LIKE THE SEA

DANCING WITH MARY GLASS

Spring 2025 | Fordham University Press | 192 pages | 25 Illustrations

“While there’s been ample scholarly documentation of the lives and work of some of the most significant (non-fictional) figures in postmodern dance, this fictional biography, written in a fully lyrical mode, expands the possibilities for exploring the ways in which an aesthetic practice is grounded in both political and personal histories. Mavor’s Mary Glass is an uncannily convincing participant in this sphere, and the places where her life and those of ‘real people’ intersect are both illuminating and enthralling.”
—Barbara Browning, author of The Gift

An exploration of the mythical Mary Glass—her art, her life, and her times.

Mary Glass (1946–2021) was an innovative modern dancer and choreographer, quietly instrumental to the San Francisco Bay Area art scene of the 1960s and 70s—barely known today—admired for her experimental movements based on sounds and images of the Pacific.

As a child, Mary Glass took her first dance class with Anna Halprin on her famed redwood dance deck in Marin County’s Kent Woodlands. Dancing with the blue sky as her ceiling—surrounded by magical madrones and redwoods—the effect on Mary Glass was seismic. Fittingly, Halprin called her classes “dance experiences.”

Mary Glass’s lifestyle, her anxieties, and her dance reflect the human geography of Northern California: Happenings, Zero Population Growth (ZPG), feminism, same-sex love, civil rights, Vietnam, environmentalism. Cascading in the waves of the politics of the time was Mary Glass’s anorexia, an unexpected pregnancy and her life-long love with the Black painter Eliza Vesper.

Today Mary Glass is remembered by an increasingly diminishing handful­ of devotees. Author Carol Mavor is one of them.

In this daring work of fictocriticism, where “feelings are facts,” Like the Sea asks its readers—just as Anna Halprin asked of each of her young students as they were leaving class—“What are you taking with you from the natural world?”

Halprin’s words will resonate in Mary’s mind her entire lifetime and beyond.

In the after-time of the prescient Mary Glass—with its decline of sea kelp and warm Decembers—Mavor herself considers the Anthropocene, tasting extinction as if swallowing the long-gone abalone mollusks of her own Bay-Area childhood: salty, like the sea, but strangely sweet. And from it, Mavor delivers the reader to the far-away country of the not-so-distant past to help envision a future.

There are no photographs or films of Mary Glass dancing. The life of Mary Glass is nearly forgotten, her memory on the edge of extinction. In meditative, dazzling and lyrical prose, Like the Sea tells us—like the ocean’s music in our ear—we need to remember extinction to imagine our way out of it.

SERENDIPITY

THE AFTERLIFE OF THE OBJECT

Fall 2024 | Reaktion Books | 224 pages | 87 Illustrations, 78 in colour

“Welcoming us into the afterlife of the happy accident, Carol Mavor’s poetic ruminations reveal a cavalcade of surprising connections between a diverse array of images and objects. In the process, Serendipity reflects on the magical power of writing itself, on the capacity of the learned essayist to take us on dizzying flights of fancy and into profound depths of understanding.”
—Geoffrey Batchen, Professor of History of Art, University of Oxford

An exploration of the sadness, as well as the joy, of unexpected discoveries in history and life.

Carol Mavor’s first “happy accident” occurred in 1980 when visiting New York’s Serendipity 3, a dessert café favored by Andy Warhol. Mavor’s memory of eating a frozen hot chocolate became food for thought, nurturing accidental discoveries about art and literature.

This book’s happy, yet dark, accidents include Anne Frank’s journal, discovered in the Secret Annex after the Second World War; Emily Dickinson’s poems, scribbled on salvaged envelopes, hidden in a drawer; and Lolita, rescued from incineration by Nabokov’s wife Véra.

Mavor’s writing is dependent on serendipity’s layers of happenstance, rousing feelings of something that she did not exactly know she was looking for until she found it. All history is about loss, and in the case of this book, much of it is tragic—but Serendipity also offers the happiness that can be found in unexpected discoveries.

