Category: Nonfiction
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The rest of Psychogeography
In “South Downs Way,” Will Self writes about how he has “taken to long-distance walking as a means of dissolving the mechanised matrix which compresses the space-time continuum, and decouples human from physical geography” (69). Which is a mouthful, and perhaps a bit tongue-in-cheek, but also kind of excellent: he’s walking, in part, to remind…
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Psychogeography: Words by Will Self, Pictures by Ralph SteadmanBloomsbury, 2007
Though I didn’t go to any events at the Conflux Festival this year, it nevertheless seemed like the weekend of the festival would be an apt weekend to start reading this book, which I checked out from the library a while ago. The festival, which used to be called Psy.Geo.Conflux, is centered on psychogeography, a…
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In Utopia by J.C. HallmanSt. Martin’s Press, 2010
“Utopia is in a bad way,” this book starts, then follows with this definition: “Utopia can be broadly defined as any exuberant plan or philosophy intended to perfect life lived collectively” (3). Not many pages later, Hallman lets us know where he stands, which is in favor of this exuberance: “the utopian flame should not…
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“Chester” by Henry James(in English Hours, Oxford University Press, 1982, originally Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1905)
James doesn’t only write, in the essays in English Hours, about the physicalities of a place: he’s also writing about culture and history, about the American temperament and the English temperament (or at least, about an American’s impression of them), about the majesty of Anglican services and American twinges of jealousy at all the richness…
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“London” by Henry James(in English Hours, Oxford University Press, 1982, originally Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1905)
Henry James is one of my favorite writers: I love his long sentences, the way the make me slow down when reading: both in the sense that I often have to slow down, because of their length and twistiness, and in the sense that I want to slow down, to better savor the way they’re…
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The Locavore’s Handbook: The Busy Person’s Guide to Eating Local on a Budget by Leda MeredithLyons Press, 2010
Leda Meredith, when she talks about eating local food, speaks from experience: in 2007-2008 she embarked on “The 250”: a year of eating, “almost exclusively foods grown or raised within a 250-mile radius” of her apartment (1). I’m impressed. My own six-day attempt at eating foods from within a radius of about 200 miles from…
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Waiting for the Weekend by Witold RybczynskiViking, 1991
Despite the title, and despite the fact that much of this book tells the story of how the weekend as we know it came into being, Waiting for the Weekend isn’t just about Saturday and Sunday and how they got that way. It also examines larger questions of leisure: what is leisure, anyhow? And how…
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Irving Penn: Small Trades by Virginia A. Heckert and Anne LacosteGetty Publications, 2009
When I quoted a passage from Proust about the “litanies of the small trades”, Carol mentioned this book of Irving Penn’s photographs of workers in Paris (and also New York and London) from 1950 and 1951. I’d mostly known about Penn’s fashion work or portraits of celebrities and society people (I’m thinking of pictures like…
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Bluets by Maggie NelsonWave Books, 2009
I don’t know whether to call Bluets poetry or nonfiction: it is a book-length essay, but a poetic one; it’s a series of 240 “propositions,” like Pascal’s Pensées (from which the book takes its epigraph), each ranging from a sentence to a paragraph in length. Whatever you want to call it, I was enchanted by…