My collection of the what, where, when of the nose and glasses is presented as a bibliography of references and as an archive of uses: including book covers, illustrations, posters, variations on the theme.
November 2021
October 2021 Stranger Faces Namwali Serpell
From Transit Books: In a collection of speculative essays on a few such stranger faces—the disabled face, the racially ambiguous face, the digital face, the face of the dead—Namwali Serpell probes our contemporary mythology of the face. Stranger Faces imagines a new ethics based on the perverse pleasures we take in the very mutability of faces. https://www.transitbooks.org/books/strangerfaces
October 2021
The Art of Being Bill: Bill Murray and the Many Faces of Awesome
August 2021
Richard Zenith's new biography about
Fernando Pessoa, a poet who wrote with some 75 alter-ego voices...
| When the ever elusive Fernando Pessoa died in Lisbon, in the fall of 1935, few people in Portugal realized what a great writer they had lost. None of them had any idea what the world was going to gain: one of the richest and strangest bodies of literature produced in the twentieth century. Although Pessoa […] lithub.com |
Siri Hustvedt made the re-introduction to Pessoa on Page 23 of The Blazing World.
Although Pessoa's name was familiar, I knew nothing about his extraordinary life. So when I saw that there was a new biography, I ordered it right away. While poking around my bookshelves, I discovered that I had had for years one of his books of poetry but had never read it. Now I am deep into Pessoa - amazed by the versatility of his many voices. I've been challenged to keep up with just one alter-ego, hard to imagine keeping up with 75!!!
With 3 different maskings was Harriet Burden trying to take on too much?
Summer 2021
The Blazing World
Siri Hustvedt
After years of being ignored by the art world, the protagonist, Harriet Burden conducts an experiment: she conceals her female identity behind three male fronts, who put forward her artwork under their names.
July 2021
Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews
Calvin Tompkins
In 1964, Calvin Tomkins spent a number of afternoons interviewing Marcel Duchamp in his apartment on West 10th Street in New York. Casual yet insightful, Duchamp reveals himself as a man and an artist whose playful principles toward living freed him to make art that was as unpredictable, complex, and surprising as life itself. Those interviews have never been edited and made public, until now. The Afternoon Interviews, which includes an introductory interview with Tomkins reflecting on Duchamp as an artist, guide and friend, reintroduces the reader to key ideas of his artistic world and renews Duchamp as a vital model for a new generation of artists.
Spring 2021
https://jewishcurrents.org/current-issue/
April 26, 2021
The Language of Humour
Alison Ross
The Language of Humour:
* examines the importance of the social context for humour
* explores the issue of gender and humour in areas such as the New Lad culture in comedy and stand-up comedy
* includes comic transcripts from TV sketches such as Clive Anderson and Peter Cook
With an uncanny similarity to my "No Joke" census sign, the nose and glasses on this cover caught my eye.
The Little Book of Dad Jokes
published by OH
November 2019
Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity—A Cultural Biography Irene Gammel
HERE for my post about the Baroness.
September 2019
Surrealism and the Book
Renée Riese Hubert
July 2019
The First Book of Jewish Jokes: The Collection of L. M. Büschenthal
A translation of a collection of jokes published in 1812 by Lippmann Moses Büschenthal:Sammlung witiziger Einfälle von Juden, als Beyträge zur Characteristik der Jüdischen Nation
June 2019
Nose book: Representations of the Nose in Literature and the Arts
Victoria de Rijke; Lene Østermark-Johansen
June 2019
Words in Time and Place
David Crystal
June 2019
The Haggada of Passover
a pop up for kids of all ages
June 2019
How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found
Doug Richmond
June 2019
Funny Face!
Mark Rich and Jeff Potocsnak
an amusing history of potato heads, block heads and magic whiskers and the uncanny likeness of Mr. Potato Head and Groucho Marx.
June 2019
Topol's Treasury
Chaim Topol
Topol has gathered together his favorite jokes, stories, sayings, and wise words from around the world of Jews.
May 2019
Images of Intolerance
Sara Lipton
April 2019
Dark Mirror
Sara Lipton
In Dark Mirror, Sara Lipton offers a fascinating examination of the emergence of anti-Semitic iconography in the Middle Ages. To view the images in the book: HERE
March 2019
The Nose
Nikolai V. Gogol
"The Nose" is a satirical short story by Nikolai Gogol written during his time living in St. Petersburg. During this time, Gogol's works were primarily focused on surrealism and the grotesque, with a romantic twist.
