Last Thursday afternoon I had the pleasure of seeing Gomorrah, director Matteo Garrone’s sixth feature film and winner of the Grand Prize at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival. It plunges viewers directly into the vicious lives of the Neapolitan mafia (the Camorra) as they unfold in and around an oversize, crumbling modernist apartment block. [...]

Robert H. Abzug’s engaging study of nineteenth-century reform-movement figures, including those who agitated for temperance, abolitionism, and women’s rights, argues that their aims can only be understood in the context of their religious thinking. [...]

The answer to one question in this week’s “FYI” column, in the Times‘s city section, is totally fascinating. Here is the question and response: Q: Given the ubiquitousness of cellphones, it’s easy to forget that telephones are historical artifacts, but I’ve often wondered: What is the oldest telephone number still in use in New York? A: Here’s an [...]

Over the weekend my review of Sharon Core’s new exhibition at Yancey Richardson Gallery was published on Artforum.com. It begins: “What pictorial genre seems to require less interpretive acumen than the painted still life? Accumulations of fruit and fish and fowl are all exquisite surfaces, and invite surface readings. But photographer Sharon Core, after making a [...]

After publishing the post below, I pulled out The Selected Writings of Sydney Smith, edited and with an introduction by W.H. Auden. In his introduction, Auden offers this: “Physically, [Smith] was swarthy, sturdy tending to stoutness and suffering in later life from gout. Mentally, like so many funny  men, he had to struggle constantly against [...]

“Writing, depending as it does on those enabling assumptions by which ideas are produced and understood at a particular cultural moment, is also, for the kind of critical intelligence discussed and at work in these pages, an act of resistance to those assumptions.” So suggests Richard Poirier, founding editor of Raritan: A Quarterly Review, in [...]

Bruce Robbins, in a review of Stefan Collini’s 2006 book Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain published in the journal Modern Intellectual History, provides this fascinating discussion of the tensions inherent in the term “intellectuals”: The intellectual enters the public sphere when she or he makes use of the authority gained in [a] specialization in order to [...]

Yesterday afternoon, during a conference held at Columbia University on Lionel Trilling and his legacy, the eminent historian Fritz Stern recalled one day in 1962, during the Cuban Missile crisis, when he met Trilling on the corner of Broadway and 116th Street. Unsure whether nuclear missiles would rain down on New York, Stern cautiously admitted [...]

I eagerly await the moment when I can sit down to read Marilynne Robinson’s new novel, Home. In the meantime, the media blitz surrounding it is in full swing. Ruth Franklin, writing in the October 8 issue of The New Republic, discusses the absence of God from contemporary American fiction, places Robinson in relation to [...]

Farmers and Fishermen displays Daniel Vickers’s magisterial command of the local literature of Essex County, Massachusetts, as well as of historians’ interpretations of the labor performed there in the first two centuries of European settlement. Vickers aims, in this clear, accessible narrative, to fill a gap in the knowledge of preindustrial America concerning the structure of labor relations in the region’s farming and fishing communities. [...]

Samuel Johnson, in The Rambler no. 14, titled “On the Life of an Author vs. His Writing,” notes: It has long been the custom of the oriental monarchs to hide themselves in gardens and palaces, to avoid the conversation of mankind, and to be known to their subjects only by their edicts. The same policy [...]

“What lives brightest in the memory of these outings is a Thoreauvian feeling of looking at things—earth, plants, rocks, textures, animal tracks, all the secret places of the out-of-doors that seem not ever to have been looked at before, a hidden patch of moss with a Dutchman’s Breeches stoutly in its midst, aromatic stands of [...]

In the May issue of Scientific American, which I have begun skimming online since the novelist Marilynne Robinson cited it several times in a lecture I saw her deliver last month and an artist friend in Miami explained to me his recent fascination with theoretical physics, has a fascinating article on the arrow of time. [...]

I’ve just finished Susan Jacoby’s 2004 book Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, which I enjoyed reading. It is an account of freethought from Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason and Virginia’s 1786 Act for Establishing Religious Freedom to present-day battles between those supporting and fighting the teaching of evolution. The book’s tone remains fairly [...]

The blog Boston 1775 has posted Harvard’s rules for incoming class of 1741. In the 1700s, ordinary schooling for Boston boys ran from about age seven to age thirteen or fourteen, if they lasted through the whole course. Therefore, the few boys who went on to college were still truly boys, only in their early [...]

The contributors to Reading Room, the New York Times blog dedicated to discussing books in depth, are currently focusing their energies upon Marilynne Robinson’s 1980 novel Housekeeping. Click here for the moderator’s introductory post. Last Thursday, I had the pleasure of attending a lecture by Robinson at DePaul University in Chicago. She read two essays, [...]

A week or so ago, The New Republic published Jed Perl’s review of the Nicolas Poussin exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Now T.J. Clark has written a review, for the London Review of Books, of that exhibition and the simultaneous Gustave Courbet retrospective. Both are worth reading, and both have rapturous ledes. Here’s [...]

In an article published three weeks ago at Inside Higher Ed, Lindsay Waters, executive editor for the humanities at Harvard University Press, discusses the relationship between books and essays in humanistic scholarship, and makes a claim for the latter: Books are the standard now, and for me to ask you to think that the future [...]

