Destined for Greatness

 
Destined for Greatness
Passions, Dreams, and Aspirations in a College Music Town

by Michael Ramirez

photos by Mike White

Rutgers University Press

2018 

 

 
Destined for Greatness is a sociological study of rock musicians in Athens, Georgia. Ramirez interviewed 48 musicians across 22 bands about how they got started in music, what their music career has been like, how they imagine their future. His interest here isn't in the artistic content of the songs, but in the job of being a musician. The book is organized around the stages of the lifecourse (and their intersection with the stages of having a career) with a special emphasis on differences between men's and women's experiences.
 
Although all Ramirez's interviewees were based in the same town, his research is not ethnographic, and there's no thick description of the Athens music scene, of what it's like to play or listen there, of what any of this music sounds like, beyond that it's rock rather than some other genre. If you go into the book expecting that, you'll be disappointed. His study is written up much as it would be if he interviewed people from across the country, about almost any kind of work. Though just as Ramirez isn't trying to be Gary Alan Fine, he's also not trying to be Michele Lamont, so there are no elaborate selection criteria for making a half-dozen comparisons between various 'halves' of the sample. Gender is the main point of difference between the musicians. Most of the rest of what Ramirez finds is similarity across them (or differences with little systematic basis).
 
The musicians Ramirez talked to aren't nationally famous; most are probable little known outside of Athens. Their level of success varies. A few make enough from playing local shows and regional tours to treat music as their full-time job; most are musicians in addition to other work, usually service jobs, occasionally office work. To be included, the band had to rehearse and perform regularly, and to either tour or have an album. The weakest part of each chapter is actually the introduction, when Ramirez tries to link whatever he's talking about to something a nationally famous musician has said in a public statement. He's on far firmer footing writing about his actual interviewees.
 
Ramirez frames his work primarily from a lifecourse perspective, and he's especially interested in the idea of emerging adulthood - supposedly a recent stage of life that sits between the end of adolescence and the start of full adulthood, when people have mostly achieved independence from their parents, but not yet achieved a marriage, mortgage, career, and children of their own. (As I understand it from authors other than Ramirez, the idea that people commonly wed and start having kids in their late teens or very early twenties is an expectation set in the historically abnormal 1950s. We hold ourselves to an imaginary standard set at a weird time.) 
 
Like many people their age, young adult musicians tend to delay forming their own families. Unlike most, their chosen career isn't seen as a 'real' or 'grown-up' job by others, so they have added difficulties in feeling like full adults, rather than like they've 'fallen behind' their peers. I think the extended apprenticeship of grad school might produce a similar feeling, and there are probably other career trajectories with the same problem, particularly in any creative field.
 
As I mentioned, the organization of the book centers on the stages of the lifecourse. We get a chapter about how they discovered their love of music, how they learned to play an instrument, and how they started playing rock music. We get a chapter about forming their first bands and playing their first shows. We get a chapter about the challenges of making a career out of music, especially for those who have to integrate musicianship with other employment, and about how they think about their identities as musicians and as adults. We get two chapters about gender - one about men in rock music, and one about women. And we get a chapter about how musicians envision their futures, whether they'll keep performing, and how they plan to continue their careers.
 
I started reading this hoping for an ethnography of the Athens music scene, but I appreciate Ramirez's research, and his insights into how people negotiate informal careers in creative industries. There are a handful of black and white photos of the scene; I sort of assume these are from around the same time Ramirez was doing his interviews, but that they probably don't show anyone he actually spoke to.

One Week in January

 
  
One Week in January

New Paintings for an Old Diary
by Carson Ellis

Chronicle Books

2024

 

  

I think it's just a thing that happens, in your 40s, to find old diaries and letters and things. I found a bunch the last time I moved. Over the past few years, I've heard from several old friends from college, because they found something like that and thought of me. Artist Carson Ellis made a discovery of her own, a diary she kept for a week in 2001, at the beginning of the new year, starting on the first day she moved into her new apartment in Portland. 
 
One Week in January is that diary, with the addition of illustrations showing the people and sights from that time in Ellis's life. If you don't otherwise know her (she's the author and illustrator of several children's books, for example), Carson Ellis is married to Colin Meloy, the lead singer and songwriter for the Decemberists. 

 

In January 2001, Ellis and Meloy were best friends and neighbors living in tiny studio apartments on a converted warehouse. The Decemberists had self-released their first EP, were starting to play their first live shows, and Meloy was writing 'Grace Cathedral Hill', a song that would go on their first full album, Castaways & Cutouts. 

 

Ellis had a crush on Meloy, while he was going on casual dates with several other girls in their social circle. She was trying to support herself as an artist, working on a couple big paintings, and getting smaller gigs making posters and flyers and the like. Already, she was making all the promotional art the Decemberists needed.

 

In January 2001, I was halfway through my first, very lonely year of college. I didn't get the courage to tell anyone I was trans until the start of my sophomore year, that fall. Later, in my senior year, I lived in a studio apartment about the same size as the one Ellis describes, although my building had private bathrooms and only the kitchen was shared. I went to a Decemberists' concert while I was in college, so only a couple years after Ellis wrote her diary, when they were still a small enough name to play at a bar instead of a larger concert venue, (though large enough that I'd heard of them).

 

image by Carson Ellis

 

Ellis's diary is surprisingly detailed and specific, and (in her own judgment, stated in the introduction) kind of boring. He diary captures her sharing meals with friends, trying to get work as an artist, checking her email to find nothing new, dealing with the hassle of getting her phone line set up, and on the last few days of the week, going out on the town and trying to have a good time with her friends, despite everyone's lack of spending money.

