Nicole Eisenman

Nicole Eisenman by Nicole Eisenman, Beatrix Ruf, Lynne Tillman, Laurie Weeks, and Nicola Tyson

Harcover: 96 pages

Nicole Eisenman is a contemporary artist, best known for her paintings (though she also works in installation, printmaking, and sculpture), and a 2015 MacArthur “Genius” Fellow. This book came out in 2011 and features many handsome reproductions of Eisenman’s paintings and drawings from the mid-90s to about 2010. Check out this book to look at the paintings, of course, but you’d be remiss to skip the writing, which includes an introduction by the editor/curator Beatrix Ruf, an interview with the artist, and a short story.  In the interview, conducted by the author Lynne Tillman, Eisenman talks about her approach and evolution as a painter, and the early influence of art history on her work  – particularly Italian Renaissance and Gothic art. She points out how she built from the ruins of these traditions, imbuing them with her specific world of characters, abjection, subconscious desires, and importantly, humor. She also addresses feeling constantly disappointed by feeling forced to define herself and her paintings in terms of gender, when to her, “all in life and painting is fluid.”  Speaking about her newest paintings at the time, she explains how she reassessed her formal approach, deciding to become more painterly and less controlling – that is, to let the paint itself claim as much or more meaning than the image. This changing approach can be seen in the range of paintings featured in the book. The author Laurie Weeks provides a surreal and hilarious meta-story about writing a story for a Nicole Eisenman book, in which the author and her cohorts pontificate on the artistic and political implications of Eisenman’s work, and totally eviscerate capitalism and patriarchy in the process. I enjoyed it immensely and can’t think of a better introduction to the paintings in this book. Recommended!

 - Aleta L.

Dog

Dog by Michelle Herman   Hardcover: 188 pages

Dog is a novella about a cynical, reclusive poetry professor and her transformative experience adopting a puppy. Though she’s resistant to change at first, the protagonist finds that the emotional space she creates for Phil, the dog, opens things up everywhere: she begins reconsidering the meaning of “goodness” in her life, and she contemplates her past, present, and future with more kindness than she’d ever been able to muster. I enjoyed the changing tone of the professor’s musings as she grew more and more attached to the dog, and appreciated the depictions of her very different academic and domestic selves – a divide everyone can relate to on some level.  Ultimately a story about companionship and possibility, I recommend it if you want a rare feel-good but believable, engaging short book – it didn’t take much time to read, but the story is still hanging around pleasantly in my mind.

 - Aleta L.

A Really Good Day

A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life by Ayelet Waldman        Hardcover: 256 Pages          (Aleta L.)

Ayelet Waldman is an author, mother, and former public defender and law professor. This book is a true story about her struggle with a severe mood disorder; though she never received a lasting diagnosis, she went through years of treatment with common pharmaceuticals. These mostly didn't work, or if they did, temporarily and with terrible side effects. In addition to feeling bad most of the time, she was alienating her family and friends, and her suffering felt endless.  This desperation led her to the surprisingly positive research on the use of  psychedelic drugs for therapeutic purposes, and she decided to try it out on herself.  She had a truly simple goal: to see if she could have justone really good day.

Microdosing is a method of taking drugs in tiny, sub-perceptual doses, for therapeutic purposes, usually every other day or so. Though most of the drugs used for microdosing are illegal, there exists an underground of practitioners of the psychedelic that she managed to tap into, and she had a vial of "Lewis Carroll" liquid LSD sent anonymously to her mailbox. Waldman shares with us her month-long experiment, documenting how her mood, physical state, and motivation were affected by the tiny dose she took every third day. She then writes entertainingly about her life and previous experiences with illegal drugs (few and far between), her relationships with her kids, husband, and parents, her professional life, and her direct experience with drug policy in the United States – she recounts specific drug cases she defended, and the stories are heartbreaking. She has a convincing take on the destructiveness of this country's attitudes and laws about illegal drugs, particularly for disadvantaged populations.  Her account of the history of psychedelic drug use is fascinating, covering the invention of LSD, to its popularity and notoriety mid-20^th century, to its eventual banishment,  not only from public use, but from scientific research as well.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book – it’s part anecdotal musing and part no-nonsense social commentary, and Waldman is hilarious and utterly serious in just the right amounts.  Her research is thorough and honest. The question she raises about why we have legal access to so many harmful, ineffective substances, and no access to relatively harmless, effective ones, is extremely important; as is the more philosophical question about why our own consciousness isn’t ours to explore however we see fit. She does a fantastic job trying to answer these, and issues just a little hope that some sanity might enter our approach to drugs in this country, sooner than later.  Quite a few books about the subject of psychedelic therapy  have come out recently, mostly by fairly mainstream authors; something is in the air, and this book is a good place to find out about it – highly recommended!