Anniversary or Apathy? Anniversary or Apathy?
Memory and revolution in Poland since 1989
Dec 16, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Piotr H. Kosicki
Barber Barber
From the hotel in Martyrs’ Square we drive west into Achrafieh in search of a barber, where I learn there are four words for barber— three of which are spit out, the last of which—coiffeur—anoints the tongue with its mellifluence, like the milky coffee served by the small African woman who never stops bending and refilling. We sit with a group of men wearing three-piece suits fingering their prayer beads and crosses and watch a man, larger than most, giggle through his haircut. He has some advice for what I ought to do with my sideburns. They are too long, and my beard, it is not good, there are ways to fix this, and so these men, who in another time would have other advice, and other things to offer, gather around to officiate as my coiffeur takes a blade to my neck, and gently trims until my head is as smooth and perfumed as a past which is not past, but present.
Dec 16, 2014 / Books & the Arts / John Freeman
Artists Keeping Secrets Artists Keeping Secrets
The eloquent silences of Albert York and Judith Scott.
Dec 9, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Barry Schwabsky
Suspicious Minds Suspicious Minds
Joseph O’Neill’s Dubai novel, The Dog.
Dec 9, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Peter C. Baker
Propaganda, Deed Propaganda, Deed
A riot is a riot because it is not simply a message.
Dec 9, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Joshua Clover
Our Words, Our Selves Our Words, Our Selves
Is our language broken and suddenly in need of repair?
Dec 4, 2014 / Books & the Arts / E. Ethelbert Miller
Plugged Into the Socket of Life Plugged Into the Socket of Life
Behind Richard Pryor’s jokes and barbs was a man yearning to be free.
Nov 25, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Scott Saul
The Osprey The Osprey
or sea-eagle, what the guidebook says is white, grayish brown, and “possessed of weak eye- masks” in its non-migratory island instance, is blue. Blue, riding thermal bands so low over the water it picks up the water’s color, reticulate tarsi tipping the light crests; and picks up one of the silver fish cutting the surface there, so the fish is blue, too, flapping-gone- slack in the grasp of its claws—as only the owl shares an outer reversible toe-talon, turned out for such clutching; as the water, in turn, picks up the sky- depth reflective blue sent down from ages beyond, into which the osprey lifts now without a least turning of wing-chord though “they are able to bend the joint in their wing to shield their eyes from the light”; what I mean is, by the time I tell you this it’s gone: fish-and-bird, this “bone-breaker,” brown or gray “diurnal raptor,” back into the higher trades. Someday, too, this blue—
Nov 25, 2014 / Books & the Arts / David Baker
Transmission Transmission
So he who strongly feels, behaves. —Marianne Moore You find in an alley the mouthpiece of a flute. Gossip alone makes music and suddenly from the pines the birds all fly away. You are devoted to giving clear meaning to one movement. The water in the fountain. Down the fountain. Over it. The prayer chapel but its brick bench. Magnolias in almost bloom. The failure to believe in mathematics is a failure of emotion— you have spent all of your free time. Choral directors describe the torso in terms of the muscles of sound. Your wife paints your two-year-old’s fingernails and the two-year-old says, toes too! Sitting next to an anthill feels like this. They work so hard. And for so little. For salvation. This is the mystery. This is forgiveness.
Nov 25, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Gary L. McDowell
Imitations of Life Imitations of Life
Benedict Cumberbatch plays Alan Turing as a creature of secrets in The Imitation Game.
Nov 25, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans