Books Archives - Page 12 of 12

“Ziggy Stardust’s Reading Habits”

October 4, 2013 By Gretchen Williams '14

“Plenty of music fans could have guessed that David Bowie was a fan of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, since Mr. Bowie once aspired to produce a musical based on the novel. Now we have 99 other book recommendations from the Thin White Duke…”

“Elsewhere, there’s Dante’s Inferno, Homer’s Iliad and The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Min‘ by Julian Jaynes. As the A.V. Club put it: ‘David Bowie has once again shown that he’s not only far richer, sexier and more fabulous than you, but probably smarter.'” –John Williams, The New York Times, October 1st, 2013

Elisabeth Tonnard, “In This Dark Wood” (2008)

November 16, 2009 By Professor Arielle Saiber

“This book is a modern gothic. It pairs images of people walking alone in nighttime city streets with 90 different English translations I collected of the first lines of Dante’s Inferno. The images, showing a crowd of solitary figures, are selected from the same archive as used for Two of Us (the extraordinary Joseph Selle collection at the Visual Studies Workshop which contains over a million negatives from a company of street photographers working in San Francisco from the 40’s to the 70’s).
The book is set up in a repetitious way, to stress a sense of similarity, endlessness and interchangeability. The images are re-expressions of each other, and so are the texts.” —Elisabeth Tonnard

Contributed by Guy Raffa (University of Texas – Austin)

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