 

One Week in January is the kind book I think you can probably only make and have an audience for if you're already famous. The paintings Ellis made for the book do a lot to elevate a concept that would otherwise probably only merit a zine. I say this, but I am in fact glad I read it. It reminds me of a similar time in my own life, especially my last year of college and first year couple years of grad school, a time that was emotionally fraught and painful, but also full of nights out and fumbling attempts to create an adult identity. Ellis's paintings show the kind of scenes I used to take photos of, friends I was hanging out with, views of the city I encountered during the day and wanted to hold onto. It's a good book for starting a new year.

The Nude

 

The Nude

by Michelle Lindley

Atria Books

2024 

 

  

The Nude is a literary novel about an American curator going to Greece to acquire a newly discovered statue of a nude woman for her museum. I perhaps should've given more thought to what it meant that I saw it on a list of the best book covers for the month it was released, but not on any of the lists of the best reviewed books for that month.

 

Most of The Nude is intended to be slow-burning tension and mounting internal turmoil as Dr Elizabeth Clark becomes more and more anxious from the heat, the jet lag, her migraine headaches, her pill addictions, her increasingly erotic fascination with her translator Niko and his artist wife Theo, haunting childhood memories of her dead sister; with the Greek museum's slow-walking the acquisition, protests against the expatriation of ancient art, vandals attempting to sabotage the statue to send a message; her failing marriage back home, pressure and doubt about her abilities from her museum director back home, competition from her rival over who will take over as director after this buy... It all accumulates and Elizabeth's behavior becomes more erratic until the vandals succeed in damaging the statue and Elizabeth reaches a breaking point of her own.

 

There are two problems though, and I think they're kind of related. There's not enough tension, and not enough payoff. Although things keep happening, and it seems clear that eventually Elizabeth will become overwhelmed and act out in some way, author Michelle Lindley blends the anxious with the ordinary in a way that probably makes the book more realistic, but also seems to rob it of some of its potential power. Elizabeth belongs in a thriller, the plot structure wants to be a thriller, but it's not, you know, thrilling enough.

 

In Elizabeth, Lindley has created a protagonist who belongs in transgressive fiction. She's someone who feels fundamentally unable to fit into society, who constantly strives to appear perfect and succeed at work, but who's so tortured by her own psyche that she seems always on the brink of disaster. Elizabeth is ultra-controlled, always anxious, always unhappy. She hates her body, starves herself and recoils from casual touch, but also loves her painkillers and tranquilizers, loves to binge eat as a treat, and sleeps with men in a mercenary way to advance her career. Her migraines are debilitating and make her see hallucinatory auras; she's gone hysterically blind twice in her life and fears it'll happen again, maybe even on this trip, especially since she's taking her pills too quickly and they might not last.

 

There's all the ingredients for steadily ratcheting tension, perhaps with minor outbursts building toward a major eruption. But Lindley continually undercuts the anxiety with normality. There are too many possible sources of stress, but none of them get enough attention. Nothing can really build up, because it all keeps alternating. Every unsettling thought or moment is counteracted with something prosaic. Even the suspicion that Elizabeth slept with a major donor to the Greek museum, or perhaps was assaulted by him, while she was awake and ambulatory, but not conscious or forming memories, just goes nowhere and ultimately comes to nothing, dropped and forgotten.

  

None of the stress keeps Elizabeth from keeping up appearances and going through the motions; and all the other characters seem perpetually relaxed, unbothered, unhurried. It should create more frisson! Elizabeth is not fun or normal! But she's desperate to be liked, desperate for others to think she's fun and chill, and determined that no one should suspect her of being uncool enough to care what they think of her. 

 

She acts out some, but not in ways that are truly satisfying or cathartic. The migraine imagery is too brief before the pills kick in; we never get a full phantasmagoria. She's obsessed with sexy free-spirited Theo, her first time being attracted to a woman, possibly her first time actually desiring a person and not just the social advantage she can gain from them, and Theo is interested back, so when Elizabeth eventually stops trying to please everyone else and gives in to her own desires and urges, you might expect the two women to do more than kiss a couple times. But no.

 

It's incredibly anticlimactic. And I think kind of emblematic of the way that Lindley's efforts to make her book literary and realistic prevent it from delivering the pleasure that we'd get from watching real chaos. At one point near the end, Elizabeth tells us she feels feral, feels unhinged. That is what I'd spent the whole book up to that point waiting for! But even though she says it, she doesn't really do it. Instead of fireworks, everything mostly fizzles.

All the Beauty in the World

 
All the Beauty in the World

The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

by Patrick Bringley

Simon and Schuster

2023

 

 

 

All the Beauty in the World is a memoir by a man who spent a decade, from his mid-20s to his mid-30s, as a museum guard at the Met. Bringley initially takes the job as a way to process his grief over the death of his older brother. He spends his time in the museum in an almost meditative state, allowing himself to see the art, to be emotionally moved by it, while practicing not having any conscious verbal thoughts. Eventually, without quite noticing it happen, he begins to heal, to become friends with other guards, to have opinions and preferences again. With more time, he starts wanting more than guard work can offer, and eventually leaves the museum.
 
Bringley spent his teen years idolizing his brother, and his time in college worrying after he's diagnosed with cancer, then spends a long time in the hospital, then dies. After college, Bringley worked briefly at the New Yorker, and I suspect that the same skill at writing that got him the job there helped him convert a decade of experiences and memories into this rather slim volume. 
 
Grief weighs heavily on the first half of the memoir. When Bringley finally starts to open back up again in the second half, we learn that he's been married since before his brother died, which felt like a surprising revelation to me, like a thing I'd have expected him to mention earlier.
 
