Usually, we know what to do when we go to a museum. Beautiful, finely crafted objects are available to be looked at, and otherwise left alone. We admire the subject matter and the artist’s unique way of representing it. The works afford experiences of visual and intellectual enjoyment. We may return to the same works again and again, finding new elements to enjoy even as the work’s features remain largely unchanged. But this experience prepares us poorly for ‘conceptual’ art, so-called based on the proposition that it features ideas as much as physical stuff.
Taking care of your lawn is a kind of entry-level way into this manner of interacting with the world. There is a right way to do it, and while it may not take immense skill, it takes attention to detail and orderly thinking. You mow the lawn; it smells nice and looks sharp. Then you clear the garden beds of weeds and stray grass, then trim the edges between the grass and the gardens and the sidewalk. When you’re finished, you’ve spent some time interacting with the physical world, a relatively rare state of consciousness for some of us. A small problem has been resolved. You have maintained the place where you live.
A master of the macabre, challenging and subversive, Rachel Ingalls' novellas have a way of drawing you into her alternative universe that is both unsettling and thrilling.
How Not to Kill Yourself is a riveting and inspiring read for anyone who has had to keep company with the chthonic feeling that the breath of life is a curse. Martin is one of the few members of the Socratic guild who is also a masterful writer of fiction. His knack for descriptions enables him to bring abstract concepts down to earth. Turning the final page, I had to smile at the last chords of this self-study since they seemed to encapsulate the pat-on-the-back spirit of a good book.
“Marriage,” writes Devorah Baum, in her incisive and thought-provoking interrogation of the subject, “is a formal relation that could arguably lay claim to being the world’s most enduring and universal.” It’s the plot that drives much of western literature and drama; it is presented to successive generations (especially women) as both the highest goal and a yoke of oppression. It has often been regarded as the most bourgeois and conservative of institutions, while proving flexible enough to accommodate radical reinventions. Why, then, she wonders, has there been so little serious intellectual engagement with the idea of marriage?