This also marks our 45th One Great Reader interview overall (what a year!), and we look forward to taking a moment to collect what we've done so far, and doing some very fun things with it. Stay tuned!
]]>After you finish our interview please do find his book Doomed and Famous as much more Adrian isn’t nearly enough. To further tempt you, I leave you with its flap copy that promises a most delightful read:
In Doomed and Famous, an obituarist opens his archive in celebration of the most marginal and improbable characters, creating a meta-fiction of extinction and obscurity. For many decades Adrian Dannatt tracked and dredged the dead, with a macabre disregard for the etiquette of mortality. His specialty, much in demand among even the most mainstream publications, was to memorialize those whose eccentricity or criminality made them unlikely candidates for the fleeting immortality of a newspaper necrology. Dannatt maintained a veritable lust, perverse certainly, for capturing and celebrating such wayward existences. This book is a selection of some of the best—meaning most improbable—of these miniature biographies.
Here are arranged an almost fictive cast of characters including an imaginary Sephardic count in Wisconsin, a sadomasochist collector of the world's rarest clocks, a discrete Cuban connoisseur of invisibility, an alcoholic novelist in Rio, a Warhol Superstar gone wrong, a leading downtown Manhattan dominatrix, a conceptual artist who blew up a museum, and many others. Dannatt terminates this volume with his own putative extinction, performing the difficult if not dangerous task of penning his personal life history and ultimate end.
-Wes Del Val
WDV: Whose writing about contemporary culture is clearest and smartest?
AD: My publishers Sequence Press, run by Katherine Pickard with gallerist Miguel Abreu are known for a commitment to the radical, stylistically as well as politically. One might even detect a sort of steely tardif Gallic Marxism, one of their allies being the philosopher Alain Badiou, notorious for his self-proclaimed Maoism. Indeed he came to Manhattan at the behest of my publishers specifically to debate how it is possible to be a Maoist in light of what we now know about the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. This lecture-performance Dialogue Between a Chinese Philosopher and a French Philosopher led me to actively think about what Mao was trying to do, namely the “re-education” of those guilty of incorrect thinking, to physically change the tenor of their beliefs, their being. This seems particularly relevant to our current lively debates about racial and gender identity and rather than resist the wind of history I decided to become an eager participant of our own “Cultural Revolution.” Like many an enemy of the revolution I am of a certain age, rich in bourgeois tendencies and even wear glasses. Indeed as an actual landlord, let alone a “bad-influencer” and Rightist, I am clearly already among what Mao listed as the “Five Black Categories.” Luckily I am not being forcibly re-educated in some distant province but instead willingly attempting to change the assumed fixity of my internal wiring, to think anew.
As such my chosen writing about contemporary culture would have to include Fred Moten, surely the most agile and elucidating framer of “race” in the widest sense. Thanks to Moten I am trying to approach race, or my own attitudes regarding race, as a different conceptual space. I might even dare ponder race as an Oulipian exercise in “restrictive form” and social grammar, a question of “style” both literary and quotidian, of how we interact with others, with the supposèd “other” on a daily basis. As such I am attempting to find the anagrammatic link between, say, Harry Mathews and Harryette Mullen, between Queneau’s notion of Oulipians as "rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape” and Ellison’s Invisible Man in his basement. Here I should also mention Darryl Pinckney’s book Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature which happily fractures all clichés of monolithic and approved “blackness” to emphasize instead the individual, indeed the eccentric individual, so central to my own world view. Likewise, as someone who personally tries to avoid the company of men, from sheer physical cowardice, Pauline Harmange has proposed a deliciously revolutionary all-out war against my species, her alternative bestseller Moi les hommes, je les déteste really needing to be read in its original French for full frisson. If not quite as inspired in its frenzy as Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto it certainly tickles all the right spots when it comes to the proposed death of the patriarchy, so easily confused with the “death of the author.” I might conclude with the name Aria Dean, such a pleasingly resonant name in itself, half opera singer, half academic executive. In a typical coincidence my friend Bingham Bryant the young filmmaker was describing his proposed new co-operative venture with Dean when I realized that I had been reading her on “Blacceleration” the night before, knowing nothing about her, just because it was on the bedside table at my publisher’s apartment. Dean’s textual adventures seem to propose new ways of fracturing the formal boundaries of politics and art, fiction and filmmaking, opening instead to a communal ambition, shared engagement, to defeat old certainties. As bold an artist as critic, Dean also happens to share a gallery, Chateau Shatto, with my old friend, the Situationist revolutionary Jacqueline de Jong—ageless comrades on the barricades. And yet and yet, however hard I try to liberate myself I am well aware that I remain an unforgivable member of the “Stinking Old Ninth.”
What a start, that’s months’ worth of essential reading right there! Two related questions: Besides Harmange, has anything else gender-related from the past few years marked you as these have as you proceed in your self-re-education? And I’m glad you brought up Oulipo, you’re the first in 45 interviews to do so. Do you read those texts in their original French?
Well, French feminist writing has been at the heart of my ongoing self-re-education, starting of course with Simone de Beauvoir and everything from Kristeva to Monique Wittig, it's just such a rich and dare I admit “chic” vein of theory, fiction and poetry. It can however be damn hard to read in French and as with the Oulipo I always try to understand them in the original but end up reading them in both French and English. Actually English-language Oulipo is a whole thing in itself. I went to a great event in Paris hosted by that splendidly named poet Rufo Quintavale featuring English-language Oulipians, including the late Tom La Farge who with his wife Wendy Walker created the equally excellently named “Writhing Society.”
Which writers whom you’ve met came across in real life most similar to their writing on the page?
In my distant thespian youth I was lucky enough to act on television with Beatrix Lehmann, playing Aunt Georgina, and as a special treat she introduced me to her elder sister Rosamond. I had not read her work but retroactively connected the smart and feisty woman I encountered with the marvels of her novels, especially that bi-sexual classic Dusty Answer. In my recent thespian dotage I was lucky enough to act in a film with Eileen Myles, she playing a rock star and myself her manager, and in this case I had already extensively delved into her oeuvre and her deadpan laconic cool exactly matched her writing on the page. Chinua Achebe was as gracious and elegant in life—I was lucky enough to once meet him in London—as peerless on the page. A memorable afternoon was spent visiting Lionel Ziprin, that master Kabbalist, in his small apartment in Seward Park surrounded by glorious clutter. He was lying on his bed attached to a breathing apparatus for emphysema and with his long white beard and bushy eyebrows the strangest thing began to happen; for as it grew darker and darker and no light was lit his face began to reverse itself, his mouth to his beard, his hair as his chin, until his features were entirely upside down and his voice came from a black void, a ritual of shape-shifting that he was generously allowing me to witness accompanied by his soft occult whisper. As with Lehmann (two extremely different people!) at the time I had read nothing by Ziprin but am now a devotee of Songs for Schizoid Siblings. And at the risk of this degenerating into a show-off litany of name-dropping, I could add that visiting Paul Bowles in Tangiers proved as nerve-wracking as his writing. It was already such a cliché to go and see him and with my friend Peter Culshaw, the musician and writer, we were naturally hesitant to do so. In fact I had at the time a fantasy of writing a comic article about being the only visitors to Tangiers not to go and pay their respects to Bowles! We had no introduction whatsoever, only the address of his modernist housing block on the outskirts of the city, and simply went there uninvited to ring on his bell. I remember well the polished bronze door plate and the back room where he lay on his mattress surrounded by male-physique magazines, our cracked cups of tea on the floor. On explaining that we were here traveling through Morocco recording different local musics, one of his own specialties, a strange glimmer came to his eye, “yes, sometimes you have to use….a knife!” The way he hissed that word was pure Bowles.
That’s all just delicious! I in fact just listened to four hours of Bowles’ recordings of Moroccan music this very weekend. I only drop that as it’s quite the coincidence.
Are there expatriate writers who you believe had to relocate to come into their own, otherwise you suspect we’d not be reading them?
A great question but there are so many of them it would be hard to make a list, because in a sense every writer is an “expatriate,” the foreign and often difficult country in which they live being literature itself. But I guess the big ones would be Gertrude Stein and Joyce, Beckett and Nabokov. And how about Patricia Highsmith in Switzerland and Suffolk, or those two very different figures from the West Indies, CLR James and VS Pritchett? Or two classic Englishmen in the USA who both went to Dulwich College namely PG Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler. Or from Canada you have Leonard Cohen and Nancy Huston and Mordecai Richler. But there's also Ondatjee, Doris Lessing, Iris Origo, Edith Wharton, Germaine Greer, James Baldwin. It's an endless flow of exile...
Looking at your shelves, which single publisher has consistently produced the most handsome books?
I have long admired the book designs of Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications (BLP), a radical house of fine vintage set up in West Ealing, London in 1969. Named after Paul Bogle, the Jamaican martyr, and Toussaint, the great Haitian revolutionary, these handsome hardbacks boasted notably snazzy covers, especially desirable being the red-and-green boards of Writing In Cuba Since the Revolution. Likewise, any of the many publications by the late great Marxist typographer-designer Robin Fior deserve all their cachet, as his recent retrospective exhibition at the Gulbenkian in Lisbon made clear. But if I must choose a single publisher responsible for probably the most handsome row of books on my groaning shelves it would probably be Oxford Classical Texts. Curiously I just discovered that the young Kim Jong-Un also seems to be a fan of these books, a man whose relatives I visited in their family mausoleum in Pyongyang.
https://twitter.com/holland_tom/status/910991185631727621
I love the weight and heft of these volumes and especially their elegant dust-wrappers whether in distinctive green or tasty powder-blue. This latter colour we hijacked, thanks to my editor Katherine Pickard, a wily aesthete, and designer Geoff Kaplan, for the covers of my own Doomed and Famous.
Ah yes you did, I’m glad you pointed that out.
All I see in that Kim Jong-Un photograph is a classic interior designer move of buying books-by-the-foot for an imagined intellectual effect for the client...
Which living writer would you most desire to write a biography about you?
What a wonderful notion—such vast vistas of possibilities. Yet also the nagging reality of one’s own parochial limitations, the very paucity of my connections amongst the truly great and good of the contemporary literary canon. But within this fictive arc of limitless grandeur I can’t imagine anything more exciting than having Hélène Cixous pen my biography. I even dare quote her in the epigraph at the entrance to my own book, Digression is the soul of literature. I am a terrible digresser myself and do not doubt la grande Cixous would be able to track me firmly down all my dim alleyways, behind my “Veils” and “Rootprints,” through those Oulipian labyrinths indeed, with her usual admirable acuity.
Very good answer, I did say “most desire” so it needn’t be realistic.
What do you want to happen to your books after you die?
Oh no, the key question which I ponder daily, nightly.
What can I do with them all? Will I ever build that fantasy dream bookshelf, free-standing library to contain them all? This is part of my sad fantasy to become sufficiently successful, recognized, whatever it is called, that some institution might accept my soi disant archive; my lunatic collections of newspaper and magazine cuttings, hoarded invitations to exhibitions, boxes of letters and postcards, my jottings, notebooks and sketchbooks, scrapbooks, “yet every scrapbook stuck with glue.” And, centrally, what about the books themselves? Should one have a bookplate or not? A thousand years ago in Ankara I attended a conference where I was lucky enough to meet Cornelius Castoriadis and the delightful Marcia Tucker, who founded the old New Museum. This event was organised by a mysterious Swiss diplomat who collected not books but bookplates and explained to me the perils and pleasures of that world. I would love to have one, especially choosing who to commission to design a great bookplate, but right now that would lessen the value of the volumes, so I have this fantasy of working like a mad man to try and establish the tiniest flicker of fame so that I can at last have my own bookplate, and it will not instantly sabotage their re-sale.
This is particularly poignant for me right now as my father, the well-known modernist architect Trevor Dannatt just died at 101. Though the Royal Institute for British Architects has taken a judicious tranche of his library (complete with his own entirely justified bookplate) I still find myself inheriting his voluminous handwritten journals, his own cuttings, letters and postcards from friends. These are exactly the same things I myself have piled up in countless boxes, our shared DNA wired for this obsessive commitment to saving every scrap. I just hope that in a hundred years one of my great-great-grandchildren will inherit a few dusty tomes, bookplate and all, by which to remember the dim glimmer of their doomed forebear.
If you could start a new international literary prize what would your categories be?
A bid for pure radicality—formal and political. This of course leaves the moot question of who defines the “radical.” The other real issue is how much money is involved, because that changes everything. I would like to start a prize whose largesse was so staggering, impossible, that it becomes radical in itself; the $650,000 of the MacArthur Fellowship may be something but my fantasy runs more to the hundred million dollars left by Ruth Lilly to Poetry magazine or François-Marie Banier’s billion euro bonanza, actual beauty and brilliance for once recognised and rewarded with real money. I would start a two million pound prize for a single page of writing that was so extraordinary, so astonishing that nobody has ever read anything like it before. Something like the All Souls exam combined with a Kabbalistic occult revelation which would actually shatter our world through words.
Fabulous. A dozen various scenarios instantly ran through my head. And you’re completely accurate about actual beauty and brilliance so rarely being recognized with real money. In your estimation which writers’ grand sales of their books have matched their prowess on the page?
Another deliciously juicy question, especially as I love many bestsellers whether Conan Doyle, Ian Fleming or Rex Stout. But at the same time it's amazing how bad the prose of many bestsellers can be...so it's actually physically difficult to get through them. Yet there are also bestsellers snobs foolishly dismiss because of their success; for example in Britain Joanna Trollope is a ubiquitous bestseller just like her distant relative Anthony, and both are truly addictive, or the success of Amor Towles' Gentleman in Moscow is another exemplary case.
Which books’ indexes did you most quickly page to once you got your hands on a copy?
The biographies of Malcolm McLaren and Guy Debord to check whether I was in them, denounced by both for being a “known troublemaker”!
Wait, you indeed made it in both for being a troublemaker, or should have? While on the subject, who has wreaked the most havoc in literature with their words?
Happily I made it into the Debord memoirs and biographies, several of them. I am also proud that my name is in Paul Gorman's definitive McLaren biography, but curiously there is nothing about McLaren’s threats to sue me over his planned adventures in North Korea, which led to the rare honour of actually being denounced by McLaren himself as a “known troublemaker and disturber of the peace”!' I suppose the most “havoc” ever wreaked by the written word must belong to the Bible, these “people of the book” also having a great capacity for fighting, torturing, excluding and killing on the basis of these same words.
What a badge of distinction to have been denounced by both. I like knowing this. And there’s probably not a better answer than what you gave for the latter.
What locations have you been to which were written about more beautifully than they turned out to be in reality?
The distant suburbs of London now prove a disappointment compared to the great dark mysteries of Arthur Machen, the Limehouse Docks fail to achieve the foggy threat of Sax Rohmer, Muriel Sparks’ lodging houses have been long converted back to “single-family-homes” and even Eastbourne hardly measures up to the gin soaked tristesse of Patrick Hamilton. One does begin to fear that much of Britain is now much better on the page, especially those musty Penguin pages of yore, than as experienced today, general ghastliness being so widespread.
When in your life has your breath been taken away by something you read?
I literally had to hold my breath whilst finishing George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air. Drenched in nostalgia for a “real England” the villains of this prescient 1939 novel are the very same property speculators and mass-market high street retailers, motorway-planners, who have by now effectively destroyed the magic of rural Britain. Also, it was thanks to my enthusiasm for this book that I was accepted as a student by St Chad’s, an all male Anglo-Catholic theological college, despite not having any of the obligatory exam results in maths or science. For in charge of my illegal admission was one Wheatley Blench, a formidable literary scholar of highest high church bent who had actually known Orwell, “Yes, Blair was a solid chap…though in Spain he did fight on the wrong side of course.”
My god, British names! How did Wodehouse not get to “Wheatley Blench” first.
What are some of the most stimulating publishing world-related conversations you’ve had around a dinner table?
Aside for my own much-aforementioned editor Miss Pickard, it is always elucidating and intriguing to be with my friend Emmie Francis, the fabled young editor at Faber & Faber. Over some bottle of fine wine in south London she might outline a vision for truly filthy avant-garde publishing—a la Barney Rosset—wherein the visual becomes literary and literary becomes visual. While the current “trade” publishing landscape does not really allow for that kind of imagination, she does remain committed to new forms of potential publishing—she has the “eye” in every sense. She’ll bring bestsellers, prize-winners and renegade literature to us all, for time to come. It is likewise always a delight to ponder the nexus of literature and design with Vintage-Random House’s legendary art director and cover queen, Megan Wilson, ideally whilst eating deeply of her famous roast chicken special. Of course the “publishing world” should not be thought of as just some monolith of the entertainment-complex with vast budgets and hefty laminated volumes; thus I would be equally happy discovering some hidden speciality of lower Manhattan with Fan Kong, an expert on the tiniest most elegant of handmade fanzines, sometimes in an edition of one and small enough to hide in a thimble.
Emmie Francis’ name is new to me, but your putting her in the same sentence as Barney has immediately put her on my radar.
Where should reading never occur?
On a cell phone whilst with other people.
Well then I guess a lot of people are reading all the time... Thanks Adrian!
Adrian Dannatt as drawn by Duncan Hannah
WDV: How many books and magazines would you say are currently in your home and studio and how do you generally treat them?
KDB: At the moment there’s a lot of everything, difficult to say how many but it’s getting too full and there’s not much space anymore to stack things up. The atelier is quite small and everywhere you look you see magazines, loose papers, notes, pictures, old and new books, postcards and works. It’s a collection of what I like, what I want to keep and what I want to work with.
My greatest concern is that soon these beautiful magazines won’t exist anymore, which makes me treat them with care and respect. This is also the reason I cannot throw anything away and I like to be surrounded by them.
The books are mostly situated in the living room. Here you will find all reading, photography and art books. I’m thinking of moving to another home (and/or city) that has more space.
Yes, an opportunity for more space for anyone who loves printed material is just about the greatest thing, but then there’s the moving of everything…
The good thing is I just found a large house in the countryside (where I was born) with a big atelier where I will have more overview and space to keep order in my magazine archive. At first I tried to throw away some of the magazines but probably they will move to the new house, too.
I don’t associate your work with images from recent magazines, so what is the breakdown in your atelier between old magazines and say those from the past three years? Do you have a favorite magazine decade? And what sparked your love of magazines to begin with?
I’m quite addicted to buying magazines, especially fashion and photography ones, but I don’t cut these newer magazines. I will keep them and who knows, maybe in ten years will pick them up again.
There’s an order in the magazines I keep. In the atelier you’ll find all kinds of vintage ones which I consider as working material while the newer magazines are now piled up in the living room.
My favourite magazine decade is without doubt the 1960s, also because it was a very creative, inspiring period. I would have loved living in those years.
When I was very young, maybe 10 or 11, my father kept family albums with pictures and I wasn’t allowed to touch them. But I did anyway. I even sometimes stole pictures from these albums (which I still have). This made me want to start cutting up old magazines and make my own albums.
Describe what an ideal weekend looks like which leads to satisfying time spent reading?
I don’t see that much difference between weekends and weekdays but during the weekends I take more time to read and I also try to read the newspaper (especially the culture section and interviews). I have a large collection of notebooks where I write/cut and glue down things I read and find interesting. It’s something obsessive.
Books are becoming more important in my work because I use them as inspiration to base a theme on. Last year would have been an important year for me but with the pandemic almost everything was canceled. I had a solo show at Les Rencontres in Arles and the work was partly inspired by the book Commencer (How It Is) by Samuel Beckett. In French the word has a double meaning: “to start” and “how it is.”
During the lockdown I read again L’astragale by Albertine Sarrazin which became the inspiration and reference for my series “Les Soireès d’Albertine,” which was also partly based on and named after the character from the Proust novel La Prisonnière.
In my latest book (and series) You Could at Least Pretend to Like Yellow, I only use yellow, the color I hate the most. For me it’s the color that represents jealousy, untrustworthiness, rage and cheating and it’s quite strange that this color appeared in my work during the lockdown when I was in doubt, anxious and overexcited. A coincidence was that when Tony Cederteg from my publisher Librayman came to select the works for the book, it reminded him of the Swedish film by Vilgot Sjöman I Am Curious (Yellow). The funny thing was the next day I found in an antique bookshop the complete scenario of the movie.
Wow, that’s quite the linkage.
What newspaper/s do you like reading and do you recall what culture articles or interviews particularly grabbed you the past six months?
I read two Flemish newspapers on the weekends: De Morgen and De Standaard. Mostly I’m interested in the culture supplement. If an article interests me I cut it out and keep it in a map. These are mainly interviews with photographers, musicians, writers and artists.
Recently I found very touching in an interview an image of a woman. She looked into the lens and was so fragile, strong and riddled at the same time. I read the article without knowing who she was and found out she was raped at the age of 12. It was Fiona Apple and I immediately started listening to her music and became a big fan.
What a way to be introduced to her, especially as she’s been recording for around 25 years!
What are books you’re very happy you read, but you never desire to do so again?
The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights by Joan Didion are both fantastic books but make me very scared. I bought them a long time ago before I could move myself to actually read them. She is a brilliant, iconic and honest writer full of passion and also moving, touching, strong and fragile at the same time. When I read these books that deal with the loss of a loved one, it brings back memories of my own past. Sometimes I force myself to read more about this subject. I’m not easygoing with these books, but at the same time I find it very intriguing to read how others think and go through this process that is the hardest in one’s life.
When is the last time laughter nearly brought tears after reading something?
Platform by Michel Houellebecq has unforgettable taunting scenes. The part where he describes himself travelling with a group to Thailand, observing the characters and group mentality is hilarious. I also enjoyed the movie The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq where he plays himself as a character who is easy to feel sorry for but who also manages to get his way at the same time. For example the part when he complains to his kidnappers about the quality of the wine and how he gets it done that they arrange a girl for him to spend the night with.
Marcel Proust is quite funny sometimes. The first time I read “Combray” (the first part of The Remembrance of Things Past) I laughed a lot when he described his hypersensitivities. A few people I know really have a kind of Proustian character/attitude and when I see them they always make me think of scenes from his books.
What do you consider are the most eccentric subjects you like to read about?
At the moment I’m reading The Drinker by the German writer Hans Fallada. It’s partly autobiographical (like many of his books), in diary form and tells the story of a man in the grip of alcohol. It’s quite shocking but also very original. Normally I don’t like to read about alcoholism but his style and neurotic behaviour is so intriguing that I want to read everything he published.
If I like a writer I want to know him or her better and the first thing I look for is biographical material to get a grip on them as a person and dive deeper into their world.
Recently I got a commission to make images for the covers of the Copenhagen trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen. Of course I started to look for more information about her and found out that the three books were freshly translated and published in Dutch, too. It’s a dark, gripping portrait of childhood, addiction, affairs, abortions and bad relations.
What have been your most rewarding deep dives into a writer’s life?
At the moment I’m reading the Cahiers 1943-1949 by Marguerite Duras. I found out that most of her novels are autobiographical. Her stories are very rude, sometimes hard but also very emotional and she manages to write it down in a very clear observative style. She writes in a very cinematographic way.
Who posts pictures of books on Instagram that you like?
One of the people I follow on Instagram is Philippe Azoury for his intelligent and strange choice of books, records and pictures of street life. Through him I discovered the photographer Corrine Day. When I saw a picture he posted of a young girl coloring her hair, I was very touched and attracted. I immediately looked up who Corinne was to find out she died much too young of a brain tumor. Unfortunately her book Diary, which is a treasure, is also completely sold out.
I don’t get why in addition to Diary there is so little of Corinne’s work in print?!
Are there other books you feel are treasures but sadly are also completely sold out or go for wild prices online?
I discovered this by accident and I don’t search for rare or expensive books. My interest truly lies in vintage magazines, which are also starting to get rare and expensive sometimes. Some well-known vintage fashion magazines are going for really wild prices.
Are there specific colors or design elements which you find usually draw your attention when you’re scanning covers in a bookstore?
Mostly by black & white pictures.
Knowing your work, that’s not at all surprising...
What do you use as bookmarks?
I love it when books have a string attached as a bookmark ribbon. They give a feeling of nostalgia and you can touch it (or even play with it) while reading the book. Otherwise I don’t pay much attention and mostly use a leftover piece from one of my magazines I use to make my work. Tony Cederteg made a very nice bookmark for my little publication Dirty Scenes showing a detail of a flower overpainted in yellow. I still use it today.
Me, too, the playing with the ribbon and the favorite pages ripped out of magazines. I have close to three decade’s worth.
What books in your life were you most excited to read and they lived up to,
and even exceeded your expectations?
The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk was very exciting to read. I liked the main male character’s obsession with objects and especially the fact that the author crossed the boundaries of the book by creating a real museum that accompanies it. I did not have the chance to see the museum in person but have the photo book at home and it’s fascinating to see a collection of everyday objects that became the memories of a love affair.
What did you read last year which transported you furthest from your then states of mind?
Last year I read House of the Sleeping Beauties by the Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata. It’s an intriguing story about a man who becomes a member of a club of elderly gentlemen who can spend the night in a house with a young beautiful girl that’s sleeping nude when they arrive. Because of his visit to the house of the sleeping beauties where he always sleeps next to another girl, memories from the past emerge through seeing and smelling. The book became a starting point for an exhibition I’m working on where I turn the points of view to those of the sleeping girls and their dreams.
I don’t know it, but it seems VERY Japanese and perfect for you to explore in your work. Thanks Katrien!
Katrien De Blauwer
]]>If you don't know Rachel's work or your interest in fashion coverage was seriously altered like so much else upon Covid's arrival last year, herewith a personal favorites listing of the titles of some of her pieces for GQ since right before quarantine changed everything. She always writes plenty about today's big guns in fashion, but I left those off for the most part as I don't feel they need added attention here. This will take you less than a minute to read but should give you a solid sense of the state of contemporary international fashion, bringing you right up to the present. I hope you pick up Rachel's breadth and unique framings and it all leads you to finding her on GQ's site, where she contributes frequently; on their popular podcast, Corporate Lunch, which she co-hosts; and on Opulent Tips, her Substack, where she somehow delivers even more goods.
Now then, this, and then finally, our interview:
The Most Sustainable Idea In Fashion Is Personal Style —February 2020
Why the Most Advanced Move In Menswear Is Dressing Like a Grandma —March
What Shopping Will Look Like in 2030 —March
How Three Brick-and-Mortar Retailers Are Surviving With Neither Brick Nor Mortar —March
In the Fight Against Coronavirus, the Hermès Scarf Becomes an Unlikely Weapon
—April
We Are Living In the Age of Sweatpants and Never Going Back —April
What Luxury Brands Can Learn from Looting —June
The C.A.R.L.Y.—That's “Can’t Afford Real Life Yet”—Is the Consumer of the Future —June
The Plate—the Plate!—Has Become a Menswear Status Symbol —July
The Coolest, Most Expensive Clothes on the Planet Are Made From Other, Older Clothes —August
Drake Isn't the Only Man Who Loves Birkins —August
Fall’s Must-Have Shoe Looks a Lot Like a Rich Lady’s Necklace —September
For Grace Wales Bonner, the Tracksuit Is Sacred —September
Fashion Is Finally Catching Up to Marine Serre —September
The Best ’90s Designer You’ve Never Heard of Is Back —October
Rick Owens Takes On Fashion’s Last Taboo: Male Aggression —January 2021
Call Him Bro Brummell: Menswear’s Very Rich Moment Is Here —January
—February
Who Owns Quilted Clothing? —February
Yes, the United States Needs a Fashion Czar —February
The Dawn of the Quaranzine —March
Forget Video: The Fashion Photograph Still Has Plenty To Say —March
The Rise of the Sober, Tasteful Menswear Skirt —March
Why No One Can Knock Off Telfar —March
The Designer Who Predicted the Apocalypse Is Thinking About What Comes Next —March
The Prince of Skinny Jeans Says Goodbye To All That —April
We're Going to Be Talking About This Gucci x Balenciaga Collection For Years —April
-Wes Del Val
WDV: Are you aware of a more impressive collection of books of anyone in fashion than Karl Lagerfeld’s jaw-dropping one famous from photographs? Whose have you stood in front of which moved you?
RT: Many years ago, before we were friends, I Airbnb’d Cat Marnell’s Tribeca loft. I was blown away by her book collection—it was all far-out, out of print stuff, lots of art books, everything John Fairchild ever wrote, and obscure memoirs by rich women about how to be beautiful. I had this totally incorrect notion that coffee table books were just vanity projects, which is probably the most idiotic thing I ever thought. I wrote down everything and read it all; Cat has one of the best minds in magazines.
Speaking of Tribeca lofts, I loved discovering photographs of Willi Smith’s apartment. He had a chaise longue covered in blankets with a small side table (you can see it here), and all his books were stacked on the floor in something of a jumble—not because he was messy but because he was clearly looking through his books all the time. I love the idea of a space in your home—on a pedestal, like Willi’s!—dedicated to reclining and reading, paging through big books of photographs and art. I can’t imagine a better way to get ideas.
I should add that some of the greatest designers are terrible readers. There is genius and then there is the genius required to glance at the world and channel the energy of the moment into clothes.
Ah John Fairchild. When are we getting the biography he deserves?? And I know you’re absolutely correct with your last point about designers and reading. Warhol once again admitted what so many didn’t feel they could: “I never read. I just look at pictures.”
Since you admitted thinking coffee table books were just vanity projects (though I can assure you more than a few definitely are) was probably the most idiotic thing you ever thought, what is next behind that, meaning in terms of books/magazines/reading what today can you not believe you once believed?
What a crazy question!!! I’ll tell you what: I used to make like, scrapbooks and zine-like journals when I was in high school—I have one that’s mostly pictures of politicians playing musical instruments, but I also had photographs from an Anthropologie catalogue, of a profoundly cheesy, pseudo-Parisian Brooklyn townhouse living room. I was critiquing the former, but not the latter. I titled that page, “MY DREAM LIFE.” I guess it’s pretty telling that I was suspicious of politicians but not of Anthropologie—though I wised up fast, as you’ll soon read.
What book would excite you most if you found out it was going to be made into a movie or series and who would you want to direct and star in it?
I guess my answer is The Beautiful Fall, but it would be so bad. I mean, you just can’t shrink people like Saint Laurent and Antonio Lopez into film. Maybe Olivier Assayas could do it, and Kristen Stewart could play Loulou de la Falaise and Ezra Miller could play Saint Laurent? And maybe Harry Styles would play Karl Lagerfeld. I would have loved to have seen Philip Seymour Hoffman play Lagerfeld; probably the only actor who could convincingly say, as he once told Irina Aleksander, “I hate ugly people. Very depressing.” I don’t really understand why people make movies about real events—that’s why Phantom Thread was so sublime!
Still, I wonder if the only way to make a fashion film is to make it sort of bad. I watched that Halston documentary, not the recent one but Ultrasuede—made by the guy on the reality TV show about the south—and it was strangely the most resonant fashion film I’ve seen in a long time, with Andre Leon Talley yelling at the guy because he’d never heard of John Fairchild, and Ralph Rucci screaming for water. All the contemporaneous pieces about how much people hated Altman’s Pret-a-Porter tell you more about the world of fashion than any fictional film ever could. We are a very prickly and vain bunch, you know, and we can’t resist saying an outsider got us all wrong, thus telling on ourselves.
Multiple salient points there. Who are contemporary writers definitely outside of fashion circles who if given the chance you’d immediately commission for long pieces on any aspect of the industry?
Well first, there are sooo many people writing about the semiotics of clothing and the crazy stuff designers are making and I just wish more people would write about shopping. We all shop! We all have to buy things. And it has probably never been less enjoyable or more puzzling than it is now. So it’s such a good way in. I find Sapna Maheshwari’s work so essential, and she is technically a business reporter. And that’s how Cintra Wilson got into fashion—she had never covered it before the Times asked her to write Critical Shopper. Which are the best columns, by the way: Alex Kucyznski’s review of Anthropologie was FORMATIVE for me. Go read it right now, for real. (But don’t forget to come back!)
Someone should ask the great critic Madeleine Schwartz to re-read The Ladies’ Paradise and look at Felix Vallaton’s department store paintings and report on the state of shopping in Paris—now, or post-lockdown. Or get Malcolm Harris to write about the labor fetishization inherent in buying couture. Or ask Kim Kelly to write about fast fashion. Or just send Jo Livingstone to Dover Street Market because doesn’t that sound fun???
There you have it folks, they’re here for the taking...
What are formative magazine pieces for you which you’re sure you’ll never forget?
The thing about fashion writing is that it’s just unparalleled when an insider is holding the pen. It too often goes wrong, but when it’s good, it is, in the words of Cole Porter, an Old Dutch Master/Mrs. Astor/Pepsodent.
I like to see someone trying to solve a problem, and going door to door—doors both exclusive and unexpected—to figure it out. You know: Cathy Horyn pausing in her 2012 piece on the future of Barneys to weigh the ideas her sources have offered; or her 2007 story about dealmaking, where she’s going from lunch meeting to lunch meeting asking various power players about the state of designer appointments. I love how Ingrid Sischy became this vessel of interpretation for her subjects, whether they were close friends like Miuccia Prada or industry outcasts like John Galliano struggling with addiction amidst his fall from grace at Dior—I think that piece is one of the great stories on creativity, addiction, and forgiveness. I love when someone can point to someone and unpack their whole world with blazing insight and enthusiasm: Judith Thurman on Yves Saint Laurent as pseudo-Proust; or Hilton Als on Andre Leon Talley as “the only one”; or Rhonda Leiberman in Artforum on her tortured relationship with Chanel, or art buying as socially acceptable shopping; or Amy Spindler writing about Gianni Versace, in her obituary, remembrance (“by his couture collection on July 6, he was looking at the shoulder pad as Andy Warhol looked at a soup can, with a true Pop Art sensibility: taking the banal and glorifying it”--WOW!), and magazine piece that characterized him as Gatsby. I also think Dana Thomas’s Gods and Kings, her book about McQueen and Galliano, changed my life and the way I think about creativity. And Diana Vreeland’s Allure taught me how to look at photographs.
What a fantastic list. No excuses with those links provided dear readers.
Which books have covers you like so much you could frame them?
I hate book covers. Very depressing.
Fine, but uh-uh, you’re not getting off that easy. You’ve got opinions, don’t hold back now, especially on something like this for an interview like this!
I think the Gallimard house design is the most genius book cover design ever: crisp white with just the pertinent information. Obviously I don’t dislike images because I literally stare at stuff for a living; I just hate marketing. It is the great fear and enemy of my life! Gallimard books look almost prescriptive, like you’re reading your vegetables, and I think that’s really elegant.
But those aren’t really frameable. My favorite novelist after Edith Wharton is Evelyn Waugh and he has had some pretty spectacular covers—particularly the semi-German Expressionist-meets-Gerald Murphy cover of Vile Bodies. (The American first-edition cover sort of reminds me of the cover of the Byrds’s Sweetheart of the Rodeo; that’s neither here nor there, just something I thought everyone might enjoy.) And the first-edition of Brideshead is like, where the twain—of artistic covers and Gallimard simplicity—meet, spelling out the full title within a florid Romantic garland, like the intertitles in a silent movie. (I just rewatched Room With a View—my favorite film about hair in the Molly Young style—and it has similar titles! Although, of course, it is a talkie.)
Book covers are so bad now. I don’t mean to sound like an idiot, but I really don’t understand why everything looks the same? It is so easy to be creative! I would never pick up a book because its cover looked like the cover of another book I read. It’s the same with the Spotify algorithm; they simply don’t understand what I’m after at all.
If a definitive oral history about any scene from any era were to come out tomorrow, what would it be which would make you drop everything else (including streaming shows or movies!) to read it?
The past decade has been really bizarre. Someone get on that!
Speaking of, whose writing today makes you pause whatever you’re watching at night if you see on your phone that something by them was just posted online?
One thing no one talks about is that there are so many fashion websites right now. We hear so much about sports sites, which are cool and all, but we’ve got Fashionista, and The Cut, WWD, NYT, BoF, Vogue, The Goods….T Magazine, Dazed, i-D, System, 032c, SSENSE, HighSnob’s magazine is a treat….and what we are doing at GQ is so awesome, both online and in the book. (It’s such a thrill to work somewhere where you believe in the work. It’s exciting!) All these places with incredible writers at all different places in their careers. I keep a fainting couch in my living room for whenever I think about how sad I am that Ingrid Sischy and Amy Spindler are gone, but I feel so lucky to have so many peers and elders writing about the subject I’m most passionate about.
Outside of fashion, I love David Rimanelli’s writing. I love Sam McKinniss’s writing (and his art, here’s the proof—WDV); if he typed up the back of a cereal box I’d inhale it. I really love Doreen St. Felix’s writing. Doreen just knocks my socks off. Jeez. She crafts her pieces. A.S. Hamrah is the same way; so is Jasmine Sanders, and so is Richard Brody. And Alex Vadukul. (What a dinner party!) I love Michael H. Miller’s writing, and Molly Fisher’s. Both of them really write like adults, you know what I mean?Just clear and sophisticated.
I’m a choppy, quick writer. I report, I ask around, I observe, I go to stores and call up designers and stylists and stuff, and then I churn it out. And I like that. But of course, it makes me wildly wowed by people who are masters of the opposite.
What year would you say you bought the most books and magazines and what did you buy?
Probably this year. I really got on a roll of keeping a big stack of stuff next to bed and not being super discriminating about it. Now I finish everything—including garbage. Sometimes I’ll buy a bunch of unauthorized biographies and read them all. (I can tell you “everything” about Mick Jagger and Tom Cruise’s high school girlfriends.) Maybe a few years ago I really wanted to read what everyone else was reading—I did the circuit, you know, of Eve Babitz to Elizabeth Hardwick to Caroline Blackwood. Now I couldn’t be less interested in that. Gianni Versace put out incredible books, for example. The latest I hunted down were Men Without Ties (exactly what it sounds like) and The Art of Being You (art that inspired him, with no text!). He was meticulous about being ridiculous. I re-bought all of the John Ruskin and William Morris I read in college, because I, too, hate the modern world and am interested in the possibilities of beauty through socialism. And I love wallpaper!
I started buying a lot of old magazines this year—a lot of old Vogues from the 90s and early 2000s. Kate Betts is soooo cooool; she had this idea, back in 1994, to send a reporter to Chanel and Supreme. She used to do the front trend pages, and they were truly reported. I’m on the record as hating trend reporting because I think it’s meaningless but hers actually told you what was going on.
Let’s talk quality garbage reading. What is in that category for you which you feel you could gladly revisit someday?
I keep a list in my bedside table drawer of what I’ve read since last March and there are like 80-ish books on there, so some of them have been less challenging than others. I had the time of my life re-reading The Devil Wears Prada. So much cooler than the film—the Anne Hathaway character smokes!!! I adore the Gossip Girl books—I used to go to Barnes & Noble in high school and sit on the floor reading them, before the Janet Malcolm piece! Of course none of these things are garbage. My eyes roll out of my head at our cultural compulsion to insist that all lowbrow is in fact highbrow which merely reduces everything to middlebrow. But it’s very clear that Cecily Von Zeigesar was reading Edith Wharton and that informed her books. Maybe the word is not “garbage” but commercial, in the broadest sense of the term.
One thing I return to again and again are books by women writing about how to be them. Amanda Brooks wrote two that are standouts, as is Helen Gurley Brown’s Having It All and the diet book Susan Orleans wrote under a pseudonym in 1999. It’s called The Skinny. Also good are the socialite cookbooks, like Nan Kempner’s RSVP, which features Lynn Wyatt’s Tex-Mex fajita recipe and Ross Bleckner’s panna cotta; and Betsy Bloomingdale’s Entertaining With, which features long treatises on table manners and the menu from Swifty Lazar’s last Oscar party.
Think of the shows you thought were the strongest from the last two seasons. Which books would be fabulous accessories to carry while wearing what you saw and liked?
Jonathan Anderson is on some kind of explosive artistic journey that has brought me tremendous joy and intellectual bounty this year, and almost every collection has come with reading material. He made a Joe Brainard book for the men’s show in January, and I have sat down and leafed through it several times.
I remember...sorry, that was too easy, but it was right there. And yes, Jonathan is phenomenal.
What books should publishers ask you to write introductions for right away? Doesn’t matter if they’re in or out-of-print.
One of my favorite writers is Florence King—someone we might, in contemporary parlance, call “a right-wing nut job” but who called herself “a conservative lesbian feminist.” She wrote wildly mean columns for The National Review and was one of the first people to write sardonically about WASP culture—like, pre-Preppy Handbook! I think her books WASP, Where Is Thy Sting? and Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady are missing pieces in our conversations about ’70s feminism, conservatism, and poverty.
Ooh, great answer!
Who has written most compellingly about the past decade of the parts of fashion which interest you?
I love great talkers. When Ingrid Sischy interviewed Miuccia Prada on Charlie Rose? That was heaven! Mrs. Prada is one of the all-time talkers. She really wants to know what you think and why. When I interviewed her a few years ago, she kept pushing back on me—“Do you really think so?” Her curiosity makes you feel really alive. I so badly wish Ingrid and Amy Spindler were still here. They both had the best points of view: Ingrid was so enthusiastic, but never full of it, never trying to sell you something. When you read Amy’s pieces, you get the sense she was really on the side of designers and disliked business, or was suspicious of power. One of her obituaries said she loved catching a fashion executive in a lie—now the whole idea is to keep the lie afloat!
I have people I text with daily and Zoom a few times a month to just talk about fashion, just theorize, just share stuff, gossip. I text and DM people all the time and say, “What are you hearing about [x]? What did you think of this show?” The thing you have to understand about fashion shows is that everything happens off the runway—in the cars or walks between shows, backstage, before the show when you sit down and you start talking to someone next to you, a model bums a cigarette. Sitting in the second row and realizing the CEO is sitting in front of you. You’re either going to tap him on the shoulder and introduce yourself, or eavesdrop. A lot of the last year has been spent trying to replicate that.
I think Robin Givhan just gets it. I don’t really get how she does it because it’s so accessible and lands with a THUD but she’s never laboring over the page. Robin and Cathy Horyn both have this attitude I love, which is: “why isn’t this better?” I’ve read interviews where Cathy has said it’s the midwesterner in her, and I know Robin is from Michigan…. Maybe that’s it! (I sure hope it is, because I lived in Ohio for several years!)
I really like Aria Hughes, who writes for Complex, and Steff Yotka, who’s an editor at Vogue. They’re young, both around my age, so the past decade is what we grew up with, or matured with. And you have to look at that without feeling like everything you’re seeing is the greatest thing you’ve ever seen, because you didn’t really live through the stuff that came before. And you have to know what’s special and what’s good.
So much good stuff here Rachel, especially all you said about what the last year has been like for you and fashion and the business of writing about it.
When are we getting the biography Ingrid deserves?? I was happy with her collected essays a few years ago, but we need a bio! I want a big one about Miuccia as well, she has to be one of fashion’s most dynamic thinkers, but it’s too soon as, fingers crossed, she still has plenty more magic in her. As for Amy, there can’t be anyone finer than you to write about her, so…
The 90s were so cool! It’s fascinating that Mrs. Prada and Tom Ford were hitting their prime right at the same time: the mind and the body. Real Cartesian dualism, and Amy wrote about it all!!!
I’ve always wished book publishers would add the editor’s name to the copyright page like they routinely do the designer’s. Is there anything you’d like to see publishers start adding?
More authors should write dedications like Eve Babitz!
You abound with suggestions for people to launch off from. Thanks Rachel!
Rachel Tashjian
]]>Shortly after (so, earlier this year), an IG account I really like called RareBooksParis posted that they were collaborating with a magazine called BILL. I had never heard of BILL so was immediately intrigued for that reason, but doubly so when the picture they teased was of a page of a grid of unfamiliar images with no text. Of course with the ease of social media I quickly found BILL on IG and online, started digging, and found it's the creation of Julie and that's exactly what the magazine is all about: compellingly-edited pages just of images. This collaborative issue is number three and I've actually not seen it yet—distribution of it is taking forever to arrive in the states—but from the spreads I've seen on IG and online, the trust I have in Julie's vision, knowing the taste of RareBooksParis, and the fact that the fabulous Roma is publishing it, I have zero doubts that it'll be as special as I'm anticipating.
How'd it get the name BILL? It's a cute story and here's Julie telling it:
"I was initially thinking to call it Pelican (or Pelikaan, in Dutch), based on a bar in Antwerp that had a great neon sign of the word "pelican." It was pretty random and every time someone would ask me about my magazine I was slightly embarrassed to reveal the name. In the meantime I had already created the logo which is an abstraction of a pelican’s beak. A few months after, I was visiting a friend in upstate NY and staying in a room that had a huge library on bird-watching books. I started to go through them and kept on reading the word “bill,” which I then realised was another word for a bird’s beak. The word “bill" has so many different meanings and connotations which I thought would be great for a magazine without any text in it. When people encounter the word "bill" it generates an array of visual images, ranging from a person, a pet, a money bill, an invoice, a playbill, and of course the bird one. I like that it’s a word that keeps people guessing/visualizing."
I hope you get a copy—it's a bill you'll be happy to pay! -Wes Del Val
WDV: When do you care about book design and when not when deciding what to bring into your home?
JP: Inevitably it always comes into play when I’m bringing books into my house. I consciously and subconsciously take design into consideration in every object that enters my home, from a book to a spoon.
But there must be a lot of books you have, such as novels and poetry, where you wish you liked the design more but you have to own it nonetheless because you care most about the content, no? I know that is the case for me. Let me also ask when is the last time you did really like the content but did not end up buying a book because the design was just too poor?
Ultimately what I would consider a poor design usually has to do with an “over designed” book. I gravitate towards simple and timeless publications, rather than ones that have a super defined graphic esthetic. When the experience of a book is defined by too many design decisions it becomes so self reflective as an object, which in most cases takes away the attention from the content.
My friend Jason Dodge has a beautiful and very simple poetry publication series called Fivehundred places. On the cover of each book is a dead scissor by Paul Elliman. The books are unique in their simplicity and size, they can fit in any coat pocket and are great to pass on to friends to share poetry.
Most of the books that I buy are secondhand, I’m actually a lot more critical of printed matter that is made today. If I buy a new book, it’s often a facsimile of an existing publication or one that seems to put the content first, rather than the design. Books that I often pass on, but actually would like to own in terms of content are exhibition catalogues. After seeing a great exhibition I usually drift to the museum bookstore in the hopes of finding an amazing catalogue that augments my experience and gives me the opportunity to bring some of the material home. But 90% of the time I won’t buy it because of it’s all-encompassing nature which is also reflecting in the design. Often the tendency is to make the catalogue as accessible as possible for a wide audience. This results in an object that is not radical enough as a book, but rather tries to be a version of the exhibition in book format, lacking an identity of its own. It either takes a very smart and critical graphic designer (Julia Born, Scott Ponik, Mevis & Van Deursen to name a few) or an artist that takes over most of the designing of the book themselves (Mathias Poledna, Lutz Bacher, Christopher Williams...) to make the book an experience that goes beyond the idea of “cataloging” an exhibition. On the contrary, I appreciate that the Walther König bookshops that are part of many European art institutions and museums are always putting a focus on the artists that are in the current exhibition(s), by presenting all the books that are still in print (or even out of print) by the respective artist(s), and so I usually end of buying artist’s monographs instead. I remember the amazing selection of Darboven books at the Walther König store at Haus Der Kunst in Munich when her exhibition was on view.
A big yes to Walther König’s dedicated buying philosophy of pulling backlist titles! That’s one of the reasons they’re easily amongst the best in the world.
What do you read to refresh after a long day mired in design minutiae?
Most often I will be listening to radio instead of reading as I spend a lot of my day reading while designing.
I also read a lot of visual books, so reading images rather than text, which is the basis of my magazine BILL.
Two points of interest: Can you explain how and what you read as you design? I’m intrigued as about the last thing every designer I’ve worked with gets to do is focus on words while they’re designing. And how do you specifically read visual books?
I usually read all the texts that I will put in the layout of a project beforehand to understand what I’m working with, but often read them again once they are implemented to check how the text is flowing into the design. Aside from that I’m constantly researching certain topics or artists during the day, which feeds into my practice as a designer and teacher.
Reading images in books means engaging with an image in a printed form. So much of how we engage with images these days is screen-based, so I actively try to read images on pages. What comes into play here is also a lot related to how the image appears on the page: its size, the way it’s printed, the paper, the physical experience of the book it’s presented in, and of course its relation to other images in the same book. I’m extremely fascinated by all of these aspects and have been since I started studying graphic design. Making a magazine that doesn’t have any guiding text in it has been the way for me to research this further and put my thoughts around the reading of images into a concrete (and ongoing) project.
What elements of a book do you look at first to see if you’re impressed with the design?
The physical aspects of a book are very important to me, the size, paper, weight, how it holds in your hands, how the pages flip, how it lays flat. Secondly I look at typography and the interplay of text and image, how those two types of content are interwoven and played out throughout the book. A cover obviously also is an element of design that comes into play but I would never judge a book solely by its cover!
So essentially the entire thing. Perhaps more revealing to ask you what parts do you care least about?
Ha. A dust jacket? I very often take them off which results in finding randomly displaced dust jackets in my library.
