Nobel Prize-winning poet Louise Glück dies at 80 | NPR
“At the end of my suffering / there was a door. / Hear me out: that which you call death / I remember.”
April 8, 2024, Solar Eclipse | NASA
On April 8, 2024, a total solar eclipse will cross North America, passing over Mexico, United States, and Canada.
Mark your calendar.
Harry Smith Was a Culture-Altering Shaman. Can the Whitney Contain Him? | The New York Times
A solo show takes on the legacy of the painter, folk musicologist, filmmaker, obsessive collector and underground legend. It also hints at what has been lost.
Chinatown
India’s Early Electronic Music From the ’70s Is Finally Being Released | The New York Times
A trove of tapes discovered in a cupboard at the country’s National Institute of Design showcases artists composing early synth recordings on their own terms.
Why Lydia Davis Loves Misunderstandings | The New Yorker
The writer’s painstaking attention to the smallest units of language scales up to momentous questions about how errors of communication shape human relations.
Feel-Ins, Know-Ins, Be-Ins | The New York Review
A newly reissued recording proves that the late saxophonist Pharoah Sanders could get the grandest of effects from the humblest of riffs.
Ben Lerner’s Long Search for Contact | The New Yorker
In “The Lights,” the writer flickers between prose and verse, life and fiction, and the earthly and the alien, hoping to bring each closer to the other.
Thoughts on Notes on the Anniversary of 9/11
Here’s the annual link to what I thought about 9/11 back in 2012. I might write it differently today but I still feel that way.
It’s worth noting, I think, that COVID has killed far more people here in New York City (and around the world) than the 9/11 attacks, and isn’t through with us yet. But even COVID, or perhaps especially COVID, has spread as it has from neglect and a failure to react by a government whose election and appointment grew out of the fear implanted by 9/11.
One consequence of this fear is a perilous distrust, mangling, and confounding of information and its sources. Another is a perilous belief, in the form of retreat and denial, that we can control or evade the other consequences of the attacks on behalf of our own privilege, entitlement, comfort, and self-interest. We are stoned on this and dying from it.