A Website of the Radical Imagination
I. Season Over, Suddenly “Knickerbocker basketball is on the air.” That old phrase kept recurring to me whenever I got home early to watch a playoff game at 4 or 5 PM (as needed) this year, for this Knick team, warts and flaws notwithstanding, was always worth the watch. The reason for the early start … Read more
McKenzie Wark’s latest dip into Debordiana, The Spectacle of Disintegration, focuses on Guy Debord’s comrades as well as on the Situationists’ bibulous prince. He gives Sit’-for-a-season T.J. Clark the most ink, though Clark’s early and late works of Art History are too rich for any bite-sized summary. But other, lesser figures in Debord’s orbit are … Read more
We are entering a time when words must be backed up by actions. 1. In May of 2013, Dominique Venner, the former OAS terrorist turned semi-respectable historian and paladin of the French New Right (although there’s nothing new about it, really, it’s the same old Action française Catholic-monarchist bullshit, the same pompous argot of bourgeois … Read more
I. The Game…What Game? Everyone agrees basketball has changed dramatically over the decades since the NBA began in the 1940’s, but just how do we measure, mark, and comprehend the shock of the new game? Some markers are intrinsic (size, shape of court, basket height, rules to prevent outright domination by the tallest and most … Read more
The H.D. Book by Robert Duncan. Edited and with an Introduction by Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman. University of California Press. 678 pp. $49.95. January 2011. Robert Duncan began writing The H.D. Book in 1959 and finished it except for embellishments in 1961; yet only now, half a century later, has it reached book form. … Read more
What is this phenomenon? This death that comes about? Of course, it is because the artist is not needed, but what has that to do with the artist? Rimbaud, we don’t need you. Hear? Rimbaud! I say we don’t need you! It might have been Lorca who said that literature is dangerous. In Imaginative Qualities … Read more
New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani, known as one of David Foster Wallace’s most prominent detractors while he was alive, had — almost — only nice things to say about his latest posthumously published book, Both Flesh and Not. The book cobbles together essays spanning Wallace’s 20-year career that (mostly) have not appeared previously … Read more