My Current Reading List

I have three books that I am currently reading. Two are books of essays, and the other is a history, so it will be easy to alternate between the three. They are Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation, What's Queer About Europe?: Productive Encounters and Re-Enchanting Paradigms and Letters from Prison and Other Essays. The book about Yugoslavia was written by Laura Silber and Allan Little. It is about what happened there after the death of Tito and the splitting of Yugoslavia into independent nations. It is interesting. What's Queer About Europe is a challenging read. I am currently reading the introduction. It is a book of essays on queer studies. Letters From Prison is a collection of essays Adam Michnik. It was published in 1985, and it deals with the political situation in Poland in the first half of the 1980s. It has an introduction by Jonathan Schell and a foreward by Czesław Miłosz. It was translated from Polish by Maya Latynski. I found this book with the books on Russian history even though it is obviously a book about Poland if one reads the book's cover. Even before reading that my first clue that it was about Poland was the name of the author of the foreword. Czesław Miłosz is obviously a Polish name. I will write more about these books as I read them.

I also recently found a slim book of photographs taken by Christopher Makos of Andy Warhol. It is entitled Andy. They are photos of Warhol wearing jeans, white button-down shirts and plaid tie with women's wigs and make up. These photos were inspired by photos that Man Ray had taken of Marcel Duchamp in drag in 1921. Duchamp became Rrose Sélavy. The photos of Warhol were called Altered Images. Duchamp was a leading figure in Dadaism, and some people say Warhol was a late Dadaist. I can definitely see Dadaist aspects in some of Warhol's art as well as others of the Pop Art movement. Warhol's appearance was definitely altered by the wigs and make up.