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on Groucho Marx: The Comedy of Existence by Lee Siegel
Groucho Marx told the following anecdote during an appearance on “The Dick Cavett Show” in 1969: “A priest stopped me in Montreal some years ago. He asked, ‘Aren’t you Groucho Marx? May I shake your hand?’ I said sure. Then he said, ‘I just want to thank you for all the joy you’ve put into…
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on What Is Landscape? by John R. Stilgoe
John Stilgoe has taught the history of landscape development at Harvard for forty years, but his many books stare steadfastly out the classroom window. “Landscape mocks scholars,” he says. “Landscape perception is peculiar to each inquirer.” In his introduction to Landscape and Images (Virginia, 2004), he writes, “Landscape inveigles. Trees and highways, rivers and villages,…
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on A General Theory of Oblivion, a novel by José Eduardo Agualusa
After achieving its independence from Portugal in 1975, Angola slipped into a 27-year period of civil war between two former liberation movements, Marxist-Leninist and anti-communist respectively. The debacle was also a proxy war between the Soviets and Americans, with Cuban militants and South African detachments thrown in the mix. José Eduardo Agualusa’s 2012 novel, A…
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on The Importance of Elsewhere: Philip Larkin’s Photographs, by Richard Bradford
The most well known photograph of Philip Larkin is a self-portrait he took in 1957 with his new Rolleiflex Automatic twin lens reflex and cable release, the same type of camera used by Brassai, Bill Brandt, and Lee Miller. Mark Hayworth-Booth, the Victoria and Albert Museum curator who provided the introduction to The Importance of…
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on Moscow in the Plague Year, poems by Marina Tsvetaeva, translated from the Russian by Christopher Whyte
Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) published her first book of poems, Evening Album, at age 18 in 1910. Although her second book, Mileposts, appeared in 1921, it did not include most of the poems written in the interim, “arguably the most productive [years] of her entire career” according to her latest translator, Christopher Whyte. Moscow in the…
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on The Roar of Morning, a novel by Tip Marugg, translated by Paul Vincent (Yale University Press)
First published in 1988, Tip Marugg’s novel The Roar of Morning comprises just two and a half hours in the life of its unnamed narrator. But it conveys a lifetime of brooding on the beauty and desolations of life in the Caribbean. At thirty minutes past midnight, a man sits on his garden terrace alternately…
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on Fanny Says, poems by Nickole Brown
The title character of Fanny Says, Nickole Brown’s second collection, is her late grandmother, Frances Lee Cox of Bowling Green, Kentucky. “What people don’t know about my name / is that my grandmother gave me that ‘k’ – my very own unexpected consonant,” she writes in “Fanny Linguistics: Nickole.” Although the poems illuminate Fanny’s life…
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Eight Poets Recommend New and Recent Titles
Welcome back to The Seawall’s semi-annual poetry feature. This season, eight poets write briefly on some of their favorite recently published titles. This multi-poet/title feature is posted here in April and November. The commentary includes: Daisy Fried on Delinquent Palaces by Danielle Chapman (Triquarterly Books/Northwestern) David Roderick on Wild Hundreds by Nate Marshall (University of…
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on The Sonnets and Steal It Back, poetry by Sandra Simonds
With speed, one’s attention may dart from jotting a shopping list, to a radio report on a bombing in Ankara, to a daydream, to a child in the yard poking a stick at a dead squirrel. With speed, a poet changes what is sensed and envisioned into a poem, an incarnation of the mind’s unstoried…
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on The Hotel Years by Joseph Roth, translated by Michael Hofmann
In 1923 at the age of 29, Joseph Roth was hired by the Frankfurter Zeitung, the oldest and most widely read liberal daily newspaper in Germany. He soon became the paper’s Paris correspondent, dispatched from there to cover the south of France, Russia, the Balkans, Italy, and Poland. Although today he is best known for…
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on Katherine Carlyle, a novel by Rupert Thomson
A person in the habit of watching oneself become oneself – that is, one believed to be a changeling who affirms and is elated by the struggle – has two desires. The first is to get lost, to wander away, unfettered, to draw closer to the provisional. The second is to be found, recognized. They…
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on Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal by Jay Parini
Jay Parini’s biography of Gore Vidal, Empire of Self, is an entertaining narrative, but midway through the book I shifted over to YouTube to watch Vidal in action. He made himself so visible that one can’t help but indulge. I watched the 1995 BBC documentary on Vidal, largely the product of its then seventy-year old…
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Catching Up With Recent Poetry Collections
If there were three more of me, On The Seawall would have covered the seven titles mentioned below long before now, each of which was published in 2014 and has been on my to-write-about list for months. Before remorse sets in permanently, I’d like to tell you something about the pleasures of these works by…
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on The Story of My Teeth, a novel by Valeria Luiselli, translated from Spanish by Christina MacSweeney
In his essay "The New Writing," the Argentinean novelist César Aira extols prose fiction that puts “processes back on the throne which had been occupied until then by results.” For Aira, professionalization has “congealed” the novel and “shattered the form-content dialectic which makes art ‘artistic.’ ” He asks writers “to recuperate the amateur gesture, and…
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on The Book of Beginnings by François Jullien, translated by Jody Gladding
Near the end of his life, Robinson Jeffers wrote a short lyric called “On an Anthology of Chinese Poems” in which he extols the virtues of the poets and their verse: Beautiful the hanging cliff and the wind-thrown cedars, but they have no weight. Beautiful the fantastically Small farmhouse and ribbon of rice-fields a…