{"id":69068,"date":"2020-06-02T01:09:05","date_gmt":"2020-06-02T05:09:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/?p=69068"},"modified":"2020-06-13T03:25:11","modified_gmt":"2020-06-13T07:25:11","slug":"i-arrogantly-recommend-by-tom-bowden-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/2020\/06\/02\/i-arrogantly-recommend-by-tom-bowden-3\/","title":{"rendered":"I arrogantly recommend&#8230; by Tom Bowden"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/saobernardo_2048x2048.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-thumbnail wp-image-69071\" src=\"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/saobernardo_2048x2048-93x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"93\" height=\"150\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/saobernardo_2048x2048-93x150.jpg 93w, https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/saobernardo_2048x2048-1024x1647.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/saobernardo_2048x2048-768x1236.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/saobernardo_2048x2048-600x965.jpg 600w, https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/saobernardo_2048x2048-955x1536.jpg 955w, https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/saobernardo_2048x2048.jpg 1273w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 93px) 100vw, 93px\" \/><\/a><em><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/books\/sao-bernardo\/9781681373850?aid=1028\">S\u00e3o Bernardo<\/a><\/strong><\/em><br \/>\nby <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Graciliano_Ramos\">Graciliano Ramos<\/a> (<a href=\"http:\/\/: https:\/\/www.nyrb.com\/collections\/padma-viswanathan\">Padma Viswanathan<\/a>) translator,<br \/>\nNYRB Classics<\/p>\n<p>Consider the Western. Both North and South American literatures have it: Novels of settlements, displacement and murder, (threatened) lack of law and order, rugged individualism matched to rougher fists\u2014all at the mercy of amoral and unforgiving natural forces. Human values are thrown in stark relief; life is fought for, not a right; and people are beaten, or worse, for less than nuances of opinion.<\/p>\n<p>Enter Paulo Hon\u00f3rio, a former field hand, now in control of the estate he used to work for, S\u00e3o Bernardo, in northern Brazil. (Here \u201cestate\u201d = desolate land, feebly watered, but hundreds of acres of it.) Although <em>S\u00e3o Bernardo<\/em> was published in 1934, Hon\u00f3rio is a type of man we\u2019re already too painfully familiar with: He knows little, envies and debases the educated, does not tolerate differences of opinion, has a hair-triggered temper and violent fits; sees no reason to spend money on social services or friends or (eventually) his wife, has almost zero empathy for others, and sees himself as a perpetual victim. But his brutality is slightly moderated by the \u201calmost\u201d in \u201calmost zero empathy.\u201d Hon\u00f3rio has his Rosebud, and he has regrets. But he knows himself well enough to realize that, if he had to do it all over again, he would change nothing. Thus, although<em> S\u00e3o Bernardo<\/em> is intended as ironic comedy, <em>right now<\/em> the comedy is too bitter for laughter.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"La Grande Evasion 2017 - interview de Patrick Chamoiseau\" width=\"635\" height=\"357\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/rIYmaUDxLbk?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><br \/>\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=lhULvm3TNl8<\/p>\n<p><em><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/books\/french-guiana-memory-traces-of-the-penal-colony\/9780819579300?aid=1028\">French Guiana: Memory Traces of the Penal Colony<\/a> <\/strong><\/em><a href=\"http:\/\/: https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Patrick_Chamoiseau\">Patrick Chamoiseau<\/a> (Matt Reeck) and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cantorfineart.com\/rh-artist-bio\">Rodolphe Hammadi<\/a> (photographs)<br \/>\nWesleyan University Press<\/p>\n<p>Devil\u2019s Island, in French Guiana, was a notorious prison camp where the French government sent convicts from its various colonies around the world. The convicts\u2019 forced labor was used to help expand French imperialism into Guiana, for \u201croads, mines, and in fields of private companies\u201d (Wikipedia).<\/p>\n<p>Patrick Chamoiseau is a Martinican novelist who, in collaboration with photographer Rodolphe Hammadi, writes on the \u201cmemory traces\u201d of colonist history, specifically the emotional effect on Guinean culture by the penal colony\u2019s ruins (the memory traces): the chains embedded in stone, etchings and drawing in cells, solitary confinement cells, \u201cdisciplinary\u201d cells, freemen\u2019s quarters, and cemeteries, whose material presence marks and embodies horrors of colonial history.<\/p>\n<p>This is not a history that tries to quantify and sift among the data, but that tries to sense the historical, ambient spirit within the traces, compelled to remain there as witness to abuse in the name of progress. Hammadi\u2019s photographs succeed in conveying the sense of place and give form to Chamoiseau\u2019s words.