Richard Estes' Realism

Patterson Sims, Jessica May, Helen Ferrulli
Portland Museum of Art
5 out of 5 stars
Reviewed by Nancy

Summary

Richard Estes (b. 1932) is one of the most celebrated adopters of Photorealism; his paintings are characterized by painstaking detail that mimics the clarity and accuracy of photographs. Estes’ most famous canvases from the 1970s depict New York’s urban landscape, and his manner of painting reflections in a multitude of metal and glass surfaces displays astounding technical skill. In his subsequent career, Estes has continued to demonstrate his superlative ability to show complex plays of light and shadow in Maine seascapes, views of Venetian lagoons, and nighttime street scenes.


Accompanying Estes’ first solo exhibition of paintings in the United States in over two decades, Richard Estes’ Realism surveys fifty years of his work and places him within the historical narrative of realist painting. The authors explore the ongoing modernist dialogue between camera and canvas, and discuss the situation of Estes’ work at the crossroads of painting and photography. Fifty full-page plates showcase the amazing precision of Estes’ paintings, and a thorough chronology and bibliography provide an enlightening account of his life. This handsome book offers a lavish presentation of Estes’ spellbinding body of work that attests to his enduring artistic impact.

My Review

It was a rainy Saturday and a perfect time to go to my local art museum and discover the work of photorealists Richard Estes, Robert Bechtle, Ralph Goings, Audrey Flack, and others.

The exhibit was small, but very well displayed and comprehensive. I enjoyed having a latte in the café and buying a pair of colorful socks made in Vermont from the museum store.

I loved Robert Bechtle’s subdued suburban scenes and classic cars.




Audrey Flack’s bright and colorful still lifes are shiny and eye catching.




I especially loved Richard Estes’ realistic paintings of New York with their depth, history, and abundance of reflective surfaces.





After seeing the exhibit, I went immediately in search of books about Richard Estes and came across this gorgeous, well-organized book that presents a thorough and absorbing account of the artist’s life, his work, and his influences. 50 pages are devoted to full-color plates of his paintings from New York and other places he’s traveled to.

The book ends with a chronology of the artist’s life and career beginning in 1932 with his birth and ending in 2013 with marriage to his longtime partner, Chris Jones.


Mr. Estes at his home in Northeast Harbor, Maine. RALPH GARDNER/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

This book is a treasure, and I’m thrilled that my library had a copy.

ICE BY ANNA KAVAN...A SLIPSTREAM POST-APOCALYPTIC NOVEL

Ice by Anna Kavan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“As her fate, she accepted the world of ice, shining, shimmering, dead; she resigned herself to the triumph of glaciers and the death of the world.”



Her hair was a blizzard, a shimmering cascade of pale luminous moonlight. She was fragile as if made of glass and crystal, built like a waif with pallid skin and bruised eyes. She is an ice sculpture carved out of a glacier that is shattered and reassembled time and time again. He needs her, desires her, craves her. He wants to clench the slender bones of her wrist and grip the gaunt thrust of her hip.

He finds her as the world is ending.

She belongs to another, but then he realizes that she is discontented. ”While she was happy I had dissociated myself, been outside the situation. Now I felt implicated, involved with her again.”

HE?

The unreliable narrator of this tale is suffering from daytime apparitions and nighttime terrors. The lurid concoctions of his agitated mind bleed certainty into the fantastical fooling, not only himself, but also this reader. He has seized his own deceptions and sees them for what they are, but understanding and containing them are two very different things. ”The hallucination of one moment did not fit the reality of the next.”

Ice is advancing across the Earth. He has the means to save her or at least put off the inevitable.

He is chasing a wraith. He loses her and finds her again only to have her turn to smoke in his hands. He knows she is real though everything must be questioned. She hates him. She misses him. She expects him to save her as she bashes him with her animosity. When he dreams of her, she is dead.

”I felt I had been defrauded: I was the only person entitled to inflict wounds. I leaned forward and touched her cold skin.”

He has a rival.

A doppleganger.

The split half of himself who is assertive, brutal, and obsessively possessive, The Narrator refers to him as The Warden, but it is unclear exactly who he is. I have lingering doubts about The Warden’s identity. Is he separate from The Narrator or is he merely just another personality that he jumps to when he needs to be someone else? Someone who can control the girl. The one who can remind her of who she is.

