9 posts tagged “books”

It was more than three years ago that I picked up a remaindered copy of Hannah Arendt's classic The Origins of Totalitarianism. It sat on the shelf for a long while before I decided to tackle it. Nobody would call me a voracious reader, but I try to read at least one difficult book a year. I mean, that's opposed to the light reading that balances my book diet, or, even lighter, the re-readings of old favorites. Anyway, The Origins of Totalitarianism was to be it. And it is. I'm about 140 pages into it.

Around when I started it, my brother-in-law, who is a historian by training and blogs on urban development issues, told me that it took him some time to understand that starting a book, or reading a book, doesn't necessarily mean reading the whole thing. That selective and partial reading is allowed, and may often be a better use of one's time. I have always been a bit of a purist in that respect, expecting myself to read a book in full, if I was going to say that I had read it. But The Origins of Totalitarianism is a big book, about two inches thick; I thought to myself, maybe this is the book I'll try that out on. Or at least, be open to it.

So I started by aiming to read only Part One of the three parts, Antisemitism. But then I talked to political science professor and Mess Hall keyholder Sophia Mihic. Turns out she teaches this book regularly. I told her my plan. And she says to me, "well, you've got to read Part Two, Imperialism, because it's amazingly relevant and current material." So I am. And she's right. Oh my god, is she right.

I'm only about fifteen pages into Part Two, and it's all there: our current situation. Arendt describes the economics of imperialism, which she defines as existing as a historical period from 1884 to 1914, and forming the transitional period between the 19th and 20th centuries, as the crystallization of expansion for expansion's sake. Part and parcel of this political-economic development was the move from a production economy to a speculation economy. The other essential element in her narrative is the subservience of states to business. When speculation ran aground, armies were called in to do the dirty work of pacifying native peoples, the better that the speculators could realize their returns, through straight plunder, if necessary.

Weirdly (or not?) the currency of Arendt's analysis was just yesterday recognized by Richard Bernstein in the New York Times. The thing Bernstein does not talk about, and what really distresses, is the fact that Arendt wrote all this in 1948. Between '48 and the period of Imperialism, only a catastrophe across Europe and much of the world brought some clarity following the decades of dysfunction. What will a political historian be writing about in 2048? What awful events, what multiple holocausts, will happen between now and then, that said historian will emerge mid-century clear-eyed?

But that all said, I'm still making no promises on finishing the book.

For about the past year I had a copy of William Shirer's Berlin Diary sitting on the shelf, in the reading queue. I was turned on to this book by my friend Sam Gould, whom I once caught with it on a trip, toted along as his casual reading. Later my brother-in-law told me that this book became a popular assigned book in many college European History courses for the generation born in the decade before World War II. And that explains its frequent availability in secondhand bookstores and rummage sales.

Upon my latest return from Vienna, I was feeling the need to process my experience through some reading and so finally cracked the book. I'm now getting into the three hundreds, where Shirer leaves Berlin to cover the Western Front, which the Germans had only days ago pushed westard into Belgium and the Netherlands. On his way to the front he passes through Aachen and later Louvain. He tells of the Germans having deliberately destroyed the University Library there, and of them burning the irreplaceable books. And then, the High Command lying about it, declaring that the British did the deed, in an attempt to fabricate another excuse for Geman aggression.

And then today received in my inbox from a friend this link, to hip hop poet Kevin Coval's blog. He's composed a poem in response to the Israeli Defence Force's closure of a literature festival that was to be held last month in Jerusalem.

The opening epigraph says it all...

Reflection on The Israeli Army shutting down The Palestine Festival of Literature
in the month of May in 2009: Burning Books, A Bebelplatz in Jerusalem

Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too.
Heinrich Heine

From there, he goes into something sad, outraged, and beautiful.
Check out the whole thing here.

Tonight I made some time to get lost in the new book from Temporary Services, Public Phenomena. It is, on balance, an impressive document, and an enjoyable book experience.

With this book I have my usual gripes about Temporary Services work, though. Chief among them this time around, the 'straight' style of image presentation and the direct voice in the text. For example, in the collection of photos documenting improvised methods of saving parking spaces on snowy Chicago side streets, the pics are almost all straight on. There, centered and filling the picture field, is an old chair or a couple of beams balanced on a box. Odd objects caught in the technically illegal act of saving a private space on a public street. But you'd never know about how the functional imperatives actually shape these creations because the method of photography gives no context. I want to see what else is on that street, how this pirated space relates to the parking spaces around it, how it stands in relation to the other side of the street, what kinds of junk might be found in the parallel alleyway, etc. A few distance shots would have been helpful for the reader to understand and imagine what drives these acts. In the text TS makes a joke about these temporary, soft-aesthetic barricades coming across as Arte Povera sculptures, but their photography makes it true. I know TS prefers ostensibly direct approaches in the name of accessibility, but sometimes a simplicity of documentary style renders acts grounded in concrete socio-spatial circumstances more abstract than they are, which reduces accessibility.

