Published by schoenbooks March 31st, 2008
in Spotlight and Celansalon.
As promised, Rod Mengham and Seth Parker will headline the second seasonal Celansalon at Schoen Books, this MONDAY April 7 @ 7:30, with browsing beforehand.
Rod Mengham lives and works in Cambridge. He has written books on Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, Henry Green, and on language and cultural history; he has also edited books on violence and the artistic imagination and on modernist and contemporary fiction. He is the editor of the nonpareil Equipage series of poetry chapbooks, co-editor of (and translator of Andrzej Sosnowski–cf. Jubilat 4–for) Altered State, the anthology of contemporary Polish poetry, and, with John Kinsella, co-editor of Vanishing Points: New Modernist Poems (Salt, 2004), an expansive English language landscape. Unsung: New and Selected Poems (available at the reading via Amherst Books) is just out from Salt (cf. Jacket 12).
Seth Parker lives Invisible Ear [<–invisiblink] and rides to work in Model Homes on his glitterpony, Skein. He has written books about Damon Che Octopus but not nostrums.
Published by The Assistant December 12th, 2007
in Spotlight and Walser.
as much as I do?” This unlikely question, an allusion to Walser’s apocryphally asking Lenin whether he, too, liked pear bread, is likely to be the first thing I ask anyone when I’m travelling abroad. Their encounter allegedly took place in the legendary Spiegelgasse (”Mirror Alley”: so narrow that you can see the reflection of the buildings opposite in the shop windows.)
Published by schoenbooks October 19th, 2007
in Spotlight.
The winner of our contest, Dr. Suzanne Klingenstein of Boston writes:
1. The name of the book that first translated tohuvabohu with 2 Ws:
Buber/Rosenzweig, Das Buch im Anfang.
2. W words: “Wirrnis und Wüste”
3. The poem Alter may be alluding to: Wallace Stevens, “The Planet on the Table”
The decisive hint where to look for the translation was that you HAVE a first edition of it. Since I bought a copy from Ken in February 2006, it could only be Buber/Rosenzweig. I sure hope I’m not wrong.
She wasn’t.
And, as promised, she won a first edition of the book in question, Das Buch im Anfang (Schocken, 1925), translated by Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig. In fact, the winning words, “Wirrnis und Wüste” appear only in the first edition. After Rosenzweig’s death in 1929, Buber changed “Wirrnis und Wüste” to “Irrsal und Wirrsal.”
The first book I read by Cynthia Ozick was The Messiah of Stockholm, in which she channels Bruno Schulz, whose letters to Yiddish poet-philosopher Debora Vogel which became Cinammon Shops (which became Street of Crocodiles in English) are as lost as Continue reading ‘{Interlude: Rabid Reading}’
Although not as bus-sized as those of another author she admires, Ozick’s own collections of essays are as authoritative as anyone’s: Art & Ardor (1983), Metaphor & Memory (1989), Fame & Folly (1996), Quarrel & Quandary (2000),
and, breaking the mold, The Din in the Head (2006), in which the tête-bêche title-piece Continue reading ‘CONTEST Comment 2: Ozick’s omnibuses’
