BOOKS Archives - Reinventing Home

The Temple of Our Familiars

What is home without a familiar shadow at our feet? At Reinventing Home, we can’t get enough of cats and dogs, so we were very pleased to receive two inspired anthologies from Notting Hill Editions. On Cats, compiled by Margaret Atwood, and On Dogs curated by Tracey Ullman, feature delightful paeans to our pets by those with literary pedigrees. These books explore what we learn from our animal familiars—and why it helps, sometimes, to view the world from a four-legged point of view. And they also reminds us why pet lovers, in general, are healthier, more creative, and have more fun. But who knew reading about them could be so enjoyable?

The Art of the Flâneur

The qualities of the flâneur are not achieved overnight, if they can ever be today. But if the historical flâneur is missing from the physical streets of Paris, he’s increasingly present in spirit, as a metaphor for the kind of unrushed, intellectually rich and creative life we long for. And we can channel the spirit if we try. Paris showers its special magic on those who submit most fully to its siren call. That’s the mission of today’s flâneur and his contemporary partner, the flâneuse.

The Soul of Toys

While strolling through a park in Berlin, Franz Kafka met a young girl bereft because she’d lost her doll. To console her, Kafka explained that the doll was off on an adventure and had even sent him a letter! When the child demanded to see it, Kafka went home and composed it. Over time Kafka sent many letters from the doll, taking great care to fill in her back story—how she had grown tired of living with the same family, wished to travel, then became engaged and married.

The Story of a Happy Home

In the last few years, we’ve learned a lot more about the writer and psychoanalyst, Lou Andreas-Salomé, friend of Nietzsche, lover of Rilke, colleague of Freud. There’s a new bio-pic that focuses on her independent spirit, and now the first English translation of her novel, Das Haus, by Frank Beck and Raleigh Whitinger. A recent annotated edition, titled Anneliese’s House, will soon be released in paperback. In the meantime, the book is gaining the attention of literary critics, feminists, and followers of depth psychology.

The Hare with Amber Eyes

Close on the heels of an exhibition in 2020 about the Ephrussi family at the Jewish Museum Vienna, the Jewish Museum in New York was confronted with a question: “Why tell a story that has already been told?” The answer is simple. Some stories are so compelling that they merit endless recounting. Edmund de Waal’s family tale, The Hare with Amber Eyes, is one of fortunes made and plundered, of homes made and lost, of disaster, dispersal, and reunion.

Hauntings

What happens when the wallpaper seems carnivorous, the furniture instills a sense of dread, and home–the one place we count upon to protect and nourish us–turns sinister? In ghost stories, rooms are hostile and houses are taken over by spirits with the power to destroy our souls. When did these bone-chilling stories first become popular and why do they continue to captivate? In short, what hold does horror have on us?

The Voice of Things

My wife and I moved a short while back from our crowded and lair-like house outside Boston to an abruptly more open and airy place in Amherst. Over a month in, I’m still gaping at new space and different light. The move came after thirty years in the house that most of our lives had happened in, the house about which I said for close to thirty years to anyone who would listen, “You’re going to have to bury me out back by the hollowed-out apple tree trunk.” And I meant it.

Numinous Things

A decade ago, wars of liberation were being fought all across North Africa and the Middle East. Smaller, more personal wars of liberation were being fought in France, too. Here in the fifth arrondissement of Paris, we battled the forces of French bureaucracy to liberate our household goods from their shipping containers at Le Havre. We had valued most of the fifty boxes at $50 each. Many contained books, writing supplies, and journals. Many contained art. How do you assign such things a dollar amount?

This Analog Life

This is the age of Kindle, cloud storage, and the app-for-everything. We’ve said goodbye to personal libraries and printed books, to cabinets and accordion files, to calculators and accounting ledgers. But is our understanding of the world—and even our sense of self— diminished as we lose our paper trail? The Berkeley artist Ann Arnold recently joined me in considering the advantages of the analog life. Here are our a few of our observations about old-fashioned ways of storing and accessing information.

BOOKS

© 2023 Reinventing Home