The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles
(newly revised and updated edition)
Hillel Schwartz
The MIT Press
Paperback, 568 pp., 6 x 9 in.
ISBN: 9780942299359
mitpress.mit.edu
Carson Chan is an architecture curator and writer. He co-curated the 4th Marrakech Biennale (2012), and was Executive Curator for the Biennial of the Americas (2013). He is currently pursuing a PhD in Architecture at Princeton University.
For our third guest-reviewed bookmarked section, we’ve asked curator/writer extraordinaire Carson Chan to choose three tomes exemplifying his taste in text – one very fat, one deliciously savoury, and one we will describe only as “interesting”.
The fact that we’re able to reproduce most things with unprecedented speed today doesn’t make the copy contemporary. This revised and updated edition of a book on the concept of the copy by poet and cultural historian Hillel Schwartz brings us back to ancient Greece before getting to photocopiers and the Internet. Schwartz is known both for his translations of Korean poetry and his writing on everything from the politics of sound, fat, millenarianism, and French prophets.
Since the book’s first printing almost 20 years ago, it has itself appeared as pirated PDF copies on online file sharing sites – but reading this physical re-issue (especially if you’ve read the first edition), brings the subtle and beautiful meaning of the copy home. Objecthood aside, read it for Schwartz’s erudite prose, particularly if you’re a wordsmith.
Consider the Oyster
MFK Fisher
North Point Press
Paperback, 96 pp., 7.8 x 5 in.
ISBN-13: 978-0865473355
Both WH Auden and John Updike have praised Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher’s prose as second to none. The mid-century American food writer has an easy clip to her words, and she describes food with the same pearly efficiency we recognise in Hemingway. In homage David Foster Wallace named both his 2004 essay and 2005 book Consider the Lobster, after this 1941 volume of hers. Fisher’s original tome, peppered with recipes throughout, is a series of her memories and ideas related to oysters, recounted as if told by the doyenne herself at a cocktail party. We learn that her mother loved the oyster bread served at her school dormitory in the 1890s, that the best oysters she ever ate were prepared at an inn in France, and that Cicero nourished his eloquence with hundreds of oysters each day.
Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting
Sianne Ngai
Harvard University Press,
Hardcover, 344 pp., 9.3 x 6.3 in.
ISBN-13: 978-0674046580
hup.harvard.edu
In the information age, the more we’re exposed to, the more we’re asked to opine upon what we see. Short of actually coming up with a response, we label many things as simply “interesting”. Stanford English Professor Sianne Ngai’s book seeks to figure out what it is we mean when we use this non-response response. Her method is thorough and academic, beginning with the word’s usage in literature through Kant’s Critique of Judgment and JL Austin’s How to do Things with Words. The same analysis is given to other words of “weak aesthetic judgment” like “cute” and “zany” – you’ll have to read the book to find out why the latter word is included in the mix. I
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