Here's what I liked best:
Max Klinger etchings from a surrealist book about a glove Weird stuff: the glove rescued at sea, the glove dreamed of in a nightmare, the glove drives a classical chariot. He's got all these vaguely erotic, exciting dream images. I find I've collected a few in the past for my image collections. Also something really wonderful I’m generally not a fan of art videos, but James Nares did something called “Street” which is sixteen hours of film shot out a car window in NYC, very high def film, the kind used for slo mo of sipping hummingbirds, etc. He took this film and slowed it down, cut and edited to one hour, and it is extraordinary: big screen, monumental people, like watching people on the subway, but if they look up you don’t have to look away.
Everyone looks somehow dignified and lovely. They aren''t smiling, with a few exceptions (a woman talking on her cell phone). They seem deep inside themselves, walking, crossing streets, most not engaged with each other at the moment. You have an illusion of seeing their true selves, and these true selves are competent, going about their business, figuring out what they have to do, or mulling over what they've done. A kind of focus and determination (they’re in themselves so fully) that gives dignity and a kind of beauty.
Also birds, trash birds, English sparrows flickering like gifts from god rising instead of coming down from heaven, and a landing pigeon of extraordinary beauty its wings, its curled pink feet, a little ruffle of feathers in the wind on the back of its neck.
I googled images from the project, but they just seem to be snapshots: it’s the motion that makes it, the sense of going inside someone else's time.










convoluted
for my taste. This one is certainly highly plotted and also
melodramatic, but the main character makes suspension of disbelief well
worthwhile.
it
sets as its subject Italian immigrants, although many other groups and
individuals are included. One poem is addressed by the Italian and
Jewish victims of the Shirtwaist Triangle Factory fire "to the Chinese
girls, the Indonesian girls,/ the Vietnamese, the Taiwanese/ girls
girls" of today. The most brutal poems come out of the 1911 Shirtwaist
Triangle Factory fire--and seem fearfully relevant as I write this a few
days after 








books on the
and partly woman-led Commune, which is followed by terrible, bloody reprisals from the ruling class.
Fred Arment's thriller The Synthesis
is readable and fast-paced with the the main character repeatedly
being chased and whisked off and saved by unknown people. There are
conspiracies and conspiracies against the conspirators, with the main
plot element a financial plan to stop history. Intrerestingly, Arment's
nonfiction book released in 2012 is called The Elements of Peace: How Nonviolence Works.
This is a guide to nonviolent conflict resolution with case studies of
methods for maintaining or achieving peace. It would have been
interesting to see some nonviolent conflict resolution in the novel. But
maybe by definition that would not have been a thriller.