”Systematic bullying when she was most vulnerable had distorted the structure of her personality, made a victim of her, to be destroyed, either by things or by human beings, people or fjords and forests; it made no difference, in any case she could not escape. The irreparable damage inflicted had long ago rendered her fate inevitable.”

She is a victim, but he is starting to understand that he is a victim too. In her presence, sometimes he becomes someone unacceptable. Her very delicacy, her fracturability makes him want to hurt her, makes him need to hurt her.

Kindness is something he learns too late.

The world is so disturbing because he knows it comes from within his own mind.

Bruce Sterling termed the phrase slipstream to describe this type of writing long after this novel was published. He wrote: "...this is a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility." I knew after reading only a few pages that I was going to have to read this novel quickly, feverishly, if I had any chance of staying in the boat as I swirled without paddles through the mind of Anna Kavan. I put Franz Kafka in the boat with me, but he too is a fragile soul, and became sea sick with the changing directions of this twisted plot. There are Kafka moments, especially when The Narrator is dealing with a government bureaucracy that is becoming more and more detached as the world becomes smaller.


Anna Kavan was also a painter. This is her self-portrait.

Anna Kavan, AKA Helen Emily Woods, AKA Helen Ferguson, suffered from depression and heroin addiction. She was in and out of treatment centers her whole life. She attempted suicide, but survived each attempt. Many people believed that she passed away from an overdose in 1968, but she actually died from a heart attack. She burned all of her correspondence and her diaries before she died. This is truly unfortunate because I have a feeling that to most of us her diaries would be like trying to read Cumbric, but to a select few it would be like finding an extension of their own brain.

I can’t help thinking The Girl in this story is Anna Kavan. A fragile woman herself whom both men and women found to be attractive. Ultimately, The Girl in the story accepts her fate, and I tend to think that Kavan reached the same conclusions with her own life. She lived in seclusion. Though venerated by many writers, most of her work was published after her death. She was a lost girl who became a lost woman, incapable of escaping the ebb and flow of a mind that obviously saw the world differently. Like The Narrator, the barrier that most of us have between real life and fanciful thoughts must have been breached for her. Everything was real, and everything was imaginary. The disparity between one or the other is a hair's difference.

This novel is bleak and beautiful. Anna is so crafty and so lost; yet, so desperate to be found. I can already tell that I will never completely shake this novel off. I will remember the starkness of the trees, the desperate searching, the walls of ice, the escaping to be repossessed, and the nameless characters who together might form one being.

I purchased a first American hardcover edition of this book from Between the Covers Rare Books in New Jersey.

You can find more of my writing on my blog at http://www.jeffreykeeten.com .


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The Last Word

The Last Word by Lisa Lutz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When the parental unit goes on strike, Izzy finds that she's bitten off more than she can chew running Spellman Investigations but that is far from her only problem. Her friend and former client, Edward Slayter, has Alzheimers. Henry Stone wants to talk to her. Her brother keeps tricking her into spending time with her niece. And exactly what is a Conflict Resolution Specialist. Oh, and there's a little matter of embezzlement...

The Last Word is the sixth Spellman book published and the last to date. As the series goes on, I feel like a parrot and not the dead one from the infamous Monty Python sketch. How many different ways can I declare my love for this series?

As per usual, the cases are secondary and the mysteries surrounding the various members of the Spellman family and their associates take center stage. What's with the parents? What's with Rae? What's with Demetrius? Who slipped Slayter the mickey? So many questions.

One thing I love about the Spellman Files that I've likely mentioned before is that Lisa Lutz manages to craft a mystery with a lot of laughs without making it descend into ridiculousness. While there is hilarity, it's of the realistic sort and not cutesy unbelievable crap.

I also like that the characters aren't static. They change with every book. I like where The Last Word left the Spellman clan but I'll be ready when the next book comes.

Still no detective babies. Four out of five stars.

