Books
Reader’s Diary: ‘Bresson on Bresson’
Before starting to make films, Robert Bresson had been a painter. Or rather, he remained one, since according to him, “It’s not possible to have been a painter and to no longer be one.”
Barry Schwabsky
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Reader’s Diary: Caetano Veloso’s ‘Tropical Truth’
Caetano Veloso is an aesthete, not a man of politics, but the times and his conscience lent a political valence to his aesthetic choices.
Books
Reader’s Diary: Scott L. Malcomson’s ‘Generation’s End’
It wasn’t exactly on purpose that, in the wake of the catastrophe that was Election Day, 2016, I started reading a book about the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Books
Reader’s Diary: Liam Gillick's ‘Industry and Intelligence’
Is Liam Gillick a writer?
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Reader’s Diary: Azra Raza and Sara Suleri Goodyear's 'Ghalib'
While Ghalib's poetry contains the delicate, evanescent moods and divided self-consciousness one associates with periods of decline, it also embodies the opposite, an arrogant rhetorical vehemence and originality that at times calls to mind John Donne more than any of his Western contemporaries.
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Reader’s Diary: Pierre Reverdy’s ‘The Song of the Dead’
I daresay Pierre Reverdy is the favorite French poet among American poets. But how well do we really know his work?
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Reader’s Diary: Walter Benjamin's ‘Sonnets’
In 1913, the young Walter Benjamin struck up an intense friendship with the poet Christoph Friedrich Heinle — one of the most enigmatic episodes in Benjamin’s enigmatic life.
Books
Reader’s Diary: Barrett Watten's ‘Questions of Poetics’
What is “language writing” anyway?
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Reader’s Diary: David Beech's ‘Art and Value’
What in the world is art worth?
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Reader’s Diary: Cormac McCarthy's ‘Blood Meridian’
Thanks to Blood Meridian, I’ve learned, at least temporarily, the meanings of “quirt,” “pritchel,” and even the seemingly ultra-rare “malandered.”
Books
Reader’s Diary: ‘Eva Hesse: Diaries’
An artist’s fame may continue, or even grow, as the actual works on which it is nominally based are lost from sight.
Books
Reader’s Diary: George Seferis's ‘Six Nights on the Acropolis’
George Seferis's mercurial tone can turn on a dime from lyricism to humor and back again, just as his characters shuttle between sensual abandon and neurotic self-flagellation.