Marjorie Welish’s poetry, like Thelonious Monk’s music, is a montage of moving parts in which you’d be wise to expect the unexpected.
Reader’s Diary
Posted inBooks
Reader’s Diary: A Philosopher’s Fictions
It’s kind of wonderful when pure chance leads you to a book that unexpectedly illuminates another one you’ve just read.
Posted inBooks
Reader’s Diary: The Potential Novel of a Conceivable Algeria
The 1950s through the mid-1970s were the great era of the unreadable novel. Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma was one of the first and most remarkable of these.
Posted inBooks
Reader’s Diary: It Was a Colorful Year
Darby English’s new book 1971 decries black nationalist demands for a unified artistic community in favor of abstraction, individualism, and personal autonomy.
Posted inBooks
Reader’s Diary: The Monastery Door Is Open
Pierre Reverdy’s novel The Thief of Talant is not a novel at all, but a long poem or sequence with elusive narrative underpinnings.
Posted inBooks
Reader’s Diary: The Porn of Poetry
Dodie Bellamy’s Cunt Norton isn’t exactly pornography, but it’s a step in the right direction.
Posted inBooks
Reader’s Diary: The Importance of Being a Simile
Although the poetry in Geoffrey Nutter’s Cities at Dawn is almost always calmly descriptive, whatever it describes is somehow something else and not itself.
Posted inBooks
Reader’s Diary: David Graeber’s ‘Debt: The First 5,000 Years’
It’s no wonder that few things inspire as much persistent paranoia as banking. But a little paranoia might not be such a bad thing.
Posted inBooks
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.”
Posted inBooks
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.
Posted inBooks
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.
