Urbane meditations on the history and meaning of the still life in art and literature. Essayist, poet, translator, and fiction writer Davenport (The Cardiff Team, 1996, etc.) takes as his subject the idea of the still life in art. However, he doesn—t offer any sort of academically systematic treatise of the topic. Instead, it’s more accurate to say that he takes the idea of harmonious disarray in art as a way of focusing and stimulating his own wide-ranging and historically literate imagination. Here is a conservative sample of the Davenport mode of verbal meditation: “The pipe begins to appear in Renaissance still lifes as a memento mori: life passes away like smoke. An extinguished candle usually accompanied a pipe, and books and food and musical instruments added up to the vanity of our brief life. The nineteenth century would transmute these symbols into ones of peace, cosiness, and domesticity, until in Picasso and Braque they are emblems of shrinking privacy, the precious vestiges of harmony in a distracting and insane world.” Sometimes his leaps of imagination and lists of connections strain credulity. This kind of thing can be dazzling or irritating, depending on how you feel about argument and documentation. Davenport knows this, of course, and aims by virtue of his book’s “disarray of perceptions and conjunctions” to charm his consenting partner into a like state of meditation on van Gogh, on Nietzsche, on Edgar Allen Poe, on the persistence of apples and pears in the Western imagination, on the assemblage of objects on Sherlock Holmes’s desk at 221B Baker Street. Davenport has the wonderful ability to “read” inanimate objects in their historical setting, and he seems to remember everything he ever read. The range of allusion is immense and challenging and rewarding. Davenport is a virtuoso of the literary essay, and here the magic mostly works. (8 pages b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 30, 1998
ISBN: 1-887178-85-6
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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