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on Villa Triste and Young Once, two novels by Patrick Modiano
American readers asked a collective “Who?” when French novelist Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014. Writing in the Telegraph (UK), Duncan White quipped, “Modiano was simply a French thing we didn’t consume, like snails.” But across the Channel, Modiano has enjoyed a loyal following ever since his first novel, La place…
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on Baseball Books: Larry Doby, the ’72 A’s and Reds, and the ’77-‘78 Dodgers
From the University of Nebraska Press Greatness in the Shadows: Larry Doby and the Integration of the American League by Douglas M. Branson Hairs Vs. Squares: The Mustache Gang, the Big Red Machine, and the Tumultuous Summer of ‘72 by Ed Gruver Dodgerland: Decadent Los Angeles and the 1977-78 Dodgers by Michael Fallon I…
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on Three New Titles by Pascal Quignard: Abysses, The Hatred of Music, and A Terrace in Rome
Abysses / translated by Chris Turner (Seagull Books/ Univ. of Chicago) The Hatred of Music / translated by Matthew Amos & Fredrik Rönnbäck (Yale University Press) A Terrace in Rome / translated by Douglas Penick & Charles Ré (Wakefield Press) * * * * * * * * By the time Pascal Quignard (b. 1948)…
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on Arthur Dove by Rachael Z. DeLue and Solomon D. Butcher, ed. by John E. Carter
In 1997, Rachael DeLue visited the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. to look at paintings by George Inness. She recalls, “My visit to the Dove galleries served as a diversion – some pleasant, no-strings-attached looking in the midst of intense scholarly study, or so I thought. Instead, what I saw captivated me canvas after canvas…
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Eleven Poets Recommend New & Recent Collections
Welcome back to The Seawall’s semi-annual poetry feature. This season, eleven poets write briefly on some of their favorite recently published titles. This multi-poet/title feature is posted here in April and November. Scroll down to read. The commentary includes: Lisa Russ Spaar on Honest Engine: Poems by Kyle Dargan (University of Georgia Press) Joyce Peseroff…
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on Mr. Zed’s Reflections, prose fiction by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, translated by Wieland Hoban
What do we know about Mr. Zed? Not much. The narrator of Mr. Zed’s Reflections begins with these meager details: “One has to imagine Mr. Zed as a person who keeps his ulterior motives to himself, bears his worries with composure and does not like to forego good things. Of a stout, round build, he…
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on At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell
In October 1973, OPEC declared an oil embargo on the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Japan, cut production by 25%, and raised the price per barrel by 70%. The French government, encouraging energy conservation and investment in nuclear technology, ran ads with the following tagline: En France, on n’a pas de pétrole, mais…
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on The Irresponsible Magician: Essays and Fictions, by Rebekah Rutkoff
In Notes on Thought and Vision, H.D. wrote, “My sign-posts are not yours, but if I blaze my own trail, it may help to give you confidence … to get out of the murky, dead world of overworked emotions and thoughts.” Rebekah Rutkoff cites H.D. in her essay “The Incubators,” one of ten in The…
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on Writing Across the Landscape, Travel Journals 1960-2010, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
On October 7, 2005, Lawrence Ferlinghetti turned up in Brescia, Italy where his paternal family had lived. He had met the Fluxus performer Francesco Conz in Verona; Fluxus was a sort of Dadaist spinoff and Conz anointed Ferlinghetti as an emeritus member. On the 7th, they performed together on stage in Brescia: “I painted a…
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on The Quarry, essays by Susan Howe
Susan Howe was born in 1937 in Boston and spent much of her childhood in Cambridge. In her essay “Sorting Facts” (1996), one of ten pieces collected in The Quarry, she recalls her earliest impressions of factual imagery – World War II newsreels. Howe writes, “Authentic documentary material blighted the hearts of children all over…
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on Dickinson in Her Own Time, edited by Jane Donahue Eberwein, Stephanie Farrar & Cristanne Miller
For both the poet and her engaged reader, the laws and behaviors of her poetry take precedence over the habits and accidents of her life. Is there a memorable poet who has ever limited herself to the mere facts of her experience? Who has portrayed herself solely as a subject of cause and effect? This…
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on The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store… by C.D. Wright
C.D. Wright wrote poetry as if serving a truth to be discovered. Do you object to “as if”? To persist in that pending, provisional state requires a quizzical tenacity. Between one’s experience of walking down the sidewalk on Main Street and the culture’s explanatory narratives of that walking, there is a gap. Some say a…
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on How To Watch A Movie by David Thomson
David Thomson’s How to Watch a Movie is actually concerned with how to watch a movie again. “The ultimate subject of this book is watching or paying attention,” he notes at the outset. Thomson asks for “watching as a total enterprise or commitment,” not because the movies offer such redemptive enlightenment (though they sometimes seem…