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In line with our ongoing discussion on art, Chus alerted me to a new installation at the Guggenheim in New York, in which three baristas operating espresso machines hand out free cups of coffee. Why is this art? Are the good-looking espresso machines art? Are the baristas performance artists? If it’s in the Guggenheim, is it art?

Or maybe this is a comment on how everything these days is called “a work of art”, so “art” has ceased to mean anything.

Or maybe the fact that people keep asking the baristas how much is a statement on the commodification of art.

There’s also a hotel bed, which you can book for US$700 a night. You can walk around the museum, trailed by a security guard.

I suggest that three guys get dressed as a horse, approach the barista, and say, “Three coffees, please.” Then the barista can recite this verse:

One horse who wants three coffees.
I don’t know.
I just don’t know.
If he wants three coffees I’ll give him three coffees,
but I know there’s only one of him.

Yes, that’s from Sesame Street. It does not explain what a horse is doing in a coffee shop, or why three guys would get into a horse costume, but it sounds like many of the answers you get when you ask, But is it art?

Koosi with her favorite book

Reader: Uro de la Cruz
Early reading: The Lord of the Rings.

The Name of the Bullfighter by Luis Sepulveda. A Ludlumesque Chilean political thriller.
Inferno by Patricia Melo. Like the Filipino movie Tribu set in Rio de Janeiro.
Reading Pictures by Alberto Manguel. Essays on interpreting photographs and paintings.
Dirty Havana Trilogy by Pedro Juan Gutierrez.
Show Me The Magic by Paul Mazursky. Funny stories on the making of his films Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, Moscow on the Hudson, The Tempest, Harry and Tonto, Blume in Love.
Murder in the Marais by Cara Black.
Which Lie Did I Tell? by William Goldman.
The Way of All Flesh by Midas Dekkers. Essays on the inevitability of death and decay.
Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Balthazar by Lawrence Durrell.

*****
Reader: Butch Perez
Early reading: Everything Arthurian, from Prince Valiant comics to The Once and Future King

This year’s reading, partial returns.

Non-fiction:
The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel
Love, Passion and Patriotism: Sexuality and the Philippine Propaganda Movement, 1882-1892 by Raquel A. G. Reyes
The Invisible Palace: The True Story of a Journalist’s Murder in Java by José Manuel Tesoro
The Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight into Beauty by Soetsu Yanagi
Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World by Timothy Brook

Fiction:
Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño
2666 by Roberto Bolaño
Mystery novels with quirky detective heroes set in exotic places. My favorite series this year were the Inspector Salvo Montalbano series (a middle-aged philosopher-gourmet police inspector in small-town Sicily) by Andrea Camilleri and the Dr. Siri Paiboun series (the 73-year-old national coroner of Laos during the Pathet Lao regime) by Colin Cotteril.

Science fiction:
Rainbow’s End by Vernor Vinge
Beyond Infinity by Gregory Benford

The Patron Saint of Plagues by Barth Anderson

Reader: Tina Cuyugan
Early reading: My mother forgot she left me in the comic books section of the old Makati Supermart, and reclaimed me only days after. By then it was too late: I had become a Reader and she was no longer needed.

The Unforgiving Years by Victor Serge. As one who spent much of his life fomenting revolution in Europe, and who later irked Stalin enough to get himself targeted for assassination, Serge didn’t have to go far for material. This novel begins in pre-war Paris, with the spy D on the run from his own government, moves on to the battle of Leningrad, and then a German city being barraged by Allied bombs, before the final reckoning in a hyper-real Mexican landscape.

A Writer at War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army, 1941-1945 by Vassily Grossman. Read it as a companion to his doorstop masterpiece Life and Fate. Grossman transformed himself from a plump, bespectacled intellectual into a great war correspondent, in the thick of action in Stalingrad, the Ukraine and Berlin. His dispatches heartened the Red Army, and the nation. That could happen only because Russians read.

Soul by Andrey Platonov. In the title novella of this astoundingly luminous collection, a Soviet bureaucrat is sent into Central Asia to round up the remnants of his nomadic tribe. When you depend on a flock of lost sheep to lead the way and on the blood of a dead buzzard to slake your thirst, you know you’re trapped in a Russian narrative. Platonov suffered greatly under Stalin (how not?), and was helped by his loyal friend Vassily Grossman.

One Soldier’s War by Arkady Babchenko. In 1995, when he was 18, Babchenko was drafted by the army to fight in Chechnya. Despite his later training as a lawyer, he writes with an honesty and simplicity one could almost call elegant, except that his subject matter is the extreme brutality, terror, and physical deprivation of his stint in the military—before he actually got around to fighting the Chechens. Ah, Russia.

Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte. A charming and absolutely untrustworthy Italian fascist journalist, Malaparte intersperses hallucinogenic scenes of wartime depravity with accounts of dinner parties with Swedish royalty, Nazi high officials, and Spanish diplomats—in which he always gives himself the best lines. Hmmm. Still, you are not likely to forget soon the tale of the German general who battled a Finnish salmon.

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford. This Edwardian novel, set in glittering spas and wealthy estates, is as far away from a battlefield as one can get. But the savage sexual maneuverings and hypocrisy of its characters seem almost more barbarous than mere warfare. I raced through it slack-jawed, except when squealing “No way!” and “What the—?” at every other page.