Often? Can I ask why?
I care about all the aspects of a book, it’s hard to deconstruct it, without losing the connection to the experience as a whole. I will take off a dust jacket when it feels too forced and the book is easier to handle without it. So mostly I think it has to do with the physicality of it, rather than the design. By removing it, it starts to lead a life on its own, which in some cases will surprise me, and I rediscover a book by finding its lost jacket.
Thinking of adding a protective layer to books, in the case of James Lee Byars’ 1/2 an Autobiography, the book is wrapped in pink tissue paper which you have to open (rip) to be able to read the book. Karel Martens also wraps his Printed Matter books in a similar thin paper with silkscreened pink text on it. I think these are interesting examples in which the idea of protecting a book by wrapping it is more literal and utilitarian and plays with the design. In these two examples it’s an interesting dilemma whether or not to keep the wrapping. (I did...)
Who are publishers with content you really like but the design is generally pretty weak?
Publishers with a lot of capital and access to amazing content like Taschen, Phaidon, Rizzoli... often make books that from a design perspective lack a soul. I was recently at a stock sale at the Taschen shop in Brussels and found myself really confused. The prices were extremely low (the shop was moving and selling everything -75%), the books are mostly enormous formats, pompous coffee table books in several volumes, and although a few titles really appealed to me (I doubted for a while about Kubrick’s archives) I felt a bit grossed out by the situation so I walked out empty-handed and relieved.
I don’t disagree, especially regarding the general lack of soul. Since you brought them up, a particular design peeve I have about Taschen is anytime they place English, German, and French texts all in the same book. I get why they do it cost-wise, but god it’s unappealing. I consistently bag on those three (and a few others), but the fact is that I do have some very good books by all three that they’ve produced over the decades and I’d be surprised if you didn’t as well. Is that in fact the case?
I definitely agree on the language issue (also very often the case in exhibition catalogues). I’m glad you asked me more specifically about these publishers because I noticed that maybe my criticism is more specifically directed to Taschen, not so much Phaidon or Rizzoli, I just find that their current books are quite commercial and all look the same. From Phaidon I enjoy their artist monograph series, like Maurizio Cattelan’s version which he scaled down to a tiny format, or the Fischli and Weiss one. I love many Rizzoli books from the 80’s and 90’s focusing on fashion, design, architecture, and I have many of them which I cherish a lot: several Sottsass books, Memphis Milano, Gae Aulenti etc.
Now, who most effectively and consistently marries content and design?
I like books that have proven their worth, in a sense that the design stays relevant over time. I strive to design printed matter in a way that doesn’t employ strategies or design elements that refer to a certain time or era but ideally want my work to be timeless. For that reason I would say Primary Information because I find it incredibly important that books that were made decades ago and are completely impossible to find get redistributed in the world, in their original form. I’m really in awe of how they achieve to make their books look almost identical to the originals, while there have been so many shifts in production methods for making books in the last 50 years.
Oh we know PI here at OGR! ;)
The topic of book production doesn’t often come up in this series so can you tell us about your current thoughts on any aspect of it? Are you nostalgic for any parts, has it never been a better time to be making print productions, where is it lacking or struggling, etc?
I very much believe that a lot of the design of a book has to do with the way it’s been printed and bound. I spend a lot of time thinking about this when I make BILL. It’s definitely quite unusual to combine around 15 different paper stocks in one magazine. I’ve been working with one particular printer for the last few years and I don’t see myself changing that very soon. They are based in Munsterschwarzach, a tiny town in Bavaria, Germany. The business is connected to a monastery, which has a guest house, a bakery, a butcher and a printer. The whole operation and work flow is so small that I’m often still able to make adjustments on press (I try to go there when I can), not only in color and density of printing (which is pretty standard when doing a press check), but also in the paper or ink choices. They are willing to think along with me and experiment, which is so much of what BILL is about. This personal relationship with a printer has definitely helped my practice enormously, I’ve been more than ever very inspired by the process of offset printing. As mentioned, there have been a lot of changes in the printing business and so much work is being outsourced to China for example. My opinion is to be able to really work with the production of a book as a designer and to use it as part of your design concept the closer you can be involved in the process of making the book, the better. If you think about it, it’s very strange to just send off a pdf file and get a book back after a few weeks without even being involved in any of the steps. Paper is another aspect of book design that I research a lot on, and it’s definitely been challenging in the last few years with a lot of paper companies merging or going bankrupt. I love cheap, thin, unassuming papers, and I’m usually looking for existing paper stocks that will probably disappear in the future. A wood containing coated paper is one of my favorites (nowadays coated paper is made without wood, which makes it last longer, but feels a lot more artificial) but there are only three or four stocks left in Europe that are produced like that...
Could the situation in Munsterschwarzach sound any more idyllic...
Are you currently the reader you want to be?
Great question! I never thought about this. I feel that the older I get and the more I use books in my teaching, I’m starting to use my own reference library in a very active way. When I think of one book, it always links to a few others. I create narratives between books and constantly am surrounded by stacks, piles and small book constellations, both in my home and my studio. It’s a tool in my work but also a constant form of research. So I’m not sure if I am where I want to be yet, I obviously always want to know more!
What are key moments in your life when you’ve been completely amazed and revitalized by book design you came across?
Getting introduced to the books of Hans-Peter Feldmann (early ones, examples here: http://artistsbooks.info/AB_Feldmann%20Hans-Peter.html) made a huge impact on me when I was studying graphic design in my early twenties. Later I discovered the magazine Ohio (only using found photography) which he co-edited and it has inspired me ever since, BILL is definitely heavily influenced by it.
I was shocked when I discovered Isa Genzken’s book I Love New York, Crazy City. I think it’s one of the best designed books ever made, all coming from her hand. In this case the pompous format is required and absolutely part of the experience!
Hans Hollein’s MAN transFORMS, the catalogue for his exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt Museum is a book I can’t live without. There is also a second volume which reflects on the exhibition afterwards which is a very important reference to me that I keep coming back to.
Yes, I see Hans-Peter’s influence on BILL. What and/or who else has their touch upon it as well?
– Re-Magazine (edited by Jop van Bennekom)
– Here and There magazine (edited by Nakako Hayashi)
– File magazine (edited by General Idea (A.A. Bronson, Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal))
– Early issues of Purple magazine (Elein Fleiss and Olivier Zahm)
– Ryuko Tsushin magazine (when designed by Kazunari Hattori)
– Nest magazine (edited by Joseph Holtzman)
– Le point d’ironie (edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist)
– Seasonal Comme des Garçons publications
– Terrazzo magazine (edited and designed by Ettore Sottsass)
And more specifically from Hans-Peter Feldmann:
– Ohio magazine (edited by Uschi Huber and Jörg Paul Janka, until 1998 together with Stefan Schneider and Hans-Peter Feldmann)
– Cahier d’Images (Hans-Peter Feldmann & Celine Duval)
What famous books do you wish you could redesign?
Redesigning would imply I want to change the design of the book, I was thinking rather that I would like to work on certain books just to be able to handle and distribute the content. Books with a lot of images such as Gerhard Richter’s Atlas, Learning from Las Vegas (the oversized original) or Let’s Take Back Our Space by Marianne Wex are books that come to mind.
How do you define the word “book”? Am I reading a “book” if it’s a pdf of exactly what is in the physical version?
I definitely very rarely read pdfs of books, I always prefer a physical experience with a book over a digital one. I would call a book a book when it’s a bound volume of pages.
So for you a book has to be physical to qualify? I certainly feel that an ebook is a book, and it doesn’t bother me including a finished pdf in that category as well. I’m just always interested in how people who work with these things define them.
I’m not sure if I have such a set view on whether a pdf should be called a book or not… I notice with my students that there is a tendency to want to create a physical experience, so they often will layout, print and bind the research texts they are gathering rather than keeping them in a digital format. I think maybe especially during this time when we’re indoors, it’s comforting to surround oneself with books at home. For me personally when I’m working as a designer I’m constantly using books from my library. They help me shape ideas which I try to incorporate in the design projects I’m working on. I’m not sure if pdfs would be able to keep me engaged in such a way. That said I’ve never worked on an ebook before so maybe this is an experience that could change my view!
Which book designers from any period, including the present, deserve monographs of their work?
I’m usually more interested in book design done by artists rather than designers. So I would love a monograph on the book design of Richard Hamilton, Alighiero Boetti, Hanne Darboven, and Jef Geys, just to name a few.
Your five favorite book cover designs are...
I find it incredibly hard to make a top five but these are some covers I like a lot, but not by any means a top five...
— Claes Oldenburg: Skulpturer och teckningar 17 Sept.- 30 Okt.1966 (Moderna Museet)
— New Order Untitled (New Order’s US “tour book” by Peter Saville)
— Clear Sky (Bruce Nauman)
— Collected Words (Richard Hamilton)
— Italy, The New Domestic Landscape, Achievements and Problems of Italian Design (MoMA original edition)
I think the graphic design of that last one is fabulous as well. Wish I could say the same about its physical design as mine is so brittle from age and exposure that it might actually be my least favorite to hold. But I don’t remove my jackets and am afraid if I took this one off it would crack to pieces. Knowing the cheeky sensibilities of the Italians featured in the book that may very well have been the point...Thanks Julie!
Julie Peeters
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Punctuation be damned, let them all bleed into each other. That's poetry to me. They're all titles or descriptions of pieces Lili Anolik has written over the past decade for the likes of the New York Observer (god I still miss that paper in its heyday), The Believer, Vanity Fair (mostly Graydon's, for obvious reasons if you know VF then versus now), Esquire, and Air Mail (Graydon again). Lili is so good at and comfortable where the seamy meets the mainstream in popular American culture—especially if it happened in LA from 1970-2000—that I'm thrilled whenever she mines any topic from those decades. A podcast she made last year, called Once Upon Time...in the Valley, was all about Tracy Lords' years in the porn industry. No surprise to anyone who knows Lili’s interests.
You saw Eve Babitz's name twice above because Lili put so much time into tracking Eve down that multiple national stories were justified and it all led to Lili's first book, a "biography" about Eve. I'm giving Lili the primary credit for Eve's revival the past five years (but not discounting what you've done, NYRB, with your re-issues of her books). Lili's next book is included in the first paragraph as well. She's deep into it so I'm very pleased I was able to get what I could here. Read on to see which one it is, I assure you it'll interest many great readers. -Wes Del Val
WDV: Do you have any examples of books you really liked before they became too popular?
LA: Well, I loved Eve Babitz’s books before she became such a thing. My favorite book of hers is Slow Days Fast Company. My second favorite, Hollywood’s Eve. There’s a young guy writer named Jarett Kobek—Turkish-American, I think. Lives in California. He wrote a book called I Hate the Internet. Self-published. It got attention, but not enough. And the book of his I really love, The Future Won’t Be Long, seemed to sink without much of a trace. It’s absolutely brilliant, though, and completely off the wall.
I’m with you on both, though as you point out Kobek isn’t exactly too popular. As for Eve, I applaud all that NYRB has done with her books the past few years, but frankly she’s one I’d rather read about then read—hence why I was so pleased when I saw your Vanity Fair piece on her turned into a proper biography!
I don’t know if I’d call Hollywood’s Eve a proper biography. Though maybe with a subject like Eve, improper is the way to go.
Well “proper” or not—you’re right about improper + Eve—it certainly satiated what I was curious to know about her.
Which two living writers talking for two hours would you happily pay to watch online?
Mary Gaitskill and the Marquis de Sade. That’s a bit of a disingenuous answer because I’m more interested in Mary than the Marquis. So I’d probably watch her with both eyes; him out of the corner of one eye—you know, just to make sure he wasn’t getting up to anything too, too weird.
I thought you were saying disingenuous because only one of them is living. Once again with you on the Marquis, but Mary talking to another breathing writer?
Disingenuous because the Marquis isn’t a particular fixation of mine. He’d be there strictly for Mary. I’d like to watch her bounce off him, react to him. But I can tell, Wes, that you're the anal type and are going to insist that I stay within the bounds of the question. You said "two living writers," which disqualifies the Marquis. So I'll swap him out with the cultural critic James Wolcott. I happen to know, Mary and Jim went on a date in the 80s. I'd want to eavesdrop on them reliving it. What did they do? Dinner and a movie or just dinner? Who paid? I'm dying to know.
I’m right with you...and because they’re both alive ;) it could happen!
What do you wish you could read again for the first time because it left you so moved upon finishing it?
I can’t really answer this question because I’m more of a re-reader than a reader. I mean, if I really flip for a book, I read it a bunch of times. But the first grown-up books that moved me are Straight Life by Art and Laurie Pepper, which I read at 9; and Great Expectations—by Dickens, obviously—which I read at 12. I still love both. Two books that I read in my 20s—that is, as a grown-up—that I’ve read over and over: Kafka Was the Rage, an unfinished memoir by Anatole Broyard, and Tapping the Source, a surfer noir by Kem Nunn (I named my older boy after the lead character in Tapping). And I’m always dipping in and out of David Thomson’s The Biographical Dictionary of Film. So, in a way, I’m never not reading that book.
Good lord, Straight Life at nine years old? No wonder you went on to tackle the subjects you have. How did you find this book and how many times have you read it? What does it mean to you now compared to when you were a (precocious) child? I’d love to know all you want to share about this as it’s such an unforgettable autobiography.
My father is a bebop fiend. He was reading Straight Life, and I thumbed through it in a bored moment and my eyes popped out of my skull. It’s one of those books that tells you everything you want to know—about sex, about drugs, about crime, about sweating it out in San Quentin. There’s also a photo in it of Art at 12. He was a dreamboat and an older man to my 4th grade self. I was hooked! I read it every single night for a solid year. As soon as I came to the end, I flipped right back to the beginning.
I stumbled on it again in my mid-20s. That’s when I realized it was a flat-out great book, and maybe as good as Dostoevysky.
Since you brought up Thomson’s Dictionary, I have to share this, I loved it when I first saw it, and still do:
When the magazine Sight and Sound organised a poll of the greatest books about film, Geoff Dyer chose all five editions of the book known in its latest — sixth — edition as The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. Here’s what he said, it’s all so very him:
“I would restrict my choice to the various editions of David Thomson’s A Biographical Dictionary of Film. I’m sure some future scholar will produce an admirable thesis comparing the changes in—and evolution of—what has come to be, along with everything else, a vicarious and incremental autobiography. In that context, even Thomson’s diminishing interest in cinema—or current cinema at any rate—becomes a source of fascination. The Dictionary is not only an indispensable book about cinema, but one of the most absurdly ambitious literary achievements of our time. It deserves a shelf to itself.”
David created a form with that book. It’s absolutely sui generis. I own at least four of the editions, but I can’t distinguish between them. Meaning, I know he adds new people and new movies each time, but I can’t tell who or what or where. All I know is that I buy the new edition and it’s more of what I like.
I’m a Geoff Dyer fan, too, by the way. His book on not writing a book on D.H. Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage, is pure heaven.
I’d for sure be happy to read Out of Sheer Rage again for the first time.
You wouldn’t have become a writer if you hadn’t read who and/or what?
I started reading the movie writer Pauline Kael at 14. (My dad bought me her last collection, Movie Love, for Christmas my freshman year of high school.) She’d already retired by then, but I hunted down her earlier collections at various libraries. The only time I’ve ever stolen anything was a copy of Taking It All In from the library at Milton Academy. Pauline will always be the gold standard for me. She writes with such energy and intelligence and flash—with such libido, too.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you which writers and books you’re disappointed you didn’t read while in your teens?
In a weird way, I wish I’d read less in my teens. I was a compulsive reader then, but an immature one. Any book I read in middle school or high school, I have to re-read now because I don’t trust my teenage taste or reactions.
I like that. I feel that way for some reason about what I read right after college.
What’s a book series that should exist and for which you’d be the perfect editor?
I’ve never edited anything except, occasionally, work for friends who happen to be writers. I don’t have an editor’s mindset. Or skillset.
Ok, then to consult on? The point is there must be something thematic which would make you very happy were it available.
You think I’m being an intentional pain-in-the-ass here, Wes, but I’m being unintentional. Really, my brain doesn’t work like that. I’ve never edited except in the most informal, slapdash way, so I don’t look at books with an editor’s eye.
Boo! Ok, next.
With which writers do you wish you could have been college roommates?
I’d have loved it if Pauline Kael and Joan Didion were roommates, with me in the single next door so I could put a glass cup to the wall and eavesdrop. Who would’ve taken the top bunk, though? That’s the real question.
What are favorite magazine pieces you’ve ever read which would make for fantastic movies or series if adapted today?
Janet Malcolm’s book-length piece for the New Yorker on Sylvia Plath called “The Silent Woman.” It’s journalism as blood sport. Malcolm is the main character in it and I wonder which living actress has the chill perversity to play her. Ruth Gordon would be perfect except for the living part. Judy Davis maybe?
Which people are you disappointed didn’t write their memoirs before leaving us?
Tuesday Weld. She’s still alive, but she’s disappeared from public life for so long I sometimes forget. She’s one of my favorite actresses, though, and she was a teen sex kitten in the 50s; dated Elvis; turned down Lolita in Lolita and Bonnie in Bonnie and Clyde; and she’s so good in Pretty Poison and Once Upon a Time in America it’s crazy. She once did an interview with Dick Cavett that you can see on YouTube and it’s just out of sight. Yeah, I’d like to hear more of what she has to say.
I would, too! Seems perfect for you to tackle à la Eve Babitz...
My intuition is that Tuesday would be more responsive to a male writer than a female. I could be wrong, but that’s my guess.
You get 30 minutes and two empty Ikea bags to take the books you want from any bookstore. Which store and what are you walking (more like hobbling due to the size and weight of the bags) out with?
Book Soup on Sunset Boulevard. Because they have great taste there. It’s where I first read Denis Johnson (I’d avoided him for years because I thought he spelled his first name in such a dumb way) and Elmore Leonard (because I thought he and James Ellory were the same guy, and James Ellroy is a problem for me)—two of my all-time favorite writers. They also sell great non-book products. When I was trying to woo Eve, I bought her a Kim Novak postcard that I plucked off a spinner by the cash register.
Oh I love that about Denis (it’s always the first thing I’ve thought of as well when I see his name in print—like I just did again, right now) as well as your Elmore/Ellroy mix-up. Makes me think of a moment where I burst out laughing during Jesse Pearson’s excellent Apology magazine podcast when he confessed in an episode that one of the main reasons he could never get into Updike is because Updike was just too weird-looking for him. I knew exactly what he meant. I adore those kinds of often irrational admissions, yours and Jesse’s, especially concerning anything cultural.
What’s impressing you the most these days about anything to do with publishing? Traditional, self, digital, book, magazine, doesn’t matter.
I do not have a PRAYER of answering this question. I’m too checked out.
Boo! Boo! Ok, next.
What years produced the sexiest books/authors combo?
Well, I’m working on something now about Bennington College Class of 1986 (class of Easton Ellis, Donna Tartt and Jonathan Lethem), so I’m going to name the mid-80s/early 90s as the sexiest period. Though the 1920s also rates high on the sex appeal scale. I mean, everybody loves The Great Gatsby and I’m no exception. Never does that novel seem un-au courant. It’s endlessly fresh. And Fitzgerald’s life matches the scope of his work. You feel like if you can figure him out, figure his book out, you can figure out what it means to be an American.
Fitzgerald has never done much for me...I hate his awful 20s hairstyle with the middle part, I always just see Oldman in Coppola’s Dracula... Thanks Lili!
Lili Anolik
]]>A: All three have benefited enormously from the hard work of Paul Gorman, who has written comprehensive books on all three (and many more besides).
We love Paul's work, which covers that glamorous and entertainingly seedy intersection where rock, fashion, and commerce meet, and we can't help but recognize him as our kind of person when he says "Second-hand books have been my life-blood since my early teens". Amen to that, Paul (plus, we didn't think anyone but us read The Oldie. Bravo to that.) Interviewer Wes Del Val brings us possibly our longest One Great Reader to date, & it's pure fun the whole way. Click to read more...
]]>I know no one blogs anymore—yes of course they do, they just now call them newsletters—but Paul has been doing so regularly since 2011 and there's a wealth of his writing on paulgormanis.com. As he tells you on the homepage, Paul Gorman is about all of this: art, books, conversation, cults, dancing, design, encounters, environments, events, film, galleries, groups, individuals, invitations, magazines, music, opinions, performance, photography, places, press, privacy, spaces, style, thoughts + views. You're about to get a fine taste of most of these right now as from the very first question on Paul took them and covered a lot of ground! See, intense attention... -Wes Del Val
WDV: Who got the majority of your pounds spent on reading anything last year? Physical, digital, newspaper, book/magazine publisher, one writer, etc, doesn't matter.
PG: When lockdown isn’t in force, a couple who live in one of the houses in our square set up a book stall against their railings at 7am every Saturday. There is a wide range—fiction, non-fiction, children’s, art, design, cookery, etc—priced 50p or £1, and an honesty box with a place to leave books for resale there.
When I walk our dog first thing at the weekend I make sure I have some change and always return with something interesting: The Bizarre Affair, a large-size illustrated book of Clarice Cliff’s work; a first edition of Alan Moore’s Watchmen; the Architectural Digest’s International Interiors; Paris & The Surrealists with photographs by Michael Woods and text by one of my favourite writers, the late George Melly.
Second-hand books have been my life-blood since my early teens in north London in the early 1970s. For years I haunted jumble sales (flea markets where the takings go to a cause, a local church fund or charity) for clothes, radiograms and gewgaws for my room and books, gathering together hauls which I have in my library to this day—a run of 15 or so of Richmal Crompton’s William Brown stories in the 50s George Newnes editions complete with illustrated dust covers, a tray of 30 orange spine Penguins for £1 including authors whose work I have investigated ever since: Evelyn Waugh, PG Wodehouse, Kingsley Amis, Edna O’Brien, Daphne du Maurier, Graham Greene, John Updike, Saul Bellow and Anthony Burgess.
One time I came across an illustrated first edition of James Stephens’ magical comic novel The Crock of Gold; this resonated with me since I had been visiting Ireland with my family every summer since the age of five and was over-identifying with our Irish roots. The Crock of Gold led me to seek out such writers as Flann O’Brien and James Joyce, and, in the latter’s case, biographies of those figures who seemed important.
When I was 15 I found rummaging at a jumble sale Richard Ellman’s towering 1959 biography of Joyce, and on another stall Ross Russell’s relatively recently published Charlie Parker bio Bird Lives!. This in turn led me to Charles Mingus’s Beneath The Underdog. Non-fiction, memoirs and biography have remained a focal point ever since that time when I was an isolated teenager.
Meanwhile, back in the 70s and early 80s the Compendium bookshop in Camden, which sold beat and outsider literature, brought me up to speed on Burroughs, Kerouac, Ginsberg and Bukowski.
But I digress. Apart from our neighbour’s book stall, my acquisitions these days are pretty evenly spread across the universe: digitally I subscribe to the New York Times and Washington Post and pay a monthly amount to The Guardian and read the coverage of all three papers daily online. Between us, my wife—a voracious reader who has educated me in the worlds of art, fashion, architecture and design—and I subscribe to physical copies of apartamento, Private Eye, World Of Interiors, the FT Weekend and the London Review of Books.
We also pick up irregularly such magazines as the New Statesman and Literary Review and I scan her purchases such as Paris Vogue. I have a British friend who has been stranded in Texas since the pandemic hit so I send him copies of some of the above as well as mags he will not be able to obtain there which give him a flavour of the old country, such as The Oldie.
I also collect one-off issues of publications when they cross my radar—recent examples include the excellent punkgirldiaries Blogzine 5 and the very touching special issue of Jockey Slut dedicated to the late musical alchemist Andrew Weatherall, who died suddenly last year.
Since I am currently writing a book about the music press 1950-2000 I have been acquiring particular back issues of Rolling Stone, Black Echoes, Black Music, Vibe and Melody Maker—I have a copy of the very first issue from 1926; it’s a revelation in the way that it dealt with race and identity—and the NME to fanzines such from Shout (about soul music in the 60s) and Ben Is Dead, the great US feminist punkzine in the 90s.
I also top up my archive with issues of what used to be described as ‘little’ magazines that I don’t already have such as the literally tiny The Fred, which covered vanguard British art and literature in the 1980s, and WET, the LA design and music magazine of the late 70s/early 80s. There are also those activist/radical titles, copies of which I am constantly adding to—Friends and its successor Frendz, my favourites of the British underground press, and Spare Rib, the pioneering feminist magazine which ran for 21 years from the early 70s. I have loaned examples of many of these to Subscribe, an exhibition about lifestyle magazines currently being planned by the Art Institute of Chicago.
Having written a book about The Face (Thames & Hudson, 2017) I already have a big collection of that title and others which set it in context, including i-D, Details and Blitz.
I have a library of books about magazines, and what with my music press book, have recently added Boys Own: The Complete Fanzines 1986-92, about the humorous zine which grew out of football and style culture to foreshadow the rise of acid-house and club/dance culture.
And I have many volumes on writers; some of these are coming in handy for my music press book, which aims to redress the balance of the earlier version, published as the oral history In Their Own Write in 2001. While I included female and minority writers in that edition, it was overbalanced in favour of entitled white men and I’ve felt guilty about that ever since. Now Val Wilmer’s Mama Said There’d Be Days Like This, the Ellen Willis compendium Out Of The Vinyl Deeps, Evelyn McDonnell and Ann Powers’ Rock She Wrote, Sue Steward and Sheryl Garratt’s Signed, Sealed and Delivered and others are helping me gain a much more rounded perspective.
Whew, all that from the question of what did you spend your money on last year! I gladly welcome the enthusiasm, but therefore no follow-ups, moving on.
How much of each day do you choose and/or get to read for pleasure?
My life and work are indivisible, so what I am currently reading usually pertains to what I am writing, and it’s almost always non-fiction. But one of the strategies I have adopted for dealing with the anxieties arising out of the pandemic is to read fiction before I sleep. I find that this cools me out and stops me thinking about work/worldwide despair. Recently I’ve read Andrew O’Hagan’s novel Mayflies and, for the umpteenth time, Raymond Chandler’s last published novel, Playback, which was based on an unfilmed screenplay. It’s a melancholic book; I constantly cast and recast the characters as I read it. I have never written a screenplay but if I did it would be to return this to its rightful place. It’s not fiction, but I also can’t recommend Tabitha Lasley’s extraordinary Sea State enough (though it makes for a tough read if you’re a man). Her crystalline writing about experiences with the men who work on the North Sea oil-rigs blends reportage with personal memoir really effectively.
I also like reading books by people I know; it cheers me that they have made the effort and obtained the ultimate reward in getting the damned things published. I really liked Fayette Hauser’s recent investigation into the wonderfully deviant world of The Cockettes (Acid Drag & Sexual Anarchy 1969-72) and love the British cultural commentator Peter York’s well-timed diatribe The War Against The BBC. This is a pamphlet style book, another Orange Penguin concisely pinpointing the interests of the dark forces which are now gathered: since they are anti-public service they are not only anti-BBC but pro the privatisation of the National Health Service. Add to that they will also simultaneously be Brexiters and climate change deniers and you begin to understand what we’re up against.
Who are your favorite people to see blurbing, where if you see they added their name and praise to a book you’re nearly guaranteed to like it?
As an insider I know that that stuff is all a bit of a racket but still I’m very grateful to Andrew O’Hagan for supplying the following for the paperback edition of my Malcolm McLaren biography:
"Paul Gorman’s book is the Citizen Kane of rock biography. It’s a brilliant story, an unforgettable tour of art, culture and British eccentricity. Just a terrific read. My advice is this: If you go to someone’s house and they fail to have a copy of The Life & Times of Malcolm McLaren on their bookshelves, don’t sleep with them.”
Pretty good variation there on John Waters’ famous quote.
Don’t disagree about the quid pro quo nature of plenty of blurbing, but are there in fact some names that do pack some persuasive weight for you if seen on the cover of a book?
I guess John Waters would be a good example but honestly can’t think of anyone else.
What three subjects do you own the most books about?
I guess these are focused on the three major preoccupations of my life: music, popular culture and biography.
In regard to music and popular culture, a story: when I was at school in the 1970s we took O (for Ordinary)-Level examinations at the age of 16. The number you attained determined the direction of your studies for the next two years before you left or went into further education. A minimum of five O-Level passes was required in subjects including English language or literature, a foreign language, maths and a science. Academically already a failure, for the latter I chose Biology.
But the consumption of music and the culture around popular music consumed me to such an extent that I pored over every issue of the weekly New Musical Express - which at the time took its cue from the New Journalism and was as interested in covering phenomena such as Evel Knievel and Kenneth Anger movies as it was the latest releases by David Bowie et al - to the exclusion of pretty much all else.
On the report to my parents before I took my O-Level exams, a teacher wrote:
“If Paul is as familiar with DG Mackean’s Introduction To Biology (the set text of the period) as he is with the New Musical Express, he will pass his O-Level. As it is, he isn’t, so I fear he won’t.”
And his fears were confirmed. I didn’t. My academic career ended soon thereafter when my father’s ill-health forced a drastic change in circumstances leaving me to throw myself into all that the city had to offer that was judged bad for you, at the expense of school attendance.
As for biography and memoir, I am obsessed with the minutiae of other peoples’ lives. This was very helpful during my years as a journalist on unglamorous weekly trade papers. By the time I was 23 I had won the country’s leading prize for investigative reporting (about monopolistic practices in the food processing industry). It was presented to me at a swishy awards ceremony by Tina Brown. She soon left for the US and Vanity Fair. I stayed and became news editor of The Grocer…
This facility has also been helpful in assembling material for the 12 non-fiction books I have published. But I wonder whether this over-emphasis on facts and detail hasn’t painted me into a corner creatively. We shall see.
I think you should stay on the course you’ve established, but I’m biased as I share many of your same interests. However your last point is an intriguing one.
Speaking of minutiae, regarding details it’s a fine line when telling your own or another person’s story. What are some exemplary memoirs or biographies where you finished completely satiated on that front?
There are so many. Matthew Sturgis’s lives of Walter Sickert and Oscar Wilde are benchmarks for me, and Benjamin Moser’s recent life of Susan Sontag is masterful. James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On The Mountain, Bob Collacello’s Warhol, George Plimpton’s Edie, Rachel Roberts’ No Bells On Sunday, Patti Smith’s Just Kids, John Lahr’s Orton, George Melly’s run of memoirs which began with Owning Up and included the immortally-titled Rum Bum & Concertina, Jonathan Meades’ An Encyclopedia of Myself and most recently Rupert Everett’s To The End Of The World—it’s a tale of film industry deceit which also made me laugh out loud.
Can you share memorable stories of people older than you putting certain books in your hands which permanently altered your life?
I’ve been wondering recently whether my (and my brothers’ and sisters’) facility for reading and writing at very early ages was a result of our strict Catholic upbringing.
The Church loomed large in our lives. We were not only there every Sunday but high days and holidays revolved around the Catholic calendar. Add to that the fact that two of my uncles were priests, one the chaplain at Strangeways prison in Manchester (as celebrated by The Smiths) for several years before retiring to the Vatican, and you can see how infused we were with the texts and the rituals. Words like catechism, confession, communion were our lingua franca, and the readings and prayers were inculcated in us.
Books were abundant in the house where I grew up; those on the shelves were mainly second-hand and either WW2 memoirs of the likes of Churchill or Field Marshal Montgomery, under whom my father served in the Africa Campaign in the combined British forces as a “Desert Rat,” or works by such long-forgotten writers as Ngaio Marsh.
There was no intellectual framework in which literature was discussed; in fact, to express critical cultural opinions in possibly high-falutin terms (“Big words like marmalade,” my mother would crow) was to run the risk of all-round mickey-taking. I liked that. It kept you on your toes. My mother was well-born but left school when she was 14 and worked in a card shop when I was growing up, my father was a net curtain salesman and had departed formal education even earlier and travelled the world with the armed forces before settling down with her and producing six children (I am the youngest).
We didn’t have a lot of money and it was a crowded, sometimes fractious household—though there were also parties and music and huge family gatherings—but my parents and siblings absorbed written material voraciously: as well as the above there would be on loan from the local library novels, detective fiction, travel writing, cookery books, books by popular columnists. And then there were the papers, which included London’s two evening publications printed each day in several editions, the sports and racing pages scanned assiduously by my Dad.
It was my siblings, and in particular my eldest brother Michael, who actively stoked the household appetite for literature. No coincidence that he and my other two brothers became librarians. After working at the British Library, Michael moved to the US and co-wrote the bibliographers’ bible Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules 2. His career took in oversight of libraries at university campuses in Illinois and California and he also served as president of the American Library Association. He thrives at 80, with a considerable library of his own built up over 70 years, including a full set of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanacks and the complete PG Wodehouse first editions.
I’m the youngest by eight years so benefited from the cumulative effect of this atmosphere—there was a feeling that I should be educated along the right lines: for Christmas and birthdays I not only received the latest rock, reggae and soul records, but also such books as Diary Of A Nobody, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and, at the age of eight from my sister Joanna, a beautifully illustrated volume of Greek myths and legends published by Paul Hamlyn which I have in front of me now, inscribed in her dramatic italic handwriting “December 1968.”
Another brother, Timothy, instructed me directly by giving me Animal Farm and 1984 to read at the age of 12 and then quizzed me on what I understood about them. He also led me to the works of the Bloomsbury set, particularly Virginia Woolf, and also Colette, Jean Rhys and Angus Wilson, while my late brother David’s interest in pop culture and politics took me to such books as Robert Greenfield's Stones Touring Party and Scandal 63, produced by the Sunday Times’ Insight team about the Christine Keeler affair 10 years earlier.
As I absorbed these influences and directions, I developed my own taste, for the pared-down work of Raymond Chandler but also for highly-stylised writing, in particular Nabokov, Borges and Burgess, whose books I return to again and again. The two volumes of AB’s memoir Little Wilson & Big God and You’ve Had Your Time are my desert island reads. It’s meaningless, but I take something from the fact that he died in the hospital where I was born…
Three brothers who became librarians! I bet the church thought they were going to get at least one for the priesthood… That’s really a lovely tiny memoir of your family’s influence on shaping your reading tastes.
Who are your heroes who you know were, or strongly suspect had to be, great readers?
There are many I greatly admire and I know for a fact that they were all prodigious readers. But I’m like Burgess’s F.X. Enderby, in that I envy no-one except “the great proved dead”.
When you look at your shelves can you remember where you bought and/or how you acquired most, if not all, of your books?
Yers, down to the location of the particular jumble sales and junk shops. There was one such which specialised in literature in Finchley Road close to my school where I picked up many paperbacks. I particularly remember that place because of its name: Reedmore Books.
Cute, I wonder if just a coincidence.
What are books that taught you about that generic term “style” (however you define it, whether in film, music, literature, etc) which you can’t ever see yourself not looking through at least once a year for years to come?
The book to which I return most on this subject is out-of-print. This confirms, to me at least, the general stupidity of those that run book publishing. Today There Are No Gentlemen was published in 1971 by Nik Cohn who was 26 at the time. It remains a formidable analysis of the importance of visual identity and is available in a compendium of Cohn’s work but the original slim volume deserves resurrecting, not least because copies now change hands in excess of £500 each. I’m glad to say I have a pristine copy.
What are some oral histories you most wish existed?
Hmm. Having written one I believe there are too many anyway. They are the lazy writer’s option unless you are Studs Terkel, George Plimpton or Jonathan Green. And which of us is? Answer: only Jonathan these days and he’s focusing his work as one of the great slang dictionary compilers of all time..
If you owned a bookstore what five titles would you make sure were never out of stock?
All The Devils Are Here by David Seabrook
A Bit Off The Map and Other Stories by Angus Wilson
Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton
Once In A Lifetime: The Crazy World of Acid House and Afterwards by Jane Bussman
Rated SavX: The Savage Pencil Scratchbook
What are your most prized books you acquired for free because you found them or acquired them for ridiculously low prices used?
The tray of 30 orange spine Penguin paperbacks, each one a stone classic that sent me off onto multiple trails and which I paid £1 for at that jumble sale in St John’s Wood in 1972, takes some beating, but over the last few years I have completed at minimal cost my collection of the Raymond Chandler novels and short stories published in Penguin’s crime series (green spine) in the early 70s. Each has a cover by the designer James Tormey customising film noir stills with extreme colour effects. I bought two for 5p each in my early teens and now I have all eight, gradually picked up online for next to nix.
If anything can beat the feeling of completing a meaningful collection, it’s doing it on the cheap. Thanks Paul!
Paul Gorman via Thames & Hudson
]]>Ok, Geoffrey. He's a poet, editor, book and film critic, translator, and cultural historian who over the decades has authored close to 20 books and written for seemingly every literary and cultural magazine in New York. I've been reading him for years, mostly in the New York Review of Books, and I've always most enjoyed his elevated appraisals of 1940s-60s American jazz and pop music and noir fiction and movies and how he lived amongst and through such joys. You'll see that he spreads his reading enthusiasms well beyond those four categories, wears his erudition lightly, and provides us with several titles which will greatly burnish OGR's Season Three book list when it comes out in a few months.
Are there too many books being published today?
Certainly more being published, one way or another; wouldn’t ever say “too many” since who is to say which ones are in excess, outside of a totalitarian environment where production and content are tightly controlled. The more ways to publish, the more books there will be. Whether the number of those inclined to read them is expanding proportionally remains the question.
Yes, that last point is THE question.
What’s your take on today’s readers of LOA books versus when you first started? Same with LOA’s titles’ general reception in the marketplace now vs yesteryear?
The first Library of America volumes were published in 1982; I joined the staff in 1992 and retired as editor-in-chief in 2017. There has clearly been a generational shift in the readership within that time, while in the same period the scope of the series expanded in many ways. From the founding of the press there was never a hard and fast definition about what should constitute an American canon, and over these past decades the list broadened to encompass many different genres—journalistic writing (in anthologies devoted to World War II, the civil rights movements, the Vietnam War, and other themes), crime fiction, science fiction and fantasy, children’s literature, writing on food and sports, critical writing on movies and rock and roll, and much else. The new and forthcoming volumes by Joan Didion, Octavia E. Butler, Shirley Jackson, E. O. Wilson, Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway (finally), and the stories of O. Henry, along with Kevin Young’s superb anthology of African American poetry and an anthology of feminist writings edited by Alix Kates Shulman and Honor Moore, give an idea of the range.
What anthologies have been important in your life?
A very long list, starting with the ones with broken spines and detached pages that are never gotten rid of. In a high school textbook that belonged to my father—The Riverside Book of Verse, published in 1927—I read the shorter and simpler songs, and picked out individual lines in longer ones (“I saw Eternity the other night” or “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen”). When I was eleven or so Robert O. Ballou’s World Bible came into my hands and gave a first glimpse of foundational texts from the Rig-Veda to the Tao Te Ching, and opened up worlds. After that there was Donald Keene’s Anthology of Japanese Literature, which affected me like an alternate history of the world, with alternate forms, styles, and codes, and led on to many other books. With anthologies you tend to go back many times to the same passages. Here I find an old underscoring in thick pencil, from Bashō: “Now, when autumn is half over, and every morning and each evening brings changes to the scene, I wonder if that is not what is meant by dwelling in unreality.” I could single out Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry (1960) and Jerome Rothenberg’s Technicians of the Sacred (1968), touchstones for me and every other young poet I knew; W. H. Auden’s supremely diverting commonplace book A Certain World; or Black Water, Alberto Manguel’s anthology of fantastic stories, where I came upon Flann O’Brien’s terrifying “John Duffy’s Brother” and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s notes for stories he never wrote: “A person to be writing a tale, and to find that it shapes itself against his intentions: that the characters act otherwise than he thought: that unforeseen events occur; and a catastrophe comes which he strives in vain to avert. It might shadow forth his own fate—he having made himself one of the personages.” Too many books maybe, but never too many anthologies.
Gosh, I’m glad I asked!
Can we go back to the beginning of this response and focus on those beloved books you’ll never get rid of? Mine also have broken spines and pages falling out and I’ve often had to resort to a rubber band to keep them bound, which over time inevitably dries out and falls apart, rendering it useless, but thereby produces a different physical reminder of what time does to human beings’ profound relationship with words on physical pages. Can you please share your feelings about these special books in your collection?
My sense of writing is spatial, which is why I find e-books unsatisfying. I don’t know where I am, and there isn’t the satisfying sense of physically opening a book, turning a page, going back to the page before, browsing freely in an improvised way. The books that have been around a long time, that you’ve opened many times possibly from an early age, seem almost to know you. There’s a continuity, sometimes with the previous owners. I don’t keep diaries but the books I’ve read and kept around serve almost the same purpose.
Whose names appear the most on the covers of books currently in your home?
Shakespeare by a good distance (plays, commentaries, sources); my parents were involved in theater and the house was full of plays and books about stage history, so Shakespeare got his hooks in early. Tied for second probably Jules Verne (I developed a yen to collect all the Livre de Poche editions with the original illustrations) and Balzac, whose work I have been very slowly making my way through for about sixty years now. I’ve also ended up with an inordinate number of books and magazines devoted to the films of Hitchcock and to film history in general. Even before joining up with Library of America I had a weakness for books in series: Penguin Classics, the Pléiade, more recently NYRB Classics—they’re like super-anthologies that can encompass so much more and stay open to incorporating new aspects of past and present, not a fixed canon but an expanding one. Finally there are the crime and espionage writers always good for rereading: Hammett, Chandler, Thompson, Highsmith, Ambler, Himes, Christie, Le Carré, Ross Macdonald, Sjöwall and Wahlöö, and my antiquarian favorite Freeman Wills Crofts whose ingenious timetable mysteries have somehow been a great consolation during the past year’s lockdown.
Which writers from the past 30 years can you foresee slowly making your way through perhaps for the rest of your life?
I suspect I will spend a lot of time catching up with the many novelists I did not have time to read, including many only now being translated for the first time. And rereading contemporary poets whose work I love, John Ashbery, Susan Howe, Joseph Donahue, and a dear friend who left too soon, Michael O’Brien.
Are you a better reader with or without something on in the background?
As often as not there’s something playing, but if I’m absorbed I stop hearing it. Some things—Schoenberg’s solo piano music for instance, which for me at least is devoid of earworms—go well with almost anything. I don’t generally listen to vocal music while reading.
Funny, I can’t listen to vocal music either, unless the lyrics are in any other language than English—something about my brain not being able to process hearing and seeing familiar words at the same time. Completely agree about Schoenberg solo piano, and now that we’re so eye-to-eye (ear-to-ear?) on this, can you please keep going and give me others devoid of earworms which you can read to?
Olivier Messian: “Préludes pour Piano”; Federico Mompou: “Música Callada”; Miles Davis: The Complete In a Silent Way Sessions; Pharoah Sanders: Summun, Bukmun, Umyun; Marvin Gaye: Trouble Man; and (recently discovered favorites) Gonzalo Bergara: Porteño Soledad; Vikingur Olafsson: Debussy Rameau; Terry Riley & Don Cherry: Live in Köln (February 23, 1975).
Under which editor-in-chief of which magazine during which years do you most wish you could have been a part of the staff?
It would have been fun to have a shot at reviewing the books or plays or movies or music of other decades but I don’t fantasize about being part of vanished circles. It was my good luck to be associated with The Village Voice when M. Mark was editing the Voice Literary Supplement and to have worked with Robert Silvers and others at the New York Review, and I find it hard to imagine having a better experience elsewhere.
I will never miss an opportunity to ask anyone who I know worked for Robert Silvers to share favorite recollections. And I’m a bit embarrassed to admit the name M. Mark is new to me, so can you please do the same for her? I guess I needn’t tell you that stories are such significant assists in keeping behind-the-scenes figures remembered from generation to generation.
Which entertainers’ biographies merit re-readings?
Well, “entertainer” is not exactly the word, but if you open the autobiography of Miles Davis (written with Quincy Troupe) on any page, you are almost bound to keep reading for the rare experience of hearing someone (in a memoir, where it’s least expected) saying exactly what he thinks. (Troupe’s later addendum, Miles and Me, adds his own frank commentary about their friendship and collaboration.) When it comes to memoirs I have a particular fondness for those by friends, family, and other associates—books like Margaret Talbot’s The Entertainer about her stepfather Lyle Talbot, a stalwart of pre-Code movies, or Anne Wiazemsky’s Un An Après, her account of her marriage to Jean-Luc Godard and the days of ’68 (which unfortunately was turned into an abysmal movie released here under the equally abysmal title Godard Mon Amour), or Mr. S, by Frank Sinatra’s valet George Jacobs, which gives about the most candid and plausible portrait of Sinatra I’ve seen. Still looking for an affordable copy of the memoirs of Jessie Royce Landis, who played Cary Grant's mother in North by Northwest (though she was only eight years older than Grant) and his prospective mother-in-law in To Catch a Thief; John Ashbery, who did a flawless Landis impression, spoke of it with enthusiasm.
What a fact that Landis one.
Yes, I laugh (but should maybe shudder) to think of Miles being called an “entertainer.” Anyway, I was pleased when Miles and Me came out and always love knowing inside baseball stuff about anyone who does a follow-up after participating in a famous bio or autobiography. Can you think of some you wish existed?
It would always be interesting to know what the ghost writers of all those Hollywood memoirs left out for legal reasons.
Who are the most musical writers to you?
At various ages I was fond of reciting (to myself) Ginsberg, Whitman, the hurricane scene from Lafcadio Hearn’s Chita, certain passages from the King James Bible, the first pages of Bleak House, and the last pages of Moby Dick, everything grand and rolling. James Joyce and Malcolm Lowry and Sir Thomas Browne expanded the range. Later came the hardboiled music of Raymond Chandler, David Goodis, others. What is sometimes called musical can be elegant veneer without the possibility of jarring rhythmic lurches and the stirring up of chaotic elements. My first response at any moment would be Shakespeare because Antony and Cleopatra is the most sustained verbal opera I know of, with fantastic sensual values in every mercurial interaction of vowels and consonants, and constant surprises in its turns and segues. Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse has the effect of a perfectly achieved musical structure through proportionality, echoes, transitions. My sense of musical possibilities continues to widen in reading the work of many contemporary poets—I think of Nathaniel Mackey, for instance, whose work enacts an extended and complex musical exploration which he has deepened in collaboration with musicians.
Which living writer would you most like to have seated next to you, with you both in the mood to converse, on a long distance flight halfway around the world? We’ll one day get back to when that could be possible...
I dislike flying and generally avoid conversation while in the air, preferring immersion in a long and preferably undemanding book. Even a terrible book like Tom Clancy’s Red Star Rising which kept me settled during a 14-hour flight to Tokyo. If I were inclined to converse, I’d rather do the listening and hope for a traveling companion who could keep me enthralled with information about things I would love to know more about—maybe a deeply informed investigative journalist like Lawrence Wright or a literary biographer and chronicler of America like Brenda Wineapple or a visionary polymath like Nathaniel Tarn.
Ha, I had to smile at, to my very specific question, this: “I dislike flying and generally avoid conversation...”.
What are other terrible books you’ve finished which you have no problem saying were such?
I once spent a year reading pretty much nothing except paperback crime novels of the 40s and 50s—it was research for my first book, and I thought total immersion was the way to go. A good many were bad but following through on the project provided the necessary adrenaline. I do like reading accidentally encountered books, ghost-written autobiographies or genre novels of other eras or weird self-help books, and miss the second-hand bookshops and rural yard sales where oddities used to turn up.
What are your favorite introductions you’ve read in books?
Most of my early literary education came from the introductions to various paperbacks of the 50s and 60s, notably Signet Classics which stood out with a great list, some fine cover art, and introductions that tended to be really informative and sometimes eloquent. I still have my old copy of Fielding’s Jonathan Wild with J. H. Plumb’s sonorous evocations of 18th century London (“The vices and follies of mankind were written large across the metropolis”); most of the others fell apart or went by the board years ago. I have a vivid memory of Seymour Krim’s brief introductions to each of the selections in his anthology The Beats, which was like a guided tour of a milieu that at age twelve seemed thoroughly exotic; and Jean-Paul Sartre’s introduction to Jean Genet’s The Thief’s Journal was so mesmerizing I must have read it many times, since phrases like “Not all who would be are Narcissus” or “a Genet with Genet stuffing, like the prunes of Tours,” are still fresh in memory.
Who wrote the most literary liner notes you remember reading?
Some liner notes are literary artifacts in themselves; Harry Smith’s elaborate index to his American Folk Music anthology of 1952 establishes an almost incantatory tone with entries like “Hanging mentioned on record”—“Humming, records featuring” — “Lies mentioned on records”—“”Mountain vantage point theme”—“Poverty mentioned on record”—“Prisoner visited by relatives”—“Satan mentioned on record.” Mostly I’m hungry for information, of which early LP releases had so little, and also the opportunity to share somebody else’s reaction. A jazz historian like Loren Schoenberg, commenting on reissues of Chu Berry or Coleman Hawkins, walks you through every track and makes available details that would otherwise be unavailable or unnoticed—you might not always need all that but it’s nice to know it’s there. There are so many. Just looking around the room, Robert Palmer on Ray Charles, Steve Barrow for The Story of Jamaican Music, Alec Cumming on Burt Bacharach have all been helpful.
