#bookforum

[fuckyeahwomenfilmdirectors]

Agnès Varda

[amatsuki]

There is nothing suspicious—or particularly gendered—about a desire to rest. But if we can sympathize in this respect with women who are drawn to the housewife fantasy, then we must also address the housewife’s immature side: her refusal of responsibility in the public sphere. The housewife lifestyle abandons the struggles of feminist advancement, community building, justice, and political engagement. It trades them for insularity, callowness, and superficial self-regard.

And here we return to Davis’s initial characterization of housewifery’s appeal: “I might have liked to hitch my wagon to someone, confident that he loved me enough that I could be comfortable in a state of financial dependency,” she writes. This desire to be taken care of, to be loved in a way that obviates responsibility, is not a fantasy of a marriage. It is a fantasy of a return to childhood. She’s not looking for a husband; she’s looking for a parent.

[golongbyjoannanewsom]

lauren oyler takedown that is all the talk of literary twitter

[fairest]

Our tanned balls, our white selves

"...given the general state of culture these days, the mere act of writing a novel—whatever its politics or lack thereof—should be understood as a de facto leftist gesture because the contemporary right are illiterate, hateful ghouls. They don’t read books or book reviews or anything else. They binge Twitch streams, tan their balls, try to get librarians fired, and hang out in the smoldering ruins of Twitter sharing anti-Semitic memes and security-camera footage of people being murdered in the street. If you are reading this, they hate you. If you walk out of your house today and are stabbed to death with this issue of Bookforum tucked under your arm, these people will spend a week retweeting images of your dead body and joking about how that’s one weird trick for canceling student debt. While it is emphatically true that there are complicated, worthwhile intra-leftist fights to be had about what constitutes equitable discourse in our communities and our art—and specifically about how to balance an unwavering conviction in freedom of speech with the recognition that certain speech-acts have the potential to do real harm—it is also emphatically true that none of us should be censoring ourselves or each other on account of the hypothetical risk of some gooning jackboot with a Sailor Moon avatar and a sonnenrad tattoo laughing at our best jokes for the wrong reasons."

[iishtar]

Since Montaigne, the best essays have been, as the French word suggests, trials, attempts. They entail the writer struggling toward greater knowledge through sustained research, painful introspection, and provocative inquiry. And they allow the reader to walk away with a freeing sense of the possibilities of life, the sensation that one can think more deeply and more bravely—that there is more outside one’s experience than one has thought, and perhaps more within it, too. These essays, by contrast, are incapable of—indeed, hostile to the notion of—ushering readers, or Oyler herself, into new territory, or new thought. The pieces in No Judgment are airless, involuted exercises in typing by a person who’s spent too much time thinking about petty infighting and too little time thinking about anything else.

Ann Manov, Star Struck

[dispactke]

Bye Bookforum, see 'ya, wouldn't want to be'ya.

(Actually I would, desperately...)

[protoslacker]

However, in European history, as the classical languages of Greek and Latin gave way to the vernacular languages of Europe it was the active voice that was given more and more priority in how the world was talked about and thought about. The active voice is the grammatical voice that speaks as if an actor can act without being affected by the action, and can, if they wish, reverse the action. It is the voice that says that the drift is the end product of the driving wind, the cast the end product of the casting, the throw. This is the voice that laid the ground for the seemingly detached observer of modern science, the distanced actor of technology – and its passive twin our sense of the environment as mere resource or instrument (Romanyshyn 1989). Owen Barfield describes this as a process of ‘internalization’,‘the shifting of the centre of gravity of consciousness from the cosmos around him into the personal human being himself’ (Barfield 1954: 166-7).

Bronislaw Szerszynski in (PDF) Postprint version – to appear in Performance Research. Drift as a planetary phenomenon

I keep pointing to a Podcast discussion between author Sarah Jaffe and Kelly Hayes about how grief shapes our struggles because it really touched a nerve. We neglect grief at our peril. In their discussion Jaffe told about interviewing Namwali Serpell about Serpell's novel The Furrows in Bookforum, Mourning Routine. Serpell pointed to this essay by Bronislaw Szerszynski.

