Weegee, the New York tabloid photographer, who documented street life in the “naked city” in the 1930s and 40s, had an eye for the asymmetrical. His principle subject was public mayhem: the crime and criminals that enacted their traumatic narratives in public.
Albert Mobilio
Albert Mobilio is a poet, critic, and an editor at Hyperallergic. He is the recipient of an Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant, MacDowell Fellowship, Whiting Award, and the National Book Critics Circle award for reviewing. His work has appeared in Harper’s, Black Clock, Bomb, Cabinet, Hambone, Open City, and Tin House. Books of poetry include Bendable Siege, The Geographics, Me with Animal Towering, Touch Wood, and most recently Same Faces. Games and Stunts, a book of fiction, was published in 2017 by Black Square Editions. He is an associate professor of literary studies at the New School’s Eugene Lang College and a former editor at Bookforum.
Posted inBooks
Some Sentences to Relax With
As I sometimes — or quite a lot of the time — find myself disposed to avoid the demands of work and household, my favorite dodge is perusing much read books for those “juicy” parts that I’ve doted over for years. Samuel Beckett’s Murphy is just the right book for this kind of time wasting: It’s a novel about an indolent, hapless, emotionally paralyzed man. He’s a loner, out of step with the world, torn between desire for his mistress and the wish to sink further in a self-involved fantasy world. The eponymous un-hero Murphy (he really can’t be called an anti-hero as his chief aspiration — a catatonic state achieved by rocking in his rocking chair — barely qualifies as anti-anything) is securely held by what Blake called “mind forg’d manacles.”
Posted inArt
Mirror, Mirror
What do we see when we look at art? What do we want to see? Answers come readily and are various: we seek beauty; enlightenment; pleasure; escape from ourselves; insight into those same selves.
