Repost: People applauding commuters in Port Authority

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Aesthetic Thursday: Bradley Rubenstein

Bradley Rubenstein, Unititled (Girl with Puppy Dog Eyes), 1996

What Is The Gotcha! in This Photograph?
At first I see this image as a brash conceit. All art is a conceit - right? - but this image forces me to see the conceit, to see that it's a mash-up. Maybe I am troubled because I have this ontological conviction that a photograph tells me something about reality. Maybe so. But maybe the reality that I am seeing is not so conceitful as I first think. What is going on here? Through the use of digital manipulation puppy dog eyes are inserted into a girl's eyes.

I Like Images That Make Me Re-Think What I am Seeing
I like images that ask me to question the image, to make me consider its mode of production. How did the artist do this? What was his method? I suppose this is Rubenstein's point. By making me aware of how this particular image was produced I am struck by another possibility - the genetic manipulation that would be required to produce a real girl born with puppy dog eyes. Rubenstein is playing with conceit to alert us to the biogenetic possibility that what we see as conceit could become a reality. What if someone decided that little girls and little puppies are a desirable combination? Is what we see in the art an image of a possible future? 

Two Paragons of Cuteness: Kids and Puppies
On the placard, a museum curator has written this, "Merging two paragons of cuteness—kids and puppies—into unsettling hybrids, the artist offers an eerie forewarning of the transgressive potential of genetic manipulation." Where is the transgression? In imagining such mutations? Is the point that the degrees that separate the photoshop touch-up from the biogenetic not that far apart? Perhaps. Maybe the most unsettling aspect of Rubenstein's photographs is that he is telling us we have already arrived at this stage - we are just waiting for the biotechnology to catch up. I think I need to go watch Bladerunner and re-read Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans.

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Image: Metropolitan Museum of Art

Aesthetic Thursday: Matthew Jensen's "49 States"

Matthew Jensen, The 49 States, 2008-9

Google Streetview in Art
I am addicted to Google Street View. I am going to Philadelphia this weekend and I have already seen on Street View what the hotel will look like, what the front of a restaurant I want to have lunch at looks like — all as if I will have already "done" the trip before I even go. Someone else has already been there. Someone has already snapped a photograph. There is nothing new under the sun. But I like what Matthew Jensen has done in the Metropolitan Museum of Art display of his work — he has taken a collage of images from Google Street View and organized them alphabetically according to State (e.g., the fifty states of the United States).

Jensen's Work at the Met Reminds Me of the Iconic American Road Trip
Seeing Jensen's work at the Met, as part of an exhibit on contemporary photography, I think of travel, the association Americans have with the road trip and snapping pictures. What is a road trip without a camera? Now that we have Google to take our snapshots for us maybe the camera is dead on the road. *sad face*. The images Jensen has collected are absent individuals but it seems easy enough to insert a human being into each State's slot. Look, there is me in New York. There is me in Connecticut. I look at my home state of Louisiana and compare it to Wisconsin. They both seem the same — and taken as a whole the image captures a unity of sorts, the kind of unity I get when traveling on the interstate where every exit is the same as the ones that came before it and all the ones ahead will look the same and so on. Is this a new American flag? Maybe so.

Stray Observations:

• Why are there only forty-nine states in Jensen's collage? I did not have time to figure out what state is missing.
• Did Google allow Jensen to use their images?
• I feel like Jensen's work would be better if every picture in the series included a person whose face is blurred out.
• I want this piece to hang in a doctor's office.

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Found Objects: Jean-Paul Sartre Found On Construction Signage

In this post, I look at a sign that is supposed to be one thing, but looked at through the lens of existentialism means something else entirely.

This sign is on a fence meant to direct visitors to the 9/11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan away from construction on the new transportation hub for the PATH train at the World Trade Center Site.

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New York City Subway Story: 34th Street Herald Square BMT Broadway Line

*The following is an excerpt from my book Things I Shouldn't Have Said and other Faux Pas.*

The N train is a New York City Transit subway line.

I feel shabby. On the BMT Manhattan-bound platform waiting for an express train, she wore white earmuffs, a chic gray winter coat affixed with neat round black buttons, forest green stockings, and black boots.

Video Repost: Nick At Nite Those TV Classics!

This is a clip from a Nick at Nite promo: "Those TV Classics!" 

I think lots of people from my generation will remember this advertisement.

