My review of Niklaus Largier's In Praise of the Whip: a Cultural History of Arousal (Zone Books) has got some comment-box action at the New Statesman. And another great Zone book -- Who Are You? Identification, Deception and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe by Valentin Groebner -- is over at the Daily Telegraph.

The new issue of Cabinet -- the Magic issue -- is out now. It includes 'Talk to the Hand', my essay on early-nineteenth-century gesture manuals for public speakers. The most ambitious of these was Chironomia: Or a Treatise on Rhetorical Delivery by Gilbert Austin, published in 1806. These are the kind of antics he expected his students to replicate. Maybe while wearing a super-starched cravat, the tying of which required yet another set of convoluted instructions for the would-be gentleman.

A couple of frieze pieces that I neglected to link before: on Land, Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook and Susan Sontag's journals.

A short history of hypochondria: part of Documenta Magazines Online Journal.

A Conspectus of the Arts and Sciences

Reading:
Emily Cockayne, Hubbub: Filth, Noise & Stench in England, 1600 - 1770 (Yale)
Martin Rowson, Stuff (Jonathan Cape)
Max Andrews (ed.), LAND, ART: A Cultural Ecology Handbook (RSA)
Georges Didi-Huberman, L’image ouverte (Gallimard)
Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture
BOOKFORUM

Listening:
www.monobolical.com
Nico, The Marble Index (while waiting for this to arrive)

Proving ground

‘Atomized’, my essay on the ruins of a gunpowder works near Faversham, Kent, that exploded in April 1916, killing 108 people, is in the new issue of The Dublin Review.

I’ve written a catalogue essay on the Swedish photographer Anders Petersen, one of four nominees for the 2007 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. The winner will be announced on 21 March at the Photographers’ Gallery, London.

My latest column for frieze is on Secrets of Women, by Katharine Park: a fascinating (if somewhat narrowly focussed) study of human dissection in the late Middle Ages.

I'll be your mirror

RIP Jean Baudrillard (1929 – 2007)

‘In the trompe-l’oeil, whether a mirror or a painting, we are bewitched by the spell of the missing dimension. It is the latter that establishes the space of seduction and becomes a source of vertigo. For if the divine mission of all things is to find their meaning, or to find a structure on which to base their meaning, they also seek, by virtue of a diabolical nostalgia, to lose themselves in appearances, in the seduction of their image. That is to say, they seek to unite what should be separated into a single effect of death and seduction. Narcissus.’ [Seduction, trans. Brian Singer (London, Macmilllan, 1990), p. 67.]