— Halldór Laxness, World Light (trans. Magnus Magnusson).“You can take everything from me except the freedom to look up at the sky occasionally.”
Category: Art
Thoreau: “A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature”
“A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.”
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett’s first major biographer, dies aged 84
Sad to hear that Deirdre Bair, who wrote the first major biography of Samuel Beckett, has died at the age of 84. Her work continues to exert an influence on contemporary Beckett scholarship, to say nothing of its inspiration to modern practitioners and performers of his writing. She also wrote a biographies of Simone de Beauvoir, Anaïs Nin, Carl Jung, Saul Steinberg and Al Capone. Most recently, she was the author of Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir and Me – a Memoir. She will be sorely missed.
Neil Genzlinger has written an obituary for Bair in The New York Times.
Teju Cole on his new book of photographs, Fernweh
“I translate it in my head as ‘far away from here’, the longing to be elsewhere.”
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In a recent interview with Granta, Teju Cole discusses his new book of photographs, Fernweh (literally, ‘far-woe’). Source: Granta Magazine.
“Questions that demand answers”: Rebecca Solnit on Dorothea Lange
“In our current era of uprooting, thanks to economic policies that have created mass homelessness again in California and crushing debt across the nation, Lange’s images seem immediate, urgent, thorny again, questions that demand answers.”
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Rebecca Solnit discusses a 1956 portrait by Dorothea Lange for an upcoming exhibition of her work at the The Museum of Modern Art. Source: The Paris Review.