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Aesthetic Thursday: Eva Hesse at the Whitney Museum of Art

Eva Hesse, No Title, 1970

I like to go to the Whitney to experience one artist's work — and that is it. The Whitney does a good job of showcasing one work by one artist in a collection of works dedicated to several artists' work. Here is Eva Hesse's sculptural evocation  — I call it an evocation of a sculpture because I am not sure if it is a sculpture or something else. Rope suspended from the ceiling in what appears to be haphazard, but on closer inspection, the organization of rope is purposeful, designed. Hanging rope. Hanging garden. Hanging. The feeling I get standing, hanging, hanging around, flapping my arms, my body, in space — this is how this piece makes me feel.

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Image: Whitney Museum of Art

Photographs: "Train Station" and "Orange Train"

"Train Station"

Orange Train

In this post, I showcase two photographs on a recent trip I took on the Amtrak Crescent — a heavy passenger train that travels from New York City to New Orleans daily.

image credit: Greig Roselli

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Theresa of Avila on the Meaning of Life

Handwriting Credit: Greig Roselli

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The Best Novels I Read in 2012

Top Ten Novels Read in 2012

1.       Lionel Shriver. The Post-Birthday World .  2007. 528 pp.

I was intrigued by the storytelling. Shriver is da bomb.

2.       Lionel Shriver. We Need to Talk About Kevin. 2003. 400 pp.

About a high school shooting, it is a dark indictment of American mores.

3.       William Trevor. Felicia's Journey. 1994. 240 pp.

Stepping into this novel is like stepping on a hot plate with set to slow burn fuck up.

4.       Don Delillo. White Noise.  310 pp. 1985

Written over twenty years ago, this novel may be too ironic to still matter.

5.       Lionel Shriver. A Perfectly Good Family: A Novel  305 pp.

Southern family, a house, sibling rivalries – and the death of parents!

6.       Norton Juster. The Phantom Tollbooth. 1961. 272 pp.

Very clever novel about how to overcome boredom and to think for oneself.

7.       Terry Pratchett. Hogfather (Discworld, #20) 1996. 448 pp.

Ho Ho Ho. Death cracks me up. An alternative Christmas story for sure.

8.       Lindqvist, John Ajvide. Let the Right One In. 2005. 513 pp.

Child murderer(s), bullying, girl vampire, pedophilia and Sweden. Chilling.

9.       Joyce Carol Oates. Zombie 1995. 181 pp.

The ending is fucked up. Pair it up with Shriver’s Kevin and Trevor’s Felicia.

10.   Ransom Riggs. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (Miss Peregrine, #1)  2011. 352 pp.

It’ll make for good CGI film-making and the time travel makes sense. Sorta.

Honorable Mentions

George R.R. Martin. A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, #1) 1996. 693 pp.

   The names are fun. And maps! Surprisingly easy to follow.

Neil Gaiman. American Gods . 2001. 632 pp.

   Gaiman wants us to like his villains. I don’t mind.

Lonely Christopher. The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse 2011 190 pp.

   I was not stunned by this mess.

Charlaine Harris. All Together Dead (Sookie Stackhouse, #7)  2006. 323 pp.

   Don’t hate me but Allan Ball does a better job.

Neil Gaiman.Neverwhere 1996. 370 pp.

   Great concept: a world under London. Feels like Pullman. It isn’t.

Phillip K. Dick. The Simulacra. 1964. 214 pp.

   Sorry. I was not liking this paranoid regurgitation. Not Dick’s best.

Phillip K. Dick. Paycheck and Other Classic Stories 1952. 432 pp.

The one about the robots and the dude who builds a replica of his hometown are the best of the stories.

Shriver, Lionel. The Female of the Species 1987. 416 pp.

   I’d rather a story about the Masai then Gray and her failed trysts.

Rick Riordan. The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, #1) 2005. 337 pp.

   The book is lackluster and I’d suggested Homer instead.

Daisuki Igarashi Children of the Sea, Volume 1 (Children of the Sea, #1)  Unknown date. 320 pp.

Too bad I read this book from left to right first! Duh. Read it from right to left.

Collins, Suzanne. The Hunger Games Trilogy: The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay

Great set of books: I loved the description of food. I hear there is a Hunger Games cookbook.

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From the Womb to the Tomb

Joseph Campbell, Hero With a  Thousand Faces (1949), page 8

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Poem: Thrasymachus Blushing

thrasymachus blushing
blushing belies betrayal
betrayal of the body 
the body belied

so says socrates
not blushing
but catching thrasymachus in a blush

a crucial catch of the passage
says the professor
a critical juncture blushing
is

for in it
socrates 
calls thrasymachus out

for is it not true
that one cannot
forfeit an argument?
even if one knows forfeiting is the right thing to do
our body forfeits for us
turning rouge
in a crowd of philosophers
vying for truth

to get the answer wrong is an admission of failure
of not getting it

and we want to get it

so we plow on regardless
but our body -
it sees our flaw
and quickens -
blood flows more fully 
and all can see our less than comfortable
feeling of resting with a certain unjustified truth

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Greig Roselli ® 2012

Repurposing: Alice in Wonderland Book Clock

This nifty book clock clocks at fifty bucks at the Brooklyn holiday bazaar. Too bad I cannot afford it.

www.bugcicle.com 

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Quote: Kobo Abé On the Value of Work

The only way to go beyond work is through work. It is not that work itself is valuable; we surmount work by work. The real value of work lies in the strength of self-denial.

