> I also want to mention Andre Malraux and Octavio Paz with a certain
> provision that both were Marxists at some point in their lives and the
> remains are laced through their works. So, with a little tweaking you
> can tease out a more explicit Marxist view from much of what they have
> written.
Damn, Chuck, I've been reading Andre Malraux, fiction and non-, for the past month or so - _The Conquerors_, _Man's Fate_, _Days of Wrath_, _Lazarus_ (just about finished) - and I'm just about to plunge into his art history tome, _The Voices of Silence_, which I've been putting off til now but comes highly recommended by a certain chief museum curator I know and respect. I expect I'll read it in snatches, however.
Tonight at a secondhand bookshop I picked up a copy of Malraux's _The Temptation of the West_ and I have a copy of his _Anti-Memoirs_ winging it's way to me as well from an online source. I also nabbed a copy of Jean Lacouture's Malraux bio, but who knows when I'll get to that. So, it's with Malraux that I'll make the transition from summer into fall (and it is alarmingly fall-like, with the thermometer plunging to under 40 degrees here when it was stiflingly hot not two weeks ago).
It probably sounds very acquisitive, but it's really just dealing with what needs to be dealt with - and I got every last one of them save _Voices..._ secondhand, strangely enough. I also took a break somewhere along the way and read one of the 50s dime novels I picked up in Hancock Michigan last summer and it left a bad taste in my mouth. (I'll likely do the same thing again in six months or so and have the same reaction...)
BTW, for someone looking for a decidely entry-level view on painting in a social context, the _What Great Paintings Say_ series by Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen actually isn't that bad, notwithstanding the obvious presumptuousness (Great? says who? - Say? say what?) behind the title. I picked up a remaindered copy of Volume 1 not long ago, and while not explicitly Marxist, there is an awareness of class relations woven throughout the text that was somehow missing from whatever it was I had to read in Art History 101. They're published by German art-house Taschen who also do the sex books - like the 755-page _Erotica Universalis_ compiled by Gilles Neret that found it's way to me a few years back.
At any rate, the Malraux stuff is pretty interesting so far. It feels less like a distraction than most of what's out there (from what? that's the question that sets the mind reeling).
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/ dave /