The Directors’ Preface announces that “This exhibition is the first retrospective on Chase in thirty years.” Continue reading William Merritt Chase: An American Master, by Elsa Smithgall et al. @ NYJB
Michèle Audin’s debut novel “One Hundred Twenty-One Days” is a story about mathematics and love. Continue reading Translation Tuesdays: One Hundred Twenty-One Days by Michele Audin
Life in the Folds by Henri Michaux is “a masterpiece of concision and pain. . . . a literary achievement . . .” Continue reading Forgotten Classics: Life in the Folds, by Henri Michaux @ NYJB
What’s the best cure for a man who hates the mountains? Send him to the mountains. What’s the best cure for a misanthrope? Send him to live with other people. Thus begins “Twenty-One Days of a Neurasthenic” by Octave Mirbeau (1848–1917). Continue reading Twenty-One Days of a Neurasthenic, by Octave Mirbeau @ NYJB
For Jennifer Birkett, Emeritus Professor of French Studies at the University of Birmingham, Samuel Beckett thought “life was a matter of doing time, while writing was a way of undoing it.” Continue reading Undoing Time: The Life and Work of Samuel Beckett, by Jennifer Birkett @ NYJB
I. Burial of the Dead April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarden, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s, My cousin’s, he took me out … Continue reading Commonplace Book: April is the cruelest month …
Thomas Bernhard (1931 – 1989) was one of the twentieth century’s greatest prose stylists. He belongs to the trinity of novelists who died early, the other two being W.G. Sebald and Roberto Bolano. Along with Sebald and Bolano, Bernhard’s works are experiencing a popular revival coupled with attention from academic and critical circles. To understand Bernhard’s peculiar brand of fiction one has to examine his country of origin. Austria’s intellectual and literary community minted numerous famous names in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. An incomplete list would include the following: journalist-critic Karl Kraus, philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, psychologist Sigmund Freud, Nobel … Continue reading The Lime Works by Thomas Bernhard @ Joe Bob Briggs
I: The Mount Everest of Modernism “It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.” – Sir Edmund Hillary The Cantos. Ezra Pound. The very mention of those names send shudders down even the most well-read literary snob. T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” seems like a small indentation in comparison. The only work with comparable difficulty and lit crit caché is Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. Reading these works carries along serious bragging rights. “I saw the new Terrance and Philip movie. Now who wants to touch me?” Eric Cartman said in the South Park movie. As a reader … Continue reading The Cantos by Ezra Pound, A Critical Appraisal
The Driftless Area Review 