But don't read this commentary as a statement of disappointment! I depend on TS–my trusted colleagues and occasional collaborators–to produce work we can argue over. They deliver every time. I recommend this book. It is worth it alone for the digestable and smartly annotated list of book and web resources included at the end. As generous as ever, they turn me on to lots of things I never knew existed. 

Yes, the MRCC/Drift book is finished. Except now I think it should have been titled a A Call To [F]Arms, considering the rad elements of Sam Greenlee and Gerald Raunig. Yes, food and revolution. But whatever. That is not the only criticism I have of the book, of course. On the design tip, Mike Koppa emailed me comments before I saw the thing, noting that the gutter is too tight. Absolutely, I agree with that. The margins could be chopped by a quarter inch, at least.

mrcc book

Then there is the writing. Mine is not first rate, that's for sure. The C/CURE item is way too short, and captures nothing of how amazing our afternoon spent on the far, far south side of Chicago was. And then there are the omissions: no mentions at all of Gerald Raunig, InCUBATE, the AREA release event, not much on Mess Hall, nothing on Kevin Hamilton, Brett and Bonnie's Garage & Garden space, and probably other things I'm forgetting.

But who cares. It's still great–even more so when you consider it went from an idea in conversation to a real object in less than three months as a side project! (Recall that Downtime at the Experimental Station took about two years to reach fruition.) Compared with most of the quick-and-dirty publications that come out of the critical/social art scene, this one is anything but cheap looking. And some of the texts are fabulous. Sarah Kanouse's introduction is beautiful. Claire Pentecost's reflections are (as usual) insightful, self-critical, and expansive. Sarah Holm's devout and grace-filled dairy-chore narrative may be the single least expected text I've ever encountered in a publication coming out of a critical art effort. Finally, mIEKAL aND's avant-theory maps the outer limits of intellectual analysis, and proves that the work of poets is absolutely and vitally necessary if we are ever to crack the logocentrism of our linguistic prisons. And oh my god is his text fun to read.

The bad thing about living in the Information Age is that I can never get to all the media waiting for me. Books go unread, podcasts are bookmarked but never listened to, the satellite TV DVR is full of nearly a hundred saved shows (everything from Top Chef to old Twilight Zones) and movies (Stolen Life, a documentary about Fred Hampton, Teahouse of the August Moon) that I hardly have the time to sample let alone exhaust. When we first moved to Madison, I pledged to increase my media consumption–I would finally have the time to watch all those movies I'd heard, read, even talked about, but never actually saw. We'd subscribe to the New York Times, get the three-disc Netflix service and the Gameday audio for all MLB contests. Add to this the decent offerings of the Madison Public Library and, needless to say, I'm swamped. I haven't upped my consumption much, but the backlog has certainly grown, perhaps logarithmically.

The other night I finally did get around to viewing a DVD that had been sitting on top of the TV for nearly two months. It was Tom Dowd: The Language of Music, and strangely enough the story of Tom Dowd resonated with my recent visits to Dreamtime. Like who knows how many millions of music fans, I first became curious about Dowd when I noticed that his name was on so many great records. What I didn't know was that Dowd was involved in the Manhattan Project as a young man, before he turned his attention to recording music. In the movie he mentions the secrecy, the surprise he experienced when the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This immediately brought to mind my recent exposure to the story of Bern Porter, another Manhattan Project worker who later became an avant-garde poet and mail art innovator.

It was at Dreamtime that I was introduced to Porter's work, and Xexoxial Editions publishes a number of his books. According to mIEKAL aND, Porter and presumably other scientists and engineers were told by the government that their research was going into the development of forty-two peaceful, civilian uses for nuclear energy, in a campaign of detailed deception (these researchers were pretty smart; the lies had to be full). This is what he believed at the time of the bombs being dropped in Japan. He resigned almost immediately after the bombings, and moved headlong into experimental literary work. Dowd talked about the research and the deception, but didn't seem to have much of a problem with it. Perhaps that's to be expected; after all, he was only the age of an early undergraduate student at the time. But the experience nonetheless shaped him, and the documentary makes a point of identifying this formative time by including several clips of the Bikini Atoll test explosions. Dowd only left the research path when he was told after the war that all his research experience would count for nothing in college, and that he'd have to go through the regular coursework even though what he'd already done was more advanced. The comparison between Dowd and Porter left me wondering about other scientists-in-exile from their fields. I wonder especially about those from their generational cohort, and how many of them turned to art and cultural work instead, and how those military-industrial complex turncoats put their talents to creative alternative uses–which somehow contributed to the cultures of experimentation in living that places like Dreamtime continue.