March 2019
Groucho: the life and tImes of Julius Henry Marx
Stefan Kanfer
This definitive biography of one of the world's greatest comedians unflinchingly yet affectionately uncovers the man behind the cigar.
March 2019Simcha Weinstein
Rabbi Simcha Weinstein grew up in England. As a short fellow, he waited for his growth spurt. That never happened, so to avoid the anti-Semitism he confronted, he became funny. He later turned that humour into his own stand-up and wrote a book describing how Jewish humour has changed in the 21st century and how comedians like Sacha Baron Cohen, Sarah Silverman and Jon Stewart now use the old taboos to get lots of laughs.
March 2019
Arthur’s Halloween
Marc Brown
While bedtime storytelling with the Lang Wolf Pac, I grabbed a book from their shelf and discovered the adventures of Arthur the Aardvark and his pals as they go trick or treating. His rabbit friend donned the nose and glasses for his costume.
February 2019
The Jewish Joke
Devorah Baum
Comedy is full of famously funny Jews, from Groucho Marx to Larry David to Sarah Silverman. This smart and funny book includes tales from many of these much-loved comics, and will appeal to their broad audience, while revealing the history, context, and wider culture of Jewish joking. The Jewish joke is as old as Abraham, and like the Jews themselves it has wandered over the world, learned countless new languages, worked with a range of different materials, been performed in front of some pretty hostile crowds, and yet still retained its own distinctive identity. So what is it that animates the Jewish joke? Why are Jews so often thought of as "funny"? And how old can a joke get? With jokes from Lena Dunham to Woody Allen, as well as Freud and Marx (Groucho, mostly), Baum balances serious research with light-hearted humor and provides fascinating insight into this wellknown and much loved cultural phenomenon.
December 2018 Androgeny
June Singer
Full of psychological and spiritual insights that speak to today's sexual confusion. Singer shows how a person can at once embrace complementary and contradictory attitudes toward sex and gender. Finally, she proposes a range of choices by which people can identify themselves, secure that the masculine/feminine interaction within each individual is not only normal, but the dynamic factor in their wholeness.
November 2018
Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams
Mark Ford
Raymond Roussel, one of the most outlandishly compelling literary figures of modern times, died in mysterious circumstances at the age of fifty-six in 1933. The story Mark Ford tells about Roussel's life and work is at once captivating, heartbreaking, and almost beyond belief. Could even Proust or Nabokov have invented a character as strange and memorable as the exquisite dandy and graphomaniac this book brings to life? Roussel's poetry, novels, and plays influenced the work of many well-known writers and artists: Jean Cocteau found in him "genius in its pure state," while Salvador Dal?, who died with a copy of Roussel's Impressions d'Afrique on his bedside table, believed him to be one of France's greatest writers ever. Edmond Rostand, Marcel Duchamp, Andr? Breton, Michel Foucault, and Alain Robbe-Grillet all testified to the power of his unique imagination. By any standards, Roussel led an extraordinary life. Tremendously wealthy, he took two world tours during which he hardly left his hotel rooms. He never wore his clothes more than twice, and generally avoided conversation because he dreaded that it might turn morbid. Ford, himself a poet, traces the evolution of Roussel's bizarre compositional methods and describes the idiosyncrasies of a life structured as obsessively as Roussel structured his writing.
September 2018
Kati Stevens
a short book about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. The electric candle and faux fur, coffee substitutes and meat analogues, Obama impersonators, prosthetics. Imitation this, false that. Humans have been replacing and improving upon the real thing for millennia - from wooden toes found on Egyptian mummies to the Luxor pyramid in Las Vegas. So why do people have such disdain for so-called "fakes"? Kati Stevens's Fake discusses the strange history of imitations, as well as our ever-changing psychological and socioeconomic relationships with them. After all, fakes aren't going anywhere; they seem to be going everywhere. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.
August 2018
Picasso and the Chess Player
Larry Witham
In the fateful year of 1913, events in New York and Paris launched a great public rivalry between the two most consequential artists of the twentieth century, Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp. The New York Armory Show art exhibition unveiled Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, a "sensation of sensations" that prompted Americans to declare Duchamp the leader of cubism, the voice of modern art. In Paris, however, the cubist revolution was reaching its peak around Picasso. In retrospect, these events form a crossroads in art history, a moment when two young bohemians adopted entirely opposite views of the artist, giving birth to the two opposing agendas that would shape all of modern art. Today, the museum-going public views Pablo Picasso as the greatest figure in modern art. Over his long lifetime, Picasso pioneered several new styles as the last great painter in the Western tradition. In the rarefied world of artists, critics, and collectors, however, the most influential artist of the last century was not Picasso, but Marcel Duchamp: chess player, prankster, and a forefather of idea-driven dada, surrealism, and pop art. Picasso and the Chess Player is the story of how Picasso and Duchamp came to define the epochal debate between modern and conceptual art--a drama that features a who's who of twentieth-century art and culture, including Henri Matisse, Gertrude Stein, Andr Breton, Salvador Dal , and Andy Warhol. In telling the story, Larry Witham weaves two great art biographies into one tumultuous century.
