Black Candle Black Candle
Your girlish shoulders are for blushing, For blushing under whips, and in dawn’s raw ice to shine. Your child-like hands are for pushing, For pushing flatirons and feed sacks, and knotting twine. Your feet, infant-tender, are for tiptoeing, Tiptoeing through shattered glass, in the blood-tracked clay. And I, I am for you, a black candle burning, Like a black candle I am burning, and dare not pray. (translated from the Russian by Christian Wiman)
Jan 4, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Osip Mandelstam
Last Year’s Model: On Simon Reynolds Last Year’s Model: On Simon Reynolds
A critic of pop’s retro turn can’t shake his own strain of pop nostalgia.
Jan 4, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Sara Marcus
Extremely Extremely
Stephen Daldry’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Wim Wenders’s Pina.
Jan 4, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans
Remembering Hitchens Remembering Hitchens
“Christopher had a twenty-five-year adventure with The Nation that I hope was as rewarding for him as it was for us, despite the political collisions.”
Dec 22, 2011 / Editorial / Victor Navasky
Is the World Really Safer Without the Soviet Union? Is the World Really Safer Without the Soviet Union?
Instead of a new era of democracy, disarmament and interdependence, we have had unchecked militarism and economic crisis.
Dec 22, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Mikhail S. Gorbachev
The Soviet Union’s Afterlife The Soviet Union’s Afterlife
Twenty years later, questions endure about how and why the nation abruptly dissolved.
Dec 22, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Stephen F. Cohen
Back in the USSR Back in the USSR
Ever since 1991, Russians have been looking to the Soviet past for comfort and pride.
Dec 22, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Vadim Nikitin
Shelf Life Shelf Life
Andrew Tabler’s In the Lion's Den: An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria; Steven Cook’s The Struggle for Egypt: From Nasser to Tahrir Square.
Dec 21, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Frederick Deknatel
You Can’t Always Get What You Want: On Stephen King You Can’t Always Get What You Want: On Stephen King
In 11/22/63, Stephen King conveys the horrors of American exceptionalism.
Dec 21, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Charles Taylor
L’Élan Vital L’Élan Vital
It happened when a doctorate honoris causa was awarded to a certain Lamerdière of Freiburg— Switzerland or Breisgau, who cares? Garbed in rainbow gown, he mounted the dais and barfed his Objurgation. I revile the larva, he said, the grub from which, in due course, issues the angelic butterfly only to die in the flaring of a match. I despise the silent, the tenuous, the fading. The only god is Rhombus, not the mullet, but the everlasting anti- teleological, universal thunderclap. Not that susurrus which sophists call l’élan vital. If god is word, and word is sound, this almighty bombination, for which no beginning is, no end will ever be, is unique in being both itself and everything else. Jove dies, your Excellencies, the poet’s hymn does NOT last. At this point a Jumbo jet blasted my ears and I woke. Reprinted from The Collected Poems of Eugenio Montale, 1925–1977, translated by William Arrowsmith and edited by Rosanna Warren. Copyright © 2012 by Beth Arrowsmith, Nancy Arrowsmith and Rosanna Warren.
Dec 21, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Eugenio Montale