The secret to John Updike’s long tenure as America’s preeminent man of letters can be found in the essays from Self-Consciousness, his 1989 memoir-of-sorts. The book is fairly representative: it’s an unabashed hymn to Updikehood, a finely recorded bout of nostalgia, a cheerful philosophical riff, and a masterwork of English prose…
Why is poetry these days so hard to remember?
Consciousness has caught up with the impossible soul on “the other shore,” the shore that permits, and legitimizes, the imagination, the vehicle of consciousness. Seshadri’s metaphor is doubly apt (if not multiply complex): improbable as it may seem, the imaginary number (i or √−1) regularly surfaces in science and engineering; it is present in the formalisms underlying modern technologies…
In a darkened room of Chelsea’s Jack Shainman gallery last month, I watched Richard Mosse’s new short film “The Enclave,” as the disembodied eye of a Steadicam roved a mountain landscape—pink, impossibly pink—with inhuman sweeps. On a mountain slope the color of cotton candy, the camera edged down a gravel road…
What is Emily Apter really against, what is she really for, and why does she invoke world literature to make that case?
Quietly composed for France’s Fata Morgana Press in the aftermath of The Kindly Ones—a monumental study on human baseness and Nazism—Mr. Littell’s new book at first appears to bear little resemblance to its precursor. Where The Kindly Ones is an exuberant historical novel, a 992-page behemoth of rape, incest, and murder, The Fata Morgana Books is a spare, 184-page collection of four short novellas, comparatively light, until the end, on physical violence, and stripped of the ornamental graces of period, geographical location, name, gender…
A decent strategy with TED might be to reclaim our teenage capacities and treat these videos as hopelessly passé—ignore them to death. Critiquing them, even as I have done, will do what criticism has done for television: creating an added enjoyment as you go on consuming the crap you despise…
Fundament represents a radical desublimation of the obsession with sex and death. In its unflinching presentation of the twin poles of mortality, what was previously obscene has shifted to center stage, to the stomach’s chagrin…
The laughter said: this is where the play ends, but that’s fine, because I know what happens next. There is no need for you to finish your story, because I can finish it for you.
Too often, modern academics approach Benjamin as a Rorschach test, gazing at the text and thereby gauging their own predilections toward Marxism, poststructuralism, sociology, Jewish mysticism, urban theory, or modern-day Dadaism. No thinker in modern history is so overdetermined by the pet theories and partial readings of others…
Enter the double: the curated profile, the version of you that bears all your identifying information—name, clothes, job, appearance, place of birth—but whose social grace is impeccable, whose interests are noble and fascinating, whose biography is impressive yet humbly presented, whose comments are edited for maximum wit.
Berl’s Poetry Shop located in Dumbo has emerged from nowhere it seems to become one of the most exciting venues for poetry in New York City. No easy feat considering the long-standing wealth of options. Owned and operated by poets Jared White and Farrah Field, Berl’s features an exhaustive inventory of poetry titles and chapbooks from small presses and independent publishers…
One time I was in therapy for being sad, and while I was there I learned about The Power of Positive Thought. I know this sounds like magic and/or fake and/or antithetical to the open-eyed truth telling to which we’ve all dedicated ourselves as writers, but if you would like to not kill yourself after years and years of sitting at a desk with little or nothing to show for it, it’s a really great option…
The result is a sharply integrated and commanding whole, a triptych of love, poetry and grief orchestrated around the time in which each section was written: the June before, the August during, and the months after his mother’s death.
It’s as though Proulx and Finn mean to demonstrate to us in showing the violence as they do that the passion vindicated in a murder with a gun will never outlive the hot moment it lurks in. Both deaths are murder-suicides where neither the victim nor shooter survives; they’re double-barreled sound and fury, absorbing themselves like an unhealthy star…
