I’ve been worrying about Sniffles, the star of Monica Drake’s beguiling comic novel Clown Girl. She’s the kind of clown girl you would worry about, though. As her primary clown act, for example, she shapes balloons into religious tableaux — you know, manger scenes, Mother and Child, Annnunciations. She’s aiming ultimately for a [...]
That clown post we were talking about? It’s going very slowly. To tide you over (and let’s face it, tiding you over is right at the heart of our business!) we have a few quick scatter hits.
1. Penguin reports (via Publishers Weekly) that its eBook sales the first four months of the year already [...]
So. We only THOUGHT we’d fixed the problem. We use “we” very loosely. But no, vermin still infested the machineworks. The gnawing sound wasn’t a hallucination. Our tubes grimaced and cracked. And…we…were…down. And then. Strangely back up. Go figure. Anyway, if you tried to connect today? We offer our condolences. [...]
“We’re all guilty.”
Ross Macdonald, The Blue Hammer
Every fire season in the West I think of Ross Macdonald. In his novel The Underground Man (1971), a wildfire burns an erratic swath through the steep canyons slicing the hillsides behind Santa Teresa, Macdonald’s mythical version of Santa Barbara, threatening to “strike across the city all the [...]
Here at Art Scatter central, we’ve always thought of ourselves as environmental. Meaning simply that we believe that we share and shape a variety of environments — physical, cultural, political, literary, etc. You can carve them up as thinly as you want, but you also have to realize that they don’t stay sliced — they [...]
Things are looking OK now, but we’ve had some serious outages for the past couple of days. If you tried to log on and failed, the problem is not with your computer, it’s with our server. The fix-it hamsters say things are so fixed, now! (We have our doubts. That’s just the way we [...]
Today, the New York Times has a short item: Thomas Moran’s landscape “Green River of Wyoming” sold on Wednesday for $17.73 million at a Christie’s sale of American art in New York. This doubled the previous auction record for an American 19th century painting (previously held by John Singer Sargent’s “Robert Louis Stevenson and His [...]
Scatter remembers hauling teenage boys to Tower Records Monday midnights to get Tuesday CD releases that went on sale at 12:01. We feel the same sense of anticipation describing Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book ($14, 184 pages), published today by NYRB Classics. We held back recommending a midnight raid on your local bookshop, [...]
We all love random numbers, don’t we? Maybe not truly “random” (otherwise I would just have to type 197,328 and you’d start guffawing, perhaps because each consecutive number pair adds up to 10 or something), but numbers connected to “reality” in one way or another. I have had periods of thinking the Harper’s [...]
Nell Warren’s paintings at PDX Contemporary Art have been on my mind all weekend. “Quandaries” they are called. I’ve played with that notion, echoing the word in the “quaint” look the paintings have or the “boundary” Warren blurs between abstraction and representation. My doubt not about if I like them but why. In her [...]