in Culture Digest | 22 DEC 17

Weekend Reading List

The revolutionary power of joy, the pleasures of the small magazine and Charles Mingus’s eggnog: what to read (and drink) this weekend

in Culture Digest | 22 DEC 17

Charles Mingus, 1976. Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons

  • In an age of perpetual inward-looking self-monitoring, it’s more important than ever to search for a radical happiness: Lynne Segal writes about the revolutionary power of joy.
     
  • 'What happens to language when that country doles out both bombs and aid – are we then forbidden from speaking about the bombs?’ Sukjong Hong on the multi-tonal poetry of Don Mee Choi.
     
  • ‘Our culture is terrified of sexually-awakened girls’: Lauren Elkin on how the petition to remove Balthus’s Thérèse Dreaming (1938) from the Met would erase an interior life.
     
  • The usual musical symbols for sex can, in the wrong hands, become 'a sort of sonic pornography in itself, leaving sound objectified and caricatured.’ Don’t miss Philip Clark on works which demonstrate other ways of marrying sound and body.
     
  • 'A little magazine is like a little gallery in an obscure, forgotten corner. What a pleasure to know a little place where you might discover one or two or three new things.’ From 2015, Etel Adnan on the charms of the small magazine.
     
  • And it’s time to crack out Charles Mingus’s punchy eggnog recipe.
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