Caetano Veloso is an aesthete, not a man of politics, but the times and his conscience lent a political valence to his aesthetic choices.
Author Archives: Barry Schwabsky
Barry Schwabsky is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. His recent books include The Perpetual Guest: Art in the Unfinished Present (Verso, 2016) and a collection of poetry, Trembling Hand Equilibrium (Black Square Editions, 2015). Imminently forthcoming is a new book of essays, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017).
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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.
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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.
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Reader’s Diary: Barrett Watten’s ‘Questions of Poetics’
What is “language writing” anyway?
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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Reader’s Diary: Henri Lefebvre’s ‘Critique of Everyday Life’ (Conclusion)
Encore un effort on Lefebvre. My first go was nothing but objections. Round two started out with admiration but I soon found myself airing further criticism — almost against my will…