June 2018
The Haunted Smile the story of Jewish Comedians
Lawrence J. Epstein
May 2018
Mr. Lear: A life of Art and Nonsense
Jenny Uglow
September 2016
Old Jews Telling Jokes
August 2016
Robert Desnos, Surrealism and the Marvelous in Everyday Life
Katherine Conley
In this critical biography of Robert Desnos (1900-1945), Katharine Conley reevaluates the surrealist movement through the life and works of one of its founders. Desnos was as famous among the surrealists for his independence of mind as for his elaborate "automatic" drawings and his brilliant oral and written performances during the incubational period of the group. He stayed with the official surrealist movement in Paris for only six years but was pivotal during that time in shaping the surrealist notion of "transforming the world" through radical experiments with language and art. After leaving the group, Desnos continued his career of radio broadcasting and writing for commercials. Though no longer part of the official movement, he remained committed to his own version of popular surrealism: Desnosian surrealism and the search for the "marvelous" in everyday life. Near the end of World War II he was deported and imprisoned for his work in the French Resistance and died at the newly liberated camp of Terezin in Czechoslovakia. Reports from within the camp indicate that Desnos took with him into Terezin his most deeply held surrealist beliefs.
August 2016
Chantefables
In 2016 I discovered this marvelous book of rhymes for children and gifted it to Clementine for her birthday. Desnos was the poet who channeled the voice of Duchamp's Rrose Sélavy in a series of surrealistic aphorisms.
Michael Krasny has been telling Jewish jokes since his bar mitzvah, and it’s been said that he knows more of them than anyone on the planet. He certainly states his case in this wise, enlightening, and hilarious book that not only collects the best of Jewish humor passed down from generation to generation, but explains the cultural expressions and anxieties behind the laughs.
"What’s Jewish Alzheimer’s?"
"You forget everything but the grudges."
"You must be so proud. Your daughter is the President of the United States!"
"Yes. But her brother is a doctor!"
"Isn’t Jewish humor masochistic?"
"No. And if I hear that one more time I am going to kill myself."
With his background as a scholar and public-radio host, Krasny delves deeply into the themes, topics, and form of Jewish humor: chauvinism undercut by irony and self-mockery, the fear of losing cultural identity through assimilation, the importance of vocal inflection in joke-telling, and calls to communal memory, including the use of Yiddish.
Borrowing from traditional humor and such Jewish comedy legends as Jackie Mason, Mel Brooks, and Joan Rivers, Larry David, Sarah Silverman, Jerry Seinfeld and Amy Schumer, Let There Be Laughter is an absolute pleasure for the chosen and goyim alike.
No Joke Making Jewish Humor
Ruth R. Wisse
August 2012
Inverted Odysseys:Cahun, Deren, Sherman
Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, and Cindy Sherman were born in different countries, in different generations; Cahun in France in 1894, Deren in Russia in 1917, and Sherman in the United States in 1954. Yet they share a deeply theatrical obsession that shatters any notion of a unified self. All three try out identities from different social classes and geographic environments, extend their temporal range into the past and future, and transform themselves into heroes and villains, mythological creatures, and sex goddesses. The premise of Inverted Odysseys is that this expanded concept of the self; this playful urge to "try on" other roles-is more than a feminist or psychological issue. It is central to our global culture, to our definition of human identity in a world where the individual exists in a multicultural and multitemporal environment. This book is an "odyssey" through historical, theoretical, critical, and literary perspectives on the three artists viewed in the context of these issues.
