Ioanna Kostopoulou reviews Genese Grill’s translation of Robert Musil’s Theater Symptoms

After a century of deafness to the task and ambition of music, composers may need to relearn how to learn before Schumann’s words can even begin to make sense. How can the music of the past free the music of the present?

“From the artist’s perspective, it's the case that all art has to be a reconsideration of art history. Every artwork, in order to find its originality, has to reconsider all of art history.”

For Anvil and Rose 12, Inspector Watt returns with reviews of books from Paul Celan (tr. Pierre Joris), Jean Daive (on Celan), Alen Hamza, Lara Mimosa Montes, and a COVID anthology edited by Alice Quinn.

Jack’s poetry asks you, the reader, to abandon yourself, to engage with what you don’t know, and can’t understand, and enter a path of transformative gnosis.

Every time a new technology is invented our first thought is, how can I use this to get off? Our second: how can we use this to talk to the dead?

In this latest Anvil and Rose, Herman Van den Reeck reviews books from Rosebud Ben-Oni, Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley, Andres Cerpa, Andrew Levy, and Jackie Wang.

The experience is absolute; a demonstration is made of the presence of an incomplete reality to which its image is opposed by the intervention of a motor element condensing the real and the virtual into a superior unity.

Every year in April I am reminded of two monumental poetic works which begin with the Earth’s springtime renewal: The Canterbury Tales from 1400 and The Waste Land from 1922. 

Art, that great teacher, says to us, like Robert Frost’s most famous lines, “Here are your waters and your watering place. / Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.”

“We hear the intuitive Bloom, the open and receptive reader, the brooder and fabulous conversation partner, talking and chuckling, searching and scowling; we see him rubbing his brow and thinking aloud…”

In this latest Anvil and Rose, Inspector Watt reviews books by Agustín Guambo, David Lehman, J. Michael Martinez, Maureen N. McLane, and Chelsey Minnis.

Adam Morris reviews Padma Viswanathan’s new translation of São Bernardo by Graciliano Ramos. “The novel is at once a merciless satire of social class in postcolonial Brazil, and a sensitivity reader’s worst nightmare.“

Helen Adam is a singular luminary whose ballads, if you read them out loud and late at night, will sneak into your mind and create phantasmagorias of exquisite, sensual, brooding, and melancholy fairy-tales.

Joe Safdie hits two bird with one stone reviewing Ammiel Alcalay’s A Bibliography for After Jews and Arabs and his forthcoming Ghost Talk.

Herman Van den Reeck returns for 5 lightning reviews of books by Justin Phillip Reed, Lana Del Rey, Maria Dahvana Headley, Eliza Griswold, and Norman Finkelstein.

‘Song. Sang Freud. Spread on the chalcedony, a land there is no title to.’ And where is that? …

Every creation has resonance beyond itself. Our participation in nature is a creative act by which nature knows its further nature, as we know our own.

The artist Tom Leaver is a painter who dons rubber gloves, dips his fingertips into the palette, and spreads gestures across the canvas. To him, it is an act of meditation, the procession of time throughout a day distilled into an image.

To create something new, at best, is to give an intimation of the potential that is obstructed, and hence, by a contrast however faint, to draw attention to the obstruction and the pain it induces.