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Dismas Hardy Lures Abe Glitsky Out of Retirement and into Trouble

Reviewed by James L. Thane
Four out of five stars

I've long been a fan of John Lescroart's series featuring San Francisco lawyer Dismas Hardy and Homicide Inspector Abe Glitsky, and so it's always a treat to open a new book in the series. Glitsky has recently been forced to resign from his position as head of the Homicide department and is at loose ends. Feeling like he's too young to be retired, he's spending his days reading, watching television, and generally being bored as hell.

On the night before Thanksgiving, Hal Chase, who is a guard at the jail run by the county sheriff, goes out to the airport to pick up his brother who's flying in for the holiday. When the two men return to the Chase house, they find Hal's two young children in bed asleep. Hal's wife, Katie, is nowhere to be found and a few drops of blood on the floor suggest that she has been the victim of foul play.

Although this begins as a missing persons case, it quickly becomes a homicide investigation, even though as yet, Katie's body has not been found. The most logical suspect in such cases is always the surviving spouse and the detectives are strongly suspicious of Hal Chase from the beginning. There were serious problems in the marriage and while Hal has something of an alibi, it's not air tight.

As a sheriff's deputy, Chase is no dummy when it comes to this sort of thing and he quickly realizes that he needs a very good lawyer. His wife had been in therapy with Dismas Hardy's wife, Frannie, and so Chase asks Hardy to represent him. Shortly thereafter, Katie Chase's body is discovered in a wooded area near their home and Hal finds himself in jail, indicted by a grand jury for the murder.

Wyatt Hunt, the P.I. that Hardy usually relies on, is out of town for a while and so Hardy appeals to Abe Glitsky to investigate the case for him. Glitsky agrees, and what initially appeared to have been a relatively simple case soon turns into something much more complex and seriously dangerous for a lot of the parties involved, Glitsky included.

While Glitsky has played a prominent role in all of the books in this series, Harding has always been the principal character, usually defending someone that Glitsky's homicide department has charge with a killing . There's usually a lot of great courtroom dramatics, and these are the things I like best about the series. In this book, though, Glitsky is really on center stage and there are no court room scenes.

It's a fun read; it's well-plotted and there's a lot of great banter among the characters, which is another attractive hallmark of the series. I enjoyed the book very much, and it should appeal to large numbers of crime fiction fans, whether they are familiar with the series or not. But as far as favorites go, this is one that will fall into the middle ranks of the books in this series for me, simply because I favor the books in which I can watch Hardy at work in the court room.

I Smell A Rat...and It Stinks

The Stainless Steel Rat Returns by Harry Harrison
Reviewed by Jason Koivu
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Ever pick up a book you're in the middle of and start reading it just to finish the fucker? That's where I was at with this. It's a cold, hateful place...

The Stain Steel Rat, this sort of zany James Bond in outer space action/comedy series spanned about 50 years. There were decade-long gaps between books. Writers' styles can change over time. I get that and I'm willing to except change. Maybe a character unintentionally evolves. That's fine. I'll roll with it. But when the book series is meant to be a comedy and it is not funny, I will not roll with that.

James "Slippery Jim" diGriz started out in book one as a sarcastic bastard. He was a loose canon, fun, kind of like a nasty Han Solo at the beginning of Stars Wars. By the end of the series (this book is the last one, btw), Jim is now morally upright and utterly boring, like Solo in Return of the Jedi. Returns came out 12 years after the prior book and a whopping 50 years after the first. Was Harry Harrison rusty? Did he forget how to write diGriz? Or did he want to turn his anti-hero into a good guy and leave us with a warm fuzzy for the fella? Whatever the case, he didn't come with a good game plan for this changed character.

In general, Harrison's writing has eroded. There's lot of mundane dialogue. It's not funny or even necessary. The sentences themselves just feel mechanical. Things happen, it looks like it might be rough going, but time and time again the hero fixes it and we're off on our merry way. No tension. No excitement. No reason to care.

Maybe this deserves a half star more than I gave it, but I'm not in a generous mood. Harrison fucked me on this one and he's getting nothing more from me. Nothing! I'm not even shelving this under my "humor" or "comedy" categories. There's no reason to.

