Forty-One False Starts: eEssays on Artists and Writers by Janet Malcolm (English

Description: Forty-One False Starts by Janet Malcolm Brings together essays published over the course of several decades (many from The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books) that reflect Janet Malcolms preoccupation with artists and their work. Her subjects are painters, photographers, writers, and critics. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description Janet Malcolms In the Freud Archives and The Journalist and the Murderer, as well as her biographies of Sylvia Plath and Gertrude Stein, are canonical in the realm of nonfiction - as is the title essay of this collection, with its forty-one "false starts," or serial attempts to capture the essence of the painter David Salle, which become a dazzling portrait of an artist. "She is among the most intellectually provocative of authors," writes David Lehman in The Boston Globe, "able to turn epiphanies of perception into explosions of insight." Forty-one False Starts brings together for the first time essays published over the course of several decades (many from The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books) that reflect Malcolms preoccupation with artists and their work. Her subjects are painters, photographers, writers, and critics. She explores the "dominating passion" of Bloomsbury to create things visual and literary, the "passionate collaborations" behind Edward Westons nudes, and the psyche of the German photographer Thomas Struth.She delves beneath the "onyx surface" of Edith Whartons fiction, appreciates the black comedy of the Gossip Girl novels, and confronts the false starts of her own autobiography. As Ian Frazier writes in the introduction, "Over and over Malcolm has demonstrated that an article in a magazine-something we see every day-can rise to the highest level of literature." Author Biography Janet Malcolm (1934- 2021) was the author of many books, including In the Freud Archives, The Journalist and the Murderer, Two Lives: Alice and Gertrude, which won the 2008 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, and Forty-One False Starts, which was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book and a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. She was a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker and a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Table of Contents Introduction by Ian Frazier Forty-One False Starts Depth of Field A House of Ones Own The Woman Who Hated Women Salingers Cigarettes Capitalist Pastorale The Genius of the Glass House Good Pictures Edward Westons Women Nudes Without Desire A Girl of the Zeitgeist Advanced Placement The Not Returning Part of It William Shawn Joseph Mitchell Thoughts on Autobiography from an Abandoned Autobiography Review "No living writer has narrated the drama of turning the messy and meaningless world into words as brilliantly, precisely, and analytically as Janet Malcolm . . . Her influence is so vast that much of the writing world has begun to think in the charged, analytic terms of a Janet Malcolm passage." --Katie Roiphe, The Paris Review "[A] master of the profile...alluring, pointed, singularly perceptive tellings." --The New Yorker "Forty-One False Starts [is] a powerfully distinctive and very entertaining literary experience. . . what the reader remembers is Janet Malcolm: her cool intelligence, her psychoanalytic knack for noticing and her talent for withdrawing in order to let her subjects hang themselves with their own words. . .These short pieces [are] unmistakably the work of a master." --Adam Kirsch, The New York Times "Forty-One False Starts is a remarkable and, in its strange way, gripping piece of work. It achieves the rare feat of communication something valuable about the largely ineffable creative process." --Zoe Heller, The New York Review of Books "[An] invigorating new collection . . . keenly intelligent journalism that feels, always, as if it had been written by a human being, one with a beating heart, a moral compass, a wide-ranging curiosity, and a point of view." --Laura Collins-Hughes, The Boston Globe "Even if youve been reading Janet Malcolm for years, the critical appreciations collected in Forty-One False Starts may surprise you. The title essay is (or pretends to be) a series of scrapped beginnings to her profile of the painter David Salle, a giant of the art world in vulnerable mid-career. If you want to write magazine prose, this alone should make you buy the book. Ranging from Bloomsbury to Edward Weston to J.D. Salinger, the entire book is full of stylistic daring, fine distinctions, and bold judgments set down at the speed of thought." --Lorin Stein, The Paris Review online "[Malcolms] portraits of the storytellers . . . are glorious. Without any diminishment of her critical eye, she seems like shes having more fun--when she describes Gene Stratton-Porter writing deranged childrens books, or Julia Margaret Cameron admiring Englands finest beards, or Blair Waldorf sulking over caviar at the Plaza." --Molly Fischer, The New York Observer "Janet Malcolm offers a penetrating new collection of essays . . . Shes so penetrating, in fact--and her writing so seductive and entertaining--that I always begin reading her books in a kind of critical defensive crouch. . . She might be the most gifted scene-setter in American journalism. . . Shes so deft an observer--so rich are her descriptions and insights--that you might find yourself rushing through a piece and only remarking afterward how fine her sentences are." --Michael