Towards the end of his life, Lucian Freud attended the 80th birthday party of a friend, where a little girl was told not to touch him. “I’m not an object,” he protested. Perhaps she’d mistaken him for one of his portraits, because over the previous decades no artist had been better at manipulating canvas and paint to give the illusion of real human bodies, stilled lives. Everything about a self-portrait like Reflection (1985), from its intent pink-rimmed eyes to the shiny patch on its forehead, makes it look as if it is not a painting but a person, who is on the verge of leaning out of the frame to touch the viewer—though whether to kiss them or headbutt them it is hard to say.
Daddy investigates the shadier corners of the human experience, exploring the fault lines of power between men and women, parents and children, and the past and present. Cline deftly interrogates masculinity and the fates of broken relationships, examining violence on both a societal and personal level.
What sets Vesper Flights apart from other nature writing is the sense of adoration Macdonald brings to her subjects. She writes with an almost breathless enthusiasm that can't be faked; she's a deeply sincere author in an age when ironic detachment seems de rigueur. "I choose to think that my subject is love, and most specifically love for the glittering world of non-human life around us," she writes in the book's introduction. And that love is obvious throughout the book.
In “The Sound of Hope: Music as Solace, Resistance and Salvation During the Holocaust and World War II,” Kellie D. Brown shows how for persecuted and imprisoned Jews, music became a way to preserve their humanity and at times even their lives. Although the book is sometimes a bit of a slog, Brown has succeeded admirably in bringing together in one volume so much important research. While our current crisis differs vastly from the era she depicts, the contemporary resonance is inescapable.
It is the summer of all this and more:
of sea-rising romance
and heat-curdled revelry,
Yes, I have tried cleansing, cutting, bingeing,
purging, laughing, grieving, slutty fucking,