Search Blog

Issues

  • Issue 49

    Michelle Tea, T Cooper, Judith Thurman, and more.

  • 48

    Oliver Sacks, Richard Ford, Jorie Graham and more

  • 47

    Michael Ondaatje, Lydia Millet, Gary Snyder, and more.

  • 46

    Susan Orlean, Steve Almond, David Shields, and more.

An interview with Ellis Avery

Written by admin on February 6, 2012 — Leave a Comment

The super-talented Ellis Avery is the author of The Teahouse Fire, (Riverhead 2006), which won three awards and was translated into five languages, and The Smoke Week (Gival Press 2003) an award-winning personal account of life in lower Manhattan after 9/11. Her critically acclaimed new novel The Last Nude, centering on the relationship between Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka and her muse, Rafaela, was released in January this year. Before her reading from The Last Nude last week at KGB bar, Ellis and I sat down to chat about Paris, artistic ambition, historical fiction, and painting classes with naked models.

Congratulations on the release of The Last Nude! There’s a big tradition of Americans going off to Paris and writing there; I’m thinking of writers like Henry James, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, and Earnest Hemmingway. Do you think Paris still holds a certain fascination for American writers, and if so, why?

Paris was the epicenter of Anglophone modernist literature in the twenties and thirties.  Americans went there and it set them on fire. Paris has always been a small, dense city, and the idea of being there when you could have just happened to run into pioneers in literature, art, music, dance, and fashion must have been incredibly seductive.

Read more »

Tagged ,

New show of drawings by Hilary Berseth at Eleven Rivington Gallery in New York City

Written by admin on January 20, 2012 — Leave a Comment
 

 

All images courtesy of Eleven Rivington Gallery

Hilary Berseth (SOA’ 2001) impressed with his first show at Eleven Rivington Gallery in 2008. He seamlessly blended nature with human agency; his honeycomb sculptures combined his own wood and wire armatures with wax and honey structures built by bee colonies. His manipulation of natural processes resulted in beautiful, subtle effects. The sculptures were cacti-like formations, with soft curvatures and elegant flowing lines; the poetic manifestation of mathematical formulas embedded in the natural world. Critic Karen Rosenberg, writing for The New York Times, described Berseth’s work as “a novel twist on process art.”

Berseth’s most recent show, at Eleven Rivington through February 5, 2012, is a slight departure. His graphite drawings feature some natural elements, such as plant life and clouds, but this time they are captured on a paper. The use of graphite lends the drawings an ethereal lightness, while the images, (juxtaposing a tree inside a room, or an eyeball with what look like vines or veins), masterfully blend the real and the surreal. Recurring themes are decay and impermanence; one particular drawing shows a room that could be a scene of either a demolition or a cataclysm. The floor is littered with wood pieces, and an entire wall has been ripped away, revealing a dark interior. The use of half-opened doors as an entrance into the composition suggests a psychoanalytic preoccupation, while the drawing of the eyeball references the technique of optical illusion.

Read more »

Tagged , ,

Photohysteria in Paris

Written by admin on January 3, 2012 — Leave a Comment
 

 

Every year, photohysteria descends on Paris in the form of the world’s leading photography fair, Paris Photo. This November, the Grand Palais off the Champs Elysees played host. I wandered in to take on the works of 117 international galleries, and to find out what the buzz was about.

My starting point was Magnum, the legendary agency co-founded by Henri Cartier-Bresson. The fair’s theme, Africa, was represented by Ian Berry’s harrowing images of South African apartheid, and George Rodger’ 1950s study of the Nuba tribe in South Sudan. Hitler’s ex-protégé Leni Riefenstahl was so struck by Rodger’s naked warriors that she asked Rodgers where to find them, and photographed them to great acclaim. I was similarly impressed.

At the Stevenson Gallery, Viviane Sassen showed why she featured on the Paris Photo poster this year, and why she works successfully in high fashion. Neon-yellow butterflies in mud, a sleeping boy in fishing nets, overexposed flowers at night – there was an idiosyncratic dreaminess hinting at a vision of African photography that is both contemporary and versatile.

Read more »

Tagged , ,

Columbia: A Journal 2012 Contest

Written by admin on December 30, 2011 — 6 Comments

The 2012 Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art Writing Contest is now open

$500 prizes in each genre: fiction, nonfiction, and poetry
Plus publication in our landmark 50th issue.

[JUDGES]

Nonfiction
Anne Fadiman
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
National Book Critics Circle Award 1997

Fiction
Dinaw Mengestu
How to Read the Air
The New Yorker “20 Under 40” 2010

Poetry:
Eileen Myles
Inferno: a poet’s novel
Lambda Literary Award 2010

Runners-up will be considered for publication on our website.
Entry fee is $14 and includes a copy of Journal 50.

Deadline: February 1, 2012.

Submit your work via our submission manager.
Please note: after your file is uploaded, you will be automatically directed to our payment portal, which will allow you to buy a virtual “ticket” to the contest ($13 plus 75? processing fee).

Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

The 35th Mostra Internacional de Cinema

Written by admin on November 10, 2011 — Leave a Comment
 

 

The 35th Mostra Internacional de Cinema ran from October 21st to November 3rd, 2011. Among the films presented I saw some notable gems, well worth seeking out.