We learn about Bringley's first day on the job, about medieval Christian art, about how he mentally absents himself to experience the art in a kind of flow state, about his brother's illness and death. We learn a bit of history of the Met, and about the job of being a guard, the stations they occupy, the familiar types of patrons they see. We see Bringley moving from being the new kid to being experienced and starting to mentor others. He becomes a father. And finally he starts wanting to move on, to find a job where he can more actively talk to people instead of disappearing into his role.
 
Although the book is short, I did begin to feel a bit bored by the end, around the same time Bringley was getting bored with his job. Scattered throughout are sketchy pencil drawings Bringley made of some of his favorite artworks. They add a nice touch. 
 
Reading this also reminded me of Peter Bearman's Doormen, which is an ethnography of people who work as doormen at luxury apartment buildings in New York. They are also mostly working class, mostly men, and have a job that nominally provides security to a very wealthy people in an environment that, in truth, needs relatively little protecting. Bearman's book doesn't have the borrowed prestige of the Met, but because it's based on many observations and interviews, he's also able to paint a somewhat broader portrait than Bringley. 

No One Left to Come Looking for You

 
No One Left to Come Looking for You

by Sam Lipsyte

Simon & Schuster

2022 

 

 

No One Left to Come Looking for You is a mystery set in the underground music scene in Brooklyn in the winter at the very start of the Clinton administration, in the last week of January 1993. 

 
Our narrator is Jack Shit, bassist for the struggling noise rock band the Shits, as he goes in search of his missing roommate, the Shits' lead singer the Banished Earl, and his missing bass. Jack's stint as an amateur detective starts when he gets a call from the pawn shop that the Earl was just there trying to trade Jack's bass for cash to buy heroin to feed his 'bag fever.' Jack's on the clock, because the Shits have a big show in a week. What seems like a simple task quickly becomes complicated when the Earl isn't at any of the band's usual haunts, the person most likely to've seen him is found dead, the police get involved, and Jack gets entangled with a punk femme fatale. It's like if the cast of Scott Pilgrim got trapped in the plot of Inherent Vice.

 
The mystery here isn't particularly complicated and would probably annoy whodunnit fans. For all the Jack spends his time retracing his friend's steps, going over his memories of their time together as bandmates and roommates, and even prying into some of the Earl's private business, what's really going on has almost nothing to do with the singer himself. He's just collateral damage in a feud between his father, who owns a small construction company in the Bronx, and a certain real-life real estate figure who's infamous for not paying his contractors. There's nothing else really to figure out, especially since the audience already knows what Jack refuses to accept, which is that no one with the power to hold this particular man accountable has ever been willing to do so.

 
The inclusion of Donald Trump was my least favorite part of No One Left. I am so, so fucking tired of this guy. And I know that New Yorkers have hated him since the 80s, so his inclusion isn't exactly anachronistic ... but still, I don't think if Lipsyte had really written this in the 90s that Trump would've appeared in it by name. All the bands in the book are made up. The only other real people are Thurston Moore, who gets name-checked because Sonic Youth is the most successful band making the kind of music the Shits aspire to, and Andy Warhol, who appears in Jack's mom's oft-retold anecdote about the time she almost got to have sex with a celebrity, if not for her meddling husband. If this book weren't written in 2022, I doubt Trump would've made the cut.

 
What I did like was Jack Shit's narrative voice. He's a guy who is deeply, almost religiously immersed in and committed to the Brooklyn music scene. He knows all the people, he can describe all their bands, both how they sound and their relative status within the scene, he uses all the slang. Jack desperately wants to be cool, and of course, precisely because he's such a try-hard, he isn't, and can't be. The Banished Earl, a sort-of GG Allin figure, who founded the Shits, who chose his war name based on a book he found while dumpster diving, who's the only working class boy in a band full of college kids, IS cool, with an effortless authenticity than Jack can only dream of. He's also on a trajectory to be dead by 27, unless the current misadventure ends him sooner.

 
That ironic perspective, that gap between who Jack wishes he could be and who the reader clearly sees that he actually is, is what makes him such an appealing narrator. Jack's other friends soemtimes slip up and still call him Jonathan Litpak. His band isn't popular; even within the scene it's somewhere between obscure and unwanted. Lead guitarist Cutwolf barely seems to care about his friend's disappearance; drummer Hera has already joined another, better-liked group. The big concert Jack's so worried about is the Shits opening for two other, bigger acts. The cops find him annoying. Multiple characters repeatedly lecture Jack for being a tourist, a gentrifier, a wannabe. 

 
But Jack has a determination borne of commitment, of being a true believer in Art generally and his own art in particular, and his never-say-die optimism had me routing for him to find his friend and his axe and to get to his concert in time, even if it'll probably be the Shits' last-ever show.

 
Reading about Jack trudging through the snow, ducking into cheap bars and diners, running into people he vaguely knows, trying to project the persona of who he wants to be, reminded me of winters when I was in college, when I walked and bused all over and my favorite places had all-night hours and dollar specials. It reminded me of grad school, when the overlap between the trans community and anarchist community meant that I, a total square, got to hang out with people who turned their rental houses into communes and never used their government names, and when I got really into a couple local bands and went to all their shows. But my nostalgia isn't really a reason for you to read this. I kind of think you'd be better off with Pynchon. But if you like 90s alt rock, dramatic irony, and Nick Carraway narrators, you might still give it a try

Short Life in a Strange World

 
 
Short Life in a Strange World

Birth to Death in 42 Panels

by Toby Ferris

Fourth Estate

2020

 

 

Usually I finish my first book of the year a bit faster than this, but 2025 has been off to a rough start. Car trouble, a broken dishwasher that replaces my leisure time with housework, extra tasks at work, recovering from being sick myself, worrying over a sick relative. And, I don't know if you've noticed, but the rest of the world outside my house isn't doing so well either.
 

