Monday Memo

This week we're talking about:

• McQueen, now in theaters, explores the influences that fueled the imagination of the designer. Subscribers, log in to our archives, and see No. 25, for an image from Alexander McQueen: Unseen by Robert Fairer.
• At the Met Breuer, a dazzling collection of erotic art assembled by Scofield Thayer, editor of The Dial literary magazine, is currently on exhibition in a show entitled "Obsession." (Seen above, Picasso's Reclining Bather with a Book.) Recently, a group of writers and editors inspired by his legacy started The Scofield magazine.
• In Pittsburgh, "Intimate Subjects" promises "hidden performances" throughout the Carnegie Museum of Art, encouraging patrons to interact with the museum –– and each other –– in new ways. Involved with the local scene? Send us your happenings (we're looking at you, Littsburgh and Ace Hotel). In No. 22, Julia Cooke wrote about "The Art of Participation": A spotlight shone on a man at the front of the theater. He began to talk. Our emotions, he said, were rarely appealed to in art these days, or at least that was how he felt it. Or at least he had not felt emotion in some time in response to a work of art, and he wondered if this emotion was now relegated to his youth. He found himself yearning for the work of art that might move him indelibly.
• In Nairobi, publisher Angela Wachuka and author Wanjiru Koinange have launched Book Bunk, a scheme to reinvent the library system for contemporary patrons. In Cologne, Atlas Obscura reports that the oldest public library in Germany has been found in the footprint of a Roman building, located in the center of its town and designed to store many scrolls. Visit No. 15 in our archives to read Kathleen Ossip's poem "Libraries & Museums": Their hush and their order and their devotion to the past are a deep comfort to us. / But silence has a way of making you want to fill it.
• Jeremy Tiang has won the Singapore Literary Prize, and you can see him read an excerpt from his prize-winning novel at the Asian American Writers Workshop's "Singapore, Myth, Memory" symposium last fall. He is also the editor of this month's Macau edition of Words Without Borders, and discusses it with Publishing Perspectives.