André Aciman (born 2 January 1951) is an American writer. Born and raised in Alexandria, Egypt, he is currently distinguished professor at the Graduate Center of City University of New York, where he teaches the history of literary theory and the works of Marcel Proust. Aciman previously taught creative writing at New York University and French literature at Princeton and Bard College.
In 2009, he was Visiting Distinguished Writer at Wesleyan University.
He is the author of several novels, including Call Me by Your Name (winner, in the Gay Fiction category, of the 2007 Lambda Literary Award and made into a film) and a 1995 memoir, Out of Egypt, which won a Whiting Award. Although best known for Call Me by Your Name, Aciman stated in an interview in 2019 his best book to be the novel Eight White Nights.
Jessica Helfand – Photo by Maggie Peters in Caltech Matters
“Observation is observation. Looking, listening, thinking, conjecturing … all original ideas begin with a kind of scrutiny that is at once framed by discipline and open to discovery. Because I have always taught students in a university, not in an art school, I think I have a baseline understanding of what it means to approach the visual world from a different place. Teaching non-artists is always a little bit like being a foreign exchange student. Therein lies the challenge—and, I suspect, the fun.”
January 7, 2020 – This month, artist, designer, and writer Jessica Helfand joins Caltech as the Winter 2020 artist-in-residence in the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences’ Caltech-Huntington Program in Visual Culture, which is administered jointly by the division and The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. Helfand is a former contributing editor and columnist for Print, Eye and Communications Arts magazines, and founding editor of the website Design Observer. She taught at Yale for two decades and has held artist residencies at the American Academy in Rome and the Bogliasco Foundation, among others. Her most recent book, Face: A Visual Odyssey, was published by MIT Press last fall. On January 16, Helfand will take part in a noontime talk with Bren Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Biology Ralph Adolphs on the theme of the “face.”
From a Maclean’s Magazine online essay (01/08/20):
Don Gillmor in his home office (Photograph by May Truong)
Boomers tore down institutions—divorce rates went up, churchgoing went down. We demonized the corporations that previous generations had venerated, though we bought their products in record numbers, our idealism blurring with the search for the perfect pair of jeans. We wanted it all. In place of institutions, we created the cult of the individual, our own particular Frankenstein.
So much of our music comes back to us in unfortunate ways, Dylan’s anthems barely recognizable in sappy orchestral arrangements that fill the hours we spend on hold. And we seem to be permanently on hold these days. We are between 55 and 73 years old now, still defining this as middle age, still a potent economic force because of our numbers, controlling 70 per cent of disposable income, though it feels to many of us that we have already disposed of it. Still, we bought houses when they were vaguely affordable. And politicians still cater to us because we vote en masse. However, we are largely left out of the cultural conversation, as music and social media continues to evolve, always leaving us one app behind the curve.
On Meet The Writers this week, Georgina Godwin talks to John ‘Rick’ MacArthur about his new book ‘Graham Greene: The Last Interview’.
Rick is the scion of a great American philanthropic family but, in his own right, a veteran journalist, author and president of ‘Harper’s Magazine’, the second oldest continuous publication in the US. We take a look at how Graham Greene traversed the space between journalism and fiction and brought truth into sharp focus through his storytelling.
Anger. A word that often does the rounds in the 21st century. On a global scale, citizens are increasingly dissatisfied with their governments — from discord within the current American administration to rising hostility within France, Germany, Greece, Iraq, and Lebanon. Anger due to the persistence of racial violence, threats against the rights of women and workers, discrimination against the LGBTQ community, repression, as well as fear and instability surrounding health care systems, income inequality, the environmental crisis, and the effects of mass migration.
Join a nuanced conversation in this MoMA R&D Salon hosted by Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator of Architecture & Design and Director of Research & Development at MoMA, with speakers (in alphabetical order):
Shaun Leonardo: a multidisciplinary artist whose work discusses societal expectations of manhood––namely definitions surrounding black and brown masculinities––along with its notions of achievement, collective identity, and experience of failure.
Lydia Lunch: a writer, singer, poet, actress, and speaker whose career was spawned by the New York City “No Wave” scene. Widely considered one of the most influential performers originating from New York City, Lydia has worked with a range of bands and artists.
Andrew Marantz: a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he has worked since 2011. His work has also appeared in Harper’s, New York, and Mother Jones. He recently published his first book, Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation.
Marilyn Minter: a contemporary artist whose works are in the collections of MoMA, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, among others.
Pamela Sneed: a poet, writer, visual artist, and performer. She is the author of the books Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom than Slavery (1998) and Kong and Other Works (2009), as well as the chapbooks Lincoln (2014), Gift (2015), and Sweet Dreams (2018).
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
Boomers Daily 