One of the great pleasures in reading biography comes in constructing a life in reverse, looking at the events of a human existence and shaping them into an understandable form, something we can’t do for our own existence until it’s much too late.
New Work: Photography
It’s by no means a matter of shame, and I can’t remember why I ever felt guilty for thinking it, but no painting or symphony has ever moved me as much as great photography.
The work of Gerda Taro, Robert Capa, Margaret Bourke-White, Walker Evans, Willy Ronis, James Nachtwey, Peter Turnley and Sebastião Salgado (to name a few) inspired me, in late November of 2015, to start carrying a camera nearly everywhere I go. The following photographs are among the images I have made in the past five months during my time in Louisiana and Australia.
In Memory of Jim Harrison
Happy Birthday, Milan Kundera
“I read a book one day, and my whole life was changed.”
That moment, as described in Orhan Pamuk's The New Life, came for me during my first year of university. In southern California while on spring break, conversation from the next room grew louder. Demands rang out to pass the bottle and shuffle and deal the cards. Yet I wanted only to plunge deeper into The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Encounters: Revisiting Lafcadio Hearn, a writer without borders
Reading Around the World: Cuba
Encounters: How to Hopscotch from one favorite writer to the next
This (for now) is less about Denis Johnson than about the way that following our favorite authors opens unexpected conversations, permitting chance encounters with writers we otherwise might not have met. It’s like one friend guaranteeing that we’ll enjoy the company of another.
My start-of-the-year reading of Johnson’s work opened the door to Leonard Gardner and his slim masterpiece Fat City (1969).
What (Books) to Pack for Italy
Coffee Break: Review on the Go, The Marauders
At no time during April 2010 or in the months and years that followed the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf Coast, when the environment went from bad to worse and people along the Louisiana Gulf Coast lost their livelihoods and restaurants removed local oysters from the menu, did I consider writing a novel about these devastating events.
We should all be thankful that Tom Cooper did.
When is it OK to give up on a book?
My fantasy sometimes shifts into nightmare: towers of books on every surface, each new must-read publication waiting for me, shelves of lauded (yet still unread) novels and histories and stories and essays. Bounty, depending on my mood, becomes indictment or thrill or never-fulfilled obligation or weight on my conscience.
If I start at page one and continue for three chapters, should I forge on if I’m mildly interested? How, when so many other spines beckon me from the shelves?
In Translation: Two Poems by Yannis Ritsos
Happy Birthday to a Desert Island Favorite: Ryszard Kapuściński
Every reader shares some version of the fantasy. We play that Desert Island Game— what to pack when we’re finally allowed a holiday, a parade of days filled with nothing but the turning of pages. Titles tend to change with the passing of years. We discover new writers. We amend selections inside the box of books that always overflows despite our best logistical efforts.
New Work: Afterimages: Photographs by Annelies Senfter
Calling Joan Didion
What we need, what I’m begging for here, is for Joan Didion to do what she did in 1988. We need her observations and—let’s say it now—the enormous engine of her prose style to tell us how it is, to get inside “the process” of politics and the characters at the center of this “self-created and self-referring class, a new kind of managerial elite [who] tend to speak of the world not necessarily as it is but as they want people out there to believe it is.”
Anatomy of a Sentence: Yves Ravey's Alerte
Take a deep breath. Now read.
Translator Phoebe Weston-Evans discusses a breathless, surreal sentence from Yves Ravey's Alerte.
"There’s something about the unbridled energy of its form that blurs the notions of past and present and arranges them, briefly, uncomfortably, on the same plane." —Phoebe Weston-Evans
China in Words, Images and Song
Recently, while rearranging our bookshelves by region rather than alphabet, I noticed a major gap in my personal geography of literature. While it didn’t surprise me that Poland, South Africa and Chile take up so much shelf space, the near-absence of an entire continent—Asia—felt shameful.
This year, I’m working to correct this oversight.
