magiadoreal

Arbus in 1971, the year of her suicide.   Credit Eva Rubinstein DIANE ARBUS Portrait of a Photographer By Arthur Lubow Illustrated. 734 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $35. The poet Paul Valéry wrote that anyone preparing to venture into the interior of the psyche had better go armed. It’s a warning to be heeded by the biographer, especially when his subject is as difficult as the photographer Diane Arbus (1923-71). Arthur Lubow, a journalist, confronted a figure heaped in myth, an artist-­suicide whose work cannot be disentangled from the tragedy of her ­depression and death. In his 700-page investigation, he labored in the moonlight penumbra of those other fatal female luminaries: Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Francesca Woodman. Lubow never mentions this “tradition,” but it forms the climate of critical and, above all, popular perception of the work. Likewise the sensational appeal of the subject matter: the sideshow characters, sword swallowers, dwarv...

“An otherwise unreachable experience of reality.”   Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times THE LONELY CITY Adventures in the Art of Being Alone By Olivia Laing Illustrated. 315 pp. Picador. $26. The Book of Common Prayer offers an intercession for “our families, friends and neighbors, and for those who are alone.” We tend to put the alone in this separate category, but for Olivia Laing, “the essential unknowability of others” means that to be human is to be lonesome, at least sometimes. So why don’t we talk about it more openly? “What’s so shameful,” she asks, about “having failed to achieve satisfaction, about experiencing unhappiness?” This daring and seductive book — ostensibly about four artists, but actually about the universal struggle to be known — raises sophisticated questions about the experience of loneliness, a state that in a crowded city provides an “uneasy combination of separation and exposure.” “The Lonely City,” like Laing’s previous books — “The Trip t...

Leonard Gardner. Foto: Alissa Valles By Matt Bell Novels have two primary ­sources: writers’ life experiences or their art experiences — ­although I suppose more religious writers might also make room for divine inspiration. While it’s popular in publicity to focus on the life experience that informs a book, a writer’s art experiences are just as responsible for how a story emerges from the imagination and eventually appears on the page. As Cormac McCarthy once said: “The ugly fact is books are made out of books. The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.” Influential books come and go, but one notable survivor is Denis Johnson’s linked story collection, “Jesus’ Son,” published in 1992 and adored by two decades’ worth of writers, including myself, ever since I first read it as a 20-year-old college dropout. As I started writing, “Jesus’ Son” was an outsize influence, easily overwhelming all others, and might have ruined me as a writer if the right oth...

Each week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of books. This week, Adam Kirsch and James Parker discuss whether art should aspire to timelessness. By Adam Kirsch If you Google “Homer” and “bees,” you get images of Homer Simpson, not quotations from the “Iliad.” Photo Adam Kirsch   Credit Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson Continue reading the main story In the early Renaissance, a writer who longed for immortality knew that his best bet was to write in Latin. After all, the humanist intellectuals of that era were obsessed with the Latin style of writers like Cicero and Virgil, who had lived a millennium and a half before; why wouldn’t the readers of the year 3000 still be reading and writing the same classical language? Latin was timeless, in a way that vernacular tongues like Italian and French couldn’t hope to be. Following this logic, Poliziano composed his “Manto” in Latin, and Petrarch did the same with his epic “Africa.” Today, of course...

By  JOSHUA COHEN I call it the newspaper problem: About a decade ago I wrote an essay on contemporary poetry for a newspaper that will remain nameless, and had the occasion to quote a line by “Eliot.” The editor sent back many changes, the most telling of which was that the quotation was now attributed to “the English poet T.S. Eliot.” Vaguely piqued, I asked what the editor was trying to clarify: Was he afraid readers wouldn’t realize the quotation came from a poem? Or was he afraid readers might confuse the Eliot who wrote it with, say, George Eliot, the pseudonymous author of “Middlemarch”? Anyway, I noted that the  English  qualifier was misleading: Though T.S. Eliot had taken British citizenship, he had been born in America. The editor, then, sent on another suggestion: “the American-born English poet T.S. Eliot.” I, having lost all the patience I had as a 24-year-old, replied by modifying that tag to: “the American-born, British-­citizen English-language poet...