-
Contact
-
Writing by Location
All Categories
Friendly Fire
Reading
Archives
Tags
Barry Hannah Ben Marcus bike messengers Carver and Lish Catherine Murphy Cheever Coney Island César Aira Dalí Dante Deleuze Denis Johnson drive-in movies Flannery O'Connor Francisco Goldman Gary Lutz Gombrowicz Horacio Castellanos Moya Jim Jarmusch Jim Long John Ashbery Jorge Louis Borges Kafka Llosa Mallarmé Martin Amis Maurice Blanchot Melville Nabokov Ned Vizzini Nicanor Parra Poe Proust punk Raymond Roussel Richard Hell Rivka Galchen Roberto Bolaño Taxi Driver Tom McCarthy Twain Wells Tower Whitman William Kennedy Zadie Smith
Author Archives: David
Swan song
“Blue,” the last song on the last album to be recorded by genuine art stars R.E.M., is a wonderful career summation with urgently spoken word verses that recall Out of Time‘s “Belong” and brings back Patti Smith to close it … Continue reading
Posted in Influences
Leave a comment
A cut in the real
One sign of a really good poem, I think, is that when you read about a place or moment in time that could very much exist in the natural world, you still end up thinking of another work of art. … Continue reading
Come see your Rome that weeps
So, last week I picked up a contemporary, strongly-hyped realist novel that I wasn’t planning to actually read, but was deeply pulled in by the opening. It did what fiction does; it tells something true and makes something up at the … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
2 Comments
Willem de Kooning and revision
Woman I gives me a chill whenever I see it, but the context of MoMA’s current de Kooning retrospective made me feel as though I were seeing it again for the first time. I loved everything about this show, from the clear … Continue reading
Saul Bellow’s “condition”
Today’s snowfall, which is keeping me indoors, just made me pick up Bellow’s Letters. It begins with an amazing excerpt from his 1977 Jefferson Lecture: On winter afternoons when the soil was frozen to a depth of five feet and the … Continue reading
The songs from Just Kids
Recently I spent a day painting an apartment way up over the Hudson River and listened to the Patti Smith Just Kids playlist. The total running time is ten hours, and I made it through the first five. Among the many … Continue reading
Posted in Influences
Tagged Coming Home, Lotte Lenya, Patti Smith, Roberto Bolaño, Tim Buckley
Leave a comment
Argos Books
Argos Books: A New Form for Translation By David Varno The Other Music: Selected Poems from the 1970s, by Francisca Aguirre, translated by Montana Ray If I Were Born in Prague: Poems of Guy Jean, versions by Katie Farris and … Continue reading
