I’ve given it a week to settle or to slink off. But it just won’t. The profile of David Foster Wallace in last week’s The New Yorker has taken a front row seat, kind of like a big and slightly smelly guy, and will not move to the back. Hats off to D. T. Max, […]
Month: March 2009
That’s Him
The newly identified portrait of William Shakespeare has been unveiled at Dartmouth House, Mayfair, London Photo: Geoff Pugh THE BARD! From the Guardian: The oil canvas is thought to have been painted in 1610 – six years before the playwright’s death – when he was about 46 years old. It remained in the same family […]
The Ones Who Have Left
Lost Friends Friends carried off by life are the most difficult to appease, the most tyrannical. Barbarians of an unknown land, they sip the poison of silence and they grow beyond all limits in the distance, a blind eye to our loneliness. And to think that we were brothers in arms, that we dug up […]
Walk That Road Blazing
Fuchsia That summer in the west I walked sunrise to dusk, narrow twisted highways without shoulders, low stone walls on both sides. Hedgerows of fuchsia hemmed me in, the tropical plant now wild, centuries after nobles imported it for their gardens. And I was unafraid, did not cross to the outsides of curves, did not […]
Family Wittgenstein
At the family estate, summer 1917. Paul Wittgenstein is second from left; Ludwig Wittgenstein is at right. Photo: Michael Nedo This photo of the Wittgenstein family (as in Ludwig) captures a certain something about Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, a period of time that perpetually fascinates and compels many of us all these years later. And then there […]
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Going to the Mat To Move Someone
It keeps happening. I keep finding parallels in visual art with the way poets and writers talk about their process. While most art makers have their own “narrative” of what is going on and how their work comes into being that could be questioned as a kind of handy fiction all its own, I still […]
Dean Young: The Heart Hoards Its Thorns
Poem Without Forgiveness The husband wants to be taken back into the family after behaving terribly, but nothing can be taken back, not the leaves by the trees, the rain by the clouds. You want to take back the ugly thing you said, but some shrapnel remains in the wound, some mud. Night after night […]
Flannery O’Connor: Experienced Meaning
Photo: Jay:Leviton-Atlanta I have had a long fascination with Flannery O’Connor, the quirky, brilliant, lupus-suffering author who died way too young. She attended the Writer’s Workshop in Iowa even though she “didn’t know a short story from an ad in the newspaper,” and went on to be a star who “scared the boys to death […]
Boland and Van Eyck
Domestic Interior The woman is as round as the new ring ambering her finger. The mirror weds her. She has long since been bedded. There is about it all a quiet search for attention, like the unexpected shine of a despised utensil. The oils, the varnishes, the cracked light, the worm of permanence–– all of […]
Count Me Among the Living
The Origin of what happened is not in language— of this much I am certain. Six degrees south, six east— and you have it: the bird with the blue feathers, the brown bird— same white breasts, same scaly ankles. The waves between us— house light and transform motion into the harboring of sounds in language.— […]