Can you recall moments throughout your life when you were happiest to be reading a book?
Most of them probably. When I had just learned how to read on my own, the Classics Illustrated comic book of The Count of Monte Cristo felt like a sudden vision of adult complexities (betrayal, conspiracy, revenge)—disturbing but mesmerizing. At fourteen reading Dostoevsky’s The Possessed pretty much without stopping except for meals and sleep—it must have been summer. By the time it was done I felt as feverish as the characters in the book. This past year has been a nearly continuous reading session ranging from the Histories of Herodotus to the novels of Robert Stone to the recently published Salient, an extraordinary book-length poem by Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. that among other things finds deep poetic power in military documents from one of the supremely horrific battles of World War I. Aspects of catastrophe through the ages was a principal through line.
ARTBOOK is the retail arm of D.A.P. and their attractive, dense seasonal catalogs are essential knowledge and awareness resources. Truly, don't miss them, they're in print and online. That's ARTBOOK who handles the shops at MOMA P.S.1 and at Hauser & Wirth in LA, which is why both always have such compelling inventory. Two pro tips regarding ARTBOOK and their website: In the upper right hand corner of the site there is a square box that says "SPECIAL OFFER | MoMA PS1 | SAVE 25% TODAY." (During the holidays it goes up to 40%...) Use it, use it often! You also get free shipping, so use it, use it often! On the left hand side of the site there is a long smart list of curated art libraries. Consult it the next time you want or need to buy something for someone you like.
Overseeing all this from day one right up to the present is Sharon Helgason Gallagher, who is the President and Executive Director of ARTBOOK and D.A.P. Music and sports have their Halls of Fame, Hollywood has its Walk. For some stupid reason US publishing doesn't do the same. If they did, I find it without question that its inaugural class would have to include Sharon. -Wes Del Val
WDV: Who is publishing books who makes everything they do, from the content to design to marketing, etc, always seem highly relevant to the “right now” when the book is released?
SHG: Although they are not in the illustrated or art area, I’d like to salute the New Press in this regard. They are razor focused on the content and let everything else (from design to marketing) flow from the purposeful meaning of the book through to execution on the commercial front.
I’m pleased you chose to mention a non-art book publisher. Are there any others? I’m especially intrigued since you are in the same business but deal in such different, specific genres.
Again, looking beyond D.A.P.'s focus on arts and visual culture, I'll also give a shout-out to Haymarket Books, The Feminist Press, M.I.T., and, of course, to Semiotexte. All of these houses are laser-focused on a mission and have the wisdom to stay disciplined.
One of the insights I had early on in the history of D.A.P. was the importance of saying "no" to a good book or imprint that was outside of our mission. As I've said many times at staff meetings, especially as new people have joined the team, companies can ruin themselves by taking on that one successful title outside of their field: it can end up creating a slippery slope. So many American art book publishers "slid down that slippery slope" in the 1980s and ended up as lifestyle imprints.
What are books you were a page or two from abandoning but ended up becoming very rewarding reads?
Jill Lepore’s These Truth: A History of the United States. I picked this up when it first came out largely because I actually never took a class in US history (having grown up partly abroad). Little did I know that these past two years would have become a lesson in American History in their own right!
They certainly did!
If you didn’t take a formal US history class growing up—to which I say good, why should foreign students have to study our history, we soon enough shove ourselves down your throats as adults anyway—what were influential things you read that made you want to come to America?
Oh, let me clarify: I was born in Pittsburgh, PA, and went to elementary school in Washington D.C. When I was ten years old, my father came home one night and said we were moving to Germany for his business. So, at ten, I ended up in a German school—without knowing a word of the language. We came back to the States when I was in high school, but I left a year early and never took that standard 12th grade American History class! I benefited enormously from my time abroad, but I will admit that it left odd gaps in both my formal education and in my ability to grasp late 1960s and early 1970s American pop culture references!
Ah I see, thank you for clarifying! Luckily plenty of books have been written about American pop culture from those years for you to fill any of those gaps.
What are the sections you’d have in your dream bookstore?
I’d love a section called something like “Print Culture” displaying books on the history of book making, design and publishing; print journalism; magazine design; artist’s books, etc. What makes efforts at eclectic shelves like this tricky is that it is not easy to shelve books in two different areas of the store (both administratively and in terms of budget). But you said “dream bookstore”! (This could also lead us to a discussion of the role that industry BISAC and B.I.C. categories play in the way readers discover books, but that is a topic in its own rights.)
Me, too!
I hint you have issues with BISAC/BIC codes—and I don’t blame you—so can we discuss more? For people who don’t know they are category classification codes used within publishing to identify the genre of a title being published, and form part of the book’s metadata.
So, here's the deal on subject matter classifications in publishing. Over many decades, publishing professionals have volunteered their time to serve on the Book Industry Standards Group's various committees. The subject codes—or BISACs—they have developed over the course of decades are used throughout the publishing and bookseller communities. At D.A.P., we have lobbied to enhance codes for art, photography, architecture, and design. Beyond proposing subgenres, we also successfully introduced the designations "By Artist" and "By Photographer" so that an artist does not end up categorized as the "illustrator" of a monograph on his or her work. (I must admit to fantasizing about a monograph on, say, Gerhard Richter illustrated by him with little drawings of his own works!)
Concerning subject codes, one sees the history of intellectual trends—and fashions—if one looks at how these subject areas have been expanded and reorganized over time. There is a Master's thesis to be written here!
While useful, however, they can also be limiting because most stores will shelve a book based on its primary subject category. Of course, many of the most exciting titles are interesting precisely because they explore and transgress intellectual boundaries.
With online search and the use of keywords, finding books is ever easier.
So, the question is, how can bricks-and-mortar bookstores find new and engaging ways to shelve books that are less subservient to old categories? Physical bookstores could, perhaps, allow themselves to be more playful in grouping books as a way to define the particular viewpoints of their stores. That said, I want to acknowledge how labor-intensive reshelving a store can be! A lot of books to move around…
Thank you for touching upon this essential behind-the-scenes element of publishing which few consumers know or ever think about, but which has a significant effect upon their browsing and finding what they want to read.
You get to read only three books for the rest of 2021. What are they?
My own education failed me when it comes to Black writers. So I have all of the classics there ahead of me (many more than three!). So, I need to start that list with Baldwin and W.E.B. Dubois. But I still have Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century staring down at me from the bookcase—so that will be my #3 on the list.
Can I ask where you’d say your reading education succeeded?
Perhaps because my mother was an English Literature graduate student while I was little, I learned to read with a pencil in hand. This is possibly shocking for an art book person like me to admit, but I am a very physical reader. I see a book as a house that I move into, that is mine to inhabit and move around in. With non-artbooks, I feel personally empowered to crack the spine, turn down pages, underline and make copious annotations. The aim is to think the thoughts. So, that's where I'd say my reading education succeeded: in allowing me to inhabit and move around inside a text. And above all, not to venerate or idolize an author.
That last sentence belongs on bookmarks.
How much do you typically remember of what you read?
To be candid, I am not one of those people whose brains are a cornucopia of extraordinary facts to be drawn on at a moment’s notice. I so wish I were. Instead, what I take with me from a book is the physical experience—the somatic cognitive sensation—of the author’s rhythm of thought.
I love your book-as-house metaphor above and how the various physical elements are essential for quality reading.
Who and what especially causes such somatic cognitive sensations for you?
Perhaps it was the particular age at which I was immersed into the German language—like being dunked into a revival baptismal pond. My first year in Germany happened to coincide with the age at which German students enter the first year of Gymnasium, the more serious, rigid, academic schooling. I was just young enough—six months later might have been too late—but also just old enough—I was not an infant learning a language—to experience grammar and logic as rhythm. And there is no language better than that for German—with meaning held in suspense until the final end of the sentence and multiple dependent clauses. In the English language, my only comparison would be Henry James: each sentence is like a ride of its own on a boat with the dependent clauses lifting and sinking the meaning like little waves.
When in your life have you been the happiest reader?
Certainly during my college years at Yale. My boyfriend would pick me up at the library when it closed at midnight and we’d go to a dive bar and I’d recount where I was in the Phenomenology of Spirit while playing pinball to the rhythm of the dialectic!
With that rigorous mental background what led you to want to get into distributing and publishing art books?
It's a long story (as these things always are), but through happenstance I ended up working at Abbeville Press in the 1980s. I had only intended to take a year off from grad school, but it was in some ways a welcome change from the heated battles of "the analytics vs the continentals" that were raging at the time.
I was lucky to work for Bob Abrams at Abbeville at a time when the company was still very small but growing quickly and was able to get involved in pretty much every aspect of the business from contracts to book making—including making a pop up book for grownups in the early 80s that explained how a personal computer worked.
Two things became clear to me over the years: first, that museums were working with some interesting designers and perhaps didn't need publishers to put together books for them; and second, that the Europeans were by and large making books that were far superior in terms of thoughtful production quality.
Around that time, I had the good fortune to meet Daniel Power and Dieter von Graffenreid of Parkett and the idea for D.A.P. came about. That was now more than 30 years ago!
Who is writing your favorite criticism, of any kind, today?
Here I am currently without a favorite and welcome recommendations.
Then scratch “favorite.” Surely there are critics you regularly read and enjoy and for which you’d be happy to pass along your enthusiasm to us, no?
I think Science Studies, Legal Studies, and related examinations of the socioeconomic conditions of variable modes of justification and argument—in short, of constituting truth—are of the essence. For anyone who has not yet read Bruno Latour, I suggest starting with one of his earliest books, a slim volume, We Have Never Been Modern.
What’s an annual award that should exist in the art book world?
Perhaps there are too many existing awards! The Wittenborn Award from ARLIS, the Furthermore Foundation’s Alice (for which I’m honored to serve on the jury), the C.A.A.’s Charles Rufus Morey Award, the Schönste Bücher awards from the Stiftung Buchkunst, and then, of course, the various AIGA awards.
Wow, I’ve only heard of the AIGA awards. Can you please tell me a bit about the others? And might there be one, similar to your dream section in a bookstore, you wish existed?
Both ARLIS and C.A.A. principally recognize art historical scholarship. I guess the award I would like to see would be a well-funded annual prize for artists' books. The entire field is gaining recognition but is, as we know, caught in a long-standing series of debates about what exactly an artist's book is. At the same time, mainly through Printed Matter's efforts, artists' books have a much higher level of recognition in the art world than ever before.
You have to give the same books to someone who is 20, someone 40, and someone 60. Which titles would you be confident they’d all three really enjoy?
One can never re-read George Eliot’s Middlemarch enough times! For me, it is the "hinge" novel: while the truly existential dilemma of women vis-à-vis property ownership undergirds many of the great earlier British novels, in Dorothea, we finally have a woman who can, in effect, survive on her own means and consequently can actually attempt to be the author of her own life.
Amen!
Are you a big re-reader in general?
Not as much a re-reader as I hope to be in my old age! With Covid, my husband Skuta and I have retreated to our house out by the Delaware River and have boxes upon boxes of books still to unpack. I dream of the day when I can sit among my "friends" on the shelves and pull them down to reread and ponder what I might have meant or been thinking in my marginal notes.
What do you most long for now which you never missed reading 10+ years ago?
New Left political economy. But the world has changed so dramatically, and the scale of wealth differentials between the very, very wealthy—the top 1%—is now back to where it was in the 1920s, so movements and texts coming out of the New Left and post 1960s radicalism may no longer fit the bill. I regularly check in on the Review of Radical Political Economics, Dissent, Monthly Review, Naomi Klein in The Intercept, etc. But at this juncture, I am also trying to really see what is going on across the political spectrum and to read some conservative sources on a regular basis as part of my media diet. Finally, as a small business owner, I am on the hunt for a news and opinion site that would address both the challenges and opportunities I have. But to date, I have not found that source.
How many book fairs have you been to in your career and can you share highlights of special times that have occurred at any of them?
Some years ago, I received the Frankfurt Book Fair "cake" and the certificate for 25 years of attendance. And then if you add the artists' book fairs, ABA/BEA, and regional fairs, it is well over 50 for sure.
There are so, so many stories, especially at the Frankfurt fair. Perhaps of dancing on the piano at the old Lippanzer Bar at the Frankfurter Hof after an evening of gambling at Wiesbaden; the night that Claire Thompson of the British distributor Turnaround and I almost got locked into the fair while she was amusing me with her hilarious French literary agent imitation; the sumptuous group dinners we jointly hosted with Robert Violette at the Tigerpalast; or the IAMP (International Association of Museum Publishers) dinners, where the best seat in the house is always directly across from the most fabulous raconteur in the business, Chris Hudson, recently retired from MoMA.
I didn’t know they gave an anniversary cake! I have to ask, just in case you’ll share, what are some of the best deals you made in Frankfurt?
I'd love to also tell you about deals made, but as a distributor, I treat my clients' confidence as an absolute trust. So I will honor that trust with absolute silence!
But I will say that even before COVID, email relationships over the course of the year have changed what it means to go to Frankfurt—publishers are now in touch with each other throughout the year, sending pdfs and price quotes back and forth.
All of this used to happen in one-on-one meetings at publishers' stands at the fair or in hotel suites nearby. But seeing an entire imprint's worth of books in context at a booth is still informative in a way that pdfs and websites will never quite match. Even more importantly, renewing relationships that are professional, economic, and—over the years—personal remains a cornerstone of the industry.
And we’re back to what the physical does for heightening the experience of books in your life, a fitting way to end. Thanks Sharon!
Josiah picked up the love of books and reading from his father, Elliott, a published and renowned scholar on Mysticism, particularly Kabbalah, and also a painter and poet. Due to Elliott's research Josiah grew up around mountains and mountains of books and he told me his father is likely a part of the reason he opened Aeon and is also an obvious starting place towards his interests in both the spiritual and the avant-garde. I just find a father-son bond like that very touching.
There was definitely a deeper sense of alignment and connection happening around this week's interview, for right when I was in the middle of interviewing Josiah I saw James Hoff's answer of "Josiah Wolfson at Aeon" to my question of who at which bookstores is most consistently trustworthy for him. And then I read all of Josiah's thoughtful responses to my questions and it was immediately apparent that they were written by a progressive, mindful, gentle soul. And then he told me about his important deep filial relationship while also sending me the portrait below, telling me he isn't oft-photographed, to which I replied that I thought a real sensitivity came through. And then it was all crystal clear to me why there is such a distinct spirit of gladness that emanates from Aeon. Please do visit, you'll feel it (and probably need it), too. -Wes Del Val
WDV: If you were to start an Aeon reprint program, which books would be at the top of your list to re-issue?
JW: It's something I have thought of doing, although I think more about publishing original material. In some ways it’s easier to target a few periodicals or journals which are extinct that I'd love to reprint in complete volumes or in part. There was a publication called Experimental Musical Instruments published by Bart Hopkin that I'm fascinated by, which is available online, but when you flip through the old issues there's a special energy that comes through. I love the Heresies periodical and I always wish it was widely available, since some issues are quite rare. Radical Software is something that’s elusive and expensive to track down but should be known and would be loved.
As for individual books, there's a lot... Dick Higgins’ great double-book Jefferson's Birthday / Postface is something I wish were more readily available, as well as a couple of other titles that he published through Something Else press, which itself would be an inspiration for me in how I would want to approach publishing. Leonora Carrington has a short novel that is still out of print despite the resurgent interest, as does Anna Kavan. The list could go on and on... There are some really great children's books that I've handled which go for hundreds that I think should be in the hands of every artistic family instead of the more obvious and available things…
Since you brought it up, whose “resurgent interest” the past few years has most satisfied you? It’s been lovely to see it for Carrington by the way.
Oh yeah, it’s great to see it. Alongside Carrington I think the last few years have been particularly decent for a whole host of female outsiders. Anna Kavan, who I also just mentioned, has had a well deserved resurgence, although there is yet to be an aesthetically pleasing newer edition of her works out. In the visual world, obviously Hilma af Klint had a huge and well deserved moment which is right now being punctuated with a beautiful seven volume catalogue raisonné. Emma Kunz's works are starting to become a little more spread about and it’s only a matter of time, I should think, before a monograph with all of her work and explaining her research into healing should become available here. I would say, with those last two in mind, there has generally been a sort of resurgent interest in the spiritual and mystical disciplines, which makes sense given the fissures in our societal norms. Astrology for instance has become quite “mainstream” in the past few years, self-help books that venerate the Taoist approach are #1 bestsellers and it seems people are interested again in holistic and self-reliant attitudes. Aeon opened right around the time of the Hilma show and because of both my background in those disciplines as well as the luck of having bought three enormous occult collections before opening, it all felt very serendipitous. And I appreciate that more people are seeking it out, even if that means that the hermetic arts sometimes feel like Instagram buzzwords.
Regarding your last sentence, before and after the comma: I’m very happy for your timing, and yes, nothing like IG diluting matters of substance and turning them into fodder for lifestyle posts weighted down with hashtags.
When you stop and think about all the new books that come out every week and are added atop all those others already available, how does that make you feel?
That’s a good question—I have a funny relationship with it, and it's taken me some time to warm up to stocking more new material at the store—and even now I generally lean towards stocking reprints or anthologies of old material that I've known and loved and am very grateful to see back in print. For me it's a challenge to navigate lists of new releases, in part because I am a very tactile person and I like handling things, but also because it often involves skipping through hundreds of new monographs by artists who already have a thousand monographs published in order to find something I think is unique and worth giving space to at Aeon. And sifting through new literature is even more difficult—unless I have some context for something it all tends to go over my head when I'm looking at these lists of newly published works. I get hundreds of emails a week from publishers and individuals about their new book that I mostly have no context for and even though it might be that there is something special there, the more that is pitched to me the less inclined I feel to open any of these emails in the first place. So it’s a bit unnerving, the endless production, and most of it looks fairly dull to me, to be honest. At the same time I remain aware that Aeon is only a tiny fragment of the world at large and so I try to treat my approach to new stuff like my approach to used material, and just keep my eyes trained to see things that are unique and obviously done with love and integrity and try not to let the excess enter into my mind too much.
That seems to be a sane approach. Each bookstore should of course try and run their own race to the extent possible to keep the doors open—the visions and tastes of their buyers is what makes a bookstore one of the few remaining exciting, unexpected physical retail experiences.
I’d like to ask you a bit more about “context” since you mentioned it twice. Tell me about some particularly enlightening occurrences where you didn’t initially have a satisfactory amount of context upon seeing something new to you (whether an old book or indeed a new one) but developed it to a degree which still pleases you.
Ah well, it happens all the time in varying degrees, really. In regards to the way I meant it just now, referring to something newly published which I have no awareness of but perhaps should... I don’t really know that I can draw up a specific example. That's something that happens by the nature of my approach at large and by the fact that I’m not actually as plugged in to the literary “community” as one might expect, and frankly it happens a lot. Otherwise there are a lot of books that fall into my hands that sit for weeks in a pile and I don’t think much of them and then one day I happen to get it into my hands at just the right time and I either “get it” or get the right lead on what it actually is that somehow evaded me before. It's a constant learning experience and there's so much out there and one day something might just blend in to all of the background noise and the next day it’s shouting directly at you. I did my first catalogue recently and some of the best stuff made it in there at the last second, even though I worked on it for months. For example a journal called Criss Cross that I thought was nice enough but not necessarily a strong candidate for the catalog, until I read up on it and realized it came out of the ashes of Drop City, and that Bruce Conner contributed to it (one of my favorite artists) and so I really took notice only after that. There’s also a funny thing that can happen when someone else spotlights something you’ve been sitting with for ages and causes you to realize how significant it could be to you—an example of that is this catalogue called The Spiritual in Abstract Art, a copy of which had been sitting around at my first ever bookstore gig and one day my partner at the time pulled it off the shelf and took it home and to this day it’s one of my favorite things, yet I had been sitting there staring at it every day for weeks without giving it much thought at all. Then there are cases where you know someone’s name and legacy and almost take it for granted that the work itself would be so special. One fairly recent example that comes to mind is Maria Sabina, who I always basically knew as “the very important psychedelic mushroom woman” but when I came across a copy of the book of her writing (although she herself dictated it but did not write it) I was completely blown away at the depth of her words and work. There are a lot more examples like that, the list could go on and I could really reveal just how caught up I am in my own ways.
Each a little pathway of discovery which I think many great readers will find familiar.
What have you read about bookstores over the years that was so impactful it made you want to open your own?
I'm not sure that anything I've read about bookstores led to me opening one, per se. My feelings and motivations are more based on experience, growing up in NYC when there were more weird little bookstores and record stores, and hearing about an even more thriving time for these stores from my father who grew up here in the 60's, and so on. Truth be told, my path to this seemed to unfold so organically that even more than "wanting" to do it there seemed to be a sense of direction compelling me that I had to do it, some kind of inevitability. I got my first job at a bookstore almost by accident and it grew from there—while working for other people I observed what I thought they were doing well and what I thought they were doing poorly, and also realized I had a knack for storing a lot of information at once and for finding treasure in unlikely ways, and when some surprising circumstances led to this opportunity I basically had my whole approach worked out in my head and the sort of stupid confidence that it takes to go off the deep end. I guess you could also say that I “read” the cityscape and that motivated me, too, which is to say that the Bloomberg era sucked so much life out of this city and it has always motivated me to push some character back into it with a little more gusto.
Real life vs the read life, I love it. Can you indulge me just a bit and mention anything you’ve ever read about bookstores that you still think about?
Ha! I might have to let you down a little and say honestly I don’t read about other stores and I’m not sure I have anything at all specific…but I suppose reading about the Peace Eye bookstore added to the confidence that I could run a store and still be a creative person and a freak if I wanted to be…and piss off the cops, too. Less specifically I’ll say that any time I read about the stereotypes of bookstore owners being either snobby, aloof, or disinterested in customers it sticks with me to consciously counteract that stereotype and to greet everyone who walks in the door and try to make them feel welcome and engaged, especially since Aeon could largely be considered “esoteric” or obscure to the general population and my intention has always been to open things up rather than narrow them.
My wife and I certainly felt genuinely welcomed when we entered. I’ve never understood when a bookstore experience isn’t anything but friendly.
What do you know is out there that you wish a customer would come in and offer to sell to you?
That's tough. I'm always most interested in the things I don't know. I have plenty of favorites, plenty of books I've never handled that are mythical and desired but the way my mind operates and part of how I approach the store is to engender as much surprise and revelation for myself as possible.
How often do you experience true surprise and revelation in the store?
Well, the revelation with material comes more often when I’m out in the world with my sleeves rolled up, which is still my preferred method of gathering material. Either picking around piles or being invited into someone’s home to see their collection, that’s where the most magical discoveries occur. But in the store it’s often enough for sure. There are periods at Aeon where it feels like every day for many days in a row people are coming to me with collections and information and that doors are being opened I never knew existed and which reshape my whole understanding of what’s out there. These are periods where I can’t help but feel like I’m the luckiest person on earth, doing what I do on a daily basis. I try to cultivate it best I can, keeping relationships that I think other booksellers might veer away from, as well as just making sure to treat everyone who walks in the door with equal respect, since you never know which walk-in might come back to you a week later with treasure. I also have a tendency to put stuff to the side to spend more time with and that way the discoveries can trickle in later even when it’s slow, so basically Aeon feels like an endless realm of discovery to me, even though I’m completely at the center of it. I think the most important thing towards revelation in the bookstore or in life is being open-minded and forming the right relationships, both of which are aided by one another. I’ve been really lucky with the people around me who help me find my way to these discoveries and I also have always maintained an attitude in my personal life wherein I try to approach the world as a curious child might.
What are some signed copies you’ve ever held in your hands which have been most meaningful to you?
I generally don't fetishize signatures that much but I do love one with a good context. Some highlights: I found at a thrift store two copies of a book by Albert Hoffman both signed to Ralph Metzner, which I thought was pretty great. I once found, also at a thrift store, a signed first edition of William Gaddis’ The Recognitions, which is a really important book to me, and especially because he was not really interested in signing his books it has a lot of meaning to me that I was the one who happened to be in the right place at the right time to find it (of course also the fact that I paid $2 for it helps). I have a great signed Terence McKenna book which I love because it’s one of his less digestible books but the inscription implies that he considered it his most important work, and I appreciate that kind of inside scoop straight from the author's hand. I bought off the street in NYC a Max Frisch book, Montauk, which is about an extramarital affair he had and it was inscribed by him to the very lover about whom the book is written, pretty special association.
Those are each wonderful. Your heart must have been racing with the Gaddis in your hands!
Funny enough I was actually on the phone while I found it, finalizing a totally absurd but fairly lucrative opportunity involving someone filming something at Aeon, so I went from meaningless jackpot to meaningful jackpot really quickly. I was definitely in another world as I continued looking around, holding it tightly in my hand, almost afraid to let the checkout person handle it any further. I basically skipped and smiled all the way home. Very rarely does the world seem to speak so directly to you to say that you were in the right place at the right time.
You’re surrounded by books all day, so how much do you read when the store is closed and from which specific titles or writers are you never too tired to derive pleasure?
That’s funny—people assume I read all day and night, but as most bookstore owners, I don’t read nearly as much as I did before all of this. I used to read constantly but Aeon takes most of my focus in that way and by the end of the day my head is swimming with information, so I need to meditate and detach a bit from the way of the word... I also make music and visual work (and occasionally have a life of sorts) so after the day is through with the store I focus more on that, but I do leave a little time every day to take in something. On a daily basis I read mostly from spiritual disciplines, Sufism and Buddhism, which are both perfect reading in this way, being comprised often of short statements aimed at clearing the mind rather than filling it up, and things that you can weave in and out of at all times without losing the plot, per se. I always have something of Hazrat Inayat Kahn or Ib'n Arabi that I'm in and out of, and I have hundreds of books in the Buddhist tradition which I can read one page of daily and feel as though I've read an entire book. I also appreciate Clarice Lispector in this way, right now particularly her crônicas, as I feel like she embeds each paragraph with an entire universe that makes me want to waltz with her at 1/100th of the speed at which I would with others.
Do you have any regrets from ever getting rid of any books from your own shelves?
I certainly do! However, in trying to recall any certain one right now I'm drawing a blank—which is a good sign, because it can't have been that much of a regret, actually. I am constantly finding new things to the point where it becomes absurd to even fetishize anything, knowing something even more meaningful is just around the corner. In any case I am pretty cognizant of keeping the copies of books that had a personal energy or meaning, whereas anything I've sold which I may have regretted I could replace in due time without feeling the loss.
With which writers would you have most desired to be their drinking buddy while they were working on certain works?
I think I would have liked to smoke a pack of cigarettes deep into the night with Clarice Lispector while she was writing the Passion According to G.H.. I'm not sure if this counts exactly but I wouldn't mind a vodka with Andrei Tarkovsky while he was adapting/conceiving of Stalker... I would say a whiskey with Wlliam Gaddis during either of his major masterpieces, but I imagine the pendulum could swing either way as to whether that would be a joy or a tragedy. Those are all pretty heavy sounding nights... Perhaps I would have a drink with Daumal during a Night of Serious Drinking to lighten things up.
Ha, yes!
Whose individual libraries would you do all you could to acquire if you were told they’re available and seeking a buyer?
I’m not sure if it’s always assured that you can surmise an individual's library based on their other achievements or outward facing appearances, so it’s hard to say. I just spent a year dealing with what to me was the ideal collection for myself and Aeon, actually—basically in complete synch with my own interests from top to bottom—but I don’t think I could have guessed based on any available information that their library would have been what it was and in that way it was actually an eye-opening experience. Likewise I once bought part of the collection of a well-known film and TV actor and it was mostly occult and spiritual texts, which was a total joyful shock, considering he was so prominent in pop culture and in no way could I have known going into it that there would be so much odd and meaningful material there.
That being said, and assuming we're talking about living people, I would be curious about the library of Lucy Lippard, whose work and various involvements I’ve long admired. I'd like to handle the library of Jerome Rothenberg, as I imagine it resonates with my interest in the cross-pollination of the avant-garde with international spiritual and ritualistic traditions. I'd certainly like to buy the libraries of some of my most devoted customers! Of those not living I would pay good money to have spent some time with the accumulated library of Harry Smith (including all of the books he must've lost, thrown out, sold, etc), although I don’t know how much of it would actually be resalable so it would mostly just be for my own education and enjoyment.
For sure, I’ve often wondered myself what was seen and found by the first people who entered Harry’s place after he died.
Which three books would you be quickest to recommend to most anyone who comes into the store?
Tough to limit to three! I never push my preferences on people without hearing first what they are after, but if I have them in stock and am given carte blanche: for literature alone I’d say Lispector, Daumal, or Gaddis, who I’ve already mentioned, Otherwise Hazrat Inayat Khan’s Mysticism of Sound and Music and Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, and the Tao Te Ching are three books which have had the greatest impact on me but which are easy enough to engage with no matter what your intellectual background.
Whose last book was over a decade ago and you’re eagerly awaiting anything new they’d release?
I don't really know if I have an answer to that, actually. I think that anyone who I would want more from is gone from this earth and there's so much to read already and that whatever needs to come will come, eventually… I used to be a writer long ago and it’s been over a decade since I even wrote anything properly so I wouldn’t mind seeing something of my own!
Good response and maybe your answering to all these questions will prompt you to continue. Thanks Josiah!
Josiah Wolfson in his shop
I remember when I first saw it and thought "Bob Nickas" is just a great name that is easy to remember, unable to be mispronounced, and looks and sounds good. I still do.
I remember seeing Bob in a photograph from a 2010 Vice interview (conducted coincidentally by OGR-er Jesse Pearson) where he was wearing black cowboy boots. I remember being impressed because I think cowboy boots are eternally cool and especially on someone who lives in New York City. I remember meeting him maybe seven or eight years later for the first time and he was wearing what looked to be the same black cowboy boots. I remember telling him I liked both occurrences.
I remember at the same meeting Bob giving me a copy of Lee Lozano: Lozano c. 1962, which he wrote text for, and also very generously offering me a copy of 69 / 96, a catalog he edited for a show he co-curated, but I already had it, along with one or two others offered as well. I now know giving copies of his books to friends and colleagues is a gesture Bob cherishes. I remember being touched by it. I also remember wishing he had had a copy of his The Wonderful and Frightening World of...The Fall as I wasn't able to get my hands on it, and still haven't to this day. One Fall-related book I can and will get is his brand new one about lead singer Mark E. Smith called Slang King: M.E.S. On Stage 1977-2013.
I remember Bob, still at same meeting, rolling his eyes when I brought up the name of my friend Kenny Goldsmith. I remember being very eager for the upcoming release of a book called The Anti-Museum: An Anthology which was going to include texts by both of them.
I remember also being very excited to finally get a copy when I found out there was going to be a second printing of Bob's Catalog of the Exhibition, a fantastic book which brings together new texts written to accompany 79 exhibitions organized by Bob between 1984 and 2011.
I remember the late Jim Walrod telling me Bob is the only art critic whose opinion matters.
I remember reading Index magazine in the early 2000s and not realizing until a few years later that Bob was its co-creator (along with Peter Halley). I remember as I looked at back issues from 1996-1999 (Bob's years there as editor) thinking of course that's why it was always so spot-on with who they featured.
I remember running into Bob in late 2019 on White Street and him telling me I had to go a few doors down to Ortuzar Projects to see the Suzanne Jackson show that was on at the time. The gallery and artist were new to me, both were excellent, and I've since then not wanted to miss whatever they present.
I remember also reading these books by or with text from Bob: Komplaint Dept., The Dept. of Corrections: Collected Writings 2007–2015, At Home/Not at Home: Works from the Collection of Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg, Painting Abstraction, Tom Sandberg: Photographs 1989-2006, Theft Is Vision, Peter Hujar: Night, No Problem: Cologne/New York 1984-1989, and Paul Mogensen & Steven Parrino. I know I am forgetting some.
Once you know Bob and his work you don't forget either. - WDV
WDV: How often do you consult a specific book or magazine on your shelves when writing and do you always know where everything is?
BN: The room where I write is also my art library, where the monographs and catalogs are shelved A to Z. Unfortunately, I ran out of space not long after I had the shelves built, by a friend from my own design. They go almost to the ceiling and run between rooms. That was over ten years ago. Most of the books I've acquired since are stacked on the floor, impeding access to the lower shelves. If I need to locate anything between O and Z, considerable effort is involved. A to N, it's all right there. When I'm writing I often get up and turn from my desk to the wall of books. Much preferable to consult a book than go online. Sometimes when I have a book in hand, leafing through it, I imagine a prompt in the upper right corner that warns: Page won't load. That never happens. Obviously, I'm not a digital guy. I like to say, the hand is also digital. Running out of space took on a new and unhappy turn in recent years when I began storing books in the kitchen, and these are not cookbooks.
The books and catalogs that I've written are on shelves by the front door and were filled up long ago. I try to keep at minimum three to five copies of everything. As much as possible I give out books I've written or co-published. For one thing it's quite satisfying. But it's also practical because multiple copies take up, more and more, increasingly precious space. The shelves that continue into the bedroom are for records. The number of records I have is wildly disproportionate to the amount of shelf space for them, one of the reasons why I have lately been giving away and selling records from my collection. All non-art books are in the bedroom, since I read in bed and there's nowhere else to put them. Space—and weight—considerations come into play when I'm attracted to an oversize book in a store. Needless to say, hefty volumes never come home with me.
I want to focus on your own books where you’re contributor or sole author as you could theoretically stop bringing in any others—though of course that likely won’t happen. You’re showing no signs of slowing down writing and adding texts to books, so two questions:
1) How many titles are we talking about since the dedicated space was filled up long ago and you keep multiple copies of each?
2) I’ve always been curious if/how often prolific published writers/critics, like yourself, consult their own books or if they mostly remember everything they’ve written?
It's not possible to remember everything I've written, especially when you're asked about something from thirty years ago, which happened just last week. Someone writing a master's thesis on Felix Gonzalez-Torres got in touch, with questions related to a specific work, the go-go dance platform from 1991, as it was discussed in the conversation I'd done with Felix that year. It was published under the title "All the Time in the World," and has come to be considered an essential source on the artist. That interview and the one I did with Andy Warhol in '86 were my most requested for reprints and translations over the years.
In order to reply to his questions, I had to re-read parts of the conversation, and returning to an old text is not exactly my favorite thing to do. After something is published I usually only read it once and never again. I might go back to check a date or a quote; that's the extent of it. In the end, I wrote a long reply, almost as if I was making extended notes for a new essay on the artist. Quite a bit of effort on my part and it's not like I'm his thesis advisor.
As for the books and catalogs I've written or contributed to, they now total about 165.
Where would you like everything to end up when the time comes and are there specific desired places for specific items?
I would imagine that's going to be someone else's problem, not mine, and it won't bother me at all. A friend once asked what I planned to do with my papers, as if they were significant enough to need a future home, a university library or archive. I told him, and he thought I was joking, that I might get a shredder at some point. What should be left for posterity? Bags of confetti. The books and the art…some should be given away and some will be sold, little by little, until it's all gone. The apartment was almost empty, quietly monkish, when I settled in. There was a desk, a single chair, some books and a mattress on the floor. I love symmetry. I'd be happy if it went back to that in the end.
You’re browsing through your favorite bookstore. What’s your thought process like as you determine what you want to buy? Are the blurbs an influence, a review you read, something someone you trust told you, etc?
I don't know that I have a favorite bookstore. I go to all of them, the way you might at one time have had various partners, a sort of bookstore and record shop promiscuity. One of my preferred locations for browsing isn't a store at all, but the tables that Jen Fisher, also known as Vortexity Books, used to have, and hopefully will again in the spring, on Avenue A across from Tompkins Square Park. I'm a big walker and someone who makes the rounds, so to speak. On a nice day I would leave home, stopping first at the Housing Works Bookstore on Crosby Street, then check out the window at Mercer Street Books, on to the East Village and Good Records on E. 5th Street (which later became Stranded, not as good, and pricey), Karma, further over on E. 3rd, Mast on Avenue A, Jen's tables, where I always found interesting things. After all that I'd need something to eat, and Superiority Burger, the best veggie burger in the city—maybe in the country?—is just around the corner. Last stop Academy Records on 12th street. If I had any energy left and my bag wasn't too heavy, I would check out the Rare Book Room at Strand, which lately has been closed.
In terms of what I'll buy, I can't say a blurb exerts any particular influence. I do read a lot of reviews. At times I've had the feeling to be reading more reviews of books than books. In addition to Bookforum and the book section in the Sunday Times, where I go first to the Letters column, I have to admit to having spent time with the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal, which covers a lot. But reviews aren't that influential for the simple reason that, just as I primarily buy used records, I'm mostly looking at used books. This is where recommendations from friends come in.
Since you mention her twice, what is it about Jen and Vortexity Books, besides selling on the street, that means so much, especially when she’s so close to both Karma and Mast, making that small triangle arguably the premier NYC location for book lovers?
A lot of bookshops carry the same titles, or there are bound to be overlaps. Jen has books that no one else has, and in fact the owner of Mast buys from her on occasion. She only has used books, good ones, and at reasonable prices. There's also the person herself, who I really enjoy talking to and hanging out with. I genuinely like to buy books from Jen. Being out on the street all sorts of interesting characters come by. It's alive, if sometimes uncomfortably for Jen. There's an energy that's missing inside a store. I myself have a certain energy and sense of humor and I thrive on interacting within a situation. Some shops are friendly enough and some are uptight. In a place like that I may come across as some sort of crackpot. You know what I mean when I say there are times when you have to behave yourself, and times when you're free to be yourself.
I bet she is loaded with interesting character stories...
I’m interested that you read the letters in the Times Book Review first. Do you find them that revelatory and/or enjoyable? If you’ve always been a letters reader, which magazines or newspapers historically always had your favorites?
It's not just that the letters are right upfront in the section, but it's a follow-up to the book reviews of the week or two before. What I notice is when someone writes in to point out something that was wrong or overlooked, where there was a particular bias or a real sin of omission. The Times is supposed to be the paper of record. Well, sometimes the record skips. I have to say, the intelligence, the knowledge, of many who write in letters to the Book Review makes me wonder if they should have been the reviewers. Although the letters needn't constitute a complaint column from week to week, I've noticed that the Times publishes any number of letters, more and more it seems, that are absolutely congratulatory and praiseful. Here, the paper, at least in this section, really strokes itself. I'm not otherwise a letters reader, and I have never in my life written a letter to the editor.
Do you like giving books as gifts? How about receiving them as gifts?
Not only do I derive immense satisfaction from putting good books in the hands of friends, there are a few that I have given over and over again. Octavia Butler, Bloodchild and Other Stories, her only collection of short stories. I can't tell you how many I've given out over the years. Same with César Aira, An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter. The last person I gave it to was Mary Boone, for her birthday, when she was in jail. She and I share the same birthday. Cookie Mueller, Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black. That's a book I love giving to friends. Once I ducked into the New Museum bookstore in order to pick up a copy as a present and they didn't have any. I complained to the person at the register who said, "We don't have copies because you bought them all." One thing these three books have in common is they are small format. You want others to be turned on by them, and they are, but portability seems an important part of the equation.
Receiving books from friends, yes, one of the pleasures in life, even when they at first seem daunting or the subject is going to set you off. A friend gave me a huge history of the czars, The Romanovs: 1613-1918. History is one of my strongest areas of interest, but I was overwhelmed with this one until I got into it, and then a page-turner across three hundred years. All the while I felt as if I was learning as much about the palace intrigue of old Russia—the many poisonings—as the country today under Putin. In the same way, my plunge into books on the Civil War, especially its prelude, resonated with recent American history. My friend Noah Dillon gave me a copy of Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, by David Graeber, best known for Debt: The First 5000 Years. Although I enjoyed the book, I took offense when he identified art curator as a bullshit job. Like a lot of people who may not be familiar with the art world and how it works, I had the feeling he may have mixed up art advisors with curators. A good curator can make all the difference with an exhibition, choosing the works, installing them well, writing an insightful text, and so on. His identifying art curator as a bullshit job, as I recall, accounted for the least investigation of any job in the book; possibly not more than a short paragraph. That made me think he didn't know enough about it to go into any detail. Still, I took it personally, and even if there are some b.s. curators out there, I did think that if we ever crossed paths that I would certainly disabuse him of the general misperception. Then, just last year, he unexpectedly and sadly passed away. He was only 59. The premature deaths of admired writers—Donald Barthelme, Octavia Butler, also under 60—is a topic for another day. Maybe the best present of a book I ever received was Félix Fénéon's Novels in Three Lines, the brilliant, terse, darkly comic items contributed anonymously to the newspaper Le Matin in 1906. He was an art critic, art dealer and anarchist, making him a real hero of mine.
Back in the '80s a modest but incredible publication was given to me by Cady Noland, 100 Ways To Disappear and Live Free. Make of that what you will. It dates to 1972, from Eden Press of Fountain Valley, California. Mine is the revised and enlarged version from 1978. It's meant as a guide to "escape [the] past and secure a new future." Besides advice on adopting an assumed name, getting fake IDs, using a PO box for your mail, cutting ties with family, and minimizing contact with law enforcement, some of the tips include:
"Avoid having arguments or run-ins with neighbors. An old unresolved grudge might be just the spark that sends an investigator to your new location. 'Getting even' is a passion few people can resist."
"Be very careful about who comes to see you at your residence. If what you do or the people with whom you must deal are 'interesting,' it might be best to arrange get-togethers elsewhere. Keep your nest clean—good 'criminal' advice."
And this one's quaint, but remember we're back in the '70s:
"If you're planning to remain in the same general area, don't use your old library card anymore. Chuck it and apply for another at another branch, under another name, of course."
I can’t proceed without savoring this: “The last person I gave it to was Mary Boone, for her birthday, when she was in jail.” That’s an opening sentence of a short story.
And you’re right about Graeber probably mixing up advisor vs curator.
How important is reading non-art material to being a singular art curator?
Well, I don't believe she should have been in jail. It was Martha Stewart all over again. Successful women being publicly punished? That's justice? When so many men on Wall Street are caught with their hands in the cookie jar and get a little slap on the wrist. My sense is that when people like Mary are caught for tax evasion it's enough that they pay the taxes, plus the penalty and interest. That's what I see as paying your debt—if not to society then to the IRS.
I don't think of books that aren't about art as non-art material. And then there's a whole interzone of books that relate to art while being about other things, as the last three I've read. Adrian Dannatt's fantastic collection of obituaries, Doomed and Famous, a book you're not unhappy to have been left out of. Seth Price's Dedicated To Life. Yes, he's an artist, but the book is mostly written as verse, an extended deadpan comic-poetic hybrid that began as "an experimental Young Adult novel" whose central character is "a weirdly articulate ten-year old girl." The best piece in it, however, is written in diary form—his own. I know it's the best because I wanted it to go on when I came to the end. And then there's Michael Bracewell's Re-Make/Re-Model: Becoming Roxy Music. This is decidedly not a rock bio—the band only coalesces in the last fifty pages, "becoming" is key to the story. The book is focused on the experiences of Bryan Ferry, Brian Eno and Andy Mackay at art school in the mid- to late-'60s, when a decisive shift from a very moldy, staid situation opened up to something new—Mod culture, fashion especially, and American Pop art—aided and abetted by the influence of Richard Hamilton primarily. Interesting to consider how things turned out for Eno, who when he was at school was almost always on the verge of being expelled, and who some instructors would have voted "least likely to succeed." My one criticism is Bracewell's overuse of a word that's always bound to announce itself: sartorial.
I just tucked into Adrian’s new book recently as well and fully concur and your descriptions of the other two make both sound very appealing. I love that one criticism you mention.
Have you ever read any books about writing?
The simple answer to that would have to be: never. Isn't every great book about writing?
No disagreement here. Well then, what did you read that made such an impression that you wanted to start writing for others to read?
There really was no particular plan, and it wasn't something read but someone encountered. In school I was the TA for the art critic Gregory Battcock, a dandy/Marxist/bon vivant, known for his anthologies, particularly Minimal Art. I had switched from a boring journalism program to the art department, where all the odd, interesting people were. I wasn't studying art. Was I studying anything at all? Watching movies mostly. But he was my introduction to the New York art world. Through him I got to visit the Factory for the first time and meet Warhol. I still have a copy of Popism: The Warhol '60s, which is probably his best book. It had just come out and there was a stack of them on a table near the door. As people were leaving, he would sign a copy and hand it to them. Being junior to everyone else, I was last in line. When he was about to sign I said, "Oh, do you have to?" He looked confused, obviously. I "explained" by saying that I thought one day the valuable books would be the ones he hadn't signed. With that he drew a big dollar sign on the title page and signed his name. Everyone else got a signed book. Bratty as I was back then, I got a signed drawing.
And I’d guess worth multiple $ today.
Can you share your favorite used bookstore finds where you felt you were practically stealing because you found such unexpected gems for so cheap?
Like everyone else of a certain age, true bookstore finds, or steals, are really a matter of the pre-internet years. Living in New York, my best finds are books in the street, for free. It's not uncommon to come across a whole box of interesting things. It's true as well that you'll dig in and come up empty, as I did with a pile of guides to buying fine wine—a sure sign of the new yuppies here in Soho now. I remember once the sight of books that had been neatly arranged on a long window ledge. Among them was Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror: An Essay On Abjection. Opening the book I saw there was a signed dedication on the title page.
Fabulous. The few times that’s happened to me I always want the dedicatee to be someone notable as well. I once got a used book dedicated to David Remnick.
Anything else unexpected that you’ve come across in a book, from the street or say the Strand, that was pleasing?
I bought a used copy of George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, which is a must-read. It's his first book, from 1933, a memoir of scrappy and desperate times, in the second part living the hard-bitten life of a tramp on the road in England. In one instance, he gets himself arrested intentionally just to find out what it's like to spend Christmas Eve in jail. There was the stub of a movie ticket the previous reader had used as a bookmark, common enough to find. It was for a screening at Film Forum of Come and See, the most harrowing anti-war movie I have ever seen. I believe that its main characters, two young kids, were subjected to real bombs and ammunition. No exaggeration to say that after it's over you are almost as shell-shocked as they must have been. My friends Bruno and Ivana had taken me, and the ticket stub was from the very same day and time we had gone, so whoever had the book was in the theater when we were. That was also the last time, sadly, that I've gone to a movie.
Wow, that’s a great one. I wish we could know why the person sold it.
What’s one obscure book you have and love that almost no one knows about?
An Account of the Crimes of Peter Thiel and His Subsequent Arrest, Trial and Execution, published by the guitarist Bill Orcutt. It's a visual looping stutter across 72 pages that's based entirely on the title. This came with a limited edition record, of the same title, that Orcutt self-released in 2017. The book states: No rights reserved. This work is free of known copyright restrictions.
What are the two best books about any aspect of culture (American or abroad, doesn’t matter) from the years you were in your 20s and 30s?
I'm not sure I'm answering the question exactly, but since I aimed to be an art writer it was clear that the writers who I absorbed the most from in that period weren't critics but artists: Ad Reinhardt, Robert Smithson and Dan Graham. When I moved to New York in the fall of '84, I looked forward to the art reviews in the Village Voice every week, especially when Gary Indiana was the paper's art critic, between '85 and '88. All those columns were brought together in Vile Days, edited by Bruce Hainley. It was a pleasure to revisit them, even if his stylistic power combined with his considerable acumen left me feeling fairly inferior. Oddly enough, I don't recall it having that effect back then. Speaking of the Voice, the artist Aura Rosenberg, an old friend of mine, gave me a copy of Jill Johnston: the Disintegration of a Critic, which collects her writing for the paper from '60 to '74. Her early dance columns are, for me, the best. Once the book was past them, I lost interest, or I was somewhat floundering in her stream of consciousness. Despite a rather free relation to punctuation, she wasn't in any way unaware of the predicament. In full flight by 1971, she would observe: "I know now that I can only ever hope to be totally misunderstood." I recommend her book on Jasper Johns, Privileged Information, which was published in 1996, and is fairly, or is that unfairly?, unsung. Nowadays I'll read Hilton Als on any subject.
Yes, was so pleased to get to read those pieces by Gary in that collection. I find it fascinating and admire your honesty that it left you feeling inferior now, all these years later, when you didn’t then and now also have decades under your belt of writing about art. Can you tell me more?
That's just the way it is when you read something so beautifully put together, and it's not simply a matter of style. I'm admiring style and the mind converged on the alternating currents, in Gary's case, of high regard and outrage, love and disgust. It's possible as well that my image of him living a fairly dissolute life yet still able to craft a beautiful piece of writing, seemingly effortlessly, and under the demanding deadline of a weekly paper, is why I'm impressed to this day. He also wrote one of my favorite true crime books, Depraved Indifference, the story of mother-son killer grifters Sante and Kenneth Kimes. And his essay length book on Pasolini's Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, published by the British Film Institute, is excellent.
How many printed things you can read would you say come into your home in an average year and are you a good purger when/if the time comes?
I would have no idea. It's only newspapers and magazines that get tossed out—after I've clipped anything I might need at a later date. Even that clipping of articles and reviews has slowed down in recent years, for all the obvious reasons, not least the sense that you're already your own bursting-at-the-seams archivist.
Look at your books right now. What are three which are $15.00 or less and you wholeheartedly recommend them?