Kobo Abé, The Woman in the Dunes (1964)
Image credit:  Greig Roselli
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Bathers Caught in Hyde Park, London

The Serpentine, Hyde Park, London metropolitan policewoman chases naughty bathers circa Pre-WWI London.

Someone on Flickr posted more about this image here.

New Yorker Cartoon: "Fear not my princess ..."

Gahan Wilson, "Fear not my princess ..." Published in the New Yorker, September 23, 2002

"Fear Not, My Princess"

     I like cartoons like the one presented in this re-post of a New Yorker cartoon. A one frame, black and white cartoon drawing. The precursor to the Instagram post — just one frame to capture what you want to say. The picture ought to grab the reader's attention, and the caption has to be both pithy and smart and tie the image to a theme. In the above cartoon drawing by Gahan Wilson, what appears to be a night with a shield walks along a beach with maiden a crown. A discarded coke can is wedged in the center, and it is evident that we are looking at a beach scene.

The Image's Gag Effect

     The gag effect comes when the reader realizes that this is a fantasy scene. On the surface, it's an ordinary beach, but it's a microcosm of that beach wherein the beachgoers have all gone home for the season, sent packing to their cars (hence the "parking" sign in the upper lefthand corner of the drawing. What's going on here? I feel a sense of nostalgia looking at this drawing, of days spent on the beach in Pensacola, Flordia as a kid, exploring the grit of sand on my toes and making sandcastles. The caption is funny because it alludes to the idea of stowing away to the beach and getting lost in the fantasy of the moment. But what we have here is a miniature of a knight and a princess, the vestige of an imagination gone away (until next Summer). And the knight tells the princess, "fear not" and comforts her that soon a child will return to build them a "castle in the sand." How sad! I remember making sandcastles only to watch them destroyed by the incoming tide.

. . . With a Dash of Whimsy 

     And here the artist had made an image of that fleeting feel of Summer moment but added a dash of whimsy to it by imagining who might be living in that castle of sand how they would feel when it was washed away.

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The Famous Quote "Kiss Me Kate" From Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew"

William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1590), Act Two, Scene One, Line 1175

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Quotation: Walker Percy on Hurricanes in Louisiana

”I've noticed in Louisiana in hurricanes — my theory is that people enjoy hurricanes whether they say so or not. Because in hurricanes, terrible things are happening, people are getting killed, you're liable to get killed, there is a certain exhiliration. It comes from a peculiar sense of self, the vividness. As Einstein said, ’Life is dreary as hell. Ordinary life is dreary.’ Somebody asked him why he went into quantum mechanics. ’Well, to get away from the dreariness of ordinary life.’ Louisianans enjoy hurricanes if they're not too bad.”

Walker Percy, American novelist 

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Notes: 

Percy, Walker. "The Modern Prognosis: An Interview with Walker Percy" Reprinted from "The Novelist's Freedom": Walker Percy Talks About Science, Faith, and Fiction. Brent Short. Washinton: Sojourners, N/A May 1990. 27-29.

On Compulsive Readers: A Response to Joe Queenan's Article "My 6,128 Favorite Books"

   

William Adolphe Bouguereau, La leçon difficile, 1885

I read a piece by Joe Queenan in the Wall Street Journal on compulsive readers. It prompted me to write about compulsion in reading.

    Compulsive readers are not plagued by the mantra "I have no time to read." We read in the interstitial spaces, before work, before feeding the baby, after dinner, and in between lovemaking. I am reading White Noise by Don DeLillo before work, I will read the poetry of William Blake to my mewling baby, and in between lovemaking perhaps I will read out loud to my lover selections from Umberto Eco's Infinity of Lists. It's true we don't read because it helps us. Or makes us smarter. Or gives us further insight into the problem of reality. Reading is a mental condition. We read because we are crazy. It should be listed as a mental disorder in the DSM-IV.

