gerard b

• Rated 3 stars

“I enjoyed reading this to my 7 year-old son, who enjoyed hearing about the protagonist's journey. But it is a rather dark tale, and perhaps my son was too young for it. He kept focusing on characters' tragic aspects, which abound in this story. I was most interested in the descriptions of how things were made - in the passages that dealt with firings and glazes and how they were achieved. I could have done with more about the way characters discovered these properties - we're told a lot of times how talented people are, but don't read about them working much - and less of what seemed sentimental (even maudlin) devices to add depth.”

gerard b wrote this review Wednesday, July 1 2009. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 2 stars

“For a book about which one has heard so much, this was really disappointing. Turgid. Slow. Not terribly visual...once you get passed the idea that the character wakes up a vermin, well..there's not much left to do. I can imagine how the story was revolutionary, but after a nearly a hundred years of elaborations, it seemed a little less than spectacular to go back to its roots. Makes me think of how I once had a professor who told me it was wrong to dislike Mahler because it sounds like movie music. I told him I didn't care - I still don't like Mahler...”

gerard b wrote this review Sunday, June 21 2009. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 3 stars

“Johnson claims to be acting as a devil's advocate with this book. It's useful to keep in mind that the devil's advocate makes dark arguments in service of the light, but Johnson's are too often merely dim. His great success in the book is also his most unsettling failure - he convincingly decouples form and content to argue that the forms of video games, complex new television and film narratives, and the internet are productively re-wiring our brains. His argument (as he reminds us on every other page) flies in the face of common wisdom that holding that such media are having a negative effect on learning.

He's startlingly convincing and often common sensical about it, but in the end I cannot accept that what is being conveyed through media is as unimportant as Johnson seems to feel it is. If it were. would he constantly talk about the critical and economic successes of his examples? But Johnson really lost me when he tried to argue that television was enhancing our emotional intelligence. He seems not to realize how crafted an image can be - where was this guy during the Bush years? I kept thinking of Nicholas Carr's essay on "the Google effect" in the July/August 2008 Atlantic Monthly, which is as much my experience of the internet as anything Johnson describes.

The book is a good if occasionally frustrating read for anyone who is trying to work in education these days and feeling like brain plasticity is an empty promise. I'm not sure that buying a Nintendo DS is going to do me or my 7-year old son any good...but I feel like ti may do less harm than I may previously have felt.”

gerard b wrote this review Sunday, April 19 2009. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 3 stars

“It's interesting to see how the idea of story has changed - the books happens in a few different way and that's strange to me. IN the first half, it's a conventional narrative, then the Invisible Man spends dozens of pages recounting his backstory, then it returns to a narrative. I read it looking for descriptions of what cannot be seen, and was interested in the few that i found, but was more taken by the overt claim that invisibility would be form of power. Wells would have published this book a few years before camouflage was introduced and soldiers would require the mental reassurance it provided...interesting.”

gerard b wrote this review Friday, April 10 2009. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 4 stars

“The good essays in this are outstanding. My favorite is Ellen Gruber Garvey's piece on scrap booking. It succeeds at what this genre of history does best - connecting the past tot the present to reveal continuity where others see revolutionary transformation (which is what marketers want you to see...). IN this particular essay, we read of the way 19th and early 20th century scrapbookers used slivers of existing to piece to gether new and personal narratives...in much the same way people are slicing up movies and re-posting the pieced together results on YouTube. A great book for getting in touch with the creativity of the past...and reminding the reader that the more things change, the more they may be staying the same...”

gerard b wrote this review Sunday, March 15 2009. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 3 stars

“I'm very interested in ideas advanced by books like this, but they don't always succeed as literature. In this case, the idea that some poem is contained within the larger poem "Paradise Lost" is enchanting...but that _this_ is the poem is mildly disappointing. It's a tricky question - when does the throll of an idea exceed its execution? And what, as readers, are we to do about it? Perhaps get our copies of "Paradise Lost" and make our own poetry...*sigh*”

gerard b wrote this review Thursday, August 14 2008. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 4 stars

“It's been a long time since I enjoyed a collection of short stories. Somewhere in the last decade or so, the genre seemed to lose its urgency...but now I feel like grabbing lots of them. On the condition that they're as good as this collection. I was struck by a couple of things - the emptiness I would sometimes feel as the estrangement between characters yawned (as in the title story), but also by the texture of the writing itself. The author does a stunning job creating the textiles, tastes, and scents of the settings without ever losing sight of the way they frame human interaction. A great read, too soon finished...”

gerard b wrote this review Monday, July 21 2008. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 4 stars

“In the long line of books that examine art criticism crisis, it's hard to imagine another title is necessary. But this one is a welcome addition to the profession's endless anxieties, if only for its snarkiness. One can greatly enjoy watching familiar writers sniping at one another from the security of their tidily divided sections, and occasionally, as each struggles to appear most sane (mostly in vain), one can gain an appreciation of an idea that's so far out of fashion it gets nothing but greif but that may just make sense. My favorite cage match is Lane Relyea vs. Jerry Salz. Everybody loves Jerry Salz. Why? Because he's a big softy who loves artists? Does anybody have the nerve (anybody but Relyea, that is) to say that perhaps part of the problem with criticism is that we're up to our eyeballs in crappy art? That little scuffle is just one of the books pleasures.

Personally, I hope art criticism remains in 'crisis' for another 10 or fifteen years. That way it can stay a lively, competitive field where those in power are fretting about losing it and those without power are plotting to seize it. The last thing we need is for art criticism to be 'stable' like it supposedly was in its glory years of the middle of the last century, when vatic pronouncements rained down on our humble heads from giants at little magazines. Viva Crisis!”

gerard b wrote this review Sunday, June 15 2008. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 3 stars

“I guess the thing that sticks with me is the way the author uses footnotes...his essay on David Lynch was a good read, and that it had this simultaneous essay going on in the footnotes struck me as interesting. I had first come to him through his fiction and I vastly prefer his essays. Perhaps I'm remembering this book as better than it was, but I'm still kind of a fan and would recommend it...”

gerard b wrote this review Monday, June 9 2008. ( reply | permalink )

0 of 1 members found this review helpful.

• Rated 3 stars

“Since people do it all the time, I'm not going to feel bad about 'reviewing' a book I've only partly read...but understand my comments are limited to the chapter on imitation in Renaissance painting and its relation to the modern idea of 'influence'.

Too bad Ackermans' reasonable attempt to clarify this subtle distinction will almost certainly elude most contemporary artists. Imitation, Ackerman suggests, and be a useful way to borrow form the past and enrich present and future activities. Influence - imitation's modernist descendant and the word too often used in art schools - Ackerman describes as retro active, an unconscious process artists may not even be aware of.

Influence keeps the machinery of criticism in business. We have to employ armies to suss out the concealed, subconscious connections between past and preference. It's a little like the therapy industry. It's as impossible to imagine how the 19th century got by without psychologists explaining us to ourselves as it is to imagine the 21st century without critics explaining art to everyone.

Concluding the chapter, Ackerman hopefully suggests that some postmodernist thinking looks at imitation (the conscious process of reflecting on absorbing others' work) as a way out of the bag. But I fear most young artists are too deeply engaged in the mythology of pathology to recognize the gift he offers. Too bad. If anything, the book is a useful reminder that there's still a place for depth in a world that appears to prize breadth over all things.”

gerard b wrote this review Monday, May 12 2008. ( reply | permalink )