Short Life in a Strange World is an account of author Toby Ferris's personal quest to see all the remaining paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder that exist in the world. There are 42 such paintings, and all but one are in public museums. Ferris started this project the year he turned 42, the same age that Bruegel died.
 

Short Life is a mix of things. It's structured by Ferris's trips. The prologue tells us how he got started, the epilogue takes place after he finished, and each of the dozen chapters covers one trip, where he usually visited several museums, often in more than one country. Ferris talks about the logistics of the trips, about the specific paintings he saw on each one. He talks about Bruegel's life and painting techniques; he talks about specific details and recurring themes in Bruegel's art. Ferris tells us about his own life, his brother, who is also an author, his dead father, who left behind a few sparsely completed diaries when he died. This is all blended and interwoven, and though at times the mix contains (to my mind) too much Ferris and not enough Bruegel, I generally liked the way he integrated all this material, the way a single detail in a painting would require a bit of history about the 16th century Netherlands, and relate to an incident in Bruegel's life, and remind Ferris of something his father did when he was younger.
 

 

Dulle Griet via Wikimedia

 

The Triumph of Death via Wikimedia

 

The Fall of the Rebel Angels via Wikimedia

  

 
Before reading Short Life, my most vivid images of Bruegel were probably his apocalyptic paintings, scenes where early modern warfare mingled with scenes of Christian eschatology, like Dulle Griet, The Triumph of Death, or The Fall of the Rebel Angels. These images are sometimes falsely attributed to fellow Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. But many more of Bruegel's paintings are scenes of peasant life, like Children's Games or The Wedding Dance, and they often depict winter, like The Census at Bethlehem.
 

 

Children's Games via Wikimedia

 

The Wedding Dance via Wikimedia

 

The Census at Bethlehem via Wikimedia

  

 
This is what Bruegel is best known for - his dense, detailed paintings of the communal aspects of village life, often blending realism with allegorical meaning, often including those at the margins of peasant life, the poor, beggars, people with injuries or disabilities, children.
 
Bruegel lived during a time of dramatic change, as Europe was convulsed by the effects of the Gutenberg printing press and the arrival of new goods from the Americas, as leaders sent soldiers and mercenaries to slaughter and burn in the name of the Catholic Church or the Protestant Reformation. Bruegel's legacy was also spread by his son, Pieter Brueghel the Younger, who used sketches inherited from his father to paint copies that now far outnumber the originals.
 
Ferris is a person who likes numbers, and seemingly doesn't really like other people. He hates crowds, and on most of his trips, the route from the airport to the museum was all the sightseeing he did. He made a spreadsheet to track his project, and he talks about it far, FAR too much. He calculated the total square footage of Bruegel paintings, and each chapter lists the percentage of that total he saw on that trip.
 
In the shortest chapters, Ferris visits a single museum to see only one painting, and whatever thoughts he shares sound trite. The longer chapters are better; my favorite was probably the chapter about his trip to America, where he talks about the risk of encountering bears while camping, getting angry at his brother while camping, a bear that appears in a Bruegel painting, a violent 'game' similar to bear-baiting that appears in a different painting, bears as a symbol of anger, and Bruegel's depiction of allegorical figures like the embodiment of anger. It's a chapter where Ferris's interlacing really works.

 

It wasn't particularly deliberate on my part, but I'm glad I read this in the winter, during my own Bruegel year.

The Five Lives of Hilma af Klint

 

 

The Five Lives of Hilma af Klint

by Philipp Deines

translated by Renata Stein and Ruth Bittorf

adapted from the biography by Julia Voss

David Zwirner Books

2022

 

 

I think it's fair to say that Hilma af Klint is having a moment. She was Swedish, a spiritualist, a painter, and possibly a lesbian, whose life and work spanned the late 1800s and early 1900s. She was one of the first abstract painters, predating several much better known names, and she was arguably underappreciated by other artists during her life.
 
af Klint was featured in a few European galleries in the 2010s, notably the 2013 Venice Biennale, and then she was given a solo exhibition in the Guggenheim in 2019, which had record-setting attendance. In addition to an exhibit book Paintings for the Future, there's also a recent biography by Julia Voss, a biopic called Hilma, and a novel, Sofia Lundberg's Friday Night Club.

The Five Lives of Hilma af Klint, which is what I just read, is a graphic nonfiction biography of af Klint by Philipp Deines, who is Julia Voss's husband. If I understand correctly, this is a kind of simplified companion to or adaptation of his wife's book.
 

Deines tells af Klint's life story in five chapters, hence the title, and definitely hits all the high points. Hilma af Klint lost a beloved younger sister just as she herself was becoming an adult, and felt haunted by her sister's ghostly presence for the rest of her life. She was in a spiritualist club that did seances and  automatic writing and drawing, which might be where she first developed certain abstract symbols and motifs. She studied painting and initially produced portraits and landscapes in a more-or-less traditional style. She was the very close friend, and maybe lover, of another woman artist. She got work as a medical illustrator for a veterinary college.
 
Guided by her spiritualist beliefs and visions, af Klint developed an abstract style, trying to depict spiritual concepts in like, instructional diagrams. She exhibited more often to other spiritualists than to other artists, but felt unappreciated by both. A significant portion of her works were never shown during her life, and she included a stipulation in her will that they not be shown for at least 20 years after her death.
 