July 11, 2011
Book of Ruth
Robert Seydel
Robert Seydel's Book of Ruth presents an assemblage of collages, letters, journal entries and other artifacts from the life of Seydel's fictional alter-ego, Ruth Greisman--spinster, Sunday painter and friend to Joseph Cornell. Drawing on the inherent seductiveness and intrigue of archives, the volume is conceived as a gathering of fragmented materials by Greisman unearthed from a storage space in the Smithsonian and a suburban family garage, which are presented as a mosaic portrait of a reclusive artist. The New Yorker described the project thus: "Burrowing into the pop-detritus archive somewhere between Ray Johnson's mail art and Tom Phillips' Humument project, Seydel's serial collage Book of Ruth describes an allusive fantasy about his aunt and alter ego Ruth Greisman, her brother Saul, and their escapades with Joseph Cornell... unfold[ing] in novelistic rhythms." Over the past decade or so, working almost exclusively in notebook form, Seydel has produced hundreds of works in multiple ongoing and interrelated series that move freely between lyric and narrative modes. (Poet Peter Gizzi notes that "so many of his tools are a writer's: whiteout, pencil and pen, erasers, tape, type and newsprint.") Book of Ruth constitutes his masterpiece to date. In Seydel's hands the detritus from which Ruth makes her art and narrates her inner life shines like pages from an illuminated manuscript.
2009
Attached to the Mouse
Holly Crawford
The Mouse and the Duck are celebrities created by Disney through its new art form, the animated cartoon. Using various outlets including mass-media, television, and theme parks, Disney made the Mouse an icon of corporate success and American culture. From Pop art to the present day, more than a hundred artists have incorporated the Mouse's image, humor, and nostalgia into their work. HOW AND WHY? Attached to the Mouse is the first art history analyzing use of Disney imagery by such contemporary artists as Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, Warhol, Chagoya, Thiebaud, Helnwein, Boltanski, Dion, and Pensato. This book explores the impact of Disney, including artists' economic and psychological motivations, on contemporary art.2006 A Rose is a Rose is a Rose. Jennifer Blessing and the Guggenheim Museum Gender Performance in Photography
The Guggenheim's classic study of photo-based artworks that question gender identity is back in print at last. This important volume, whose title combines Gertrude Stein's famous motto, "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose," with the name of Marcel Duchamp's feminine alter ego, Rrose Selavy, features portraits, self-portraits and photomontages in which the gender of the subject is highlighted through performance for the camera or through technical manipulation of the image. In many of the works, photography's strong aura of realism and objectivity promotes a fantasy of total gender transformation. In other pieces, the photographic representation articulates an incongruity between the posing body and its assumed costume. Features work by Cecil Beaton, Brassa‘, Claude Cahun, Marcel Duchamp, Hannah Hàch, Man Ray, Janine Antoni, Matthew Barney, Nan Goldin, Lyle Ashton Harris, Robert Mapplethorpe, Annette Messager, Yasumasa Morimura, Catherine Opie, Lucas Samaras, Cindy Sherman, Inez van Lamsweerde and Andy Warhol.
2005
Clowns and Characters: instructional guide
Leon Frank
A Walter T. Foster Art Book
2005
Clowns: The Fun Makers
Mel Boring
A history of clowns and clowning down through the ages, describing many of today's clowns and their acts. Has suggestions for becoming a clown.
2002
Giggling into the Pillow
Chris Bridges
"Bring some laughter (the good, non-pointing kind) back into your bedroom! Inside you'll find 36 articles, short stories, parodies, and how-to guides to help you discover why the whole sticky business is even more fun than you thought. Learn how to handle yourself in an honest singles bar, discover out how a lonely Valentine's Day can still be romantic, see what happens when good-natured mountain folk try their hands at porn, and much more. Grab a moist towelette and jump right in!"Thankfully, we have people like Chris out there who realize that all of our anatomy - including our funny bones - can be sexual organs; that realize that what happens when we laugh and what happens when we orgasm, are pretty damned similar and when combined can be a fabulous uproar. And if sex isn't a fabulous uproar, why bother?" - from the foreword by Heather Corinna, founder of ScarletLetters.com and Scarleteen.com
1996
Post-Modernism and the Engendering of Marcel Duchamp
Amelia Jones
A critical analysis of postmodernism in the visual arts since the 1960s, this book focuses primarily on American texts that reference and construct Marcel Duchamp as the originator of postmodern art. Amelia Jones contends that Duchamp, through his 'readymades', (the standard terms used to describe Duchamp's works) has paradoxically served in a paternal role for post-1960s American artists, critics and art historians, who have attempted to construct a new tradition of artistic practice that counters the masculinist ideologies of Abstract Expressionism and Greenbergian modernism. Adapting feminist, psychoanalytic and Derridean conceptions of interpretation as an exchange of sexual identities, Jones offers highly charged readings that focus on the eroticism of Duchamp's works and on his theories of artistic production. She reconstructs Duchamp as an indeterminably gendered author whose gift to postmodernism might best be viewed in terms of the potential of his readymades to destructure the contradictory notions of sexual difference and subjectivity.
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