But while his own fiction often showcased his mastery of postmodern pyrotechnics — a cold but glittering arsenal of irony, self-consciousness and clever narrative high jinks — he was also capable of creating profoundly human flesh-and-blood characters with three-dimensional emotional lives. In a kind of aesthetic manifesto, he once wrote that irony and ridicule had become “agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture” and mourned the loss of engagement with deep moral issues that animated the work of the great 19th-century novelists.

Excerpt from “Exuberant Riffs on a Land Run Amok,” New York Times, September 14, 2008.

At this point I’ve done little more than skim Vanderbilt’s book, but I intend to read more.

I did like how this little excerpt from Slate‘s book review commented so aptly on the Vector Portraits by Andrew Bush – our cars as “the face we show to the world,” particularly when considering them alongside the “urban masks” of Walker Evans’ subway riders.

An excerpt from Vincent Bugliosi’s Four Days in November.

So Benny told Jim the story of why Marcia was mad at him. Since becoming employed full-time again, he had grown aware of a phenomena that seemed to happen only at work, or at least happen with more frequency at work than other places in life, and the phenomenon was this: one person would say something and the person listening would have positively no idea what he or she meant, but not wanting to appear rude, or worse, stupid, or alternatively, not caring to waste any more time, it was easier just to nod or laugh along than it was to pause and inquire what that person really meant. This was especially true with hallway banter and kitchen talk and other types of inconsequential daily exchanges. People were indifferent to what was said, or they were preoccupied by other things, or they had long ago concluded that what passed for speech during the course of a work day was mostly the babble of idiots. “So I thought, would it make a difference, really,” said Benny, “would it honestly make a difference if instead of replying the way I would normally, I answered everybody with quotes from The Godfather?”

An excerpt from Then We Came to the End, Joshua Ferris.

My final day at the [Disneyland] magic shop, I stood behind the counter where I had pitched Svengali decks and the Incredible Shrinking Die, and I felt an emotional contradiction: nostalgia for the present. Somehow, even though I had stopped working only minutes earlier, my future fondness for the store was clear, and I experienced a sadness like that of looking at a photo of an old, favorite pooch. It was dusk by the time I left the shop, and I was redirected by a security guard who explained that a photographer was taking a picture and would I please use the side exit. I did, and saw a small, thin woman with hacked brown hair aim her large-format camera directly at the dramatically lit castle, where white swans floated in the moat underneath the functioning drawbridge. Almost forty years later, when I was in my early fifties, I purchased that photo as a collectible, and it still hangs in my house. The photographer, it turned out, was Diane Arbus. I try to square the photo’s breathtakingly romantic image with the rest of her extreme subject matter, and I assume she saw this facsimile of a castle as though it were a kitsch roadside statue of Paul Bunyan. Or perhaps she saw it as I did: beautiful.

[Steve Martin, Born Standing Up]

I am well familiar with this notion of nostalgia for the present, and was struck by this sweet, frank passage in Steve Martin’s memoir. It is particularly interesting to take this phrase, maybe strip it from Martin’s context, and pair it with the Arbus photograph. Disneyland is so much about a nostalgia for simple storybook ideals, but not for those in actual storybooks — instead, for the contemporary “Disneyfied” retellings. Even if eliminating a cynical view of the appropriating and commercialized Disney universe, it clearly often relies on the cultivation of a fictionalized nostalgia.

So I guess it is very striking and, well, heartbreakingly nostalgic to see that Martin is speaking of a very different twist on the concept; a Disneyland that is real and buried into his own childhood experiences, in three dimensions. I get a little uncomfortable with the very near schmaltziness of the last line there, but I do not doubt his sincerity nor disagree with his sentiment.

