Commentary |
on The Poetry Lesson, by Andrei Codrescu
Maybe the reason why Andrei Codrescu has taught literature and creative writing at LSU for twenty-five years is that there are no corporate job descriptions calling for anarchists with proven skills in Dadaism. Now 64, Codrescu looks back fondly on the days when people at parties had sex in bathrooms with broken locks, just as…
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on Great House, a novel by Nicole Krauss
A thirteenth century Jewish mystic, Azriel of Gerona, added the following to the essential writings of the Kaballah: “If you dare to contemplate that to which thought cannot expand and ascend, you will not escape one of two consequences. From forcing thought to grasp that which cannot be comprehended, your soul will ascend, be severed,…
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on Encounter, essays by Milan Kundera, translated from the French by Linda Asher
Encounter is the fourth collection of Milan Kundera’s essays in English and perhaps his last. These latest pieces, published between the mid-90’s and 2008, return to his favorite topics, such as the defense of the modern novel, and the nature of the self in a world capable of totalitarianism. But Encounter sounds a bitter, fearful,…
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on Mourning Diary, by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard
Roland Barthes lived near or with his mother Henriette for most of his life. Starting the day after she died on October 25, 1977 and continuing for the next two years, Barthes expressed and probed his grieving by jotting notes on slips of paper. Out of this stack of notes came the second half of…
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on All is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost, a novel by Lan Samantha Chang
Lan Samantha Chang’s second novel follows the determined career of Roman Morris, a respected poet. As the story opens in 1986, he attends Miranda Sturgis’ workshop at The School, a famed creative writing program in Bonneville, Michigan. His colleagues include Bernard Sauvet and Lucy Parry, who will go on to play significant roles in his…
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on Juvenilia, poems by Ken Chen
The first-person in American poetry has become a marked man, a “person of interest” in the criminal sense. All he ever wanted in his youth was to be a metaphor for something. We tried to keep him sober and productive. But in his epiphanic moments, we could no longer ignore his untrustworthiness. Sensing a shift…
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on One More Story, short stories by Ingo Schulze
Ingo Schulze was born in Dresden in 1962. Now living in Berlin, he is often described as the writer most representative of the united Germany. Two years ago he visited Dresden, located in what used to be the GDR. “It was a very sobering experience,” he said in a recent interview. “The whole Disneyfication of…
Commentary |
on Theatre, essays by David Mamet
David Mamet’s 1997 Paris Review interview includes this exchange: “Interviewer: Is there a moment in one of your plays that you really didn’t know was there? Mamet: Yes. I wrote this play called Bobby Gould in Hell … Bobby Gould is consigned to hell, and he has to be interviewed to find out how long…
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on Shoulder Season, poems by Ange Mlinko
“Postmodernism has an allergy to depth,” sneezed Terry Eagleton in an otherwise thoughtful article in The Guardian a few years ago. Profundity for Eagleton requires language working at a “deep moral or metaphysical level,” but the “centreless, hedonistic, self-inventing, ceaselessly adaptive” creature who emerges from postmodernism cannot or refuses to go deep. But as British…
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on 03, a novella by Jean-Christophe Valtat, translated from the French by Mitzi Angel
The narrator of 03, now in his mid-40’s, begins by recalling the moment he spotted a “slightly retarded” girl (“it was harder to guess her age”) waiting at a bus stop in the dispiriting town of Montpérilleux. He was 18. “I was drawn to her precisely for the chance to love a beauty that had…
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on The Pages, a novel by Murray Bail
Murray Bail’s beguiling fourth novel, The Pages, begins with Erica Hazelhurst, a 46-year old professor of philosophy, and Sophie Perloff, a 43-year old psychiatrist, driving from Sydney to a remote sheep farm in New South Wales. Erica has been hired to evaluate the philosophical work of the late Wesley Antill who thirty years previously had…
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on The Art of Description: World Into Word, essays by Mark Doty
Reflecting on Gerard Manley Hopkins, Elizabeth Bishop advised herself as follows: “Portray not a thought, but a mind thinking … The ardor of [an idea’s] conception in the mind is a necessary part of its truth, and unless it can be conveyed to another mind in something of the form of its occurrence, either it…
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on The Last Skin, poems by Barbara Ras
Barbara Ras’ third book of poems, The Last Skin, is marked by worship and worry. Her materials include the death of a parent, travel and meditation, nature and memory, serial wars, time. But it is the profound, implacable tension sparking through those materials that creates her distinct manner – graceful or erratic gestures veering between…
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on First Loves and Other Adventures, essays by Grace Schulman
In From Shakespeare to Existentialism, Walter Kaufman wrote, “One learns to ask about every philosophy and every religion, and about great poets and artists, too: What is it that they praise?” At the same time, his poets and artists showed him that we are not at home in the world we praise. He quoted Nietzsche…
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on Four New Poetry Anthologies
The Horse Has Six Legs: An Anthology of Serbian Poetry, edited and translated by Charles Simic (Graywolf) Seriously Funny, edited by Barbara Hamby and David Kirby (Georgia) Poetry of the Law, edited by David Kader and Michael Stanford (Iowa) Gurlesque: The New Grrly, Grotesque, Burlesque Poetics, edited by Lara Glenum and Arielle Greenberg (Saturnalia Books)…