Her new book considers the concept of "aloneness" from the perspective of key artists, focusing on Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Henry Darger, and David Wojnarowicz and touching on luminaries from Alfred Hitchcock to Nan Goldin to Billie Holiday. Bedford Hills prison for selling cocainea first offenseunder New York's Rockefeller drug laws. You can see them, but you can't reach them, and so this commonplace urban phenomenon, available in any city of the world on any night, conveys to even the most social a tremor of loneliness, its uneasy combination of separation and exposure. "Elle, “…A lovely thing. THE LONELY CITY. The book became my companion during a period of personal solitude and sadness that unexpectedly unfurled over my summer and then lingered into autumn; my intermittent reading exactly coincided with a very specific period of necessary withdrawal for introspection and personal repair. Hot. Olivia Laing is a writer and critic. What is loneliness? It was a studio, with a kitchenette and an elegantly masculine bathroom tiled all in black. Most days I did the same things. Favorite Books of 2016 A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin. Laing’s intuitions and speculations are fueled by firsthand experience. He was almost never without a glittering entourage and yet his work is surprisingly eloquent on isolation and the problems of attachment, issues he struggled with lifelong. A moving mixture of personal memoir and art writing, Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City looks at the topic of loneliness by weaving her own story of a rough stay in New York with the work and stories of four different NYC artists: Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Henry Darger, and David Wojnarowicz. When she first came to Manhattan, in her 30s, Laing (The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking, 2013, etc.) There were things that burned away at me, not only as a private individual, but also as a citizen of our century, our pixelated age. Harris's experiments were decried as excessive and shut down by NYPD; now, of course, it's a truism to say we are eager to live our entire lives online, freely offering up our photos, emails, data, and tweets for mass surveillance. I think it's about two things: learning how to befriend yourself and understanding that many of the things that seem to afflict us as individuals are in fact a result of larger forces of stigma and exclusion, which can and should be resisted.”, “So much of the pain of loneliness is to do with concealment, with feeling compelled to hide vulnerability, to tuck ugliness away, to cover up scars as if they are literally repulsive. Laing opens up the work by admitting her feelings of shame about being lonely: "Loneliness is difficult to confess, difficult too to categorize . The Lonely City is a roving cultural history of urban loneliness, centered on the ultimate city: Manhattan, that teeming island of gneiss, concrete, and glass. The Lonely City Book Description : "You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavor to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by thousands of strangers. "Laura Miller, Slate, "Laing writes with a compassion and curiosity rarely seen in any genre...Although I read The Lonely City in the same urban spaces that usually impart a familiar lonelinessloud cafés, quiet apartments and slow trains choked with strangersI felt different while reading it....Something surprising happened, something Laing most likely intended"The Rumpus, "A singular, fiercely candid and rare book. I knew nothing about Laing when I opened this book to the essay about Henry Darger, “the Chicago janitor who posthumously achieved fame as one of the world’s most celebrated outsider artists, a term coined to describe people on the margins of society, who make work without the benefit of an education in art or art history.”, Music: House Of Love - "Loneliness Is A Gun". Miracolo d'Amore. it can't bring the dead back to life, it can't mend arguments between friends, or cure AIDS, or halt the pace of climate change." ", 02/01/2016The lonely city of the title is teeming with painters, filmmakers, writers, and thinkers. I arrived in September, and at immigration the guard said to me without a trace of friendliness why are your hands shaking? To create our... What does it mean to be lonely? But this type of solitude doesn't intrigue her Laing is pulled in by the type of loneliness that hurts so much because it happens in the presence of others. And that this is art - Edward Hopper, Warhol, Klaus Nomi, Basquiat. Olivia Laing launches her book with the idea that “loneliness might be taking you towards an otherwise unreachable experience of reality,” which may be true and worth avoiding whenever possible. I want someone to want me. Great quote, "learning how to befriend yourself and understanding that many things that seem to affect us as individuals are in fact a result of larger forces of stigma and exclusion, which can and should be resisted. . Orson Welles was probably not the first person to say, "We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone," but he did say it, and I believe he really meant it. The Van Wyck Expressway was the same as ever, bleak, unpromising, and it took several attempts to open the big door with the keys my friend had FedExed me weeks back. card classic compact. Does it draw us closer together, or trap us behind screens? Her own experience with it proved almost vertiginous: "The whole thing seemed insane, a trading-off of time against nothing tangible at all: a yellow star, a magic bean, for which I was surrendering all the pieces of my identity, every element except the physical carcass in which I was supposedly contained." And lost me at chapter three. Go out for eggs and coffee, walk aimlessly through the exquisite cobbled streets or down to the promenade to gaze at the East River, pushing each day a little further until I reached the park at Dumbo, where on Sundays you'd see the Puerto Rican wedding couples come to have their photos taken, the girls in enormous sculptural lime-green and fuchsia dresses that made everything else look tired and staid. Buy The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone Main by Olivia Laing (ISBN: 9781782111252) from Amazon's Book Store. card. A dazzling investigation into loneliness, art and the modern city - 'A fierce and essential work' Helen Macdonald. Better, she makes their