The Mumpsimus

2020 has been such a difficult, strange year that I often forget a book I wrote got published at the beginning of it. The publication of that book feels like it was a lifetime ago, something from a different world. And in many ways it was a different world, because the book was released just as we were becoming aware that COVID-19 might be something of a problem for the United States. A month after the book's publication, we knew things were serious. Two months after, the routines of the world had changed. Trying to do a year in review post this year is especially difficult because the year felt so long and life was so upended that memory is both hazy and untrustworthy. This year, I didn't write a lot, but I read far more than I thought I had — once I started making a list in preparation for this post, I was surprised at just how much reading I did. This realization made me somewhat less depressed about how little success I've had this year at writing fiction or essays, ...

  Waterhour, the rubble scow ferries us into evening, we, like it, are in no hurry, a dead Why stands at the stern. —Paul Celan, "Rubble Scow" trans. Pierre Joris One hundred years ago, Paul Celan was born; fifty years ago, he died. A variety of books have been released to honor this occasion, but the most significant, for English-language readers at least, is Memory Rose Into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry translated by Pierre Joris , who has made the translation of Celan a significant focus of his life's work. Joris's translation of Celan's 1967 collection Atemwende appeared from Sun & Moon Press in 1995 as Breathturn . This was followed by Threadsuns in 2000, Lightduress and Paul Celan: Selections in 2005, The Meridian: Final Version-Drafts-Materials in 2013, and then in 2014, the companion volume to the new one: the magisterial Breathturn Into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry , which collected Joris's previous translations al...

This post continues to chronicle my attendance at the Telluride at Dartmouth program at the Hopkins Center for the Arts. Days 1 & 2 ( A Dangerous Method  and Albert Nobbs ) can be found here , Day 3 ( We Need to Talk About Kevin ) can be found here . I resisted In Darkness  because it is a Holocaust film, and that is just about my least favorite movie genre. Nonetheless, it is a genre I'm deeply familiar with, and was the subject of the first serious film book I ever read, the original edition of Annette Insdorf's Indelible Shadows ,  which I discovered on my father's bookshelves when I was in high school. Soon after, I saw Schindler's List  and found it deeply moving in a very adolescent way (on my part, at least, and maybe on Spielberg's). Later, I realized that Schindler's List  had created a sort of emotional smugness in me -- it had made me feel good about feeling all the appropriate emotions. Spielberg is one of the greatest manipulators of emotio...