3 results for "History"

Capital

Kenneth Goldsmith
"Acclaimed artist Kenneth Goldsmith’s thousand-page beautiful homage to New York City. Here is a kaleidoscopic assemblage and poetic history of New York: an unparalleled and original homage to the city, composed entirely of quotations. Drawn from a huge array of sources—histories, memoirs, newspaper articles, novels, government documents, emails—and organized into interpretive categories that reveal the philosophical architecture of the city, Capital is the ne plus ultra of books on the ultimate megalopolis. It is also a book of experimental literature that transposes Walter Benjamin’s unfinished magnum opus of literary montage on the modern city, The Arcades Project, from 19th-century Paris to 20th-century New York, bringing the streets to life in categories such as “Sex,” “Commodity,” “Downtown,” “Subway,” and “Mapplethorpe.” Capital is a book designed to fascinate and to fail—for can a megalopolis truly be written? Can a history, no matter how extensive, ever be comprehensive? Each reading of this book, and of New York, is a unique and impossible passage."--
Verso 2015-01 913 pages

Humblebrag: the art of false modesty

Wittels, Harris
From comedian and writer (Parks and Recreation, Eastbound & Down) Harris Wittels comes a hysterical breakdown of boasts, brags, and self-adulation disguised as humble comments and complaints-based on his popular @humblebrag Twitter feed. Something immediately annoyed Harris Wittels about Twitter. All of a sudden it was acceptable to brag, so long as those brags were ever-so-thinly disguised as transparent humility, such as: "Just filed my taxes. Biggie was right, mo money mo problems." "I hate when I go into a store to get something to eat and the male staff are too busy hitting on me to get my order right :( so annoying!" Taking action by naming this phenomenon and creating the Twitter account called Humblebrag-dedicated solely to retweeting the humblebrags of others-Wittels's new word took the Internet by storm. Harris also shows readers what humblebrags might look like from some of history's most notable names, as well as devoting an entire chapter to a man who just might be the greatest humblebraggart of them all...
Grand Central Pub 2012-09-25 252 pages