#bookforum

[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.

[weirdgirlification]

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."

[romdocitizen]

Thanks to his hard-won lack of self-awareness, Mishima is oblivious to the conceptual fissures within Sun and Steel, such as the unresolved tension, if not hopeless contradiction, between “seeing without words,” on the one hand, and fetishizing the ultra-erotic beauty of the doomed hero, on the other. The gaze is not a vector of pure libido; it cannot select its targets without language, culture, ideas about what makes something fuckable. You cannot immortalize a hero without representing him, whether in Homeric epic or in a maladroitly Photoshopped poster. Your body cannot disappear into the black hole of ecstatic annihilation and crystallize into an eternal monument at the same time. But Mishima’s peerless power is so totalizing that it apparently neutralizes contradictions by fiat, so that, for example, the most decadent vice of all—the aestheticization and eroticization of deadly violence—can be proposed as a manly virtue, and a philosophy that prizes experience above all else can enfold a vision of sex as the static communion of a calcified body and a desiring gaze. Who wouldn’t be tempted by the promise of a power that simply cuts through the Gordian knots of confusion, ambivalence, cognitive dissonance, all the things that might impel us to consult our self-critical consciences?

If nobody has enough to lose from a revolution to bother plotting its reversal, then it’s not a revolution at all—which means that any year of revolution is necessarily a year of counterrevolution, too. Sun and Steel is a transmission from the dark side of the moon, an artifact of that other 1968, the one Apple never tried to co-opt. That’s what everyone was worried about on the fortieth anniversary of ’68—co-optation, the neoliberal appropriation of the counterculture ethos, the commodification of dissent, the new spirit of capitalism. But all the while, this other beast was slouching along, knowing its time was not yet at hand but would be, in due course, and that a few more years of trickle-up economics would help pave the way. As the historian Timothy Snyder recently observed, with respect to the contemporary recycling of political ideas from the ’20s and ’30s: “Fascism is becoming a story oligarchy tells about itself.” Mishima, like the Italian Futurists before him, reminds us that sometimes, fascism is also a story that the avant-garde tells about itself.

- Elizabeth Schambelan, "In the Fascist Weight Room"

RIP Bookforum, have one of my fav pieces of literary criticism from the past few years in remembrance

[sapphireshorelines]

I have complicated feelings about wanting to disappear, because I already struggle with feeling invisible, and I know that visibility can be construed as a privilege, but I also never want to be fully seen. I even like, on occasion, to be misheard. What I struggle with more is being misunderstood.

Durga Chew-Bose (x)

[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...)

[kammartinez]

By David L. Ulin

Dec. 13, 2022 9:11 AM PT

What was it about Bookforum? The announcement on Monday morning that the current issue of the publication, founded in 1994, would be the last, has provoked an outpouring … not of protest (although that too) so much as of grieving. I feel it, too, this sense of loss and anger, this feeling that something essential is being needlessly destroyed. That’s because for so many of us in the book world, this quarterly review journal represented a kind of critical apotheosis, positioned in the middle territory between service journalism and the academy. As both reader and writer (I published several reviews and essays there between 1998 and 2008), there was something special in the way Bookforum privileged voices — those of the critics as well as of the writers under review. To engage with an issue has long felt to me like going to a fabulous party where the guests are not just brilliant but also personable. This is how criticism is supposed to operate, to get your blood up. It reminds you of how much all this matters. It reminds you that literature is a collective soul. Collective soul is how I might describe Bookforum also. It was edgy, opinionated, willing to be provocative, and it encouraged the same of its contributors. The first piece I wrote for the magazine was a takedown of William Gass’ collection of novellas “Cartesian Sonata” — bloodless, as Gass’ fiction often was. Rather than leave it at that, however, I was encouraged to go further, to frame the collection not only on its own terms but also in relation to Gass’ monumental achievement as an essayist. To consider his writing more broadly, in other words. This was a hallmark of the journal, which pushed me to think about both my own work and that of others. It encouraged me to read ambitiously. Moira Donegan on Sarah Schulman, Meghan O’Rourke on Lynne Tillman, Tillman on Don DeLillo’s “Underworld.” Such pieces remain models as much as they are reviews or essays. They rewire our understanding of what criticism is, and what it can do. This is not to say Bookforum was without antecedent; it’s impossible to imagine it existing, for instance, without the example of publications such as the New York Review of Books, the Village Voice Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books. All of them also published extended review essays and urged contributors to push the boundaries of their work. At the same time, the magazine felt to me a bit more open, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say: less doctrinaire. The work that resonates (Ismail Muhammad on Charlottesville, Heather Havrilesky on “Wonder Woman”) framed books through the lens of a wider cultural engagement; they sought to make connections beyond the page. Perhaps the finest example of this — and among my favorite critical essays — is Lucy Sante’s 2007 exegesis on Georges Simenon. Here’s how Sante ends that piece: “You the reader are pulled into the situation, maybe against your better judgment, by an irresistible wish to figure out what exactly is wrong with the picture. And then, helplessly, you witness spiraling chaos …. Simenon’s genius — his native inheritance, refined into art — was for locating the criminal within every human being. At the very least, it is impossible to read him and remain convinced that you are incapable of violence. Every one of his books is a dark mirror.” Complicity, chaos, a sense of context: This is what, at its sharpest, criticism means to evoke. Earlier this month, Penske Media  Corp., which owns Rolling Stone and Variety, among other publications, purchased Bookforum’s parent company, Artforum International Magazine; although no reason has been given for the shutdown, it’s not hard to imagine this takeover as the cause. Either way, here’s what I know: I’m tired of losing outlets to conglomeration. I’m tired of culture being under siege because of money, of corporations and the wealthy buying platforms and destroying them just because they can. I keep thinking about the Believer — sold out from under its editors by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, only to be rescued after a public uproar. Something similar could also happen here. But if this really is the last issue of Bookforum, I want to remember its vitality. I want to remember the feeling of seeing each issue in my mailbox, checking the table of contents, bookmarking the work I wished to read. The current issue is no exception, which only makes the situation that much more fraught. This is not a dying journal, in other words, but a thriving one: Sasha-Frere Jones on Gordon Matta-Clark, Harmony Holiday on Hilton Als, Stephanie Burt on N.K. Jemisin. Here, we see the conversation that is being taken from us. There is no more elemental dialogue.