An unconventional, amusing dictionary is always useful, and Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary is the masterwork. His definition, for example, of Year: "A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments." For me, and I'm not alone, happiness arrives when something long out-of-print, and that can only be found on the Abebooks site at a ridiculously inflated price, is returned to print, once again affordable. An original copy of John Miller's Cinematic Moments, from 1977, would set you back $200 at least. Used copies of the reprint are a fraction of that. His observations, measured and cerebral, with hints of deadpan humor, suggest a meeting of Rainman and Proust, their repetitions hypnotic. One entry: "I am walking by a parking lot. I notice that the attendant has grouped all the red cars in one section, all the blue in another, and so on. To me this is pleasing." Another: "I'm rereading something I'd written a few days ago. It's a rough outline of what I had on my mind. Now I can't make sense of it. Without a coherent expression, does this idea exist?"
And I can darkheartedly recommend any of Alissa Bennett's 'zines in which she mines the tawdriness of bad behavior, inept criminality, and celebrity death, while also exploring a form of autobiographical confession—talk about identifying with your sad-sack subjects. Among them, Dead Is Better, Legalize Crime, and Pretend You're Actually Alive.
Hey Heinzfeller Nileisist, publisher of these fantastic zines by Alissa, it’s not too soon to anthologize them… Thanks Bob!
Bob Nickas, photographed by Jason Metcalf
]]>You can (and should!) still subscribe for 2021, but the rate is now just a bit higher at $125. It bears repeating what Mark Nelson said in last week's OGR interview: "To consider the sheer number of hours—many of them mind-numbing—that go into the creation of well-made books is to realize they are already, quite literally, the best deal you will ever get for your dollar."
And this is no recession-related low pricing (this is the last part about money and PI's titles and then I'll move on, I swear I'm not getting a cut on any future sales, I just feel this strongly about what they do), they want you to not have to think twice to own their books, it's part of the very core of their philosophy:
"Our mission is to publish out-of-print books that remain vital to ongoing conversations around artistic practice and to publish contemporary books by emerging, mid-career, and established artists. All of our publications are distributed internationally and priced at cost so that they are affordable and accessible to the largest possible audience."
The co-founder and artistic director of Primary Information is James Hoff and I've been intrigued for a long time by his singular painting, sound, performance, and publishing practices. I don't know if I discovered PI first or James, but I remember thinking (and still do!) that his working with it was a perfect match. Before I let you go, please download (for free thanks to my dear friend Kenny Goldsmith's essential avant-garde archive, UbuWeb) this PDF, which is my favorite example of why what both James does on his own and for Primary Information is so special to me, and many others. -Wes Del Val
WDV: Who are dead writers important to you with whom you wish you could have regularly exchanged books and discussed them with each other?
JH: Hmm I can’t really speak to people I didn’t know. Of course, there are people that had great knowledge or libraries, but they may have been jerks (in which case I would never loan them a book) and sharing a book involves a certain sense of vulnerability. So, I can only answer by naming a few people that I have known that I wish were still with us. One is Steve Dalachinsky, a poet who sold books on the street in SoHo for several decades. He turned me on to a lot of great work (both books and music). Another is Seth Siegelaub (for whom Primary Information is named after). We didn’t have a book-sharing relationship and we weren’t particularly close, but aside from his well-known contributions to art history, he was also known for compiling libraries and bibliographies on Marxism and media, textiles, and physics, among others. Shannon Michael Cane whom I worked with at Printed Matter. We never really shared books, but he had the type of limitless knowledge of artists’ books, art and music that only an artist could have.
I think of these three, all memorable characters in their own special way, regular OGR readers may know Steve the least. Can you share some fond memories of when he was selling books on the street?
I used to pop by and see him when I could. He never cut me any deals and generally just sold tourist fare, but that table was always buzzing. He introduced me to Tuli Kupferberg and Rashied Ali at different points. When Tuli rolled up, he said “This is James, he’s young and has no idea who you are.” Tuli said okay, and I was annoyed, but that’s how it goes. I later worked with Tuli on a Fugs exhibition at Printed Matter. When I went to pick up all the books and magazines he published in the 60s, he pulled out deadstock copies of 1,001 Ways to Live Without Working and went through each page flattening them and breaking the glue binding with force and purpose. When his partner objected, he said “500 years from now it will be dust, just like us”. Good point. We later published facsimile editions of his Yeah Magazine at Primary Information.
Rashied was super nice but we had less interaction, probably because I was speechless... I mean he was one half of Interstellar Space. Steve and I met through the poetry and music world and I spent a lot of time in his apartment with him and his wife Yuko Otomo. Steve told me once that publishing is a teaching gig and that is how I’ve thought of it ever since. So many friends spent time at the table. I guess selling books is a teaching gig, too.
Those are lovely reminiscences James, thank you. P.S. I probably would’ve had the same reaction upon meeting Rashied Ali...
Which writers are more interesting to read about than their own writing is to read?
Arthur Cravan, Racter, Tony Conrad, are a few that come to mind.
Cravan was a poet, proto-dadaist prankster, boxer, and nephew of Oscar Wilde who died at sea trying to reunite with his wife Mina Loy. He seemed to be always in trouble, always in good spirits, and always with an absurd plan. Of all the texts I’ve read about him, I’ve yet to see one on the merits of his poetry.
Another awful writer, Racter was a computer program that wrote prose and poetry. The book The Policeman’s Beard is Half-Constructed (published in 1983) is supposedly the first book written by a computer.
Conrad is perhaps controversial since I have published a book of his writings, which are great by the way, but his biography cuts through so many aspects of the post-war avant garde and to some extent pop culture that it’s hard to imagine that the story of his life and work wouldn’t top his writing on Pythagoras, neurolinguistics, or media theory.
What are topics you can’t imagine you’ll ever tire of reading about?
Computer viruses. They make for both great fiction and non-fiction.
You can’t give an answer like that and then leave us hanging, let’s please have great examples of both!
They are close to a half century old at this point and intersect with everything from Bugs Bunny to Iranian nuclear facilities. Of course there are fictional viruses and virus hoaxes, but by fiction I mean that malware and hackers occupy a fictionalized narrative in society, a sort-of tech version of satanic panic. We use them as a catch-all for our collective anxiety around technology (which is not specific to our connected era). We blame election losses on them rather than examining the election systems (electoral college, gerrymandering, voter suppression) that are far more likely to affect results. They make for a good story.
As for real ones, just last week hackers tried to poison part of Florida’s water supply.
All of that said, I have a friend who did buy a voting machine from Ohio a few years ago on eBay or Craigslist. He had it hacked in less than an hour. It still had the 2016 voting rolls on it (shaking my head). When will we finally upgrade from Windows 98?
I love this. I think I could ask the same question to 500 curious, engaged people and I’d not get this answer!
Who is living who you’re most disappointed doesn’t write often enough anymore?
Kenneth Anger. I’m dying for Hollywood Babylon III.
I wonder if most people even realize there was a HB II?
What are volume threes or even an author, artist, or photographer’s third book which were as strong as the first two?
Hmm. Three is definitely not the sexiest number and am a little stumped. But, Ripley’s Game is definitely my favorite Ripley novel and I’d say that Malkovich played the best Ripley in all the movie adaptations. If I recall, it was the third and last good book in the series. The third issue of Jeromy Rothenberg and David Antin’s Some/Thing magazine has a cover by Warhol that I’ve always loved. It’s a sheet of perforated stamps that say “Bomb Hanoi”.
You can only read physical books and magazines and nothing digital or online for the rest of the year. Or vice versa. Which do you choose?
I guess that depends if money is a factor and if nothing digital means all digital sources or just digital magazines and books?
On whatever your current financial situation is and all digital sources, so no news apps, IG, etc.
Digital for sure, if only because I could buy a lot of physical books without the added pressure of reading them.
Ha, deleting that pressure does sound wonderful!
Which people’s or outlets’ book reviews do you consistently care most deeply about?
If we’re talking traditional reviews, none in particular to be honest. I have just never gravitated towards them for some reason. I guess I'm old fashioned, but I tend to follow publishers and bookstores directly. People who work at bookstores that I go to regularly are perhaps the people I trust the most. They have a specialized knowledge that is often undervalued and they work tirelessly. They are the front line workers of the knowledge industry.
The algorithms simply can’t compete. Who at which bookstores is most consistently trustworthy for you?
Matt Shuster at Karma and Josiah Wolfson at Aeon books. Historically, Max Shumann at Printed Matter, too, though I mostly just shuck the PM insta feed these days (algos get a bad rap; they ain't all bad).
Who’s the most famous writer you’ve seen on the street but never met in person?
Hmm. Good question. Nelson Mandela walked past me in London in 1996 (but we were technically indoors).
What defunct newspapers, magazines, and/or journals were too far ahead of their time for their own good?
Radical Software, Triple Jeopardy, Zeitschrift für Alles (Review for Everything), Yeah Magazine, Bit International, SMS, Wedge, Just Another Asshole, Feminist Art Journal, Top Stories, Left Curve.
Though all are of their time, they were either focused on form or content that differentiated them from their peers and still seems relevant today.
I think I’ve only heard of one of those, which is exactly why I asked you James. I love knowing (or think I know) that I share many of the same interests with someone and then see a list like this.
When’s the last time you experienced something similar, where someone you like referred to a number of books or magazines or something else to read which was brand new to you?
It happens constantly. Two weeks ago, I was on a virtual balcony with my friend Mashinka (Firunts Hakopian) who works at the Berggruen Institute and I made the mistake of asking her for an AI ethics reading list. Not only did I not know anyone or anything she recommended, I was in VR and couldn’t write anything down. Later, I tried to recall them but it was hopeless. She’s working on a book that is essentially a sensitivity training manual for future AI in the workplace so I may just wait to read that and crib the footnotes. Truth is, I almost always start in the footnotes of any book. If there aren’t new names I put it down.
Yes! Starting with the footnotes, first class reading hack that.
What have you read the past few years for the first time that made you want to read everything you could by the same writers?
They are younger writers that are dealing mostly with race, media, art, and technology: DeForrest Brown, Jr., Nora Khan, Legacy Russell, Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves, and Aria Dean, among others. I’m mostly interested in what comes next and think we should all consider ourselves on standby for works to come from these thinkers.
Brian Eno composed music for airports. What would you recommend as music for reading?
I’d recommend the hum of everyday life or noise in the classic sense of the word. White noise or musique concrète also works for me, anything that doesn’t carry a melody. I used to read a lot on planes and that was perfect. Stan Brakhage once said that music was an aesthetic error in film. I would perhaps extend that to reading.
What do you read that you consider “light,” but can’t get enough of it?
Media theory. I guess it’s not light, but I don’t read it in a heavy kind of way. I read it like I would read a pulp novel, with little care as to what I retain. Generally speaking, it’s a genre that traffics heavily in teasing out the obscure histories of everyday media. Where else can you learn about the relationships between tinnitus and Colin Kaepernik, cold war encryption and the Beastie Boys, insects and the internet, the movie camera and automatic weapons, mass séances and the collapse of the Soviet Union? It’s basically academic clickbait.
I like that you stated “with little care as to what I retain.” How is your retention generally these days and when was it strongest? Perhaps it’s right now? I know practically everyone says they haven’t read anything since last March, but maybe besides media theory, you have the right present frame of mind for a lot to be soaking in? That’s why I’m curious.
I find that not trying too hard helps. I’ve always been better at absorbing information passively, which is one reason why I’d never shame someone for scrolling while watching a movie or talking at a concert. This is one of many things I miss in our pandemic times; absorbing information indirectly through casual conversation or other forms of incidental or unexpected socializing at openings, dinners, readings, etc. Being on the move also helps.
Isn’t reading one of the worst ways of retaining information? Isn’t information better served through anecdotes, gossip, and jokes?
Yes, yes, and yes. Thanks James!
James Hoff self portrait
I was thrilled when I saw this book was coming as for years I've not been alone in having a deep affinity for the Arensbergs' discerning eyes and open minds which placed in their LA home (densely) some of the most important 20th century modern paintings and sculptures next to Mesoamerican artifacts next to Renaissance works, etc.This is what you'd see just looking at their living room fireplace: three Picassos, three Braques, three Rousseaus, three Klees, four Brancusis, four Duchamps, interspersed with original letters written by Sir Francis Bacon, a leaf from a 1462 Mainz Bible, a monolithic figure from Easter Island, a Peruvian mask, Persian rugs, and at least a dozen pre-Columbian sculptures. Whew! And that's just one part of one room. The book details every object on every surface in every room. You are walking through the Arenbergs house and you get to stare at their art and get an answer for what each piece is which you have a question about. A decade in the making, it is an absolute tour-de-force and must win awards.
Some pertinent details:
Authors: Mark Nelson, William H. Sherman, Ellen Hoobler
Publisher: Getty Research Institute, the kind of institutional support it would have taken to get something like this book produced, plus they're in LA so it makes sense
Designer: Mark again, with his firm McCall Associates
Front cover: Louise and Walter Arensberg and Marcel Duchamp informally gathered, perfect
Spine: a smart use of orange to make it pop on shelves
Website: hollywoodarensberg.com
Yes, Mark is author AND designer. That's why I had to feature him, I found the combination for this special book just too intriguing. Plus the fact that he has years of experience designing books for artists, galleries, and museums as a partner at McCall Associates made me sense that he was a great reader and would give me intelligent, thoughtful responses. He is and he did, did he ever.
I'm sorry this introduction is so long, I already cut a bunch more I wanted to say about this book. Please now proceed. -WDV
WDV: Which designers’ shoulders do you most wish you could have been peering over as they designed book covers?
MN: Alvin Lustig—no competition. But maybe not for the reason other designers might think. Like many people, I admire Lustig's graphic design work, but I’m mostly interested in him because he was truly one of L.A.’s early modernists. He designed the stationery for Walter and Louise Arensberg's Francis Bacon Foundation, as well as brochures, stationery, and other ephemera for the Arensbergs’ next door neighbor, the art dealer Earl Stendahl. I’m not sure how well known those strange little examples are to people who study his work, but they are important to me. I feel so incredibly fortunate that I was able to visit his widow, Elaine Lustig Cohen, a few years before she died. She was able to tell me a few great anecdotes about their time together in Los Angeles, but I wish I knew more of them.
Most great readers of course know him through his numerous New Directions’ designs. I wasn’t aware of this Arensberg connection, but fitting that this info comes from you!
Sadly, I can really only transmit the small amount I know from what she told me and showed me when we met, back in 2014. I was introduced to her through a designer named Doug Clouse, who worked with me for a time at McCall Associates. Doug suggested the two of us meet because he knew she had actually been inside the Arensberg house. In fact, she turned out to be one of only two people my co-authors and I could find who had known the couple personally. Elaine told me that whenever Alvin was meeting with the Stendahls she would walk next door to visit the Arensbergs and to study their collection of more than 1,000 art objects. I hadn’t even realized, until I met her, how much her life had intersected with the subjects of my own interest. At the time of our meeting, much of the reconstruction of the house (in book form) was well underway so I was able to witness, first hand, the joy she felt in revisiting each room.
Speaking of Lustig and ND, were original editions of his books for them important for you to see in person and/or own?
At the time, Doug was going through an intense phase of collecting original Lustig-designed publications and he would often have them at work so we spent a lot of time discussing them. I wouldn’t say it was crucial to have seen them for Hollywood Arensberg, but there can be no doubt that seeing originals of anything is far superior to seeing reproductions. I would be happy to spend most of my waking hours digging through stuff in archives.
You’re handed two $100 bills and can only buy books with all of it. Where are you going and what are you buying?
This is a very poignant question for me because my dear friend Susan Delson has just given me an unnecessarily generous gift certificate as thanks for some assistance I provided on her forthcoming book, Soundies and the Changing Image of Black Americans on Screen: One Dime at a Time (Indiana University Press, Fall 2021). Soundies are these little-known and not so well-understood films that were played in bars and restaurants by dropping a dime into bulky machines called Panorams—by combining sound and image they were sort of a precursor to MTV. Her book doesn't just put a gloss on the well-known performers that were featured in these movies—Nat King Cole or Dorothy Dandrige, for example—it puts the apparatus of their production into an illuminating cultural context and challenges some very base assumptions about race relations in the US. I think it's going to be a tremendously important book. Anyway, Susan bought me the gift certificate at McNally Jackson in Nolita. There are many independent bookstores I love to support, but for this answer at least, I guess I am going there.
Now, what to buy? It’s been troubling me, since I want my choice to be special and remind me of our long friendship. But now that you’ve put an extra $200 on the pile I’m really sweating. I guess with your money I’d buy Kuniyoshi, by Matti Forrer, as I’ve always wanted to know more about ukiyo-e prints. I’d also pick up Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta: A Sixteenth-Century Calligraphic Manuscript Inscribed by Georg Bocskay and Illuminated by Joris Hoefnagel, recently published by the Getty. I’ve been meaning to get that for a while now and it just looks like it will be a pleasure to take in. Neither of these particularly reminds me of Susan though, so I guess I’ll have to let you know later what actually transpires.
Susan’s book sounds very interesting. Thank god for university presses which can accommodate historically important subjects like this without having to solely worry about sales.
Undoubtedly that is true, but I wouldn’t count her out in the sales department! Type “soundie” into YouTube and see what comes up. Now imagine someone helping you understand better what you are actually looking at.
I think you could maybe ask Getty for the calligraphy book since they’re the same publisher as your Arensberg one…;)
I suppose I could. I wouldn’t turn down a free copy, certainly, but I’m a big believer in buying books. I feel so much more connection to them when I have offered a little of myself (that is to say, of my money) by exchange. To consider the sheer number of hours—many of them mind-numbing—that go into the creation of well-made books is to realize they are already, quite literally, the best deal you will ever get for your dollar.
Mind-numbing...so very true. A person can get Hollywood Arensberg for just $65.00?! And of course less from you-know-who.
What are some of the finest book recommendations you’ve ever received and in turn have passed on to others?
Many years ago, someone introduced me to James Joyce’s The Dead. I think it has to be the most moving story ever written—an astounding meditation on the meaning of love and the perils of hubris. I’ve read it too many times to count and it never loses its punch to the heart and the gut. Not long ago I read it aloud to my very young daughter. I thought she would be bored but she stayed right with me all the way through. I think it's important to have at least one piece of writing to treasure this way.
A more recent recommendation I received was John Brewer’s The American Leonardo. It’s the story of a returning World War I veteran and his French wife who try to sell what they believe to be an original Leonardo da Vinci painting. They are slighted by the famous dealer Joseph Duveen and the ensuing years-long legal battle is gripping. I found Brewer's exposition on early court cases challenging the authenticity of paintings, which pitted ideas of connoisseurship against nascent scientific analysis, incredibly engaging. I have since passed it on to at least three others. And I’ve learned that one of them has just passed it on to someone else as well.
Also on the list would be The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, by Stephen Greenblatt. To the extent that I have or need a hero, Lucretius would fill that role. His story isn’t just well-told here, it seems especially urgent given all that’s going on around us. I can’t hand it to anyone else though: that would be a little too much like proselytizing for my taste.
Well you can do it care-free here. I’ve had the ebook of The Swerve for years and maybe now thanks to you recommending it I’ll finally read it.
Great! I’ll be interested to hear what you think…and I won’t even feel as if I’ve told you to buy it.
Whose offices have you been in with the most impressive reference libraries?
Many people I know in the art-world have impressive wrap-around libraries, well-stocked by seemingly limitless budgets for book buying. They are great resources, but the libraries themselves don’t really move me one way or another. My favorite library, by far, belongs to the art historian Charlie Stuckey. One can just feel that he has lived with his books and loved them. They line every wall in his Manhattan apartment but he accesses them with an ease of recall that seems almost supernatural.
“Lived with and loved them” is the crucial distinction you note. I get the sense the many people you know in the art world with impressive, well-stocked wrap-around libraries rarely if ever open any of what they own and are mostly using them as decor because nothing else one can decorate with so inexpensively signifies taste and/or intelligence as does a “right” book on display. Is that a correct assessment?
Hmm… I didn’t mean to suggest that, actually. I only meant that many of the libraries I visit regularly seem to have been generally assembled as a means to an end—that end being the selling of paintings. If a gallery has a 15-million dollar painting by Max Ernst for sale, they quite rightly will want to know everything about it and will therefore purchase every book on Max Ernst. They will do this for every valuable painting they have for sale, ad infinitum, and so their libraries grow exponentially through a kind of transactional accretion. That doesn’t make them bad libraries—they just don’t necessarily communicate the same warmth as one made by an individual out of a love for books or the ideas inside them. Of course I know, abstractly, that there are some people who could theoretically drop many millions of dollars on, say, a 42-line Gutenberg bible just for show. But is there any wrong way to own a book? Don’t answer that.
I won’t, but will mull it, it’s an intriguing point.
What is reading you consider of a quality level which you make sure you never miss regardless of your schedule?
I don’t read much fiction anymore, but I’m still interested in essays or polemics on the writers I was drawn to as a younger person (Nabokov, Camus, etc.). I’m very interested in understanding what drew me to them in the first place and how reception to those books has changed over time. I usually encounter these pieces in the New Yorker and will invariably stop whatever else I am doing to read them. Which reminds me, I just learned recently about Kamel Daoud’s The Mersault Investigation (OK, sorry, I know—it came out seven years ago) a novel told from the perspective of the brother of Mersault’s unnamed “Arab” victim in Camus’ The Stranger. I’m going to buy that after I finish answering these questions for you.
No apologies necessary! No one today, not even our most dedicated and celebrated book reviewers, can possibly keep up with everything.
Has anything book-related embarrassed you?
Of course! But I can’t talk about it—too embarrassing. Also, admitting that I just learned about The Mersault Investigation doesn’t make me feel great. But one must be continually awed—and, dare I say, comforted—by realizing that what we don’t know is so much more vast than what we do know.
What books did you hold in your hands last year which gave you a jolt of excitement for the current state of book design and publishing?
That question is a little unfair, but since it would be tacky to give the prize to Hollywood Arensberg, I’ll have to give it to Aby Warburg: Bilderatlas Mnemosyne: The Original. I would have preferred a little more didactic help, opposite the plates pages, for understanding the associations Warburg may have been looking at in his project (OK, call me lazy), but the idea and the visuals are incredible and just the fact that someone cared enough to get it made makes me excited about the possibilities of the book form. It was published last year by Hatje Cantz to accompany two joint exhibitions: One, at Berlin’s Haus Der Kulturen der Welt and another at the Gemäldegalerie of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. One can get a good sense of the exhibitions (and by extension, the book’s content) online, but I hope some institution in the United States will take it on so it can be more fully appreciated here. The book is big though—and by big, I mean huge—so I would counsel people to measure their available empty space before committing. I love this little animation of the design process posted online by the book’s designers, WilsonWooton.
I don’t speak French, but I really liked the accessibility and feel of this one I picked up last year. You certainly don’t get details of the images, but there is something to be said for being able to get a sense (in print—though maybe this is a case where online experience is superior overall?) of the scope of Warburg’s incredible project without having to break your back or wrists.
Cool! I haven’t seen that book before. I’ll check it out.
How do you handle big/huge books you come across these days that you want to buy? Do you make sure you’re able to create room for them or does their size in addition to what you already own ultimately preclude you from purchasing?
I must admit to feeling real annoyance at books that seem unnecessarily out of scale. The real question is always whether or not a book needed to be big to best get its idea across. If the answer is yes, then I’ll somewhat grudgingly find the space for it.
Can you share favorite memories of developing passions for new subjects because you specifically read about them as opposed to say saw a documentary, heard a lecture, etc?
A single paragraph in the book West Coast Duchamp, in an essay by Naomi Sawelson-Gorse, titled “Hollywood Conversations: Duchamp and the Arensbergs” redirected the course of my life for more than a decade. What more needs to be said about the power of print?
What having to do with reading words makes you the most optimistic for 2021?
The headlines of nearly every newspaper worldwide as they appeared online not long after 12:00 noon EST on the 20th of January.
The design of spines of books is so often plain and boring (most back covers are for that matter as well). Looking at your shelves right now, which titles first jump out due to the designer not forgetting the importance of an eye-catching spine to assist in garnering attention for bookstore customers’ scanning eyes?
This is a beautifully simple question that deserves an absolutely epic answer. I would love to attend a panel discussion in which a designer, an author, a philosopher, a mathematician, and a poet all express their views on the subject. With no such panel imminently planned—and no such thoughtful people on hand—I’ll do my best in a few words. If I simply turn around and look at the many books I have on the desk behind me (those that I am actively using) the two that stand out the most (though for entirely different reasons) are The Lives of Artists and Imponderable: The Archives of Tony Oursler.
The Lives of Artists consists of six small books that package together the collected New Yorker essays of Calvin Tomkins. In these books you can really see designer Kobi Benezri's careful hand at work. Each spine has only one word on it, and the mind is left to fill in the rest. When all six books are put together the entire title and their author come together as one. The interior typesetting is beautifully done, too. It’s really perfect!
The spine of Imponderable works in a completely different way. The book's audacious one-word title presents the type of paradox one might find in a Magritte painting. That is to say, when we see it on a shelf we understand, clearly, that we are looking at nothing other than a book—and therefore logic dictates it must contain words and images to ponder—yet the title forcefully exclaims that the information inside may not be so accessible for this purpose. The thickness of the spine, with its plain but considered typeface, renders this challenge more acutely. It somehow shouts and whispers at the same time. Had the author or designer or publisher put more information on the spine—the subtitle, especially—the effect would have been greatly diminished. Inside, the strange and overwhelming collection of objects presents worlds of magic and pseudoscience (among much other high weirdness) that are both known and unknowable…which is to say, imponderable. I will never find my way out of it.
I should add that I don’t necessarily consider simple informational spines boring (provided they are well typeset). Often it is the case that spines become confusing or over-designed. And they can sometimes even wreck the simplicity or prettiness of a cover—sort of in the same way, I suppose, that ugly shoes can wreck an expensive suit.
Nothing like discussing minutiae with designers! Those are two wonderful examples and descriptions. I wasn’t aware of the Oursler and am kicking myself as I love JRP|Ringier, and agree that what Phaidon did is absolutely a thing of beauty and befitting the writing contained within.
Someone wearing a smoking jacket and an ascot, while puffing away at a pipe, should create a YouTube channel where they have a sort of “fireside chat” about book spines. Just spines, nothing else. I’d tune in.
With which writers do you dream you could have been in regular friendly correspondence?
George Orwell. To me, he has never been surpassed. Homage to Catalonia, Burmese Days, Animal Farm, 1984. The collected essays, too. Pure brilliance. Had I been writing to him though, I quite possibly would have spent some time and energy trying to cheer him up, which maybe would have wrecked his writing or driven him crazy. Better for me not to have done so, I suppose.
Yes, cheering up many creative people through the ages would I think have resulted in a lot of missed masterpieces… Thanks Mark!
Mark Nelson
]]>Because these deep interests of his continually rub off and have introduced me to several works and movements I'd very likely otherwise have had minor awareness of had they not received his caring attention and treatment.
Because of these specific books with his name attached to them: What Nerve! Alternative Figures in American Art, 1960 to the Present; The Collected Hairy Who Publications, 1966-1969; Return of the Repressed: Destroy All Monsters, 1973-1977; and most recently, Peter Saul: Professional Artist Correspondence, 1945-1976. Gee, I see I really go for his books that tell me precisely in the title what years they'll be covering. I also loved what he did ten years ago with two Charles Willeford re-issues.
Those are a few of the reasons I'm pleased to feature Dan Nadel this week.
Dan's biography highlights:
He started and ran the esteemed publisher PictureBox from 1999-2014.
He was co-editor of The Comics Journal from 2011-2017.
He has curated exhibitions at RISD Museum of Art, Matthew Marks, Prism, Derek Eller, Karma; Marlborough, Eva Presenhuber; and Jeffrey Deitch.
He has published essays and criticism in Art in America, the New York Review of Books, and Artforum.
He is currently the curator-at-large of the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at the University of California, Davis.
Amongst other significant balls in the air he is working on a highly anticipated biography of a living giant who, surprise, straddles the comic and art worlds.
Join me in keeping your eyes on whatever Dan does if you haven't been already. -Wes Del Val
WDV:What do you remember reading when you were younger which was most formative in sparking interests which you’re still passionate about today?
DN: D'Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths was something I read over and over again as a kid, as well as a D'Aulaires’ Book of Norse Myths, and a more generic, but (in my memory) cool book about Russian mythology. A coverless copy of an early 1980s Ghost Rider comic book loomed large. So did a Justice League comic book with a villain whose face looked like the melted-face equivalent of Luray Caverns.
Do you still have them and do you still look at and find pleasure in them today? Are there other books from your youth you never stopped regularly opening, up to the present day?
I still have them, but I don’t spend any time with them. Not really. The only books from when I was a kid that I look at now are with my own kid, and that’s Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen. Those two carried over and went right to him. He got much more into my old Batman and Superman comics. So we share those.
Are you precious with your books?
I’m not—unless it’s something actually precious.
So what would you flee with in the standard fire-in-the-house nightmare situation?
I’d rather not take any books if the rest were going to burn. The choice would haunt me... I’m an all or nothing type that way.
When is the last time something visual in a book jarred you in any way?
Maybe eight or nine months ago I bought a book called Images of Horror and Fantasy (Gert Schiff, Abrams, 1978)—it contains a photo of a 1970 installation by Larry Rivers called Caucasian Woman Sprawled on a Bed and Figures of Hanged Men on Four Rectangular Boxes. It’s in the Menil Collection in Houston. Can’t imagine it’ll ever be seen in public in my lifetime. It’s a shocker. But otherwise, though I’m a fraidy cat about horror movies (I can’t watch horror movies), very little in print or art-in-person jars me at all.
Of course after what you just said about it I naturally immediately googled and, whoa, couldn’t even see it online!
How often do you find yourself consulting a book or magazine because somehow there’s just nothing online about the image or subject you’re looking up?
Constantly. For the projects I’m working on now—an exhibition on comics in Chicago, a book on Black cartoonists in Chicago 1940-1980, and a show for the Whitney about surrealism, most of the sources are print-only. In these pandemic times, I am often relying on the kindness of people who can send me xeroxes or even iphone snapshots. So yeah, if you’re looking to write in depth about, well, nearly anything art or comics related, you’re dealing with info that is only in books and magazines, the majority of which have not been digitized. Thus: I accumulate books. I also am lucky to work with great museums and museum workers who can supply scans and access to research databases.
What are some aspects of contemporary book publishing which might surprise other great readers who have never encountered the business?
I had a publishing company for a while, and worked at a distributor, DAP, and I remain consistently amazed by the curiosity and dedication of the publishing and acquisition people and the enthusiasm and knowledge of sales departments and sales reps. These are people who love books and are knowledgeable about books across formats and genres. While I’m at it, the few remaining companies that sell books into libraries amaze me. What a service! I guess readers might be amazed by the sheer quantity of incredibly smart people involved in the space between the writer and the bookstore.
How long have the books in your house looked as they do right now? In other words how often do you rearrange the placement of any of them?
We moved in August, so just since then. We are a two-book-worker household. My wife has her own visual book collection, which she organized and generally leaves in place. The brilliant artist Ohad Meromi designed and built our shelves, so there’s lotsa room for organizing. Me, I move my books around a lot based on projects. So, books migrate in and out of my little office as needed, probably a few times a week. It’s relaxing!
“Lotsa room…” (Sigh) How much more would you say you can take in before space will become an issue? I’m ever curious about how booklovers deal with these not insignificantly-sized things that just keep coming and coming…
“Plenty” is relative. I mean, we just got a slightly bigger Brooklyn apartment and Ohad came up with genius solutions for it. Space is always an issue. I can’t take in much more, really, without getting rid of things. And sometimes after particular projects I can part with various things I’ve accumulated, making room for new accumulations.
What new book did you open in 2020 which made you happiest?
Slant Steps: On the Art World’s Semi-Periphery by Jacob Stewart-Halevy. And not a book, but a zine—pal Frank Santoro’s magnificent radio-play in print form, Caniffer #2, which explores a group of cartoonists in Ohio in the 1930s.
Caniffer #2 seems right up your alley.
How important are zines to you today compared to any other time in your life and outside of art book fairs how do you stay on top of all the tiny and fantastic print productions which are being continually made all over the world?
Oh, this is a funny one. The answer is that I don’t stay on top of it. Happily. I “grew up” in the eighties and nineties. So zines were hugely important to me for music and comics. Chemical Imbalance, Ben is Dead, on and on. But I guess we should focus on comics. When I was in high school and all the way through running PictureBox (so, ugh, I guess roughly 1999-2014) zines were important because for certain artists (John Porcellino, Ron Rege, Megan Kelso, CF, Mister Mike, et al) it was nearly the only way I could see or learn about anything that wasn’t published by one of the few indy publishing houses. I remember my first package from Paper Rad back in the year 2001 or so…opening it sitting in a laundromat. How quaint! I exhibited at the first, I dunno, eight or so Printed Matter Art Book Fairs and co-founded Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Fest (later called CAB), did fairs all over the place, including one steaming hot Tokyo Art Book Fair kept company by Yokoyama and Hathaway. And I distributed minicomics and zines through PictureBox. So, I guess between 2005 and 2013 I really tried to stay on top of it all. But after that I was pretty tired! And now there are more zines and fairs than ever. But I’m satiated, Wes. I’m content. I want for nothing in the world of zines. Sometimes an old friend like CF, Freibert or Carlos will send me something and I’ll be so happy. And Johnny Ryan’s Instagram feed is the best zine of all. But otherwise I have been trying to focus on my own work (which sometimes, as with the MCA Chicago exhibition, cross into zines, but then only for a discreet purpose) and mining other areas of culture. Plus friends tell me if there’s something I “must” see.
Think of your favorite books. Which ones do you most desire you could have been a fly on the wall during the acquisition and editorial meetings about them?
Having been in, and conducted those meetings, I don’t really want to ruin my favorite books by thinking about them, but if I had to, it would be 1968’s Head Comix because I’ve read some of the correspondence involved and it captures a moment in mainstream New York cultural production when people like Jules Feiffer, Paul Krassner and Milton Glaser were somehow considered tastemakers who could sell a product. That was certainly a blip. Yeesh.
God, “blip” certainly is the truth.
Who in the visual, graphic, and/or comic worlds has the most interesting personal history and stories, who if the right biography came out it would cross over to readers not usually interested in those topics?
Robert Crumb, and I’m writing the biography right now, so don’t try anything funny.
Oh that’s fabulous! I think I actually read that somewhere and am so pleased you’re the one doing it. I could ask you a dozen Crumb-related questions, but that’s for another interview, so just these: When’s it coming out and who’s publishing it??
The book will be published by Scribner in 2023 or 2024.
What’s a subject there are not enough books written about?
The history of cartooning. There are so few books written about the medium and its practitioners, which means the full scope of its many complicated histories has only barely been glimpsed.
Well you’re certainly doing all that you can to rectify that!
I try, but there are so many conversations, so little infrastructure, and such a small audience for such endeavors that it’s a slog. A fun slog, but still.
Back to crossing over and Robert Crumb. Like the 1994 documentary Crumb, which many people not necessarily into comics watched and enjoyed, what are some of the best books for great readers who may have never picked up a comic book or graphic novel but know excellent writing when they see it?
For a book about comics, you can hardly do better than Mark Newgarden and Paul Karasik’s How to Read Nancy. For a book OF comics: I would refer you to Kevin Huizenga’s The River at Night. It’s one of the rarest and most difficult achievements in art: a perfect book that contains profound thinking rendered in plain language that, in its execution, achieves a poetry of surface. It’s as good as anything can get.
Wow, what an endorsement!
Which writers’ career arcs have most fascinated you?
Many, but lately: Nick Tosches. I’ve gone back to Tosches to track the evolution of his thinking about lineages, race, and the twisty paths followed by songs.
“Twisty” for sure, that’s a perfect word for his approach. He’s one I was most pleased to spot walking downtown one evening by himself a year or so before he died.
If you could steal one book from anywhere right now, where and which would it be?
Wherever this is, I would like to spend some time with it:
Here is the auction description:
Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune. From Frank Herbert's Novel. [No place, possibly Hollywood: circa 1975]. First edition, featuring concept art, designs and storyboards, photographically reproduced, for an unrealized film adaptation of Dune, produced to pitch the project to prospective financiers. Oblong folio (8.125 x 11.5 inches; 209 x 294 mm., with a sheet bulk of 3 inches (78 mm.)). Eleven full-color leaves, nine are costume and spaceship designs by Chris Foss, and probably Moebius (Jean Giraud), and two are by H. R. Giger; one text leaf (title-page, verso blank); and 268 black and white leaves of storyboards and designs for characters, sets and spaceships. Most of the storyboard pages are laid-out with twelve rectangular panels filled with artwork, captions in French and English in image, (many storyboard pages have some blank panels). All pages on thick photography paper, printed on rectos only. Printer's light blue cloth, gilt-lettered blue cloth labels on the front board and spine, snap enclosure to fore-edges (strap with button lacking); red ribbon bookmark. Binding rubbed and thumbsoiled. Front hinge almost entirely broken, as expected with the stress of the thick text-block; rear hinge starting; the first leaf and last few leaves creased. Still, very good, contents very well preserved. Rare. An important artifact from a high-profile unrealized collaborative project, the subject of Jodorowsky's Dune (Sony Pictures Classics, 2013).
I see on the site this information was added below that: Possibly, as many as twenty copies were produced, but we were able to locate just one other online.
So, unfortunately you may never get to see it. On the other hand, if anyone could I feel like it would be you. Thanks Dan!
Dan Nadel
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A: "It opens up a world and gives you license to cultivate your legitimate weirdness."
So opens this week's One Great Reader with Simon Critchley, a philosopher and teacher, as well as prolific author on everything from Martin Heidegger to Wallace Stevens to David Bowie. We're pleased to present this succinct and bracing conversation about books, morals, and funny philosophers with interviewer Wes Del Val. Click to read more...]]>He's written a number of academic books (of course) on his philosophic specialties but has also crossed over as it were with several books on serious subjects deserving of contemplation by great readers and composed in ways suitable for a wider audience. Amongst the latter are attention-grabbing titles as these: How to Stop Living and Start Worrying; The Faith of the Faithless; Having Been Born – Tragedy, The Greeks and Us, and most recently, Notes on Suicide. These are all matters which will never depart the human experience so might as well face them with a clear-eyed guide like Simon. But before any of those, start with his The Book of Dead Philosophers, it is witty and uplifting and simply and effectively re-affirms Cicero's timeless maxim that "to philosophize is to learn to die."
Ok, ok, if that all sounds too bleak for you (it's not, I promise), then Simon has also written seriously, and again accessibly, on these matters: humour (British spelling), football (not the American version and a perfect subject for Simon to tackle since this Liverpudlian has said of the Liverpool Football Club that it is his only religious commitment and is the governing passion of his life), and David Bowie.
Last week I asked Edwin Frank how reading was preparing him for dying and did he know what he thinks he'd turn to if given the time and faculties at the end? Looking back I should have saved this one for Simon. Edwin evaded the question (which is no knock on Edwin!) and Simon did the same in his own way with a few of this week's. I told Simon there wasn't as much Simon as I desired, but that knowing him through his writings I wasn't surprised with what he gave me. His response: "Call it English reserve. Less is sometimes more." Perhaps I should have taken that second sentence advice when writing this introduction...
Anyway, I’m not disappointed, I just wanted more. If this is too little Simon for you, too, then there is plenty else readily available and you know where to start. -WDV
WDV: What does reading do better than anything else?
SC: It opens up a world and gives you license to cultivate your legitimate weirdness.
With the topics you write about I’d love to know regarding your own “legitimate weirdnesses.” Which books and writers have left the deepest impression of “weirdness” upon your life? I feel “weird” is such a subjective concept that I’m ever intrigued to know what have been islands of relatability and/or comfort for a great reader who has ever felt out of step with their peers or society.
Can we just leave the sentence as it is...I like it for its weirdness.
Which are the most enjoyable books about philosophy that are under 200 pages?
I’m not sure whether philosophy should be enjoyable. It should feel as if your mind is on fire. Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals is shortish and viscerally powerful. You could just read the second essay where he uses a scalpel to examine our stupid views about morality.
Who has left you shaking your head at the cleverness of their thinking and writing?
It happens fairly regularly, as long as you avoid philosophical crap about Stoicism, neuroscience, the brain and spirituality. I reread Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit recently and it left me breathless, especially the chapter on Religion. And it’s a book I thought I knew well. I didn’t. In a more mundane mood, I reread Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue and had forgotten how brilliant it is. It is a wonderful example of analytic methods used to real historical and moral effect.
Since you list two books which you recently re-read, are there others you’re keen to re-read, particularly if you feel time or life experiences would provide fresh insights?
Bataille’s Inner Experience and the German sermons of Meister Eckhart.
What have you read in your life which has made you most uncomfortable?
What makes me most uncomfortable is the depthlessness of human folly and the kinds of book that people use to buttress that folly. I could name names, but any book that claims to know the nature of things and then tells you what to do morally and politically is to be avoided. But I also know that getting older is largely defined by impotent rage at human idiocy that could be easily avoided if people read more.
Please do name names! We’re all curious what you have in mind.
I’d rather not. Anyone who claims to have a theory of everything should be avoided.
And what are top recommendations which have assisted you in avoiding impotent rage?
Reading Greek tragedies and Shakespeare’s Hamlet really helps.
How do you feel about illegal ebook download sites? For instance, of which I’m sure you’re aware, I’m one click away from dozens of your books which could be mine with one additional click.
Yeah, I don’t care. I have a day job teaching philosophy. And if I expected to make a living from the books I write, I would have written very different books. I’m proud to say that everything I’ve done has been on my own terms, although I’ve had some tempting offers to sell out. Which I very nearly did. More than once.
Any comments on the ethics of using such sites?
It’s immoral, of course.
Do publishers and/or writers gain anything from having their titles uploaded on them?
Nope.
Is it better for an author to potentially gain a wider audience due to such sites,
Arguable.
or strictly be in front of only those people who paid to read, which would probably constitute a smaller number?
I don’t really have a view on this.
I’m just very curious about your thoughts on all this as a philosopher, regardless of how you feel about them as pertains to your own titles and occupational/financial realities.
I think people should get paid for their work and writing is work. What has shifted are boundaries between what people will pay for (coffee, sushi) and expect to get for free (books that took many years to write).
Do your students ever give you satisfying reading recommendations?
Yes, that’s what students are for. Last fall semester, in my Zoom seminar, I had a student living in Bangalore, India, who was trained in classical Buddhist commentaries, such as Nāgārjuna. So, we read some texts and he led us through them. It was very illuminating. This kind of thing happens a lot in my classes.
Nearly everything I have written has been worked through graduate seminars. This is a great good fortune of my job. It also means that my seminars can get messy because I am always trying to figure things out. I am like a vampire with students and feed from their recommendations. Not all of them, but a good number.
What are “depressing” and/or dark subjects you like to read about which always make you feel better during and after?
Take your pick. The last thing I wrote last summer was a new preface to my little book on suicide. So, you can imagine that the research was a lot of fun. I came to some alarming conclusions about the correlations between social media and suicidal ideation. But I guess I felt better when I was able to explain all that in clear prose.
You get to spend a whole uninterrupted week doing anything you wish that is book/reading-related, so you could read the whole time, go to bookstores or libraries, organize your collection, etc, you get the idea. What do you do?
I would make notes. The key to reading and writing is note taking. I cannot stress that enough. The key to writing is the art of the precis.
What a fascinating, unexpected answer. What books have you taken the most notes about in your life?
Books written in languages other than my own, so mainly French, German and Ancient Greek.
Do you take notes only for books you’re reading for professional purposes, or also pleasure,
All books.
and do you write in your books?
I write all over them. I think it is important to not respect the sanctity of books, but make them your own. A teacher of mine, who was brought up in a very religious household, used to write in ballpoint pen over his copy of the Bible. I found that instructive.
If you could write a biography about anyone, who would it be?
Julian of Norwich, the first woman to write a book in English. We know very little about her life. So, a biography would be nicely speculative. She is a real hero of mine. And the name ‘Norwich’ always makes me laugh.
Look at your shelves. Which three publishers’ books are taking up the most space?
Fitzcarraldo, Penguin Classics, Faber.
A real Brit’s list! And which specific titles do you own the most copies of, whether classics from different publishers or some in different languages, or perhaps some you collect in different editions.
I don’t collect books, on purpose. I don’t like preciousness around books. I have four copies of Joyce’s Ulysses, because they keep falling apart.
Who is the funniest philosopher to read?
Me, obviously. But Diderot is funny. Kierkegaard can make me laugh. As can Freud. But the funniest, laugh out loud book I read in the last year is Stewart Lee’s How I Escaped My Certain Fate. Maybe the best book on stand-up that I have ever read. And philosophically minded.
The start of the front cover blurb from (then called) Dazed & Confused itself is humorous: “So long, so bitter—and so thoroughly enjoyable.” Thanks Simon!
Simon Critchley in his office at The New School
]]>Responsible since the start for overseeing the program is Edwin Frank, and he has taken it from strictly re-issues, (almost always featuring introductions from notable writers, which is still primary and they still excel at), to imprints devoted to children's, kids, comics, and especially close to his heart, poetry, for Edwin's also a published poet. He told me this specifically about the NYRB/Poets line, but I think it also applies to his editorial philosophy overall and every fine thing they do at NYRB for all of us grateful readers:
"I wanted the books in the poets series to be portable so that they will accompany readers into unexpected places and moments. The series is otherwise the sort of mix, or mess, I like to make. There are poets from the past and poets from the present and translations from quite a range of languages. There's Mandelstam's famous line about poetry being 'a nostalgia for world culture.' I like that."
Before I let you begin, here is a PSA I pulled from their site which everyone who loves them should know about:
Is there a book that you’d like to see back in print, or that you think we should consider for one of our series? Let us know! We welcome your thoughts and suggestions. While we cannot respond individually to every recommendation, if you’re the first to suggest a given title, we’ll happily send you a free copy of the new edition when it’s published.
Please contact us by sending an email to bookrecommendation@nybooks.com. Don’t forget to include any relevant information about the book: author, title, date, etc. Also feel free to mention why you think it should be published in the series.
I’m publicly adding the one at the top of my list here: Duke Ellington’s Music Is My Mistress.
And now, after years of enjoying their books, please enjoy Edwin!
-Wes Del Val
WDV: For which books do you wish you could write introductions, regardless if they’re currently in or out of print?
EF: Well, I suppose the books that would be most interesting to introduce are the books I am so close to that in a sense I can barely see them. Introducing them would mean to step back from them and see what they might mean to somebody else, and that would serve as a kind of reintroduction to them on my part. It's poets who would fit the bill for me: Dickinson, Stevens, Eliot, Creeley. To introduce “The Prelude,” a poem I love, a poem that is itself all introduction—that would be an interesting challenge!
May we please have but a taste of what you might say to introduce it to new readers, since you love it so?
Hmmm. Well “The Prelude” is a narrative of the growth of the individual mind. It is Wordsworth's mind and Wordsworth's story and yet the whole thing is oddly, attractively, impersonal. Wordsworth's sense of himself is not so much as an individual as a kind of medium and in that way he tracks a dimension of consciousness that is common to all of us, something above and beyond my thought, my feelings, my appetites, a center of feeling that links us to nature at large, or, turning that around, the link to nature at large that provides, if anything does, a center to our feelings. The poem is a kind of ecology. At the same time, it also has wonderfully detailed and evocative sections about—a famous passage—skating, about how books enter and shape a life, about London street-life, about Wordsworth's euphoria at the outbreak of the French Revolution and eventual disillusionment at its ugly Jacobin turn.
That certainly whets, thank you.
When you’re particularly low on the book business what do you read to reverse the feeling?
When I see all the fine books coming out from venturesome small presses, new and old—Archipelago, New Directions, New Vessel, Wakefield Press, Contra Mundum—I'm reminded of how many rich (if not necessarily enriching) and strange books continue to find their way into print.
Venturesome is right! “Not necessarily enriching” after listing those presses really intrigues me coming from you. Can you please expand?
It was a joke! I meant the books aren't always all that profitable.
Ha, of course! Didn’t obviously see it like that...but it is surely correct.
What have been key eye-opening reading experiences in your life?
