Athenaeum Review

Border Documents is a new photobook from Arturo Soto, a photographer, writer and educator. It is "a personal archive of ordinary events that reveals how emotions become attached to public spaces." Having grown up listening to his father’s stories about his youth in the twin cities of Juárez (Mexico) and El Paso (USA), fascinated by how much things had changed in just a generation, Soto compiled and narratively shaped his father’s memories, then photographed the sites where they occurred.

In this conversation: the concept behind the book; the structure of the narrative; Georges Perec and the infra-ordinary; biography and personal experience; the new book in relation to Soto's other work; growing up, studying, working, and traveling in places from Mexico City to Oxford to Panama to Los Angeles; further reading on Ciudad Juárez and El Paso; and much more!

A few other interesting books about Juárez:

• Edmond Baudoin and Jean-Marc Troubet, Viva la Vida: Los sueños en Ciudad Juárez (Mexico City: Sexto Piso, 2011)
• Charles Bowden, et al, Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future (New York: Aperture, 1998)
• Julián Cardona, Stardust: Memories of the Calle Mariscal (El Paso: Rubin Center for the Visual Arts), 2014
• Ricardo Ainslie, The Fight to Save Juárez: Life in the Heart of Mexico’s Drug War (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013) 
• Alfredo Corchado, Midnight in Mexico: A Reporter’s Journey through a Country’s Descent into the Darkness (New York: Penguin, 2013)
  

A conversation with Dr. Leigh Arnold, curator of Haegue Yang: Lost Lands and Sunken Fields at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas.

In this conversation: war poems by Walt Whitman, Yehuda Amichai, and Siegfried Sassoon; Jonathan Shay's books Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character and Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, how veterans view the representation of war in Saving Private Ryan and Apocalypse Now; Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death; war and politicians from the Iliad and Thucydides to Henry Kissinger; and much more.

See also: Tom Palaima, "Writing on War"

Thomas G. Palaima is Robert M. Armstrong Centennial Professor of Classics emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin. He is recipient of a MacArthur fellowship (1985-90) and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023.

Correction: The two senators who stood tall opposed to the Gulf of Tonkin resolution were Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska.

Iain McGilchrist is the author of The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World and The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. He has said that "‘Our talent for division, for seeing the parts, is of staggering importance – second only to our capacity to transcend it, in order to see the whole."

Julia Friedman is a Russian-born art historian, writer and curator.

In this conversation: the importance of holistic understanding in art history; postmodernism and theory-driven vs. object-centered criticism; literal-mindedness and abstraction vs. embodied and emotional understanding; power and self-aggrandizement vs. wonder and awe; the power of beauty and the criticism of Dave Hickey; Kandinsky vs. Malevich; AI in art; the films of Andrei Tarkovsky; and more!

Mai Wang is an assistant professor of literature at UT Dallas, where she teaches Asian American and Chinese diasporic literature. 

Her first book project, The Asian American Renaissance, examines the imaginative alliances formed between diasporic Asian American authors and their nineteenth-century American predecessors.

In this conversation: How Asian American authors have formed imaginative alliances with their 19th century predecessors; Eileen Chang and Emerson's concept of negative freedom; Carlos Bulosan and America Is in the Heart; and much more!

Michael Thomas is curator of The Legacy of Vesuvius: Bourbon Discoveries on the Bay of Naples at the Meadows Museum, Dallas, as well as From Texas to the World: Common Ground at UT Dallas and the Dallas Museum of Art.

In this conversation: What the Bourbons discovered in 18th-century excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum; the effect of the Grand Tour; 18th-century archaeological techniques; highlights of the exhibition; artists at the Spanish royal court, and more!

Gerytades: An Aristophanes Play... sort of, by poet and translator A.M. Juster, is out now from Contubernales Publishing.

In this conversation: How Gerytades was lost and found; what makes for great comedy; timeliness and timelessness in human nature; how to approach a play that survives in fragments; the fate of light verse; literature, humor, and the underworld; approaches to translating Latin; and much more!

"Dragon Eye," Thomas Riccio's immersive video installation documenting the culture of the Miao people of China, was recently on view at the SP/N Gallery at UT Dallas.

In this conversation: The process of visiting and doing research with the Miao people in remote mountain villages; cultural preservation in the face of modernity; "Form Fatigue"; an example of a healing ritual; the relationship between Indigenous rituals and Western performance; doing theater in Chicago, Alaska, and Dallas; anthropology and AI; Sophia Robot: Post Human Being; and more!

Thomas Locke Hobbs is a photographer whose books include L.A. Vedute, which was shortlisted for Aperture Photobook of the Year, and Rampitas.

In this conversation: Cities in the U.S., Peru and Colombia; domestic architecture, density and class division; negative space in the built environment; Eugène Atget and photo history; season, climate, and mood in Los Angeles; the photo book as object; and more!