work resonate for us. The Lonely City r/KielWisconsin. She falls prey to a crippling loneliness which gives rise to this hybrid memoir and art history on the theme of loneliness; and how she finds an alleviation of her loneliness through the visual arts. . It's a ghostly blueprint of urban loneliness ― an emotion that Laing calls ‘a city in itself’―that reminds us how … Laing realizes that we are all stumbling around the same scary zip code of the mind, looking for a friend. Each of her four main players gets his own chapter, in which Laing does a deep biographical dive on the artist's work and how he approached the theme of solitude, but these various personae are shades that haunt the entire work. So I was attracted by Olivia Laing's title, especially the subtitle "Adventures in the Art of Being Alone." Mostly I liked the solitude, or, when I didn't, felt fairly certain I'd sooner or later drift into another liaison, another love. To see what your friends thought of this book, The way that I interpreted the statement is death, when there is no longer any feeling at all. I was possessed with a desire to find correlates, physical evidence that other people had inhabited my state, and during my time in Manhattan I began to gather up works of art that seemed to articulate or be troubled by loneliness, particularly as it manifests in the modern city and even more particularly as it has manifested in the city of New York over the past seventy or so years. This was the driving motivation of David Wojnarowicz, a still under-known American artist, photographer, writer and activist, whose courageous, extraordinary body of work did more than anything to release me from the burden of feeling that in my solitude I was shamefully alone. It's about loneliness, and through lives of different artists, most of who I knew very little about, she speaks of the need in all people in general, to feel a part of something. Therefore, “The Lonely City” is exactly the kind of extended meditation on loneliness I crave to better inform me and expand my understanding of this condition. Fascinating and poignant. eyewitness to history, Sari Nusseibeh is one of our most urgent and articulate authorities on the conflict in the Middle East. share. . Laing believes that cities inherently breed lonesomeness, even as they also allow connections to bloom. Laing is a masterful biographer, memoirist and critic. ... Laing is a great critic, not least because she understands that art can and often does manifest multiple conflicting meanings and desires at once. Are … Art like love and friendship allows us to forget for a moment that we are all separate minds trapped in separate bodies with no way to become anything else, that loneliness is a condition built into our anatomy. Most of the time, I sublet a friend's apartment on East 2nd Street, in a neighbourhood full of community gardens. Laing is part of a new group of nonfiction writers who are not afraid to infuse their own experiences into works of reportage, delving into the archives of libraries and into their own memories, discovering and delighting in both the puzzlements and the revelations that lie beneath the surface. . It took me some time to read this simply because I found it riveting, beautifully written, and I wanted to savour it. Author-wise, I'd guess from her point late in the book when she gets comfort to her loneliness online, the time is circa 2000s. Statements like this have a more than casual link with the belief that our whole purpose is as coupled creatures, or that happiness can or should be a permanent possession. What I was building in those years, and what now follows, is a map of loneliness, built out of both need and interest, pieced together from my own experiences and those of others. This is a. Urban loneliness may have its counterpart in America's wide open spaces the melancholy cowboy riding out solo over an expansive range. She makes the topic her own. If you liked the Lonely City manga, Anime-Planet thinks you'd like these manga. It took me some time to read this simply because I found it riveting, beautifully written, and I wanted to savour it. This thought makes her feel less alone, and she passes it along to us. In its interdisciplinary scope and mix of culture, theory, and memoir, The Lonely City brings to mind other nonfiction hits of recent years, books like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts or Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams. One might think this state was antithetical to urban living, to the massed presence of other human beings, and yet mere physical proximity is not enough to dispel a sense of internal isolation. It was great to be reminded of the friendship between Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat. I found the chapters on Warhol and Wojnarowicz particularly insightful, though all held endless pleasures and fascinations. Humane, provocative, and moving, The Lonely City is a celebration of a strange and lovely state, adrift from the larger continent of human experience, but intrinsic to the very act of being alive. As a teenager, sitting on my bed on autumn evenings, I used to imagine that place as a city, perhaps at dusk, when everyone turns homeward and the neon flickers into life. Her critically acclaimed book,The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking, is published by Picador. Fearlessly tracing the roots of loneliness, its forbidding consequences, and its complicated and beautiful relationship with art, it is powerful, poignant and magical. Here How do we live, if we're not intimately engaged with another human being? In her diary of 1929, Virginia Woolf described a sense of inner loneliness that she thought might be illuminating to analyse, adding: 'If I could catch the feeling, I would: the feeling of the singing of the real world, as one is driven by loneliness and silence from the habitable world.' Loneliness is a collective; it is a city." I'd reread entire pages so I could feel the rhythm of them again. His art "served as lightning rods for other people's fears and fantasies about isolation, its potentially pathological aspect." Of all the many documenters of the lonely city whose work educated or moved me, and who I consider in the pages ahead – among them Alfred Hitchcock, Valerie Solanas, Nan Goldin, Klaus Nomi, Peter Hujar, Billie Holiday, Zoe Leonard and Jean-Michel Basquiat – I became most closely interested in four