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Finding Vivian Maier Official US Theatrical Trailer #1 (2013) - Photography Documentary HD\" width=\"635\" height=\"357\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/er8-Vq__cRE?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/viv.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-large wp-image-69069\" src=\"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/viv-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"635\" height=\"635\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/viv-1024x1024.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/viv-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/viv-768x768.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/viv-600x600.jpg 600w, https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/viv.jpg 1050w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 635px) 100vw, 635px\" \/><\/a><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/books\/vivian-maier-a-photographer-s-life-and-afterlife\/9780226599236?aid=1028\">Vivian Maier: A Photographer\u2019s Life and Afterlife<\/a><\/strong><\/em><br \/>\nby Pamela Bannos<br \/>\nUniversity of Chicago Press<\/p>\n<p><em><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/books\/vivian\/9781910695616?aid=1028\">Vivian<\/a><\/strong><\/em><br \/>\nby Christina Hessleholt (Paul Russell Garrett, translator)<br \/>\nFitzcarraldo Editions<\/p>\n<p>I looked forward to Pamela Bannos\u2019 biography of Vivian Maier. John Maloof\u2019s documentary, <em>Finding Vivian Maier<\/em>, sketched the broad outlines of Maier\u2019s adult life: The lank and aloof Maier decides early on to become a nanny to children of wealthy families while pursuing her photography habit, often while taking the children for walks. However, she is occasionally possessed of a cruel and angry streak that seems to have lead to her changing positions from one family to another, until she became too eccentric around the children to be either safe or reliable.<\/p>\n<p>Forced to retire and living alone, impoverished, she becomes unable to pay the rent on the storage units she keeps her photographs in. Her properties are seized, the photographs go up for sale, and we\u2019re back to the beginning. <em>Who was this person?<\/em> Clearly, there had to be more than Maloof was able to dig up.<\/p>\n<p><em>Vivian Maier: A Photographer\u2019s Life and Afterlife<\/em> provides an abundance of details unavailable in Maloof\u2019s documentary, and extends beyond it to her years of retirement. Yet it\u2019s the abundance of details that made this biography, for me, almost unreadable. This is the sort of writing that wants full value for all research done, even if 90% of it is trivial or irrelevant.<\/p>\n<p>We find out, for instance, about distant cousins who lead fabulous lives or meet fabulous people, or friends of friends who lead fabulous lives or meet fabulous people: all as an attempt to insert Maier into a milieu of talented, influential doyens\u2014so that Maier\u2019s greatness comes with an implied seal of inevitability: partially inherited, partially environmental\u2014What\u2019s a girl gonna do? But once the six degrees of Kevin Bacon are peeled off, the remaining reality is\u2014as amply detailed by Bannos\u2014Maier grew up desperately impoverished in a desperately dysfunctional family. Raising other people\u2019s children and taking pictures on the side sounds like a sober, if unambitious, way out of her predicament.<\/p>\n<p>During her decades as a nanny, Maier silently amassed a collection of 150,000 images, most of which she never developed. Based on the evidence of the four or five books of Maier\u2019s photographs I own, her eye and sense of composition almost never err, nor do the great range of humanity and empathy her subjects convey. That may be the edited, best version of Maier\u2019s talent (with more books of previously undeveloped images presumably to come), but it\u2019s still a formidable talent, and the fact that the talent went unshared and unknown still amazes: Who <em>was<\/em> this person?<\/p>\n<p>Bannos clearly did a lot of legwork for this book, and it may be the only biography of Maier available for a while. (The undeveloped rolls of film may reveal more about her yet.) Bannos isn\u2019t a prose stylist \u2014the sentences plod along like cement shoes. But plodding sentences are one thing; I just wish her editor had been more ruthless in demanding concision, especially when the prose isn\u2019t making the life interesting.<\/p>\n<p>While Christina Hesselholdt succeeds in re-telling Vivian Maier\u2019s life story in a way far more engaging than Bannos\u2019s biography, Hesselholdt hasn\u2019t succeeded in creating an intimate inner life for Maier.<\/p>\n<p>The problem for Hesselholdt and Bannos may be that, apart from Maier\u2019s self-portraits, Maier the thinking artist remains as mysteriously aloof as ever\u2014no diaries, no correspondence\u2014only the memories of her by the families she worked for. Hesselholdt\u2019s Maier assiduously avoids discussing her inner life, as well might have Maier herself. But the result is a biography told in the first person.