Mark Harrington

Mark Harrington

Artist

Mark Harrington is an American-born Europe-based artist who has exhibited widely in Europe and the United States since the 1990s. "My paintings focus on space and light. No narrative. No symbolism. No reference. No representation. I want them to mean and to arouse a sense of resolve and upliftedness."
 

White Teeth

Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith’s dazzling debut is street-smart and learned, sassy and philosophical. It is set in London and is rich of sights and smells of the world that England has inherited.

This book is unique for the evocation of a place through the rhythm of language - as used in conversation, or in suggesting how certain characters are thinking. It is very London - specifically parts of London that I know, where I have lived and met friends. It holds true for a wide perspective of time, from the eighties to the present.

Mark Harrington

Against Nature

Joris-Karl Huysmans
The spectacular antidote against naturalism. His hero is the most decadent dandy of the late 19th century.

A slender novel of the late nineteenth-century based in Paris. The protagonist, a precious aesthete and anglophile, prepares himself for a journey to London. He fails to accomplish the journey but reaches the conclusion that anticipation, when pursued with passion and precision, is an equal, if not greater reward. Reading the book insinuates a question that never leaves the mind - is his conclusion sublime or absurd, and if sublime what impact should the idea have upon our lives?

Mark Harrington

Coming Through Slaughter

Michael Ondaatje
New Orleans, shortly after 1900: Buddy Bolden, womanizer, barber and cornetist, is considered the man who invented jazz. One day he disappears. His old friend Webb hunts him down in Storyville, New Orleans' whorehouse district, and brings Buddy back to Canal Street, the site of orgiastic music parades where Buddy plays until he goes mad.

Ondaatje’s first novel is a journey through the streets, bars and music halls of New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth-century, focusing on the life and artistic evolution of the innovative trumpeter, Buddy Bolden. Bolden had enormous influence on the birth of jazz, and figures prominently in compositions by Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton, among many others. He died before the advent of recorded music, which makes Ondaatje’s book powerful and poignant as a portrait of Bolden, the music of his time, and the pace of change in early New Orleans.

Mark Harrington

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