Deines's art style is kind of cartoony, but I appreciate that his goal seems to have been to show as many of af Klint's potential influences as he could. We see what the af Klint family estate looked like, we see Stockholm, we see af Klint's early realist art and the paintings of her contemporaries, and of course, we see examples of her groundbreaking abstract works. Taken together, all this gives you something valuable that text alone wouldn't be able to.
 
My one complaint about this book is that all the text is typed instead of being hand-lettered. And the font is like, Calibri, and it usually seems too small for the word bubbles its filling. The mechanical and low-effort look of the text was a jarring contrast with Deines's fluid and very human linework.

The Undressed Art

 

The Undressed Art

Why We Draw

by Peter Steinhart

Knopf

2005 

 

 

The Undressed Art is both a defense and a description of the process of drawing figures from life, written at a time (the early 2000s) when Steinhart believed that traditional drawing skills were being devalued both in art schools and the art world more generally, in favor of photography, conceptual art and installations, and using computer graphics in commercial design. Steinhart argues that we should value drawing as a process and a practice, rather than for the product it produces.

 
Steinhart lays out his case in miniature in the first chapter, then works back through it over the course of the book, though in a way that's patient and conversational, rather than regimented or forceful. He starts with a discussion of children's drawings, and how so many of us stop drawing (and thus stop improving) around 9 or 10. He talks about sketching and learning to draw from observation. He talks about drawing nude models and about the experience of modeling. He discusses factors, like the rise of abstract expressionism, that have led drawing to fall out of favor in art schools. And he talks about producing finished works, and distributing them.

 
At a number of points he incorporates findings from neuroscience, to talk about what happens inside our brains when we look at a person, when we draw, when we look at a drawing. In brief, other people are the most interesting things in the world to us, their faces are the key to understanding them, reciprocal looking is the basis for connection and rapport, and drawing from life captures some fraction of those emotions and preserves them on paper.

 
'Drawing is seeing,' Steinhart says over and over again, by which he means that the act of drawing from nature, from observation, is a way of looking closely and carefully at something, and trying to recreate it. In the same way that you can't explain an idea to someone else unless you understand it yourself, you can't draw something well unless you've really seen it. He argues that this is an innate human faculty, like language or music. Most of the time, we don't draw to make art. We draw to draw; we draw to see.

 
Steinhart views drawing as perhaps the most humble form of artistry. He doesn't try to aggrandize it, only to ennoble it. He's writing for an audience of fellow enthusiastic amateurs. Even among people who make art professionally, it's a minority who can make a living, even fewer who'll be famous. So his defense of drawing doesn't rest on the idea that it's a pathway to fame. Only that it's worth doing, worth practicing, worth trying to do well, even if your only audience is just yourself. If drawing is a profoundly human activity, then we draw to feel connected with our common humanity, and the great number of other drawers throughout history, whose works are not seen, whose names are not known.

 
Drawing from live nude models has always been controversial, sometimes scandalous. There are always people who think it's improper, others who find it unnecessary. And there are always people who believe in it so much that they'll meet regularly and pay fees to hire models to draw. In cities with enough artists, some people can make a living as models, but it's physically strenuous work, and precarious. I modeled once for an art class in grad school - because I was curious, because I wanted to feel a connection to the art world, because I wanted the students to learn to draw a transgender body. But the opportunity's never come up again. Steinhart says there's always a moment of desire and embarrassment when the model disrobes, before the drawing starts. But the work of observation and recreation crowds out any sexual meaning and replaces it with discipline, and art.

 

There are illustrations throughout the book, drawings of life models by some of the artists Steinhart talks to. Among other things, these drawings help contextualize what he's talking about when he describes the differences between sketching and finished work, or how artistic poses differ from the way we're used to seeing nudity in pornography or advertising.

 
Steinhart's observations about kids' art matches what Georges-Henri Luquet says in Children's Drawings, and though he talks to far fewer art models than sociologist Sarah Phillips, but he makes some of the same points she does in her book Modeling Life. Between reading this and watching so much Portrait Artist of the Year lately, I feel a bit tempted to try to start up drawing again, which I haven't done seriously since high school. It does take a lot of time to do well. There's also a certain irony to Steinhart's motivation, from my perspective. Figurative art and the skill of drawing may be out of favor at our most elite art schools, but I read so many comics, so many books with illustrations, and it's all drawing (whether on paper or a digital tablet) that produces the type of art I see and seek out most.

The Plain Janes

 
 
The Plain Janes

by Cecil Castellucci

art by Jim Rugg

Minx Comics

2007

 

 

The Plain Janes is a young-adult graphic novel aimed, I think, at kids growing up in the aftermath of 9/11, in the pervasive fear and parental over-protection of that time.

Jane is a high school freshman whose family has just moved to the suburbs in the aftermath of a bombing in the city. I say I think this is a 9/11 analogy because it's an American comic released in the 2000s, but the details are vague enough that you could see parallels in any number of terror attacks. Jane was close to the site of the bombing, and while she was in the hospital, she started a one-sided relationship with a John Doe coma patient who was next to her when she woke up. Throughout the book, Jane's internal monologue takes the forms of letters she writes to this unconscious young man.

In the city, Jane had long blonde hair and popular friends. But after the attack, she gave herself a pixie cut and dyed it black, and at her new school, she rejects the advances of a popular girl who's much like her former self, and tries to befriend three outcast girls who sit apart, together, and eat their lunches in silence. They're all named Jane. Several attempts to befriend them fail, including trying out for Science Club, the school play, and the soccer team in the hope of winning over nerd Jane, theater Jane, and jock Jane.