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Christina Hesselholdt Interview: Small Dramas of Existence\" width=\"635\" height=\"357\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/5sVfLEL1xhk?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"ICP Lecture Series 2014: Justine Kurland\" width=\"635\" height=\"357\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/m6YPqeNMZYE?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><em><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/books\/justine-kurland-girl-pictures\/9781597114745?aid=1028\">Girl Pictures<\/a><\/strong><\/em><br \/>\nJustine Kurland<br \/>\nAperture<\/p>\n<p>Photographer <a href=\"https:\/\/www.miandn.com\/exhibitions\/justine-kurland3?view=slider\">Justine Kurland<\/a> staged from 1997-2002 a series of photographs showing small groups of teenage girls vagabonding and hoboing across the country as runaways leading rough-and-tumble lives. The results are a portfolio of color photographs as classically composed as any Renaissance painting, and a beguiling sense of remembering what it was like when every experience was new and independence meant danger and success required friendship.<\/p>\n<p>Girlhood Across America Captured by One Photography; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2018\/05\/21\/t-magazine\/justine-kurland-girl-pictures.html\">a gallery of images; New York Times<\/a><\/p>\n<p>The Lawless Energy of Teenage Girls, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/culture\/photo-booth\/justine-kurland-captures-the-lawless-energy-of-teen-age-girls\">&#8211;The New Yorker<\/a><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Cornelius Cardew &amp; The Scratch Orchestra - The Great Learning (Paragraph 1)\" width=\"635\" height=\"357\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/2k1m1ITcljM?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><em><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/books\/stockhausen-serves-imperialism-and-other-articles\/9781732098695?aid=1028\">Stockhausen Serves Imperialism<\/a><\/strong><\/em><br \/>\nby <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Cornelius_Cardew\">Cornelius Cardew<\/a><br \/>\nPrimary Information<\/p>\n<p>Essays on composers and composition by the British composer Cornelius Cardew, circa 1974, are more interesting for their tone of anguish, righteous anger, and drive to moral good than as slices of Marxist dogma, which both impels and drags down his discussions of what compositions \u201cought\u201d to do, and which composers have \u201cfailed\u201d to do so. John Cage is chastised for introducing into music bourgeois notions of anarchy, and <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Karlheinz_Stockhausen\">Karl Heinz Stockhausen<\/a> for bourgeois notions of mysticism.<\/p>\n<p>Being a Communist in good standing, Cardew both quotes Mao on <a href=\"http:\/\/: https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Yan%27an_Forum\">\u201ccorrect\u201d ideas<\/a> regarding music and denounces his own previous works. (Such Maoist self-denunciations later became absorbed by capitalist corporations and academia, which renamed them \u201cperformance reviews.\u201d) But with ideological rigidity comes blindness to see in oneself the faults one intolerantly points out in others. The assumptions Cardew makes\u2014on any given point\u2014go unexamined, and answers are known before (or without) being proven.<\/p>\n<p>There is no joy in the music\u2014intellectually or emotionally, via performing, composing, or listening\u2014just the relentless shame at having not having connected with proletariat audiences, who tend to be put off by all the discussions that must occur before, during, and after each musical performance to assure it has been \u201cproperly\u201d contextualized and understood, etc. As Brian Eno reportedly said at the end of a (non-Marxist) music conference a couple of decades ago, \u201cSo many theories; so little music.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"[FIN DE DROITS] Stockhausen : Refrain op. 11, pour trois instrumentistes\" width=\"635\" height=\"357\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/KYvJKmaXLf8?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>S&atilde;o Bernardo by Graciliano Ramos (Padma Viswanathan) translator, NYRB Classics Consider the Western. Both North and South American literatures have it: Novels of settlements, displacement and murder, (threatened) lack of law and order, rugged individualism matched to rougher fists&mdash;all at the mercy of amoral and unforgiving natural forces. Human values are thrown in stark relief; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":69069,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[502,13,65],"tags":[466,461],"class_list":["post-69068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-avant-garde","category-photography","category-world-lit","tag-i-arrogantly-recommend","tag-tom-bowden"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69068"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69068\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}