Oslo, August 31, by Norwegian film director Joachim Trier, is an intimate, anguished portrait of a young man, Anders, who leaves a drug rehabilitation center and wanders through his native Oslo. Through flashbacks, we are shown Anders’ struggles with drug withdrawal. Actor Anders Danielson Lie, whose gaunt, boyish looks underscore his character’s vulnerability, delivers a strong performance—a mix of abrasive cockiness and debilitating self-doubt. Oslo’s streets and parks are linked to childhood memories in accompanying voiceovers. The comforting voices try, but ultimately fail to revive Anders’s will to live. In spite of its weighted theme, the movie avoids sentimentality, thanks to the taut, self-mocking dialogue and episodic structure.

Read more »

Tagged , ,

The Marriage Plot: A Review

Written by admin on November 6, 2011 — Leave a Comment

I was very excited to review Jeffrey Eugenides’s new novel The Marriage Plot.  I loved Eugenides’s previous works, The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex. These works fully engaged the reader; the characters had great depth. The voices were new and the stories stayed with you long after you closed the book.

The Marriage Plot centers on three young adults – Madeleine, Mitchell and Leonard – who have just graduated from Brown (Eugenides is also an alumni) in the early 1980s. Eugenides follows the trio, who are trying to find their way in the world after living somewhat secluded lives during college.

Read more »

Tagged , ,

Oliver Stone at the New York Film Festival

Written by admin on October 27, 2011 — Leave a Comment

Oliver Stone believes Salvador wasn’t a box office success because of the “South American curse.” The film was welcomed by the critics and nominated for two Academy Awards, but Americans don’t care about “what happens in the back kitchen,” he said at the New York Film Festival’s screening of Salvador, his film on El Salvador’s civil war.

It’s a shame.

Salvador deserves the kind of praise heaped on Platoon, an opus on the Vietnam War that established Stone as a director back in 1986,only months after Salvador was released. Platoon was a bloody meditation on Stone’s personal experience in Vietnam.

Read more »

Tagged , ,

A TALKATIVE CORPSE: THE JOYS OF WRITING POETRY IN IRISH

Written by admin on October 25, 2011 — Leave a Comment

Part One: Translation

Writing poetry in Irish forces you to think about translation, for practical reasons as well as  artistic ones. For one thing, because I write in a minority language my poems are more often published with a translation than not.  The majority of readers, who do not have Irish, will only ever read the translation.  Even those who do read Irish will usually read the translation and compare it to the original.

However much I might yearn for the ideal Irish reader, the English translation is an inescapable part of the experience of reading my poems and the aesthetic impact of any given poem comes from a sort of negotiation between the original and the translation.This is kind of irksome to me but it is also apt.  All poetry, and certainly all the poetry that I am interested in, is in part a negotiation between tradition and the individual poet, between a notional authenticity and a living artefact, between fidelity and assertiveness, origins and originality.

Some poets have addressed the problem of the translation creatively and have formed active artistic partnerships with their translators.  Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s work with Paul Muldoon (whose connection to this city as poetry editor of The New Yorker is worth mentioning) have forged a very fruitful poetic team.  Their joint work, poem and translation in friendly apposition rather than jostling for position on the page, may be seen as an artistic collaboration between two highly accomplished poets.  The poetry resides not simply in the original poem, nor can it be located in the translation.  It exists between them in a kind of dynamic tension between the source poem and its English version, in the gaps, historical and linguistic, between the Irish way of expressing an idea conceived in Irish and in that ideas translated equivalent.  Ní Dhomhnaill and Muldoon have made a virtue out of an artistic necessity and a new poetry out of an old problem.

Read more »

Tagged , , ,

A TALKATIVE CORPSE: THE JOYS OF WRITING POETRY IN IRISH

Written by admin on October 25, 2011 — 1 Comment

Part Two: Reinvention

Part of the problem of writing in Irish is the very basic one of vocabulary. The Irish language is, like all modern languages, deluged with English.  Those cranks who set out to protect the language (and I am one of them) are forced to reckon not just with the contagion of English in the everyday life of native Irish speakers but with the constantly developing lexicon of modern life.  Irish was in steep decline even before the Industrial Revolution (which has still to reach Ireland).  We have no native word for a spinning jenny, never mind a jet engine or a flash drive.

The poverty of technical vocabulary makes it difficult to write a contemporary urban poem in good Irish.  That difficulty, however, is not necessarily a bad thing.  Peter Porter famously wrote that poetry “is a form of refrigeration that stops language from going bad” but poetry in Irish is forced to be more than just a linguistic cryogenics lab.  The writing of poetry in Irish is an act of reinvention of the language.  The description of twenty-first century life absolutely necessitates the finding of words with no historical precedent in the linguistic tradition.  This may seem somehow presumptuous, and it is, but it is worth considering that just as metaphor is the basis of poetry, so it is the basis of all language.

All poetry operates by analogy, in the slipperiness of words and in the shifting similarities between images.  Lexicographers in Irish have a more active role in the forging of the language than their counterparts in English.  It is almost a creative role, even a poetic one.  The word for spam, for example is turscar, which translates as something like “driftwood”, the stuff that gets washed up on the shore.  To my mind that wilful renewing of the language at the most basic level of vocabulary is an act of poetry.

Read more »

Tagged , , ,

Written by admin on October 24, 2011 — Leave a Comment

« Older Entries