*True Notebooks: A Writer's Year at Juvenile Hall by Mark Salzman. This book is an excellent non-fiction account of writer Mark Salzman’s time teaching a creative writing class at a juvenile detention center in Los Angeles. His students are just teenagers, but the crimes they are charged with are so severe they are being tried as adults. And regrets about there cases, the gangs and families waiting for them in the outside world, and the choices they made that led them to prison consume the vignettes the boys write during Mark’s visits.
My boyfriend gave the book to me for the holidays and I couldn’t be more pleased with it—I’m about half way through the it now, but I would finish it all tonight if I didn’t have to pack. He joked that the book was an apt answer to the question “Why write well?”—a Raymond Pettibon quote written on a popular UChicago t-shirt—but I am impressed by how the boys’ honest, unadorned language answer the question “Why write at all?” in the first few chapters, both for themselves and for Mark, who portrays himself as shallow, quick to stereotype and afraid of Central Juvenile Hall’s inmates in the first chapters.
The next two gifts are both art books—which reminds me how absent visual art has been in my life since I provisionally nixed an Art History major in favor of Fundamentals: Issues and Texts. I’m taking an Art History class this quarter, but these texts should hold me over until then:
*Solar System & Rest Rooms: Writings and Interviews with Mel Bochner, 1965–2007
I worked at the San Diego Museum of Art for almost two years in high school, giving tours and teaching children about art during Family Weekends. One of my favorite exhibitions (and probably the most challenging to tour) was of Mel Bochner, a conceptual artist who played with language, transparency and representation in very monochromatic, symmetrical and patterned drawings and installations. Like Bochner, I am fascinated with the question “How do we articulate what we think about what we see?” or in other words, how do we use language to express how we feel, think and live from an intellectual premise? The book opens with one piece that I think exemplifies this conundrum: “Language is not Transparent,” (1970) a phrase written in chalk on a wall of the L.A. County Museum of Art, is an installation which explores how writing and art lend immediacy to an abstract and not at all transparent idea.
I’ve only skimmed the book so far, but I’m already pleased to read about Bochner’s relationship to the philosopher Wittgenstein who examines similar concepts in Philosophical Investigations, a text I keep returning to since I arrived at the University.
* Paul Klee: Selected by Genius, 1917-1933
ed. By Roland Doschka
Klee is just fantastic; I don’t have much to say here besides awe over this full-color volume of some of Klee’s best works—a mix of abstract, German expressionism, and witty, swirling images that don’t quite fall into any one art movement. I’ll have to visit the Art Institute of Chicago this winter to see some of his paintings and etchings up-close again. What, a girl can’t read all the time?
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