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The Social Vision of Alfred T. White
Phillip Lopate says: “This enlightened and enlightening book uncovers the fascinating roots of affordable housing for the working poor, and in doing so, returns us to the pursuit of that ideal as something not just noble but eminently practical. An essential contribution to urban history in general, and Brooklyn’s in particular.”
Andrew Dolkart, Fitch Professor of Historic Preservation, Columbia University, says: “Alfred Tredway White’s housing projects for working-class Brooklynites mark the beginning of serious housing reform in America. This volume of essays fills a major gap in the literature on housing reform and confirms White’s place in that movement’s pantheon.”
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Blue Fire
From “burning blue” by Douglas Messerli in OR: A Literary Tabloid #4, Los Angeles: As anyone who has read the circumstances around this murder has wondered, why did Constance Kent admit to a crime—refusing to deny her testimony for the rest of her life—that she most probably did not commit? How can one come to any understanding of a figure seeking and achieving so much good after, at least her own mind, committing such an atrocious act? The child, after all, was not just smothered, but cut with a knife before its body was thrown into the privy!
The problem here, as Walker recognizes it, is how to “tell” this story without making further assumptions about the young woman’s life or simply throwing a web of one’s own imaginative desires across the almost obliterated truth of the circumstances…
The result is an amazing work of erudition that not only asks important questions about Constance and her family, but reveals the cultural context surrounding a young, somewhat bored and occasionally rebellious girl…
By quoting from various reports of the murder….[continue reading the full review]
Henry Wessells says: “What is remarkable about Blue Fire. A Poetic Nonfiction is Wendy Walker’s insistence upon working with the literary materials and facts of Constance Kent’s life in an ethical manner and in creating the broadest possible context. ‘The Great Crime of 1860’ was sensational in its day and was important, too, for certain legal precedents, so the sensation has never entirely dissipated. Recent accounts of the crime have seemed of too narrow compass. It is an appalling situation that a young woman could be sentenced to death upon the basis of a false confession that conflicted with facts established during the earlier, inconclusive hearing. And the ultimate silence of Constance Kent, during her imprisonment and after her release, raises other issues. The power of Walker’s approach is rooted in recognition that to render it in fiction would be unethical appropriation…. The range of Walker’s reading is the rock solid structure in and on and about which the poetic text dances: in particular, her close study of the literary and scientific works forming the contemporary climate of 1860. The result is kinetic and enables the reader to ‘catch Constance in the spaces between speech, her own and others’.” Read more at The Endless Bookshelf.
William Gillespie of Spineless Books says: “Wendy Walker composes a magnificent book incorporating found text, [and] visual elements, in which voluminous research … is translated into a crisp, angular, paratactic poem, which, in turn, becomes a filter for the research. This process subverts history’s feigned innocent objectivity by subordinating its documents to the poetic.”
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623 Titles Without Paintings
Henry Wessells says: “The arrangement of these quotations invites collisions of time and biography and meaning; and Benkert’s commentary is at times playful, at times serious (and it may be difficult to untwine those two modes).” Read more at The Endless Bookshelf.
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Administrative Assemblages
Andrew William Webster says: “La Farge presents his Machines as an instructive apparatus, and Administrative Assemblages reads like an unassuming, but eloquent, classroom lecture, utlilizing the first person plural throughout, a choice that imparts an inclusive feel.… La Farge explains that each assemblage is a commonplace apparatus ‘for ordering and systematizing material that we have to supply.’ Apparatuses appear in the form of lists, maps, and classificatory systems, to name a few. In and of themselves, these formal systems are familiar, but La Farge’s elucidation of oulipian re-contextualizations and manipulations makes them unique.…
“It’s like stepping into the classroom of an extremely knowledgeable professor for the first day of class and struggling to copy down the multitude of discussed concepts. Luckily, in Administrative Assemblages, the lecture notes are available to the students for casual perusal. And La Farge further tempers the potential confusion by assuming his students are already readers and writers. His helpful suggestions not on how to write, but on how oulipian constraints can inform writing, alone make this pamphlet worth the ten dollar cover price.” [from the review in Marginalia, Volume 5 (1910), 84-7)
Douglas Messerli says: “These systems, based primarily on methods attempted by members of the Oulipo writers, offer up new possibilities of how to write; and La Farge’s clear and concise descriptions, along with his list of methods, if nothing else, should well serve creative writing classrooms from here to eternity…. In short, La Farge’s 13 Writhing Machines, given the contents of this first volume, promises not only to be an utterly entertaining presentation of various formal systems of literary writing, but an illustrative example of how to get writers, young and old, to experiment with new and empowering systems outside the scope of realist psychological narrative. We have long needed such a thorough discussion of such works….” Read more at Exploring Fictions
Davis Schneiderman says: “[D]oes this primer, beautifully assembled into an eminently useful amalgamation of related tactics, actually attempt to de-Oulipo-fy… and so follow the work most recently begun in The noulipian Analects? Are we not somehow made to expand our view of Oulipo’s influence and output well beyond their ‘intentions’…? Put another way, does this merger of Oulipian methods with a motley band of relevant-but-often-unassociated ‘writhing machines’ perhaps democratize ownership of the entire mad misadventure of collaborative writing?” [American Book Review 30:5, July/August 2009]
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Homomorphic Converters
Douglas Messerli says: “The second installment of Tom La Farge’s grand effort to name and describe literary constraints to writing—what he describes as ‘an arbitrary rule imposed upon composition that drives you to say what you had not thought of saying in ways you would not have chosen to say it’—is devoted to more complex systems than those outlined in volume No. 1.” Read more at Exploring Fictions.