In a post published last week at the U.S. Intellectual History blog, Tim Lacy writes: Most past works of U.S. intellectual history have focused on public and private figures, institutions, and books that could in some sense be considered “canonical.” I refuse to dismiss all the historians who did that work, in blanket fashion, as [...]

(Photograph by Tony Cenicola for the New York Times) I have just completed the last book I will read this year: J.M. Coetzee’s new novel, Diary of a Bad Year. Each review of the book has of course discussed its three-stream or three-band structure. The first stream, at the top of the page, presents a [...]

I share a birthday with F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was born on this day in 1896. He happens to be among my favorite writers—I have read The Great Gatsby four times and This Side of Paradise twice (so far), and keep The Crack-Up at hand for regular browsing. Last week The Guardian published an excerpt [...]

At half past noon on Monday, the artist Sharon Hayes emerged from the UBS tower on Sixth Avenue (between Fifty-first and Fifty-second Streets), microphone stand and small amplifier in hand. She set them down on the sidewalk and, without preamble, began speaking the text of an anonymous love letter, catching and holding the eyes of [...]

Three recent long-format essays have cast retrospective glances at aspects of literary and intellectual life as it was lived twenty to twenty-five years ago. I first came across Joseph Epstein’s “‘The Literary Life’ at 25,” which revisits the article Epstein wrote for the inaugural issue of The New Criterion. Near the beginning of the piece, [...]

The Observer has published another literary list, this time asking fifty notable writers to name “brilliant but underrated novels that deserve a second chance to shine.” Owing perhaps in part to differences in reading habits on either side of the pond, not only are many of the books new to me, but several of the [...]

Last Tuesday I listened to the New Yorker critics Joan Acocella and Alex Ross discuss criticism; last night I listened to the New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik discuss Marcel Proust’s letters. This took place at NYU’s Maison Francaise, and marked the republication, earlier this year, of The Letters of Marcel Proust, selected and translated [...]

In the September/October issue of Boston Review, Susie Linfield, a longtime contributor to the magazine and the associate director of the cultural reporting and criticism program at NYU, has published a provocative essay on “why photography critics hate photographs.” If you’re willing to accept her central conceit—that Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and, especially, Bertolt Brecht [...]

Given past experience with panel discussions, and common assumptions one brings to them, I didn’t have the highest hopes for one titled “Criticism and the Arts,” held last night at Hunter College. It featured Joan Acocella (of the New Yorker, Greil Marcus (author, most recently, of The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the [...]

One attendee of my talk yesterday offered a lengthy consideration of what I said. Among other points was this, which I feel is worth sharing and which he kindly allowed me to post: You suggested “one should live by the creed of verbs”, and even that “doing so flattens out the implicit hierarchies lodged in [...]

I had the pleasure of speaking to a fairly large audience at Parsons today. Here is one paragraph from my talk: Instead, one should live by the creed of verbs—to review, to write criticism, to make art—rather than nouns. I have taken recently to saying that I “write about art” rather than “I’m an art [...]

(Detail view of cover of mock-up made by designers) As I publish this entry the Serpentine Gallery is celebrating the opening of “Uncertain States of America,” curated by Daniel Birnbaum, Gunnar B. Kvaran, and Hans Ulrich Obrist. As I mentioned in a parenthetical aside in this entry in June, I was asked by the three [...]

At the invitation of Matthew Higgs, I submitted a question—one of twenty, each submitted by a different person—to the artist Kay Rosen, whose last New York exhibition I reviewed in the September 2005 Artforum. It was for one of his “20 Questions” projects, and the Indiana-based artist’s answers have been printed in a small book [...]

After the difficulty I faced finding this book, I finally found a copy of The Emperor’s Children at Strand Books last week, and devoured it over the weekend. It skewers the pretensions of people who are young, overeducated, and trapped in the Manhattan media echo chamber, yet I couldn’t help but have sympathy for its [...]

On the plane yesterday I read James Salter’s Last Night, a slim collection of stories in which each tale would seem too brief were it not for the author’s aptitude for compression. More than any other fiction I’ve read in the past few years, the stories possess a quality I identify as “adult”—the light in [...]

Jonathan Franzen’s The Discomfort Zone (FSG) is a beautifully written small book, surely a disappointment to those wishing to revisit the expansiveness of The Corrections, but undeniably winning for readers willing to be buoyed along by fluid, never-preening prose and the small insights, sadly often unusable, one gains about one’s past. Its six interlinked essays, [...]

The Beiderbecke Affair has posted an excerpt of a conversation between The New Republic’s Leon Wieseltier and Jed Perl, held earlier this year at the 92nd St. Y and reprinted in Columbia Magazine. Here is the first part of that excerpt: Leon Wieseltier: I think that if a critic discovers a book or a show [...]

(The audience five minutes before the panel began.) On Saturday afternoon I participated in a panel discussion at the opening of “Uncertain States of America” (see pictures two posts below), along with Yean Fee Quay, head of the exhibition department at the Reykjavik Art Museum (a future venue for the show), P.S. 1’s Bob Nickas, [...]