Among my formative books were the showpieces of the 60s—Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor, Catch-22, V and Gravity's Rainbow, Mailer's The Armies of the Night. One spring when my family was living in England I was hypnotized by Virginia Woolf's The Waves, a book I've never gone back to, not wanting to spoil a first impression of such intensity. Dostoevsky and more Dostoevsky. There is the moment in Dickens' Bleak House when, after the miserably poor streetsweeper Jo who lives in a cul-de-sac known as Tom All-Alone's has died, with the Lord's Prayer on his lips no less, Dickens addresses his readers directly: "Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen, etc. And dying thus around us every day." Sheer melodrama and sheer nerve, but Dickens carries it off. The spectacular orchestration of his novels still amazes and delights me. Iris Murdoch's novels and, especially, her Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, mean a lot to me. I love the colloquialism of her philosophizing. I remember in the 80s in the London Review coming on the great AIDS elegy by Thom Gunn that begins, "Your dying was a tedious enterprise/ First petty things took up your energies" and deepens in feeling slowly and terribly to return to a new, devastating version of that first line at the end. The novels of Jean Rhys. Adorno's Minima Moralia. An address to young students of history from the ex-Soviet bloc that Eric Hobsbawm delivered not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It ends:
"Governments, the economy, schools, everything in society, are not for the benefit of the privileged minorities....It is for the benefit of the ordinary run of people, who are not particularly clever or interesting (unless, of course, we fall in love with one of them), not highly educated, not successful or destined for success, in fact, nothing very special. It is for the people who, throughout history, have entered history outside their neighborhoods as individuals only in the records of their births, marriages, and deaths. Any society worth living in is one designed for them, not for the rich, the clever, the exceptional, although any society worth living in must provide room and scope for such minorities. But the world is not made for our personal benefit, nor are we in the world for our personal benefit. A world that claims that this is its purpose is not a good world, and ought not to be a lasting one."
That is perfectly said.
It really is, makes me want to read more Hobsbawm right away. You just listed so many lasting truths. How is reading preparing you for dying and do you know what you think you’ll turn to if given the time and faculties at the end?
Dodging the question, but I'll say that it interests me that two of our great critical writers, Samuel Johnson and Susan Sontag, found the prospect of death unendurable.
An intriguing point to contemplate.
Whose letters do you most enthusiastically recommend reading?
I'm not a big reader of letters. Dickinson's, Lawrence's, Keats' are the ones I know best. I love Virginia Woolf's journals.
If you could be a fly on the wall between any two living people talking about books, who would it be?
I wonder what the American painter Archie Rand, so much of whose work responds to poets, and the English poet Alice Oswald would find to say to each other.
With what poetry means to your life, what specific matters or topics would you hope to hear them discuss?
Well I'm curious because I'm sure it would be a surprise! I don't know either of them. The relation of painting to poetry, however, is ancient and deep.
What interests you least about books?
The dreadful expedients of what passes for "storytelling," that dance of attendance on the reader's earnest gullibility. Though I'm also sick of what passes for the opposite of that: Knausgaard-stuff.
You’d be a poorer reader today if you weren’t keeping up with whose tastes and opinions?
You know, as you grow older keeping up tends to give way to thinking over. I'd say the answer to your question is Freud.
Do you still actively read him and what about him enriches you as reader?
I found myself, I'm not sure why, but with a strong sense of compulsion, drawn to his metapsychological papers at the beginning of the pandemic, and Jacqueline Rose recently wrote a wonderful piece for the London Review in which she points out that the most notorious of these, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which Freud introduces the idea of an innate human drive to death, was written in partial response to the toll taken by the Spanish Flu. In any case, I'm not interested in Freud as an expounder of a doctrine, and I don't think he was all that interested in that side of his thinking either, or less so than he is thought to have been. I'm interested in him as a thinking writer. He is a real essayist, following the lead of his thoughts and turning them around as he goes, and they take him and us to strange and suggestive and uncertain places. He is a moralist of the best sort, alert to how our sexual nature perpetually subverts our constructed identities while alerting us to the salacious underpinnings of moralizing. He is a mythographer of the mind. Id and Ego are best imagined as figures out of Blake, weird emanations of our perpetually conflicted and yearning human being. Anyway, this year—this last year—that reading Freud was some of the most interesting and pertinent reading I had done in a long while.
Which writers make you put down everything else on your plate when they have a new book, essay, or article come out?
Bernadette Mayer, whose way with words is at once casual, personal, and rigorously inventive. Fanny Howe, whose novels, essays, and poetry find new ways to explore the political and spiritual borderlands and desert places of American life. My first love as a reader was fantasy—Ursula LeGuin, Alan Garner—and so in the 90s I lighted upon Philip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy with total delight, and I read the two volumes of the new trilogy he is working on, The Book of Dust, the moment they came out. T.J. Clark, whether he is writing about Veronese, Poussin, Malevich or Picasso, looks at paintings with old-fashioned formal care and precision while thinking about what their looking like that entails—historically, psychologically, politically, for art and for life—with wonderful reach and daring.
If you were given $1000 to spend over the next week on books and/or anything book-related (collectibles like authors’ autographs, printed matter, ephemera, etc) what would you buy?
I discovered at the start of the pandemic that a good collected Thomas Hardy turns out to be surprisingly difficult to come by.
Cost or availability-wise? If the former, perhaps now that we’re several months into the pandemic sellers would be more open to offers...
I expected that Hardy's standing and popularity as a novelist over the years would have meant that both popular and scholarly editions of the major novels would be readily available. There are heaps of paperbacks, of course, and it would be easy enough to assemble a pretty broad sampling of his work by picking among them, but it's hard to find a sturdy uniform edition. It seems that anyone who has one is holding on to it.
Are you a collector of Hardy and/or anyone else? And speaking of collecting, what are some collections you’ve stood in front of in your life which have especially impressed you?
I am not much of a collector of particular authors or editions, though I guess my Hardy misadventure shows that I am becoming a bit of a completist. I like the little blue hardbacks Oxford World Classics used to come in and snatch them up when I see them. Likewise when it comes to the volumes of the Cape Editions series that Nathaniel Tarn edited in the late 60s and early 70s. One way or another, at this point I do have a lot of books.
What’s a book-world dream you’d like to see come true within the next three years?
It would be great to have Mavis Gallant's journals at last. Mavis was a great artist and a person of extraordinary determination and bravery—someone on whom nothing was lost.
Might they indeed be coming…?
It's unclear. A selection was published in the New Yorker shortly before her death and a volume was said to be imminent, but the years have passed without the book coming out. It's a great pity. Mavis had a very clear sense of her journals as part of her work as a writer and she wanted them out there.
On the mentioning of her name, thank you for making so much of her work newly available. Anytime I come across lists of writers and books people are most thankful of the NYRB for publishing her name and titles are almost always included. I hope you often hear or see such praise.
So her journals and Virginia Woolf’s. Since you’re not a big reader of letters, but appear to be of journals, can you share those which have meant the most to you?
Gide's Journals are fascinatingly slippery. Thoreau. I still have Pepys to look forward to!
What has been re-issued in the past decade that you’re envious NYRB didn’t get to do?
Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina. The novels of Alejo Carpentier. Elsa Morante's History. Carole Rumen's translation of the Mahabharata. Danilo Kis. Bassani's The Novel of Ferrara. Leiris's Phantom Africa.
I can’t imagine how many NYRB titles have made other publishers jealous… Thank you Edwin!
Edwin Frank, photographed by Jonathan Becker, via Air Mail
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Andrew Romano writes about politics as a National Correspondent for Yahoo News and you can imagine the intensity of his life the past four years, and especially the last few months. That's what pays the bills.
He's also written for Apartamento, Monocle, and T magazine and I'm fairly certain if writing about design (particularly houses, particularly modernist ones from the last century) could add up financially he'd opt to do that full-time. "Design" is what first put him on my radar years ago, and it's his pictures and words about the subject (especially, again, when about mid-century houses) which he regularly posts on IG which have made him a VIF (very important follow) for me. I’m hoping some enterprising publisher sees this interview and gets him a multi-book deal with the idea he mentions...
There are no additional questions and/or comments from me in this week's interview, as Andrew gave such lovely little stand-alone jewels-of-answers, along with multiple links, that you barely need even read the questions. Nothing additional from me now as well so you, too, can (and will) enjoy Andrew. -Wes Del Val
WDV: What are your current thoughts and feelings on physical books in your life compared to at any other time in the past?
AR: Sadly, the older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve objectified books.
As a kid I cottoned to language: reading at the dinner table, pretending to be a poet, majoring in American literature. I never really cared what my books looked like. I cared what was in them.
But the technology that took off after I was a teenager in the ‘90s has of course liberated words from the printed page, and that in turn has forced books to justify their physicality. Like, why can’t this be a site or a feed or a post or a podcast or whatever? Why does it have to be a thing?
That trend has certainly paralleled and probably influenced my own relationship with books. The books I have around me now are all essentially physical—visual or beautiful or collectible in some way.
I’m not particularly happy about this, because ultimately Middlemarch matters more to me than my favorite design monograph. I think I fetishize books too much, and read too little.
Which critics (of any subject) do you read and find yourself agreeing with most often?
I’m suspicious whenever I “agree” too much with a critic. I worry it’s just vanity—me searching for someone to validate what I already think. It’s more interesting when a writer leads you out beyond your own limitations—beyond the scope of your own knowledge, the comfort of your own opinions, the confines of your own perspective (and privilege, in my case)—and reveals something that rings true.
For me, Wesley Morris of the New York Times has been the essential critic of this catastrophic year. I say “this year” because it feels like that—more than TV or music or film—has been his subject lately: America’s political myths, its pandemic fiasco, its racial reckoning. Morris is no secret; I mean, he won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for his film criticism. But at the Times he’s doing something even deeper. He’s using culture to make sense of our senseless moment.
Read Morris on the mustache he grew during quarantine and what it taught him about his own Blackness. Read Morris on Patti LaBelle’s live 1985 cover of “If You Don’t Know Me by Now” as a prescient expression of the “ultimatum now being laid down in the streets of this country.” Read Morris on how “alarm was central to the Little Richard experience”—including “alarm about how robbed he was,” and by extension how robbed all Black Americans have been. Read it all. And be sure to listen to Morris and Jenna Wortham’s loose, illuminating podcast, too.
Other favorites: Louisa Thomas on sports, Doreen St. Felix on television, Leah Ollman on visual art, Lily Loofbourow on the culture of politics, Rebecca Traister on women and politics, and Alexandra Lange on design and architecture.
What are the best interviews you’ve ever read, ones which you wished were double, triple, quadruple the length? Basically they could have gone on and on for you.
It’s much easier to find bad interviews these days. The form is everywhere—quick clickbait content, default podcast material, artisanal magazine filler. I guess it’s because interviewing someone seems easier than, you know, writing something? But it’s not! I’ve published dozens of interviews over the course of my career and I’m only proud of three: one with the producer Rick Rubin (my first assignment for Newsweek after moving from New York to Los Angeles in 2013); one with Maurice Sendak at his house in Connecticut; one with the sculptor Ricky Swallow for Apartamento. And they’re all basically about the same thing: creativity.
In that vein, I don’t think anyone has ever beat (or will beat) the classic Paris Review interviews about writers at work. I have the four-volume set of paperbacks they collected and published back in 2007-2008—somewhere, I think they’re buried in a moving box right now—and I remember compulsively reading them cover-to-cover and then leaving them around the house for years to revisit at random.
The roster alone is dizzying: Vladimir Nabokov, Elizabeth Bishop, Joan Didion, Billy Wilder, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Evelyn Waugh, E.B. White, John Ashberry, V.S. Naipaul, Stephen Sondheim. And on and on and on. But it’s not star power, per se, that makes these conversations click. It’s that interviewer and interviewee actually collaborated on each interview, honing questions and answers over time until their back-and-forth became a kind of literature of its own. So while the dialogue isn’t exactly spontaneous, it is endlessly revealing—even when people like Nabokov aren’t being entirely frank about their “process.”
That’s what interests me most: people who make things talking about how they make things. Circling that unsolvable mystery, searching for clues. Others in this genre: the very raw Lennon Remembers interviews for Rolling Stone (John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Jann Wenner, 1970); Paul Zollo’s Songwriters on Songwriting (Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, etc.); Pierluigi Serraino’s The Creative Architect, which is about a long-lost 1959 UC-Berkeley psychological study that tried to pinpoint the source of creativity by probing modernist designers such as Eero Saarinen, I.M. Pei, Philip Johnson, Louis Kahn and Richard Neutra.
If you could spend a month in any house and could only bring along books for enjoyment, what house and which books?
After what feels like eternity in quarantine with two young kids and both my wife and I struggling to work full-time from home, a month alone with books sounds like a dream. It almost doesn’t matter what house I’m in, as long as no one else is around.
But since you asked, let’s say Frank Lloyd Wright’s beach cottage for Della Brooks Walker. Walker’s first letter to Wright sets the scene. “I own a rocky point of land in Carmel, Calif. extending into the Pacific Ocean,” Walker wrote in 1945. “The surface is flat, it is located at the end of a white sand beach… I am a woman living alone—I wish protection from the wind and privacy from the road and a house as enduring as the rocks but as transparent and charming as the waves and as delicate as a seashore. You are the only man who can do this—will you help me?”
By 1951 the house was finished: a 1,200-square-foot arrow that rests atop triangular Carmel stone walls and culminates in a hexagonal living room framed by a head-height hearth and reverse-stepped glass panels revealing panoramic views of the rocky coastline. It’s Wright’s only beachfront Usonian—his term for a new, more organic kind of American middle-class home—and between the space itself and the sea outside, I can’t imagine it would ever get old.
For company I would bring a certain kind of book that adulthood seems to have crowded out of my life: the sweeping 19th-century novels by George Eliot (The Mill on the Floss, Daniel Deronda), Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities, Our Mutual Friend) and Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina, The Death of Ivan Ilyich) that I’ve always wanted to read but have never gotten around to. Eliot’s near-omniscient empathy, Dickens’s supernatural vividness, and whatever magic Tolstoy harnessed to transform his writing, as Matthew Arnold put it, into “a piece of life” rather than a “work of art”—perhaps it’s pretentious, but you’re never really alone with those three.
What are the most enjoyable, but non-specialist, design and architecture books which have greatly added to your love of both and which you’d give to ten various people with confidence that they’d do the same for them?
Two by Esther McCoy: Five California Architects and The Second Generation. McCoy came to California via Arkansas, then Kansas, then Greenwich Village, where she befriended and assisted Theodore Dreiser in the 1920s. She hung with the bohemians. She wanted to write fiction. She camped out in Malibu before Hollywood knew it existed. During World War II McCoy worked as a draftswoman at Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica; discouraged from pursuing an architecture career on account of her gender, she later wandered into R.M. Schindler’s revolutionary home and studio on Kings Road and got a gig drafting there.
Eventually McCoy used her stint with Schindler to help establish herself as the first and finest chronicler of California modernist architecture. Together, Five California Architects (1960) and The Second Generation (1984) tell the story of that moment by profiling its most important practitioners, from the idiosyncratic Craftsmen Bernard Maybeck and Greene & Greene, to the proto-minimalist Irving Gill, to the competing Viennese emigres Neutra and Schindler, to all the lesser-known but no less fascinating figures who followed: J.R. Davidson, Gregory Ain, Harwell Hamilton Harris, Raphael Soriano.
McCoy’s genius is that she approached architecture not as a critic or a theorist or even a journalist but as a human being. Her style is crisp, droll and unerring, and she shows as much interest in the life and character of the designer—and the feeling of living within his design—as she shows in the intricacies of the design itself. Her New Yorker short story “The Important House” is a small satirical masterpiece. No one has ever written more accessibly about architecture and the people who make it.
Tell me a dream book series you wish existed? Who would publish, edit, what would be the subject, etc?
I sometimes call myself a design fan. But what really moves me are houses. There’s a difference. For me, the story of a good house is a lot more interesting than the theory it embodies or the trend it reifies. Who made it? How? Why? Who lived there before? Who lives there now? What do they fill it with? What does it feel like? How has it changed over time? Who changed it and why? Whenever I have time to freelance for Monocle, I try to write these stories in miniature. But I crave a book series: in-depth biographies of a bunch of good houses, one volume each.
My favorite nonfiction books preserve what used to be known as “magazine writing”; my shelves are filled with collections by Gay Talese, Joan Didion, A.J. Liebling, Joseph Wechsberg, Calvin Trillin and Nora Ephron. I even cheekily refer to myself as a “magazine writer” in my Instagram bio, despite the fact that I technically write for a website. I consider magazine writing a genre—a form that transcends format.
Magazine writing doesn’t assume prior interest or knowledge. It is made to be stumbled across in the pages of a periodical rather than sought out in the aisles of a bookstore. It knows it is competing for attention with the stories that surround it. It knows time is short. It has to work a little harder. It has to hook you. It has to communicate. It has to connect. While magazines themselves are ephemeral, the best magazine stories are built to last. John McPhee calls it “the literature of fact.”
I would like to read a book-length, New Yorker-caliber profile of, say, the 200-year-old samurai dwelling that Isamu Noguchi moved to a stonecutter’s village called Mure and then reshaped as he would a sculpture (among many other houses). Beautifully photographed and designed, of course—but there are plenty of pretty books being published these days. Here, the writing and the story would come first. That’s rarer.
The same thing could work with songs. Or even collectors and their collections!
You get to drive around LA for a weekend with three other living writers. Who would you want to join you in the car and what would be essential stops?
Joan Didion is a given. I might gingerly suggest we follow the geographical arc of the The White Album and see what’s left of her apocalyptic 1960s in contemporary Los Angeles—but honestly, I would follow Joan wherever she wants to go.
Who else? This is like hosting a dinner party or something, which I really don’t have the brain for. Maybe Carolina Miranda, who writes passionately and polymathically about art, architecture, urban design and the culture of Los Angeles for the LA Times? Miranda’s work charts how the arts intersect with politics, gender, race and development, so it would be a kick to check out the construction site of Peter Zumthor’s controversial new LACMA with her, then visit Boyle Heights, where young anti-gentrification activists have been chasing gallerists away.
For my final passenger, I would say the ghost of Jonathan Gold, but you asked for “living writers,” so I suppose he’s disqualified. I might invite Tejal Rao, the New York Times’s California restaurant critic, who in that strange role doesn’t seem to write enough, but who always nails it when she does. Or I’d go in a different direction and corral a songwriter instead: maybe Kendrick Lamar, or Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas. Los Angeles is many cities in one, and I’m far more intrigued by theirs than mine.
What are your reliable methods which point you in the right direction when you want to start reading about a new subject which you don’t know much about?
I’m a journalist because I’m curious, and I’m curious about a lot of things: politics, policy, science, crime, music, TV, movies, art, design, food. So I’m also a generalist, which means 1) I probably won’t have a day job much longer, and 2) I’m constantly learning. It’s my favorite part of the gig. (It’s certainly more fun than writing!) My method is fairly instinctive at this point, but if I had to describe it, I would say it starts as a kind of rooting around: in local news reports when I’m writing about COVID; through Instagram hashtags and Google Images when I’m clueless about some designer. Once something catches my eye, I start drilling down into more authoritative sources: those searchable uploads on Google Books; oral history transcripts and recordings; digitized museum archives; archival finding aids; online permit records; old newspaper articles; etc. US Modernist is a particularly useful site for architecture—it even includes addresses and owners’ names. Still, there’s always a point when you have to abandon the iPhone and track down out-of-print books (Biblio, eBay), old architectural magazines (Arts & Architecture, Pencil Points) and living, breathing experts. It’s mind-blowing how much information isn’t on the internet and probably never will be.
What are memorable reads which you’re surprised you ended up liking as much as you did?
Lawrence Weschler’s book about Bob Irwin, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees. I knew almost nothing about conceptual art and even less about Irwin before reading this, but Weschler somehow managed to make a page-turner of Irwin’s process—how each body of work led to new questions, and how those questions led to a new body of work. Probably my favorite profile ever, and a model for the sort of book I hope to write someday.
Anything and everything by John McPhee, whose faith in facts, investment in structure and quietly virtuosic sentences have the power to transform seemingly “boring” subjects—geology, canoes, oranges—into founts of fascination. His work is a reminder that reality never runs out of marvels, and his FSG first editions are also lovely to look at and collect. Some favorites: Coming into the Country, The Crofter and the Laird and The Pine Barrens (which happens to be where I grew up). My New Jersey hero.
Artists don’t always make for the clearest or most compelling writers, but Donald Judd, Agnes Martin and Luigi Ghirri have proven to be pleasant exceptions. Judd’s Complete Writings 1959-1975 show him to be a remarkably perceptive and precise critic of others’ work (and a very fluent explainer of his own). Martin’s Writings is almost the opposite: gnomic and joyous and near-mystical. And Ghirri’s Complete Essays: 1973-1991 is somewhere in between—an allusive, eclectic and gently witty exploration of identity, time, memory, vision, representation and sense of place.
Two more, quickly. The recent portrait of Nick Drake (Remembered for a While) edited by his sister Gabrielle transcends the tired music bio genre by relying on letters, photographs, personal ephemera, intimate interviews and incisive musical analysis to help explain, as much as possible, an enigmatic artist who died far too young. And I thought the pandemic would be the last thing I’d want to read about right now, but Zadie Smith’s brief and brilliant Intimations proved me wrong.
What are the best-designed books you’ve added to your shelves in the past two years?
Japanese Flower Arrangement for Modern Homes by Margaret Preininger is probably my prized possession right now. In the 1970s, Barbara Giella, the daughter of the second owner of the Walker House, interviewed Ola Walker, the original owner, for her NYU dissertation on Schindler. I recently found Giella’s notes. In them, Walker says that her ikebana teacher was Margaret Preininger, who was one of the first Americans to master Japanese flower arranging. Preininger taught at LA City College and organized some Schindler lectures, and that’s how the Walkers encountered him. What’s really interesting is that Preininger’s drop-dead gorgeous book about ikebana in the modern home was published in December 1936, right as construction on *our* modern home was being completed. There’s a page about flower rooms, and a paragraph about tokonoma, or specialized alcoves for arrangements; our house features both. Clearly Preininger’s ideas guided Schindler’s design. She probably even consulted with Walker and Schindler, or at least they consulted her work. And if you look closely at the original Julius Shulman photographs from 1937, you can see ikebana arrangements everywhere. I wonder if Preininger was brought in to help stage the house? Either way, her book illuminates an important and previously unrecognized influence on the architecture of the Walker House and the life of the family that built it. I love discoveries like this.
Also: Tauba Auerbach’s self-designed S v Z; the new French-language Pierre Legrain monograph designed by Carole Daprey; any of the Apartamento books.
Who impresses you the most right now in the world of publishing, whether with books, magazines, newspapers, or digital?
Apartamento. I adore everything they do: the series on architectural houses (of which my book, the Walker House, was the first); the design monographs (Michael Anastassiades, Arquitectura-G); even the cookbooks. Somehow their material seems both ambitious and low-key, their designs idiosyncratic yet of-the-moment. Most of all, you sense their enthusiasms are genuine. They’re not chasing trends. They feel like fellow fans.
Indeed, they’ve created a real international circle, with your book certainly doing its part to add to the love. Thanks Andrew!
Skye first appeared on my radar when she was the Creative Director of Dossier (its first issue from 2008 feels like a hundred years ago), and I never wanted to miss an issue. I'm excited she's back in magazine-land and hope the same fervor develops for Playgirl. -Wes Del Val
WDV: What are the most meaningful books you’ve read which were also the fastest you got through?
SP: I think this has to go to The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. I don’t know when I’ve read a book so quickly that blew my mind open in a similar way. I read most of it on the subway, during a work trip I took back to New York two years ago. I had recently been attacked by a dog, and along with the physical trauma, I had some serious emotional trauma going on. The book is all about how trauma is experienced in the body and the brain. It’s an excellent read for anyone who has experienced trauma, or anyone else who wants to understand from a scientific perspective why it’s impossible to just “get over” trauma. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
What a balm, it sounds like you found it just when you needed it! Since it was so impactful, and since we’re all amidst such challenging, traumatic times, could you share some particularly truthful moments from it, which could benefit someone who hasn’t read it?
The greatest revelation in it for me (which may not be so surprising to others) was that trauma isn’t a feeling. It’s a physiological response. What that means is that trauma isn’t just something you can “get over.” It actually changes the way your brain works. I think understanding that is very helpful in terms of recognizing how real it is, and how necessary it is to get help to address it. That understanding also felt important in terms of having compassion for both myself and others.
Who are living writers you wish you could work with as editor?
There are so many writers whose work I adore, but the most satisfying work that I’ve gotten to do is working with writers who aren’t well-known, but are still earlier in their process. I also think that identifying talent is one of my particular strengths as an editor. In Playgirl we ran an essay from an incredible writer named Lexie Robinson, which was her first published piece. Another editor, Khira Jordan, and I worked very closely with her on it, and it was an absolute pleasure to be part of bringing it into the world. It’s an enormous privilege to get to work with people who have something important to say, and help them say it in a way that it lands.
I completely agree. What are your sources for finding unpublished or little-known writers and writing which excites you?
My friend Molly Guy is teaching a writing workshop series called Brooklyn Writers Collective. She was an incredible resource while we were working on Playgirl, and suggested I check out Lexie’s work as well as Ivy Elrod, who is a good friend of mine but whose piece also came out of one of Molly’s workshops. I also dug through The Creative Independent, which is how I connected with Nina Aron, the Editorial Director. I did a cold-reach out to her after reading an interview with her there that led me to her work.
Whose writing makes you most satisfied to be able to read it right now while it’s brand new?
Sometimes I have the experience of reading a book and finding that I actually have to close it for a minute to catch my breath. I felt like that reading The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy for the first time, and last year when I read Ocean Vuong’s book On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, and reading Rebecca Solnit’s essay Men Explain Things to Me, and I’ve had it more than once reading essays Carvell Wallace has written. The experience of reading something that is so breathtaking it makes me completely stop is one of my very favorite ones as a reader.
Are you a better reader today than you were ten years ago?
I’m afraid not. I don’t feel like the past ten years have been kind to my reading abilities. I think it’s the confluence of becoming a parent during that time, along with the rise of the smartphone as a constant source of information. Between those two massive shifts, my attention span has definitely suffered.
Indeed, I also don’t know anyone whose attention span hasn’t been radically altered since the advent of everything-at-our-fingertips-all-the-time. Never have there been more things which I genuinely want to read (I have 800 ebooks just waiting on my reader, not to mention all the physical books on my shelves, many of which I’ve had for decades and still not read) and never has my mind wandered more frequently than when I am reading most anything. I can read a dozen books at once, but if only I could read a dozen books at once.
So let me ask, what kind of reader do you think and/or hope you’ll become in the next ten years?
The last couple years have really marked a shift in my relationship with reading because I’ve started writing again. The last time I moved I found these notebooks from when I was in middle school, where we were required to keep a writing journal and turn it in to our teachers. I would fill mine with stories, poems, journal entries, just this massive amount of writing, and in the back of one my fifth grade teacher, Miss Singleton, had written, “I can’t wait to read the books you write one day.” I really loved writing. But then when I was a teenager I picked up a camera, and for many years my creative outlets were purely visual—although I continued to be a voracious reader. It’s just the last couple of years that I’ve started writing again, which has been wonderful, and it’s definitely changed the way I read and even think. So in terms of the next ten years, I guess my hope would just be for that process to continue to unfold.
What books and writers are you on your own with liking, meaning none of your closest friends feel the same way?
This question made me wish that I had the kind of life where I regularly discussed books with my friends (and made me think that maybe I should work on that). So, not knowing what my friends don’t like, I can say that I have had some periods where I’ve gone off on reading tangents into various, random genres. I went pretty deep into noir for several years when I lived in Paris in my 20’s, writers like Alan Furst, Raymond Chandler, Phillip Kerr. That kind of reading is great escapism. Then in the other direction, I worked on a project about Detroit a few years ago and read a lot about the history of the city, including The Origins of the Urban Crisis by Thomas Sugrue, and The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, which are both fascinating and relevant not just to the history of Detroit but more broadly to understanding America. That led me down a whole path that I’m still on, reading books about the intersections of race and class in America. One that I found particularly excellent was Strangers in Their Own Land by Arlie Hochschild. And then a number of years ago I also went on a deep dive into English history, which Allison Weir has written about so incredibly. Even though her books are basically made up of information pulled from historical records, what makes them successful, I think, is that she somehow manages to make those records tell a story in a way that they don’t feel dry.
What did you read in 2020 which you are kicking yourself you didn’t read earlier in life?
I have not read a single book since March. It’s without question the longest I’ve gone in my entire life without finishing a book, and I blame the combination of anxiety and parenting small children while the world burns. I just can’t focus long enough. I’ve read a ton of New Yorkers (see below), and have consumed a ridiculous and probably poisonous amount of news coverage. But I haven’t lost hope. I have a small stack of books on my bedside table: new reads, and re-reads. Now that the election is over, I’m rooting for myself to finish one of them.
Don’t beat yourself up, reading a ton of New Yorkers always warrants self-satisfaction! I’m so far behind I just went on a ten issue run a few weeks ago...which brought me up to April 2018.
I imagine a lot of people have been re-reading pretty steadily, if they’re reading period, since March. What’s on your bedside table which you might start and even finish again and others which are new? I’ll be rooting for you…
The books sitting on my bedside table now are The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls; Beloved by Toni Morrison—both of which I’ve read before but it’s been so many years that it will likely feel like the first time—Berlin Noir by Phlip Kerr, which I’ve been reading again slowly; Girl, Other, Woman by Bernadette Evaristo, which my mother gave me because she loved it; Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace by Joseph M. Williams, which is what it sounds like, a style guide; The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, which I have read big chunks of but not in its entirety; Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin which I have never read; and, as mentioned, about 20 copies of the New Yorker in various stages of being read, from almost-finished (I tend to lose steam after the fiction) to not-even-opened.
What/who do you read which always makes you feel smarter after?
The New Yorker. For the first several months of the shutdown we were in Mexico, where we were living for the past two years. Because the town we were living in had no mail service, I was still having my New Yorkers sent to Brooklyn, and I would pick them up when I was here for work. When we came back to New York in July, I had six months of New Yorkers waiting for me. It’s like a dream, an endless pile of New Yorkers. I have been slowly working my way through them and they are my primary reading material right now.
I’d be buried in my piles of them if I didn’t read them digitally, but I’m disgusted I’m so far behind. I guess trivialities like this are for those of us who don’t have kids. Besides obvious reduced free time, how has having children changed what reading means for you, for better or worse?
Having kids requires that you take the long view on a lot of things, and reading is one of them. I have three kids, so my time is limited, and that means that I don’t currently have the time or often the energy to read the way I did previously. But I know from talking to people older than me that while it’s quite consuming, this time in life, when kids are little, is also ultimately short. I know my life won’t always look like this, and the time available to me for reading won’t always be so tight.
Right now a lot of the reading I do is with my kids, which is wonderful, too, especially as they get older because it gives me a chance to re-read books that I loved when I was little. I’ve gone through all the Roald Dahl books with my two older children. My 9-year-old and I have been reading Judy Blume lately, who I absolutely adored when I was a kid. And my mom saved a big box of my books, so there are also these random books in there that I’m so glad she saved because I never would have found them again. There’s this book called Harry’s Mad by Dick King-Smith about a boy in London who inherits a talking parrot that was one of my favorites. My daughter and I read it recently and she loved it too, so that’s a wonderful experience.
That’s wonderful, I hope it leads to all three of them loving to read for the rest of their lives.
Whose taste in book recommendations never lets you down?
Again, this kind of conversation is something I’m going to work on! But right now, sadly the answer I’m going to give is a friend from high school who I follow on social media but rarely speak to: Emma Straub, who is a writer and also has the beautiful bookstore Books Are Magic. If she recommends a book on her social media, I almost always check it out.
How often do books enter and leave your house and what is the current ratio of read/unread books on your shelves?
While we were in Mexico, I was traveling a lot solo for work, and one of the things I was doing regularly on those trips was going to actual bookstores and browsing the shelves. It was wonderful and meant I had a regular stream of good, new books coming into my life. But I don’t have to go into bookstores to accumulate books. I will buy them at yard sales, pick them up off stoops, get them from the library. Books come into my house a lot faster than they go out. I usually purge them once a year or so, and I have a hard time letting go of ones that have carried meaning at some point in my life because they feel like they are a part of me. Certainly they are little clues to how I have become the person I am.
As far as the ratio or read to unread, I’d say 85/15. There are definitely some books on my shelves that I haven’t read but I do intend to read at some point. This is especially true for classics. I’ve often had it happen that I’ve struggled through a classic on a first, or even second read, but if I put it down for a few years, I can pick it back up at a later date and just breeze through it.
Two questions from that: What bookstore experiences did you like best on your solo trips and do you recall any fabulous stoop finds? I always thought those regular opportunities would be a primary reason to live in Brooklyn.
In New York I usually go to Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene, and Books Are Magic in Carroll Gardens. In Paris I love Shakespeare and Co, of course. But being able to wander the aisles of any independent bookstore is always a pleasure for me. Last spring I took a work trip to San Cristobel de las Casas, which is this beautiful town in the mountains in Chiapas, Mexico, and I found the most wonderful bookstore there. The town is on the backpacker trail so they had this incredible selection of second-hand books, and I stayed until they closed (I actually bought another Jeanette Walls book there, Half-Broke Horses, which I read on the plane home). As far as stoops finds, I’ll pick up anything that I actually think I’ll read. But my best find wasn’t a book, it was a chair. I saw a Herman Miller office chair that was being thrown out on the Upper East Side and I stopped my car in the middle of the street to grab it while a line of cars honked behind me. I’m sitting in it now.
What a find, lucky you. Chairs and sitting and readers and reading aren’t discussed enough, so you might have sparked a future question for my files… Thanks Skye, for both that and everything else you just said!
Skye Parrott, photographed by Kat Slootsky
]]>Of course it should come as no surprise that David is so adept on Instagram and has everyone in the art scene following him, for look at his chops: he's been writing about art since 1988 and from 1993 to 1999 was a regular contributor to The New Yorker. Since 1997 he has been a contributing editor at Artforum, and has written for Bookforum, Interview, Texte zur Kunst, Vogue Paris, frieze, The New York Times, and Flash Art. David curates, he teaches, he reads, he clearly knows his stuff. If you're already aware of him then you know what I'm talking about. If not, I'm very pleased for you to now know him. -Wes Del Val
WDV: With which five people in the art world, living or dead, would you have liked to start a book club?
DR: The living and the dead in a book club together is itself an interesting notion. “Eldritch”? Maybe H.P. Lovecraft should be a member, though he seems to have been a disagreeable, quite objectionable person, and he belonged to no art world. (Whatever he was his hyperbolic racism and xenophobia stood out as exorbitant even in his own era, but even so: He was a huge influence on my sensibilities from a very young age, and he still delivers the goods.) At least one person like that should be in every book club. One monster per Jane Austen Society, etc. [My Jane Austen book club: Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick, Raymond Williams, Henry James, and ___]
Let’s see…well among the dead, and I feel a little weird here, but I would like to have Robert Rosenblum. Perhaps his Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art could serve as the starting point, with its suggestions about historicism. Robert said that the late eighteenth century witnessed the first sort of sensibility that was in a sense promiscuous about historical periods—ancient Greece AND China during the Ming Dynasty AND the Natchez et cetera, etc. And how this promiscuous approach to history is still very much alive in our present [I think it was first published in the late ‘50s or early ‘60s.].
Brooks Adams, one of Robert’s students and an art critic and a droll wit. He might introduce The Memoirs of Madame de Boigne. His tone of voice I feel echoes that of the countess.
Cecily Brown would be great fun in a book club, and I would look forward to her “presentation” on Sade’s Justine, or perhaps on the Memoirs of Madame de la Tour du Pin.
My old college friend friend James Meyer, the art historian of the ‘60s and ‘70s, could
tell us about the Orphan of the Temple, la duchesse d’Angouleme: Marie Antoinette’s daughter, the one member of the royal family to survive the Terror. She has a memoir too.
Richard Howard who might give French tutorials, I need one desperately.
That’s a big emphasis on French culture there! Two questions: Is French history a favorite topic of yours to read about and did you know Richard Howard? If so, can you please share some memorable anecdotes about him? He was a hero of mine.
Yes I am a big francophile, though only in a rather bookish way. History, art, literature. And gossip. It’s not like I’m dying to be there much or ever. French is the only foreign language in which I’m somewhat and not really a lot but somewhat capable, to read at least. So I was able to read long novels, in high school and college at least. Once while I was living for a year in Los Angeles I rented this place in the Hollywood Hills from a Swiss man whose books in English were confined to workout manuals and colonic irrigation treatises, but he had some French books. I was so lonely and isolated then—I saw no one and lived in an inconvenient place and didn’t drive—I started to reread Madame Bovary in the original. I stumbled over so many words and I didn’t have a dictionary but even so I finished it very quickly, like in two days.
I didn’t know Richard Howard. Of course he’s been very important to me for his translations, probably that’s why he came to mind. I got my first translation of his when I was quite young, of Barthes’ On Racine. I still have it.
Which non-art critics’ writings are the most important to you and have made you a better writer?
Probably the ones that are actually really important and have truly affected my writing aren’t the ones I’d like to say. As for a better writer, I couldn’t say. I certainly read certain things with the idea that perhaps they would nourish my own prose style. I remember reading Lord Macaulay’s The History of England from the Accession of James the Second, and in the back of my mind I had the grandiose notion that his grand style might be…useful. That’s not why I read it though, obviously. I do like historians though. I want to read Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion, I must get a nice edition. (In a related way, I love Keynes’ The Economic Consequences of the Peace.) But I really doubt that anything you might consciously conceive as an influence to your writing, I’m pretty sure, is in fact the important one, and I would definitely side with Harold Bloom’s idea that probably the most profound influences are not conscious. They are repressed!
I’d say Susan Sontag was exceedingly important and influential for me. Hardly a novel generative figure but an inevitable one for me. I think I got to Against Interpretation and On Photography fairly early, in high school, maybe I was sixteen, and I still quite like a lot of her essays and some of her non-essays. Once I reviewed The Volcano Lover, and I can’t say as I remember my review I’m very fair with it, pretending as I did to be distant when Susan was doing all the things I dreamed about in writing and reading. Maybe I am rather deformed by Susan, I didn’t grow as a writer. I’m a critical bonsai tree.
Clement Greenberg, The complete essays in criticism in four volumes. Oh but that’s art criticism.
I loved the Fassbinder collection The Anarchy of the Imagination. I always liked that and once Jerry Saltz asked sort of this question in An Ideal Syllabus (Subtitled Artists, Critics and Curators Choose the Books We Need to Read. The collection of the series edited by art critic Jerry Saltz for frieze magazine came out in 1998. If you like OGR you would like this. –WDV) and I listed the Fassbinder, the Salons of Baudelaire, POPism: The Warhol Sixties, and the collected writings of Robert Smithson, and that’s still a good list for the student/”young me.”
Okay so I answered your question sloppily or disobediently, that stuff is very art critic-y.
I love Hilton Als as a writer, ever since The Women. I love the book reviews of V.S. Pritchett. Elizabeth Hardwick, Janet Malcolm—especially the Plath book, The Silent Woman. I want to say Joan Didion but I haven’t read her in a very long time, I should go back. What else? I love Benedetta Craveri’s Madame du Deffand and Her World—oh, she has to be in the book club. I have her most recent book, The Last Libertines from NYRB, but haven’t read it. Such a sucker for le dix-huitième. Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel, Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic, Barthes’ S/Z (the best ever), Jules Laforgue’s Berlin: The City and the Court. I could go on and on and on.
So much there to make anyone a better writer!
What would be a cool dream museum exhibit around books?
Richard Prince and Fulton Ryder. Richard has been one of my most enduring contemporary-art preoccupations. I first saw a show around 1985, I was still in college, I think it was at Nature Morte or Cash/Newhouse, at any rate at one of the cooler, more conceptually-oriented East Village galleries. At that point, I didn’t know what appropriation was strictly speaking in its Douglas Crimp/”Pictures”/October senses, though that was incipient. But I loved the photographs, I thought: This is me. Anyway, one could corral a very impressive museum show about Richard Prince in relation to books. Fulton Ryder as his semi-secret gallery/bookstore/publisher would give numerous indications: his collaborations with Colin De Land as John Dogg and Why I Go to the Movies Alone; his and Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye; pulp novels and “Nurse Paintings”; and of course all of his artist books. I used to make a real effort at keeping abreast of them, to be a completist in this collection, but I couldn’t. So many. And that’s just the obvious stuff, one could do so much with this as an exhibition. Maybe someone will ask me to organize it? One more thing: I have this zine, The Masochist, and the most recent number of it is given over to Richard, so now I can even see myself inscribed in this art-bibliophile history.
I also had to abandon the completist route and am right with you on what a dream-come-true show that would be. I guess the closest the public has come to something like it is “American Prayer,” his 2011 exhibition at Paris’ Bibliotheque nationale de France, which was a look into his private library and influences. The book for that show is great. I’m so pleased to see Fulton Ryder active again, but of course knowing Richard it could disappear again as suddenly as it’s re-appeared, so if you want one of its productions I highly encourage non-hesitation.
What have you read recently that you’re not embarrassed to say you knew very little about until now?
Well, in a non-specialist way, I think I know something about John Singer Sargent, but I enjoyed immensely Julian Barnes’ book about Dr. Pozzi, The Man in the Red Coat. After this, I read his book about Shostakovich, a composer that I know in a vague Greatest-20th-Century listicle way but really not a lot. It’s not really a work of history or criticism per se, well it’s a novel, but it serves as history/criticism for me and no doubt that’s part of the Barnesian idea. He’s really been a big person for me, I read Flaubert’s Parrot when it came out. This just occurs to me now. Michael Fried’s book about Madame Bovary and Salammbô, Flaubert’s “Gueuloir,” was the best sort of criticism, as I thought I knew both novels pretty well, and even so I got a lot out of it, especially with regard to the Cathaginian phantasmagoria. I have the recent collection of D.H. Lawrence’s prose with me, I read around it for great bits. I had thought I loathed Lawrence, but Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage was fantastic. I love this sort of history and criticism and autobiography, taking genre distinctions and sort of putting them in a light acid bath, dissolving somewhat—I guess I show my hand, I wish I could write like this. He has a Tarkovsky book and yeah I love Tarkovsky, so read it yeah. And finally, Journey to the Abyss: the Diaries of Count Harry Kessler 1880-1918, though I just acquired it & I haven’t learned much yet but I know I will, plus it’s a nice complement to Alex Ross’ Wagnerism. I know it’s going to be just heaven.
I admire your honesty as a long-time writer for showing your hand like that, it’s such a welcome trait to see.
What are the three best non-specialist books from the past five years for general smart readers about any aspect of art?
For some reason I’m coming to this question last, but here are a few books I might recommend to the interested non-specialist: Double Vision: The Unerring Eye of Art World Avatars Dominique and John de Menil by William Middleton. The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning by Maggie Nelson. Douglas Crimp’s Before Pictures is great. October goes to the peep show. Ninth Street Women is soooooo perfect for this. What else, off the top of my head, would make a nice gift for someone? Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. Perfect for the pointy-headed neophyte. Likewise Hito Steyerl’s The Wretched of the Screen—that title! Too good. Oh, and Gary Indiana’s Vile Days. Because you just have to. I was going to add Blake Gopnik’s Warhol biography, which I haven’t read though I’m sure it’s a terrific resource—I have so many Warhol books, catalogues, and I still buy them but this book is, I don’t know, 900 pages? But I’m glad I have it here. And I would recommend it because at least one totally brilliant person, Simon Linke, enthusiastically liked it, but I would add Gary’s withering [“withering” autofill] review in Harper’s.
Yes, Gary’s review of it was pure Gary and I hope this prompts people to look it up.
What reading material gets you to open your wallet these days because you must own it and/or you wish to support the people behind it?
The Judd catalogue from the Modern
Alex Ross’ Wagnerism
Several old books purchased last weekend at Alabaster Books on 4th Avenue, including volume one of Atget: Old France for $75; my third copy of Paul McCarthy’s Propo [$45]; the collected poems of Noel Coward, with song lyrics; a quite old paperback copy of Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era [$30]; a nice book on Kiki Smith editions, beautiful design, [$100]; Durling’s translation of Petrach, a book I had in college and I don’t know why but just wanted to have again, though it remains unopened.
Shout out to Alabaster! Poor Alabaster, most people overlook it in favor of the Strand around the corner, but it is a wonderful shop and should not be dismissed OR missed when a great reader is in the vicinity. What do you particularly like about it?
The last time I was there, a few weeks ago, it was after stopping by the Strand, I wanted to buy something there as an absurdly modest gesture of support in this moment of their travails, but it was too hectic, it made me nervous, pandemic etc., so I left. Alabaster is maybe a block away, and though it is small I didn’t feel nervous. It’s a wonderful surcease, the somewhat dim interior, my favorite sections [poetry, the art and photo books, literary criticism], the unbelievably nice young man at the desk. It was very mental-health enabling; I bought lots.
You nailed its particular appeals and I’m sure they were very pleased when you walked out with lots.
What books are coming out in the next six months which you’re most excited about?
Motley Stones by Adalbert Stifter, from NYRB next spring. Stifter found an unlikely booster to his readership in Thomas Bernhard, whose typically bejeweled and hilarious evisceration of his fellow Austrian writer in Old Masters is a model of seductive hatred.
If price were no barrier, what would you start adding to your personal library?
Every expensive or rare book or just my old books that I have lost over the years, lost or sold. Well not every but many, to re-collect my past for one. I guess if price were no barrier that could mean maybe I had the means to move to a bigger place? It’s a perpetual Battle of the Books here but they aren’t at war with each other, they’re at war with me. If I could show you a picture…it’s nuts. Fun too but nuts a lot.
When I was a child, every month we went to New York—”the City” as many in the Tri-state area would say—for the weekend. Visits to the old Brentano’s on Fifth and also the old Scribner’s, also on Fifth, and Doubleday, also on Fifth, and Rizzoli, which then had locations on either Fifth or 57th Street, I can’t remember, were the rule. I remember buying L’amour bleu there. Super-gay for someone just on the cusp of adolescence, and no one batted an eye, such was the munificence of that dispensation, which was both generous and indifferent. I got whatever I wanted. This precocity with respect to l’amour bleu-type things was, to my mind, remarkable as my own actual “intimate” life was very retarded (I was in college when I lost my virginity, and just typing that phrase makes me giggle). On the one hand: Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs in the original. On the other: “Oh my God no, Kay Ishiwa is having sex with Jeffrey Cantor? NOOOOOO!!!”
I just looked up L’amour bleu online; it’s a common old book, easy to acquire, not even expensive. I don’t really want it, for what, to remember thinking at 14, They do that? But Rizzoli also carried these particular Skira books, oversized and coming in “silk-upholstered” boxes. I had a couple, I remember one, Tamara de Lempicka; I think Arcimboldo was another.
Whose posts on Instagram about books consistently get the most likes from you?
I think the only one I follow is @karmabooks. I look at a lot of booksellers, maybe I follow more than that one. I wanted to follow Ursus but it’s not really for me, and it’s a nostalgic, sentimental thing, remembering when I used to shop there altogether too much. So many nice things but not cheap. I’m going to take a look now. That was such a great store, though I know many people disliked it, I think.
Wow, just Karma? I mean they’re wonderful and a must-follow, but surprised only one.
There are others, I realize, looking over my follow list, but they aren’t very revealing. David Zwirner Books? D.A.P.? But really, that I don’t or didn’t follow doesn’t indicate a lack of interest on my part. I used to follow absurdly few, for a long time, that was itself perhaps an affectation and not a special or interesting one. I used to follow hardly any galleries, and no museums at all. So you see what I mean.
What books have you started and stopped multiple times but you just know you will one day finish them?
Pretentious but true [pretentious and obvious even more like it]: Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon is a challenge and I have read a lot of it, but I don’t know when I’ll finish it. Yes it is very long, but I think it’s also a matter of how much of Gibbon’s sui generis style one can take, say 600 pages at each attempt?
Moby Dick
Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness
Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting [I’m probably lying but I do have a nice hardcover Bollingen edition in two volumes]
The Devil Wears Prada. I did have that book lying around forever but I never read it. I saw the movie. A friend told me I was horribly vulgar just seeing it. Well not quite that but he refused to see it: He remained absolutely loyal to Mrs. Schaffer. (i.e. Anna Wintour, ex wife of David Schaffer –WDV)
Since no one writes letters anymore I don’t know what that augurs for future books of correspondence amongst writers today, like the rich trove we have from the past, so whose email exchanges from the last decade between two people in the book world do you wish you could read?
Emails? Hillary/Huma, duh.
Not exactly book world folk, but it’s an answer which would intrigue a lot of people (still? I think?) so let’s stick with it. Thanks David!
Besides all that I just had to be in touch with Jaja when I saw a picture of her shelves and what I believe (I couldn't clearly see all the spines) is the complete set of the French men's magazine Paradis, one of my all time favorite publications, and one which I can only think of two other people who might also have them. Needless to say I'm very impressed by Jaja's digging and taste and think you will be as well.
If you could post female nipples on Instagram which books or magazines would you like to pull from to feature where you’re quite sure the images aren’t already online? Contrary to what people feel as we drown in imagery, not everything has been digitized…
It would have to be Plexus. A French magazine which ran from 1966 to 1970. In contrast to the typical notion of publications available at the time, Plexus was devoted to humour and eroticism. It discussed philosophy, sexuality, sensuality, art, surrealism and science-fiction. Always with a touch of irony. It went against the tyranny of conventionalism and believed that people should be as free and provocative as they wished. This approach inevitably drew fire from both conservatives and traditional institutions. It was censored in 1967 because of its so-called pornographic articles. Contributors included (among my favourites) Félix Labisse, Leonor Fini, Dalí, Sam Haskins, Paul Delvaux, Lucien Clergue, Sempé and Falco. I was very fortunate to grow up in a family where books and magazines were everywhere. And even better, a complete set of Plexus. My parents didn’t believe in censoring photography publications or books and never imposed judgements on what I should or shouldn’t read. They also had a great collection of Zoom magazines which captured the seventies and eighties through the art of photography. Images from Zoom or Plexus would probably almost immediately be removed by Instagram. Too much nipple exposure. Something I continue to find absurd and confounding.
