Commentary |
on The Philosophy of Translation by Damion Searls
“The translator does not ‘capture the spirit’ of the foreign text, as translators are so often told, but is affected by the foreign text. Searls’ best advice is to remain open to the experience of reading the text, not to capture it.”
Commentary |
on Question 7, a novel by Richard Flanagan
“Memoir, fiction, criticism, political punditry, a pinch of travelogue: Flanagan sees a mash-up of genres as the form perfectly tailored to our mashed-up era — history as theater of the absurd.”
Commentary |
Outlasting Wreck and Ruin: A Pilgrim’s Progress in Heather Treseler’s Auguries & Divinations
“… myths of femininity and sexuality, carceral impediment, empire, labor, suburban (and other domestically and culturally prescribed) exigencies, fertility, and the ‘magical thinking’ by which women can grow into themselves despite systematic obstacles.”
Commentary |
on The Art of Dying: Writings 2019-2022 by Peter Schjeldahl
“Schjeldahl, for the benefit of his devoted audience, demystified both art and writing about art. ‘Each of us,’ he commented in 2004, after visiting a Vermeer exhibit, ‘is born with a capacity to see and feel intensely and with precision.'”
Commentary |
on No Judgment, essays by Lauren Oyler
“Does Oyler know that her negative reviews have had an impact? Sure. Does she care? She doesn’t … not care, but observes that caring too much about it is playing a different game than what the critic does.”
Literature in Translation |
from Dostoyevsky in the Face of Death, or Language Haunted by Sex
“Retired Lieutenant Dostoevsky, age twenty-seven, for having taken part in criminal designs, having circulated a personal letter filled with impertinent expressions against the Orthodox Church and the sovereign power and for having attempted, together with others, to circulate works against the government through means of a private printing press, is condemned to death.”
Essay |
“I see a postman everywhere”: Elizabeth Bishop’s Postcards
“Bishop often mailed postcards from locales while expressing a longing, on the written (verso) side, to be elsewhere. Or she editorialized the postcard’s depiction of her location, adding captions, often ironizing or qualifying it.”
Text and Image |
“Proximate Postcards (I)”
“I leaned towards him and ran my tongue across the rim of his upper lip. He trembled, inhaling sharply, emitting a thin clarinet-like whistle. The febrility of his response was disappointing.”
Commentary |
on Calligraphies, poems by Marilyn Hacker & Collected Poems by Ellen Bryant Voigt
“Although the pair differ from one another in their concerns and methods, they share a durable — and sometimes quirky — mastery of prosody that is unmatched in contemporary verse.”
Poetry |
“Three Days,” “Coppice” & “Cicadas”
“I think he didn’t want me to see. He told me to go check the rods. / When I came back, the hare’s jacket was off, his intestines were out, and we baked him on the grill.”
Commentary |
on The Age of Guilt: The Super-Ego in the Online World by Mark Edmundson
“His chief goal is to attach the super-ego and its turd-in-the-punchbowl qualities to the culture wars. The super-ego, he submits, is behind the worst of right and left politics.”
Commentary |
The Perpetual Virtuosities of Alice Fulton: on Coloratura On A Silence Found in Many Expressive Systems
“… she ranges nimbly among operatic extravagance, virtuosic ornament, bedrock intelligence and technical chops … but also attends to the hidden, the blue, notes between notes, to what’s nearly obscured or in the margins.”
Literature in Translation |
“Onwards,” “Too Philosophical,” “Doll,” “The Comfort of Complaining,” “The Benefits of Talking,” “To a Writer,” “Self-Reflection” & “I Wish I Had”
“How ghostly my life / in its fall and rise. / Always I see myself waving to myself, /’ floating away from the one waving. // I see myself as laughter, / as deep mourning again, ‘/ as a wild weaver of talk; / but all this falls away.”
Fiction |
“I Saw Elvis in Palm Springs”
“Claudia was in Palm Springs because she’d made a fairly lucrative commercial deal with a Japanese yogurt company and wanted to go somewhere alone where she could pretend she’d come by the money in a more respectable way. Like phishing or selling drugs.”
Essay |
“‘A Giving of the Self’: on Thom Gunn and Courtliness”
“Looking over the span of Gunn’s writing, I get the sense of someone grounded in his own being, a self he inhabits with great confidence and apparent ease in large part because he is not especially concerned with himself.”