Innocence by Penelope Fitzgerald. Written by a little old lady, this novel is about the romance between a young girl from a noble family and an idealistic doctor set in 1950s Tuscany. Which should teach one not to judge a book by its blurbs. Cool formalists Julian Barnes and A.S. Byatt acclaim Fitzgerald as a 20th-century master gifted with precision, tart wit, humanity and the ability to conjure dizzying yet totally likely plot twists. And economy: she could pack numerous complex lives and entire cultures into just 180 pages of streamlined prose.

Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee. Nicely textured biography for those who like grande dames, grand houses and grand literary salons.

Factotum by Charles Bukowski. Even if your policy is to avoid drunks at parties, bear with Bukowski, who is raw, funny and utterly clear-headed as a writer.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and Other Pieces by James Thurber. Priceless for the bizarre tales (“The Night the Bed Fell”, “The Night the Ghost Got In”)of Thurber’s family. Their misadventures, despite his laconic Midwestern recounting, will be immediately understandable to any Pinoy who’s lived in a multi-generational household. “The Dog That Bit People” contains no life lessons whatsoever. Read it and weep for joy.

Choice entries from Toujours Tingo by Adam Jacot de Boinod, a book listing weird words and phrases from all over the world.

Layogenic: Filipino for someone good-looking from afar but ugly up close.

Ikibari: Japanese, a “lively needle” and describing a man who is willing but under-endowed.

Fensterln: German for climbing through a window to avoid someone’s parents so you can have sex without them knowing.

Okuri-okami: Japanese for a man who feigns thoughtfulness by offering to see a girl home only to try to molest her once he gets in the door – literally, a “see-you-home wolf”

Trennungsagentur: German for someone hired by a woman to tell her boyfriend he has been dumped.

Momma ko ene: Cheyenne for having red eyes from crying over your boyfriend marrying someone else.

Nito-onna: Japanese for a woman so dedicated to her career that she has no time to iron blouses and so resorts to dressing only in knitted tops.

Last week we went to two art galleries to see what was new. There are very interesting paintings and installations on view at Finale Art File and at Manila Contemporary. Some pieces we like, some we avidly dislike, and some we don’t get at all. The question that kept recurring in the conversation was “But is it art?” As in, “That’s clever, but is it art?” or “I’d buy that, but is it art?” This question demands answers in an era where a dead shark in a tank of formaldehyde is a work of art that fetches a bajillion dollars. (“But is it art?” is also the title of a book by Cynthia Freeland which I’ve had for years and must get around to reading.)

Take this arrangement of tables near the entrance to Finale. I thought, “Oh, they must be setting up for the next exhibit.” Turns out the tables were the exhibit. On the tables were laminated price lists from different gallery shows. (When you enter a gallery, there’s usually a table by the door with the titles of the paintings and their selling prices.)

Hmm, a bunch of tables. Is it art? What does it mean? If I put all the tables in my house by the door, is it art? And if I move one of the tables, am I a vandal?

This one I like very much: a photograph of a building covered in netting, printed on a tarp which billows in the breeze.

I’d happily hang it on the side of my building, but is it art? The photographer didn’t construct the building or set up the netting, he just happened onto the site and snapped a photo. Does the fact that people want to own it confer artiness on a piece?

Over at Manila Contemporary on Pasong Tamo Extension, I saw these photographs of a man in a shiny pink suit in various locations in Paris. The photo at the bottom is a “reproduction” of Manet’s famous painting, Dejeuner sur l’herbe.

All together now: But is it art? If you and your friends were to get decked out like German Moreno and pose like the figures in Caravaggio’s The Calling of St. Matthew, would it be art?

This painting I responded to.

But of course I would respond to it, having grown up on the campy Adam West Batman series. It derives its power from my childhood memories. So is it art?

I’ll read the Freeland and get back to you.

We trooped to Finale to see Paulo Vinluan’s solo show, “Social Graces By Default”. His work is clever, satirical, and mischievous, three adjectives that I approve of.

Most of the paintings have been reserved, but you can still buy this Hopia.

This is the artist’s arm, with Venus flytrap tattoo.

The exhibit runs until December 31. Finale Art File is at Warehouse 17, La Fuerza compound, 2241 Pasong Tamo, Makati (near Edsa), telephone (632)8132310.

Only on the final page did this reader recognize the true source of Netherland.

“A world was lighting up before us, its uprights putting me in mind, now that I’m adrift, of new pencils standing at attention in a Caran d’Ache box belonging in the deep of my childhood, in particular the purplish platoon of sticks that emerged by degrees from the reds and, turning bluer and bluer and bluer, faded out; a world concentrated most glamourously of all, it goes almost without saying, in the lilac acres of two amazingly high towers going up above all others, on which, as the boat drew us nearer, the sun began to make a brilliant yellow mess.”

More than 80 years ago, the final page of a great American novel contained these lines:

“And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.”

Joseph O’Neill has reimagined The Great Gatsby for the 21st century.

“All this garbage of light”, a review of Netherland, in Emotional Weather Report, today in the Star.