Then Jane (art Jane?) gets an idea to do a guerilla public art installation on an empty construction lot. Rather than trying to join the others, she recruits them, getting them interested and excited in her new project. The secretly form PLAIN, People Loving Art in Neighborhoods, and take on more projects, all whimsical public displays. The police overreact, calling these "art attacks" and declaring a public curfew. Jane's traumatized mom also panics and grows more possessive.

Jane gets a crush on a cute guy who is also a loner and outsider at school. The other Janes all find themselves becoming more confident. And PLAIN, despite its general secrecy, gets at least one surprise recruit. An interesting turning point comes when PLAIN starts advertising participatory events, for example, asking everyone to sing at a specific date and time. The town's teens, bristling under all the new restrictions and collective punishments the school and police have been handing down, are happy to join in. What started as a playful solo art show becomes a collective resistance to unjust authority.

I think, somehow, this year I've been enjoying a multimedia subgenre of coming-of-age stories about girls forming or joining clubs. This and Loveless and This is How We Fly and Six Angry Girls, but also the movie Whip It, and anime like Laid Back Camp and Do It Yourself and Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken. Mostly by accident, I've found a series of stories that would've been excellent advice to my younger self, (and that still resonate with me today as I increasingly try to return to the world after the Covid lockdown) - go out, find friends, do things together.

I hope there are comparable stories addressing boys and young men, because if anything, they are even more lost and lonely than their femme and enby peers, and the hateful rightwing radicalization offered by the online Manosphere should not be the only voice showing them a path to camaraderie, companionship, and a cure for being alone.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

 
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
by Gabrielle Zevin
Knopf
2022

 

 

I was recommended Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by a couple friends, as well as seeing it appear on a number of last year's 'best of' lists, and I'm glad that I was able to get ahold of a copy. This was a very well-written book.

 
We primarily follow Sadie and Sam, two childhood friends who used to play video games together in the 80s, who meet up again in college in the mid-90s, and begin a long creative partnership as video game designers. We learn in the first sentence that they will be successful, and eventually famous, and at a number of points, Zevin narrates an event from a future perspective, such as showing how Sam or Sadie will describe it in an interview years laters.

 
Sadie and Sam have an intense relationship. It's non-sexual, based on their shared love of playing and making video games, and the idea that they bring out each other's best creativity. Their friendship is also difficult. In between being friends as kids and in college, they have a 6-year falling out, and we learn early on from glimpses into the future that they will have another 6ish-year separation as adults.

 
Sam's college roommate Marx is the third main character, and Sadie's instructor-turned-boyfriend Dov is also important, especially during the early years. Marx is a wonderful human; Dov is awful, and his bad, power-imbalanced relationship with Sadie is realistic and frustrating. Almost everything that happens is realistic. Sam's foot, never fully healed from a childhood injury, keeps getting worse in ways that are accurate to that sort of wound. 

 
And their careers develop in ways that seem grounded in reality, rather than wish fulfillment. We see each character respond in authentic-feeling way to the situations they encounter, and the choices they're forced to make. They are successful, but it's a climb, not an escalator, and at various points it's much easier for one of them or the other. I think we see a bit more of Sadie's perspective than Sam's, but he's a pretty close second.

 
One of my favorite things about Zevin's writing is that the structure of each section mirrors whatever game they're designing at the time. This is most obvious for 'Both Sides,' which takes places in two alternating worlds, when each chapter is literally split into a Sam section and a Sadie section; and in the 'Pioneers' section, which is narrated from inside the 'Oregon Trail meets Animal Crossing' online game, with headings like posts on the Western town's message board instead of numbered chapters. But it's also true of the section where they design their first game, 'Ichigo,' about a child journeys out and returns home, and the section about Sadie's multiple viewpoint Shakespearean murder mystery. And arguably the book, taken as a whole, mirrors the structure of the 'Ichigo,' in addition to the first section.

 
Once we reach the event that causes the pair's second falling-out, the book is pretty sad from thst point on, although we do see them reconnect before the end. 

 
I think I tend to introspect a lot when I read literary fiction, and this one got me looking inward more than most. I usually prefer to look at myself like viewing an eclipse through dark glasses, protected by the multiple layers of distancing and metaphor that scifi provides, rather than staring directly into the sun via lit fic. But I'm glad I read this one; I give it my strong recommendation.

Nutcracker Nation

 
 
Nutcracker Nation

How an Old World Ballet Became a Christmas Tradition in the New World

by Jennifer Fisher

Yale University Press

2003

 

 

In Nutcracker Nation, Fisher looks at the history of The Nutcracker in America and the meaning it holds for both dancers and audiences.

 
In America, The Nutcracker is an annual Christmas tradition, the single biggest money-maker for dance companies, the one ballet that nearly every dance student has performed, the ballet that people are most likely to have attended as an audience member, and the show that critics and 'serious' ballet fans and performers feel the most ambivalent about. So it's popular, loaded with extra meaning as a holiday tradition and childhood rite of passage, and as a result, a bit maligned by the people most interested in ballet for its aesthetic qualities and association with status.

 
Fisher starts with a history of The Nutcracker. It was first produced in Russia in the 1890s, but had little commercial or critical success there. An animated version was included in Disney's Fantasia. In the postwar years, it began to become an annual tradition in the US, helped along by several tv specials in the late 1950s. It acts as an 'invented tradition' - a relatively recent ritual that has the appearance of being much older, in part because it uses symbols that represent contemporary ideas about the past.

 
Fisher then discusses both the 'traditional' Nutcracker and some of the many variations meant to modernize it, or address gender issues, or make it more appealing to aesthetes, or make it more relatable, either to popular audiences or specific ethnic communities. She also explores the ethnic stereotypes that are usually incorporated into certain dances, and some of the ways ballet companies have tried to change those. This section draws on her observations attending a really wide variety of performances.