Robbins, The Chicago Tribune "Malcolm has solidified her reputation as a guide who can expertly help readers through, as her New Yorker colleague Ian Frazier writes in the introduction to Forty-One False Starts, a good big mess. One is the sheer pleasure of her rich descriptive power, her sentences turned like spindles on a lathe. There is the historical interest: reminders of who was once fashionable, should one care. There is the cruelly perfect aim of her insults. But there is, above all, the unequaled glimpse into the mind of Malcolm the critic, which is as close as were likely to get to the mind of Malcolm, one of our smartest, best writers, someone whose personal inscrutability and elusiveness I regret all the time." --Mark Oppenheimer, The Nation "Malcolms severity, her terrifying neutrality-like a teacher who is capable of handling even her most despised pupils no differently than the ones she secretly adores-is part of what makes her a brilliant writer. It is also why her writing does not occasion adolescent reverence and why her image is not printed in fashion magazines. You discover Didion in high school and you read her on the beach. Malcolm you discover in college-or after-and read before you do your own work....[She] is a priestly figure; an aura of quiet surrounds her work. She is always in control....Reading even the most cerebral of her sentences, you feel smart by association rather than dumb by comparison." --Alice Gregory, Slate "Bringing together a quarter-centurys worth of subtle, sharply observed essays on artists and writers, this collection chronicles not just life events and artistic influences, but also the amorphous subjectivity of biography itself . . . These unstinting essays investigate how a consensus forms relating to a body of work or an artistic movement, how attitudes toward art change over time, and how artistic legacies are managed--or mismanaged--by children and heirs." --Publishers Weekly (starred review and pick of the week) Review Quote "No living writer has narrated the drama of turning the messy and meaningless world into words as brilliantly, precisely, and analytically as Janet Malcolm . . . Her influence is so vast that much of the writing world has begun to think in the charged, analytic terms of a Janet Malcolm passage." -- Katie Roiphe, The Paris Review "[A] master of the profile...alluring, pointed, singularly perceptive tellings." -- The New Yorker " Forty-One False Starts [is] a powerfully distinctive and very entertaining literary experience. . . what the reader remembers is Janet Malcolm: her cool intelligence, her psychoanalytic knack for noticing and her talent for withdrawing in order to let her subjects hang themselves with their own words. . .These short pieces [are] unmistakably the work of a master." -- Adam Kirsch, The New York Times " Forty-One False Starts is a remarkable and, in its strange way, gripping piece of work. It achieves the rare feat of communication something valuable about the largely ineffable creative process." -- Zoe Heller, The New York Review of Books "[An] invigorating new collection . . . keenly intelligent journalism that feels, always, as if it had been written by a human being, one with a beating heart, a moral compass, a wide-ranging curiosity, and a point of view." -- Laura Collins-Hughes, The Boston Globe "Even if youve been reading Janet Malcolm for years, the critical appreciations collected in Forty-One False Starts may surprise you. The title essay is (or pretends to be) a series of scrapped beginnings to her profile of the painter David Salle, a giant of the art world in vulnerable mid-career. If you want to write magazine prose, this alone should make you buy the book. Ranging from Bloomsbury to Edward Weston to J.D. Salinger, the entire book is full of stylistic daring, fine distinctions, and bold judgments set down at the speed of thought." --Lorin Stein, The Paris Review online "[Malcolms] portraits of the storytellers . . . are glorious. Without any diminishment of her critical eye, she seems like shes having more fun--when she describes Gene Stratton-Porter writing deranged childrens books, or Julia Margaret Cameron admiring Englands finest beards, or Blair Waldorf sulking over caviar at the Plaza." --Molly Fischer, The New York Observer "Janet Malcolm offers a penetrating new collection of essays . . . Shes so penetrating, in fact--and her writing so seductive and entertaining--that I always begin reading her books in a kind of critical defensive crouch. . . She might be the most gifted scene-setter in American journalism. . . Shes so deft an observer--so rich are her descriptions and insights--that you might find yourself rushing through a piece and only remarking afterward how fine her sentences are." --Michael Robbins, The Chicago Tribune "Malcolm has solidified her reputation as a guide who can expertly help readers through, as her New Yorker colleague Ian Frazier writes in the introduction to Forty-One False Starts , a good big mess. One is the sheer pleasure of her rich descriptive power, her sentences turned like spindles on a lathe. There is the historical interest: reminders of who was once fashionable, should one care. There is the cruelly perfect aim of her insults. But there is, above all, the unequaled glimpse into the mind of Malcolm the critic, which is as close as were likely to get to the mind of Malcolm, one of our smartest, best writers, someone whose personal inscrutability and elusiveness I regret all the time." --Mark Oppenheimer, The Nation "Malcolms severity, her terrifying neutrality-like a teacher who is capable of handling even her most despised pupils no differently than the ones she secretly adores-is part of what makes her a brilliant writer. It is also why her writing does not occasion adolescent reverence and why her image is not printed in fashion magazines. You discover Didion in high school and you read her on the beach. Malcolm you discover in college-or after-and read before you do your own work....