Squeeeeking in just under the wire with today's post! Sorry, guys - sometimes, life gets in the way of our very best intentions.
I've been seeing Alyssa Ettinger's work all over the place, lately. Her new knitware line seems to have struck a chord with many people, and deservedly so. I was so happy to find her Etsy Shop.
There's a word I'm looking for - not trompe de l'oeil - that means an object that is made to look like it was crafted in another way, like the way the Whitman sampler box looks cross-stitched, or these cups look like they are made of yarn. It's been on the tip of my tongue for days, but I just can't quite seem to remember what it is. So maddening!
I just had to share this installation by Rachel Whiteread. She's made an inside-out library, a room full of the ghosts of books. The above picture is from the MOMA website - you can go there to read the gallery text and whatnot. It's really very lovely.
A minimal surface is one whose area becomes greater whenever it is
distorted. At any given point, a minimal surface either is flat or has a
saddle shape, and the mean curvature of such a surface is zero. When fabricated, minimal surfaces are quite strong; thus, these objects have many potential applications in design.
The form pictured to the right was expressed in 1864 by Alfred Enneper, a
mathematician at the University of Göttingen. This highly
symmetric surface that bears Enneper's name is defined by a simple equation, and its shape is complex and lovely. It is essentially a disk warped into a saddle shape until it self-intersects; here, its edge has been arrested just prior to self-intersection.
If you were to take a piece of wire and twist it around the edge of the sculpture, then dip the resulting loop in soapy water, the resulting form would echo the topology of the carved wood.
There is a rich history to using mathematical forms in works of art, and Robert Longhurst is one of many sculptors engaging this tradition. I am interested in how he uses organic material to achieve organic shapes, mediated by formulae and analyses often perceived as abstruse or dry. His work reveals a creative and elegant approach to critical thinking, giving lie to common misconceptions about the field of mathematics.
Not long ago, on a rainy night, my car's back window was smashed in with a brick. Up and down the street, little cubes of safety glass lay glittering like a sky full of ersatz diamonds. It was brutal, unexpected and surprisingly beautiful - much like Yannick Murphy's novel Here They Come, published by McSweeney's earlier in the year.
Well, now. Murphy's gift for detailed and powerful imagery is undeniable. Her sentences and paragraphs are complex and deeply affecting. The plot - or seeming lack thereof - appears to be the point at which opinions of this book diverge."Yannick Murphy seems to lack the patience and craftmanship it takes to be a good novelist. Her writing is self-gratifying with no real respect for the craft."
I would argue that one's appreciation of Here They Come hinges on the slight difference between an Entwicklungsroman and a Bildungsroman. While Murphy's novel deals with the narrator's development and maturation, her growth is implicitly demonstrated rather than overtly emphasized. To explicitly show the arcs of plot and character development would be to shatter the lucid immediacy of the story and undermine the narrative voice.
Murphy's narration perfectly conveys the tone of adolescence without being a literal transcription of adolescent speech. She sounds like what we thought we sounded like, when we were thirteen and putting words down in our diaries. Both lyrical and deadpan, its freshness often scraped down to rawness, it captures the pathos of childhood's self-centered perspicacity.
In Here They Come, Murphy has done the near-impossible with deceptive alacrity. She has deftly manipulated the conventional elements of plot and storytelling in a way that is completely true to the narrator's way of seeing the world. Rather than lacking craftsmanship, this book is so precisely engineered that its structural supports are nearly invisible to the casual glance. In this sense, she has written a very subversive novel.
Here They Come is a brilliant, remarkable book, and I recommend it highly.
From left to right:
- Emily Coral Necklace
- Seedling Pearl Necklace
- Katie Ladder Necklace
- Stackables Coral Ring
You can bet I check the sample sale page about a thousand times a day.
