Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama is 87 years old and she is the most fabulous thing.  And her work is as fabulous as she is and it is going to be in a traveling retrospective around the US this year.  Here are some details...

Book Rec: White Teeth

I read five books on vacation, White Teeth was by far the best.  (Don't waste your time with Beautiful Ruins and don't ever touch Girl on a Train.  After it was in the third B&B bookshelf I gave in to curiosity and it was a terrible mistake)  Anyway, I can't believe Zadie Smith was 21 when she wrote the majority of this book.  It's like seeing David Hockney's self-portrait at 16.  A sliver of me feels motivated to know there is such genius out there but the larger chunk feels incredibly depressed.  Luckily I have no problem with a prodigy writer, I just marvel as she twirls the words around the page like she made each one new.  It has everything I love in a good novel; strong plot, developed characters, descriptive places, witty dialogue.  Here is an excerpt I dog-eared: 

“If someone asked her just then what memory was, what the purest definition of memory was, she would say this: the street you were on when you first jumped in a pile of dead leaves. She was walking it right now. With every fresh crunch came the memory of previous crunches. She was permeated by familiar smells: wet woodchip and gravel around the base of the tree, newly laid turd underneath the cover of soggy leaves. She was moved by these sensations.”