Reading in Place 

    I remember reading The Catcher in the Rye on the back porch of my Aunt Ida's house. I was a teenager bored with the holidays so I read the seminal text of post-war American adolescence while my cousins rode down the tree-lined block in their go-carts. I read all sixteen of L. Frank Baum's Wizard of OZ books (and most of the forty written after Baum's death) in my walk-in bedroom closet in Mandeville, Louisiana. My brother thought I must have been masturbating. He would bang on the closet door. "What are you doing in there?" "I'm reading. Leave me alone!" The compulsive reader demands his privacy. We are labeled anti-social, lumped together with the onanists, misanthropes, and other creeps. I read Douglas Brinkley's book about Katrina in a pub on late Saturday night and some drunken dude was flabbergasted. He sat next to me and heckled me about why I was reading and not socializing. I thought the answer to his question was because I like to read. But I realized I had a mental condition. I just read because it was a compulsion. When I was a busboy for an after-school job in High School I was remonstrated by the fry cook for reading in the walk-in freezer. So I moved to the cracker boxes and read there.

Reading is a Mental Illness

 We compulsive readers, I agree, are not working with a full deck. We read to ourselves when we otherwise should be engaged. I read Lolita in Jerusalem on a religious field trip to the Holy Land for Easter in 2000. The priest who led the trip caught me reading about Humbert Humbert and said, "Hmmmm. Not spiritual reading but is it interesting?" He wanted a reason why I would read Nabokov's novel about a beguiling young tween on a great American road trip with a middle-aged man when I should have been focused on the sorrowful mysteries of Christ. But, I told him, I had already read Thomas a Kempis's Imitation of Christ. It was onto other things. I read the Sickness Unto Death while at the graveyard of Kierkegaard which was funny because Kierkegaard's name means churchyard in Danish. I read the Moviegoer by Walker Percy in the college library at the Catholic University of Leuven. Native Son was read during a road trip that included seventeen states. I had completed college that year and my traveling companion was a Roman Catholic priest. I read Patriot Games in my seventh grade Louisiana History class while Mrs. Docker went on about the history of king cakes and Mardi Gras beads. I am not even sure how many books I read in my parent's van during family vacations. Jack Prelutsky, Shel Silverstein, Avi, Madeleine L'Engle. At first, I became dizzy while reading in a car but after a while, I adjusted to the bumps and screams, taunts from my brothers.

Where Reading is Inappropriate

     Now I read in planes, cars, closets, cubicles. It is true it is a tad bit socially inappropriate to read a book in public. Reading a book at the dinner table made my father angry. I read the Duino Elegies in New Orleans in 2005 waiting for the streetcar. A truck pulled up and two college kids cursed me out. "Fucking faggot. Reading a fucking book!" What was it about Rainer Maria Rilke that freaked them out? I imagine it is a queer thing to do. Read. I learned about sex from books. On the shelf was a book I remember titled, Serious Questions About Sex Answered. I don't remember much about the answers. We have clandestine moments in reading. I read Gore Vidal's the City and the Pillar in secret at the back table of the library. It was the first novel I remember reading about coming out. Working as a page one summer I shelved a book on nudist colonies so many times I realized people were taking it off the shelf and after a quick look putting it back on a shelf, no concern for where it belonged. I finally sat down and read the book myself. The photographs were black and white, grainy, of upper middle-class white people doing all sorts of everyday activities in the nude. Nothing exciting.

Etiology of an Incurable Habit

     I think my compulsive reading habit started in kindergarten. On the first day, Mrs. Robicheaux gave us our reading book and I read the last story about a red fire engine during nap time. The teacher caught me reading the book and she said, "Don't read that story. We have not gotten to it yet." It was a lot more interesting to read the fire engine story than to sit on the floor and share my blocks with Skylar who was not that nice and faintly smelled of tomato soup. I wish I could remember the name of reader. Skylar teaches Geometry at a private Catholic high school in southern Louisiana. I think he is the assistant coach for the football team.

Books are Not Sacred Objects

    I don't think books are sacred objects. I will read a scroll, a web log, a typed out letter, a found piece of tissue paper with scrawl on or an epub file of Of Mice and Men. To me the medium doesn't matter. A symptom of the compulsive reader is to read whatever is in front of you. Yes, we like to discriminate -- and the more books you read -- the more you know what to avoid. I don't read Harlequin Romances nor do I read much biography or memoir -- unless the subject is someone I am intensely interested in, like Virginia Woolf, Steve Jobs, or a biography of someone I am currently reading a lot of at a given time -- or someone who is not an artist, writer, or someone who doesn't express themselves too much. A biography of a Jewish Hasidic woman in Crown Heights is something I would read.
    I think it is a misconception that people who are compulsive readers read a lot to appear smart. Joe Queenan argues people who read vast amounts of books do so because they are ultimately dissatisfied customers. They read because they are dissatisfied with reality. I think this is partly true. It is perhaps too neat, however, to divide reality into those who read compulsively and those who don't -- as if those who are dissatisfied bury their dissatisfaction in a big, fat nineteenth-century novel. People who are dissatisfied don't all commit themselves to compulsive reading. People who read voluminous amounts of literature find pleasure in what they find in books. Even badly written books. It is not an escape from reality but rather reality is somehow represented through a different lens than we get through our bone-worn senses. To engage reality is to read.

