For much of his career, Levé was known primarily as a photographer, and his form of choice was the photo-series. He made obsessive use of what Zadie Smith calls, in an essay on Levé published in Harper’s, the ‘deferred term’: the absence that structures the aesthetic field, nowhere visible in the frame but for this very reason determining our experience of every object within it. In the series Rugby, for example, Levé depicts men’s bodies tangled up together in piles; thanks to the title, we can recognise this scene as a scrum, and the men as players grouped around an invisible ball. [read full essay]
Written as the exhibition text for Vietnamese-American artist Diane Severin Nguyen’s film In Her Time, exhibited at the Rockbund Museum in Shanghai, Olivia Kan-Sperling’s Little Pink Book is less a companion than an accessory to the film, a kind of textual bauble that draws attention to itself rather than clarifying anything about the work it ostensibly accompanies. This disjunction can’t be accidental — Kan-Sperling refers to Little Pink Book in an afternote as a ‘perverse mistranslation’ of In Her Time, a phrase that gestures toward irreverence. And it saturates the text: ornamentation isn’t a flourish but the only mode of engagement. [read full essay]
Stillman’s work invites literary comparisons: an avowed Austenite, he cites a constellation of authors as influences. The literary lineage of his films was among a range of topics that we discussed as he carried out a tour of five British cinemas — exhibiting rare 35mm prints of two of his best-loved features. The Whit Stillman Tour, in association with Lost Reels, continues with screenings of Metropolitan at the Filmhouse, Edinburgh (25 July) and the Ultimate Picture Palace, Oxford (31 July). [read full interview]
‘I used to love blackouts,’ Tim MacGabhann writes in his new memoir, The Black Pool: A Memoir of Forgetting, a stunningly visceral account of the half decade he lost to alcoholism and drugs. ‘The trouble,’ he then qualifies, ‘kicks in when you come back — that hard punch of the breath’s renewed insuck waking up, out of nothing, into being.’ [read full interview]
Serious effort is being made on both sides of the Atlantic to promote Coll not merely as an ‘unjustly neglected author’, or an ‘eccentric, hermetic writer’ — the stock role of the rediscovered 20th-century genius — but as the very paradigm of belatedness itself, of isolation itself: the writer with an audience of one. If this critical-marketing strategy draws more readers to Coll’s extraordinary novel, I’m all for it. But I also want to suggest that it runs the risk of obscuring another, potentially more interesting way of understanding his project. [read full essay]
On October 9, 2024, a year after Hamas’ brutal attack on Israel, the New York Times published accounts of what 65 American doctors, nurses, and paramedics saw while working in Gaza’s hospitals during the following year of siege, slaughter, and famine. One type of medical issue that repeatedly occurred was children with gunshots to the head or left side of the chest. ‘I couldn’t believe the number of kids I saw shot in the head,’ Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, the article’s author — who worked at a hospital in Khan Younis for two weeks — told another doctor who had also worked there, after returning home. ‘Yeah, me too,’ that doctor responded. ‘Every day.’ [read full essay]
A while ago, I went to Café Oto in Dalston, North London, to hear some Jeremy Prynne. The reading, imaging and playing were each eloquently curated and performed; there settled that head-nodding seriousness of the avant-garde; the audience’s deep silence was strictly — and self-imposedly — maintained. And yet, some minutes into the first reading, it became hard not to laugh. [read full essay]
It is undeniable that few Anglophone film critics of the last 50 years have been as humble, curious or open-minded as Rosenbaum. No widely-read American critic has maintained as close a relationship with the critical and cinematic cultures of Europe and Asia, or has been a more consistent enemy of a culture at home that derives profit from the closing of minds. But the culture Rosenbaum inveighs against is also the one whose critical avant-garde he has ended up representing. [read full essay]
Her use for the novel, it seems, is its formal compatibility with the human relationships which, for Rooney, seem to be the only reason for living. In one particularly dark moment, Peter considers ‘[t]he final permanent nothing that is the only truth.’ Against the vastness and totality of this void, the task remains — for life and literature — the same: to seek out, cling to, and create meaning enough to go on living and to go on being moral. The everydayness of both love and the novel might seem unworthy of such high stakes — both seem, in Peter’s words, to be ‘experiment[s] bound almost certainly for one kind of failure or another.’ But Rooney is, as ever, interested also in how small daily miracles make this life seem more bearable than is proportionate. [read full essay]
Following years of stagnating productivity, successive British governments have tried and failed to kick-start growth. Perhaps we could teach the Chancellor a thing or two. The 15 contributions on this year’s list represent growth of 66.67% on last year’s total of nine. This is also a rise of 56.25% on our yearly average of 9.6. [read full essay]