Month: December 2016

5 Literary Loves from 2016

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Helen Garner – Everywhere I Look

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There’s no going wrong with anything Helen Garner’s written, from the fiction (The Children’s Bach, Cosmo Cosmolino and The Spare Room are favorites of mine, but that’s not to sell Monkey Grip and other things short) to the journalism and nonfiction. Everywhere I Look compiles Garner’s writing for a variety of publications, and the selections are impeccable. If “Dreams of Her Real Self” doesn’t at least put a lump in your throat, you’re probably dead inside, and “The Insults of Age” is a frank and funny depiction of not the clinical hardships of getting older but the cultural ones. Everything here is smart and mordant and undeniably alive. Put it at the top of your 2017 list if you didn’t get to it this year.

Dorothy Whipple – Someone at a Distance

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So few books hit the sweet spot Dorothy Whipple found in Someone at a Distance. It first appeared in 1953, and Persephone Books in the UK reissued it as a classic in 2008. It was originally considered popular fiction, but the characterization is complex, and the tone is never less than perfectly appropriate as Whipple takes us through a range of emotional registers. The plot is deceptively dramatic after what feels like a low key start. Probably the most purely pleasurable bit of reading I did all year, like an even more absorbing version of Elizabeth Jenkins’s novel The Tortoise and the Hare.

Berlin Metropolis 1918-1933

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Neue Galerie in New York is one of the greatest places on earth (as is Galerie St. Etienne). This volume accompanied an exhibition there that closed in January, but it seems to me an exceptional example of a book that goes beyond just the work on offer to take the measure of the art and culture that marked a time and place. It covers everything from fine art to architecture to fashion to film, and the essays are absolutely worthy of the visuals they accompany. My initial interest was the visual art (“Art and Anti-Art in Berlin Around 1920″ doesn’t disappoint), but Dorothy Price’s, “The New Woman in 1920s Berlin,” and Sharon Jordan’s “The Rhythm of Our Time is Jazz: Popular Entertainment during the Weimar Republic” are remarkable as well. Jürgen Müller reinterprets Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. It’s just a glorious book.

James Beard – Love and Kisses and a Halo of Truffles: Letters to Helen Evans Brown

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James Beard’s actual personality feels a bit lost now, culturally. He’s more a name – namesake of the James Beard Foundation, Awards, etc – than a distinct individual. These letters were all written to Helen Evans Brown between 1952 and 1964. Brown was a formidable figure on West Coast cuisine in the 1950s and 60s. They feel a little bit in the MFK Fisher vein, with Beard doing a lot to establish a broader, more adventurous food culture in the US, but he’s funnier than Fisher, and ultimately the mix of humor, self-deprecation and genuine confidence on display make him irresistible. Take this for example, on a piece he’d contributed to for Life magazine in 1955:

The Life steak article is awful. They took a bit from everyone, put it all together and called it steak. The picture of Mr. Quincey Jones broiling steaks over hot flames is enough to make you woops.

I’m not part of the “2016 was the worst year ever” brigade, if only for the fact that prior to November, a lot of memorable, good things happened. For that matter, a handful have since. Still, in grim, uncertain moments, a book like this one is a welcome relief.

Matthew Desmond – Evicted

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Desmond manages the remarkable balancing act of applying both empathy and realism in looking at the lives of several Milwaukee residents whose housing situations range from fluid to frighteningly tenuous. He doesn’t tack on a neat and tidy ending, and this isn’t the kind of work that provides easily digestible lessons or policy proposals, though it might prompt a few of the latter, with any luck. If the James Beard book was a trip into a beautiful segment of the past, Evicted, I’m afraid, is a gimlet eyed look ahead to the coming years for a lot of Americans.

  • John McIntyre

What I’m Reading: Artist and Writer Marion Coutts

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It’s a little startling to realize that The Iceberg was Marion Coutts’s first book. She’d already built a years-long reputation as a visual artist prior to taking it on. A look at her work makes it apparent why. It’s precise and allusive, as distinct as a firm voice speaking above the din and saying just what must be said, without over-explaining. This is an intelligent artist who assumes a knowing audience. The results are a pleasure to behold, they’re meditative without being too detached. Not surprisingly, she often hits these same marks in her writing.   