Which books do you wish there were documentaries made about the writing-of them?
Roswitha Hecke's photo book Liebes Leben (Love Life). The film director Werner Schroeter introduced the photographer to Zurich-based artist-muse and prostitute, Irene. This meeting resulted in a poetic and romantic documentary style representation of the model going about her daily life through the streets of Zurich and Rome. This is definitely not a moralistic portrayal. The photos capture Irene, a gaze of independence and defiance, teasing the viewer, in black and white tableaux. Nothing too explicit or objectionable. This is about a woman looking at another woman. It’s intimate and a different viewpoint on seduction. The images are interspersed with excerpts from Baudelaire poems and reminded me that he once wrote in his personal journal ”What is art? Prostitution.” A documentary about the relationship between the two women would be fascinating. Why Hecke chose to focus her eye on a prostitute and understanding whether it was an act of sexual reclamation or whether it ends up being another form of abjection. So many questions.
What a fabulous answer. I love that book and am not at all surprised you know it. I hope someone who has the means and ability to make small (in scope, not interest) films sees this…
I’d really like to know any others you have in mind. Can you please share one or two others?
Young London: Permissive Paradise by Frank Habicht.
The book was published in 1969 and is a collection of mostly black and white photographs of London at a time when things were changing fast. The city was still a hotbed of creativity but a darker mood was taking hold. Disillusion with the postwar dream and political turbulence. Rates of poverty and deprivation under the gloss were becoming pressing concerns. Frank Habicht’s images are fascinating. He photographed the streets of London during seven months and shot 250 rolls of film. Flower children, nudity, the working class, social activists wearing beads and Greek Shepherds’ coats, hard drugs and psychedelia, the establishment, left-wing intellectuals, the older order and the free spirit, ennui and exhibitionism, all superimposed. A city that was starting to fragment. I think that London at the time was the only place in the world where you could do what you want, it was unregimented. No rules and restrictions. This is what set London apart.
For which books from the past few years would you have loved to have been asked to blurb? Feel free to give us your blurbs here!
Insomniac City by Bill Hayes: A love letter to Oliver Sacks and New York. I’ve read it twice and was stunned both times. It is beautiful, tender and magical. A meditation on life and grief.
The Glossy Years by Nicholas Coleridge: Some people will call this book “silly” but I just call it hugely entertaining! It’s a gossipy and scandalous memoir from the chairman of Condé Nast Britain. Names dropped on every single page but with wit and endless enthusiasm. His thirty-year career at Condé Nast is fascinating and provides a penetrative insight into the worlds of journalism and British society. Two things I am most curious about.
I’m with you on most anything to do with Condé Nast. I don’t know why it stays endlessly fascinating to so many people. I hear Graydon Carter is working on a book (though hope it transcends just his Vanity Fair years) and every year I wish we’d get a thick biography about SI Newhouse.
Oh, yes! I have been told about Graydon Carter’s memoir and can’t wait to read it. I occasionally read Air Mail but I miss his Vanity Fair years.
What do you think of Air Mail?
I’ve received the ”Graydon Carter here…” emails every Saturday in my inbox since week one, and I like that it’s got the mark of his old standby editorial tastes (class, power, and the good life) running throughout it, and I see what they’re going for overall, and I open probably one in every 10 or so emails from them, but I’m not paying for it. I’m surprised they’re not doing some bi-annual or quarterly print offerings, but if they’re truly sticking to digital like they announced when they started then I applaud that.
What are you most curious about right now and what are you reading to satiate your interest in it?
I’m curious about so many things. I even find the ordinary deserving of scrutiny. I’ve always been inquisitive, particularly when it comes to human beings. Through books I can satisfy every single aspect of curiosity: curiosity about humanity, curiosity about who we are, curiosity about objects, cultural curiosity…
I think this is pointedly reflected in the pile of books by my bedside table! At the moment the pile consists of: My Life in France by Julia Child, Harvard Square by André Aciman, Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker and Look Again by David Bailey. Oh, and also Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A., which I noticed Lee Kaplan is also currently reading.
What are some visual books which came out in the early 2000s which today are still completely relevant and inspiring?
Most of the art/photography books or magazines I buy were published in the seventies and eighties. But I did get my hands on a scarce Helmut Newton book called Yellow Press which was published in 2002 by de Pury and Luxembourg. It contains a lot of personal photographs and behind-the-scenes imagery. A real gem.
Another book which came out in 2014 and I still find highly relevant is Self Portrait 1973-1986 by Luciano Castelli. It was published by Patrick Frey. The painter Luciano Castelli started posing for the camera in the seventies and played with the idea of his own body. He posed in outrageous outfits and played roles usually assigned to the feminine. For Castelli, the notion of beauty, the right to live in complete freedom and stereotypes of identity are all essential questions.
What is it about productions from the seventies and eighties that is so enchanting for you?
I’m not sure. I think there was less restraint in the seventies and eighties. More freedom. Look at French Vogue in the late sixties/seventies. Nothing was toned down. Storytelling was crucial and didn’t work the political correctness fields. Photographers like Guy Bourdin were given carte blanche to create the most surreal and mad scenarios which today would probably be regarded indecent and would shock too many people.
Are you an impulsive or considered book buyer and how many books would you say you’ve bought this year?
Book shopping is probably one of my favourite activities. I find it intoxicating. I have no self-discipline or self-control when it comes to books or magazines. I collect photography books but every purchase is mostly unplanned. Occasionally it will be a direct response to a recommendation from a friend (almost always Emilie Lauriola who is the director of Le Bal Books in Paris) but a lot of the time it can start anywhere: walking into a bookshop, watching a film, going to an exhibition, looking at out-of-print publications…total cross-pollination.
I buy a lot of books and magazines. Probably too much. My husband and I already have two rooms in our apartment with floor-to-ceiling walls covered in books and magazines.
Everyone should know Emilie and Le Bal. What is it about them that is special to you? And do you and your husband have the same tastes and how did you join libraries when you first moved in together?
My husband, Mat Maitland, is an image-maker and art director who grew up obsessed with pop aesthetics and surrealism. I tend to like a more dreamy and romantic genre. We both love spending hours in bookstores or markets looking for interesting vintage magazines as well as books on art, fashion, and photography. When we moved in together, we immediately knew that a library room would be essential. We each had so many boxes of books and magazines! It was also important since we both use books and magazines as a resource for work.
If you’re able to have a dedicated library room that is wonderful!
What are the most absorbing reads you’ve ever experienced, where you truly lost track of time and had to be shaken (figuratively) back to reality?
Conundrum by Jan Morris.
Jan Morris was born James Humphrey Morris on 2 October 1926, in Somerset. An accomplished soldier in the British military, a foreign correspondent, an intelligence officer and Britain’s best travel writer, her memoir, Conundrum, is one of the most absorbing stories I’ve ever read. Not only is it a fascinating biography it is beautifully and vividly written. She was one of the first people in public life to describe in detail a surgical sex change in the early seventies. A journey that involved years of hormone therapy while married with children and finally culminated in reassignment surgery in Casablanca, Morocco. An extraordinarily bold and challenging thing to do at the age of 46 in 1972. When I think about today’s searing social divisions, this conversation about sexual orientation and gender identity seems even more important.
I hope this sparks people to learn more about her, what an extraordinary life.
How do you browse in bookstores?
There is nothing more thrilling than browsing in bookstores. When London came out of its first lockdown, I wanted to welcome back the joy of discovering books and immediately headed to Daunt in Marylebone. Even the masks, queues and neurotic hand sanitisation could not diminish my enthusiasm! I couldn’t wait to revive the familiar routine. I’m a completely dedicated reader but—to answer your question—with no method of browsing. A bookshop is a voyage of discovery, a passport to other places and lives. You can walk in with a specific title in mind and walk out an hour later with an obscure French novel or armloads of art books. In Paris, where my parents live, I have a little list of favourite bookshops who will call me when something arrives that they think I will like. I love when the staff is engaged by anything you’re interested in. This will never happen with online retailing. I really hope all the bookstores I love so much can survive this new world we live in. They really need our support to thrive and are indispensable to local communities. How they are not deemed an essential service in the UK and France I will never understand. They should be exempt from lockdown restrictions.
You’ll likely hear no objections from anyone reading this!
“A little list of favourite bookshops.” Do tell please which Paris shops are on it. And anywhere else besides Daunt in London?
In London I love Donlon Books in Hackney and Peter Harrington on Dover Street.
In Paris, I will shop for books at markets, Le Bal, Le Comptoir de l’Image on Rue de Sévigné, Le Plac’Art on Rue de l’Eperon, Librairie Artcurial, Yvon Lambert, Librairie Michaël Seksik, La Nouvelle Chambre Claire, Librairie Louis Rozen, Un Regard Moderne.
Oowee, that Paris list, thank you!
What in your life would you not know about had you not read it in a book, meaning your friends and/or family didn’t tell you, you weren’t taught it in school, and you didn’t see anything about it online?
I think it will sound incredibly cliché but Anaïs Nin was quite the revelation. I found a copy of Delta of Venus when I was 14 and felt as if a door into a totally new world had opened! I shared the book with my closest friends and I’m pretty sure it was an education for all of us. We didn’t have Lena Dunham or Carrie Bradshaw at the time and Anaïs Nin, her books and diaries, was my first introduction to feminism.
I know what you mean, like a high school kid reading On the Road and then wanting to forgo their near future plans in favor of taking off, but as cliché as both are, words in a book only have true effect once they’ve been read, and I know you’ll agree that compared to so much else out there, reading is always one of the finest things you can do in this life. Thanks Jaja!
Jaja Hargreaves
]]>WDV: Has an author’s personal style which you liked ever influenced what you thought of their writing? I know I’ve wondered if I’d admire Samuel Beckett’s work so much if I also didn’t think he was one of the most dashing men ever.
AF: I would not say influenced, rather completed or enriched with another layer of meaning, or fascination: I find personal style akin to handwriting, which means it is something very telling, in particular when it is spontaneous. And with spontaneous I mean authentic, not contrived. People who make an effort are always commendable, as long as the effort is true to themselves. William Burroughs’ rather stern grey suit to me is the perfect complement to the deranged, mind-expanding quality of his writing, and a canny signifier of a personality split between convention and rebellion. Similarly, Hunter S.Thompson’s long socks are a sensible addition to his gonzo persona. On a general level, I pretty much admire writers who project a sense of self-possession when it comes to style. Tom Wolfe and Mark Twain in their impeccable white suits are an epitome of literary and gentlemanly accuracy for me. So is Emil Cioran with his slightly sad vestiaire and wonderfully unruly mane, or Leonardo Sciascia in his impeccably somber grey suits and perfectly pressed shirt: a look worthy of a school teacher in a tiny burg, which in fact he was by day.
Are there living writers you can assess the same way?
Honestly, not much. There is this very interesting book that was published a few years ago, Legendary Authors and the Clothes They Wore, and the living or contemporary examples are not enlightening, to me at least. I mean, the slightly grungy-clothed persona of David Foster Wallace was on point, but it also looked a bit like a pose, if I can. That’s what puts me off about contemporary writers, and even more about artists: the look is part of the package as it has to convey and sell the personality. They are visual embodiments of a clichè that is spendable on the media. I cannot see much spontaneity, even when the attitude is one of complete disregard for clothing. Lack of spontaneity, even at the peak of flamboyancy, puts me off. Then again, whoever looks at me will surely object that my way of dressing is far from being spontaneous, too, but I think differently and I believe I can spot when a look is made up. In writers I admire, and let’s put the very bourgeoise Simone de Bouvoir in the lot, the look is never about having a look. Rather it is a uniform, an extension of inner thoughts or maybe a protection from the outside world. This last line is very personal: my rather somber, monastic look is a shield. I can see that in writers like Michel Foucault: that white turtleneck he wore constantly, even under the sex-club-redolent leather Perfecto, looks to my eye like a way to keep up a zing of properness, at every cost.
Jack Kerouac’s image was used in a Gap advertisement in 1993 and Joan Didion was shot for a Céline one a few years ago (and a classic, though I found too predictable, shot of her in the late 60s is on the cover of the author and clothes book you just mentioned). A semi-related question to the above since we’re talking writers’ style is: What is it about writers that so few are ever called upon by fashion houses to advertise their wares when the industry clearly loves using non-models, like athletes, movie stars, and musicians? I have my own reasons, but would like to know yours.
You are right, and I think this comes with the heavily market-oriented mentality of contemporary fashion. Quite simply, writers have a far less wide-reaching appeal than movie stars or athletes. And when fashion houses look at writers and include them in their narrative, they do so to project an image of utter sophistication, sending a message that sounds like: we are above the rest. Recently Valentino did some poetry reading on their Instagram and I found it both interesting and awkward. Poetry is a serious thing, and I believe those self-proclaimed poets doing basically broken lines on IG are not real poets, so mixing these—for the coolness factor—with a real poet like Mariangela Gualtieri was a bad curation for me. The real problem, to me, is that, for some strange reason, fashion is, deep down, scared by culture, and so it uses it in ways that project superiority—the case for Prada, whose rather patronizing attitude I find a bit classist—or taking actions that would need some further rumination, like the aforementioned Valentino. The idea per se was wonderful, the execution not so much.
If you were shown pictures of anonymous bookshelves, seeing which titles would indicate to you that the owner and you would probably get along very well?
I would not prejudge on the titles—personal taste and inclinations are not questionable, even though seeing the heavily marketed bestsellers du moment, or du recent past, is a NO for me. I am always favorably impressed by a well-equipped library—more is more for me when it comes to books—and most of all what impresses me are well-worn, evidently-used books. I like it a lot when I see the classics in there, from Dante to Joyce, but also when a bookshelf signals a very specific taste. For instance, genre writing is considered on the B list of literary inclinations, but Ian Fleming and George Simenon are actually wonderful writers. A nice bookshelf dressed up with coffee table tomes selected by the architect just because they signal status puts me down, especially as I, a person of both words and images, am instantly attracted to art books. Anyone who owns I borghesi stanchi, a massive tome of drawings and words by the late Leo Longanesi will instantly be my friend. This book is an unsung gem: a brilliant satire of the bourgeoisie in quick sketches and sardonic verses. Whoever runs the IG Art Books & Ephemera must have bookshelves that get me salivating.
I had to put that part of the sentence in bold as I so wholeheartedly agree. And yes, AB&E is the best, his collection is niche and seemingly endless.
If you could write a book about any writer from any period who would it be?
This is a hard one. So many. I am fascinated by someone like Voltaire, for the historic moment he inhabited and for his energizing belief in the enlightenment of culture, just as I am by the renegade life of Hunter Thompson or the encyclopedic knowledge of Giorgio Manganelli. Ennio Flaiano’s comic pessimism is so inspiring, I’d love to write about him, too.
Comic pessimism, it’s one of my very favorites as well and I feel like non-Americans appreciate it so much more than American readers generally do. Please tell me what you like about Flaiano’s version of it that makes it so inspiring.
What I find endlessly inspiring about Ennio Flaiano—whom with his moustache, dark suit and chubby figure cut a fascinating silhouette, too, and who worked as the scriptwriter to Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita—is the clarity of vision, the glaring simplicity of the writing, and the ability to laugh, or smile, at the misery of human nature. He has a way of saying very bitter things in a manner that feels soft, yet still piercing. His understanding of human behavior is canny. He also speaks to me on a stylistic level as he writes in fragments, short short stories, sentences. His thoughts are pulverized and the reader feels like they’re getting the particles.
Sounds wonderful. Unfortunately there doesn’t appear to be much of him in English so may have to appeal to our friends at NYRB to help rectify.
Which living writers’ homes would you most like to have free reign to tour?
To be completely honest with you, I’d love not to explore the houses, but the heads of writers I admire. They don’t make them like these anymore: men like the aforementioned Ennio Flaiano, whose understanding of behavior and psychology belies the ability to detect meaning in the smallest signs, or an encyclopedic connoisseur like Giorgio Manganelli, whose hunger for literature in its many forms feels derangedly sensual to me. Manganelli was a glutton of words: when reading his books, which often do not even have a story or are mere rhetoric exercises, I always learn new words, new ways to construct a sentence, and that is so valuable for me. I must confess here that I read certain writers, my favorite writers, for the technique of writing, for the wording more than the stories. I forget the stories right away, but the style remains. I like Ágota Kristóf, whose trilogy of the city of K (The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie –WDV) is an all time favorite, because of the dryness of the prose and the martial rhythm she gives to her stories, but also because, as an Italian who oftentimes writes in English, I can relate to a Czek writing in French. No matter how fluent, when writing in what is not your native language, a disconnection happens: I feel like an adult with the writing means—vocabulary, syntax—of a child, and that I find in Kristof. The style is simplistic, but there is so much fire burning below it.
When it comes to houses, I would have loved to see how Emil Cioran lived, because apparently he was very frugal and a real flâneur roaming the streets of Paris for whole days. So maybe he lived in something that looked like a monk’s cell, which I’d love. Extreme frugality turns my mind on, just like extreme lavishness. For pure reasons of good taste, as she is such a stylish woman, I’d like to visit the rooms inhabited by Joan Didion.
Fully agree regarding extremes on either end and I’m particularly enamored of those on the sparse one. As a quick aside, and I apologize for sending you elsewhere while in the middle of this interview, but this is my favorite such example I’ve seen in many years. I just had to share.
Ok, back to books and reading.
If you could go anywhere in the world for a week and select a book each day from a bookstore to read, where and which bookstore?
I’d love to travel back in time, to my hometown of Ragusa, Sicily, and roam again the gigantic rooms of the Giovanni Paolino bookstore. Mr Paolino was my first bookseller: the place was huge and my father used to leave me there when making commissions in the city center. He and Mr Paolino were long-time friends. I remember that bookstore like a labyrinth, filled with everything. My most cherished books were bought there. I have a copy of Karl Kraus’ The Last Days of Mankind I bought around 1989, and Leonardo Sciascia’s Candido from even earlier.
Is it no longer open or do you just never find yourself in Ragusa? What did it have that you miss when you go into other bookstores?
The bookstore is no longer open. At one point it moved to another location, but it was not quite the same: smaller, and in a way cooler, more elegant, but less captivating. What I liked about the original one was the scale: so big, some areas seemed not to have been touched for years, full of dusty old tomes. It gave me a sense of discovery. I always went there without a plan, and went out with bags of books. I am sure there are plenty of places like this in the world, but I am not that little child anymore. I would not say I am blasé, but with the weft of experience comes being less ready to be surprised. What I miss is the feeling of being in a cave, ready for treasure hunting.
How does current book culture in Italy strike you? Do you see people leaving bookstores with bags or empty-handed, and what does it take for you to buy a book today?
Italians are not the best readers at the moment, probably. I rarely see people leaving bookstores with bags full of stuff. We have pumped-up literary cases every now and then that catalyze the attention of the public and urge everyone to buy, but it’s forgettable stuff. The problem is that newspapers and magazines do not foster good quality writing—with the exception of daily papers Il Foglio and Il Manifesto—while in the past great writers, Dino Buzzati to name one, who wrote incredibly catchy cronaca nera (crime news) articles for Il Corriere della Sera—used papers as their writing gym, so to speak. It’s all very disappointing.
Curiosity is what it takes for me to buy a book today. I still enter bookstores without a plan and roam freely: fiction, non-fiction, poetry. If a title or cover gets my curiosity, I dive in and read a few random pages. If what I encounter interests me, I buy.
What were formative book and magazine reads which got you interested in fashion?
There were a lot of magazines in my house, as my mom has always been an avid reader. On top of that, both my aunt and uncle were hi-end fashion retailers, so they got many books and magazines from fashion houses, which they gave to me since my interest in fashion sparked really early. So the first formative reading was early 80s issues of Vogue Italia and Gap, which was a very well-read and well-written trade magazine. Then I started choosing by myself and i-D was THE magazine: a place of crazy ideas and crazier fashions, conveyed with a lively visual language. But in terms of Italian writing, Brunetta and Camilla Cederna have had a huge impact on my thinking and prose, for the sharpness of vision and the wit of the writing and, in the case of Brunetta, the drawings. So the formative book is Il Lato Debole, a collection of Camilla’s columns illustrated by Brunetta.
The Cederna names are new to me, as I’m sure they will be to most readers, so since they’ve made such a difference in your life, we’d love to know more about them.
Camilla Cederna was extremely sharp in her analysis of the superficial obsession of the Italian consumerist and nouveau riche society. Her gaze was sharp and unremitting, always finding the weak spot in everything that was so cool at a given moment in history. She was extra bitter, and yet she never came across as teacher-like, or someone patronizing. She mocked fashions and obsessions, but in a respectful way. Her way of looking at things and then writing her impression has been deeply formative for me, in the sense that I find in Cederna a template of informative journalism with a personal point of view and a fierce no-bullshit attitude. All this, in a wonderfully elegant Milanese package; la Cederna was never seen without perfectly coiffed hair and pussibow blouse.
After putting it like that I can certainly see her strong influence in your critical writing.
What do you read these days which keeps you interested in observing and writing about fashion?
I keep myself interested in fashion by not reading about fashion. The Saturday edition of newspaper Il Foglio is my weekly must, as it features longform articles on matters ranging from art to society to cinema. I find myself intrigued by the writing on cinema by Mariarosa Mancuso, for both the unexpected point of view and witty style. When I am prepping for a fashion month and the seasons of on-the-road reviews, I religiously re-read random pages from La Solitudine del Satiro by Ennio Flaiano and Camilla Cederna’s Quando si ha ragione, just to remember what an honest point of view conveyed through impeccable writing is. I love gossipy, silly reading: Dagospia is the best Italian site in this sense, with truly amusing headlines. I am a sucker for a punchy headline. When I feel in a more academic mode, I read the fiction section of fashion journal Vestoj, where clothing and roundabouts are treated as part of novels and short stories. There is some interesting reading material on Anothermag.com, but the truth is I am very random. First thing in the morning I read Il Foglio, Il Sole 24 Ore and news agency ANSA online and for the rest I jump here and there wherever Google takes my fancy. I am impressed by the journalism of the New Yorker for how informed it is—Rebecca Mead’s profile of Alessandro Michele is a wonderful token of prose and investigation. The New Yorker and Interview writings by Ingrid Sischy collected in Nothing Is Lost are a masterclass in insightful journalism: that is one book I often return to, a bit enviously, because I can truly see Sichy was given a long time to write her profiles, carrying multiple interviews with the same subject, and that made a big difference. Today when you get a commission you are lucky if you get a week from first contact to filing a finished story. I might sound old, but quality takes time.
Yes, Nothing Is Lost is one I’ll as well go back to repeatedly for years to come. The trim size of the book was a bit too large for my taste, but kudos to Knopf overseers for going with that elegant, timeless cover design.
Who are some people in fashion who have impressed you with being well-read?
Many of them. A lot of my colleagues are well-read and so are a few designers. Rick Owens, for instance, whose interest for a decadent writer like Huysmans is particularly noteworthy, within his very own aesthetic system. But to be honest with you, I am more likely to discuss books with friends and acquaintances outside of fashion because talking books with colleagues or designers often becomes a race to show off who is the smartest and most cultured, and I am not interested in that. I am genuinely interested in exchange, and in quality over quantity. For instance, Ágota Kristóf’s trilogy was mentioned to me briefly during a car ride by an architect. He said just a few things, but that made me want to immediately read the books. There are journalists who occasionally touch fashion, like Michele Masneri, whose advice I would completely take. I like his classy way of being bitchy.
Very good point about the know-it-all race.
Who is someone most of us probably wouldn’t know, but their writing and opinions are very meaningful to you?
Antonio Pippolini, my partner, is someone whose opinions are fundamental to me. He is not a writer, but a draughtsman, but his sharp sensibility is priceless when I edit, and his notations are always stimulating and mind-expanding.
That’s lovely. How does he contribute priceless feedback when you edit? Every writer should be so lucky to have a discerning, trustworthy eye so close at hand.
Antonio reads my stories when I think they are done. He always unremittingly points out what is missing in terms of tone, where the writing goes weak, what I should keep and what I should take away. We sometimes have fights on this, but I know he is right, even when that means rewriting the whole thing. I trust him because not being a fashion person, he gives me the feedback of a real reader. I do not want to only talk to fashion readers.
What’s your preferred way to organize your books?
By publishing house and format, except for the miscellaneous shelf above my desk, where I store all the books that I consider fundamental. One book I could not do without is Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit: it is so witty, so sardonic, so absurd. Also, living both in Milano and Ragusa, of all the authors I love (Flaiano, Gadda, Manganelli) I have double copies, so that books do not travel and each library is safe.
By publisher? Wow, that’s a first in this series. Begs me to ask then by which publishers do you have the most books? And can you give us some more of what titles are on your fundamentals shelf?
Adelphi is the Italian publisher which makes up ¾ of my whole library: they have a wonderfully eclectic catalogue and they still stand for quality and literature with a capital L to this very day. I always trust what they publish, because there is a cultural plan behind it, not a marketing one, even though they are the Italian publishers of huge bestsellers such as Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Mordecai Richler’s Barney’s Version. Adelphi also happens to have Manganelli, Flaiano, Sciascia, Landolfi, Cioran in their catalogue. Most of these are on that shelf I mentioned, which also houses Nothing Is Lost, Tom Wolfe’s New Journalism, Glenn O’Brien’s essays, a small book of Piranesi etchings, Gillo Dorfles’ Mode & Modi and a funny bestiary by Guerrilla Spam I got as a present for my 48th birthday, this year. The other publishers that feature heavily in my library are Sellerio and Einaudi. To tell you a fetishistic truth, I love both Adelphi and Sellerio for the paper they use: so rich and tactile. The Adelphi series Piccola Biblioteca is my absolute favorite: pocket-size, super elegant, with deranged colors for the covers.
Don’t be at all bashful about preferring some books for their physical qualities. Not in front of this crowd!
Which writers would you welcome to write about fashion and style as you think they’d deliver fresh insight and observations?
This is quite a hard question. Let’s put it like this: I’d love to have William Burroughs apply his cut-up point of view to the psychology of clothing, and Yasmina Reza her wit, her way to decode behaviors. I’d love Ennio Flaiano to decode fashion as a render of status and Yoko Ono to unleash all its absurdities.
I hope we continue for years to come to see you tap these and your other influences to keep giving us honest, sharp fashion commentary. Thanks Angelo!
Angelo Flaccavento
I was able to meet François last month in Paris and this is the first interview in the OGR series which I did in person and recorded. He was dashing around the city looking for film as he had a very short window in Paris between shooting trips, but he could see me for an hour. It was a cold, drizzly morning and I was able to find us a table in an empty sideroom of a cafe on Place Saint-Sulpice. He showed up wet with a peacoat and watch cap on and was happy to have a coffee. Once we settled in and I asked him the first question his eyes lit up and he was off to the races, for François LOVES books. The hour flew by and he bundled back up to continue his search. As he walked away I remember thinking he looked warm -Wes Del Val
FH: I would choose my first main shock actually, which was being able to photograph Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé’s house in 1982 in Paris. It was a shock to be by myself in front of that collection. I managed to do some trips with them after, in Russia and elsewhere, and I started a collaboration with them over the years. The idea of a real collector, in a very Proustian way, is why I would like to have had Proust writing about both of them and their Paris apartment. It would have been really interesting to read his description about the juxtaposition of the periods in that home.
I am currently reading Proust in the Power of Photography, a book that Brassaï wrote, and it is absolutely super interesting. He says that Proust was very attracted to photography, which I did not know, and he used to have his portrait taken many times and he would exchange portraits with the people he admired, or with a girl for instance that he wanted to write about. The focus he had on photography is very interesting.
What are three important books for you which you think not enough younger people know about?
Since I have 5,000 books it is very difficult to choose. I would start with Vogue’s Book of Houses, Gardens, People by Horst, the original one with the portraits of Cy Twombly’s house and Pauline de Rothschild’s. I think it was the first time someone opened the door to really unique interiors and that was of main importance for me. I was inspired by it, especially as I saw it before working for US Vogue, for how I could document history and generations’ visual moments through interiors.
The second one is Alex Liberman’s The Artist in His Studio because I had the chance to be brought to New York by Alex in 1984 to work for Condé Nast. I was a very young French photographer living in a sixth floor walk-up and he called me and asked if I wanted to work for Condé Nast. I didn’t speak English, I had absolutely no clue, I learned German and Latin in school. But I said “Why not?” and went to New York by Concorde and started my relationship with Condé Nast. Basically I was the last trouvaille (find) by Alex. I really admired the people who were working for Vogue and Vanity Fair, meaning Penn, Avedon, Horst and Newton. Helmut used to often work at my parent’s place when I was a kid and basically I thought it was more important to see him working than to go to school those days he was there.
What I liked about Alex’s books is that he himself was an artist, an art director, and a photographer, and I think he used this particular one as a tool for himself to get to go into the artists’ studios, to visit Matisse, Picasso, Bonnard, Dubuffet… The last time I was in New York I found in a flea market all the press photos from the “Artist in His Studio” exhibition at MoMA in 1959. There is a direct link in a way with my own work and that body of work. I think it is really important, along with Ugo Mulas’s work of artists working in New York in the 1960s.
My third book is Cy Twombly Photographs, the Matthew Marks catalog from 1993 of Cy’s first photographic work when it was not really well-known. Cy used to always say he was known first for his paintings and drawings, and then his sculpture, and then his photography. I found in this small book really a sensibility of how you can use your own environment and your own place as the base of your photographic work as personal meaning.
My work is really a combination of those three and what I wanted to make myself: the photographs of my house with the same Polaroid camera Cy used for his own, the connection was very important, making it an homage to him; an homage to Alex going to the artist’s studio like I do now with visite privée for my personal research; and with Horst about my relationship to being a commercial photographer and how working for the big magazine titles can open some doors.
Since you travel so much, how and what do you like to read when you do so? Do you prefer to bring multiple books for variety, or one long one which will sustain you for the whole trip, or none because ebooks suffice and weigh nothing?
First, I never read books on a tablet, only physical. That’s why I make books, because I love them as an object and not only as reading material, so for me the final object is as important as what is inside. Because I travel with all my camera equipment in the plane or train I usually get minimal extra space, so I can not travel with as many books as I would love to, but since I buy books in almost every place I go, I always have a couple in my bags and it always varies. For example, over my last few trips to Arles I’ve been reading a small new Luigi Ghirri book about some photography experiences he had in Italy in the 1970s; the John Richardson book, Picasso and the Camera; and a big Sigmar Polke book on photography. I’m not a fan of paperbacks, but I am reading La Pelle (The Skin) by Malaparte at the moment because he is very influential on me and was one of my mother’s favorite writers, and with shooting his house I have a connection.
What are the most pleasurable conversations you’ve had about book culture with any owners of the properties you’ve photographed?
Right now I am working on another book, this one with Beatrice Monti Della Corte, called A Tower in Tuscany. She has the Santa Maddalena Foundation, a retreat for writers. Her father was a friend of Malaparte’s and she always talked to me about her childhood and the times she spent alone with Malaparte in Capri, when she was 15, 16 years old. With Beatrice it is a long story of traveling for 30 years together around the world: to London to photograph Bruce Chatwin’s flat done by John Pawson; to Greece with Bertolucci; going to Istanbul with her searching for her family memories; visiting the Pierre Loti bedroom in the Bosphorus; crossing India with her husband Gregor von Rezzori for a month and doing a travel and photography diary on Mogul architecture; visiting and photographing the ateliers of Cy Twombly and Bob Rauchenberg...just to name few. She had a great influence on me—traveling in such company was the best education I could get.
I also had a chance to photograph John Richardson and we had fantastic conversations about his relationships with all the artists he knew. We talked mainly about his time in the south of France with his lover Douglas Cooper at the Chateau de Castille (I was lucky to photograph its Picasso mural), going to the bullfights in Arles with Cocteau and Picasso, and visiting them (Picasso and his wife Jacqueline) at Villa La Californie. John’s life during these years is described in his wonderful book, The Sorcerer‘s Apprentice. I brought John a gift I found: a photograph by Jacqueline of him, Cooper, and Picasso talking on the stairs of La Californie.
Ha, what a coincidence, I’m reading The Sorcerer’s Apprentice right now.
Which books most influenced your photographic sensibilities when you were starting out and which today impress you?
All of Helmut Newton, but especially Pola Woman. Brassaï is very important—his Paris de nuit (Paris By Night)—because there is a link between him and literature with Paul Morand writing in Paris de nuit. I always wanted to collect Brassaï’s original pictures of him photographing Picasso’s studio, so I have a couple of those prints. When I was younger and didn’t have the money to collect photography, Brassaï’s again, for example, I would collect the book and the postcards. Owning an actual print or first edition is almost like traveling for me. I am also a big fan of the publishers Cahiers d’Art and Zervos.
Something important I want to point out is that when I was a kid I was not speaking, I had a problem with language and was stuttering into my late teens. I didn’t speak, so my world was very closed and the only relationship I had with the outside world was through my parents’ library. So for me books offer even another way of discovering and I could dream with and through them. For example I remember a book which was very important to me was one about Katsura, the royal garden in Kyoto, and at 10 years old, 12 years old, I always looked at that book, almost everyday. So of course the first place I went when I visited Japan was Katsura. Another is Mario Praz’s book on interior decoration (An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration: From Pompeii to Art Nouveau). He was a scholar and collector of paintings of interiors.
Today what impresses me is books about African and New Guinea art because I’ve started to collect those objects. Another relationship I have with books is that when I find an object I want to do some research on, the only way I do it is through books. I always go to a book before looking online. That’s why I always wanted to live near the Strand when I lived in New York. You can not imagine the number of hours in my life I spent in that bookshop! And I found absolutely great treasures for nothing. Especially before everything was online. It’s very difficult now to find discoveries. It’s funny, I still always go first to a bookstore.
What do you want to happen to your 5,000 books when you die?
I’m working on archiving everything because I would like to start a foundation in Arles. I would love my house and its contents, including the archive, to be a resource. I just think it will be a fabulous opportunity to be able to share visually with the rest of the world some precious moments I was lucky to have recorded through the years. It’ll also allow me to do some more books with it. But first I have to organize it. It’s probably a ten year project.
From discovery to purchase, how do you find what you want to read these days?
I still buy newspapers, Le Monde and Libération and the New York Times when I’m in New York, and regularly read the New Yorker, so those are my main sources. That’s why I loved working for a newspaper, even as a photographer, even when they paid shit in those days. I love working today for T magazine, WSJ, and Die Zeit in Germany. And for many years I had a contract with La Repubblica in Italy. Last year I started a relationship with M, Le Monde’s weekend supplement, and I have carte blanche so every week the magazine will open with one of my images.
It all goes back to my love of paper. I think that’s really why I love photography, it is a link between that and magazines and books and print.
Which living writers’ homes would you most like to photograph? Which dead writers’?
Much easier for me to list dead writers, but if I had to pick a living one I’m sure my friend Maylis de Kerangal would give me something interesting. I just like the way she describes intimate feelings and spaces. I can see visually through her.
As for dead ones, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa for sure. Proust for sure. Victor Hugo! I love his drawings, too. Celine would be another one. My father was a big fan of Dostoevsky so that would have been interesting to see where the imagination and aesthetics meets. Roland Barthes. I would love to have photographed James Baldwin’s place, either in Saint-Paul de Vence or New York because I think he was so innovative and I loved how he was so politically correct and incorrect at the same time—working with Avedon, part of the civil rights movement, gay, anti-establishment. I love his juxtapositions and he is very important, especially now, especially now!
If you had to select only five books from what is in your home right now to display on your coffee tables for all of 2021, what would they be?
For sure Picasso’s catalogue raisonné of his ceramics by Alain Ramié. The catalogue raisonné of Cy Twombly’s sculpture. A James Turrell book because I’ve had chances to photograph some of his installations, including the early one he did for Panza di Biumo in Italy, which I did when I was very young and which inspired me a lot. My fourth one would be something crazy, a Dieter Roth artist’s book. The last one would be the Polaroid book of Carlo Mollino’s nudes because it’s always inspiring me. I have a couple of obsessions: Cy and Carlo Mollino, where I have almost every book, every catalog, even the smallest publications.
I have to pick one more and it would be the catalog from the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco called La Carte d'après nature by Thomas Demand because I love Luigi Ghirri’s work in it.
What are your favorite books by either writers or photographers who only published one during their lifetime?
Lampedusa, again. He only published Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) in his lifetime. After his death a few small notes have come out, but only the novel while he was alive.
Ah yes, an unusual one, which I love, is the Description de l'Égypte by Napoleon (full title in English: Description of Egypt, or the collection of observations and researches which were made in Egypt during the expedition of the French Army—WDV). When he invaded Egypt he did a big history of its monuments and buildings which the French Army discovered at the time.
How do you prefer to live with your books: neatly organized where you know where everything is or the opposite?
Stacks. Everywhere. And I more or less know where everything is since I have a good visual memory which helps me navigate.
Which books on your shelves make you fantasize the most?
Before the Second World War there was a French periodic journal called Voyage en Grece. It’s what they would give people taking a cruise to Greece for them to discover everything once they got there and only ten issues were made. I have six of them and found them at a bookshop next to where my mother lives in Paris. This series along with Greece, Gods and Art by Alex Liberman make me dream and were big inspirations for my latest book, Fashion Eye Greece. I have a copy of Alex’s book in every house of mine and when Louis Vuitton asked me to do this one I thought it would be another great way to pay homage to Alex since I really like to do that with the books I make—connect them to the books I’ve read.
And you should know we, your many fans, relish your extraordinary connections every time we turn the pages of one of your books. Thanks François!
François Halard, photographed by Chantapitch Wiwatchaikamol
]]>Before you read this introduction scroll down into the interview about half way and stop once you get to what looks like a poem. Read that first and then return here.
Being a great reader, you had numerous titles and covers and passages and feelings pop into your head while you read it, didn't you. Many manifestos are formal and dry, but this one is inviting and breezy and makes you want to befriend the person who sees and uses books this way in her daily life and has built a network around these ideas. I think you'll be happy to read it again when you get to it after starting the interview at the top.
Equally formal and dry can be "About" sections on companies' sites. But not the one on Sendb00ks's, and like the manifesto I want to put the whole thing here as it's well worth the full read:
Sendb00ks is an online platform and registered cultural association.
We discuss our favourite books with artists and share the conversations.
Each month we commission an artist to design a postcard that we slip within the pages of one of their favourite books. We then distribute them worldwide to our subscribers. These are hand wrapped and written in Berlin with recycled brown paper.
We also curate a small selection of books found in charity shops across England and other places from around the world safeguarding the underlinings and notes in margins.
Some of these can be found on our website. Some can be found on selected shelves, in August 2020 we launched 'A Shelf' at Yvon Lambert in Paris.
We want to know what books are on your shelves and bedroom floors, which books changed your lives and which books you go back to every night. We think that the conversations surrounding literature should always be open and accessible to everybody wherever they live and whatever their education.
Sendb00ks is non profit and we work in less inspiring places to keep this cool project going so donations and books are appreciated.
Delivery is worldwide and swift. Sharing is encouraged.
I hope Sendb00ks is new to you. The passionate creator and overseer of it is Gemma Janes and I hope she is new to you, too. Isn't it grand when you discover someone doing something passionate and unique with books today? Once you've read the interview please do all the requisite finding and following on social media so you can be in-touch with Gemma. She'll love to hear from you. -Wes Del Val
WDV: What have you read in your life which gave you the most serious cases of wanderlust?
GJ: Reading is a trip in itself, but I’m not sure a book has ever initiated in me a desire to go to a specific place. It gives me a taste for it sure, but not in the same way a friend recommending a village and the contact of a restaurant hidden on a back street does. The closest I think I’ve ever gotten to wanderlust is in Latin American literature, particularly with Gabriel García Márquez, where the weather played a character in itself throughout his novels. It made me crave the feeling of being under a huge sky at the mercy of the weather's moods. All of his stories are so magical and seem to heighten my senses, particularly in One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Apart from that I tend to seek out books about places while I am there, or afterwards. I recently spent a night in Venice for example. It was unplanned, we arrived in the evening and left the next morning. But because of the quarantine, during the night the city was absolutely empty, the boats were silent in the water. It was eerie. We were running through these tiny dark alleyways trying to find this one restaurant for hours. I thought: I know this experience is going to forever change the way I read about Venice.
What are memorable books you read about a place once you were there?
Last year I made a road trip from LA to Panama and along the way I was picking up and reading whatever books I could find. This really changed the experience. My Mexican friend, and great reader and writer, Fernanda Ballesteros suggested I read The Pearl by John Steinbeck when I arrived at the Sea of Cortez in Baja California. To have this short story as a guide, with its background understanding of the marine life and fascinating history of Baja, alongside moral allegories about humans’ corruption of the land made our experience so much richer. Steinbeck overheard the story from some fishermen while he and his ecologist friend Ed Ricketts were exploring this major pearl harvesting port. The ocean beds are now bereft of pearls, their numbers first diminishing after a disease swept through the sea beds during the 1930’s and more recently due to irreversible changes to the chemical balance in the water caused by pollution and overfishing. This book really put our trip into a whole different context and made us incredibly aware of the history and the landscape, and the disastrous effects humans are having on the natural world.
You’ve modeled for a decade, so what do you read to make castings bearable, in other words when life is at its most boring, what nourishes your mind and/or soul?
Well that sounds like a really long time, but I don’t really do it anymore and when I did I often found really inspiring people around me, I was definitely never bored. But I suppose sometimes it can be comforting to lift yourself out of an uncomfortable head space with a book. When I was modeling I read a lot of Russian short stories. In my favourite, “The Meek One,” the characters are psychologically so real. Dostoevsky made these great human flaws seem so comical, like you are a part of a theatre group and nobody is laughing. He came with me on some shoots when I came close to the edge, when I was being dressed up in a fabric that changes color as it gets wet and having people throw mugs of water in my face while asking me to look ecstatic. The stories were so funny, so farcical, but so relatable that it helped me to keep everything in perspective. Reading can definitely switch up the tone. Lydia Davis is also the master of short stories to read while waiting around. A favourite is “The Fish.”
If you could have dinner with one living writer and any three dead, and the point was for all five of you to have a spirited evening eating, drinking, conversing, and enjoying each other’s company, who would be at your table?
I’d invite the women writers I go to all the time. Living: Miranda July, she is so much of everything and would be the life of the party, making the evening into some kind of weird performance art. I watch her in interviews sometimes and can’t stop laughing. I’d like to just absorb that across a dinner table. I’d invite Toni Morrison, what a woman, so much love and joy and depth. I’d invite Clarice Lispector, the force! And maybe Françoise Sagan although I think Toni Morrison might hate her. Perhaps we could play poker and keep them separated. I’d hope the conversations would turn into dancing.
You get to put one book on anyone’s bedside table for them to see tonight. What and who would you choose?
To see or to read? That's the question. I am constantly trying to sneak books into the hands of those I want to influence. I read Audre Lorde’s Your Silence Will Not Protect You recently. I felt it was an extremely valuable experience. Lorde really breathes a kind of power into her reader, to speak, to listen, to deepen empathy and then to be brave and to use your voice to confront injustice. We sent this book to our 100 subscribers as confinement was lifting and people were taking to the streets following the horrific police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Our readers are mainly young women in America. I hoped they would be able to feel stronger after reading the book. As a teenager I was reproached for voicing my opinions and was not encouraged to speak. If I had read this book when I was 18 perhaps I would have been more inclined to defend myself and my ideas.
You only get to read one book for the rest of 2020. What would it be?
Difficult. I have just gone back to school and I am realizing how much I am learning from the books I would never pick up by choice. So maybe something I know very little about. I would like to learn more about permaculture, herbs and the natural world as a source for all we need. My brother has just come back from two years in New Zealand living this. Walking through the woods with him is eye-opening. He knows which nettle when simmered will make a tea to help inflammation, or what herb can defend your tomato plant against insects. So I'd have to go with his recommendation which is A Field Guide to the Native Edible Plants of New Zealand. It's niche but there we go.
Whose autobiography that hasn’t been written would most interest you to read?
There is a Turkish novelist called Elif Shafak. I encountered her by chance one morning at Latitude Festival with my friends a few years ago. We all walked into the tent and were completely spellbound by her stories and the way she talked about her life and the experience of being a young woman growing up in Turkey. We didn't want her to leave the stage. She was recounting the challenges that faced her but telling them in such a moving, compassionate way. She left the biggest impression on us all and I think about her a lot. I'd love to have her autobiography.
Your favorite bookstore wants you to help them create five new unique categories for shelving. What do you have in mind?
I have recently been curating a shelf at my favorite bookstore in Paris, Yvon Lambert. The aim was to have books that represent and speak to every possible reader. There are books on foraging for mushrooms, an old edition of The Odyssey by Homer and then new published work by Anne Carson. They really let me have full freedom, which was fun. There are no categories on that shelf but we wrote a manifesto last year and I suppose some of these can categorize our selections.
Books to read aloud
Books that will disturb your sleep
Books that you will sleep beside
Books about them
Books about you
Love those. As I do the whole manifesto (co-written with Charles Flamand –WDV), which other great readers will as well, so thank you for letting me post the whole thing here, it so neatly and charmingly sums up all that you’re doing with Sendb00ks.
We send books
Essential books
Beautiful books
Forgotten books
Undiscovered books
Rare books
Cheap books
Weird books
Rich books
Old books
New books
Fiction books
Poetic books
Art books
Cookery books
Books written by the dead
Living books
Books to read aloud
Books that will disturb your sleep
Books that you will sleep beside
Books that you will tell your friends about
Books about them
Books about you
Books that you will send to your love
Books you will never forget
Books that will shape your future
Love books
Banned books
Underground books
Sexy books
Books to be read in the subway
Or in the sand
Or in your bath
Waterproof books
Big books that won’t fit on your shelf
Small books to put in the pocket of your jeans
Books wrapped in brown paper
Books with pressed flowers
Books with lipstick kisses
Books with an original piece of art
Books about gender
Books about nature
Books from this planet
And books from others
French books
English books
English books in French
And French books in English
We send books from all over the world
To everywhere in the world
Delivered to your mailbox.
Look at your books right now. Seeing which two titles next to each other makes you instantly smile?
I just looked and the first thing that made me smile and also feel like bursting into tears is Downhill all the Way by Leonard Woolf, a book that deserves way more recognition. It is next to Orlando by Virginia Woolf, which was not intentional. It is as though they are still somehow finding a way to be next to each other. Their story is so amazing to me, I take a lot of inspiration from the Hogarth Press that they created together, their incredible teamwork, creativity and talent. They published T.S Eliot, Freud, Katherine Mansfield. Even though Virginia struggled so immensely with her mental health their love is so palpable in their writing in the way they talk about supporting one another in their life and work. I dont know if you’ve read the suicide note she left Leonard. I’ll put it here in my answer. I also don’t know how I got from two titles that make me smile to a suicide note…
Dearest, I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will, I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that – everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.
I want to mention one other current thing which has been making me smile. I came to a cafe to work this morning in my new district, the 5eme arrondissement. I am very happy in the 5eme, I feel like I've just arrived home, it is full of bookstores. Generally I read my books and then I send them or give them to friends or leave them in different places, but I brought Sula by Toni Morrison with me as I am bringing it everywhere. It is the book we will be sending in November with the artist Ines di Folco. She is going to paint the scene where the two inseparable friends Sula and Nel swing the neighborhood boy Chicken Little around by his hands. Sula loses her grip and the boy falls and drowns. They don’t tell anybody. It is the beginning of guilt for Sula, but for Nel, who shuns the responsibility, it is a feeling of pride and lightness. It’s one of the most powerful scenes I have ever read. From Ines’ painting we will make a sleeve for the book and distribute it to our subscribers. We will write the blurb together, too, about Ines’ experiences. I'm not sure the book makes me smile, but the daily conversations I have been having with Ines do.
The beautiful serendipity of the Woolfs finding themselves next to each other on your shelves all these years later! So I guess you don’t organize your books alphabetically...
You get to guest edit an issue of any existing magazine. Which title and what are your ideas?
I love my friend Haydée’s magazine The Skirt Chronicles. Their new issue, with the theme ‘deserts’ was supposed to launch last week at Yvon Lambert, but couldn’t unfortunately due to the new lockdown. They manage to combine it all so well: recipes, books, fashion. You learn, you are entertained and you want to talk about what you read with your friend that evening. So this is the inspiration, but I think perhaps I would take a magazine read by many young people and try to make it like one of the old Harper’s Bazaars from the 50s currently on show at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs right now (until Jan 3). Dorothy Parker sold her first poem to the magazine. There are these brilliant interviews and portraits with writers like Françoise Sagan written by Tenessea Williams in 1956 and the advertisements are like secrets passed down by mothers. “Greasy hair? Try rubbing your perfume in the ends.” I’d commission photographers and filmmakers I love to make work about the books that have inspired them, and their bookshelves.
