The Monthly Digest: May 2017

Last month LARB featured a number of articles on music and visual art. Some of our authors explored how these modes of expression intersect with literature. For example, Colin Marshall contributed an eloquent review of Haruki Murakami’s Absolutely on Music: Conversations with Seiji Ozawa, in which the best-selling author and legendary conductor discuss their art forms, Scott Timberg launched a monthly series titled “All the Poets (Musicians on Writing)” by interviewing Stephin Merritt of The Magnetic Fields, and Jon Friedman offered an appreciation of “the fabled, trailblazing music critic” Ralph J. Gleason. Other pieces explored how art and music reflect on, and are shaped by, larger social forces. Peggy Kamuf contemplates the exhibition “It is obvious from the map” (REDCAT, March 25, 2017 to June 4, 2017), which tackles the subject of migration. Jonathan Guyer and Surti Singh delve into the complicated legacy of “the Art and Liberty Group, an avant-garde movement also known as Egypt’s Surrealists.” Matthew Jeffrey Abrams traces the making, unmaking, and remaking of the Shchukin Collection. Katie O’Reilly reports on the struggle to overcome gender bias in jazz. And, 100 years after “Marcel Duchamp submitted, to the Society of Independent Artists in New York City, a urinal as an artwork titled Fountain and signed with the pseudonym ‘R. Mutt,’” Susan Barbour teases out the secret meaning of his last work, Tu m’. — LARB Editorial