In the autumnal blur I didn’t send out an email last week about the release of one of my favorite episodes of Private Life so far, the tour de force reading by Holland Taylor of the tour de force essay by Renata Adler “The Perils of Pauline” originally published in the 14 August 1980 issue of The New York Review of Books!
You can listen on the NYRB site, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or, wherever you get your podcasts.
I’m also please to announce that the new episode out today is a conversation with Edwin Frank, legendary editorial director of the NYRB books. We discuss the state of “novels” via the iconoclastic work of literary criticism Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) by Leslie Fiedler, recently reissued by NYRB, and his own Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth Century Novel (2024). For direct links, again, you can listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify etc.….
Also out today, over at Johanna Fateman’s art critical playground “The Critic’s Table” for Cultured magazine, I’m part of a fun, fiery, roundtable on “Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous” along with Julia Brian-Wilson, David Riminelli and the illustrious Ms. Fateman herself. Between this and last month’s “one sentence reviews” TCT is proving itself the most innovative and vital place for art criticism today, and I’m delighted to be a part of it. Conveniently, we had the conversation at my office, i.e. Julius’ in the West Village, and as we got increasingly soused the talk went off increasingly the rails—a New York art critic tradition! Anyway, I’m excited about this format as a potentially viable model for exhibitions reviews. Let me know what you think: “Four Art Critics Walk into a bar…and Debate the Met’s Krasner-Pollock Retrospective”
FURTHERMORE: For the past few months I’ve been mailing photo-postcards to my friend, the artist Amy Trachtenberg, which have been accumulating as part of her show “Abstract Objects of Devotion” at 500 Capp St, San Francisco—David Ireland’s victorian home-cum-gesamtkunstwerk. We’re doing a talk there on Saturday, 10 October. It’s a small space and my understanding is it’s already sold out (!) but I’ll be in San Francisco for a few days on either side of it if you have any hot tips on where to go dancing or just wanna say hello…
More soon!
" . . . but for all of this fine detail, there is also an all-over mist-like grain when prints are enlarged to this size, a subconscious shiver about the images, conveying a peculiar, sad eroticism, all the sadder and more erotic for their intense pictorial intelligence . . ."
Gorgeousness. Thanks J.E.!