“Information is increasing while direct contacts are in decline. Relations are becoming more numerous while their intensity and authenticity are diminishing,” wrote Henri Lefebvre in 1961, and by 1981 he understood that this would entail “a solitude all the more profound for being overwhelmed by messages.”
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: Denis Johnson’s ‘Jesus’ Son’
Reflected in sentences of throbbing beauty, the blind urge to self-destruction becomes a visionary quest
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Reader’s Diary: Henri Lefebvre’s ‘Critique of Everyday Life’
The writings of Karl Marx will always remain a source of insight and inspiration, but vast swaths of the Marxist literature that exerted such a fascination when I was younger now seem barren of interest.
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Reader’s Diary: Fred Dewey’s ‘From an Apparent Contradiction in Arendt’
Hannah Arendt, an untimely, unassimilable figure, looms ever larger in the life of thought.
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Reader’s Diary: Frank Lima’s ‘Incidents of Travel in Poetry’
“There are several Puerto / Ricans on the avenue today, which / makes it beautiful and warm,” wrote Frank O’Hara in “A Step Away from Them.” It was 1956, the day after Jackson Pollock’s funeral.
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Reader’s Diary: ‘The Brexit Crisis’
The presses roll fast when there are no presses to roll.
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Reader’s Diary: Darryl Pinckney’s ‘Black Deutschland’
This is not so much a second novel as a mature reimagining of what a youthful first novel might have been.
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Reader’s Diary: Max Stirner’s ‘The Ego and His Own’
In a recent long, too long, much too long article in the London Review of Books, Andrew O’Hagan quoted John Lanchester paraphrasing dear old Edmund Wilson to the effect that poets feel differences among themselves as tantamount to lying.
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Reader’s Diary: On Richard Bellamy
Richard Bellamy is one of the very few art dealers around whose name the word “legendary” floats like an aura. But how to convey what was so special about him is a nice problem for a biographer.
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Reader’s Diary: Robert Glück’s ‘Communal Nude’
Some of Robert Glück’s essays came my way in the 1980s via such publications as Poetics Journal.
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Reader’s Diary: Rana Dasgupta’s ‘Capital’
My all-too-brief visit to Delhi last year ignited in me a desire to learn about the history of India.