September 2011

Brazilian Landscape, Eizabeth Bishop by Angus Cleghorn After a decade in Brazil, Elizabeth Bishop was offered a $10,000 advance “to provide the text for the Life World Library Brazil, but famously disliked how the editors changed what she wrote” (Bishop: Poems, Prose & Letters viii) in the 1962 volume....

Bird’s eye view of Central Park, New York, John Bachman, 1859 by Katy Layton-Jones Melodramatic Landscapes: Urban Parks in the Nineteenth Century, by Heath Massey Schenker, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 232 pp. At the end of a decade during which urban green space ascended the hierarchy of public and...

Les Murray, David Naseby, 1995 From The New York Review of Books: The New American Poetry both captured and helped to create the spirit of the 1960s. In its first decade it sold a hundred thousand copies; in 1999—by which time half the young rebels it had announced were...

Rabbi with Torah, Hyman Bloom, 1955 by Alan Montefiore The origins of A Philosophical Retrospective – Facts, Values and Jewish Identity lie in a much more ambitious project, one of looking back on all that I have written over the years on the topics which have been of most...

Things, Boundlessly | by Justin Taylor

Poetry

The question of whether Zukofsky is truly neglected (and of whether said neglect has been just) is far less interesting than the simple fact that one can approach Zukofsky with a readerly freshness—an innocence, if...

AUF Summer Camp on Utøya, 2010, photograph by Arbeidernes Ungdomsfylking (AUF)  by Markha Valenta However nuanced, it is striking how little extant interpretations attend to the fact that Breivik’s most grotesque violence was not directed at Muslims or immigrants as such but at the youth members of the Norwegian...

After the Sale: Slaves Going South, Eyre Crowe, 1853 by Calvin Schermerhorn When enslaved Americans confronted the intensifying market economy of the nineteenth-century United States, they faced ominous changes and serious challenges.  If they lived in the coastal upper South – Delaware plus the eastern portions of Maryland, Virginia,...

Photograph by Francesc Torres, from Memory Remains: 9/11 Artefacts at Hangar 17   From London Review of Books: Long resident in New York, the Catalan artist Francesc Torres was two blocks from the WTC when the first jet struck the north tower, and he witnessed the collapse of both buildings...

Women’s First March Against Porn, Broadway and Columbus, 1977, photograph from San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library by Carolyn Bronstein Beginning in the mid-1970s, many American feminists viewed pornography (and its presumed causal relationship to violence against women) as the single greatest threat to female autonomy.  Ideological changes...

When Kerouac Met Kesey | by Sterling Lord

The American Scholar

During his trip back to Oregon in 1963, Ken and his entourage began to think about what would become the Merry Pranksters’ bus trip to New York the following year...