 2022’
Paris+, par Art Basel is the fourth event of its kind in the portfolio of Art Basel, the world’s biggest art fair. Other, related editions are regularly held in Hong Kong, Miami Beach, and the Swiss city of Basel, where its tentpole fair is held. Expect big sales and even bigger crowds, as has long been the case with Art Basel’s other editions.
Books: TLS/Times Literary Supplement – Oct 21, 2022
This week’s issue of the TLS, featuring @George_Berridge , Claire Lowdon and Edmund Gordon on new books by Cormac McCarthy, Barbara Kingsolver and George Saunders, respectively; Gabriel Josipovici on Cézanne; @15thcgossipgirl on Chaucer’s innocence; @rinireg on hatred – and more.
Times Literary Supplement – TLS Website
Preview: The New Yorker Magazine – Oct 24, 2022
Inside the U.S. Effort to Arm Ukraine
Since the start of the Russian invasion, the Biden Administration has provided valuable intelligence and increasingly powerful weaponry—a risky choice that has paid off in the battle against Putin.
What We’ve Lost Playing the Lottery
The games are a bonanza for the companies that states hire to administer them. But what about the rest of us?
Who Paul Newman Was—and Who He Wanted to Be
He thought his success was just a matter of hard work and good luck. Other people had a different perspective.
West Yorkshire: Touring Brontë Sisters’ England
Emily Bronte, Anne Bronte, and Charlotte Bronte lived 180 years ago. We visit Bronte Country and walk in the footsteps of the Bronte Sisters, piecing together their tragic short lives as we visit places they lived or frequented. The Brontes wrote some of the most dramatic fiction right here in West Yorkshire and many of the places still exist.
On our walk, we will head to where it all started at the Bronte’s birthplace in Thornton. Visit the school that Charlotte Bronte immortalised as Lowood School in Jane Eyre. See Oakwell Hall which she based Fieldhead on in Shirley. Walk the wild Haworth Moors to Top Withens where Emily Bronte found inspiration for Wuthering Heights, and a whole lot more. All the time telling the story of how the 3 Bronte Sisters came to be the famous writers we all know today.
Preview: New York Review Of Books – Nov 3, 2022
Gored in the Afternoon
Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux, translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer
Annie Ernaux, the 2022 Nobel Literature laureate, has published a diary of a sublime love affair—both a quest for self-awareness and a desire to escape the self—in which she traces a familiar arc of loss.
Reform or Abolish?
American prisons are often unjust, inhumane, and ineffective at protecting public safety. Mariame Kaba and Ruth Wilson Gilmore believe they should be eliminated entirely.
We Do This ’Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice by Mariame Kaba, edited by Tamara K. Nopper and with a foreword by Naomi Murakawa
Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, edited by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano
Then What Happened?
Yasmine Seale’s new translation of The Thousand and One Nights has a texture—tight, smooth, skillfully patterned—that make previous versions seem either garish or slightly dull by comparison.
The Annotated Arabian Nights: Tales from 1,001 Nights translated from the Arabic by Yasmine Seale, edited and with an introduction and notes by Paulo Lemos Horta
The Limits of Press Power
To what extent did newspapers influence public opinion in the US and Britain before and during World War II?
The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler by Kathryn S. Olmsted
The Media Offensive: How the Press and Public Opinion Shaped Allied Strategy During World War II by Alexander G. Lovelace
‘We Know What That’s Like’
The filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s recent arrest in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison marks the latest phase in a campaign that the Iranian judiciary has been waging against him for over a decade.
No Bears a film written and directed by Jafar Panahi
A Prisoner of His Own Restraint
Felix Frankfurter was renowned as a liberal lawyer and advocate. Why did he turn out to be such a conservative Supreme Court justice?
Democratic Justice: Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court, and the Making of the Liberal Establishment by Brad Snyder
The Illusion of the First Person
A historical survey of the personal essay shows it to be the purest expression of the lie that individual subjectivity exists prior to the social formations that gave rise to it.
Shakespeare & Company: Author William Boyd On His Book ‘The Romantic’
Soldier. Farmer. Felon. Writer. Father. Lover.
One man, many lives.
Born in 1799, Cashel Greville Ross experiences myriad lives: joyous and devastating, years of luck and unexpected loss. Moving from County Cork to London, from Waterloo to Zanzibar, Cashel seeks his fortune across continents in war and in peace. He faces a terrible moral choice in a village in Sri Lanka as part of the East Indian Army. He enters the world of the Romantic Poets in Pisa. In Ravenna he meets a woman who will live in his heart for the rest of his days. As he travels the world as a soldier, a farmer, a felon, a writer, a father, a lover, he experiences all the vicissitudes of life and, through the accelerating turbulence of the nineteenth century, he discovers who he truly is. This is the romance of life itself, and the beating heart of The Romantic.
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