May 2012
22 posts
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Rainer Werner Fassbinder: A Baby Caligula
Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945–82), hard-living, frenetic (libertine, bourgeois-scourging) New German filmmaker would have turned sixty-seven today, had he survived even into his forties. Strong-armed by the influence of Brechtian theater and Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967), Fassbinder went on to direct forty films and made-for-television performances—though like the Frenchman L. J. M....
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“America is Dollaria.”
– Sigmund Freud to Oskar Pfister, 1930. This contemptuous term for the United States was evidently common among Central European intellectuals. As early as 1921, Albert Einstein, writing about an upcoming trip to America, expected a correspondent to be familiar with the reference.
From Ernst...
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“When he sees the part of the screen that has the word that he’s looking...”
– science writer Kitty Ferguson (who helped Hawking edit The Universe in a Nutshell) on Stephen Hawking’s communication style
In Hawking Incorporated: Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject, Hélène Mialet (not without controversy) provides ethnographic context for the...
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“These definitions coincide with the terms which, since Greek antiquity, have...”
– Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Violence,” New York Review of Books, 27 February 1969
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“A Naked Singularity, Sergio De La Pava’s first novel, fizzes like an overstuffed...”
– Barry Wightman, editor of Hunger Mountain, in the Washington Independent Review of Books
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“Bruce was doing [working-man songs] in a genre that I don’t know if that...”
– Probably the only time a quotation involving the phrase “testicle fortitude,” referred even tangentially to one of our books. In this case, though, it’s worthy.
Let us now praise the “fortitude” of Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity; no, John Jeremiah...
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Roman numeral C, reinforced by (the) Latin centum:...
In which we continue to promote The Open Door: One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of Poetry Magazine by considering what exists outside its daunting canon of twentieth- and twenty-first-century giants. Part I here.
Oh, Mari’bn: You’re kiddins
Our remix of Anne Carson’s “A Detail from the Tomb of the Diver (Paestum 500–453 BC) Second Detail” (after a reading of Marjorie Perloff’s Unoriginal...
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“Bruce Smith has seemingly inhaled the entire English language to date, and in...”
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WINNER OF THE POETRY SOCIETY OF AMERICA’S
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS AWARD (2012) 