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A Place Beyond: Finding Home in Arctic Alaska

Nick Jans
Alaska Northwest Books
3 out of 5 stars
Reviewed by Nancy

Summary

Nick Jans leads us into his “found” home --- the Eskimo village of Ambler, Alaska, and the vast wilderness around it. In his powerful essays, the rhythms of daily arctic life blend with high adventure --- camping among the wolves, traveling with Inupiat hunters, witnessing the Kobuk River at spring breakup.

The poignancy of a village funeral comes to life, hordes of mosquitoes whine against a tent, a grizzly stands etched against the snow --- just a sampling of the images and events rendered in Jan’s transparent, visual prose. Moments of humor are offset by haunting insights, and by thoughtful reflections on contemporary Inupiaq culture, making A Place Beyond a book to read and enjoy.

My Review

Nick Jans, teacher and writer, looking to flee “a future that looked all too certain”, drove five-thousand miles to Alaska.

In these simply written, brief, and pleasurable essays, Jans vividly describes the mundane aspects of his life in Arctic Alaska, as well as the wild and unpredictable. He writes of repairing a snowmobile, camping among wolves, his students’ love for basketball, the treacherous mosquito season, the breaking up of the Kobuk River, and hunting with the Inupiat Eskimos. He writes movingly of a friend’s death and burial, and a Christmas Eve celebration.

I have some fascination with Alaska and was thrilled to win this through the “First Reads” program on Goodreads.

If you are at all interested in Alaska, Inupiat life and culture, wilderness, and changing seasons, then I recommend this thoughtful and introspective collection of essays.

The Centaur by John Updike
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

”It must be terrible to know so much.”

A pause.

“It is,” my father said. “It’s hell.”


Chiron depicted in Roman art. The Greeks always depicted him with human front legs. Chiron educated the children of the gods and goddesses so he is an apt mythological creature for George Caldwell to identify with.

George Caldwell is a school teacher at Olinger High School. He struggles with teaching, not because he isn’t good at it, but because he wants it to be so much more. His mind is so expansive that it often slips the bonds of Earth. One of those moments when he is taken by a flight of fancy was with Vera Hummel, a teacher as well, and also a lovely woman desired by all. John Updike is able to show off his knowledge of mythological creatures as Caldwell morphs into Chiron, and she of course becomes Venus. They discuss the gods and goddesses while flirting outrageously with each other. She extorts him to help her.

”Come, Chiron, crack my maidenhead; it hampers my walking.”

It is a good thing I wasn’t drinking coffee when I read that because it would have been spewed all over this book.

The narrative switches between George and his son Peter. Peter is a student at the same high school his father teaches at. He adores his father, but at the same time his father is so exasperating. George is self-deprecating to a painful point, and as an extension of his own view of himself, he wears a ratty cap and a dilapidated coat that make him look more like a bum than a well educated teacher. Peter is afraid for his father because he seems so vulnerable, so inept at the most mundane things, so lost in thoughts that can never be solved. In a moment of frustration, he yells at his father.

”But there’s nobody else like you Daddy. There’s nobody else like you in the world.”

The plot of the novel revolves around George and Peter trying to get home each day and encountering Herculean obstructions that keep them from arriving at their house in the country. George didn’t want to move to the country, but his wife yearned to be on the family farm. Some of George’s continuing issues with the car might have a lot to do with him never intending to own one. He prefered to live in town where he could walk everywhere he needed to be. After one of these thwarted attempts, they end up spending the night in the Hummel house. It proves to be an eye opening experience for Peter to have a day away from the chaos of their own household and have a glimpse at how normal people live. Vera truly becomes a magical goddess dispensing orange juice and bananas upon him like ambrosia.

”Intimations of Vera Hummel moved toward me from every corner of her house, every shadow, every curve of polished wood; she was a glimmer in the mirrors, a breath moving the curtains, a pollen on the nap of the arms of the chair I was rooted in.”

The novel in many ways is brilliant, reflecting an author’s mind that is brimming with intelligence and convoluted thoughts, maybe the inspiration for the labyrinth of George’s own mind. Updike does occasionally veer off course leaving the reader in the middle of the road looking in all directions for the smoke plumes of the car crash. Easily forgiven when Updike writes understated gems like the paragraph below.