[kamreadsandrecs]

By David L. Ulin

Dec. 13, 2022 9:11 AM PT

What was it about Bookforum? The announcement on Monday morning that the current issue of the publication, founded in 1994, would be the last, has provoked an outpouring … not of protest (although that too) so much as of grieving. I feel it, too, this sense of loss and anger, this feeling that something essential is being needlessly destroyed. That’s because for so many of us in the book world, this quarterly review journal represented a kind of critical apotheosis, positioned in the middle territory between service journalism and the academy. As both reader and writer (I published several reviews and essays there between 1998 and 2008), there was something special in the way Bookforum privileged voices — those of the critics as well as of the writers under review. To engage with an issue has long felt to me like going to a fabulous party where the guests are not just brilliant but also personable. This is how criticism is supposed to operate, to get your blood up. It reminds you of how much all this matters. It reminds you that literature is a collective soul. Collective soul is how I might describe Bookforum also. It was edgy, opinionated, willing to be provocative, and it encouraged the same of its contributors. The first piece I wrote for the magazine was a takedown of William Gass’ collection of novellas “Cartesian Sonata” — bloodless, as Gass’ fiction often was. Rather than leave it at that, however, I was encouraged to go further, to frame the collection not only on its own terms but also in relation to Gass’ monumental achievement as an essayist. To consider his writing more broadly, in other words. This was a hallmark of the journal, which pushed me to think about both my own work and that of others. It encouraged me to read ambitiously. Moira Donegan on Sarah Schulman, Meghan O’Rourke on Lynne Tillman, Tillman on Don DeLillo’s “Underworld.” Such pieces remain models as much as they are reviews or essays. They rewire our understanding of what criticism is, and what it can do. This is not to say Bookforum was without antecedent; it’s impossible to imagine it existing, for instance, without the example of publications such as the New York Review of Books, the Village Voice Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books. All of them also published extended review essays and urged contributors to push the boundaries of their work. At the same time, the magazine felt to me a bit more open, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say: less doctrinaire. The work that resonates (Ismail Muhammad on Charlottesville, Heather Havrilesky on “Wonder Woman”) framed books through the lens of a wider cultural engagement; they sought to make connections beyond the page. Perhaps the finest example of this — and among my favorite critical essays — is Lucy Sante’s 2007 exegesis on Georges Simenon. Here’s how Sante ends that piece: “You the reader are pulled into the situation, maybe against your better judgment, by an irresistible wish to figure out what exactly is wrong with the picture. And then, helplessly, you witness spiraling chaos …. Simenon’s genius — his native inheritance, refined into art — was for locating the criminal within every human being. At the very least, it is impossible to read him and remain convinced that you are incapable of violence. Every one of his books is a dark mirror.” Complicity, chaos, a sense of context: This is what, at its sharpest, criticism means to evoke. Earlier this month, Penske Media  Corp., which owns Rolling Stone and Variety, among other publications, purchased Bookforum’s parent company, Artforum International Magazine; although no reason has been given for the shutdown, it’s not hard to imagine this takeover as the cause. Either way, here’s what I know: I’m tired of losing outlets to conglomeration. I’m tired of culture being under siege because of money, of corporations and the wealthy buying platforms and destroying them just because they can. I keep thinking about the Believer — sold out from under its editors by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, only to be rescued after a public uproar. Something similar could also happen here. But if this really is the last issue of Bookforum, I want to remember its vitality. I want to remember the feeling of seeing each issue in my mailbox, checking the table of contents, bookmarking the work I wished to read. The current issue is no exception, which only makes the situation that much more fraught. This is not a dying journal, in other words, but a thriving one: Sasha-Frere Jones on Gordon Matta-Clark, Harmony Holiday on Hilton Als, Stephanie Burt on N.K. Jemisin. Here, we see the conversation that is being taken from us. There is no more elemental dialogue.

