March 2012
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The Gloom of the System →
thenewinquiry:
“November 10 we fill the plaza,” read the graffito on the cathedral wall. And they did: tens of thousands of students from public and private universities marched south along the central avenues of Bogotá until they reached the Plaza de Bolivar, the city’s historic center. The march, one of many that year, paralyzed Colombia’s capital, a city of 6 million people that already...
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“Why is even pleasure a kind of chore?”
– Patrizia Valduga, from One Hundred Quatrains
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“What there is time for is looking out the window.”
– Alice Munro
In Her Fashion
lareviewofbooks:
ELI DINER on a new biography of Coco Chanel. Lisa Chaney Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life Viking Adult, November 2011. 464 pp. A splendid list of accomplishments is frequently attributed to Coco Chanel: utility, ease of movement, the New Woman unburdened of corset. Masculinization! Casualization! Skirt suits, wool jerseys, sunbathing, sportswear, and the bob. Never mind that...
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“those were years when something whispered”
– Gottfried Benn, from “Fragments 1953”
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Joyce Carol Oates reads Kite Poem by Billy Collins
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“For I spoke not but the magician played me tricks of the blood.”
– Anne Sexton, from O Ye Tongues
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“Is there life before death?”
– Seamus Heaney, from “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing”
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IN THE FOREST
by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson
List to the forest-voice murmuring low: All that it saw when alone with its laughter, All that it suffered in times that came after, Mournful it tells, that the wind may know.
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When we entered the blue-painted kitchen Grandma was standing by the cooker, gripping the handle of the kettle with both hands and pressing it down on the hot plate to bring it more quickly to the boil.
‘Hello, boys,’ she said, looking up as we came in. She was wearing the dress with the red roses on it, which meant she was expecting company.
‘Where have you been?’
‘We’ve been in the ruins up...
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“I talk to God but the sky is empty.”
– Sylvia Plath, from a letter to Richard Sassoon, 19 February 1950
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“Better a debauched canary than a pious wolf.”
– Anton Chekhov
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The End of Mourning
lareviewofbooks:
JESS ROW on Tony Kushner and 21st century Marxism. Lazy Boy, 2005 From the series “East of Eden” © Pipo Nguyen-Duy Courtesy Sam Lee Gallery, Los Angeles
Tony Kushner The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Communism With a Key to the Scriptures Produced at the Public Theater, New York, May-June 2011 It was Kierkegaard who said that life must be lived forward,...
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“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”
– Samuel Beckett, Murphy
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“Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.”
– Edith Wharton, Vesalius in Zante (1564)
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Harrowing Idealism
lareviewofbooks:
PAWEL FRELIK on Steve Erickson’s These Dreams of You, “the first true Obama novel.”
The Wonders of Imitation (Video) © Rebecca B. Bennett, All rights reserved MonsterArtist.com http://bit.ly/AEJbNd
Steve Erickson These Dreams of You Europa Editions, February 2012. 309 pp. After eight novels, two nonfiction books and a vast body of journalism, Steve Erickson ought to be...
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