Serendipity

Carol Mavor is Emeritus Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Manchester. She has published widely on photography, cinema, colour and childhood. Her books include Aurelia: Art and Literature Through the Mouth of the Fairy Tale (Reaktion, 2017).

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 OxfordSerendipity: The Afterlife of the Object is like wind. Rushing, it blows air into crevices and corners, mingling and affecting; rustling. Serendipity, like strong winds, collides objects, found, post-gust, with limbs intermingled, evidence of their play. Mavor’s writing in and through Serendipity is best put, in the book’s “a productive bumping into”. - Newcity LitMavor’s Serendipity: The Afterlife of the Object includes collecting among its interests, but Mavor is mainly tuned into our moments of discovery, “by accident and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of”, and later, of “finding something that you did not exactly know you were looking for until you found it”. A widely published professor of art history, Mavor experiences serendipitous moments while gazing at artworks and artifacts, and while writing allusive, bounding essays about creative thought. So when she considers Caravaggio’s The Inspiration of St Matthew (1602) and the angel hovering over the startled saint who is trying to write something, the angel who passes freely between two worlds, she is also enacting the role of the angel, a liminal “middle voice” between writer and reader, the past and the now. - Ron Slate, On the Seawall[Carol Mavor] assembles six essays on “the chance observation falling on a receptive eye”. The poems Emily Dickinson scrawled on envelopes lead by memories and association to Marcel Duchamp’s glass ampoule and, via healthy doses of Roland Barthes, to a walnut deposited at London’s Foundling Museum. The reader finds himself juggling dead hares and Anne Frank’s diary. - Damian Thompson, World of Interiors, ‘One of the year’s best illustrated non-fiction’

• Preface My Early Education in SerendipityIntroduction From a Smashed Thimble to Two Hares Falling Out of BreathChapter One To AngelizeChapter Two Moeder, Maman, Mom - Anne Frank, Chantal Akerman, Dorothy Aileen AshcraftPostscriptum Written After: Moeder, Maman, Mom or, I sang so hard I almost explodedChapter Three Sally Mann's Scarred Tree - Tete-a-Tete with Proust's 'Three Trees'Chapter Four Making Poems Out of What Is Not There: The Envelopes of Emily Dickinson and London's Foundling HospitalChapter Five Two Hares Falling Out of BreathChapter Six Lolita's Gray EyesAfterwordReferencesAcknowledgementsPhoto Acknowledgements