[She] is a priestly figure; an aura of quiet surrounds her work. She is always in control....Reading even the most cerebral of her sentences, you feel smart by association rather than dumb by comparison." --Alice Gregory, Slate "Bringing together a quarter-centurys worth of subtle, sharply observed essays on artists and writers, this collection chronicles not just life events and artistic influences, but also the amorphous subjectivity of biography itself . . . These unstinting essays investigate how a consensus forms relating to a body of work or an artistic movement, how attitudes toward art change over time, and how artistic legacies are managed--or mismanaged--by children and heirs." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review and pick of the week) Excerpt from Book FORTY-ONE FALSE STARTS 1994 1 There are places in New York where the citys anarchic, unaccommodating spirit, its fundamental, irrepressible aimlessness and heedlessness have found especially firm footholds. Certain transfers between subway lines, passageways of almost transcendent sordidness; certain sites of torn-down buildings where parking lots have silently sprung up like fungi; certain intersections created by illogical confluences of streets-these express with particular force the citys penchant for the provisional and its resistance to permanence, order, closure. To get to the painter David Salles studio, walking west on White Street, you have to traverse one of these disquieting intersections-that of White and Church Streets and an interloping Sixth Avenue-which has created an unpleasantly wide expanse of street to cross, interrupted by a wedge-shaped island on which a commercial plant nursery has taken up forlorn and edgy residence, surrounding itself with a high wire fence and keeping truculently irregular hours. Other businesses that have arisen around the intersection-the seamy Baby Doll Lounge, with its sign offering GO-GO GIRLS; the elegant Ristorante Arquà; the nameless grocery and Lotto center; the dour Kinney parking lot-have a similar atmosphere of insularity and transience. Nothing connects with anything else, and everything looks as if it might disappear overnight. The corner feels like a no mans land and-if one happens to be thinking about David Salle-looks like one of his paintings. Salles studio, on the second floor of a five-story loft building, is a long room lit with bright, cold overhead light. It is not a beautiful studio. Like the streets outside, it gives no quarter to the visitor in search of the picturesque. It doesnt even have a chair for the visitor to sit in, unless you count a backless, half-broken metal swivel chair Salle will offer with a murmur of inattentive apology. Upstairs, in his living quarters, it is another story. But down here everything has to do with work and with being alone. A disorderly profusion of printed pictorial matter covers the surfaces of tables in the middle of the room: art books, art journals, catalogs, brochures mingle with loose illustrations, photographs, odd pictures ripped from magazines. Scanning these complicated surfaces, the visitor feels something of the sense of rebuff he feels when looking at Salles paintings, a sense that this is all somehow none of ones business. Here lie the sources of Salles postmodern art of "borrowed" or "quoted" images-the reproductions of famous old and modern paintings, the advertisements, the comics, the photographs of nude or half-undressed women, the fabric and furniture designs that he copies and puts into his paintings-but ones impulse, as when coming into a room of Salles paintings, is to politely look away. Salles hermeticism, the private, almost secretive nature of his interests and tastes and intentions, is a signature of his work. Glancing at the papers he has made no effort to conceal gives one the odd feeling of having broken into a locked desk drawer. On the walls of the studio are five or six canvases, on which Salle works simultaneously. In the winter of 1992, when I began visiting him in his studio, he was completing a group of paintings for a show in Paris in April. The paintings had a dense, turgid character. Silk-screen excerpts from Indian architectural ornaments, chair designs, and photographic images of a woman wrapped in cloth were overlaid with drawings of some of the forms in Duchamps The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even , rendered in slashing, ungainly brushstrokes, together with images of coils of rope, pieces of fruit, and eyes. Salles earlier work had been marked by a kind of spaciousness, sometimes an emptiness, such as surrealist works are prone to. But here everything was condensed, impacted, mired. The paintings were like an ugly mood. Salle himself, a slight, handsome man with shoulder-length hair, which he wears tied back, like a matador, was feeling bloody-minded. He was going to be forty the following September. He had broken up with his girlfriend, the choreographer and dancer Karole Armitage. His moment was passing. Younger painters were receiving attention. He was being passed over. But he was also being attacked. He was not looking forward to the Paris show. He hated Paris, with its "heavily