I am not Jackson Pollock / John Haskell.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Haskell, John, 1958-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Artists--Fiction.

Artists.

Genre:

Fiction.

Physical Description:

vii, 180 pages ; 22 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003.

Summary:

A circus elephant named Topsy was executed at Coney Island in the year 1903 for killing a man. That's part of history. The Hottentot Venus was exhibited in Paris in the first half of the nineteenth century because she was considered an oddity. That's also history. According to myth, the Indian god Ganesha had his head lopped off and replaced with the head of an elephant. In John Haskell's expert hands, these three curious strands are ingeniously woven together in one story called "Elephant Feelings." And so it is with all these provocative short stories about artists, actors, writers, and musicians -- from Glenn Gould to Joan of Are who are at once painfully human and larger than life. In his bewitching collection, Haskell expands small psychological moments within larger, famous lives to explore the nature of habit and desire. In "Dream of a Clean Slate," Jackson Pollock struggles with the gulf between Pollock the man and Pollock the artist; in "The Judgment of Psycho," Haskell probes the sexual dynamics between Janet Leigh and Anthony Porkins in Psycho; Orson Welles presides over the long story "Crimes at Midnight," a tense exploration of power and the consequences of using it. Haskell has written a series of myths for modern times, hypnotic meditations on the ways in which we are distant from ourselves and about the way art can sometimes help us imagine other worlds and begin to reimagine this world. It is an astonishing debut.

Contents:

Dream of a clean slate

Elephant feelings

The jedgment of Psycho

The faces of Joan of Arc

Capucine

Glenn Gould in six parts

Good world

Crimes at midnight

Narrow road.

ISBN:

0374173990

OCLC:

50561926

Online:

Publisher description