What To Read This Summer - FBC! On Art Strike

Dear Adored Readers,

Sorry there were no post last week, I've been frantically trying to write as much as I could before cleaning up my place from floor to ceiling and packing up . Because tomorrow I'm leaving you for about 10 days!
Yours truly is leaving for a magical place where there's no cell phone reception, no TV, no Internet, the only radio station you can catch broadcasts classical music and the weather forecast, and there's no newspaper to be found. On the other hand you can be asked perforce to join a hillbilly and his two retarded sons shop at Walmart, there's a Christian cult nearby whose creed involves restoring Corvairs (I kid you not, they all drive Corvairs), and at the local county fair you can witness elephant lesbian porn. The perfect place to write a novel, I'm telling you. That way, is there's some other gruesome beheading happening somewhere, at least I won't know about it. That was a horrible week, folks, please avoid boarding buses in Canada and vacationing on Greek islands, OK? I feel suddenly safer in gun-crazy America.

Meanwhile I've thought about you, my dear beloved readership, what are you going to do without my fascinating prose to read? Why, you're going to take a break from art! Come to think of it, it's becoming ridiculous how art has become your one and only social life, no?
[That is, I'll allow you one last dash to the SMMOA see the amazing Puppet Show, as it's closing this Saturday, hurry, hurry! Bruce Nauman, Mike Kelley with a rare piece, FBC! fave Michael Smith with Doug Skinner, William Kentridge, Dennis Oppenheim, ...awesome!]
So what else beside art can you do this Summer?
The movies? I'm sure by now you've all seen Dark Knight (I haven't, 2h.30 is way too long for my French self to be locked up in a dark room with a few hundred strangers, I'll wait for the DVD release). Long walks on the beach holding hands? You've spent too much time on match.com, I fear.
With the recession, the only thing you can enjoy is a bit of a staycation with a few good books. But it's summer, so nothing too taxing.

So I've turned to my Distinguished Literary Correspondent (Hi Mike! Thanks again!) and asked his advice about a few summer reads selected only for you, my devoted readers. Isn't life beautiful? My DLC gave me his picks at a very short notice and on the top of his head (and he's gigantically tall, so the top of his head is above the K2, I'm telling ya). I'm sure if I had given him more time he would have sent me a super long list. Because this guy, he has read all the books there are to be read, and then some more.
So Mike sent me 3 choices, and I happen to have read none of them, so it's pretty cool (I'm really intrigued by his last pick, actually). I'm listing them in the order he sent, but I don't think there is a hierarchy. I'm leaving his comments too, as well as mine: I've been unable so far to read a book by someone named Tartt, but if Mike says so, I think I'll try.

So, FBC!'s Distinguished Literary Correspondent Summer Reading Picks:

1. Secret History - Donna Tartt (definitely the best trashy novel of the past quarter century I think)
2. Smiley's People- John Le Carre (really, anything in the Smiley series)
3. Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson


And now FBC!'s own summer favorites:

1. Marcel Proust, A La Recherche du Temps Perdu (in French, please!). Because, you need *an entire summer* to read the whole thing, no less. And because there's everything in La Recherche: social climbing, desperate love, jealousy, literary and artistic ambitions, socialites, betrayal, obsession, depravity, some really cool parodies (at the very end there's one of the Goncourt Brothers' Journal, to die for), food, war, gay sex (well, the sex scenes and the depravity in La Recherche are pretty lame by today's standards I must say), lost illusions, and the triumph of mediocrity. Pretty trashy too, come to think of it.
2. Jean-Baptiste Botul, Métaphysique du mou. Botul was a French philosopher of oral tradition whose notes have been recently collected in a few small books, most recently Immanuel Kant's Sexual Life. He's also the inventor of wheeled luggage. His life and writings are a little bit of a hoax, and a cross between the OuLiPo tradition and whatever you want to invent about Maurice Blanchot. But whoever writes his stuff, it's hilariously funny, and short.
3. Bartlett's Rotget's Thesaurus. Because I'm reading it this summer, and it's fascinating if you have deep nerdy tendencies. I'm deriving a strong pleasure from the way words are categorized in that thing. I'm sure if you bring this at the beach you'll be able to describe the various hunks and sex bombs in a much more sophisticated way!


With that you're armed for a summer of debauchery, margaritas, sunburn and mosquito bites that should give you ample rest before the November election. Speaking of which, you guys have been awfully bad at finding art VPs for the candidates in our last polls. One last day to vote, come on!

PS: I know, the picture is irrelevant, but I'm lazy, ditto for linking the books. I'm sure you're smart enough to look them up on amazon.com yourself.

Thanksgiving In August!

Thanksgiving In August!

It is almost the end of the month and I realize I haven’t yet posted the second installment of my Thanksgiving In [Insert Month Here]™ series.
Not only this, but it spares me the pain of doing a bit of art world writing and I want to procrastinate on the upcoming Grand Tour post. I’m waiting for my lunch with Rita G., the best curator in this town, to hear what she has to say about it.

