September 2015

Vidal defined his more outré work as ‘inventions’, but though Parini admits to admiring Myra Breckinridgehe shares the common wisdom that Vidal’s legacy takes two principal forms.

Florence showed me what she called the most famous of Chinese poems. She had made her own translation from a Chinese language newspaper clipping.

In May, in the garden of the elevated house at the bottom of the hill, four shrubs of stunning azaleas come into full blossom. They protrude and hang out over the white oya stone walls and over the road. The azaleas break the rhythm of the march.

I came here to swim in the highest pool in Europe, 52 floors above the station. The surface of this infinity pond, shivering with reflections like a Fun House mirror, memory-ripples of exercisers now taking their ease on Roman couches.

The media have tried to portray Corbyn as boring, but surely a vote for him in a general election would be a vote for a bloody military coup. Hardly boring.

Forever the prankster, my father died at 79 on Yom Kippur of 2003, prompting my mother’s comment: “That day is for the holy — how did they ever let him in?”

The militarization of the Albania territory that this bunker appears to imply is, at same time, a rather ominous reflection of the growing militarization of the entire EU in response to the Syrian refugee crisis.

I’d rather stick a needle in my eye than drink a really strong coffee. Coffee is made when the devil passes water. Tea, however, is the true blood of the living God.

In attempting to reach the genuine psychological reason for the popularity of detective stories, it is necessary to rid ourselves of many mere phrases.

As the story is usually now told, Charles Frederick Worth (1825–1895), often described as a French couturier of British origin, created the institution of haute couture.

Where No Place for Fools leaves no room for fools, it pries open the space for the fool’s room, his contemporary cell: the camera.

To begin at the end: After nearly two hours exploring facets of exploitation in the globalized food system, Luc Moullet closes Genèse d’un repas/Origins of a Meal (1978) by turning the camera on himself.

The memories are like stutters. Sometimes I inhale for air, and exhale a shaking chain of memories. A choking hazard. I for the ghost. The ghost for me.

As many former Eastern Block countries in the EU display a hardly dissimulated form of racism and religious hatred, Albania, always a little behind with the most recent fad in international politics, has been profiling itself as a country of multicultural and multireligious tolerance.

At stake in this difference between the schlemiel and the cynic (or kynic) is a choice between one way of evaluating and understanding reality, chance, and humor and another.

Is it possible that the literary sensibility—person—that produced a clutch of novels under the name Thomas Pynchon has had a fat new novel out since April, under a different name, only to encounter a virtual vacuum of notice?