 
Fisher also conducted ethnographic research, attending rehearsals and performances for one amateur suburban dance company and one major urban one. She interviewed dancers, the stage crews, volunteers, and audience members.

 
The Nutcracker is always a community production. In addition to the roles for professionals, there are parts for children and teen ballet students, and sometimes extras of all ages to fill out certain crowd scenes. There is no one canonical choreography. Although certain arrangements are more or less handed down from key early productions, each dance troupe is essentially forced to interpret it in their own way. And many enjoy the chance to do something specific and local.

 
For ballet students, The Nutcracker is an opportunity to see themselves advancing in both age and skill. Many adult women have memories of ballet lessons and dancing The Nutcracker when they were girls, and it's often something from their own childhood that mothers can share with daughters.

 
Despite their artistic ambivalence, dance companies like the revenue the show brings in, often like the ritual aspect as well, and sometimes like the chance to do something lower stakes, fun, and universally beloved. And while most dance students move on to other careers, essentially every professional ballet dancer was once a mouse, a snowflake, a flower.

Sirens and Muses

 
 
Sirens and Muses
by Antonia Angress

Ballantine

2022

 

 

Sirens and Muses is a recent literary novel set initially at a prestigious New England art school, and later amidst the art world in NYC. This one caught my eye at the book store, and I read it quite quickly; I felt invested in the characters, and wanted to keep reading more than I wanted anything that might've distracted me.

 
Angress follows four viewpoint characters in close third-person. We follow them for a semester at art school in part 1, and then return to them after they've all moved to New York in part 2.

 
In art school, Louisa is a working-class scholarship student trying to find her artistic voice, and crushing on her roommate Karina. Karina is the daughter of wealthy parents, already on the cusp of commercial success, crushing back on Louisa, and dating bad boy Preston. Preston is an insufferable bro, trying to make a name for himself as a provocateur (or less generously, as a troll,) and semi feuding with visiting professor Robert. Robert is a has-been, a former political artist who's been coasting on his past glory for years, and who once briefly had an affair with Karina's mom.

 
In New York, Louisa gets a job as a studio assistant, and struggles to find the time and energy to continue her own art. Karina and Preston score a high-profile joint gallery opening - Karina rises to the occasion while Preston increasingly flounders. Robert is reduced to tutoring rich children, but also finally learns to stop feeling sorry for himself. All the characters end the book with just a hint of resolution, of either finding the next step in their life, or at least being positioned to make a decision rather than being forced into one.

 
Structurally, Louisa is the first among equals. She gets the first and last chapters, and is probably the most sympathetic character. Karina is at the center of the web of connections between the characters, and depending on your social class, probably either Louisa or Karina will seem like the most relatable character. 

 
Preston is very enjoyable to hate, although to her credit, Angress finds empathy for his actions without condoning them, and he's never reduced to a caricature. Robert's links to the others are tenuous at first and nearly non-existent later, but his presence keeps the book from 'just' telling the story of a love triangle, and he provides a kind of balance by being near the end of a journey that all the others are just starting.

 
Each of the young characters wonders about what kind of artist they want to be, worries about their romantic relationships, fears becoming like their parents, aspires to professional greatness, struggles with young-adult milestones like getting jobs and apartments, deals with troubles with family back home, each in their own unique way. All this happens against the backdrop of Occupy Wall Street, and a period of tumult within the art world about the roles of money and politics in art.

 
As I said, I really liked this one. Louisa and Karina's relationship nearly glows with emotional intensity that reminds me of Portrait of a Lady on Fire (as does Karina's decision to attempt to prioritize her more conventional heterosexual relationship over that bond.) Preston and Robert's involvement in politics and agitprop are more reminiscent of Chip Kidd's The Cheese Monkeys. Preston in particular reminds me of the most annoying contestant of Bravo's old Work of Art show.

 
I like that we combine the campus novel and the post-college novel into a single package, and that we get to clearly see the almost-contemporary setting through eyes with just enough hindsight. We see the earliest effects of Bitcoin and AI art, and the kind of behavior by powerful men that will soon lead to MeToo.

 
Among Agress's strengths, she trusts her readers to notice connections between the characters without her explicitly pointing them out. To Louisa, Preston's blog is just 'that blog that's so popular on campus.' Preston sees Karina's sketches of Louisa as just 'a bunch of drawings of some girl.' A lesser author would go on to provide more detail to make sure you don't miss it, but Angress stops there, because that's what the characters would see. She doesn't lavish extra attention onto something the characters wouldn't notice just to ensure that her audience will.

 
I don't feel comfortable predicting that a book will get a lot of attention, but this one deserves to.

Inside the Critics' Circle

 
 
Inside the Critics' Circle

Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times

by Phillipa Chong

Princeton University Press

2021

 

 

Inside the Critics' Circle is part Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology series, like Banding Together and American Zoo, which I enjoyed earlier this year. Chong conducted interviews with newspaper book reviewers, most of whom are working authors who write reviews on a freelance basis. One purpose of her book is to understand the feeling of crisis that surrounds the practice of journalistic book reviewing, which is separate from longform literary criticism and academic writing about literature.

 
Chong argues that book reviewing is characterized by several forms of uncertainty, and that reviewers' sense of vulnerability, and the field's sense of crisis, is largely a reaction to all this uncertainty. First is 'epistemic uncertainty,' which means that reviewers do not have an objective standard they can judge books against, and can't be sure in advance if other people will feel similarly about the books they review. One thing Chong observes is that because book review section editors can't know if books are good or not before they assign them to reviewers, they pick 'important' books rather than 'good' books to be reviewed. Editors also try to make a 'good match' between the book and the reviewer, by picking someone who either is similar to the author they're reviewing, or writes about similar topics or in similar ways.

