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The Artist\'s Bookshelf


 

Virgins, suicide, and the suburban apocalypse

by Roger Nieboer at 9:20 am 2006-07-27
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Here at The Artist’s Bookshelf, we’re gearing up for our next meeting (7 pm, Thursday, Aug. 3rd), during which we will discuss the wildly popular Jeffrey Eugenides novel THE VIRGIN SUICIDES. We’re reading it in conjunction with the current Cameron Jamie exhibit, which we will tour that same night at 6 pm.

As always, our discussion is certain to wander off course, and stumble upon natural tangents which will prove infinitely more intriguing than anything we might suggest. However, if you do happen to need some food for thought, or if you’ve only seen the movie (hey, that’s okay, this isn’t a class; no one will test you) or you’re just curious about what we’re all about, consider the following:

1) The novel seems to be narrated in an unspecified voice by a group of neighborhood boys, now grown, who seem to have conducted their own investigation into the grisly events of their youth.

How does this limited view add to the mystery of the story? Why did the author consciously employ this narrative technique?

2) Jeffrey Eugenides and Cameron Jamie both seem to be obsessed with American suburban life-forms and exploit this environment to comment subtlely and not-so-subtlely on our culture. What is it about the suburbs that they find so irresistible?

3) The author and the artist also seem to share a fascination with ritualized forms of violence. What is the nature of that fascination, and how does it inform and/or influence their work?

For an interesting interview with Mr. Eugenides, check out the following: http://www.powells.com/authors/eugenides.html

For more information on Mr. Jamie, including a video interview in which he describes American suburbs as an apocalypse, link to:

http://latitudes.walkerart.org/artists/index.wac?id=144

See you Thursday!

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DRACULA meets Diane Arbus

by Roger Nieboer at 4:05 pm 2006-07-07
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Last night’s meeting of The Artist’s Bookshelf brought us once again to unexpected places. After an all too brief but insightful guided tour of the current Arbus show (sprawling in scope and massive in exhibition), we hunkered down in the Art Lab, armed not with garlands of garlic and wooden stakes, but only with iced cappucinos, for a provocative examination of one of that artist’s favorite books: Dracula.

Nearly all in attendance agreed they’d enjoyed the read, though some were slowed by the period’s ornate literary stylings and incredible verbosity. Yet, we found it to be a surprisingly contemporary novel in terms of construction (the use of journals, letters and newspaper clippings) as well as its lurid obsessiveness with sexuality.

We discovered a number of thematic links between Dracula and Arbus, some of them obvious: both display an almost voyeuristic fascination with the grotesque, and some of them more obscure: both reveal hidden worlds while seemingly declaring “all is not what it seems.”

Finally, we came across a quote from the critic George Stade:

“In Dracula, for all its occasional clumsiness and systematic naivete, Stoker transformed what was merely personal or only of his own time into images of something more: of something at once monstrous, and definitively human…”

that might very well apply to the photographs of Ms. Arbus as well.

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