Reading and the Concern with Reality

    I think Orhan Pamuk said correctly, we find places to read, and for him, to write, as well as to read, because not to do so would be unbearable. Reading is an extension of being in the world. We read not so we can escape reality but we find in reading an extension of what we always already are coming to know. I postulate the first "book" ever written was a grocery list. Or maybe it was a tax roll. Then we went on to carve epigrams into blocks of stones, then great epics, and now we post blogs. This thing called writing and reading what we write is something we have been doing for over six thousand years. The painter who paints feels disconnected without her paintbrush. Take away the iPod buds from the music addict and they feel discomfited. For readers engagement with a book is engagement with the world. Since we carved cuneiform into soft clay, reality has not been the same since. Perhaps there was once an ancient Sumerian, now forgotten, who compulsively read every scroll, every carving, every piece of etching he could consume. Asked why, he just shrugged and went onto to find his next unread carved block.
     It is my hypothesis that those who read compulsively are better equipped to face reality and its vicissitudes -- as well as recognize its triumphs and pleasures. I really don't think I compulsively read because I feel it will make me a better person or make me more intelligent. Those might be healthy byproducts. I read Jane Eyre in the tenth grade not just because it was assigned by the teacher but I thought maybe the character of Jane had something to say to me. I read because I wanted to listen to Jane. And in the first pages she is reading. A reader reading about a character reading. Mise en abyme -- mirrors facing mirrors. I read about Jane Eyre who in turn was reading a story that was speaking to her and so on and so.
     When I go home for the holidays my mother still has my old bookshelves in my bedroom that she has converted into her office. I am surprised I still own books that I have not yet liberated. They still sit there, mementos of books I read or books I bought but never got around to reading. When I go home I have a sudden nostalgia for those unread books. I have gotten into the habit of pocketing one or two when I visit. I take them back with me. Sometimes I read them. Or sell them back to get a new book. I still have my set of the Chronicles of Narnia at my mother's house. The copies are browned and each one has my sixth-grade scrawl inscribed on the frontispiece. I re-read the first few pages of the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I was struck again by Mr. Tumnus, just as I was struck by him when I read the book as a child. Mr. Tumnus has a shelf full of books. Is Man a Myth? reads one of his titles. I would want to read that book, a book written by a fantastical creature about other fantastical creature.
    People think we read lots of books, those of us so inflicted because we want to have knowledge of everything. I don't think I exist in Borges's Library of Babel where the sole motivation is to find the Ur-Book, the book that will unlock the mysteries of everything and give a unified theory of life, the universe and everything. There are plenty of books in Borges's Library, an infinite library with every possible configuration of words splayed out in an infinite enclosure of an infinite set of hexagonal rooms. No monkies need to slam on keys to potentially pound out at some unspecified time the complete works of Shakespeare. I read because I am like the monkey pounding away aimlessly at the keys. I read knowing that I am slogging through the muck, and perhaps there is the hope that I will come across a diamond in the rough. Sometimes I read crap and I then I read some more crap. To find a book that moves the spirit, that moves the mind, for example, Marilyn Robinson's Home or Plato's Phaedo, to name such a few, or the crown of my book pile, those books I would keep with me on a trip to a desert island. Logophiles, bibliophiles, those lovers of morphemes strung together like beads of delicious taste morsels -- we sing the songs we hope to find in the flowing pages of books, kindles, iBooks, pages. I am Mr. Tumnus reading Is Mr. Tumnus a Myth? who in turn is reading Is Man a Myth?, seated on a weather-worn armchair, sipping tea, in the interstitial spaces of a reading life.

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image credit: Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905) - The Difficult Lesson (1884)

Aesthetic Thursday: Edvard Munch's "The Scream"

Edvard Munch "The Scream". Pastel on board, 1895.

Moma will display one of four versions of Edvard Munch's expressionist painting "The Scream". The heavily reproduced and often parodied image will be on view at the museum on October 24 - April 29. The version Moma will display is pastel on board and has been lent to the museum by a private collector. The other three versions are in museums in Norway.

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