Freek Lomme is a catalyst in exploring cultural positioning. He operates as curator, writer, editor, lecturer, advisor and moderator for diverse commissioners. He is founding director of exhibition space and publisher Onomatopee.
Confessions
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
First published 1782
Available on Project Gutenberg
Freek Lomme is a founding director of exhibition space and publisher Onomatopee, which is based in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. With projects including the exhibition series and book We Can Make it if We Try, he’s long been posing challenging questions about the relationship between the consumer and the designer and the ways in which design can be more “democratic” via self-initiated projects. In his selection of books for this month’s bookmarked section, he’s “highlighting the living nature of the DIY character. Without the Y, the will that kicks things off, nothing’s going to happen in the first place”.
Let’s start with the autobiography of eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His Confessions, decadent in size, begins with the claim: “My purpose is to display to my kind a portrait in every way true to nature, and the man I shall portray will be myself.” Marking the transition from rational neo-classical culture to sensitive romanticism, one of his self-imposed missions was to promote a new morality for man, including a primal love for one another over socially regulated (constructed) relationships. Basically he comes across as an heroic loser trying to live as well as possible, and an inconsistent asshole at the same time. His life and work deal with truthfulness, and I like this book for that.
Stoner
John Williams
Vintage Classics, 1995
300 pages
ISBN 978-0-099-56154-5, 2003
Hothouse: The art of survival and the survival of America’s most celebrated publishing house, Farrar Straus & Giroux
Boris Kachka
Simon & Schuster, 2013
448 pages
ISBN 9781451691894
I’m currently reading Stoner, a novel by John Williams, which tells the story of the unremarkable life of William Stoner, a university teacher who comes from an illiterate rural area. I read of his innocent nature, possessing a poetic inclination that he is unable to fulfill due to his time-consuming wife and other day-to-day obligations. He tries to cope with his dreams, but is constantly checked by reality. The book’s main argument seems to be that we should cherish our fruitful accomplishments over missed opportunities. We cannot change our contexts when we’re stuck with received ethical codes.
The last book I’m choosing is Hothouse, a book about the business and life of publishers Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The founders of this well-known publishing house chose to counter the culture they were part of, becoming the “Mad Men for the literary world”, in the words of reviewer Junot Diaz. Celebrating a liberal life and utilising the business opportunities of an unfolding liberal culture from within their office, often called a “sexual sewer”, they published some of the most prominent critical writers in twentieth century USA. These guys actually produced a counter-culture and integrated it into the canon, through a balance of creative solidarity and individualist rigor. I
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