- John Stoehr
Arts Editor
There's more to art than you think. It's not just theater, paintings, books and dance. It's the enterprise of human creativity and it takes vastly different shapes and forms. Here you'll find my thoughts about the arts in Charleston and beyond. Neither of us knows what to expect.
Category Archives: Books
The Sturdy Dozen: 2007’s 12 best books
December 26, 2007 – 6:05 pm
From M.L. van Valkenburgh’s annual books round-up —J.S.
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A recent study said one in four Americans read no books last year — a rather appalling statistic.
So bibliophiles, unite, as we look back at the best and most diverse books of the year.
Let’s get literate!
Full story . . .
Kooser’s Corner: ‘Elegance’
December 19, 2007 – 10:50 am
Here’s another installment of American Life in Poetry from Ted Kooser —J.S.
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American Life in Poetry
Column 142
By Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2004-2006
There’s that old business about the tree falling in the middle of the forest with no one to hear it: does it make a noise? Here Linda Gregg, of New [...]
Journal: More than ‘Essential Truth’
December 19, 2007 – 10:28 am
A few months ago, I wrote a post that touched on multiculturalism and its tendency toward a kind of relativism that inspired incredibly thoughtful comments. Two have stayed with me, because they are about the center that continues failing to hold. That is, the primal human need for universal principles seems to be daily challenged [...]
Journal: Alex Ross’ The Rest Is Noise
December 19, 2007 – 9:10 am
From my piece that ran this morning on Alex Ross’ great book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Centery — J.S.
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Most orchestras tend to avoid programming music composed after 1950, because the mere mention of the phrase “modern music” has been enough to spark debates over class, nationality, aesthetic [...]
Breaking News: The new Crazyhorse has arrived
December 18, 2007 – 3:54 pm
The newest issue of Crazyhorse has just arrived. It was printed last week and sent to my office today. Published twice a year by the College of Charleston, the literary journal has featured since its founding in 1960 the likes of Updike, Carver, Bly, Ha Jin, Billy Collins, Galway Kinnell and many more well-known poets, [...]
Your Daily Vid: Walt Whitman
December 13, 2007 – 12:41 pm
If you want to see the spirit of American arts and letters, track the life and work of Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Thomas Pynchon, and David Foster Wallace. Among their many differences, there is one strong similarly: a fetish for language. But it all started with Walt Whitman. According to this source, this is the [...]
Your Daily Vid: Anthony Bourdain
December 11, 2007 – 11:35 am
Anthony Bourdain is the host of No Reservations but also a terrific writer (and drinker, eater, and smoker, too). He has a great sense of humor that can sometimes overshadow a sharp intellect. Here he is at Google’s Author Talks series in California.
Journal: The Top 20 Books by the Village Voice
December 7, 2007 – 8:05 am
Here’s a sample of the Village Voice’s top pick of 2007 . . .
The Best of 2007
Voice writers pick their favorite 20 books of the year
December 4th, 2007 6:37 PM
All About H. Hatterr
by G.V. Desani
NYRB Books, 318 pp., $15.95
Imagine a schnockered Nabokov impersonating The Simpsons’ Apu while reeling off tales of an Anglo-Indian Don Quixote, [...]
Journal: ArtForum’s best books of ‘07
December 4, 2007 – 1:32 pm
From Art Forum . . .
ARTHUR C. DANTO, contributing editor of Artforum:
Carolyn Brown joined the Merce Cunningham Dance Company at its inception in 1953 at Black Mountain College, and she remained with the company for twenty years, becoming one of its star dancers. Her book Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham (Knopf) [...]
Journal: The Times‘ best 10 of ‘07
December 1, 2007 – 10:16 am
To run in Dec. 9’s New York Times Book Review: The 10 Best Books of 2007.
Fiction
MAN GONE DOWN
By Michael Thomas. Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic, paper, $14. This first novel explores the fragmented personal histories behind four desperate days in a black writer’s life.
OUT STEALING HORSES
By Per Petterson. Translated by Anne Born. Graywolf Press, $22. In this short [...]
