• print • Summer 2023

    Einstein on the Beach

    BRIAN WILSON HAS BEEN DEAF IN HIS RIGHT EAR since childhood. He mixed the Beach Boys’ albums, including Pet Sounds, in mono because he couldn’t hear them any other way. “It was sort of like being robbed of something, some pleasure of life,” he said in 1976. “I’m not complaining, but it’s a little bit of a setback.” I think the deafness might explain why the left side of his mouth reaches up when he speaks, like he’s addressing his good ear. (The affect has become more pronounced with age, but it’s visible in footage from the 1960s.) “I got one ear left and your big loud voice is killin’ it,”

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  • print • Summer 2023

    Guilty Pleasures

    IN HIS 1980 ESSAY ON THE AMERICAN SCENE, “Within the Context of No Context,” George W. S. Trow supplies an anecdote from Harvard in the early 1960s. During an art history class on the Dutch masters, a Black student described Rembrandt as “‘belonging’ to the white students in the room.” The white students totally agreed with this. “They acknowledged that they were at one with Rembrandt,” Trow writes. “They acknowledged their dominance. They offered to discuss, at any length, their inherited power to oppress.” 

    At the time, the prevailing wisdom was that these students were expressing “white

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  • print • Summer 2023

    Inner Visions

    IN 1912, THE SWEDISH ARTIST-CLAIRVOYANT Anna Cassel recorded the following message, crystal-clear instructions from a spirit guide, in her diary: “First, allow yourself to have dreams and then visions and colors and numbers, letters and images. Make a careful note of everything. It is of utmost importance to be thorough in your description.” Cassel was a lifelong friend of the spiritualist painter Hilma af Klint (and very likely more than a friend, for a time), as well as a close collaborator. In af Klint’s notebooks, Cassel’s group of 144 enthralling small paintings, her dutifully thorough

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  • print • Summer 2023

    Where Egos Dare

    IN THE SULLIVANIANS: SEX, PSYCHOTHERAPY, AND THE WILD LIFE OF AN AMERICAN COMMUNE, journalist Alexander Stille follows whispers of a psychoanalytic cult and breaks open the story of how psychotherapy escaped the consulting room and became the total environment of its patients. The book centers on Saul Newton, a therapist turned charismatic leader who directed a collective search for liberation through analysis and communal living. Needless to say, it all went horribly wrong.

    Many reporters claim to surface an under-told story, but Stille truly delivers. Even in New York analytic circles, few

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  • print • Summer 2023

    Pier Pressure

    BETWEEN 1956 AND 1967, the Coenties Slip on the lower tip of Manhattan was home to a group of artists who had moved to the city with grand ambitions for their work and little money to their names. In those lean years, before they were canonized, Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Lenore Tawney, Jack Youngerman, and Delphine Seyrig all took up residence in this “down downtown,” on a dead-end street on the East River where they nested themselves among fishing ships and sailors, the changing tides and unremitting grime, living at a remove from the New York City art

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  • print • Summer 2023

    Bookforum Is Back!

    BOOKFORUM IS BACK. We’ve been on hiatus since December 2022, and the Summer 2023 edition is the first issue produced in conjunction with our new publishing partner, The Nation, a venerable magazine committed to fiercely independent journalism. Our mission is to continue the conversation where we left off, publishing essays by writers who are deeply engaged with books and contemporary culture.

    Since 1994, Bookforum has staked out its own territory, inviting authors to take on—with critical acuity and personality—fiction, art, literary theory, philosophy, politics, and more. Over the years, we

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  • print • Summer 2023

    Atlas Slugged

    IF YOU WERE TO HAVE TWO MEN FIGHT EACH OTHER with a minimum of rules, should they do it in a boxing ring, or a plexiglass cube, or a cage (and maybe an electrified one)? These were the novel logistical questions faced by the founders of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, including a used-car salesman turned ad mogul and a Brazilian described by Playboy as “the toughest man in the United States,” as they attempted to identify what form of martial art was most effective at incapacitating an opponent. Inspired by a Chuck Norris flick, they chose the cage—no electricity—to determine whether, say,

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  • print • Summer 2023

    A Loss for Words

    AMONG THE OLDEST REFERENCES to menstruation in literature is in the book of Genesis, in a story about a lie. Rachel stole her father’s household gods, it goes, and when he came to retrieve them, she threw a covering over the objects and sat on it. She couldn’t stand, she apologized to her father, because she was in “the way of women.” At the end of the sixteenth century, an English clergyman clarified in his guide to Genesis that Rachel wasn’t pretending to be incapable of standing, just uncomfortable, due to her “monethly custome,” an ancestor to our contemporary “period.” As Jenni Nuttall

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  • print • Summer 2023

    The Ire Next Time

    And I’m not sure why I’m infatuated with death. 

    —Kendrick Lamar 

    It’s more than just an ordinary pain in your heart. 

    —Stevie Wonder 

    WE'RE ALWAYS WOOING our catastrophes. They delight us with their constellation of delay and grace. The catastrophic slows time and lets us revel in its ugly beauty. Then we cede it to fantasy and romance in a dissociative stupor. If you remix it well, the remixes turn out like when Moodymann flips the glowing lilt in Betty Carter’s voice from ballad into arabesque and back on his song “I’d Rather Be Lonely.” He doesn’t employ the by-now-recognizable trope

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  • print • Summer 2023

    To Affinity and Beyond

    IN OSCAR WILDE'S “The Critic as Artist,” Ernest cajoles his friend Gilbert off the piano bench and into an armchair for a discussion, as the original title of the mock-Socratic dialogue would have it, of the “function and value of criticism.” Over the course of an evening passed in the library of his Piccadilly town house, Gilbert, an incorrigible contrarian, pours glass after glass of epigram, paradox, and hyperbole down the throat of Ernest’s received ideas until they can no longer stand up. 

    It is probably unwise to attempt to derive anything as definitive as a “statement of Wilde’s aesthetic

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  • print • Summer 2023

    Spit Happens

    COME BACK WITH ME, children, to a New York before David Zwirner was Robert Moses, when nobody was watching and a “slightly hunchback, short, magical-looking” buddy from the Pacific Northwest could flood the caves of independent film with color and mayhem. Care was different then—the Hotel Chelsea wouldn’t kick you out for setting off the fire alarm and Allen Ginsberg was keeping visionaries in milk and blankets on 12th Street. The buddy from Washington State was Harry Smith, and John Szwed has ably shaped his chaos for the first full biography, Cosmic Scholar. What remains to be determined—and

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  • review • June 22, 2023

    Bookforum is back! And we need your help . . .

    We are thrilled to announce that, after a brief hiatus, Bookforum is returning under new ownership. If you care about our magazine’s mission, please show your support by getting a subscription today. You will get four print issues per year, beginning with our Summer 2023 issue in August.  

    Bookforum has long staked out new territory in the literary world, inviting authors to engage with books and cultural trends with curiosity, critical insight, and a distinctive personality. Throughout, we’ve sought out smart, unique writers to consider emerging authors and shed new light on well-known works.

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