Oh, and that book I was looking for that I alluded to in a previous post? Here it is.

I had neither read nor seen this book in quite a few years. Probably a good quarter century. I opened the cover and the narrative voice came rushing back. Rediscovering the images was like unearthing a time capsule I myself had planted as a child. I'm sure these are experiences common to folks who take the trouble to materially touch a book they were obsessed with long ago and have not seen in years.

Clymer1

But for this particular book, the amazement factor only grew as I read the tale, because the story resonates in a very contemporary way.

To put it in present social art parlance, the story is about spatial justice. In short, two girls, one shy and one brave, plus an old lady who peddles cookies, together set up what we might today call a squat. The little house is unoccupied, after all. And all the prospective renters for whatever reason didn't work out. So they take it!

I won't spoil the ending (except to say, the shy girl steps up!), but will say this–if sometimes the real world worked like this, we'd all be better off.

Adding to the contemporary meaning, at least as a shadow figure, is the fact that the author, Eleanor Clymer, turns out to be the mother of Adam Clymer, the journalist made nationally famous for fifteen minutes when George W. Bush pointed him out to Dick Cheney from the podium as a 'major league asshole from the New York Times' and the mics picked up the insult.

I was looking for a children's book I loved from years ago on Alibris the other day. A browsing detour led me to this exhibition catalogue, which I could not pass up for the $10 asking price.

Artrevcover

It is from a show that opened in February of 1971. It includes the text of Kenneth Frampton's 1968 essay "The Lost Avant Garde," which went miles in bringing the experimental arts of the early Soviet Union to a wider audience in the West, who were, of course, then searching for alternative models and histories high and low. Just imagining socially-engaged artists of the day, fueled by the cultural and political explosions of '68 and and after, seeing this work for the first time, puts one in a heady state.

The slim, now-fragile volume includes some terrific images I've never seen before. As is usual for me, I'm most interested in the graphic work. But there are some amazing pics of architectural work and theater sets, as well. Check the image below.

Artrev2

What do the Doors, Judy Collins, Queen, and Josh White have in common? They all recorded for the Elektra label. So did Phil Ochs, Love, and Carly Simon. A few days ago I finished Jac Holzman's entertaining memoir Follow the Music, so now I know who to blame (for Bread). Here's a site with what is supposed to be the complete Elektra discography. Say what you will about the taste, the range is impressive, especially once you factor in the Nonesuch records.

It is a decent story, if you can stand the self-congratulations, especially for anybody interested in how the scene and the business went from small, New York folk-oriented releases to bi-coastal, big time rock and pop acts. Analog gear heads would appreciate Holzman's nerdy passion for great recordings. All Doors fanatics (like my old friend Balz) should definitely have a read, for the tales of Morrison told from the perspective of his label president and the engineers Bruce Botnick and Paul Rothchild. There is also an amusing story about how after Music from Big Pink came out everybody wanted to go record in a big country house, somewhere. Elektra was talked into renting an old inn for a group of musicians, among them a teenage Jackson Browne, to do their thing in a 'natural' setting. The musicians plus hippie chicks plus hangers-on ended up with no recordings to show for their retreat, but smoked a kilo and a half of dope per week on the label's dime. I suppose that qualifies as one way of stickin' it to the Man. The minor characters keep the narrative interesting:  Ahmet Ertegun, Cynthia Plastercaster, Dylan, etc. Delaney Bramlett comes off as a total jerk, but maybe he was just stickin' it to the Man (ie Jac), too.

The book is fluff, mainly a diversion, but it resonated for a moment more deeply when viewing Guy Ben-Ner's video Wild Boy at the Smart Museum. The piece is an adaptation of François Truffaut’s film L’enfant sauvage (The Wild Child) (1970), which itself is based on the true story of Victor, the famous feral child of Aveyron. The video is a domestication, literally--Ben-Ner remakes the story by casting his own kid in the part and shooting the whole thing in his small apartment kitchen and living area, in a toy land aesthetic. It is silent until the final minutes...and what should be the outro but a classic of that massified wildness so typical of Sixties pop culture: the Doors' Break on Through. Most true feral children don't live long lives. Neither do they who reject their civilized upbringing and go searching for the feral. Following Morrison's artistic arc once again in the book, I have to say, the song is the perfect choice.