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My Year 2006: Serving

Douglas Messerli

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The third installment of what Douglas Messerli has described as a memoir written "out of the cradle rocking," represents his personal experiences with cultural events -- in art, music, dance, history, poetry, fiction, film, drama, television, performance, and popular culture -- from 2006.

Like the other two published volumes of his ongoing cultural memoir, which will ultimately stretch back to the year 2000 and move forward until he is unable to continue, this book contains essays on a wide-range of events relating to what Messerli has perceived as an interconnecting concern of the year -- in this case issues relating to "servitude" and "serving."

A discussion of the art of the Southern-born photographer, sculptor, and painter Bill Christenberry calls up themes from Messerli's own past interest in the South, featuring essays on different historical and literary traditions of Southern culture, on the effects of Reconstructionism, on an museum show concerning slavery in New York City, and on Eudora Welty's novel Losing Battles, as well as a review-essay on books about various battles for Civil Rights of the 1950s and 60s. In these pieces Messerli explores various notions of servitude, issues he further expands in his queries into the roles of master and servant in writings by French author Olivier Cadiot and the Polish novelist Witold Gombrowicz, and in films by Jean Renoir and Robert Altman. This volume also explores these issues in relation to creative works by and the personal lives of figures such Toby Olson, Barbara Guest, Jenny Erpenbeck, Clint Eastwood, the brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Truman Capote, Lee Breuer and Mabou Mines, Lee Mullican, Wendy Walker, Cy Feuer, Nam June Paik, Marianne Mauser, the Baroness von Korber-Bernstein, and Gilbert Sorrentino, several of them friends of the author. Related essays consider "What Is a Gay Movie?" and what was perhaps "The Last Innocent Moment" of the world exploration of nature in several books relating to the great naturalist/explorer Alexander von Humboldt.

Author of the fiction Letters from Hannuse (written under the pseudonym of Joshua Haigh), collections of poetry First Words, After, Bow Down, Maxims from My Mother's Milk and the forthcoming Dark, and plays (under the name Kier Peters) such as The Confirmation, Past Present Future Tense, and A Dog Tries to Kiss the Sky, Messerli is the editor of Green Integer, formerly Sun & Moon Press. In 2004 he was named Officier de I'ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.