RonSlate.com

on The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation, by Frederic Spotts (Yale)

Ron Slate — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 17:33:06 -0800

“Everything we did was equivocal. We never quite knew whether we were doing right or wrong. A subtle poison corrupted even our best actions.” This was Sartre’s incisive post-war assessment of the behavior of French artists and intellectuals during the German occupation of 1940-1944.

on A World of Trouble: The White House and the Middle East, by Patrick Tyler (Farrar, Straus)

Ron Slate — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 10:05:06 -0800

As the Obama administration prepares to take the reins of American foreign policy, one wonders not only if and how the new president will depart from George W. Bush’s inert approach to the Israeli-Palestinian debacle, but also how Obama’s advisers (often recycled Clintonites) regard the ambitious but failed policies of Bill Clinton and the 1993 Oslo Accords.

on The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop, essays by Lewis Buzbee (Graywolf )

Ron Slate — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 09:39:10 -0800

On returning to Massachusetts in 1978 from graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin, I entertained the idea of opening a bookstore. I made an appointment to visit the venerable publisher David Godine through a mutual acquaintance. “You’d have to be nuts,” he said, predicting lean times for independent bookstores. At that time the B.

on Satin Cash, poems by Lisa Russ Spaar (Persea Books)

Ron Slate — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 18:07:06 -0800

The signature gesture of Lisa Spaar’s third book, Satin Cash, is a shift of attention from circumstance to displaced reaction. A disinclination to be quite on top of actual things triggers a self-in-language, cloistered in memory and reconsideration, and making its way back to the actual through strangely routed observation and phrasing.

THE ICE HOUSE

on The Journey, a novel by H.G. Adler, translated by Peter Filkins (Random House)

Ron Slate — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 19:17:21 -0800

H. G. Adler’s The Journey begins with a three-page “Augury.” When Peter Filkins discovered a copy of Die Reise in Schoenhof's Foreign Language Bookstore in Harvard Square in 2002, he read the introductory paragraph and immediately determined to translate the novel:

on The Writer as Migrant, essays by Ha Jin (University of Chicago Press)

Ron Slate — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 10:46:32 -0800

Ha Jin would seem to have every reason to feel securely anchored in his adopted American home. He arrived from China in 1985 as a twenty-nine year old student of American literature to pursue graduate studies at Brandeis University. Just five years later, his first book of poetry, Between Silences, was published.

on The Likes of Us: America in the Eyes of the Farm Security Administration, by Stu Cohen and Peter Bacon Hales (David R. Godine

Ron Slate — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 09:54:35 -0800

In the late 1960s, the Boston-based art and cultural critic Stu Cohen became interested in the contemporary photography of Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander.

Tuesday Miscellany

Ron Slate — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 12:46:35 -0800

Leave it to Robert D. Kaplan to provide a most concise and perceptive analysis

on The Romantic Dogs, poems by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Laura Healy (New Directions)

Ron Slate — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 14:40:05 -0800

Borges, Cortázar, Bolaño. With the recent publication of Bolaño’s novels in English, the Anglo-reading critics now generally concur with their Hispanic colleagues: Bolaño, who died in 2003 in Catalonia, is the greatest novelist of his foreshortened generation, supplementing the imaginative portfolio of Borges (versus the magical realism of García Márques).

on The Odor of Sanctity, poems by Michael Heffernan (Salmon Poetry)

Ron Slate — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 08:52:12 -0800

NIGHTFALL

What have I done? I said to my own self.
Who have I come to be? I said again.
My own self answered me in her own words.
She told me things I could not understand.
She watched my eyes move when she told me this.
They watched a bird go over the blue sky.
The blue sky took the bird and the bird left.
The air was blue all over where I was.

on The Dawn of the Color Photograph: Albert Kahn’s Archives of the Planet, by David Okefuna (Princeton)

Ron Slate — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 12:17:30 -0800

“A phenomenon of such extended malignance as the Great War does not come out of a Golden Age,” wrote Barbara Tuchman in The Proud Tower (1962). The two decades preceding the war still provoke historians to ask why a period of such innovation and productivity led to unprecedented mass violence.

on Selected Poems of Friederich Hölderlin, translated by Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover (Omnidawn)

Ron Slate — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 15:25:38 -0800

Friederich Hölderlin wrote almost all of his complete work between 1796 and 1803 including odes, elegies, hymns, the epistolary novel Hyperion, the verse tragedy Empedokles, and translations of Pindar. Over the following four years as his mental stability collapsed he wrote several poetic fragments. One begins:

Once I asked the muse, and she
Replied:

on Hotter Than That: The Trumpet, Jazz, and American Culture, by Krin Gabbard (Faber and Faber)

Ron Slate — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 12:14:43 -0800

“Sometimes I feel the need for metallic sounds; in jazz you can hear knives singing. Knives rip up the psyche’s fabric to shreds and strengthen it in the process,” wrote the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski in Another Beauty. The trumpet has shredded without peers since the first ancient call to arms.

on A Murmuration of Starlings, poems by Jake Adam York (Southern Illinois University Press)

Ron Slate — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 12:58:51 -0800

I remember the bulletin: An Eastern Airlines commuter prop-jet had crashed into Boston Harbor after take-off from Logan Airport, less than 10 miles from our house. I was 10-years old. A little research shows that the date was October 4, 1960; the accident occurred around 5:45 pm, and I would have been watching the six o’clock news with my grandfather before dinner.

on Classical Chinese Poetry, an anthology translated and edited by David Hinton (Farrar Straus Giroux)

Ron Slate — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 09:37:04 -0800

David Hinton is the most productive translator of Chinese literature and poetry in English of the past ten years. He is also one of the most accomplished of all time. When the New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry appeared in 2003, editor Eliot Weinberger focused on five major translators: Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder and Hinton.

Poetry of Note: Books by Susan Settlemyre Williams, Robert Bly, and Norman S. Shapiro

Ron Slate — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 14:05:01 -0800

on Ashes in Midair, poems by Susan Settlemyre Williams (Many Mountains Moving Press)

on The English Major, a novel by Jim Harrison (Grove Press)

Ron Slate — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 07:50:06 -0800

In a New York Times interview last year, Jim Harrison told Charles McGrath that he wrote The English Major at top speed – even though he rationed himself to one page per day.

on Give and Take, a novel by Stona Fitch (Concord Free Press – which is half the story)

Ron Slate — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 18:28:48 -0700

Stona Fitch’ s second novel, Senseless, was published by Soho Press on September 11, 2001. Eliott Gast, an American trade representative, is taken hostage by terrorists and then methodically deprived of his five senses. His agony, monitored by cameras, is broadcast globally.

on The Cosmopolitan, poems by Donna Stonecipher (Coffee House Press)

Ron Slate — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 08:16:38 -0700

Donna Stonecipher has published three books since 2002, each preoccupied with how the mind attempts to slip undetected through its own security screening and arrive at meaningful destinations. As tour directors of signification and its frustrations, her poems are both enactments and examples.

on Bethlehem Steel: Builder and Arsenal of America, a history by Kenneth Warren (University of Pittsburgh Press)

Ron Slate — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 08:11:05 -0700

My father grew up in the Point, a blue-collar section of Quincy, MA lying adjacent to the Fore River Shipyard. The Bethlehem Steel Corporation acquired the shipyard in 1913 with a European war approaching. At its productive peak, the shipyard employed 32,000 people.