artists: Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Henry Darger and David Wojnarowicz. Another great aspect of this book was how the author not only weaved in contemporary American experience, but selected lives and experiences over time, especially in New York. She is interested in artists like Wojnarowicz who had many lovers and was part of the gay art scene in Manhattan in the '70s before dying from AIDS who suffer silently at the same time that they use their work to speak very loudly. Here ... What if somebody finally wrote to his high school alumni bulletin and told...the truth! For me, if I am in the right city, even if I am utterly alone there, I can be blissfully happy. Cities can be lonely places, and in admitting this we see that loneliness doesn't necessarily require physical solitude, but rather an absence or paucity of connection, closeness, kinship: an inability, for one reason or another, to find as much intimacy as is desired. The central figures of the book—Henry Darger, Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, and David Wojnarowicz—were all “hyper-alert to the gulfs between people, to how it can feel to be islanded amid a crowd.” By focusing on four artists (others, like Billie Holiday, also make appearances), Laing’s writing becomes expansive, exploring their biographies, sharing art analysis, and weaving in observations from periods of desolation that was at times “cold as ice and clear as glass.” She invents new ways to consider how isolation plays into art or even the Internet (which turns her into an obsessed teenager, albeit one who calls the screen her “cathected silver lover”). In Laing's head, all of these artists are still alive somewhere perhaps even in communion with one another. What do you think Olivia Laing meant with her final quote “because if we know anything from what has gone before us, it is that the time for feeling will not last”? Loneliness is collective, it is a city." Initially it was the images themselves that drew me, but as I burrowed in, I began to encounter the people behind them: people who had grappled in their lives as well as work with loneliness and its attendant issues. Laing's fascination is the acute feeling of isolation one gets in big crowds, the specific experience of looking out, alone, over a sea of apartment buildings at glowing windows emanating an remote warmth. Great quote, "learning how to befriend yourself and understanding that many things that seem to affect us as individuals are in fact a result of larger forces of stigma and exclusion, which can and should be resisted. Ali Smith pointed me to Olivia Laing—I think she was planning to introduce her at a conference in Edinburgh. Laing is particularly gifted at making historical figures come alive through her words, of contextualizing their work and honoring their artistic intentions while never losing sight of the deep and complicated humanity that enabled such creation. The Lonely City, appearing three years after Echo Spring in 2016, follows a similar pattern. Laing's mother had been a closeted gay woman until she was outed in the 1980s; her mother's partner was an alcoholic; and Laing grew up witnessing "chaotic and frightening scenes" and "coping with a simmering sense of fear and rage." Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York magazine, GQ, Matter, and elsewhere. of medicine, offering an unflinching view from the scalpel's edge. This was my first non-fiction book for a long time, and I was very curious both about the subject of loneliness, but also to see what was hidden behind the beautiful cover. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders. Join. This seems particularly unlikely in the case of Andy Warhol, who was after all famous for his relentless sociability. Laing opens up the work by admitting her feelings of shame about being lonely: “Loneliness is difficult to confess, difficult too to categorize…it is subject too to … The Lonely City is a book about art as redemptive force, both because it saves us from feeling alone and also tackles the concept of loneliness in a way that most of us refuse to do in the course of our ordinary conversations. Outsider artist Darger, a Chicago janitor, produced over 300 paintings, many disturbingly violent. It seemed to epitomise sunny abundance, but the light never really made it past the brownstones opposite, and it was clear that I was tucked up on the wrong side of the house. The loneliness theme felt forced, and every time it was introduced I often felt that the artists discussed weren't in fact lonely but simply dedicated to their craft. Humane, provocative, and moving, The Lonely City is a celebration of a strange and lovely state, adrift from the larger continent of human experience, but intrinsic to the very act of being alive. Mostly, I stayed on the eastern edges of the island, downtown, taking cheap sublets in East Village tenements or in co-ops built for garment workers, where day and night you could hear the hum of traffic crossing the Williamsburg Bridge. it is subject too to pathologization, to being considered a disease." As well as being a platform for me to ponder what I’m reading, I like to think of my blog as an ongoing exploration on the conflicted relationship I have to literature – how it can make me feel so connected to our larger shared humanity. The digital divide has fostered a dramatic physical disconnect, and its effects have redefined the way we interact within community. Warhol's art patrols the space between people, conducting a grand philosophical investigation into closeness and distance, intimacy and estrangement. In the end I called 911 and a few minutes later three firemen trooped in, relit the pilot light and then hung about in their big boots, admiring the wooden floor. 10/15/2015Laing opened her book career in 2014 with The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking, which was short-listed for the Ondaatje Prize and won front-page coverage in the New York Times Book Review. Reading this book made me feel aloneness more acutely, but also exposed its value. Conversation Starters from ReadingGroupChoices.com. Learn how to enable JavaScript on your browser, Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, Named a best book of the year by NPR, Newsweek, Slate, Pop Sugar, Marie Claire, Elle, Publishers Weekly, and Lit Hub. it is subject too to … long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. 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