Slacker Friday Slacker Friday
Eric Alterman rounds up the best of New York, confronts Reagan's Alzheimer's and reader mail.
Jan 21, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Eric Alterman
Obama: Triangulation 2.0? Obama: Triangulation 2.0?
In year three, will Obama heed the lessons of Clinton or Reagan?
Jan 20, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Ari Berman
Library Man: On Claude Lévi-Strauss Library Man: On Claude Lévi-Strauss
With a sharp eye for cultural patterns and a keen feel for the shape of a story, Claude Lévi-Strauss was a poet in the laboratory of anthropology.
Jan 19, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Thomas Meaney
Sonnet of Exemplary Sentences From the Chapter Pertaining to the Nature of Pronouns in Emile Benveniste’s ‘Problems in General Linguistics’ (Paris 1966) Sonnet of Exemplary Sentences From the Chapter Pertaining to the Nature of Pronouns in Emile Benveniste’s ‘Problems in General Linguistics’ (Paris 1966)
Sonnet of Exemplary Sentences From the Chapter Pertaining to the Nature of Pronouns in Emile Benveniste's Problems in General Linguistics (Paris 1966) This time I forgive you but I shall not forgive you again. I observe that he forgives you but he will not forgive you again. Although I eat this fish I don't know its name. Spirits watch over the soul of course. I suppose and I presume. I pose and I resume. I suppose I have a horse. How in the world can you afford this house I said and she said I had a good divorce. Strangers are warned that here there is a fierce, fast dog. Whores have no business getting lost in the fog. Is it to your ears or your soul that my voice is intolerable? Whether Florinda lays a hand on his knee or his voluble, he pleads a headache and the narrator concludes, The problem is insoluble.
Jan 19, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Anne Carson
Dorothy Wordsworth Dorothy Wordsworth
Dorothy Wordsworth The daffodils can go fuck themselves. I'm tired of their crowds, yellow rantings about the spastic sun that shines and shines and shines. How are they any different from me? I, too, have a big messy head on a fragile stalk. I spin with the wind. I flower and don't apologize. There's nothing funny about good weather. Oh, spring again, the critics nod. They know the old joy, that wakeful quotidian, the dark plot of future growing things, each one labeled Narcissus nobilis or Jennifer Chang. If I died falling from a helicopter, then this would be an important poem. Then the ex-boyfriends would swim to shore declaiming their knowledge of my bulbous youth. O, Flower, one said, why aren't you meat? But I won't be another bashful shank. The tulips have their nervous joie-de-vivre, the lilacs their taunt. Fractious petals, stop interrupting my poem with boring beauty. All the boys are in the field gnawing raw bones of ambition and calling it ardor. Who the hell are they? This is a poem about war.
Jan 19, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Jennifer Chang
Perfect-Bound: On Elizabeth Hardwick Perfect-Bound: On Elizabeth Hardwick
Elizabeth Hardwick found New York's jittery impermanence and inchoate density to be an obstacle for the fiction writer.
Jan 19, 2011 / Books & the Arts / James Marcus
An Atlas of Reckonings An Atlas of Reckonings
The horrors of The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database arise through the cumulative weight of its abstract pieces of information.
Jan 19, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Robin Einhorn
Rebel Journalist John Ross, the Master of Speaking Truth to Power, Is Dead Rebel Journalist John Ross, the Master of Speaking Truth to Power, Is Dead
American Book Award–winner, chronicler of indigenous struggles and proud radical, Ross wrote his own epitaph: "Life, like reporting, is a kind of death sentence. Pa...
Jan 18, 2011 / Books & the Arts / John Nichols
Empty Rooms: On Nicole Krauss Empty Rooms: On Nicole Krauss
Nicole Krauss's Great House swings from the evocative to the overcharged.
Jan 12, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Alexandra Schwartz
Literature and Exile Literature and Exile
Books are the only homeland of the true writer, books that may sit on shelves or in the memory.
Jan 12, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Roberto Bolaño