When I first opened the essay I didn't quite know what to do with it. I wondered what are Performanc Studies? I could tell there was a bunch of academic stuff that was going to take me some time to sort through, so I put it aside. When I finally got around to reading the essay I found it such an enjoyable and enlightening read. Of course, I did have to go look up stuff. Two links gleened from the effort to enjoy: I was pleased to discover a beautiful new translation of Johan Huizinga’s most well known book Autumntide of the Middle Ages. The edition is illustrated with 300 illustrations of works Huizinga references in the book. If you like books it's worthwile clicking on the link. The Wikipedia article on Owen Barfield was helpful to me as I hardly knew his work at all. The book referenced by Szerszynski was first publised in 1926.

[edwardalbee]

publishing fiction sounds so scary because literary critics are everywhere and they are ready to be bitchy in whatever Review of Books or Granta or Bookforum or n+1 whatever that will have them. meanwhile there are like 5 theater critics who write for 3 major publications and i do not know if anyone actually cares except other theater people

[unbornwhiskeyy]

that bookforum review is exploding but as a sometimes-writer who tries really hard to write cultural criticism that is rigorous and well-researched and open to the thing i am considering on its own terms instead of some stupid terms that i or someone else invented and that are derived from and only apply to my own stupid life, it is soooo cathartic to have read three brutally negative reviews of l*uren *yler's book in a row, because she fundamentally sucks at doing the thing she is doing

[fettesans]

Top, screen captures from various webcams in Austria, Italy and Germany showing Northern Lights, May 10, 2024. Via Nahel Belgherze. Bottom, Clarence John Laughlin, Woman Attacked by a Cloud (Descent of a Cloud), 1941, Silver gelatin print. Via.

--

Throughout The Mystery Guest, Boullier certainly does not sound like a man in top form, and his willingness to make himself appear buffoonish saves the book from being an agonizing exercise in flowery self-pity. In the kind of perfectly ironic detail that could only come directly from real life, he decides to distinguish himself by spending more than a month’s rent on a bottle of 1964 Margaux, only to learn that as part of her artistic practice, Calle keeps all of her birthday gifts in storage in their original wrapping. (If he really had been Jesus Christ, a bottle of Evian would have sufficed.) At the party, Boullier talks shit, and crosses the line between anonymous, iconoclastic interloper and garden-variety wine-drunk jerk. The prose is breathless, sometimes drunk seeming itself, and there is something realistic, even touching, about its perpetual ricocheting between hope and despair, often within the span of a single sentence. It is a tightly written portrait of the artist as a young(ish) mess, and its ingenuity lies in its positioning of the “mystery guest” as an idealized state that exists in diametric opposition to the thoroughly unmysterious position of the ex-lover. Familiarity breeds contempt, and it can also hasten breakups. If Boullier can make himself unknowable enough again, perhaps he can represent not only Calle’s future but also that of the woman who once loved him.

His problem—much to our delight, since this dilemma is what lends the book its jittery edge—is that he cannot be mysterious to save his life. In the final pages of the book, Boullier and Sophie Calle meet again some years later, and despite his misogynistic flinching at her age (“in five years she’d be fifty-five, and then sixty, and that vision was hopeless and implacable”), it becomes clear that they are twin souls, if not necessarily cut out to be lifelong soulmates: obsessed with fate, and to some degree with themselves, they have an eye for the kind of minor details that make for terrific fiction, even when they are supposedly recording facts. For a time after this meeting, they were lovers, until Boullier eventually sent her a meandering, self-important breakup email. Calle—in a move that a man so obsessed with signs surely ought to have foreseen—anonymized him as “X” and turned the email into her 2007 entry for the Venice Biennale, Take Care of Yourself, asking women from 107 different professions, from a cruciverbalist to a Talmudic scholar, to interpret his words. If dumping a writer is a risky move, dumping an artist might be more dangerous still: like an invading force, they tend to recruit collaborators.

