Picking Up the Pieces
Haslett probably made the right decision to set his novel early in the 2000s rather than try to record the madness as it unfolded. In Philippe Legrain’s Aftershock, which we looked at a couple of days ago, the economist explained that we have always had bubbles and crashes, but they are happening with more regularity: the stock market crash of ’87 followed by the dotcom boom and crash of the early 2000s and now the property bubble followed by meltdown. Legrain also noted how fast lessons are unlearned: the champagne pyramids are frothing again in Square Mile bars and Northern Rock is still doing its silly mortgages. This will continue until the next crash and after it, not least because there is no real sanction for failure anyway.
Max Dunbar reviews Adam Haslett‘s Union Atlantic.
Girls on the Run
It’s the ultimate cut-up: a watercolour and collage tableaux incorporating hand-drawings, photographically enlarged and traced figures and landscape elements, mostly repurposed from comics, children’s adventure serials, advertisements and colouring books. “Illuminating dense, often meandering prose, the drawings cover the front and back of hundreds of long, pieced-together paper pages, usually two feet in height and some extending to twelve feet in length,” writes Klaus Biesenbach.
Susan Tomaselli on Henry Darger & the Vivian Girls.
ampere’s and
This week’s visuals: Designer Tony Lee‘s re-imagining of William Faulkner‘s As I Lay Dying [via] & Moby-Dick, the exhibition & Radical book covers & Collection of vintage German pulp & dime novel illustrations [via] & The book art of Robert The, Cara Barer & Jacqueline Rush Lee [via] & The art of McSweeney’s book and […]