LIKE A LAKE

A STORY OF UNEASY LOVE AND PHOTOGRAPHY

Fall 2020 | Fordham University Press | 144 pages | 17 Illustrations

“Like a Lake is like a novella teasing an essay, or an erotic ghost haunting a fictional memoir, or a negative searching for its lost prints. It is an unnerving question-machine where desire, memory, loss and invention are staged, folded and held, tasted, re-made and undone. It’s a strange, vivid, troubling and beautiful book.”
—Max Porter

A vivid, imaginative response to the sensual and erotic in postwar American photography, with attention to the beauty of the nude, both male and female

When photographer Coda Gray befriends a family with a special interest in a young boy, the motivation behind his special attention is difficult to grasp, “like water slipping through our fingers.” Can a man innocently love a boy who is not his own?

Using fiction to reveal the truths about families, communities, art objects, love, and mourning, Like a Lake tells the story of ten-year-old Nico, who lives with his father (an Italian-American architect) and his mother (a Japanese-American sculptor who learned how to draw while interned during World War II). Set in the 1960s, this is a story of aesthetic perfection waiting to be broken. Nico’s midcentury modern house, with its Italian pottery jars along the outside and its interior lit by Japanese lanterns. The elephant-hide gray, fiberglass-reinforced plastic 1951 Eames rocking chair, with metal legs and birch runners. Clam consommé with kombu, giant kelp, yuzu rind, and a little fennel—in each bowl, two clams opened like a pair of butterflies, symbols of the happy couple. Nico’s boyish delight in developing photographs under the red safety light of Coda’s “Floating Zendo”—the darkroom boat that he keeps on Lake Tahoe.

The lives of Nico, his parents, and Coda embody northern California’s postwar landscape, giving way to fissures of alternative lifestyles and poetic visions. Author Carol Mavor addresses the sensuality and complexity of a son’s love for his mother and that mother’s own erotic response to it. The relationship between the mother and son is paralleled by what it means for a boy to be a model for a male photographer and to be his muse. Just as water can freeze into snow and ice, melt back into water, and steam, love takes on new forms with shifts of atmosphere. Like a Lake’s haunting images and sensations stay with the reader.

AURELIA

ART AND LITERATURE THROUGH THE MOUTH OF THE FAIRY TALE

(Reaktion Books, 2017)

“Forget whatever you previously associated with “fairy tales,” and enter Carol Mavor’s kaleidoscopic universe of art and literature. Everyone from Ralph Eugene Meatyard to Kiki Smith to Frank Baum to Emmett Till to Francesca Woodman to Langston Hughes is here, and so many more, held together by Mavor’s casually erudite, finely spun web. Aurelia is as strange, enigmatic, and full of magic as its subjects.”
—Maggie Nelson

“On falling asleep”
Read an extract from Aurelia, presented by the London Review of Books Bookshop blog.

Book of the week: Aurelia is book of the week for the ‘photo-eye’ blog (Santa Fe, New Mexico).
Read the review of Aurelia by Laura M. André and experience the book tease.

“What is black & white & red all over?
Answer: the photographs of Ralph Eugene Meatyard’”
Read an introduction to Aurelia written especially for the journal Hotel, plus an excerpt from the book.

Listen to the talk, “On Fairy Tales: Carol Mavor and Marina Warner” given by Carol Mavor at the London Review Bookshop on 24 July 2017.

BLUE MYTHOLOGIES

REFLECTIONS ON A COLOUR

(Reaktion Books, 2013)

“Blue Mythologies succeeds in directing our eyes anew”
—Philip Hoare, Times Higher Education

“Mavor is at her somersaulting best, moving effortlessly between disciplines”
—Dylan J. Montanari, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Carol Mavor not only studies ‘blue,’ she bleeds it’s aesthetic and emotional resonances from a fresh perspective”
—Hayden White

“It picks up . . . treasures . . .on expanding its field of operation, in the manner of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, until everything in the world is shown to be blue in some way or other.”
—Jonathan Gibbs, TLS

“This Color Can Be Dirty, Deceptive—and Divine”: get the ‘take-away’ of Carol Mavor and Blue Mythologies at the Getty.