”I closed my eyes and relaxed into my warm groove. The blankets my body had heated became soft chains dragging me down; my mouth held a stale ambrosia lulling me to sleep again. The lemon-yellow wallpaper, whose small dark medallions peered out from the pattern with faces like frowning cats, remained printed, negatively in red, on my eyelids.”

Peter becomes an artist. His father was a teacher. His grandfather was a priest. ”Priest, teacher, artist: the classic degeneration.” It did leave me wondering at the end of the book what exactly will the next generation of Caldwell’s be? Are they predestined to be teachers? Will they start the climb back to the priesthood?

I identified with both characters.

Less so with Peter as time marches me further and further away from those heady days of youth. His obsession with Penny Fogelman’s hot thighs; and yet, his fear of actually taking his clothes off in front of her were familiar counterweights from my own past. I was so skinny I thought any girl would think there was something wrong with me, like a bad case of ringworm or some wasting disease.

George’s mind is bulging with information comparable to a crammed bus enroute to Jodhpur. He sees life as larger than it could possibly be. He rises so high on the wings of his thoughts that when he crashes, it proves to be a long fall back to Earth. He battles daily with the odious, student stroking, Supervising Principal Zimmerman, who besides caressing female students also tortures George with obtuse evaluations of his teaching style. The question that plagues George is the one that eventually plagues most of us...there has to be more?

As the pendulum of time continues to duck walk me onward with my heels dragging and my hands grasping for purchase on anything to slow the motion forward, I too ask that question. It has become apparent to me that I can’t wait for some random act of the universe to send me on the proper path. The choice is really between accepting my fate, which some see as cowardly, but I see as yet another act of bravery, or I could pack up my paint kit and follow Gauguin’s footsteps to Tahiti.

Ok, well, maybe not THAT.

It does beg the question of what more is, and once we find and hogtie this mythical MORE, then what? It seems to me that most of us are just never supposed to be fulfilled. The thought of fulfillment is just depressing. It reminds me of the Matrix where they designed a world where everyone was happy and the citizens started committing suicide. We should achieve I think, but maybe not achieve too much. We always have to be left with something to dream about.


That is quite the self-satisfied smirk on John’s face in 1960, but then he can probably pull it off because he probably is the smartest person in the room.

I’m not really sure why people have quit reading John Updike. I could not put down this flawed, but wonderful book. I do hope that he does experience a resurgence of readers because there are writers in the next generation that would benefit from reading these eloquent and graceful sentences that Updike sprinkles liberally like a trail of emeralds through the texts of his books. I read this book to reconnect with his writing in anticipation of reading Updike by Adam Begley. The name of the author may be familiar to some. He is the son of Louis Begley, the writer that best carries the Updike torch forward in his own writing. However, he is 81, so someone else will soon have to shoulder the Updike legacy.

I have recently, in my hubris, launched a blog which will host my book reviews, but it will also have so much more. For example, I recently wrote a movie review of Birdman. I plan to write about whatever strikes my fancy. I thought about calling it something like The Passionate Reader, but decided I am who I am. http://www.jeffreykeeten.com


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Trail of the Spellmans

Trail of the Spellmans by Lisa Lutz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Why are Rae and David Spellman not on speaking terms? Why is Mom throwing herself into numerous hobbies? What is the link between the case Izzy is working and the one dear old Dad has his hooks in? All these questions and more will be answered in Trail of the Spellmans!

My all time favorite dysfunctional family of detectives is back in a fifth installment and I'm glad to say the level of quality hasn't diminished.

In this outing, Lisa Lutz throws a few new characters into the mix. There's the infant Spellman, Sydney, Demetrius, the wrongfully convicted man Izzy helped free in the last book, and a geriatric Spellman that I don't think was every mentioned before. In addition, old favorites like Bernie and Henry Stone also have roles.

One thing I love about the Spellman series is that the titular characters aren't stagnant. They're all growing and getting older as the series progresses. David is married with a child, Rae is quickly approaching 21, and the parents are nearing retirement age. Izzy makes some changes in this volume as well, some for the good, some for ill, and one change that made me close my Kindle for a few minutes.

As always, it was amazing watching the various plots converge. Lisa Lutz is one of the few authors that manages to surprise me a couple times in each book. I don't really know what else to say. It's a Spellman book so if you've read and enjoyed the previous four, this one should be a no brainer.