[artbookdap]

Good times at @bookforum this month. ⁠ ⁠ Can't do much better than this review of @salman.toor 'No Ordinary Love' from @gregoryrmiller & @baltimoremuseumofart⁠ ⁠ "Echoing the murky sheen of sidewalk puddles, Salman Toor’s paintings revel in the absinthe-green palette of inebriation and hallucination. His compositions whisper of the dark delights of unlit alleyways, of clandestine trysts in the garden, or the unexpected thwack of a cricket bat against a stranger’s skull. Desire seeps through his canvases like spilled wine, but it’s the kind of longing laced through with recalcitrance, that sour taste in the mouth after a middling kiss." —Kate Sutton⁠ ⁠ Then again: "Published on the occasion of the 2021 retrospective, 'João Maria Gusmão + @pedrocabritapaiva : Terçolho' from @moussemagazine lets readers into the pair’s proverbial kitchen, assembling the odds, ends, and images that have fueled their aesthetic flirtations with the psychological, the parascientific, the paranormal, and—to quote the artists—'abyssological.' Predating the visual hijinks of TikTok, Gusmão and Paiva’s films adhere to explicitly analog technologies, testing the limits of what can be recorded." —Kate Sutton⁠ ⁠ And a personal favorite: "The late artist Jack Whitten told a studio visitor: 'The old symbols that we had from previous established religion, they’re not workable anymore for this society. We have to invent new symbols.' New symbols, new techniques, and new tools—what Whitten needed didn’t exist, so he had to devise it. He might slice tesserae out of thick paint and tile the squares like a mosaic or drag a self-fashioned twelve-foot rake through a wet painted surface. No standard monograph could quite hold Whitten’s artistic imagining, so 'Jack Whitten: Cosmic Soul' by Richard Shiff from @hauserwirth reimagines the art book as something that feels improvisatory and free, letting Whitten’s six decades of art roam aside commentary that keeps up rather than corrals." — @sonomar⁠ ⁠ Read the full reviews via linkinbio.⁠ ⁠ #bookforum #artfulvolumes #salmantoor #noordinarylove #joaomariagusmao #pedrocabritapaiva #jackwhitten #jackwhittencosmicsoul #cosmicsoul⁠ ⁠ ⁠ https://www.instagram.com/p/Cl6rcRcOY8K/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[garadinervi]

Roni Horn, Hack Wit – lucky water, (watercolor, graphite, and gum arabic on watercolor paper, cellophane tape), 2014 [«Bookforum» Magazine. Hauser & Wirth, Zürich. © Roni Horn]

[thatstudyblrontea]

Wishful thinking is very strong – you don't see it coming, because you don't want to see it coming.

— Margaret Atwood

[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

[holdoncallfailed]

sorry i know i'm late but that bookforum review of the new lauren oyler book is actually insane. hats off to the true haters among us

[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.

[dispactke]

Word Works Part II

A) The space it takes to house enemies

The space it takes to house lovers

The space it takes to dodge a bullet

The space it takes to remove a bullet

The space it takes to remove your hat

The space it takes to remove your house

The space it takes to remove your house

- from a Gordon Matta-Clark "word work" sent to Carol Goodden in 1973

"The notes for potential Anarchitecture pieces he sent in letters to Carol Goodden are perfect conceptual pieces in themselves" per 

Sasha Frere-Jones in the final (?) issue of Bookforum, Dec. 2022