And the literary enthusiasm debate rolls on. What is it now – Round 2? Round 3? And this isn’t shaping up to be the type of debate that can be resolved by a decision. No, it’s going to take a knockout. The latest blows have been landed by the New York Times Dwight Garner (anti-enthusiasm) […]
“If the halls of the Hermitage were suddenly to go mad, if the paintings of all the schools and great masters were suddenly to break loose from their nails, and merge with one another, intermingle and fill the air of the rooms with a futurist roar and an agitated frenzy of color, we would then […]
“In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” This is Harry Lime’s line of shameless […]
In the latest issue of The Literary Review Alex Stein has an interview with Egyptian poet Yahia Lababidi that orbits around the figures of Georges Bataille, Baudelaire and Kafka. The first notable thing about this piece is that Stein has opted to rewrite some of Lababidi’s words to, as he states at the outset, “make […]
The literary blogosphere has been putting on its collective gas mask, or surgical mask, or whatever kind of mask protects us against epidemics. Jacob Silverman’s article “Against Enthusiasm” deriding the “epidemic of niceness in online book culture” at Slate has been getting around, presumably read, probably even debated a bit. It’s example of everyone’s friend, […]
At The Brooklyn Rail, English philosopher Simon Critchley takes on the subject of contemporary art in an article entitled “Absolutely-Too-Much.” It’s a fascinating article, but what struck me was his outright dismissal of the novel’s cultural import: “It is simply a fact that contemporary art has become the central placeholder for the articulation of cultural […]
“The concept of being and non-being is a philosophical con” – Egon Bondy At the Czech Literature Portal I wrote about the fact that you can see a documentary about Czech writer Egon Bondy online for free and with English subtitles. Titled The Last Lesson of Egon Bondy the 32-minute film is full of the […]
The Guardian reports that plans to memorialize the house exiled Austrian-Jewish writer Stefan Zweig lived in London for five years were nixed by English Heritage (EH), the organization responsible for choosing who gets a blue plaque and who doesn’t. An EH spokesperson said that Zweig’s “current profile – which has never been as high in […]
Norman Davies wrote about Poland as the Heart of Europe. Now it looks like the country is becoming the beating, bloody force of its newest wave of crime fiction For lovers of European crime fiction tired of reading about another glum, divorced, middle-aged Scandinavian police detective who drinks too much for his/her own good, a […]
Chtenia’s Summer 2012 issue is out and is devoted entirely to horses, with an essay on the animals’ role in Russian literature as well as translations of equestrian-themed work from Vladimir Mayakovsky, Nikolai Zabolotsky, Vladimir Sorokin and Alexander Kuprin among others. One odd feature of this magazine is that though there is a “Web links […]
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