The History of Dialogue (2): Joyce & Proust
Several Accounts of the Meeting Between James Joyce and Marcel Proust. From Proust at the Majestic by Richard Davenport-Hines: May 18, 1922. The Majestic, a…
Arguing the Web (2): Correspondence
“Better save my letters,” Burroughs instructed Allen Ginsberg, “maybe we can get out a book of them later on when I have a rep.” This…
The History of Dialogue (1): Marx & Lincoln
Karl Marx writes to Abraham Lincoln on November 22, 1864 Sir: We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance…
Les Trahisons des Clercs
I began to think more carefully about why Sartre might have been photographed. Cartier-Bresson took the portrait in 1946, less than a year since Sartre…
Betrayal!
If I were to start telling people about my discovery – as I’d be obliged to, once I’d identified the last photo – I’d also…
Naked and/or Dead
I connected the photographs with string and hung them from my office wall. Before me I saw fragments of an entire tradition caught up in…
Forest and Trees
Something untoward had been going on – there no longer seemed to be any question about that. But I thought perhaps I could make up…
The Third Man
I returned to Brassaï’s photo of the Pont des Arts. Though the fog seemed to have grown thicker. I could still make out its four…
Nightspawn
The other man in the first photograph is Gyula Halász. Operating under the pseudonym ‘Brassaï’, he left his native Hungary in 1924 and moved to…
Time Comes Around
One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph of the Pont des Arts taken by Kertész in 1929. Taken from inside the…
Lost & Found (4)
Dispatches from the Reanimation Library: "Hypnography: A Study in the Therapeutic Use of Hypnotic Painting." Mears, Ainslie. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1957.
The Art of the Blurb (4)
W.G. Sebald (1944-2001) introduces "Hydriotaphia, Urne-Buriall" by Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682).
The Art of the Obituary (8): Hunter S. Thompson
Hunter S. Thompson, gonzo journalist, (July 18, 1937 – February 20, 2005) He did not give “a flying fuck” what he smoked, or ingested, or…
Reading Slowly
(via) “Wordsworth claims that ‘the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.’ It seems to me…
I am a Kettle
From Newsweek: A one-page school writing assignment, written when David Foster Wallace was 9 years old
Variations on a Theme: Poor Loonies
(via) My vocation [as a writer] changed everything: the sword-strokes fly off, the writing remains; I discovered in belles-lettres that the Giver can be…