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Marion Coutts, Twenty Six Things, 2008, Super 16 film still

But Coutts’s first book wasn’t, say, an insider’s memoir of the art world or a thinly fictionalized account of those circles. Instead, she took a life-altering event, her husband Tom Lubbock’s brain tumor diagnosis, and wrote through the experience in meticulous, forthright detail. The Iceberg and Lubbock’s own account of events, Until Further Notice, I Am Alive, make a remarkable pair, a testament to their deeply shared experience, not merely through Lubbock’s illness but over the course of their relationship and marriage. Fittingly, Prophet, a piece Coutts finished in 2001, serves as the cover image for Lubbock’s book.

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Marion Coutts, Prophet, 2001

“In a marriage of near ten years and a friendship of longer,” Coutts writes, “all visual experience is for two…Soon, sometime soon I will have no one to tell this to. What will experience be then?” Indeed, Lubbock was an artist in his own right and art critic for the Independent. They can’t have always arrived at the exact same conclusions about what they’d seen, but what a touchstone to lose, a second set of eyes so discerning, and so close as to probably feel like an extension of the self. I didn’t ask her what the answer to that question is now, in part because she’s no doubt still resolving it for herself at times. What she has done, however, is continue writing – “I am working on new writing. I have quite a lot of words though I don’t know what they pertain to and look forward to clarification, from where I know not,” she tells me, and preparing an exhibition of her work, her first since 2008. It’s composed of installation, photographs and drawings. Look for it at Tintype in London, early March 2017.

The questions I did ask Marion Coutts? What she’s reading and why she’s reading it. And though she claims she doesn’t actually read much, if this list is any indication, she has well-defined tastes but stays open to the serendipity of being  unexpectedly handed a great book:

I did my first ever writing residency this summer at Cove Park in Scotland. Two weeks around solstice. I highly recommend the experience. Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts was the book I read on my first day there and I read it in one sitting – another first. I would never have time to do that at home. It left me very energized. I thought it a brilliant, unusual work and why it is feels so unusual is interesting as it speaks to and about happiness, family and the many inventive ways that belonging can manifest and these are all things that humans have a ravenous interest in. The Argonauts also brings up all sorts of ethical questions around writing about those near you – which I have done – nearness and its opposite being one of the motors of The Iceberg. And because I am very curious about form – I haven’t yet found my way to future content – I am looking to ways that writers – and artists – choose to structure the things in their head. I loved the tempo and sound of The Argonauts, the individual paragraphs, big and small, making the running, the way the parts connect to the whole and what is the whole allowed to be anyway? Interleaving and splicing, the book compresses, digresses, expands and explodes yet holds the reader very, very close all the while.

I am a visual artist. I have written one book which must serve for the time being as my single model so I feel the lack of habits as a writer. This may be a problem or may not be, but I’d quite like to acquire some habits because they can sometimes get you started. (I know they can do the opposite thing also.) Instead of books I want to read there is a whole stack of shows I want to see at the moment. James Ensor at The Royal Academy, Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970’s at The Photographers Gallery, Rauschenberg at Tate. Unlike books, exhibitions come to the end of their run and then you’ve missed them. This happens all too often. What it means to write visually is something that occupies me.

I don’t actually read very much. And the books I read come to me by diverse routes. Through a friend, I was introduced to Sven Lindqvist’s Desert Divers. I found him a terrific voice and guide. (The book is translated by Joan Tate.) He talks about the European explorers and romantic visionaries who projected themselves onto the Sahara and wrote it up for folk back home. Lindqvist went there too, and wrote what he found in bare prose: dreams, dust and the deep residual violence of the colonial project.

Through another friend, I read Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding which describes a weekend in the life of a girl on the cusp of change. I wish I had come across it long ago. It is a book a younger me would have loved. And recently I read Tolstoy’s Happy Ever After which compresses a life into eighty-four pages. In his story of Masha and her marriage, he gets into a teenage girl’s head and is also outside it, looking from afar as she ages, like through a lens. Terrifyingly elegant. And elegantly terrifying.

After The Iceberg came out, publishers started sending me books on dying and grieving. I had one more come through my door this week. I was surprised at first but it seemed to go with the territory. I have to say I don’t read them. I did make an exception for Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers which wasn’t posted through my door, I bought it in a shop – again slightly unusual for me. It is very compact. Porter thinks around loss through three tight-knit views; a bereaved husband, his sons and a volatile fiction called Crow, who inserts himself into the aftermath like an unwanted houseguest. His writing inside the heads of the young boys is great.

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Boy Looks at Rock on Top of Another Rock (2016) digital print on Canson

And a big find of the last months, apart from The Argonauts, is the poet Denise Riley’s Say Something Back which uses words to say difficult and surprising things in a way that I can’t get enough of.

Marion Coutts