BLACK AND BLUE

THE BRUISING PASSION OF CAMERA LUCIDA, LA JETÉE,
SANS SOLEIL AND HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR

(Duke UP, 2012)

“The overall effect is hypnotic, aided by the stunning visual affect of the book, its elegant typesetting and the variety of the images that litter the text. . . . a joy to read . . . a veritable feast for the eyes”
—Lucy Scholes, The Times Literary Supplement

“Carol Mavor has developed a unique way of responding to images and to their uses by artists and writers: with appetite and fastidious delicacy, she brings the full sensorium synaesthetically into play”
—Marina Warner

“Black and Blue belongs to a growing number of first-person accounts that have coped with the years 1939–46 and after, including those by Sarah Kofman … and Jean-Luc Godard”
—Tom Conley

“Black and Blue has a poetic logic of mourning, and its rage to make too much sense”
—Brian Dillon, Art Review

READING BOYISHLY

J.M. BARRIE, ROLAND BARTHES, JACQUES HENRIE LARTIGUE,
MARCEL PROUST AND D.W. WINNICOTT

(Duke UP, 2007)

“My book of the year is Reading Boyishly by Carol Mavor. It touched something very deep in me about what it is to be a creative man.”
—Grayson Perry, Turner-Prize Winner, The Guardian

“It is a sigh of relief, this book, a defense of things that make us feel guilty: nostalgia, apron strings, the ‘good-enough mother,’ the lost mother, the nest, the childhood home, the beauty of boys at play. . . . Food and kissing, eating and not eating, boredom and tenderness. Mavor’s is a style to be savored.”
—Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

“One of the best-looking books of the year.”
—Brian Dillon, Frieze

“An endlessly charming book.”
—Spencer Dew, Rain Taxi

“I love Mavor’s book.”
—Lucy Rollin, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly

“The book is unique, well researched, and visually stunning.”
—J. R. Mitrano, Choice

“Sprightly, witty, distinctly unlabored.”
—Richard Canning, The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide

“An absolute monster romp through the incredibly intricate tapestry of Oedipal desire, maternal attachment, and nostalgia.”
—Kathryn Adams, Leonardo

“A beautiful, deeply pleasurable, and thought-provoking new book.”
—Michael Payne, The Daily Item (Sunbury, PA)

“An embrace of what some have fretted about as an over-attachment to mothers.”
—Rebecca Wigod, Vancouver Sun

“With hedonistic pleasure, she offers exegetical indulgences and connections she has made in a lifetime of poring over texts, films, photographs, and other aspects of literary and visual culture.”
—William V. Ganis, Afterimage

“Reading Boyishly is a rewarding read with surprising insights into the lives of some very intriguing people.”
—Simone O’Callaghan, Visual Studies

BECOMING

THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF CLEMENTINA, VISCOUNTESS HAWARDEN

(Duke UP, 1999)

“Mavor…is smart on the topic of teendom (just one of the ‘becomings’ of her title)”
—The Village Voice

“To those accustomed to the detached tone of the academic monograph, Carol Mavor’s stance in Becoming will seem daring. From the effusive acknowledgments onwards, the author thrusts herself to the front, so that her particular appreciation of what she studies becomes both subject and critical method”
—The Times Literary Supplement

PLEASURES TAKEN

PERFORMANCES OF SEXUALITY AND LOSS IN VICTORIAN PHOTOGRAPHS

(Duke UP, 1995)

“Under her clever, searching eye and in her greedily epicurean hands, these pictures cease to be the faded work of hidden Victorians. Mavor exults in the risks they take, in the way the images flaunt their subjects’ and their makers’ own desires”
– Marina Warner, The Times Literary Supplement