THE PLATONIC SOLIDS is an essay containing a series of questions regarding the function of painting and its relation to photography. The title refers to a series of seven paintings of basic abstract forms, and to Plato’s book, “The Meno,” a dialogue that suggests that if we start with the simplest things that we know, we will be able to proceed from that and discover all the rest of knowledge.

IN RELATION TO THE WHOLE poses and answers formidably one of the biggest questions that can be asked of art: What hapens to the artist when he does not find himself at the center or does not choose to participate in the official art movements of his time? Downes’s essays, like his own practice, show us what it means for art to find and go its own way. Jim Feast in the “American Book Review” writes how Rackstraw Downes has, “remained faithful to his Muse over the long haul, a fidelity that has demanded an austere commitment to realism and a dogged environmentalism… With great verve and style, Downes argues against the critical attitudes that force a premature closure of art’s possibilities… But these essays are not for the art connoisseur alone; they are filled with a crackling intelligence and a lapidary style. Downes’s insightfulness is shown not only by the fund of fresh insights on fellow painters, but on literature as well.”

COMPLETE ESSAYS 1984-1998 provides us with an important historical document about the development of American abstract painting over the course of nearly two decades. Besides analyzing the work of Piet Mondrian, Willem de Kooning, and Eugène Leroy, and the critic Clement Greenberg, the artist discusses abstract painting’s relationship to violence, sensation, the media, the physical and cognitive world of images, consciousness and mortality in the contemporary world. In his thinking and work, as evidenced in these essays, Lasker explores “the unhappy marriages of the biomorphic and the decorative, the mark of the loaded brush and the geometric, the psyche and popular culture.”

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NAPOLEON: HOW TO MAKE WAR lists the general's 111 maxims for combat, divided into the categories General Principles, Offensive and Defensive. Translated by Keith Sanborn from the 1973 French collection “Comment faire la guerre” by Yann Cloarec. Also contains an essay by Sanborn on the intersection of Napoleon, DeBord and Paul Virillo entitled “Postcards from the Berezina.”

THE DEADMAN is a short story that combines elements of sex, community and spirituality in a highly personal vision of the flesh. A world of sensation in which the insistent demands of excess and the anguish of heightened awareness battles the everyday world of reason and the social order. Librarian, philosopher and writer, Georges Bataille is a major figure from mid-twentieth-century France whose startling and original ideas on such diverse topics as economics, psychoanalysis, Marxism, literature and anthropology, continue to be relevant.

AN EPISODE IN THE LIFE OF A LANDSCAPE PAINTER is an astounding novel from Argentina that is a meditation on the beautiful and the grotesque in nature, the art of landscape painting,
and one experience in a man’s life (the German artist, Johan Moritz Rugendas) that became a lightning rod for inspiration. The author, César Aira, was born in Coronel Pringles, Argentina
in 1949, and has lived in Buenos Aires since1967. He has taught at the University of Buenos Aires and has translated and edited books from France, England, Italy, Brazil, Spain, Mexico, and
Venezuela. Perhaps one of the most prolific writers in Argentina, having published more than 30 books himself, his novel “How I Became a Nun,” (Spain,1998, to be published next winter by
New Directions,) was chosen as one of Argentina’s ten best books.

“If we talk of eccentricities, we must move South to come across the author who nowadays is perhaps the most original and shocking, the most exciting and subversive Spanish narrative
writer: César Aira.” — Ignacio Echeverri

Dot do dot II
Edited by Stuart Bailey and Peter Bilak
DDD Publishers
134 pp.
$10.00

Since its conception in 2000, DDD has immatured into a jocuserious fanzine-journal-orphanage based on true stories deeply concerned with art-design-music-language-literature-architecture and uptight optipessimistic stoppy/revelatory ghostwriting by friendly spirits mapping b-sides and out-takes pushing for a resolution in bleak midwinter through late summer with local and general aesthetics wound on an ever tightening coil.