[Photograph by Diane Arbus via Native Intelligence]

I remember Michigan fondly as the place I go
to be in Michigan. The right hand of America
waving from maps or the left
pressing into clay a mold to take home
from kindergarten to Mother. I lived in Michigan
forty-three years. The state bird
is a chained factory gate. The state flower
is Lake Superior, which sounds egotistical
though it is merely cold and deep as truth.
A Midwesterner can use the word “truth,”
can sincerely use the word “sincere.”
In truth the Midwest is not mid or west.
When I go back to Michigan I drive through Ohio.
There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life
goes corn corn corn mosque, I wave at Islam,
which we’re not getting along with
on account of the Towers as I pass.
Then Ohio goes corn corn corn
billboard, goodbye, Islam. You never forget
how to be from Michigan when you’re from Michigan.
It’s like riding a bike of ice and fly fishing.
The Upper Peninsula is a spare state
in case Michigan goes flat. I live now
in Virginia, which has no backup plan
but is named the same as my mother,
I live in my mother again, which is creepy
but so is what the skin under my chin is doing,
suddenly there’s a pouch like marsupials
are needed. The state joy is spring.
“Osiris, we beseech thee, rise and give us baseball”
is how we might sound were we Egyptian in April,
when February hasn’t ended. February
is thirteen months long in Michigan.
We are a people who by February
want to kill the sky for being so gray
and angry at us. “What did we do?”
is the state motto. There’s a day in May
when we’re all tumblers, gymnastics
is everywhere, and daffodils are asked
by young men to be their wives. When a man elopes
with a daffodil, you know where he’s from.
In this way I have given you a primer.
Let us all be from somewhere.
Let us tell each other everything we can.

My daughter has lived overseas for a number
of years now. She married into royalty, and they
won’t let her communicate with any of her family or
friends. She lives on birdseed and a few sips
of water. She dreams of me constantly. Her husband,
the Prince, whips her when he catches her dreaming.
Fierce guard dogs won’t let her out of their sight.
I hired a detective, but he was killed trying to
rescue her. I have written hundreds of letters
to the State Department. They have written back
saying that they are aware of the situation. I
never saw her dance. I was always at some
convention. I never saw her sing. I was always
working late. I called her My Princess, to make
up for my shortcomings, and she never forgave me.
Birdseed was her middle name.

Tessa Hadley, from the story Friendly Fire
The New Yorker, February 4, 2008

My wife and I adopted our baby girl, Carmen Laura, from Bogotá, Colombia. While the courts processed her paperwork, we spent two months in Bogotá waiting to take Carmen home. Carmen’s birthmother gave her a book filled with letters, pictures and poems. “I hope that the hardness of the world will not hurt your sensitivity,” she wrote, “When I think about you I hope that your life is full of beautiful things.” With those words as a mission statement, I began making my own book for Carmen. In photographing the city of her birth, I hope I’ve described some of the beauty in this hard place.
                                                                    — Alec Soth

This book is Alec Soth’s Dog Days Bogotá (also viewable on his website). It is a portrait of a city the viewer probably doesn’t know much about — a collection of portraits of the people he has met, as well as quirky and dingy interiors, happenings on the city streets, framed drawings and photographs on residential walls, an image of a chicken sitting on a chair, and — most compelling to me — recurring photographs of the dogs of Bogotá.

The project and its aims come together in these dog portraits. That Soth has succeeded at creating compelling, “serious” dog photography is impressive indeed. Shooting an adorable dog portrait is like snapping a breathtaking sunset; it can so easily come off as just another postcard — Wegman cutsiness is eagerly waiting in the wings.

These scruffy, lonesome dogs (almost all seem to be quietly roaming the streets, lying in the dirt) are depicted with dignity. They have suffered and endured mistreatment, perhaps, but are nonetheless proud.

I’ve never been particularly moved by “travel” photography — without a certain contextualization (such characters, a point of view, a setting), travel images can come off as just another National Geographic special.

Soth’s simple introduction, citing a very personal and almost noble motivation, combined with a wise and understated collection of images, communicates the “hard” lives of these strangers, without expecting pity. The subjects don’t need pity so much as they deserve respect. This is probably the goal of every National Geographic photographer (and I realize that is probably unfair to use “National Geographic” as an epithet) to describe “some of the beauty in this hard place” but I think it is notable to see this aim executed with the influence of the contemporary art photographer.

