March 10, 2005
Worth reading
- Mark Kingwell, "The city of tomorrow: searching for the future of architeture in Shanghai," from the February 2005 issue of Harper's.
- John Elderfield's review, in the Guardian, of Matisse the Master, the second volume of Hilary Spurling's biography of the artist.
- Adam Zagajewski on Czeslaw Milosz in The New Republic. (Link found via The Page.) Zagajewski also wrote recently about Witold Gombrowicz in the February/March issue of Bookforum. On Milosz:
Yet the key to Milosz's imagination, if such a key exists, is indicated by the locus of his writing: he had an uncanny capacity for placing his writer's desk in the very center of his century's storms. Maybe that is a definition of poetic intelligence in general: not only craft and knowledge of the tradition (though this is a necessary ingredient), or wisdom concerning the human comedy, but also the more or less instinctive ability to detect the peculiar locale where the gods are sitting and throwing dice.
Milosz's trouble, and his luck, had also to do with the fact that his century was not only obsessed by philosophies but also polluted by ideologies, by murderous intellectual passions.