Last night’s meeting of THE ARTIST’S BOOKSHELF was the first to be held in our funky new club-house, a retro-fitted, mood-lit ART LAB. Our conversation, covering the stimulating COLORS INSULTING TO NATURE went through the usual ebb and flow of inspiring ideas and intellectual exchange until an aspiring rapper from St. Louis Park got the real flow going. His insights on fame and celebrity within a contemporary high school setting brought an unexpected urgency and poignancy to the evening. (It didn’t hurt that the guy demonstrated major flow skills; he really could rap.)
Some of us also attended a guided tour of Sharon Lockhart’s photo/film exhibit, which some of us perceived as being thematically linked to the novel (kids, California, coming-of-age, the loss of innocence) and others thought of as… interesting nonetheless.
Up next month: DRACULA, supposedly one of Ms. Arbus’s favorite books.
Sounds like a really great discussion! I recently called up Richard Flood (most of you probably know him personally) to get his “curator’s bookshelf” picks for the upcoming issue of Museums New York (he’s the chief curator at the New Museum these days) and this was his response:
“My selection would be Charles Robert Maturin’s Gothic masterpiece, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) which is, in its own way, as passionate a treatise on aesthtetics as one can find in the structure of a novel. It’s always on my desk & I continue to make marginal notes in this twenty- year-old possession. I’ve also recently pulled out Edmund Burke’s essay “On the Sublime” (1757) in hope that it might provide a bit of illumination on the 21st-century nightmare.”
As for me I’m bouncing back and forth between “Lying Liars” (Did you know Al Franken’s running for Senate in Minnesota???), The Powerbroker by Robert Caro, and a book I just picked up, Boquitas Pintadas, a novel by the Argentinian author Manuel Puig.
Comment by Maggie Perez — 6/5/2006 @ 12:11 am
Hey, Maggie, thanks for your book ideas. I remember Richard making similarly esoteric reading suggestions when he was still here at the Walker. That guy seems to have read everything ever published! Its impressive. Does anyone out there think “Melmoth the Wanderer” would fly at the book club?? We are trying Dracula (1897) next month (July 6), so I guess we’ll see how people take to the 19th century literary voice.
–sarah
Comment by Sarah Peters — 6/9/2006 @ 4:01 pm