Robert Adams – Why People Photograph (mp3) Blimey this is good. Sparkling critical writing – lent to me by my friend Dualtagh Herr. And wrestling throughout with the big question for critics: does writing about art diminish it? The book’s assembled from essays and reviews published all over the place and it makes such beautiful [...]
John Szarkowski – The Idea of Louis Sullivan (mp3) Slash Reading’s first coffee table book. And what a book. In 1954, John Szarkoswski won a Guggenheim award. He was a thirty-ish photographer and art historian who went on to become the most important man in photography and essentially define the canon of art photography as [...]
Roland Barthes – Empire of Signs (mp3) This is beautiful, enduring stuff. Unlike, I feel obliged to assert, most of the other structuralists and post-structuralists whose work I soaked up as an eager photography student in the eighties (my fellow students will laugh at my use of the word ‘eager’. Let them). Barthes was a [...]
Towards a Cosmic Music – Karlheinz Stockhausen (mp3) Twentieth Century music’s grandest fruitcake, Stockhausen was a fascinating figure: miles out of the musical mainstream but not a member of the avant-garde elite either. He acquired a cult of adoring disciples (plenty of apostates too) apparently by strength of personality alone. He’s my favourite kind of [...]
John McNeil – Something New Under the Sun (mp3) Subtitled, ‘an environmental history of the twentieth century’, this is rip-roaring stuff. Astonishing breadth of research – from rivers in the Urals to freon production in India via the contribution of lead additives to the success of World War II fighters (lead added to fuel reduces [...]
Christopher Headington – Peter Pears (mp3) From an affectionate official biography: a vivid snapshot of the lives of the Soviet cultural elite in the mid-Sixties from a visit Pears and Britten made in 1966. Buy Peter Pears: A Biography from Amazon.
Walter Benjamin – One-way Street (mp3) This is a section from the essay One-way Street from the collection of the same name. You’ll remember another essay from this book: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, but this one’s just as startling. Benjamin’s language is difficult. Even J.A. Underwood’s modern translation can’t [...]
Evan Eisenberg – The Recording Angel (mp3) Eisenberg’s a clever and funny writer of features for The Atlantic and The New Yorker. His book is not a history – its an eccentric, anecdotal excursion into the psychology, economics and aesthetics of recorded music and what’s fascinating is that it barely grazes the digital era and [...]
David Crystal – Language and the Internet (mp3) Crystal is a language genius and a brilliant communicator – there are enough books about language written or edited by him on my shelves to make a decent season in their own right and he’s always on the radio and TV talking the absolutists and the pedants [...]
Neal Stephenson – In The Beginning Was The Command Line (mp3) Hymn of praise and potted history, Stephenson’s lovely little book is about the pre-history of our present computerphilia. Buy it In the Beginning… Was the Command Line from Amazon.