The only bad thing about this series is that there's only one more volume in existence. 4 out of 5 stars.

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A Great Debut Novel From David Joy

Reviewed by James L. Thane
4.5 out of 5 stars

This is a fantastic debut novel, beautifully written with great characters and a wonderful sense of place. Set in the rural area of Cashiers, North Carolina, the protagonist is eighteen-year-old Jacob McNeely, whom we meet one night as he climbs the town's water tower to look down on the high school parking lot as his former classmates leave the building from their graduation ceremony. In particular, Jacob is searching for Maggie, the girl he loves and whose heart he broke two years earlier.

Jacob is not graduating with his class because he left school the first moment he could to join his father in the family meth business. Jacob's father is the kingpin of the local meth industry. He launders his cash through his auto body shop and pays off the cops to look the other way. In truth, Jacob comes from a long line of outlaws and he knew at an early age that he destiny was predetermined. He's been assisting his father for a good many years already, and even if he had higher aspirations, he understands that he hasn't a prayer of achieving them.

Jacob's mother lives alone in a cabin in the woods, surrounded by Jack Pines, having long ago become addicted to her husband's product line. Jacob laments that "I wasn't old enough to remember the day Daddy sent her there. The way he told it, she was stealing crank and spent most of her time climbing around the peter tree. So he sent her to this place. Loved her too much to give her nothing, but giving her anything at all squared things so he'd never have to love her again."

While Jacob knows he'll never escape from Cashiers, he hopes that Maggie will. She's the brightest and most beautiful girl in town, and Jacob know that she's one of the few who has a chance to escape, go to college and make a real future for herself. Accordingly, though they had loved each other since they were children, he broke off the relationship two years earlier so that she would not feel trapped, bound to Cashiers through him. He still cares for her very much, though, and when he sees that the future he envisions for her might be threatened, he acts in a way to protect her, irrespective of the consequences for himself.

In the meantime, his relationship with his father becomes increasingly rocky. His father is a strict disciplinarian who expects Jacob to obey his orders without question. Jacob is not cut from the same cloth, however, and when problems arise in the meth business and things get increasingly violent, Jacob will have some hard decisions to make.

As I suggested above, this is a great read, easily on a par with the best of Daniel Woodrell's books, and I promise that anyone who enjoyed Winter's Bone, for example, is going to love this one. 4.5 stars for me--my favorite book of the year thus far, and I eagerly await David Joy's next book.

Not My Kind of Lover

Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
Reviewed by Jason Koivu
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Oh man, I wanted to like this soooo bad! So many people complained about it, but I misconstrued their complaints for prudishness or lord knows what. (NOTE TO SELF: Stop judging people's judgements until you can judge for yourself!)

But the fact is, two-thirds of the way in I was done with this. I absolutely trudged through to the end.

Why? It's not because this is basically porn. I luuuuvs me the sex! Apparently this caused quite a scandal and I can see why. The language is sexually explicit, unnecessarily so...or well, maybe not. I suppose it needed to be said at the time or at least some time. However, a person can only take so many fucks before they no longer give one.

And I wasn't turned off by the lengthy asides Lawrence takes while grinding his ax against the industrialization of England's Midlands. Like Melville's treatise on whales in the midst of his adventure novel, Lawrence had an agenda in writing Lady Chatterley's Lover and he often takes the reader out of the main story in order to linger upon his pet project. That can be distracting, but in this case it's not enough to make me hate the thing, not on the whole.

No, my main issue is with the writing, which is a big problem since there's so much of it in books. Lawrence is quite a capable writer, but he does get adverb-lazy now and then, and often repeats words for emphasis.

That last point can be effective, say when trying to instill a sense of forward motion when describing something that's going faster and faster. Occasionally the technique works for him. Usually it does not work for me. Some call it a poetic style. I call it bullshit...what do I mean? Well, allow me to Lawrence-ify it: The technique is bullshit in the most bullshitty sense, by which I mean, it is bullshit. As you see, it looks like I've explained myself, yet I've said nothing. Done with flair, it can sound lyrical, even powerful. To me, it sounds like so much hot air. And what does hot air sound like? It sounds like

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