Mailboxes, Recommended
A century after Rilke wrote his famous letters to Franz Kappus, the literary-epistle game has changed. We want more than a holding-forth by the master alone; how about hearing from the tenderfoot, too?...
View ArticleBreak Every Rule, Part 2
Whereas the first chapter of Carole Maso’s Break Every Rule (I wrote about it HERE) is a kind of travelogue where cities or towns in Rhode Island, New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts, as well as in...
View ArticleNew Article on Rilke
Ange Mlinko’s insightful “Angels to Radios: On Rainer Maria Rilke” appears in The Nation. An excerpt: Rilke had been fascinated by the formal conundrum of enclosure and freedom at least since his...
View ArticleIs he wrong?
If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, for you are not poet enough to call forth its riches. - Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet A laundry day to be enjoyed. Filed...
View ArticleGass-X
On a sunny day I would argue that the first 46 pages of William Gass’s Reading Rilke: Reflections of the Problems of Translation, which outlines the major themes of Rilke’s art and gives a nice...
View Article“Fat, too, fool, hey?”– The Mind in Morning (Snow in film)
Snow: Kubrick style Having just reread William Gass’s “The Pedersen Kid” yesterday morning, I decided to do a study of associations–what my brain does as I read, what I think of, what I take...
View ArticleJoy to the Reader When Reading Gass’s The Tunnel
How can I contain myself? (But perhaps the question is: how could Gass both contain and not contain himself to have done what he did?) Having had The Tunnel to go back to every morning was like having...
View ArticleAnimal Studies & Rilke’s “Black Cat”
“An animal looks at me. What should I think of this sentence?” –Jacques Derrida In today’s print issue of the New York Times, there’s an article called “Animal Studies Cross Campus to Lecture Hall.”...
View ArticleA Medley of Gass Interviews and His Influence
Over at the Reading William Gass website, curated by Stephen Schenkenberg, a video has been unearthed of Gass talking in Paris about five years ago. He reads from The Tunnel for a short time–then...
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