We won’t pretend to be completely disinterested, but we genuinely believe a two- or three-year subscription to The Paris Review is a great graduation gift. Any of us would have been delightedto receive it.
Just enter the code TPRGRAD2013 and get $10 off.
In Japanese, tsundoku means, “the act of buying books and not reading them, leaving them to pile up.”
For more of this morning’s roundup, click here.
Rain comes in through the oculus making a splashing circle the swimmers avoid. Without the sun the hall is very dark, very cold. He considers not getting in, but his only alternative is to walk home in the wet. From here he can see partway into the unctuarium—an oiled body shakes under a masseuse’s pummeling. Another is picking a perfume. These are the men who will be wrapped in silk, escorted to their litters, carried away without their feet ever touching the streets. He shivers, jumps in, starts swimming. When his fingers hit the pool-end he surfaces. His hair, brown and curly before, is sleek. Squint and he might be the figure whom he will describe at the start of his poem—Triton, man from the waist up, fish from the waist down, with a heart that can’t tell the difference.
—Matthea Harvey, from “Thermae”
Art Credit Paul Benney
A deer!—nibbling on the few green things
that grow in my strawy meadow.
Mine, we say here: my studio, my meadow, my road.
It is as it is. We were born
to possess it all and more. There’s no longer
a chance to change direction. So have one. Have a meadow,
Try it on—there are black-eyed Susans in your hair.
Have a deer. Have a deer fly—(I had two
of them yesterday. My stained tablet backs me up).
Have a swallow. Try to hold it in your throat
as it goes down beyond the pines of your forest.
But first feel its presence, try to catch
its essence. Before the words intrude.
—Joan Murray, from “Possession”
Art Credit Wolfgang Tillmans
“Strether, for his part, is already dreaming of America, and of Mrs. Newsome, whose body looms before him like a continent, waiting to crush and starve and mangle him with its immense bounty.”
Scenes Not Included in Henry James’s The Ambassadors. (NSFW)
“If, as Sjón suggests, Iceland’s literary trajectory is marked primarily by its increasing speed to catch up with developments on either side of the Atlantic, it’s unsurprising to see Sjón treating its various literary traditions less as a narrative line from some distant source than as a swirling whirlpool created by conflicting currents.”
David Bukszpan on Sjón, Björk, and the Furry Trout.
Photograph courtesy of the author.
What I see and keep secret appalls me. What I speak and do not know delivers me. Does not deliver me. Will all my nights be enough to dismantle this lightning-flash? O glimpsed countenance, inexorable and pounded by the blind white air!
—Jacques Dupin, from “Lichens”
Photography Credit Joao Canziani
