Alberto Burri, Sacco P5, 1953
1. The Lonely Death of George Bell is devastating and illuminating. Suppose you die in New York and have no one? What happens? How does the city handle it, what mechanisms are place? This article is far beyond mechanisms, full of people doing their jobs but also choosing to care. It is a heartbreaking and human piece:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/nyregion/dying-alone-in-new-york-city.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=1
2. Ansel Elkins wrote a beautiful tribute/testimonial/introduction/history of Frank Stanford in last month's Oxford American. If you read this blog, you have heard of Stanford before and, eventually, I am going to get tired of reading everyone else's words on this subject and take it on myself. However, Stanford is the type of poet, at least for me, who follows me around and informs the story of my own life. He cuts a bit close. That story is not over and I would be hard pressed to write on Stanford until his relentless hold on me takes a break:
http://www.oxfordamerican.org/magazine/item/675-last-panther-of-the-ozarks
3. Great stuff from Carolina Miranda's on the ongoing impact of the disappeared "43," students lost to the horrible cartel drug war in Mexico:
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/miranda/la-et-cam-missing-43-art-of-the-ayotzinapa-protests-in-mexico-20151010-column.html
4. Alberto Burri is not nearly as obscure as he was 10 years ago, as evidenced by the Guggenheim's new retrospective of the Italian artist's work. It is long overdue, though smaller presentations of Burri's work have been arranged in bursts in recent years, the most significant of which was at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Roberta Smith has a nice introduction to Burri's work:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/09/arts/design/alberto-burri-a-man-of-steel-and-burlap.html?mabReward=CTM&moduleDetail=recommendations-0&action=click&contentCollection=Media®ion=Footer&module=WhatsNext&version=WhatsNext&contentID=WhatsNext&src=recg&pgtype=article
5. On September 14th, President Obama sat down with Marilyn Robinson to have a conversation that has received quite a bit of circulation. It seems only fitting that Robinson would be a favorite of Obama, as her books are full of men like Obama, earnest men of faith often pitched in battles of understanding against darker forces that elude their grasp. To hear Obama wrestle with the U.S. addiction to guns, in many ways, is like listening to a Robinson character lean into a problem that they cannot solve, only to find the real battle is with despair. I've long admired Robinson and her essays. Here, she offers a interesting reappraisal of Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/feb/05/edgar-allan-poe/
6. If you've read the essays of Guy Davenport, you know that the one thing that Edgar Allan Poe had in common with Thomas Jefferson is that they were both perhaps the greatest readers of Alexander Von Humboldt of their age. Humboldt was the most important naturalist of the 18th and early 19th century and his writings and observations still effect us deeply today. In terms of books covering he who newspapers reporting his death called "the most remarkable man ever born," there are two new ones, both of which seem of immense value. Nathaniel Rich has a great introduction to Humboldt here:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/oct/22/very-great-alexander-von-humboldt/
Video of the Week:
7. I am sure that the book will continue to appear on this blog, but, truth be told, I am a bit obsessed with Clive James' Cultural Amnesia. It is a long, sprawling, and insightful book, organized simply by the names of the subjects of its dozens of essays. I am getting to know James' work, and his criticism seems to be marked by a commitment to politics. It is very important for James to know that Jean Cocteau, for instance, had maybe more cocktails with Nazis than he let on or that Jorges Luis Borges' silence about the disappeared under the Argentinian junta went on too long and to devastating effect. It is a fascinating, outraged, and, at times, an esoteric volume.
I can probably be forgiven that I did not know that Clive James became famous first as a television critic and personality before he gained the distinction as one of the world's finest essays. Here is a link to a television program he hosted in 1987:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1MWwlTXqJQ
Poem for the Week:
8. As mentioned in the article above, Frank Stanford's Memory is Like a Shotgun Kicking You in the Heart:
http://thinkofmeasaplace.tumblr.com/post/42937483196/memory-is-like-a-shotgun-kicking-you-near-the
One Click Deeper:
9. In 1968, the town of Gibellina, Sicily was destroyed by an earthquakes. Its residents relocated, and artist Alberto Burri took on the old town as the subject of one of the largest land art pieces on the earth. The piece, which involves covering the old contours and building of the town with blocks of concrete is completed this year, just in time for the Guggenheim retrospective:
http://theartnewspaper.com/news/160341/