Carried Away

Just read my first Alice Munro story. Very impressed. The wonders of a quietly shifting focus, not following the story but somehow miraculously driving it, on and on, laying out a web of meaning and consequence while you are following it, with the main movement happening like behind a veil of more static but very telling and carefully arranged scenery. Sheer magic. Reminded me of Stewart O’Nans wonderful novel “A World Away”, not only in time and setting but also in its slow tempo and skillfully crafted layers – only much more condensed.

Munro surely is a writer’s writer, like Jonathan Franzen implied.

Die Europäische Lobby

Seit Jahren organisiert die kleine Amsterdamer NGO “Corporate Europe Observatory” Stadtrundgänge in Brüssel, um den Teilnehmern die Tempel des europäischen Lobbyismus zu zeigen. Nun gibt es dazu auf dem Website der Organisation einen annotierten Stadtplan und eine Broschüre mit Erläuterungen zum Download.

Updike On Visual Art

I’m reading Updike’s recent Krasner-Pollock-Novel “Seek My Face”, in very slow pace. Pick it up again now and then, with long intermissions. I like it, though. It’s a semi-fictional reflection on 20th century US art through the eyes of an artist, and it’s an intelligent deconstruction of art critics’ contortions, a welcome demystification. Many characters are easily identifiable, but in a peculiar move that tells a lot about his bias, Updike merges the whole pop art personnel, from Rauschenberg, Johns, Lichtenstein up to Warhol, into one person, Chavetz-Krasner’s 2nd husband Guy Holloway.

Silkeborg Kunstmuseum

The Danish COBRA artist Asger Jorn has collected art, first for himself, then for his hometown Silkeborg. The resulting museum is different. Not first-rate in any artsy-fartsy tourist guide sense, but a lot of interesting 20th century pieces selected from the point of view of a practitioner.