Readings Against Type

I think of Albert Mobilio as a flâneur of culture. To follow the path of his criticism down alleyways and boulevards is to be immersed in the sights, sounds, and feel of literature and art. I've long been in awe of the breadth of his interests and the depth of his empathetic imagination, and this collection, a series of amiable detours ranging from road atlases to asemic writing to the art of list making, doesn't disappoint. His language, too, is a marvel-tactile, dazzling, and ripe, like fruit at the peak of summer. -Nicole Rudick, What Is Now Known Was Once

Only Imagined: An (Auto)biography of Niki de Saint Phalle

Each piece in this book distills intently focused fascination, whether with maps, magic, cemeteries, aerial surveillance, collages of found objects, or how cities and landscapes change over time. Wherever he directs his gaze Albert Mobilio teases out unexpected perspectives, by turns playful or macabre or ironic or sublime. Tiny objects or odd hobbies may be tokens of cataclysm or prescient intuition. Glimpses discerned in a snapshot or a stretch of desert engender metaphors that blossom into narratives. A word-centered artwork by Ed Ruscha evokes "a bathroom graffito on a doomed U-boat," a falcon traces "the inseam of the void." Among the places on a West Virginia road map Mobilio finds "incantatory music" and in the argot of Mafia wiretaps "a poetry of the oblique." In the lives and works of artists (Harry Smith, Weegee, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, Vivian Maier, and many others) he is alert to endlessly suggestive processes, and from what might seem random detritus (lists, manuals, hoarded mementos) he elicits hidden histories whose implications spread out in all directions. Readings Against Type is like a steamer trunk overflowing with the evidence of many lives and many places: at once memoir and urban chronicle and meditation on art, and, not least, acknowledgment of how mysteriously all its elements interconnect. -Geoffrey O'Brien, Arabian Nights of 1934

In Readings Against Type Albert Mobilio maps cultural curiosities like few others. Whether making sense of Gertrude Stein's sentences, reading travel guides and how-to books as literature, musing on a museum devoted to one man, or glossing photographs of men's footwear on city sidewalks, his sharp prose illuminates cultural artifacts that favor odd angles of approach. Read these pocket-size pieces of the planet for a keener sense of where we've been-and where we might be headed. -Louis Bury, Exercises in Criticism