The Body in Swooping Close-Up
The half-stripped woman picked out against the dark in Artemisia Gentileschi’s Lucretia is viewed from above, yet as I stand before this yard-high canvas, she seems...
A Noah’s Ark of Books
For the past seventeen years, Reaktion Books has been publishing a series of volumes under the general rubric “Animal”—attractive duodecimos in uniform paperback editions, printed in...
It’s Not Science Fiction
The prolific science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, who is at heart an optimist, opens his newest novel, The Ministry for the Future, with a long set...
‘The Splendour and the Sting’
The name Charlotte Mew glimmers between fame and obscurity, and has now for over a century. She was born in 1869 in London and had exactly...
Remembering Boulez
To the Editors: As a surviving relic of the “dictature de Boulez” in my student days, I found Matthew Aucoin’s review of Pierre Boulez’s Music Lessons:...
The Right to Belong
If all the stateless people on earth were to form a nation, its population would exceed that of Sweden, Greece, Azerbaijan, or New York City—possibly by...
The Pleasure Crafts
The Age of Sail meant long and lonely days for whalers and seamen, but it was not without its consolations. Out on the high seas, despite...
A Well-Ventilated Conscience
About halfway through the Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by the Brazilian writer Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, the eponymous narrator complains, “the main problem with...
Object Lessons
At CalArts in the 1970s I once had a seminar with the poet and maverick art critic David Antin. The dean introduced him at the first...
An Island at the Crossroads
Okinawa, the largest island in a subtropical archipelago south of Japan known as the Ryukyus, is seventy miles long and seven miles wide. At its northern...