Is there a period which was a golden age of books for you, a time you would have most cherished going into a bookstore and seeing books old now, but new then?
Perhaps at the turn of the twentieth century as the suffragette movement was gaining momentum, when women were beginning to write without so much fear of censorship. The short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman challenged the Rest Cure method as a treatment for hysteria. It has been 100 years since its publication, so we were able to redistribute this during lockdown with artwork by Jan Melka. It would have been so exciting seeing scandalous and groundbreaking novels by women being put out for the first time in small bookshops around the city and being a part of the crowds bustling around the shop window for their copies. It's hard to imagine how much bravery it must have taken for these women to take these huge steps in publishing, taking ownership of the female experience and rejecting some of the narratives that men had been writing for for so long. But honestly, going into bookstores acts as a portal into whatever golden age you are looking for, whatever experience you are looking for from whatever era, you can go there inside a good second hand bookshop, I am sure. Speaking of which I’m going to head to Shakespeare and Company in the morning to support them during this difficult time for bookstores.
It takes a village, it always has (but especially now), and I hope people support what YOU’RE doing with books as well. Thanks Gemma!
Gemma Janes
]]>Two months ago a long-time dream of Isabella's came true: she opened her own bookstore in London devoted to her primary passions of art, photography, fashion, and especially, erotica. It's called Climax (great name, huh?) and I have a feeling it's like looking and shopping directly from her own shelves—I imagine she's the best hand-selling proprietor in London! I don't know how she is willing to part with some of the rarities she is offering, but she is, so find @climaxbooks on IG and give her more than just a follow.
While on the topic of physical material, I want to bring to your attention the formation of a new institution in Oslo, Norway: the International Library for Fashion Research. The ILFR, which in its digital incarnation was unveiled on Oct. 15 with more than 5,000 documents, will open its physical doors to the public next spring. It aims, according to its pitch book, to be “the most comprehensive and important facility of specialized fashion research—and the most unique archive of modern fashion publications in the world.” I pulled all that from last week's NY Times' article about it, and besides this development being of interest to most anyone who loves fashion's printed matter, the very cool thing is that Isabella is on the distinguished board. Bored she ain't! -Wes Del Val
WDV: What have you read in your life that has most opened your mind to the fabulous diversity found in human sexuality?
IB: I can’t pinpoint one exact thing, but I think I probably read too much Anaïs Nin as a teenager—and I remember Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye blowing my mind when I was about 16. On a visual level, I think my interest in erotica began when I interviewed Cosey Fanni Tutti as part of her one-day event, Cosey Complex, at the ICA in 2010. I was 19 and it completely blew my mind! Learning about her early work (which often involved her posing for pornographic magazines and stripping under the alias Scarlet) taking the language of pornographic materials and subverting it as a sort of punk statement. That felt incredibly radical back then, and still does now. It left a strong impression on me.
And what of recent radical things you’ve read which have also left strong impressions?
The last issue of Dazed was a very inspiring one to work on and edit. We invited six different guest editors, including Janaya ‘Future’ Khan, Hank Willis Thomas, Anonymous Club, Grace Wales Bonner, Noname and Samuel Ross to edit a section and work on a cover each. Janaya ‘Future’ Khan wrote a very moving and deeply personal tribute to John Lewis, and was in conversation with Malkia Devich-Cyril and Thandiwe Abdullah, which I encourage everyone to read.
Which magazines’ archives (from any time) do you wish you could raid?
All of SWISH publications’ magazines—particularly Madame in a World of Fantasy, Claws and Smooth. They were such incredible underground outlets for rubber, latex and fetish enthusiasts in the 70s, 80s and 90s. SWISH notoriously would get shut down by the police all the time, so I’m sure it would’ve been fun to be around to witness (or work on) all of that.
Ah niche skin mags! What are your memories of first seeing this content in print and what have such magazines meant to you in your life amongst your other reading interests?
I only really discovered them in my twenties, and they are less for reading and more for spending hours looking at the visual identity. For example, Claws has this amazing hand-drawn illustration of a claw with pointy sexy nails as a sort of symbol that they occasionally featured on the cover. All the photoshoots are so wild!
Now whose bookshelves do you wish you could raid and take what you wanted for Climax?
John Waters. Just imagine what you would find? Also, Hilton Als (not for Climax, but for myself). He recently did a video interview for the Yale photography department series (which I encourage everyone to watch, Nan Goldin, Wolfgang Tillmans and LaToya Ruby Frazier have done ones too) and you can see this incredibly rich and overflowing bookshelf behind him. At one point, he goes to turn off his washing machine leaving his shelf in full view, and it's pretty cool. I definitely paused it to have a good look.
Glad to have the tip on Hilton, I would have paused for sure as well.
I’ve always wished John would do a video series where he just goes through his shelves book-by-book and gives us his thoughts! I’d even pay for it...
Oh so would I! Someone should tell him he has two very eager paying subscribers...
What do you consider the coolest books on your shelves?
My copy of Yayoi Kusama’s An Orgy of Nudity, Love, Sex & Beauty, Vol 1, No. 1, the periodical she self-published in 1969. It’s such an important piece of counterculture ephemera and so incredibly rare. I feel lucky to have found it. I also love the hot pink Cosey Fanni Tutti VHS A Study in Scarlet from 1987 that I have, too. It was made using domestic VHS equipment and only 160 were ever produced. I bought it from a woman on eBay and it belonged to her late husband, so it feels special that he held onto it for so long.
You surely have a few more, no? “Cool” always catches people’s attention, so can you share some others?
Cool is overrated! I sort of hate the whole trend of some books becoming so cool, they become too generic somehow. But other ones I love are, Carrie Mae Weems Kitchen Table series book, an early Martine Syms zine called Fools (which is a fictional love story), some old VHS tapes from the release of Richard Kern’s Hardcore. I have both the 1992 US edition and the 1994 French edition. The cover is insane! I have some very weird old German medical books (found in Berlin as a teenager) and also this amazing OMA catalogue from 1995 from an exhibition at TN Probe in Tokyo. It has all these crazy graphics, and stickers and mad neon typography pages. Each page feels like you are in Tokyo. There are also some beautiful Tokyo landscapes by Nobuyoshi Araki, too.
I’m not sure if you also find, but the book I’ve discovered last seems to always be the coolest? Right now that is Aura Rosenberg’s Head Shots book (which I’ll be selling soon on Climax). It’s all of these incredible black and white images of male artists climaxing—including Mike Kelley and John Baldessari—alongside fiction by Gary Indiana and Lynne Tillman.
Yes, that is true, the latest and especially the next are usually the coolest.
Which writers upset you but you don’t like missing what they have to say?
I don’t think there has ever been a writer who has upset me, but there have been many I’ve found hard to read and only years later been able to get into. Kathy Acker is one for sure. And also Constance DeJong. I’ve had a copy of Modern Love for about five years and it was only this summer that I managed to read it (after many failed attempts). I loved it, and have a copy of her Top Stories issue #15 from 1983 coming from New York next week. Now I want to read everything. It’s weird how it happens, but I also believe there is a time and a place in your life that you are meant to consume the work of certain writers. And five years later, it’s the right time.
What book should all of London be reading in November? New or old, doesn’t matter, just one which would be a positive thing if people from all walks of life were seeing and thinking about those specific words?
There isn’t one specific London-specific book that comes to mind. I grew up with a German mother and New Zealand father, so I’ve never been drawn to Britishness in that way or found a piece of text that encaptures my experience of London. I’m taking a week off this month, so I’ll be re-reading Hilton Als’ White Girls and I just got a copy of Eileen Myles’ book of poetry, Evolution (which I bought from another amazing independent bookseller in Scotland called Burninghouse Books). Oh, and my boyfriend and I started reading Gary Indiana’s Tiny Fish that Only Want to Kiss in the back of his car when it broke down one summer evening and we had four hours to kill, so I want to finish that.
Sometimes when you spent most of your week reading magazine copy, the last thing you want to do is read! An occupational hazard. But these I’m excited to get into.
I think great readers manage to soldier through...
What are important magazine pieces to you which most helped form you into the editor you are today?
In 2017 New York magazine did a cover story called “Database of Desire” which was an in-depth analysis of the last ten years of Pornhub data. It took the form of a longform essay, but also highly detailed sexual almanac—basically strange trends that emerged from their analysis of data. It highlighted the racism of the porn industry alongside strange facts—like did you know searches for Daddy went up 1,361% on Father’s Day? And that Kim Kardashian’s sex tape has been viewed 144 million times? I’m not sure if this piece has helped form me into the editor I am today, but the dynamism of how they presented all of that information was really fascinating to me. I love the mix of long-form storytelling and then strange facts presented in a digestible way as data analysis. I go back to it time and time again as a reference.
Yes, that was an excellent, very New York piece. Pornhub is surely sitting on some of the most fascinating data of any company today.
If you could travel anywhere in the world for a week with a living writer you admire, who would it be and where would you go?
To travel anywhere in the world right now would be a dream come true. I think being in New York with Kathy Acker in the 80s would’ve been pretty cool. For a living writer, probably Charlie Fox. Not sure we would need to go anywhere, his imagination is wild and trippy enough. A graveyard in London would do! Also my good friend Amelia Abraham (she published her debut book, Queer Intentions, a few years ago). I would die to go to Las Vegas with her. We would probably end up getting married for fun and then lose all our money on slot machines.
You have 100 pounds to spend in a newsagent this weekend. What are you buying?
I think I would genuinely find that pretty difficult to do as I think most magazines in the UK are quite uninspiring at the moment. If I was in the US, however, I would have much more fun—the New Yorker, New York, National Geographic, T magazine and of course the weird American car magazines, porn etc. There is a newsagent in Miami that I go to anytime I’m there that has a great collection of more recent porn magazines and also classic American gems. Oh and they have a great candy selection, too.
Funny, classic case of the grass is greener on the other side as I feel just the opposite. I find European magazines so much more dynamic than 90% of what we have here, especially for the subjects I’m interested in. By the time they get here with shipping and distribution costs added in they get to be prohibitively expensive.
Curious what porn you’re buying in print these days. I’m amazed so many have held on and I’m intrigued by people still purchasing them.
Very true, the grass is always greener. I don’t really buy new porn, but the ones I last picked up in Miami were called Interstate Swinger and Swingers Today. They are still in their plastic packaging, but the front and back covers were so great I had to get them.
What were your bookstore inspirations you had in mind while opening and setting up Climax?
There are so many bookstores I love and have a very deep respect for: Donlon, November, IDEA books in London; Karma, Mast, Dashwood in New York and Alias books in LA. But I guess I wanted Climax to have a point of difference in the curation of material—that we could go from a copy of Yayoi Kusama’s The Orgy to a Valie Export stamp, to Deana Lawson’s first monograph or an early invitation card from Carrie Mae Weems from the 90s, to a copy of the fetish magazine Madame in a world of Fantasy. Mainly, I was curious if I could pull it off, or if it would just seem totally mad! But I think with the very clever visual identity from Christopher Lawson and the brilliant website design from Simon Rogers we sort of did it. The response has been completely overwhelming and made this idea that has been in my mind for half a decade feel worthy.
Big congratulations for getting to see your dream become reality! I hope its success blows past your expectations. Thanks Isabella!
Isabella Burley, photo by Jacob Lillis
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WDV: What are three future-classic photography books that have come out in the past five years which are still available and not ridiculously priced? That is perhaps until you mention them here…
LK:
1. Deana Lawson / Aperture / $85.00
This is an exceptionally beautifully designed and produced first monograph of the domestic portraiture of Los Angeles-based Deana Lawson, whose 2019 first printing quickly sold out. It presents a fresh, intimate, and dignified insight into the daily lives of Black Americans at a time when interest and discourse regarding such images runs high. Aperture has just produced a highly anticipated second printing that rivals the first, and is sure to sell out once again, so act quickly.
2. Todd Hido: Intimate Distance: Twenty-Five Years of Photographs, A Chronological Album / Aperture / $65.00
Todd Hido’s striking body of work has grown and evolved in unanticipated ways over the past two decades since 2001’s remarkable House Hunting from Nazraeli Press. Those lonely, dislocating images of a darkened suburban Bay Area have grown to incorporate wilderness, the open road, human interaction, the eroticized gaze, and autobiography—all of which are examined in the substantial Intimate Distance. Part monograph, part artist’s book, this 2016 Aperture publication is the first comprehensive overview of Hido’s entire output, one that contains his personal commentary and a striking design by the photographer’s frequent collaborator, Bob Awfuldish.
3. Who Is Michael Jang? / Atelier Editions / $65.00
“Who is Michael Jang? I don’t know if he’s a hipster or a nerd, a conceptual genius or instinctual savant. All I know is that he takes some of the best pictures I’ve ever seen.” - Alec Soth
The fascinating, and gratifying, story of Michael Jang is of a CalArts-educated photographer that went on to open a commercial photo studio in San Francisco that supported him for over four decades. All the while, Jang was shooting unseen images of the humorous and subversive universalities that unite us, as well as the pleasures and terrors of family. After four decades of laboring in darkroom obscurity, this labor of love from London’s estimable Atelier Editions documents Jang’s triumphant 2019 retrospective at SF’s McEvoy Foundation for the Arts.
Open up a mainstream interiors magazine and if books are shown cover-out in the photographs they’re very often Taschen, Rizzoli, Phaidon, and/or Assouline titles because they all publish bold-faced names and popular, stylish topics and their books are easy to find and can be readily used as affordable, attractive decoration.
Unsurprisingly it often makes for a lot of cookie-cutter shelves and tables which all feels very Professional Decorator 101. For people who truly care about books AND how their homes look, but may not specifically know much about illustrated books, what is thenext level of publishers they should always keep their eyes on?
There are certainly reasons for the frequency that one sees beautiful arrays of books from these particular publishers pictured, but much of it comes down to the fact that they all produce significant visually-oriented titles that one would naturally want to purchase and display in one’s domicile. Two of these in particular have made very deliberate inroads to marketing a type of aspirational “good life” that must include the right tomes on display, even to the point of having several of their own branded stores for their wares, but again, in most cases with these publishers, any fluff being produced is usually accompanied if not offset by significant titles from them as well.
As for alternatives, there is the tried and true French publisher Editions du Regard, whose monographs on Parisian decorators of the 20th Century are classics. The University of Chicago Press has produced a stunning four volume catalogue raisonné of Charlotte Perriand—whose scholarship is rivaled only by how immaculately elegant it will look in any décor—along with a slipcased set on architect Peter Zumthor. New York’s Acanthus Books have quietly producedsome of the most substantial tomes on the architects and buildings of the East Coast’s gilded age and old money set. And Santa Barbara’s Tailwater Press have recently produced monographic volumes on the significant early 20 th Century Southern California architects Gordon B. Kauffman, George Washington Smith, Wallace Neff, and Roland E. Coate that are must-haves. Birkhauser, Princeton Architectural Press, and Gibbs Smith are imprints always worth investigating each season for their design and architecture offerings.
And which publishers for people who still care about using books as decoration, perhaps for their coffee tables, but want to go beyond those four commonplace publishers? I know if I’m looking through say Architectural Digest and see a title by for example Mack, or even Steidl, I’m more impressed and think the owner might actually know what’s on the inside of the book, rather than just have it out because they or their decorator like the cover.
Both Steidl and MACK are great publishers whose productions rarely disappoint on any level. There are so many others who could be mentioned here, but I will note that Yale University Press has quietly produced dozens of substantive, beautifully-designed, often scholarly books in recent years—including catalogues raisonné for John Baldessari, Eva Hesse, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, and Richard Diebenkorn—that are as aesthetically pleasing as they are intellectually engaging.
Yes, you’re absolutely right, Yale’s consistent high-achievements are often taken for granted, I guess because of the academic affiliation and its often stuffy connotations. Their Eileen Gray book designed by Irma Boom from earlier this year is beautiful! And don’t forget what Irma did for that fabulous Sheila Hicks book Yale did in 2006.
When is the last time you saw an image on Instagram or in a magazine of someone’s shelves and immediately thought that you’d love to get a chance to see more in-person?
Whitney, my lovely, talented, and complementary wife / partner at the shop takes on the tough task of spending time on Instagram and with World of Interiors, so I don’t have to. Of course, she does make me take a look at such things now and then, and my jaw drops and I ooh and aah just like everyone else. François Halard and Simon Watson certainly have an eye for consistently incorporating a stylish array of books in their standout images of interiors. In recent memory, we had a signing event at the end of 2019 for Nina Freudenberger and Shay Degges’ lovely Bibliostyle book from Clarkson Potter, and I must say there are too many enviable libraries pictured in there to count. Also, the portion of Unpacking My Library: Artists and Their Books devoted to Theaster Gates’ book room definitely caught my attention.
What are books you wholeheartedly recommend to read about photography, whether history of, biographies, critical essays, etc?
As ever, Susan Sontag’s On Photography and Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida remain the thought-provoking cornerstones of this canon, and for good reason. In this vein I enjoyed Patricia Bosworth’s Diane Arbus biography, Luigi Ghirri’s The Complete Essays 1973–1991, along with the volumes of Aperture’s Photography Workshop Series, especially Todd Hido on Landscapes, Interiors, and the Nude.
Can we have some exciting tales of you going through piles of books and finding gems, whether it be unexpected autographs, documents, or rare, unusual titles themselves?
Well, despite the numerous stories I’ve heard from any number of colleagues over the years, I must dispel that old bookselling trope of buying a collection, opening up an insignificant book once you get back to the shop, and finding hundred dollar bills stuffed inside. For the record, I cannot remember ever finding any currency other than the occasional small denomination foreign bill used as a bookmark.
That noted, shortly after I opened Arcana in a one bedroom, ground floor apartment on Westwood Boulevard, I went on a day’s buying trip to bookstores south of here. In one of the grand old, but by then down-at-its heels shops, I walked to the front counter with a meager stack of finds that included a well-worn, not particularly rare paperback on Frank Lloyd Wright that was priced $2.95. The cashier, who was the daughter of the original founder, looked me up and down and asked “Are you interested in him?” When I replied that I was, sort of, she asked me to follow her back to what was a small, darkened and distinctly dusty room piled high with unimpressive-appearing stock. She opened a box containing two ancient-looking portfolios with Wright’s name on the covers saying “We just came across these, and are asking $200.00 for the set. You want them?” The portfolios showed some condition issues, but were filled with spectacular, large format plates reproducing the architect’s renderings—many using metallic inks or with tissue overlays. As I had no idea as to what I was actually handling, and that was a significant sum of money to me in 1984, I asked if she would please be kind enough to hold the set overnight while I tried to do some research. In the pre-search engine age this was not instantaneous, and while I could find reference to the books themselves, I found nothing as to what their value might be. So, summoning up my neophyte bookman’s gut feeling, the next afternoon I called the shop then got back in my trusty Volvo station wagon to go retrieve them.
For the hour’s drive, and even as I handed over the cash, I questioned if I was doing the right thing. After all, I had no client specifically in mind for them, and these things were so huge what shelves could even fit them? As it turned out, what I had purchased was a set of the first edition of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ausgeführte Bauten und Entwürfe, the landmark 1911 document on his designs. In addition to being the magnum opus on Wright’s work, the majority of the sets were burned up or water-damaged in the tragic 1914 fire at Taliesin, so I had definitely made the right decision. In fact, I believe this became the first individual four-figure sale I made at that tiny shop!
As for things being secreted away in books, this next story seems implausible, but is absolutely true. Again, shortly after we opened, I was pulling books from the new arrivals cart at one of my favorite haunts and found a copy of the The Arensberg Collection Modern Art catalogue from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Walter Arensberg was the primary American collector and patron of Marcel Duchamp, and so that book is an important Duchamp reference. I was just starting my own collection of books on the artist, and as this copy additionally had the bookplate of one of my very favorite graphic designers, Merle Armitage, I made the decision to keep this one instead of selling it at the shop. While in line waiting to check out, I saw that one of the Duchamp plates had a pretty nasty adhesive ghost on the back. I wondered why someone such as Armitage would tape something inside a book, and as I turned the page to take a further look, a small blue sheet of paper fluttered to the ground. I picked that up only to be shocked that it was in fact a double sided, handwritten letter from Duchamp to Armitage in response to the designer’s earlier request that the artist send him a set of “Optical Relief” discs! Duchamp clearly did not know Armitage personally, seemed taken aback by the request, and sent this copy of the Arensberg book as a token response in lieu of the discs. I shoved the note back where it came from, and tried to be as nonchalant as humanly possible as I paid the bill in hopes that the salesman would not open it and make the same find. It remains one of my most prized possessions for both its connection to the hand of the artist, and its serendipitous discovery by me that day. Even crazier is the fact that years later I came across a copy of one of that same dealer’s catalogues from the sixties comprised of offerings from the library of Merle Armitage. The Arensberg book was in there, meaning that it had seemingly passed through the bookseller’s hands, been catalogued, sold, re-acquired years later, and sold again, to me—allwithout that letter being noticed until I dislodged it that day. That’s got to be better than finding a hundred-dollar bill, right?
Yes, both stories are just a bit more colorful and memorable than finding a note of currency, especially the twist at the end of your Arensberg one and the letter remaining in the book all that time.
What are evergreen titles customers have been buying from you for decades?
That’s such a long list! In our early days, art book collectors were passionate about nicer titles on Picasso, Miró, Dalí, and Chagall. More interesting books on Andy Warhol - the Index (Book) in particular—have always been in demand here. But, tastes certainly change generationally!
Now, with certain exceptions, we rarely see much if any interest in those earlier artists. They have been replaced by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Louise Bourgeois, John Baldessari, David Hammons, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Yoshitomo Nara, Richard Prince, Christopher Wool. And of course, there is Ed Ruscha! We were the last retail shop Ed would wholesale his artist books to in the eighties and nineties, and we have sold well over a thousand books on or by him over the years.
There are of course the perennial photobooks such as Henri Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment, Robert Frank’s The Americans, Slim Aarons’ A Wonderful Time, Ugo Mulas’ New York: The New Art Scene, Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Larry Sultan’s The Valley, and Ed Templeton’s Teenage Smokers that seem to be constantly rediscovered and in demand.
I know we started this interview with future classics, and since we just touched upon forever classics, which is a title from 2020 by an unfamiliar photographer that excited you?
One of the pleasant surprises so far this year has been Rick McCloskey’s Van Nuys Boulevard, 1972 from Switzerland’s Sturm & Drang Publishers. While technically dark, fuzzy, and grainy, it is a truly charming document of “Cruise Night” in the San Fernando Valley, a suburb of Los Angeles, where kids and cars from all over Southern California turned up on Wednesday evenings to see and be seen, and to show off your ride. Think American Graffiti meets Dazed and Confused as photographed by Joseph Szabo. And its rather small first printing is now all but sold out.
Which photographers had/have personal libraries which most impressed you?
I don’t travel very much at all, so unless said photographer is a client based in Southern California, chances are I haven’t seen their library in real life. The first such library I was really impressed by was that of photographer and photographic entrepreneur Jeff Dunas. Jeff was a publisher of photography books early in his career, and has always been serious about acquiring both the canon of classic photobooks as well as trading new releases with his friends and colleagues, so his collection is startlingly comprehensive. And much of it is signed by the photographers.
While I have never visited their many outposts, Bruce Weber and his partner Nan Bush are grand acquisitors with engaging taste and at least four libraries to keep stocked! Bruce and Nan have always been a great supporter of a number booksellers, and are amongst our oldest clients. The pictures I have seen of their homes reveal just the tip of the iceberg, but have given me pause for thought and admiration.
Todd Hido’s craftsman home in the Bay Area hills is a shrine to his love of books—and his many, varied interests. It is filled with so many great and obscure titles that the last time I visited there was no room left to set a place on the dining room table!
Ed and Deanna Templeton have a cute, suburban home on a non-descript Huntington Beach cul de sac in which no one would imagine such a large, cool, and idiosyncratic collection of photography and art books both inspirational and by colleagues.
Then there is/was the photobook library of Martin Parr, which was recently acquired by the Tate. His was the near-infinite, encyclopedic standard by which others were measured. Again, I never visited, but my incomplete understanding of its contents is still mind-blowing!
Last, and certainly not least, there is Manfred Heiting. Manfred is primarily known as a photo-historian, one with an abiding love for the photobook. Visiting his fortress in Malibu was an eye-opening experience, as it housed over twenty thousand examples, both common and impossibly rare, all in immaculate condition. Combining scholarship, connoisseurship, and a penchant for commerce, Manfred spent five decades assembling a working library that was tragically consumed in its entirety in the 2018 Woolsey fire. He has of course started buying, sparingly, once again.
My heart just sank. I DID NOT see that coming.
I would especially love to see Bruce and Nan’s collection but each you mentioned would no doubt be utterly fascinating.
Since so many books have passed through your hands in your lifetime what are some which you’d be very happy to receive as a gift?
Having owned a bookstore for nearly forty years, I’ve been very fortunate to have the ability to amass a rather sizable library of the books I’ve admired that have passed through our doors in that period...
Just in this instant, I am impressed by handling once again my copy of Jesse Alexander’s spectacular At Speed. Published by Bond/Parkhurst Books in 1972, it is a massive, graphic summation of the sixties’ glamorous international motorsports scene. I liken it to the book equivalent of John Frankenheimer’s cinematic tour-de-force Grand Prix. As my father was a weekend SCCA sports car driver when I was growing up, this world was a source of fascination, and ever since I discovered At Speed—via Bruce Weber as I recall—it has had a specialresonance for me. If I did not own it, this would be the gift I would covet!
What sections in your store do you never tire of looking amongst?
I find myself straightening and organizing the graphic design, Pop Art, Conceptual Art, and African-American Art sections from time to time simply because I enjoy reacquainting myself with the contents on an ongoing basis. Not that I typically spend a lot of time alphabetizing here at the shop... :) Truthfully, I have so little time to devote to the actual hands-on process while down in the stacks that I liken it to my Dad’s joke from so many years ago about his own business requiring him to constantly be like Lee Iacocca having to go down to the manufacturingfloor to make sure all is running smoothly. How’s that for a dated, distinctly non-bookish reference?
Ha, yes, I think it’ll go over the head of most people under about 45…
I think we need to up that by at least a decade.
You get to swap places with any other bookstore owner for a year and run their shop. Whose would be most enticing to you?
Dagny Corcoran of Los Angeles’ ArtCatalogues played a crucial early role in the path that led me to open Arcana. She has more contacts with longtime artists, collectors, curators, and gallerists than can be imagined, and has tons of material, like myself, that never sits out on the open shelves. I suppose if I had to choose a “Trading Places” scenario, that would allow me to finally see all of the treasures that she has amassed that I’ve always wondered about. Plus, I could still stay in town!
What are important books to you that have zero photographs in them?
As a young reader, I voraciously consumed speculative fiction, with Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, and R.A. Lafferty being my favorite authors; none of whom utilized photographs. These days, I spend what little free reading time I have rotating mostly between non-fiction biographies and histories. As I write, I’m currently bouncing from Shoshona Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism to Lili Anolik’s Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A. to Pauline Butcher’s Freak Out: My Life With Frank Zappa. Full disclosure though, while all three are purely text-driven, the last two do have a smattering of photographs.
To make all of us book-lovers feel good right now can you share some favorite stories of fabulous sales you’ve made over the years? You of course needn’t name names or give dollar amounts, but I think we all always like to hear of others who equally (or more) value bringing books into their lives.
I have learned to try to err on the side of discretion, and not “kiss and tell” so much. One of the still-enjoyable aspects of maintaining an open shop after nearly four decades is putting the right book in the right hands at the right moment. This may all seem purposely vague, and is not intended to be self-aggrandizing, but we have had a nearly invisible hand in the ultimate look of countless commercials, music videos, feature films, fashion shoots, and the like. We have put artists and photographers in touch with publishers and gallerists that have impacted their careers, books in the hands of designers that have informed their output, etc. The cultural butterfly effect of this radiating out into the greater world cannot be understated, and it may be what I am proudest of as far as Arcana goes.
That IS a lot to be proud and you have many fans around the world who would agree. Thanks Lee!
Lee Kaplan at Arcana Books
]]>Though for decades I've highly respected Criterion's continual output and will no doubt subscribe to however and wherever they show their movies for years to come, I'm actually not much of a film viewer. But as I said, the pause regularly occurs. It's just that reading, surprise surprise, usually wins out, and that's why I find The Daily to be essential—I can keep up with diverse international film culture in one spot and feel thoroughly satiated. I don't pay close attention to any other filmdom blogs. And while I often miss several days' worth of posts (I highly doubt even Criterion employees get to every word every day), I love knowing they're all online when I want to dive in. My favorite kind of bingeing.
The person responsible for it is David Hudson and he is masterful at finding the smartest content, pulling the best bits, and crafting everything with an acute editorial eye to make for informative and satisfying reading and not mere link-listing. In fact I rarely click to the original piece, I just trust David's judgement and prefer his digest. He honed his chops after years writing for Fandor, Mubi, and IFC, and has been with Criterion since 2017. I like that there is next to nothing about him online; he's so dedicated to his services at The Daily that if you find him on Twitter he assumes you're confused and he directs you to @CriterionDaily. The kinds of well-formed paragraphs David delivers every day take serious time to gather and compose so I'm very pleased he could spare some of his to step out from behind the curtain and give us equally considered and lively responses.
We rarely include links in OGR interviews, but they're stock-in-trade for David's job so thought it was appropriate to keep his here for all of us to gain further enlightenment thanks to his decades of great reading.
- Wes Del Val
WDV: Are there any directors, producers, or actors you find more fulfilling reading about rather than seeing their work?
DH: I’m trying to think of a rough equivalent in film criticism to Carl Wilson’s now-classic Let’s Talk About Love. Wilson originally set out to discover what it was that Céline Dion’s massive fan base heard in her music and saw in her persona that he did not. But as spelled out in the subtitle of the first edition, he wound up taking a “Journey to the End of Taste,” and taking us along, too, on a rich exploration of the personal and social dynamics of liking and disliking things. So that’s a book that’s “bigger” than its subject, and for me, and I’m guessing for many others as well, more fulfilling than listening to Dion.
There probably is such a book out there about the work of a filmmaker or performer, and if so, I’d love to hear about it. As for film writing that more or less takes on a job at least somewhat adjacent to the one Wilson has, we could turn to J. Hoberman. For Hoberman, no text stands in isolation. When he was reviewing regularly for the Village Voice, but even more so in his series of books on American cinema in the latter half of the twentieth century, he’s always been primarily concerned with the social and political context of a film as a public event—where it came from and what impact it had on the culture at the time. And there are plenty of films I’d rather read Hoberman on than watch again.
There’s also a subgenre of books on flops and failures, the best of which is probably Lillian Ross’s Picture, an account of the making of John Huston’s The Red Badge of Courage (1951). And of course, there are shelf-loads of books that outright celebrate bad movies or argue—sometimes justifiably!—for the virtues of bad taste. Others set out to rescue the reputation of an all but universally derided work or oeuvre, although I do have to say, even as a Paul Verhoeven fan, that in the case of Adam Nayman’s It Doesn’t Suck: Showgirls, the book really is better.
The thing is, I tend to read about work I do like and seek out writing that enhances rather than attempts to surpass that work. Watching late Godard, for example, I’d be lost without the insights of Nicole Brenez or Michael Witt or the meticulous allusion-mapping of Ted Fendt or Craig Keller. On the experimental front, I eagerly turn to Michael Sicinski, Erika Balsom, or Phil Coldiron. Meantime, it’s been thirteen years since the first, and as far as I’m aware, only collection of film criticism by the critic—now a filmmaker as well—that I value as highly as any other, Kent Jones. It’s high time for another.
What nonfiction books about any aspect of Hollywood were too short? Those you’d have gladly taken at double their length.
Speaking of writers who can illuminate both forgettable and unforgettable movies, and in the case of Geoffrey O’Brien, in such transporting prose, I’d have to say that The Phantom Empire tops the list. The book came out in 1993, that is, just before the Internet really took off, so there’s something of a remove between our own multimedia-saturated moment and the phenomenon O’Brien was writing about at the time, the invasion, since the earliest days of cinema, of indelible moving images into the collective consciousness. But the way O’Brien dips in and out of genres, periods, and an array of national cinemas while returning again and again to Hollywood, plucking and spinning keen observations at every turn, remains as enthralling as ever.
Is it really too short, though? At just over 220 pages, it’s probably exactly the book O’Brien intended to write. Luckily for us, he wrote something of a follow-up in 2002, Castaways of the Image Planet.
Then there are probably a good dozen or more memoirs many of us wish would never end, but who wouldn’t want, most of all, more from Louise Brooks after reading Lulu in Hollywood?
Please keep going and give us some from your “dozen or so” memoirs, I’m fascinated to know.
An excellent starting point would be the smartly annotated list that the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw put together earlier this year, the “top 25 most compelling Hollywood autobiographies.” Seriously, this is a pretty solid round, and I’m glad that he’s included Michael Powell’s two volumes even though, technically, Powell wasn’t a Hollywood director—just one of the greatest visionaries in all of cinema.
To Bradshaw’s list I’d add With Nails, the 1996 memoir by the way underrated and underused Richard E. Grant. The title, of course, is a play on Withnail and I, Bruce Robinson’s bleak 1987 comedy that gave Grant his breakthrough role. I fell hard for Grant after seeing his character, a screenwriter, pitch a scene in Robert Altman’s The Player (1992), and years later, I picked up his book on a whim. Turns out, the man can write. Endearingly modest and often devastatingly funny, Grant has a way of conveying that “how did I get here?” feeling when writing about finding himself on sets being run by the likes of Martin Scorsese or Francis Ford Coppola. The new millennium hadn’t been particularly kind to Grant until he was suddenly being nominated left and right for his turn in Marielle Heller’s Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018). Throughout that marathon awards season, he was clearly having the grandest time. So well-deserved—and overdue.
One more. Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Moving Places could hardly be classified as a Hollywood memoir but it’s a vivid account of growing up as a budding cinephile in an era, the mid-twentieth century, when the only place to see a movie was in a theater. Fortunately, his grandfather owned and operated a small chain of them. Like Hoberman, Rosenbaum, who was the lead film critic at the Chicago Reader in its heyday and who still writes a regular column for Cinema Scope, cannot watch or write about a film isolated from its social and political context. In Moving Places, he broadens that context to include the personal. One point he drives home is that movies can strike us in radically different ways at various stages in our lives. Context isn’t everything, but it’s a lot.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/apr/02/the-top-25-most-compelling-hollywood-autobiographies-ranked
What parts of filmdom haven’t yet been properly documented or given their due justice in words?
Just the other day, the New Republic ran an outstanding piece by filmmaker, actor, and scholar Artel Great that lays out a thorough argument that’s especially urgent right now in 2020. The crux: “Since the very inception of moving pictures, Black directors have occupied a paradoxical role in American cultural history. They have represented an artistic vanguard, introducing innovations in aesthetic sensibilities and production practices, while remaining perpetually on the outside looking in. The truth is, Black artists helped build the American film industry—and it’s finally time for a widespread recognition of that legacy.” There’s work to be done in plenty of underrepresented corners of filmdom, but this right here really does need to be job number one.
https://newrepublic.com/article/159336/black-cinema-matters
Which writers do you wish would script a movie?
Prose style wouldn’t figure into it. The sort of mind that can compose a sentence or a passage that will send a reader into reveries, no matter how splendid or thrilling, may not necessarily be equipped to piece together an inventive structure, which is essentially what the work of a screenwriter amounts to—delivering bare bones to the collaborative team who will flesh them out.
It’d have to be someone who goes looking for material—the people, the places—that we rarely see on the screen and then does something fresh with it, sets it all into motion in unexpected ways that have little or nothing at all to do with the standard three-act structure. I was thinking of George Saunders, who can be ferociously funny and at times oddly moving and whose stories conjure—in me, anyway—images that are rarely like anything I’ve seen on film. That’s the other thing: He excels at the short story, and as everyone knows, there have been far more great adaptations of short stories than there have been of novels.
But looking him up just now, I see that he actually has tried his hand at screenwriting. I’ve never heard of—much less seen—Sea Oak (2017), an adaptation of his own story. And it stars Glenn Close! I’ll have to track that one down. So if this disqualifies him, let’s go with another writer who might be considered to be more or less in the same general neighborhood, Jennifer Eagan. Double-checking to make sure she hasn’t written a movie yet (she hasn’t), I’ve stumbled across a 2015 conversation she had in the New York Times Magazine with . . . George Saunders.
Well look at that neat bow you tied there!
Would you rather lose yourself in watching or reading?
Reading by day, watching by night.
What’s the most memorable review you’ve ever read about one movie?
I’m going to have to cheat a little bit on this one because the one that immediately leaps to mind—and you are asking about the most memorable one—is actually a review of a review. Or at least an appreciation. Late in 2017, less than a year before the Village Voice was forced to end its remarkable sixty-three-year run, Bilge Ebiri wrote in those now sorely missed pages about how a review of Orson Welles’s Othello (1952)—by J. Hoberman!—changed his life. Hoberman’s review ran in 1992, when Ebiri was eighteen, a freshman in college. He had never even heard of Welles’s film, but reading this review prompted him to immediately drop everything, skip his classes, and catch a train from New Haven to New York just to see this movie.
Ebiri sets all this up within the first couple paragraphs, and he immediately had me in the palm of his hand because I did something pretty similar myself at around the same age. In my case, it wasn’t a review that spurred me to drive halfway across Texas—and then back again—but simply the fact that Beware of a Holy Whore (1970) was one of the few Fassbinders I hadn’t yet seen at the time. But the beauty of Ebiri’s piece is in the close rereading of Hoberman’s review that follows the adventure. Turns out, Ebiri didn’t take to Othello the first time around, but when he went back to the review, he was able to trace “a subtle, animating thesis at work” that helped him appreciate what Welles was up to.
I like very much the twist of your answer. Since you bring up the Village Voice again can you share what specifically about it makes it sorely missed for you in 2020 when we’re swimming (drowning?) in so many opinionated and critical voices every second of every day?
It could well be that I’ll miss the Voice more sorely than others. I started reading it practically from front to back as a student, and then later, in the early 1990s, when I was living in Munich, I’d bike or take a tram every few days to Amerika Haus, which housed a library stocked with the most recent issues available of dozens of magazines and newspapers. If I’m remembering this correctly, the Voice was the only alternative weekly of the lot, which speaks to its status at the time.
You’re right to point out that there’s no longer a moment when we aren’t swamped with opinion, but when it comes to editorial guidance, we are, more and more, left to our own devices. The Voice lived up to its name, and while it was home to writers of varying views, the overall editorial stance was bold and clear. And its editors made good writers better. Alan Scherstuhl was the film editor when the paper was shut down in the summer of 2018, and his guidelines for reviewers were being eagerly passed around not long after. Aspiring critics, take note.
https://www.villagevoice.com/2017/11/01/the-greatest-film-review-ive-ever-read/
https://davechen.net/2019/01/alan-scherstuhl-the-dos-and-donts-of-film-reviews-criticism-writing/
Which film critic’s writing has made you laugh the most?
Nick Pinkerton. His reviews are rarely laugh-out-loud funny, but there’s nearly always a sly smile lurking in there somewhere that I find irresistible. If you’ve heard him speak—he was a regular on the Film Comment podcast before the magazine went on hiatus immediately after the coronavirus outbreak—you can hear that unique intonation in your head as you read, which makes it even better. And it’s especially effective because the humor is embedded in excellent writing, sharp insight, and deep knowledge. If the forum allows him to really cut loose—Twitter, for example, or a column he used to write, “Bombast,” for the now-defunct Sundance Now blog—brace yourself.
https://nickpinkerton.substack.com/
Who are book world people who deserve documentaries?
I’ve always been fascinated with the modernists, and by always, I mean going back to junior high school when I first read T. S. Eliot. Over the years, I’ve read biographies of most of the major figures, but I’ve probably read more about H.D. than any of them. It’s not that I admire her work more than that of Eliot and Ezra Pound, or William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens and so on. It’s just such a remarkable life. Engaged to Pound with whom she launched Imagism, one of a cascade of isms to tumble out of the modernist era. Lost a brother in the First World War. Close friends with D. H. Lawrence and a lifelong bond with the novelist and editor Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman). Underwent therapy with Freud. Men and women were constantly falling for her, and she for them, so there’s great gossipy drama here to pepper up the journey from one historical landmark to the next.
And she was a cinephile! In this summer’s issue of Film Comment, Sheila O’Malley has a fantastic piece on Close Up, the film magazine H.D. launched with Bryher and the novelist, photographer, and filmmaker Kenneth Macpherson. They also founded a sort of hybrid publishing and production company, the Pool Group, and H.D. appears in their only feature, Borderline (1930)—with Paul Robeson! You could go full-on Ken Burns with the modernists with H.D. to hinge it all on.
https://www.filmcomment.com/article/the-ecstatic-art-hd-poet/
Are you more adventurous in your viewing or reading interests?
For many years, it would have been reading, but ever since I started doing whatever it is that I do—about twenty years ago now—I definitely spend more time and take more chances with my viewing choices. The days and nights are too short!
Since you’re a masterful compiler who/where do you turn to online that produces similar regular posts but for different subjects which you also like?
It’s infuriating that I’ve had to drop so many bookmarks and RSS feeds, unsubscribe from so many newsletters and podcasts just to make space and time to keep up with the steady onslaught of cruelty and incompetence from that miserable excuse for a human being in our White House. Spike Lee calls him Agent Orange, and I’ll just go with that. What’s even more infuriating is that my anger is precisely what he’s after.
I try to avoid doomscrolling, and when I do manage, I’ll catch up with the two newsletters I subscribe to from ARTnews, one in the morning and one in the evening. Other art sites I keep up with are e-flux, MoMA’s Magazine, Artforum, frieze, 4Columns, BOMB, and the Brooklyn Rail. I follow a fair number of design sites and lots of tumblrs (still!), local Berlin news and culture resources, and for music, Pitchfork, Gorilla vs. Bear, Alex Ross, and a few others.
For literature, besides the majors that for you will be all the usual suspects—the London, New York, and Los Angeles Reviews of Books, the Paris Review, and so on—I usually swing by Bookforum and Literary Hub for daily news. Then there’s a slew of smaller magazines that appear quarterly or even more rarely. I also like to keep up with book design, so Daniel Benneworth-Gray, Peter Mendelsund, and Daniel Wagstaff are on the list.
Which characters in films do you imagine had great personal libraries?
I’m sure that I don’t have to tell you that the movie about great personal libraries is David Hugh Jones’s 84 Charing Cross Road (1987) with Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins. Other obvious candidates would include any movie featuring a genius (Sherlock Holmes), scientists (mad or otherwise), and of course, writers (ditto). I think, too, of films in which reading is simply woven into the fabric of the characters lives, films by François Truffaut, for example, or Nuri Bilge Ceylan. I’m guessing that the most daunting personal library of all would be kept not by a character but a director: Jean-Luc Godard.
Yes, his (“God” is in his name afterall) would be one I’d add to the top of my list as well. Thanks David!
David Hudson
]]>A timeline of my interaction with William's books: In 2010 I discovered his Killed: Rejected Images of the Farm Security Administration (2010) because I wanted to see (and still do) every book PPP Editions produced. I immediately bought it because of the title and William's concept with the images. Last year I read True Homosexual Experiences: Boyd McDonald and Straight to Hell (2016) and Boyd immediately entered my pantheon of exalted publishing people. This is what John Waters said about him: "Move over Maxwell Perkins—here’s another literary editor who deserves to be more famous than you. His Straight To Hell chapbooks join Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto as the most radical (and hilarious) filth classics in modern literature." For some reason I've yet to read Halsted Plays Himself (2011) and am kicking myself that I didn't buy it earlier as now it goes for hundreds of dollars. I'll get it from the library and I know I'll like it. I also haven't read William's first novel, I'm Open to Anything (2019), but after I read the description of it I don't see any reason why I wouldn't enjoy it as well. It features what I think is William's best cover and is from a publisher with a delightful name called We Heard You Like Books (same as the McDonald book). William is presently near to finishing his second novel.
I deliberately excluded descriptions of William's books as I'm a big proponent of online digging once a great reader meets another one. I also only included the first and third sentences of the John Waters blurb as I want you to go to Amazon immediately after you read this interview to see the full appropriately-colorful quote, and most importantly, to buy there or elsewhere the Boyd McDonald biography and others where William's name appears on the cover. - Wes Del Val
WDV: What’s a subject you’ve been steadily reading about since you were in college and which are the most satisfying books about it?
WEJ: I’ve consistently read a lot of biographies. I was an undergraduate during the apogee of Deconstruction’s career in America, when all serious literary theory concerned the text. The author virtually disappeared as an object of study, and biographical criticism was dismissed as a relic of Victorian times. Biographies had no intellectual standing at all; consequently, I’ve spent a good portion of my adult life rebelling by writing them.
The Quest for Corvo by A. J. A. Symons and Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey were enormously important formative books for me. In more recent years, I’ve enjoyed the Penguin Lives series, especially Edna O’Brien on James Joyce and Elizabeth Hardwick on Herman Melville. Even when they’re awful (and they often are), biographies have something to offer.
Which creative people have made you want to read all you can about them?
Many years ago, I devoured John Ashbery’s essay about Raymond Roussel, “In Darkest Language,” which, in an earlier iteration, introduced the author to American readers. This led me to How I Wrote Certain of My Books, Roussel’s posthumous volume that purports to reveal his technique for writing, but which ends up being more than a little mystifying. The discovery in 1989 of manuscripts of previously unknown (and enormously long) poems by Roussel initiated a whole new line of inquiry. In contrast to the position I took when answering the previous question, I think Roussel’s biographical legend is the least interesting thing about him. The way Roussel used language—specifically, the plethora of French homonyms—to generate poems and prose exerts a powerful appeal for me to this day.
I’d also like to use this context to make a plea for more translations of Yayoi Kusama. After her days as an artist and provocateur in 1960s New York, she took up writing fiction. In the late 1990s, she reemerged for Western audiences as the “dot lady” celebrated for her paintings and installations, generally to the exclusion of other aspects of her practice. At Kusama’s first big American retrospective, I bought a copy of Hustlers Grotto, a collection of three novellas, now long out of print. Her fiction is difficult to describe; to me it seems like some distant cousin of the nouveau roman. I find it scandalous that most of the writing by such a major cultural figure is simply unavailable to Americans. Even her novel with an English language title (Manhattan Suicide Addict) has only been translated into French. I suppose the galleries that represent her see little profit in the publication of books without pictures. Shame on them.
Very interesting that you pair Roussel and Kusama here and then mention nouveau roman, which ties it back to Roussel. I have to admit that while I knew she was multidisciplinary I did not know about Hustlers Grotto. And you’re right, people don’t line up for over an hour to see words in a book and take countless Instagram shots like they do for one of her installations so the chances are likely quite slim that we’ll see a proper reprint anytime soon.
An elegant proof of a mathematical theorem is internally consistent. A well thought out brand is, too. Human beings, fortunately, are inconsistent. Kusama’s literary works are not obviously of a piece with her installations and paintings. Her books don’t obey the logic of the art market, so in a society where mercantile values hold sway, they hardly exist. In this respect, they are truly subversive, and truly human, too.
When’s the last time you were envious of the quality of writing you read?
I read Muriel Spark with great jealousy. I admire her concision, and above all, her ear for the variations of human speech. Perhaps that’s a peculiarly Scottish obsession. While writing, Spark would “do voices” to try out her dialogue and see if it struck a false note, or so her longtime companion reported. I haven’t ever gone that far, but I do read long portions of my works in progress out loud. All I can say is that I’m trying, Muriel.
Do you have any authors and/or books you prefer to read after midnight?
I wish I could stay up that late!
Then do you have a preferred time for reading or can you do it anytime, anywhere… provided it’s not too late?
If I have a free afternoon, I prefer to spend it reading. My mental acuity is best when I first wake up, so I tend to write then.
Can you share memorable reading experiences from the past five years which greatly opened your eyes to another culture or scene?
I’ve actually had an eye-opening experience in the last five days: Radio by Tõnu Õnnepalu. He’s an Estonian author who has spent a considerable amount of time in France, or perhaps I should say, in the French language. The plot of the book could be fully elaborated in a short novella, but Radio’s narrator digresses for over 500 pages about Old Livonia, communism, and our present capitalist monoculture. Õnnepalu was born when Estonia was a republic of the USSR; as an adult, he saw his country’s independence and the end of its socialist system. He grew up immersed in a non-Indo European language spoken by a little over a million people, with considerable regional variations for such a small area. Becoming a polyglot wasn’t a choice for him, it was a necessity. Likewise, he can’t count on anyone outside his native country having any knowledge of it, so he must inform his readers. I grew up in the US during the Cold War, and for me, the communist East was an immense blank spot. One would hear official speeches and see propaganda, but there was little information about how people actually lived. Radio satisfied a longstanding curiosity, and I found it thoroughly engrossing.
Just your description of it is engrossing. Do you think you’ll next keep exploring the history of the communist East since you have had such a lengthy curiosity about it or move on to another topic? And if for so long, I’m curious why now just getting to it?
