Nathaniel Rich on László Krasznahorkai:
"Krasznahorkai is at heart a writer of suspense, though he takes the genre’s methods—deferral, misdirection, portent—to deranged extremes. He is expert at attenuating a premise, and the reader’s patience, to the vanishing point. He has fun with this.". . .
An interview with John Cale:
"BLVR: Do you have a favorite Velvet Underground song?
JC: Not anymore.
BLVR: Not anymore? What happened? You can’t listen to them anymore?
JC: I dunno. I just can’t. I can’t find that sensibility anywhere else. It really depresses me.". . .
Stephen Marche on the "cultural appropriation" controversy:
"The overwhelming majority of Canadian writers and artists are simply too ignorant of Indigenous cultures to steal from them. America was based on the exploitation of African-American bodies and souls—that exploitation is reflected in their art. Canada was based on conscious exclusion of Indigenous bodies and voices—we don’t appropriate; we ignore and destroy.". . .
Shannon Burns on Philip Roth:
"Some strains of contemporary criticism are driven to weed out the “bad seeds”, writers who are considered morally dubious, and Roth’s reputation has certainly suffered as a result of this critical turn, but I want to suggest that writers who disappoint moral or ideological expectations are as worthy of attention as those who appeal to and reinforce them. Writers are under no obligation to be role models or social engineers, and literature needn’t serve to reassure its readers or confirm their values.". . .
On the Jewish war novel:
"In the Jewish war novels we. . .have protagonists who struggle constantly with their own troubling thoughts about death, who are intellectual and emotional, who spend their evenings drinking and womanising, but also reading poetry and writing cynical letters home. Rather than avoiding descriptions of the soldier’s internal battles with cowardice and ambivalence, these novels give voice to them, offering a general readership access to the dark emotions and angst felt by those in war.". . .
Jenny Uglow on Modigliani:
"[Modigliani] wilfully, proudly, acted out the Modernist role of suffering artist; he priapically objectified the female body; he embraced the cultural appropriation of “primitive” art without a flicker of unease. His days were drowned in absinthe and hashish—when drunk, he yelled wild bursts of Dante and Villon and Ducasse’s mad, ferocious Chants de Maldoror (a favorite of the Surrealists a decade later). Friends watched him explode with violence or hurl himself against a wall in despair. But oh, how he worked." . . .
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