subsidized aestheticism." He disliked his French dealer … 2 In a 1991 interview with the screenwriter Becky Johnston, during a discussion of what Johnston impatiently called "this whole Neo-Expressionist Zeitgeist Postmodernist What-ever-you-want-to-call-it Movement" and its habit of "constantly looking backward and reworking or recontextualizing art history," the painter David Salle said, with disarming frankness, "You mustnt underestimate the extent to which all this was a process of educating ourselves. Our generation was pathetically educated, just pathetic beyond imagination. I was better educated than many. Julian"-the painter Julian Schnabel-"was totally uneducated. But I wasnt much better, frankly. We had to educate ourselves in a hundred different ways. Because if you had been hanging around the Conceptual artists, all you learned was the Frankfurt School. It was as if nothing existed before or after. So part of it was the pledge of self-education-you know, going to Venice, looking at great paintings, looking at great architecture, looking at great furniture-and having very early the opportunity to kind of buy stuff. Thats a form of self-education. Its not just about acquisition. It was a tremendous explosion of information and knowledge." To kind of buy stuff. What is the difference between buying stuff and kind of buying it? Is "kind of buying" buying with a bad conscience, buying with the ghost of the Frankfurt School grimly looking over your shoulder and smiting its forehead as it sees the money actually leave your hand? This ghost, or some relative of it, has hung over all the artists who, like Salle, made an enormous amount of money in the eighties, when they were still in their twenties or barely in their thirties. In the common perception, there is something unseemly about young people getting rich. Getting rich is supposed to be the reward for hard work, preferably arriving when you are too old to enjoy it. And the spectacle of young millionaires who made their bundle not from business or crime but from avant-garde art is particularly offensive. The avant-garde is supposed to be the conscience of the culture, not its id. 3 All during my encounter with the artist David Salle-he and I met for interviews in his studio, on White Street, over a period of two years-I was acutely conscious of his money. Even when I got to know him and like him, I couldnt dispel the disapproving, lefty, puritanical feeling that would somehow be triggered each time we met, whether it was by the sight of the assistant at a sort of hair-salon receptionists station outside the studio do∨ or by the expensive furniture of a fifties corporate style in the upstairs loft where he lives; or by the mineral water he would bring out during our talks and pour into white paper cups, which promptly lost their take-out-counter humbleness and assumed the hauteur of the objects in the design collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Salle was one of the fortunate art stars of the eighties-young men and women plucked from semi-poverty and transformed into millionaires by genies disguised as art dealers. The idea of a rich avant-garde has never sat well with members of my generation. Serious artists, as we know them or like to think of them, are people who get by but do not have a lot of money. They live with second or third wives or husbands and with children from the various marriages, and they go to Cape Cod in the summer. Their apartments are filled with faded Persian carpets and cat-clawed sofas and beautiful and odd objects bought before anyone else saw their beauty. Salles loft was designed by an architect. Everything in it is sleek, cold, expensive, unused. A slight sense of quotation marks hovers in the air, but it is very slight-it may not even be there-and it doesnt dispel the atmosphere of dead-serious connoisseurship by which the room is dominated. 4 During one of my visits to the studio of the artist David Salle, he told me that he never revises. Every brushstroke is irrevocable. He doesnt correct or repaint, ever. He works under the dire conditions of performance. Everything counts, nothing may be taken back, everything must always go relentlessly forward, and a mistake may be fatal. One day, he showed me a sort of murdered painting. He had worked on it a little too long, taken a misstep, killed it. 5 The artist David Salle and I are sitting at a round table in my apartment. He is a slight, handsome man of thirty-nine, with dark shoulder-length hair worn tightly sleeked back and bound with a rubber band, accentuating his appearance of quickness and lightness, of being sort of streamlined. He wears elegant, beautifully polished shoes and speaks in a low, cultivated voice. His accent has no trace of the Midwest, where he grew up, the son of second-generation Russian Jewish parents. It has no affectation, either. He is agreeable, ironic, a little detached. "I cant remember what we talked about last time," he says. "I have no memory. I re Details ISBN0374534586 Author Janet Malcolm Language English ISBN-10 0374534586 ISBN-13 9780374534585 Media Book Format Paperback Residence New York City, NY, US Year 2014 Short Title 41 FALSE STARTS Imprint Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2014-05-13 NZ Release Date 2014-05-13 US Release Date 2014-05-13 UK Release Date 2014-05-13 Pages 320 Publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc Publication Date 2014-05-13 Subtitle eEssays on Artists and Writers DEWEY 700 Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:79057490;

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