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on Why Acting Matters by David Thomson
Now in its sixth edition of 1,154 pages, David Thomson’s The New Biographical Dictionary of Film looks like a reference book. But it often reads like a collection of more than 1,400 droll job performance reviews. Here is part of Thomson’s newly added entry on Tina Fey: “She is world-famous, but it all seems to…
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on Unlearning With Hannah Arendt by Marie Luise Knott
Forty years after her death, Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) remains a favorite target for those who dislike -- and perhaps generally misunderstand -- her views toward Judaism and the Nazi genocide of the Jews. At the same time, Eichmann in Jerusalem, her account of his 1962 trial, continues as the most widely read book on the…
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on I Think You’re Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, by David Shields and Caleb Powell (Knopf)
In 2011, David Shields and Caleb Powell spent four days together at a cabin in the Cascade Mountains to record a conversation. “You can go all the way back to Plato’s dialogues with Socrates,” says Shields. “It’s an ancient form: two white guys bullshitting.” With the 1981 film My Dinner With Andre in mind, they…
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on Stills, photography by Sarah Charlesworth, edited by Matthew S. Witkovsky
In 1980, Sarah Charlesworth hung seven large photographic prints in Tony Shafrazi’s living room, his first gallery. The 78-inch high prints depicted bodies falling from fatal heights. She had collected photographs from newspapers and wire services, then magnified, re-shot, and cropped them into grainy free-falls. This was one mark of the advent of the Pictures…
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on Essays After Eighty by Donald Hall
Yesterday I watched “A Life Together,” Bill Moyers’ 1993 film on Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon. The imagery and narrative are familiar to those who have read Hall’s essays of the last five decades – Eagle Farm and its generations, the marriage and habits of the poets, the accounting of their illnesses and household habits,…
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on Windows on the World: 50 Writers, 50 Views, by Matteo Pericoli
Now living in Turin, the architect Matteo Pericoli often teaches a university course called “Laboratory of Literary Architecture” for both creative writing and design students. On the course’s web page, he writes, “How many times have we paused while reading a book and had the feeling that we were inside a structure built, knowingly or…
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on Openwork, poems by André du Bouchet, translated by Paul Auster and Hoyt Rogers
Of the French poets who launched the influential culture and arts magazine L’Éphémère in 1966, Yves Bonnefoy and Paul Celan are the ones most familiar to Anglophone readers. Limited selections of the poetry of their colleague, André du Bouchet, translated by Paul Auster and David Mus, were published respectively in 1976 and 2000. The publication…
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Thirteen Poets Recommend New & Recent Titles
Welcome to The Seawall’s semi-annual poetry feature. This season, thirteen poets write briefly on some of their favorite new and recent titles. This multi-poet/title feature is posted here in April and November. The commentary includes: Mark Bibbins on Slant Six by Erin Belieu (Copper Canyon Press) Daisy Fried on The Open Secret by Jennifer Moxley…
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on New Titles by René Char, Paula Rabinowitz, and Alexander Kluge
Hypnos by René Char, translated by Mark Hutchinson (Seagull Books/University of Chicago Press) American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street by Paula Rabinowitz (Princeton University Press) Air Raid by Alexander Kluge, with an afterword by W.E. Sebald (Seagull Books/University of Chicago Press) * * * * * * * * * * *…
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on Limonov, non-fiction by Emmanuel Carrère
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on Thousand Times Broken, poems, prose and drawings by Henri Michaux, translated by Gillian Conoley
“Is a statement really necessary?” So begins Henri Michaux’s introduction to a 1963 exhibition catalog of his drawings and gouaches. “Isn’t it obvious that I paint so as to leave words behind, to put an end to the irritating question of how and why? Could it really be that I draw because I see so…
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on Collection of Sand, essays by Italo Calvino, translated by Martin McLaughlin
In the summer of 1985, Italo Calvino completed the work to be delivered that autumn for the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard. But on September 6 he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage at his house in Tuscany and died twelve days later at age 62. In the first of these lectures, published in English as…
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on Diary of the Fall, a novel by Michel Laub
Books about the psychopathology of the children of trauma survivors form a growing sub-genre of Jewish Holocaust literature. In 2012, an Israeli study went further, claiming to find signs of trauma among the grandchildren. Haaretz reported that “out of 30 women in this second-generation group who testified that their parents were cold and distant, 20…
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on The Wilderness, poems by Sandra Lim
Hijacked by a book of poems, I want to know more about my captor. What has given rise to such intentions? Mark Strand said that a poem’s unstated command is “Be like me.” If this is the case, then my inquiry about the poems’ sources is not extra-literary. I am not abusing the poems by…