From Paleoart.

First published in 1966, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, by Justin Kaplan, is still the standard biography of our most enduringly funny writer—or, at least, the earliest writer who makes me actually laugh. I avoided it till now because I knew Twain’s life got pretty dark. He outlived his wife and all of his children; he lost a fortune through crazy investments; as a writer, he lost his sense of humor. But what he achieved is incredible. On Kaplan’s telling, it’s not so much the individual books as the tone of voice—almost a new way of writing based on the spoken word. Like David Sedaris today, Twain polished his essays by performing them onstage. He spent much of his life on tour and sold his books by subscription, direct to consumers, largely bypassing the critical establishment. In fact, it wasn’t until Twain went to England—and was seriously praised by authors like Browning and Tennyson—that Americans started to grasp his originality. Details like these make the pleasure of Kaplan’s biography worth the pain. —Lorin Stein

There really ought to be some kind of survey of artists’ and writers’ filing strategies. The writing spaces of Luc Sante and Marianne Fritz both have meticulously arranged shelves and file boxes, for instance. Who else? The artist Dieter Roth for one. A show of his book practice at Hauser and Wirth, which I saw this week, includes six hundred binders, each of which contains accumulations of everyday detritus (he called the project Flacher Abdall, or “Flat Waste”). The best part of the show is the installation of his actual studio from Basel, Switzerland, which he shared with his son. As one would expect, art supplies abound—a deeply pleasurable assortment of colors and brushes in jars and plastic buckets—but the studio, complete with tiny kitchen, also contains items that show the artists on temporary leave from the work at hand: a pair of Groucho glasses, a bottle-cap collection, slices of pie on pie-shaped rollerskates, models horses in a homemade cardboard stable. A long wooden table served as an informal canvas and displays scribbled lines like “yes or no or well I don’t know” and doodles of the sort you’d make while talking absentmindedly on the phone. The space is reminiscent, as my colleague Julia pointed out, of Donald Judd’s Spring Street building: a live/work space in which the most compelling details are the human ones. —Nicole Rudick  Read More