Reviewers also operate under 'social uncertainty,' because they don't know how other people will react to them based on what they wrote. This is especially due to the 'role-switch reward structure' where authors who will want their own books reviewed in the future are the ones writing reviews. In general, this gives them an incentive to 'play nice,' both because they know how it feels to get a negative review, and because they have reason to fear professional retribution, such as getting revenge reviewed or snubbed for a literary award when the shoe is on the other foot. Reviewers are more willing to 'punch up' against famous authors.

 
Reviewers also experience 'institutional uncertainty,' meaning that the very rules of the game they're playing are unclear. Since most reviewers work full-time at other literary activities and only review occasionally, they have no sense of themselves as 'real critics.' They feel threatened from below by amateur reader-reviewers (like me!) and from above by academic literary criticism. In defending the value of what they do against what they perceive as a widespread question 'do we even need book reviews anymore?,' the reviewers defend their work as both being more accessible than academic criticism, and as being of higher quality and addressing the artistic quality of the work rather than just giving it a thumbs up or star-rating.

 
I have to tell you, I liked this one a lot, both because I enjoy reading book reviews on the New York Times, Lit Hub, and Tor, and because I've been writing so many of them this year. Obviously I'm immune to the 'switch-role reward structure' here - I'm not a working author myself, and also, no one who writes these books will probably ever see my reviews. But I do care about writing these things well. And actually, in the amateur rpg world I sometimes hang out in online, there are the same issues of reviews often being written by people who are themselves writing things for others to review.

The Book Tour

 
 
The Book Tour
by Andi Watson
Top Shelf Productions

2020

 

 

I assumed The Book Tour was a graphic memoir, but it turns out to be fiction, a true graphic novel. Sea of Tranquility also had a fictional book tour. Despite the indignities of travel and any sort of meeting with the public, the actual hardest part seems to be being separated from one's family.

 
The fictional author touring in The Book Tour is GH Fretwell, an absolutely luckless fellow. His tour is one day behind another author who's written an genuine blockbuster hit. Meanwhile no one attends Fretwell's signings or buys his book.

 
Also, someone's been kidnapping women, including the owner of the first bookstore on his tour, and the police seem to suspect him...

 
We alternate between hotel check-ins, disappointing calls home, empty signings, and run-ins with suspicious police as Fretwell's situation devolves to become more and more humiliating.

 
Watson's art is simple and sketch-like, with cartoony faces and realistic backgrounds of the various bookstores and cobblestoned European cities. The repetition with variations captures the nightmarish quality of the tour, and there's a good balance between humor and rising dread as his circumstances get worse and worse at each stop, building to an appropriately anticlimactic conclusion.

Leaving the Atocha Station

 
Leaving the Atocha Station

by Ben Lerner

Granta

2012

 

 

Leaving the Atocha Station really did not do much for me. It's a short literary novel about an aspiring poet. The narrator is a whiny White American guy spending his first year out of undergrad in Spain on a fellowship. 

 
The narrator lies about himself compulsively. He tries to act enigmatic in the hope that people will fill in his gaps with their imaginations, and that their image of him will be better than the truth. He writes a little poetry, takes a lot of drugs, and spends most of his time trying to impress two different Spanish women. He does want to get in their pants, but I think it's even more important to him that they think he's a cool, mysterious genius.

 
He worries that he's a fraud, and honestly, it seems like he is.

 
I think one appeal of the books for writers is maybe recognizing themselves or their colleagues when they were just out of college and felt like imposters. Another appeal probably is the ideas about poetry that the author, Ben Lerner, gives the guy. He thinks a lot about how poetry fails to emotionally affect him and how what does emotionally affect him is his lack of response to this art that other people seem affected by. Yes, there's a parallel between what he says about poetry and how he tries to portray himself as interesting via absences and blank spaces he hopes others will fill with their own meanings.

 
The narrator's trip to Spain coincides with the 2004 Madrid transit bombing, which affects the country somewhat like the way 9/11 affected the US.

 
The book's two saving graces are that Lerner doesn't defend the narrator and shows that he's aware of the guy's self-delusions, so at least I get to feel my contempt without encountering defensiveness, and also it's pretty short.

 
I've seen a lot of praise for this one, and like I said, it might appeal to professional writers more than it appealed to me, but I still think it's over-praised. It also has a really cool looking cover that somehow led me to expect something different than what I got.

Banding Together

 
 

Banding Together

How Communities Create Genres in Popular Music

by Jennifer Lena

Princeton University Press

2012

 

 

Banding Together is a sociological study of the development of musical genres. Lena looked at the histories of 60 different musical styles and develops a theory by finding commonalities in the ways they changed over time.

 
The most common trajectory for a (successful) musical style is to start as a small Avant-Garde of people who innovate musically, to grow into a local Scene with multiple groups and a dedicated fanbase, succeed as a nationally popular Industry-based style, and eventually become the subject of a Traditionalist revival.

 
Lena also observes that the size of the genre and its available resources (performers, audience members, performance and recording space, money, etc) also affect the cultural and aesthetic debates within the genre. Every avant-garde is against the current establishment, every industry-based style is part of that establishment. Scenes argue about what the style ought to try to sound like, traditionalists argue about what sound is most authentic.

 
Although Lena's data only comes from music history, it's easy to imagine that other forms of cultural production might adopt similar forms and follow similar trajectories.