Will Wiles at Literary Review:
Purism was intended as a way of uniting the rigours of classicism with the modernity of the machine age. Flat planes of colour were combined with a highly symbolic visual language. Its most famous adherent was Fernand Léger. At the Ozenfant Academy, this slightly chilly left-brain philosophy of art existed alongside a dictatorial regime. Students were instructed in drawing with unforgiving hard pencils and giant sheets of paper, and encouraged towards exactness of line – sketching was a dirty word. They drew the same model, who held the same pose for two weeks. The actress Dulcie Gray, who attended the school, recalled that in the winter, the side of the model nearest the stove turned scarlet, while the other side was blue with cold. If the morning’s drawings passed muster, students were permitted to paint. A chart on the wall showed the colours they were allowed to use; the paint was to be applied according to an approved technique which yielded a consistent finish.
Nevertheless, Ozenfant inspired great loyalty and affection among his students. Indeed, his enthusiastic, sanguine character is one of the most appealing aspects of the story Darwent tells and helps explain why he stuck with the subject through all those disappointing hunts in the archives.
more here.
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We’d heard about the “€1 house” programme in which poor, depopulating towns put their abandoned or unused buildings up for sale. The programme, I soon learned, was actually a loose collection of schemes that economically struggling towns used to lure outside investment and new residents. The campaigns seemed to me to have been largely successful – some towns had sold all their listed properties. I pored over dozens of news articles that had served as €1 house promotion over the years. By attracting international buyers to a house that “costs less than a cup of coffee”, as one piece put it, some of Italy’s most remote towns now had new life circulating through them. Many local officials had come to see €1 house experiments as their potential salvation.
I began researching the lives of two 19th-century figures who have both been described as disinhibited. The first was a railroad construction foreman, Phineas Gage. The second was the photographer Eadweard Muybridge (born Edward Muggeridge in England). The two were contemporaries, and both lived in San Francisco for a time. Both were injured in accidents. But there the similarities end. Despite Muybridge’s brain injury being well documented and despite it transforming him, as some claim, in profound and disastrous ways, he scarcely features in the brain science literature, and his legacy remains predominantly that of an artistic and technical genius. Gage, by contrast, became famous for the outrageous behaviour that supposedly resulted from his injury. The literature paints him as a kind of avatar for behavioural dysfunction, with every other aspect of his life overshadowed by his status as disinhibition’s patient zero. Why are the legacies of these two ‘disinhibited’ people so different? I believe the answer tells us almost everything we need to know about the condition, about its origins and its continued use today.
America has 
“I suspect that the real moral thinkers end up, wherever they may start, in botany,” the essayist Annie Dillard mused in 1974. “We know nothing for certain, but we seem to see that the world turns upon growing.” The work of the British nature writer Richard Mabey is proof of Dillard’s wisdom. He has been thinking about botany since the 1970s, when he published “Food for Free,” his classic guide to edible plants, and his interest in vegetable life has always yielded a corresponding interest in human obligations. For him, botany is both a science and an ethics, and its primary tenet is that plants are — or ought to be — our equals.
In the late summer of 1832, England was set aflame with wonder — a glimpse of something wild and flamboyant, shimmering with the lush firstness of a world untrammeled by the boot of civilization.
I WAS TRYING TO FIGURE OUT what struck me as odd, at first, about Geoff Dyer’s new memoir, Homework, when it dawned on me: it isn’t odd. The book, that is. Formally and in terms of genre, a Dyer book almost always represents a novel (so to speak) hybrid. His scholarly projects have a way of turning into memoirs and novels. Out of Sheer Rage began as an attempt to produce a study of D. H. Lawrence but became a book about his own inability to do so (even as it remained, in the words of The Guardian, a “very strange, sort-of study of D. H. Lawrence”). But Beautiful was conceived as a work of nonfiction jazz appreciation but became, in Dyer’s own description, “as much imaginative criticism as fiction.” His works of ostensibly pure fiction, meanwhile, have tended toward the auto-fictional, to such a degree that a reader could easily forget, at least for spans of pages, that they aren’t memoir. Take, for instance, the indelibly titled Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, concerning the adventures of “Junket Jeff,” a Dyer-like avatar who moves through the world of freelance-writer assignments and celebrity art profiles (the auto-fiction gets meta-meta when you encounter a distorted-mirror story involving a character named: Geoff). Dyer has written two essayistic travelogues: Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It and White Sands, each of which involves, again in his own unapologetic words, “a mixture of fiction and nonfiction.” There are also two books about movies, each having to do with an individual picture—Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room (on Tarkovsky’s metaphysical masterpiece Stalker) and Broadsword Calling Danny Boy (on the World War II action flick Where Eagles Dare)—both of which are so essayistic and at the same time hyper-focused, consisting entirely of Dyer’s digressive and ultra-personal responses to those films’ every scene, that they resemble neither “cinema studies” nor general-interest film crit. One could go on. James Wood put it well, writing about Dyer in The New Yorker, when he described the books as “so different from one another, so peculiar to their author, and so inimitable that each founded its own, immediately self-dissolving genre.”
Allison Rosen
Last year,
It was an anxious summer. The American elections loomed, the sitting president had just been unmasked as an egomaniacal member of the walking undead, and here on the continent, across the Atlantic, Europe was about to elect the most right-wing parliament in the history of the European Union. The streets were plastered with campaign posters. In Germany, high over the boulevards, a well-known comedian gripped an enormous toothbrush and flashed her pearly whites. “Wählen ist wie Zähneputzen. Machst du’s nicht, wird’s braun!” read the accompanying text, or, “Voting is like brushing your teeth: don’t do it, and things’ll go brown.” The joke is that the Nazis wore brownshirts. To “go brown” is to go Nazi. In essence, the suggested defense against such a future was “Brush your teeth for democracy.” Or worse: “We are the guardians of oral and political hygiene—be more like us.” You slobs. It wasn’t a message endorsed by the Democratic Party or its handpicked candidate, Kamala Harris, who spent the final weeks of her abbreviated but competent campaign warning against the dangers of fascism. But it could have been.