The straightforward, carefully composed, large-format color image, combined with a very personal project documenting a far off place, is an exciting meeting of intents (one could even term them “genres”). The cold documentarian quality of large-format falls away with this subject matter, particularly when we know the story of what these dogs and people and homes have to do with each other, and with the photographer.

“Your questions are all good ones. I think you will require time and space to discover the answers that will fit your needs best. When I was much younger I was talking with a good friend, an artist of some reputation. I was worrying about career moves, gallery relationships in NYC, getting recognized by the right folks at the right time. He calmly looked at me and asked if I was in a hurry? Right then and there I realized that there was no rush for me. That I was better off when I took the time that was needed to do the things I was able. That does not transfer into procrastination, but it does allow for time to be an ally.

I pose the same question to you. Are you in a hurry?

Doing what you are now doing is a perfect start to an organic discovery of what is important to you. You sample this and that and support your habit with whatever money you can make that will not interfere with the sampling. Perhaps, in some cases, the sampling will be the job and the salary. When you are through sampling you will know. You will know that from all of the fragments of interests and tid-bits of knowledge/skills you have gleaned from the past experiences you have built that something in that speaks most clearly to what must come next.

Graduate school is best utilized when you are certain that “this” [whatever this is] is what you need to do and “here” [wherever here is] is where you need to do that. It should not, in my opinion, be the place you discover what you require.

Now this path is a bit unconventional. It drives most parents nuts and sometimes makes the participant look like the mis-fit, the n’er do well, the rambler. But collections are often the most exciting when they begin from the unknown and evolve into masterful treatises on that which had previously been overlooked. Sampling.

…

A former student of mine had a plan that worked well for him. He worked for six months a year. Made as much money as he could. Lived cheap and saved a lot. Then he worked in his studio for six months. It gave each time its opportunity to be just what it was.

This path takes patience and focus. It is not a rambler’s dream of evolution. The sampling is always pushing against what you want from the work. You are ahead of the game here because you are smart enough about your work to know when it delivers what you require. You have learned that this past six months. That strength is crucial and will sustain you. Do not not let anybody ever stain that skill or confidence.”

Murphy’s site UNphotographable collects periodic journal entries documenting that familiar, often frustrating, decisive moment in which a camera is not at hand to snare a striking visual event.  Murphy’s commentary on his project reminds us that being a photographer isn’t just a label for an occupation or for one’s visual media preference — it often defines the manner one veiws with and interacts with the world.

– Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler.

“…I’ll keep you posted on all this reunion-related nonsense. Hey, I know everybody’s coming back to take stock of their lives. You know what I say, leave your livestock alone.” — Minnie Driver as Debi, Gross Pointe Blank.

“You get out there, and the stands are full and everybody’s cheerin’. It’s like everybody in the world come to see you. And inside of that there’s the players, they’re yakkin’ it up. The pitcher throws and you look for that pill… suddenly there’s nothing else in the ballpark but you and it. Sometimes, when you feel right, there’s a groove there, and the bat just eases into it and meets that ball. When the bat meets that ball and you feel that ball just give, you know it’s going to go a long way. Damn, if you don’t feel like you’re going to live forever.”

– John Cusack as Buck Weaver, Eight Men Out.

“It’s as if her characters were rubbernecking while cruising past the pileups of their own obsessions.”
– Michael Miller, “A Review of Varieties of Disturbance,” The Believer

“The usherette’s reverie, if any (she may be dozing), centers our involvement. She has seen the film. Wanting to be elsewhere, she is elsewhere. Where are we? I think we are in Plato’s Cave, perceiving layered dispositions of reality—those of the movie, the audience, the usherette, the theatre, and the civilization that must have theatres. I comprehend the picture’s economy when I imagine something that is necessarily absent from it: noise, the clamor of a soundtrack that fills the space and assaults the usherette’s unwilling ears. Life goes on? No, it roars on, indifferent to all who have temporary shares in it. We exist in the middle of a rush so constant that it resembles stillness.” — Peter Schjeldahl, “Ordinary People,” The New Yorker, May 21, 2007