Actually existing socialism in Europe collapsed in slow motion, beginning more or less in the early 1980s. This was the last epochal political change on the world scene, and quite possibly the only one I’ll see played out in my lifetime. We are still dealing with its consequences. I’m not done with the topic by any means. It’s part of my second novel, I Should Have Known Better, which I’m finishing these days. The book’s epigraph is taken from a Fat White Family song: “Hell hath no fury like a failed artist or a successful communist.” For many readers the line will likely summon images of Hilter and Pol Pot, but I derive other associations from it. Why do I rehash a history that to many people is long dead? Our present moment seems so dystopian that I’m curious about a time when someone, somewhere believed in utopia, however imperfectly it was realized.
What are the most subversive things you’ve ever read?
I’d have to say Straight to Hell. I admit it’s a predictable response from me as the biographer of Boyd McDonald, the publication’s founding editor. The bluntness of STH’s language and the crudeness of its illustrations are still shocking many years later. The anonymity of the whole enterprise has the effect of an obscene phone call. When looking at early issues of STH, I find myself asking, “What the hell is this?” That question is one indication of a truly unprecedented work. Visual art, which is supposed to be “subversive,” rarely is because so many artists are aspiring to brand themselves and become household names. Boyd’s great virtue is that he simply didn’t give a damn. That attitude has only become more powerful after his death.
I loved your book about Boyd and he immediately became a literary hero for me. I hope people read it and do for years to come! “What the hell is this?” is beyond essential in arts and letters. Always, but perhaps now more than ever. But I shudder to think of the financial realities faced by nearly all creators throughout history whose work ever prompted that response.
Boyd used to say that he got a government grant to print smut, because he lived on welfare and produced Straight to Hell with that money. He’s a wonderful example of someone who worked within an extreme economy of means, yet created something that had an impact far beyond his very limited world. The price of doing such work is high, and most people aren’t willing to sacrifice virtually all material comforts to follow an obsession. When I wrote about Boyd, I hoped that a few readers would take inspiration from him and start their own endeavors, however modest, with unforeseen and delightful consequences. He’s someone whose work gives people permission to ignore received ideas about what constitutes “real” writing. Alas, this kind of activity doesn’t put food on the table. Not everyone can live on instant coffee and cookies, as Boyd did.
Despite the lip service cultural gatekeepers pay to supposedly radical political ideas, I believe we have entered a period of extreme conservatism. People have good reasons to be scared, but their fear has caused them to embrace a sentimental, infantilized culture. This logic became clear to me when I received an email from a book distributor, who is concerned not so much with abstract notions like virtue or good intentions, but with the concrete details of what consumers are buying at bookstores. He said, “One of the most consistent messages we are hearing is now more than ever stores are looking for ‘sure things’ whenever possible: something they can sell without much effort, something that customers automatically ‘get’ when they see it…. Sadly, this is the year where debut authors and discovered titles struggle even more than normal.” The publishing industry as it was known for decades is perishing. We must build something else on its ruins.
“Subversive” is one of my favorite topics, so can you please humor me and give me just a few more writers or specific works?
In our present era of relentless neo-Victorian pieties, I think there’s great subversive potential in being “problematic.”
After reading I’m Open to Anything’s passage about Osvaldo Lamborghini, a fan told me that this author was at the bottom of his reading list. He had heard that Lamborghini once went to the home of Néstor Perlongher, a gay Argentine writer, tied him down, and beat him senseless for being a “faggot.” My first impression was that this must have been part of an elaborate sex scene, but I could be wrong. As far as I can determine, the story is hearsay. Lamborghini’s prose is pretty much untranslatable, so dense and strange and full of allusions that I have no trouble believing it was the product of a tremendously twisted human being. But I have to say, the story makes me more rather than less curious about both writers.
As far as I’m concerned, Tony Duvert is the ultimate subversive with regard to the standards of propriety that currently hold sway. There seems to be no limit to the discomfort his writing causes. Diary of an Innocent, published in France in 1976, wasn’t translated into English until 2010. I read Diary of an Innocent in 2011, after I had published my biography of Fred Halsted, and I immediately understood that it was a great book. What I didn’t realize at the time was that it had given me permission to write fiction. The narrator of Diary of an Innocent is completely remorseless. He loves having sex with Moroccan boys, and he describes precisely how their postcolonial lives are shit. Without any maudlin hand-wringing, he makes the boys into indelible characters. There’s no guilt or self-justification clouding his vision. The narrator knows he’s a pariah, and rather than trying desperately to conform to respectable society—striving for academic tenure or hoping for the next book contract or posturing in a way that would make him appear virtuous—he abandons all caution and indulges his desires in an orgy of what people in rich countries call sex tourism. At the same time, he mounts an absolutely scathing critique of Western capitalist society and the ways it restricts human sexual behavior, to everyone’s immense misery. Duvert himself was unable to live for long (or at all) in the utopia he imagined. Briefly a literary celebrity in the 1970s, he found fewer opportunities to publish in the more conservative 80s. He eventually got evicted from his apartment that had no telephone and no heat, and was forced to move in with his mother. In 2008, he died in her house and his body was not found for days. Everyone had forgotten about him. But then his books experienced a posthumous revival, a phenomenon in which I’ve played a small part, or so I like to think.
The hybrid of pornography and the essay is a form at which the French excel; it’s part of their inheritance of the Enlightenment. The first novel Denis Diderot published was the pornographic Indiscreet Jewels. Anglo-Saxon puritanism has prevented Americans from following Diderot’s example. I seek to continue the tradition of the philosophical porn novel (or the pornographic philosophical novel), quite perversely, in the English language.
If you had to trade libraries with anyone for a year and for that time could only read the books in their collection, who would it be?
I’d like to trade with my dear friend Bernard Yenelouis, who died this year of ALS. He lived in Brooklyn most of the time I knew him, and he was an old school book collector, which is to say he often spent on books the money he should have spent on necessities like food. He was an autodidact, someone Gramsci would have called an organic intellectual, as opposed to a member of an upwardly mobile intelligentsia. He had no interest whatsoever in status or reputation. He looked very closely and carefully at photographs and told us what he saw. He taught to make a living, and when it came to the history of photography, he was the most knowledgeable person I ever met, with the possible exception of Allan Sekula. Bernie also owned a substantial number of fiction books, some of them quite rare. He was never able to organize his possessions (or his thoughts) to his satisfaction, and he sometimes referred to his apartment as the Collyer Brothers’ Collection. I never had a chance to see his trove in its entirety, so in a perfect world, I’d be able to go through this material now. It would be a chance to learn more about a person I knew well, but who still remained rather mysterious to me. I’m sure the project would take at least a year. I’m not a believer in life after death, so I have no shipping address for Bernie to receive my library, which may be almost as disorganized as his was. Putting things in order is a hopeless task, and I’m sometimes tempted to spout a variation on Henny Youngman’s famous line: “Take my library, please.”
Another engrossing description William!. I think no booklover reading this would disagree. He sounds like a character out of a Joseph Mitchell piece. I wish you could be his Joseph Mitchell...
In the spring, two good friends of mine died within a period of less than three weeks. The filmmaker Luther Price was well known enough that I could write an obituary for him and have it published. Doing that helped a lot with mourning, because I felt I contributed in some way to the perpetuation of his memory. Bernie was known by a circle of friends and former students but not famous. I must be more enterprising in how I write about him and circulate those texts in the world. You haven’t heard the last of Bernie. I’ve transformed him into a character in I Should Have Known Better.
That’s wonderful, we’ll look for Bernie there.
Are there writers you only want to hear from via their writing, and not on social media, in interviews, and/or elsewhere?
Among the living, all of them, except those I know personally.
Among the dead, I’d like to mention a couple of exceptions. Hubert Fichte’s long interview with Jean Genet from 1975, a time when Genet was doing little writing, is fantastic. It appeared very tardily in translation in The Declared Enemy. Stanford is probably still considering euthanizing its university press, so interested parties may want to snap that book up soon. I believe Ivy Compton-Burnett gave only one interview for publication, an inside job arranged by her partner, Margaret Jourdain. It contains my single favorite utterance from an interview: “I do not feel that I have any real or organic knowledge of life later than about 1910.” She said this in 1945. I strive to include a variation on her statement (changing the date, obviously) every time I take questions from an audience.
I have no way to express adequately my contempt for social media, which has become a necessary evil when promoting new publications. Only now are we seeing a general acknowledgement of problems that have been latent in the technology for some years, namely, that these platforms are dominated and owned by present-day Nazis. In practical terms, social media poses a question that can’t be answered without doing violence to a writer’s work: how to transform reading, which (like most worthwhile things) unfolds over time, into an image graspable in an instant on a glowing screen? And yet here I am, responding to your interview questions, with the resulting text to be read on computers and smartphones.
I agree with you regarding the mad, mad, mad race almost all publishers and so many writers run on social media in trying to stop thumbs from scrolling endlessly. Including Erik and me (and ideally you and many others as well—the whole thing is fueled by a lot of wishing). We will both pull snippets of this for sm (S/M? Pretty apt initials-relation, no?) to try and entice people to visit Book/Shop’s site to read the whole thing over whatever time they choose to give it and it will live there for hopefully many years. But at least it exists and it’s there! The world is a tiny bit better because you took the time to answer these questions. Look at the quality of your responses. Actually don’t, I and we will be the judge, and I’m quite certain everyone will find a lot of pleasure here. For instance it would be a shame if fellow readers weren’t aware of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s quote.
And I hope that quote leads people to read her books. I can also recommend Ivy Compton-Burnett: A Memoir by Cicely Greig, the woman who typed her manuscripts. She captures the character of one of the last century’s true eccentrics. I read it thinking, “They don’t make them like her anymore,” but I nevertheless hold out hope that new generations are out there, refusing to have their personalities ground down in the mad rush to transform every human attribute into a monetized statistic.
Can you recommend quality pornography (of any stripe or era) to read?
I love the first twelve issues of the leather magazine Drummer, published before it moved to San Francisco and started taking itself and leather culture seriously, in the process eliminating anything off-brand. Few people realize that Drummer was founded in Los Angeles and originally edited by a woman, Jeanne Barney. She had the sense of humor to put a bearded drag queen (a member of the Cycle Sluts) on the cover of the magazine, to the consternation of many subscribers. She envisioned Drummer as a cross between gay pornography and the Evergreen Review, a kind of publication rarely attempted before or since.
I’m guessing very difficult to find?
Old issues of Drummer can still be found, but they’ve become very expensive. I’m partly responsible for this, because every time I write about them, the demand increases a little, while the supply is finite.
Who can’t write books or even long articles fast enough for you?
I must admit that I don’t “keep up.” Interesting writing often reaches me years late, and I usually read writers’ books out of chronological order. I’m the last person one would want to ask about what’s new.
What consistently makes you the happiest to read?
I’m in dire straits financially, so I’d have to say a check made out to me.
I’m sorry, I truly am (What the hell is this?…), but this is a great answer. I hope this all leads people to your books, especially, I want to re-iterate, True Homosexual Experiences: Boyd McDonald and Straight to Hell, it’s still available! Thanks William!
William E. Jones
]]>As it so happens James is also now working on his fifth art/photography/design-related documentary, Breuer's Bohemia, about Marcel Breuer's experimental house designs. This follows his four other fascinating features: Spit Earth: Who is Jordan Wolfson? (2020), Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco (2018), Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art (2016), and Black White + Gray: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe (2007). Based on the releases of his last three films, it appears James can get one out every two years, so I hope there are many more in a similar vein to come from him. Proceed down for who I think he should for sure focus his attention on next.- Wes Del Val
WDV: What excites you the most when holding a new book: incredible design elements of it or content that you’re seeing for the first time? What are some memorable examples of both from the past few years?
JC: Whether it’s an illustrated book or a literary work of fiction or nonfiction there are tactile elements that stimulate me when I pick up a book. I get a rush from the aroma of fine papers and traces of the reproduction process; ink, varnish, talcum. I prefer weighty volumes that have beautifully designed covers with a bias toward minimalism, great photography and refined typesetting and design. But I’m not a fetishist and I’m always seeking content first and foremost and when these things all come together it can be really exciting. A book that floored me a couple of years ago was the re-issue of Richard Avedon’s and James Baldwin’s Nothing Personal, originally published in 1964 and designed by Marvin Israel with a new essay by Hilton Als. I recall how sad it made me feel when I encountered the first edition in graduate school, but seeing it anew the book struck me as tough, brave and beautiful and so well produced. It’s hard to believe it was even published in the tumultuous early 1960s, but equally astounding is how urgent the work still remains today. A more recent experience was Benjamin Moser’s excellent Sontag: Her Life and Work which I read immediately after its release, before it won the Pulitzer Prize. The book object itself is so sexy and heavy and Moser’s deep research and originality made it impossible to put down.
I’m intrigued that you mentioned reading it immediately and before it won the Pulitzer. Why is that? Though Moser’s Sontag received loads of press upon its release, is there a personal sense of intellectual pride or another satisfying feeling at recognizing the importance of something like a serious biography or difficult piece of literature before it gains mass critical attention? I know there is with me if I’m being perfectly honest with myself.
There is a sense of intellectual pride, certainly. I’ve always valued one’s individual ability to choose and select and to assert a personal aesthetic and with that I’ve tried to maintain a high standard for myself. Sontag has fascinated me forever and I’ve read much of her output in all genres, some of it numerous times, but she is also symbiotically joined to the cultural life of New York City in the 1960s and 1970s and its chief characters in every creative field. New York in this period is itself a character in most of my films and I would have read this book in any case.
Whose archives would you most like to access to make a book? How about a documentary?
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about Germano Celant, the Italian critic, curator and art historian who sadly died recently of covid. I first met Germano in the mid 1990s at Joel-Peter Witkin’s Guggenheim Museum retrospective dinner. Over the years, I continually marvelled at his output; how prolific he was and the totality of his vision with contributions over decades across a wide spectrum of creative disciplines. In 2014, I did an intense principal interview with Germano at his home in Milan for my documentary, Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art, a film in which he was essentially the de facto narrator. We became friends and occasionally saw each other in New York, London or Milan. Germano built art historical archives in Genoa and Milan that rivaled most institutions; focussed repositories of materials about the art I’m most fascinated by today; conceptual art, land art, arte povera, minimal art; the artists and their exhibitions of the late 1960s and 1970s. He was on the scene in a way that today makes it seem like he was everywhere at once, which he pretty much was. Germano was so intellectually compelling as well as physically striking; a force with commanding opinions about everything. His life and work would make for an unforgettable documentary film series.
That was a perfect summation of his life and heft in the art world. Absolutely agree about the essential need for a documentary on him. If only we knew someone who made documentaries...
What are some books which you were just about to give up on but then forged ahead and were pleased you did for they ended up being excellent reads?
I recently completed Henry Miller’s Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, but I found starting the book a slog. A while later, I was filming in Big Sur near the Esalen Institute and having returned from this extraordinarily beautiful place high above the Pacific Ocean, I picked the book up again and this time found it thoroughly absorbing.
What one room have you been in where you were most in awe of the books in it?
In the mid-1990s, Jack Woody and I were invited by Elizabeth Glassman to visit Georgia O’Keeffe’s summer house in Abiquiu, New Mexico, the highlight of which was O’Keefe’s library, at that time off-limits to visitors. I remember it being a small space with a kiva fireplace and floors paved with red and yellow tiles, but the library was still perfectly intact with many volumes Georgia bookmarked with tissue. The room felt as if Georgia had just been there. It was a time capsule of her life with and in the circle of Alfred Stieglitz and the intellectual community they shared in New York in the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s. The library for me gave a better impression of the artist than any photograph could. There were artist monographs, personally inscribed first editions, books on psychology, philosophy and sexuality, novels and poetry. In that one moment I sensed O’Keeffe’s aura.
Did you get any particularly meaningful personal reading done when you were in the desert for your land art documentary? That leads to a larger question of the impact of space on how you take in words. Do you notice any kind of special connection?
In the desert, I was traveling with a first edition of The Writings of Robert Smithson which I found hypnotic and transported me back to the late 1960s and early 1970s, especially “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan.” Smithson’s voice in his audio/slide show artwork “Hotel Palenque” gives one the gist of this kind of visceral reading experience. I lived in Santa Fe for over a decade and there I built a sizable library. I’ve never really thought about space in these terms but in retrospect those were very productive years as far as reading is concerned, which in turn inspired many book and film projects I produced later.
With each passing year do you find yourself reading new books or revisiting previously read favorites to experience new impacts from them?
For me it’s a mixture of both. I often return to a book to retrieve a particular sensation and, similar to watching films again, I have in the process often discovered new meaning or details that were somehow overlooked. This happened recently with Camus’ The Plague which, in the pandemic era, offered a very different, surreal experience like living inside the novel. Over the years I’ve constantly returned to books about subjects I’m obsessed with, Hannah Arendt or Walter Benjamin, the artists Francis Bacon and Gerhard Richter or filmmakers like Antonioni and John Schlesinger. When I was doing research for my film on Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe, I struggled with Hervé Guibert’s original Gallimard editions in French which I’ve returned to thanks to recent English translations. I do enjoy making new finds browsing in my local bookstores and through the latest book reviews and there are contemporary authors whose next works I anxiously await; Andrew Durbin for example, Rachel Kushner or Alan Hollinghurst.
Which artists, photographers, or filmmakers whose work you like also wrote books, essays, or articles which you hold in high esteem?
Pier Paolo Pasolini is at the top. Last summer I sped through the second edition of Barth David Schwartz’s mesmerizing Pasolini Requiem which is a monument to the biography form but deftly analyzes the director’s prolific published contributions; poetry, critical essays, stories, scripts and journalism. Werner Herzog is up there, too, especially his Of Walking on Ice, but I also love books like Michael Ondaatje’s conversations with iconic film editor, Walter Murch (The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film). The writings by artists Tacita Dean, Donald Judd and Jeff Wall have made lasting impressions on me and are always worth revisiting.
Again within those three categories, who can you not believe hasn’t had a biography, memoir, or documentary completed about their life?
Gerard Malanga is a fascinating and extraordinarily prolific poet and writer, photographer and filmmaker who was an essential Warhol collaborator in the 1960s. Malanga seems to have known or been acquainted with virtually every important (counter)cultural producer of the late twentieth century. I published Gerard’s first monograph of photographs, Resistance to Memory in 1998 and I thought then: What a compelling character and subject worthy of a substantial documentary film. I hate to think that Gerard has now fallen through the cracks.
I love the shot of Andrew Wylie you chose for that cover! (Look it up.) I think his memory still has substantial time with us as we’re not close to ceasing fixating on Warhol or his circle.
About which creative circle at any time in the past do you wish there was an in-depth oral history written?
In her essay about Gertrude Stein’s and Alice B. Toklas’ activities during the second world war, Janet Malcolm points out how often we think we know a subject but invariably our knowledge is so incomplete. The previously unheard voices of those whom Malcolm interviewed offer a new, though shockingly despicable portrait of Stein. Conversely, they give new human dimension to Toklas, typically eclipsed by the shadow cast by her lover. Using Malcolm’s inclusive line of inquiry—warts and all, sometimes damning—an in-depth oral history of Stein’s circle or for that matter Jean Cocteau’s in France before and after the war would be fascinating.
Who are your favorite ever book-world people, ie editors, designers, printers, publishers, bookstore owners, etc? Those who do fantastic work on one side of the business so readers and buyers on the other side are continuously pleased.
Jonathan Galassi, editor and publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Ecco Press
Semiotext(e)
Chris Grimley, designer, OverUnder
Alan Rapp, editorial director, The Monacelli Press
Dung Ngo, designer and publisher, August Editions
Lothar Schirmer, publisher and art collector, Schirmer Mosel
Mary DelMonico, publisher
Lorraine Wild, designer
Gerhard Steidl, printer, publisher, art collector
Mark Holborn, editor, designer, author
Dimitri Levas, designer, stylist, design collector
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet, writer, publisher, owner City Lights
JRP Editions
Sarah McNally, owner McNally Jackson Books
Bookmarc
Lee Kaplan, owner Arcana Books, LA
Book Soup, LA
DAP @ Hauser & Wirth, LA
Skylight Books, LA
Richard Christiansen, Owl Bureau, LA
Great readers love great lists, so thank you James!
James Crump in LA, 2018
]]>I'm lifting the following from Jesse's own character-filled description of what his magazine is because I'm charmed by its references from all parts of the field: "Apology is inspired in equal measure by The New Yorker under William Shawn’s editorship; 1980s and 90s punk zines; the Encyclopedia Britannica, The People’s Almanac and MAD magazine." It's not a quarterly, it's not biannual, it's not even annual (five issues since 2013, do the math), and I really like that not only is the content (along with each cover, which smartly is always sans text save the title) unpredictable, but so are the release dates. For almost a year now Jesse has been podcasting with engaging people he likes, where it's mostly discussions about reading, and regularly displays on Instagram his exceptional and unconventional tastes in books and writers (thank you for both!). So while we await issue number six, do listen to his episodes and look at his IG. But after you read this.- Wes Del Val
WDV: What are three books you’ve already reread and are sure you’ll do so again in your lifetime?
JP: My security-blanket books are The Secret History by Donna Tartt, Pet Sematary by Stephen King, and The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris. I guess the common thread is they’re all slightly brainy horror blockbusters with bleak outcomes. The way I read any of the three now is just opening the book randomly and falling in.
Specifics: I like how The Secret History is structured and where it’s set and the way its ensemble of characters interacts. I like the world-building and the pervasively gloomy mood of The Silence of the Lambs. I like that Pet Sematary is unapologetically gnarly from start to finish, that almost everyone in it dies, and that it has a wendigo.
I especially like that you’ve become so familiar with and find such comfort in them that you now prefer to randomly open and read. Two questions regarding that: 1) Each time you do such with either of them do you find yourself having new favorite sections that you’d not had previously? 2) Do you elsewhere traditionally read from beginning to end and/or do you have any personal reading quirks? I know I fairly often read magazines backwards piece by piece and almost always read the acknowledgements before starting a nonfiction book.
My favorite parts have remained the same, but I might find more nuance in passages I’d previously sped through. The only thing I can think of in terms of reading quirks is that I tend to skip the childhood portions of biographies.
I absolutely agree and wish I could as well, but I just can’t not read every word if I’m going to read read a book. Those years are never my favorite parts of a biography and when I think of all the time I could have used elsewhere...deep sigh.
Which authors have scared you the most?
When I was young it would have been Stephen King, Henry James just for The Turn of the Screw, and Peter Straub just for Ghost Story. In more recent times, Thomas Ligotti’s work makes me truly uncomfortable—both his horror fiction and also his antinatalist manifesto The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. And just a few weeks ago, a re-read of Mike Davis’s The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu fucked me up pretty good.
The last two certainly present the effect in their titles. I’ve started Ligotti’s Conspiracy a few times and maybe now this will push me to proceed further as I do relish the singular feeling of reading words and being made uncomfortable when and/or if that is one of the author’s intentions.
What’s a book which radically changed your view of its subject after you finished it?
Pranks by V. Vale and Andrea Juno. The San Francisco punk publisher RE/Search originally released it in 1987. It contains interviews with various people around the ideas of monkey-wrenching and tricksterism. I first read it when I was 14 and it helped me learn that rules are just things people make up and that you don’t have to follow them.
Oh but wait I just read your question more closely. A book that changed my view of its subject after I read it… It would probably be a history book. Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe by Thomas Cahill comes to mind.
I’m actually very pleased you mentioned RE/Search, I feel like people who mostly only know having access to the internet their whole lives might not be as familiar with them as they should be. I’d hate for them to get left behind. Can you please tell me more about what their books and general publishing programme have meant to you?
This will sound codgerish, but when I was young, like pre-teen and before I could go into the city alone, it was pretty hard to find information about weird music, art, films, writers, and ideas. No internet, blah blah blah. So a thing like RE/Search, which felt like reference material for punk, industrial, transgressive sex, and so-called “outsider art,” was truly formative. I found Pranks and Industrial Culture Handbook at a local comic book store and then memorized them. RE/Search also introduced me to Charles Willeford, one of my favorite writers.
Do you like to know a lot or a little about an author’s biography when reading one of their books for the first time? And have you ever changed your opinions about a work for better or worse once you found out anything specific about a writer?
Usually I don’t care about the bio before the reading. What does happen is I’ll read one or two books by someone, fall in love, read all their books, and then read the bio. A couple examples would be Cookie Mueller and Richard Yates. But I don’t think a biography has ever radically changed my opinion of a writer.
What source accessible to everyone consistently gives you the best book recommendations?
My podcast, and I’m not trying to be cute. I started it specifically to get reading recommendations. The guests deliver.
They certainly do. As do you I want to add. Yours is the only podcast where I’ve listened to every episode and I’ve picked up numerous exciting new writer names, titles, and even a few genres.
Thanks, glad to hear that.
A mainstream book publisher asks you to compile an anthology exploring counterculture from 2000-2020 as you define it. You can pick from books, magazines, interviews, online articles, blog posts, twitter feeds, etc. Assume you get permission for everything. Who and what do you feature?
I’d reject the job. The only reason a mainstream publisher might care about the so-called counterculture is profits and that’s gross.
Then let’s scrap “mainstream” for I wanted that corral to have an influence on what you’d pick as editor knowing it had to sell, which is of course always tricky when dealing with topics of “counterculture.” I’d still very much like to know what would make it into such an anthology which would satisfy you. And I daresay that if it satisfied you it would do the same for a number of others, but I’m fine leaving money out of it…
I don’t know why, but I’m still resisting this question. Maybe it takes more thought-work than I feel like doing right now. I know that I’ve never put a special emphasis on being contemporary with the things I read and watch. And my memory is terrible.
Ok, we can leave it there then. God, my memory is a shambles as well. I was thinking how I would answer that same question as it really is a book I wish was published, and I hit a wall after a handful. Oh well, maybe someone reading this will take the idea and do it.
What are the first few sections you usually gravitate towards when visiting a used bookstore?
Poetry, fiction, hobbies and crafts, belles-lettres.
In what order do you prefer your books, 1 being most preferable: hardcover, paperback, mass market, eBook, first edition, new, used, library book.
Used, paperback, hardcover, mass-market, library book, new, eBook, first edition.
Is anyone designing covers these days whose work regularly excites you? How about your favorite cover designers of all time?
For me it’s not so much about the designer as it is the illustrator. In that department I love horror paperbacks from the ’70s and ’80s. There’s a book called Paperbacks from Hell that collects a lot of them. I also like to look at novels from the ’70s that have strictly typographic covers. Like the original editions of a few later John Cheever books. I liked the design of the Cookie Mueller biography Edgewise.
From your point of view what is underrated right now in the world of reading?
Poetry, perpetually.
Why do you think that is, yes perpetually, with poetry? It seems so many great readers rarely extend into that category. I follow on social media quite a few people whom I truly consider great readers and they almost never mention poetry.
People have been mind-tricked into thinking that all poetry is fey, obscurant, and corny. And I think some people feel inadequate when they look at a poem and don’t get it. But what should be kept in mind is that nobody gets it. Not even the poets. That’s my favorite part. That’s why a first reading of any poem should be loose and easy. No expectations, no pressure. You can get more rigorous if you find a part that calls out to you.
Who are some writers whose words you strive to never miss, whether they be in book, article, or social media post form?
Eileen Myles, Neal Stephenson, Patti Harrison, Sam McPheeters, Bob Nickas, Vernon Chatman, Lee Child (ugh), Laurie Weeks, Renata Adler (on the off chance that she publishes something totally new).
Why the “ugh” with Lee Child? Are you embarrassed to include? Have you ever found yourself during your career, depending on the person you’re with or circle you’re in, not saying you like a particular book or author for fear of having your taste questioned? I’m always very intrigued how people handle their real opinions in different social situations, especially when books are being discussed.
Yeah, that was a pretty ambiguous ugh. I was only thinking about how he writes the exact same novel each time, and I read it each time. (PS: I don’t hide my opinions or taste. That would preempt a lot of fun conversations.)
What were the literary-related high points for you while at index and Vice?
At index, publishing Laurie Weeks and Eileen Myles. At Vice, publishing a rare piece by Charles Willeford and interviewing Elmore Leonard. Apology is an extended series of literary-related high points (and it’s weird you didn’t ask about it).
I specifically excluded Apology as since you are the founder and have total control I figured everything that made it into each issue was a high point. Are there some higher-than-others points for you after five issues?
Getting to dig through a huge pile of Frederick Exley’s papers from the University of Rochester was really cool. I found a rare piece buried in them and published it. All I really want to do is dig through boxes of old books all day. My sister is a librarian, and I’m jealous of that.
I’m sure more than a few people who just read those last two sentences are nodding their heads right now. I know I am. Thanks Jesse!
]]>I’m incredibly intrigued by this combination of factors and am very eager to see what it does on bookstore shelves, in reviews, and over social media upon its October 13 release and hope everyone involved does well by this book. And now, I present Stephanie LaCava and what she's read.- Wes Del Val
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WDV: What are some single issues of magazines which you think were particularly masterful?
SL: I love old issues of NOVA magazine, as well as those from the reboot done with Deborah Bee and Venetia Scott. I also like German magazine Twen. It was Twen that discovered the model Uschi Obermaier. All of her covers for them are great. I love the one from 1969 where she’s topless with velvet pants, her arms and legs crossed, “Miss Kommune.”
There’s a NOVA issue from 1966 where the cover line reads: “You may think I look cute but would you live next to my mummy and daddy?” accompanied by a white background and image of a young Black girl in a red party dress. I was reminded of this with recent posts showing a young boy protesting now, over fifty years later, with a similar sign.
I’ve been reading about the political magazine Ramparts (1962-1975.) Despite being linked to the New Left and considered “radical,” it had pretty good circulation and sophisticated production. It’s trajectory is really interesting, especially in the context of recent events. There’s a great story about the dandy editor in chief Warren Hinckle preserving a scoop, even though the magazine was in production, by taking out an ad in the New York Times. It would be cool to see Hinckle tackle the news cycle now.
Every time I hear a Hinckle story I always want to know another, I’m very fascinated by him.
Can you share a memorable tale of being in close proximity to a writing hero of yours?
I was so thankful to work with Chris Kraus on my novel. Separately, I have a funny story in which one of my writing heroes hung up on me. I was working on something related to Pierre Klossowski and I found a portrait he did of a young Fleur Jaeggy. Through the generosity of a friend of a friend I was able to find out her number in Switzerland. I’m pretty fearless, so I figured I would just give her a call. I grew up in France, so I can understand French fluently, but sometimes when I get nervous I don’t speak so well. She picked up and I asked her about the Klossowski portrait and she confirmed it and then, I think things went downhill from there. (laughs)
Do you have any highly recommended reading/music pairings?
I can’t listen to music while I read or write, but I could think of books and then warm-up or finale songs. I hate to reference lyrics, so I think it has to be more about the mood than the actual words. How about:
The Letters of Nina Harker by Dodie Bellamy and then Soundgarden’s Burden in My Hand or Mudhoney’s Touch Me I’m Sick.
To change things up this fall Air France decides to ditch their magazine and instead offer their customers literature which they think most will enjoy. They ask you to select three slim books which will fit in the seatback pocket and they’ll be on each flight all October. What do you choose?
Roberto Bolano’s Little Lumpen Novelita
I love this book. I love Bolano. This was the last book published in his lifetime. It’s such a good, sick story. The title explains why it’s the perfect size. (laughs)
Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas
This will keep you rapt during the flight. You may have to read parts multiple times. There’s something to learn from memorizing passages, even in translation.
Marie NDiaye’s Self-Portrait in Green
I love NDiaye and this is her shortest book, I think. It’s haunting and mysterious: a memoir that writes the unconscious.
What books have you finished which made you most want to physically see what you just read?
I’m not sure that happens so much for me with fiction. I’m into that in-between place.
I kind of want to take this question very literally and say that when I read art history, I often want to then see the objects in full dimension and scale, or the performances in person. Right now, for me it’s Alyce Mahon’s The Marquis de Sade and The Avant Garde. As I go through her text, I always want to see more than the images presented. Someone could do a whole book about Story of O imagery, for example. Inside, there’s also a tiny clipping from the second “issue” of internationale situationniste (December, 1958) that I love: a woman hula-hooping with a Sade quote below. It made me go look up the entire issue, which I found online.
I’m curious what else in Alyce’s book you now want to see since my interest is always piqued when I see “Avant Garde” in a title?
There’s a previously unpublished drawing of a brothel by the D.A.F. de Sade that I would love to see in person. Also, Man Ray’s Venus restauree in plaster and rope, the object.
What are some titles for which you wish you could write introductions for future printings? Doesn’t matter if they’re currently in or out of print.
Anything Gabrielle Wittkop or the impossible: Marguerite Duras.
As someone who runs a small press called literally Small Press, what are other small presses (historic or contemporary) which you’ve looked to for inspiration when the going gets tough?
New Directions is the ultimate, always. Historically, I like learning about the Olympia Press and Maurice Girodias who was controversial in many ways. There’s also Nancy Cunard’s the Hours Press, which did Samuel Beckett’s Whoroscope.
Did you read The Tender Hour of Twilight: Paris in the '50s, New York in the '60s: A Memoir of Publishing's Golden Age by Richard Seaver? There’s great Olympia and Girodias and Barney Rosset and Grove Press tales in it. I adore reading books about publishing history. Do you have favorites?
I have to read that. Thank you. I love Barney Rosset. I have a copy of L’image from his personal library, the book written by Catherine Robbe-Grillet under her pen name: Jean de Berg. It’s stamped with his name. My favorite books on publishing history would be Those Were The Hours, which Cunard wrote about her experiences with the press. As reference there are two really good compilations: Publishing as Artistic Practice from Sternberg Press and the exhibition catalog: Better Books/ Better Bookz: Art, Anarchy, Apostasy, Counter-culture & the New Avant-garde (bad title.) I’ve also been learning about Jean-Jacques Pauvert through reading some texts he’s published. I just got a copy of Annie Le Brun’s Sade: A Sudden Abyss, in English from City Lights Books.
When’s the last time you were impressed with someone’s bookshelves, whether you saw in-person (doubtful I guess since the quarantine) or on Instagram?
I love people’s bookshelves, even better are their stacks. I’m into the look of stacks of books against a wall or piled high. I really like that visual. What’s most impressive to me is not so much a curation, but evidence of someone’s curiosity. And definitely, works in translation—shelves that aren’t pretentious, just open and interested. I remember seeing this shelf on Instagram in a bookstore that was called “Dark AF…” I thought that was funny and wanted to read everything that was on it.
Fully agree regarding visual appeal of stacked vs shelved, when I come across the former on IG I can’t think of a time when I don’t double tap.
Can you recall books which you stayed up late reading and then arose early the next morning to continue doing?
It’s been so long since I’ve been able to do this. I would love to, though, and I remember that so well from when I was young. To be honest, I’ve been downloading books to my phone and reading them whenever I get any time. Right now it’s Annie Ernaux’s A Frozen Woman and a cinema book called Brutal Intimacy.
How would you spend $200 right now at your favorite bookstore?
Audre Lorde’s Your Silence Will Not Protect You
Fleur Jaeggy’s These Possible Lives
Jean-Patrick Manchette’s No Room at the Morgue
Zahra Ali’s Feminismes Islamiques
Unica Zurn’s Dark Spring
Caroline Blackwood’s Great Granny Webster
Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh’s Omnicide: Mania, Fatality, and the Future-in-Delirium from Sequence Press
What do you pay to read today and make sure to never miss a new production of, whether from a newspaper, magazine, or book publisher?
Again, New Directions. I think Barbara Epler is brilliant.
Funny, I’m currently right in the middle of the recent-ish biography about its founder, James Laughlin. Their run is extraordinary. Care to give us your top ND titles you wholeheartedly recommend?
Laughlin is a friend of mine’s grandfather. I mention this because it seemed so unbelievable to me at first to start a publishing “house.” That’s where the name Small Press came from—kind of a joke. It’s possible though and the increased stateside circulation of works in translation is an incredibly important thing. As for ND: There are too many. The whole catalogue is epic. I have a copy of Jaeggy’s Last Vanities on the floor by me now.
Who are the smartest writers most meaningful to you?
A certain kind of smartness can preclude from tapping into something more psychic or spiritual unless you can learn to temper the neuroses. I think some of the smartest writers have figured out how to get rid of their need to demonstrate “smartness” or prove something, because a reader can feel that. I make that mistake. It’s a young thing to do. What seems wiser, admirable and totally elusive to me is the ability to write like Annie Ernaux and have it be so beautiful and clear. I love that kind of work.
Here’s the hot takeaway: Annie Ernaux, Fleur Jaeggy, New Directions (Jaeggy is on ND!). Pick up any book with those names on it and you’re sure to be satisfied. Thanks Stephanie!
Stephanie LaCava
]]>Kaitlin Phillips is my favorite article barker on Twitter. Don't think old-fashioned carnival barking where shouting outside about the excitement inside hopefully leads to entrance dollars, but do think Twitter-as-carnival, where every posted article is trying to get you to come inside, i.e. to the brand's or writer's site, so clicks ultimately lead to dollars. Well no one makes me click like Kaitlin. (I just wish she would get some of the pennies for leading me there, barkers of all stripes deserve to make a buck.) She seemingly gets to every quality article I'd be interested in reading shortly after it's originally posted and then, and this is where she shines, always pulls the best, most relevant and enticing quote (even when they're buried deep in the piece—no simply copping the lede for her!) from it to feature in her own post. Sounds very easy, and she's certainly not the only one doing it, but it's her speed, discerning judgment, and dedication to it all that makes her so special. I don't know if she's an unusually fast reader (but I do know she's a great one despite what she says below) or an excellent scanner, but regardless she (@yoloethics) is a must-follow on Twitter if you're at all interested in art, media, books, fashion, and NYC culture. Once you settle in with her there you'll also get links to the various au courant art and culture magazines she regularly writes for. She puts the "wit" in Twitter so read her here and then please immediately go follow her there. -Wes Del Val
WDV: If you could give any famous person a book to read and if they read it you think it would truly change their public impact for the better, who and what would it be? Please not the president, as Trump reading (let alone finishing) a book isn’t even plausible.
KP: During the onset of coronavirus—when my boyfriend was mad at me for not cleaning—I read Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo by Mary Douglas. It’s about being afraid of dirt, among other things. That’s the book I’d push on any celebrity with a brain right now. My dream job is to be a book curator for models. I’d start with Emily Ratajkowski, because I think she’s a good reader. She’s trying to learn things. And while it’s valid for her to think Normal People is the best book of the year, it’s also a sign she needs weirder recs. I’d definitely ship her I Have Devoted My Life to the Clitoris by Elizabeth Hall, The Flagellants by Carlene Hatcher Polite, Sudden Death by Alvaro Enrigue, The Salt Eaters by Toni Cade Bambara. These books will take you pretty far in four different directions.
I would push particularly hard for The Flagellants, probably because I found it on accident while googling “Montana Valley Book Store” and I tend to elevate books that I find with no help from anyone. A random hobby blogger wrote about finding it on a trip to Montana, and provided this pull quote to entice other readers: “The complexities of organization, the created outcome, the materialization of concrete and abstract goals, were relegated to bosses, green-horned, starry-eyed idealists recently hired, bookworm intellectuals living in unreality, baggy-pants radicals classified as subversive. Talking about the boss killed just as much time.” Google the cover.
Agree, that’s just a bit weirder than Normal People. I wonder what social media posts by celebrities with massive followings about weird or obscure books would actually net sales-wise. These days all publishers welcome any voluntary posts about any book of course but I’d love to know numbers. Does anyone with over a million followers on Instagram ever post anything you’d ever want to read and which you believe they actually read?
I think in general no one reads. I read very little anymore. I read the most ages nine to seventeen. Just a book a day.
What have you read this year which you’re almost positive you will re-read at some point in your life?
Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann. I think it’s the only book that captured Post-Trump brain. His election gave a lot of liberals adult-onset ADD. I was glued to my phone for months. She captures that frenetic “I can’t believe I still have to pay the bills” energy that permeates our lives right now.
Which three books you own do you most wish were autographed by their authors?
A few years ago I got engaged to a European, and before I broke it off, I received one engagement present: Sisters by Lynne Cheney. The copy on the cover is: The novel of a strong and beautiful woman who broke all the rules of the American frontier. Since she’s renounced it, a signed copy seems particularly valuable. I would never pass up a signed copy of Let Me Alone by Anna Kavan, though I’d prefer it if I could bid on one of the lipsticks she left behind. And Elbowing the Seducer by T. Gertler. It wouldn’t be worth money, but it would be worth something to me. It’s the ur text for a writer girl in the publishing industry. Dwight Garner wrote about it recently, which made me mad, because I’d always planned on getting credit for discovering it.
But I don’t collect books properly. I trash everything. My boyfriend actually collects—mostly art books—and he’s so horrified by my treatment of books, he often won’t let me handle his without supervision or strenuous instruction.
Ha, I’m the same way with my art books and my wife. Though I’m by no means a collector I think it’s a bizarre male brain thing involving possession and pride of knowledge and authority, etc. Probably all stems from an inferiority complex, I don’t know, but I’m sure it’s degrees of annoying to be around.
Do you have a general rule you follow before you bail on a book? Such as, the first 50 pages no matter what, three attempts total, skip ahead to the middle to see if it’s more gripping, etc?
I don’t strain at all. If I read five pages and hate it, I’ll throw the whole book away literally in the trash. My boyfriend thinks it’s hilarious, just the number of books I throw away. (I grew up in a place where you had to drive bottles 105 miles to recycle them, so it’s been very difficult to get into the habit.) I re-read more than I read just because I am so picky and dissatisfied and angry at modern publishing. Especially in the last few years, I mostly just recommend the same 15 books to people that I read a long time ago, and read all the time to make myself feel better.
When I’m book reviewing, I have a hard rule. If I’m only finishing the book because it’s an assignment, I call Bookforum and get a new assignment. I regret panning books that weren’t even worth reading early in my career.
I’d love to know what is making you particularly angry at modern publishing.
I’m angry about what books become popular. I’m angry they don’t take chances.
I’m angry more of them don’t act like Tyrant Books. Tyrant publishes totally unheard of, fucked up, first time authors that they find in like the gutter. I don’t know how Giancarlo does it. He took me out to dinner to tell me he liked my writing when I was like 20. He found me first, was the first person in publishing to do that. Everyone else followed suit like five years later. He has a gift. No one discovers anything for themselves anymore—they wait to hear who is good from others.
For what brand in any industry would you most like to do the creative direction of a coffee table book about it?
I would love to do a book for Gucci not about Gucci just for Gucci. Aesthetics of excess appeal to me.
Has something you read in a book ever made you fearful to turn the next page?
Milkman by Anna Burns. I kept putting the book down, I was so nervous. It’s like a tinderbox. I’m sure that’s already a blurb.
Don’t often see genre-fiction level blurbs about Booker and/or National Book Critics Circle award winners, so if it’s not already, it should be!
How about something you’ve read online where you were nervous what the rest of the piece might contain?
Rachel Aviv’s pieces for the New Yorker, which so often deal with staggering loss in the face of passive injustice. The people she writes about have this desperation that makes me very nervous to ascertain their fate.
If tomorrow you could steal any book from anywhere or anyone, what would it be?
There is a photograph online of the art critic Rhonda Lieberman in front of her bookshelves, but it’s too blurred to make out their titles. I’ve read every book she’s casually mentioned in interviews—like a collection of conversations with Francis Bacon—but she doesn’t give many interviews. I don’t even need to steal her books, I just want the inventory. A quick iphone photo would do. I know people who are friends with her, and I’m always asking them to invade her privacy and send me a photo. So far they have all demurred.
I get a lot of ideas of what to read from portraits people take in front of their books. I prefer to read things they wouldn’t even think to recommend. When the AIDS activist Larry Kramer died recently, one photograph circulated with the majority of the obituaries. He’s seated at a desk in his personal library. I bought a few books from the shelves, the best so far is Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. Montaillou is supposed to be an appealing case study for medieval villages fighting the inquisition. A microsociety of people with “little money, little prestige, and little power.” Relevant, no? The preface, which I read online before purchasing, sold me: “Small subjects sometimes make good books. Didn’t the great French poet Rimbaud write a superb text on ‘Lice-Hunters’?”
Wonderful! I do the same thing, in fact did with Rhonda as well for when I saw the photo of her reading a thick Isaac Bashevis Singer hardcover at a pool in Miami I immediately went looking for it online. I also pretty much only study a page in an interiors magazine if it shows books, though they’re rarely emphasized enough in the stories! Others seem to be equally fascinated what with all the Zoom-meeting-background-bookshelves posts and comments proliferating on social media since March.
I am obsessed with our newfound window into people’s homes…
Regardless if you know they exist or not, whose diaries would you most desire to read before they’re officially published?
I want Fanny Howe’s diary more than anything in the world. Her memoiristic essay collection The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life is something I return to on Kindle all the time. There’s an essay on Simone Weil that is very important to me. To be honest, I would read the diary of anyone in Howe’s extended family tree. They are deserving of a documentary akin to the film on Francesca Woodman’s family.
Now this is total heresy, and I suppose rude, but I heard that all these famous Black writers in Brooklyn were fighting to date the writer Danzy Senna. (Danzy is Fanny’s daughter.) That makes me want to read her diary. Danzy writes really sharp, complex books about social mores. Her novels are like a glass of ice water that never melts. I bought her memoir about her father this month, and it’s next on my list…
If you were paid to stock and drive a bookmobile to one spot in America and stay there lending books for two months, where would you want to take it and what titles would be most important to you to offer to the locals?
I think bookstores should be arranged by personal recommendation. You should be able to walk in and just know what some famous person likes to read. When the “design guru” Jim Walrod died, all his books were at MAST, and perusing that was an education in itself. This lamp Jim got me a discount on sits on my desk, and I’m just a little less depressed to know that the stuff he knows at least survived in the form of his library. Helen Dewitt’s library was on display at Artists Space in Soho a few years ago—essential. Similarly, I always peruse staff recommendations at bookstores, and occasionally someone recommends enough good books in a row that I remember their names. I almost always purchase whatever Madeleine Watts recommends at McNally Jackson (she’s a novelist herself). I read The Children’s Bach by Helen Garner because of her. Perfect book.
Anyway, in my bookmobile, I’d first and foremost have a shelf of recommendations by Alex Carnevale, the writer and founder of This Recording. He was more or less the first to publish Molly Young, Durga Chew-Bose, and Alice Gregory on his website. His shelf would display the 100 books he recommended in the greatest listicle of all time: “The 100 Greatest Novels.” In 2013, I ordered everything I could afford from it, and read them during the years I was unemployed in New York. That list changed my life. He is literally the reason I read Cesare Pavese, Michel Houellebecq, Daphne Du Maurier, Fleur Jaeggy, James Agee, Irish Murdoch, Ursula LeGuin, Thomas Bernard, David Markson, Yukio Mishima, Bernard Malamud, Joyce Cary, Gene Wolfe, Robert Graves, Walter Mosley. I went to Barnard for four years, and I hadn’t read any of these people. College is such a joke.
My personal shelf would just be all the books that I recommend to anyone no matter their taste. Every time I am asked to list books I like, I just reflexively list the same ten to fifteen books that I’ve read many times over. If I’m reading lately I’m reading one of these. Why Did I Ever by Mary Robison; Radical Love by Fanny Howe; Lives of the Saints by Nancy Lemann; Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World by Donald Antrim; American Genius: A Comedy by Lynne Tillman; Platitudes by Trey Ellis; Edie: An American Biography by Jean Stein; Fear and Clothing: Unbuckling American Style by Cintra Wilson; Rule of the Bone: A Novel by Russell Banks; The Last Samurai by Helen Dewitt; Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson; Problems by Jade Sharma; Correction by Thomas Bernhard. They all go down easy.
What book did you last read which when you had the free time to do so made you want to reach for it before your phone, computer, or TV remote?
This is out of character, but the last book I read in one sitting was Duveen: The Story of the Most Spectacular Art Dealer of All Time by S.N. Behrman. The subhead is an accurate descriptor of the book. A few months ago, a friend texted me to come have a drink at Larry Gagosian’s house, and his butler—they call them house managers now, but you know what I mean—was so attentive and I got so drunk and was so awed by how all this money can be consolidated in one place that I went home and, well drunkenly, ordered this book, which apparently Larry really likes, because he fancies himself the 21st century Duveen.
Duveen was successful because every time someone tried to embarrass him, he just agreed with them and laughed harder than anyone at whatever insult they were levelling in his direction. Maybe that isn’t the thesis of the book, but it’s all I took away from reading it. Well that, and you sell more paintings if you go around pretending to refuse to sell to just anyone.
That Duveen book has been on my list for years and has just been bumped way up. Now I want to ask you a dozen questions about your time at Larry’s house...
Are there any book or reading-related trends you see regularly displayed on social media which particularly annoy you?
I dislike writers pretending to like things because their friends wrote them. I dislike writers pretending books are good when they are bad. I implicate myself. We get inured, we lose sense of what is good, what is bad, and what is perfect. Most books are bad.
Alas it’s true unfortunately and always has been. But you just listed a bunch of good ones which would satisfy any great reader for a long time, so thank you Kaitlin!