Philippa Snow, from We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together - Two French authors’ dueling narratives of heartbreak, for Bookforum, Spring 2024.

[blairwitchapologist]

read the lauren oyler bookforum takedown last night and just can’t get over this

like… holy shit lol this is so funny

[dykehaus]

new york's hottest night club is the bookforum lauren oyler take down

[grandhotelabyss]

What is the best publication right now for book reviews, if any?

Unless you live in New York and go to the parties where the names still matter, or unless you're devoted to subscribing to things in print, and I'm negative in both cases, the internet has leveled the field. We think in writers rather than publications now. For one thing, the publications aren't that differentiated any longer. The New Republic, The Nation, the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, and Bookforum all had different ideological colorings; now you can read about "late capitalism" or whatever in all of them. The new publications are better and more interesting, especially the farther they are from this ideological consensus, like Compact or the Mars Review, but their draw is that they publish very diversely in arts and culture and therefore don't have as strong an editorial line in the reviews. I'd recommend finding critics who appeal to you and following them anywhere. (Criticism and reviews aren't exactly the same either; good critics are good whether you agree with them or not; you're interested in their own literary performance as well as the one under review; whereas when I want to know in advance if I'll enjoy a book in all the practical senses of "enjoy" I usually just take the collective temperature of Goodreads and the like.)

[diaryofaphilosopher]

Letting go of the past: what is the anti-colonial struggle? Lviv BookForum 2024, Sunday 6 October 2024

"What path should be chosen by one group that has long been subordinated to another, stronger one? Is the cancel culture the only way to break free from the domination of the aggressor?. And what if this aggressor is an empire? A discussion on how we make sense of the post-imperial heritage, and whether it is necessary to renounce it, with the Dutch writer Simone Atangana Bekono, Indian literary critic and feminist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak; Brazilian feminist philosopher and journalist Djamila Ribeiro; Nigerian writer and activist Lola Shoneyin; and Ukrainian philosopher and writer Oksana Zabuzhko. Chaired by philosopher Vakhtanh Kebuladze. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Djamila Ribeiro, Simone Atangana Bekono and Lola Shoneyin will join the event digitally."

[heylabodega]

Brian’s talent—and for all the important contributions made by the band’s cast of characters over the years, Brian’s compositions are the nucleus of the glory—is inextricable from his experience of music as a channel to God, a way to examine and take solace from the fear that’s dominated his life. You don’t have to research much about the Beach Boys before you realize that Brian is freaked out by everything:  interviews, touring, the ocean, the Doobie Brothers’ “What a Fool Believes.” He wrote “Good Vibrations” while dwelling on his mother’s suggestion that dogs react to people based on vibrations: “It scared me to death.” His famous 1965 remark that he’d one day create “songs that people pray to” registers as typical rock-star arrogance if you ignore the fact that he needed songs he could pray to, too. “Voices were the problem,” he says of his mental illness, “but also the answer.” Music—harmony—was how he found God in his tenderness and terror. The human voice is the most celestial instrument, and when it combines with others, the effect is transcendent. Family voices are uncannily moving when united in song because of genetic similarities and intimacy; if you grow up together, you’re more likely to pronounce words the same way, which makes the blend more seamless. The only Beach Boys covers I can tolerate are instrumentals because listening to other singers try to riff on perfection is unbearable. And though Brian’s productions are brilliant—the instrumental version of “Good Vibrations” is a deeply satisfying song in its own right—the voices turn a listener inside out. The a cappella version of 1965’s “Kiss Me, Baby” is, for me, as sublime as the whole production of “God Only Knows.” Brian wrote of making Pet Sounds, “I looked around at the musicians and the singers, and I could see their halos.” The boys weren’t angels. They sang like them anyway.

--Charlotte Shane in BookForum

[instantbelieverwhispers2]

Sapphic Signals – Bookforum Magazine