To Have or To Be
As 1980 dawned I turned 20. That year Erich Fromm was 80, a New Left mystic living in Switzerland. 1980 was the year I read Fromm’s book To Have Or To Be. It was also the year he ceased to be; the Frankfurt School veteran died in early spring.
To Have Or To Be is a remarkable and powerful book, a humanist sermon that connects Meister Eckhart and Spinoza, Freud and Marx, and mounts a radical critique of late-20th-century life. For some - for me, certainly - it’s been attitude-forming and life-changing.
by Nick Currie on 09/12/08 | No responses | Read More
Your Name Here
‘I’d like to publish it in the traditional way,’ insisted Helen DeWitt, author of The Last Samurai (2000), in a recent interview about her new online-only project, Your Name Here. But for her new novel to end up in Waterstone’s or Borders would undermine its whole reason for being. The book, which can be downloaded as a PDF from DeWitt’s website for the suggested price of US$8, is predicated on its own unpublishability and is both the culmination and the chronicle of DeWitt’s fruitless attempts to find a literary outlet for Ilya Gridneff, a (real-life) Australian journalist…
by Ned Beauman on 30/10/08 | No responses | Read More
Back to School
New and notable architecture and design books being released by English-language publishers this autumn.
Architecture
Conditions – Snøhetta: Architecture. Interior. Landscape.
Snøhetta eds (Lars Müller)
It was no small achievement when Norwegian firm Snøhetta was commissioned to design the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt, a remarkably ambitious project to resurrect the ancient Library of Alexandria near the site of the original. In spite of the grand scale and statement of that project, the firm’s work delicately straddles architecture, interiors and landscape design in a wholly relevant way. There aren’t many firms today that…
by Eugenia Bell on 17/09/08 | No responses | Read More
Born on the Kitchen Table
As creation myths go, the AACM’s seems fairly prosaic. Among jazz origin stories, more magical is the legendary Christmas Eve of 1939, when Charlie Parker is said to have improvised a bar of ‘Cherokee’, constituting what were very likely the first notes of bebop. The AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Music), on the other hand, was hatched at a kitchen table in a housing project on the South Side of Chicago. Written by George E. Lewis, a trombonist by training and a longtime AACM member himself, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music proves that…
by Eugenia Bell on 01/08/08 | No responses | Read More
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