Meanwhile, I’ve decided to devote this Thanksgiving In August to my Distinguished Literary Correspondent, which is only fair since I’ve written about my other non-art reader* (Hi Annie!) in a previous post. Plus these two are friends and I don’t want to bring in strife, envy and jealousy between them. We’re bringing you fair and balanced views here at FBC! if slightly uncopy-edited and wholly unresearched.

So, are you asking, what would differentiate my one and only Distinguished Literary Correspondent (DLC) from my other and nonetheless also distinguished correspondents? I have tons of correspondents, what with moving countries and all that. Off course they are ALL very distinguished. We’re Frenchy, and chic! Nothing short of distinguished will do. Some of my correspondents, like DLC, I never see since many are so far away, but we can also live in the same city and never get to see each other.
For example, Jessie Bi that famed and fine chronicler of comics and graphic novels, I see once a year, if I’m lucky. When we were living in Paris at the same time we would almost never see each other but we would email weekly and sometimes daily. Jessie Bi is very distinguished in his own right too and I’ll probably devote a Thanksgiving in [Insert Month Here]™ to him one of these days, but DLC has just emailed me to say he’s reading the blog so there you are. Welcome Mike!

Anyway, let’s stop digressing and try to get back to the point. A DLC is, you have just gathered, someone you almost never see but correspond with. This particular DLC earned his name because he recommended to my attention the Courtier and Heretic book, a rather curious effort about the correspondence and only encounter between Spinoza and Leibniz. Now dear readers don’t jump to conclusions here, neither DLC nor I have much in common with the two philosophers. I think. Maybe DLC will beg to differ but I’m sure he has better things to do, like urgently go on vacation for example.
DLC and I met only once and thereafter started a correspondence that has proved rather enjoyable for me. Since Leibniz and Spinoza (should we call them Leibnoza or Spiniz , in keeping with US tabloids customs?I'll poll you on this, dear readers) met only once too and had some erratic correspondence, the comparison was apt but stops here.

What makes DLC my only literary DC? Well, for one thing he is a non-art person. All my other correspondents are in the art world, and aside from friends/family stuff we usually indulge in art stuff gossip, mostly. With DLC we mostly exchange emails about books, and he always has a very thoughtful opinion about what he has to offer.
He always goes beyond “the book is about […], I (dis)/liked it because” and offers interesting comparisons between things I would have never thought of. He’s also very good at explaining the structure of the narrative, the overall construction of the book, what he thinks of the characters, etc. Something I never done with anyone so it was a big eye-opener for me. I’m not super gregarious as a rule, so book clubs are not exactly for me, they remind me too much of middle school and the mandatory reads we had to do. But one-on-one emails suit me perfectly, and I realized one DLC is exactly what I needed to keep on reading.

Need another proof of DLC very literary-ness? He reads so many books (like, what? 5 a day? The FDA should hire him for their PR!) he probably never sleeps, and he’s not snobbish in his choices. I mean, any academic bore can go all uptight and recommend the highbrow stuff, but Mike has a very diverse and eclectic array of tastes. Plus, he teaches me new words, like “foist” the other day. For some reason he is also my one and only US friend who is attuned to cultural differences and he takes pains to explain some of the Pop culture references he’s making, so his jokes are not only extremely funny but very sweet.

The main reason of this Thanksgiving In August is that through his advice and opinion I have regained my taste for reading I was in danger of losing, by lack of cultural references (and too much work). So, many, many thanks Mike , it is truly a great gift, much, much appreciated.
BTW, when are you starting your literary blog? I’m sure my by now almost 10 readers would migrate to your URL!

Aside from this DLC is a professional writer, and judging from his emails he must be a truly good one. Granted, I’m a dumb foreigner and it’s his job/ craft to write all the time . But I admire someone who has such a fine vocabulary he can very concisely and elegantly convey what he has to say in about 3 sentences, when I need something like 6,000 + words for one idea. I want the same thing he’s having for breakfast! I also forgot to mention it, because unless he emails you (or starts his blog or do anything else I’ll publicize here) you won’t see it, but Mike a fabulous sense of humor.

DLC has also forwarded me in he past a few links about the art world he found baffling (not this one but in the same spirit). Was I ashamed of our idiot cousins! I felt terrible. I mean, I am traumatized myself when I stumble onto this kind of devious crap. That kind of stuff inflicted on innocent bystanders makes you realize how far we’ve gone from the innocent era when Chelsea what just some indifferent name to give to your dog -not that I will name my cat Institutional Critique myself.
I hope this won’t steer DLC away from art definitively, because there are some truly great people here (especially you, my 7 art-people readers) and in the end, there’s always the art. Some of it may even be very good!
Anyway, my thanks to DLC for all his help, including the non-literary kind. For all my other readers, I’ll keep you posted on what he does publish, broadcast, his Booker Prize, Pulitzer, Nobel Prize and a few Emmys thrown in for good measure, if he’s OK with that. In the meantime let’s hope he’s going to take a well-deserved vacation. He may even come back with fabulous tales of unexpected sights.



*2 non-art readers, that is, if I excuse my siblings from the non-art readership. Since they had to suffer me for decades, I figure the art stuff has sufficiently rubbed off on them that I have to exclude them from that pool. There will be hell to pay at Christmas, let me tell you!