Hats Off!
Hats off to Timothy Schaffert, who ran another great (downtown) omaha lit fest this weekend! I loved the setting--the cooler-than-cool KANEKO in the Old Market. Cody Lumpkin, a UNL grad student and compelling poet, did a beautiful job moderating the panel I was on with writers Amelia Montes, Belinda Acosta (about whom you've heard so much of late), Jeff Koterba, and publicist Lauren Cerand. We talked about options for meaningful and effective self-promotion in the age of Twitter to a huge, lovely, and gracious audience. (Jamie, please come by and see me! Yes, you! Yoga lady, drop me a line!)
Hats off to Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, who've donated hundreds of copies of their terrific new book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (reviewed in today's NYTBR, featured in a recent NYTimes Magazine), so that they could get their important message of investment and uplift out into the community. Many thanks to Jacqueline Scoones, associate director of KANEKO, where Kristof and WuDunn will be speaking this fall, who sent me home with a box of 12 brand-new hardcover copies to distribute to colleagues here at UNL.
Hats off to Amelia Montes for her great reading today at the Bennett Martin Public Library here in downtown Lincoln! She read from the introduction, letters, notes, and text of her brand-new Penguin Classics edition of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton's 1872 novel Who Would Have Thought It?. If you're in the mood for a witty Civil War satire by one of the first Latina writers published in North America (the style reminds me a lot of Dickens), you should check it out. Amelia followed the Ruiz de Burton reading with an essay of her own, "Queen for a Day," that had us all moved and laughing. Luckily, it will be published this December in An Angle of Vision: Women Writers on their Poor and Working Class Roots.
Regarding Peter Schjeldahl's piece in the recent New Yorker, however, I feel much as the narrator does at the opening of Moby Dick: "that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off." Here's why.
The concept of the destructive and reductive potential of the male gaze has been around in the culture for, oh, 30 years or so now, since John Berger and Laura Mulvey, so it's an unpleasant surprise to read not really much at all about the new Vermeer show at the Met in Schjeldahl's "Dutch Touch" but rather about the fact that one of Vermeer's milkmaid subjects is not quite to Schjeldahl's personal taste. She is "husky," he tells us--and then, two columns later, back on the topic, he makes sure to specify that she is "sturdy." Just in case we're unsure, he tells us that her "mass," "monumentally composed," "would stand [him] off, in an attitude of reverence, even if she were naked."
Um, thank you? (Oh, wait: Schjeldahl reads Proust, too, he wants you to know, and himself has a Proustian sensibility.)
This is what passes for art criticism in The New Yorker? Psssht. For shame.
Hats off to Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, who've donated hundreds of copies of their terrific new book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (reviewed in today's NYTBR, featured in a recent NYTimes Magazine), so that they could get their important message of investment and uplift out into the community. Many thanks to Jacqueline Scoones, associate director of KANEKO, where Kristof and WuDunn will be speaking this fall, who sent me home with a box of 12 brand-new hardcover copies to distribute to colleagues here at UNL.
Hats off to Amelia Montes for her great reading today at the Bennett Martin Public Library here in downtown Lincoln! She read from the introduction, letters, notes, and text of her brand-new Penguin Classics edition of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton's 1872 novel Who Would Have Thought It?. If you're in the mood for a witty Civil War satire by one of the first Latina writers published in North America (the style reminds me a lot of Dickens), you should check it out. Amelia followed the Ruiz de Burton reading with an essay of her own, "Queen for a Day," that had us all moved and laughing. Luckily, it will be published this December in An Angle of Vision: Women Writers on their Poor and Working Class Roots.
Regarding Peter Schjeldahl's piece in the recent New Yorker, however, I feel much as the narrator does at the opening of Moby Dick: "that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off." Here's why.The concept of the destructive and reductive potential of the male gaze has been around in the culture for, oh, 30 years or so now, since John Berger and Laura Mulvey, so it's an unpleasant surprise to read not really much at all about the new Vermeer show at the Met in Schjeldahl's "Dutch Touch" but rather about the fact that one of Vermeer's milkmaid subjects is not quite to Schjeldahl's personal taste. She is "husky," he tells us--and then, two columns later, back on the topic, he makes sure to specify that she is "sturdy." Just in case we're unsure, he tells us that her "mass," "monumentally composed," "would stand [him] off, in an attitude of reverence, even if she were naked."
Um, thank you? (Oh, wait: Schjeldahl reads Proust, too, he wants you to know, and himself has a Proustian sensibility.)
This is what passes for art criticism in The New Yorker? Psssht. For shame.
Jezebella said:
Ah, yes, you know what is important in art criticism? That I know exactly what gives the art critic a chub. It might be a lovely painting by one of the most important artists in the history of Western art, but, come on guys, IS SHE FUCKABLE?
Christ on a cracker. It's like the last forty years never happened.
September 23, 2009 3:32 PM