The Brooklyn Rail

YUJI AGEMATSU

Manhattan is as much a city borough as it is a vast administrative machine; its centrality is perhaps the reason why it’s always secreted such unique languages along the edges of its daily operations.

Saul Leiter: Paintings

Although he is best known as a photographer, Saul Leiter is also a diligent painter. Luckily, his paintings, which are rarely exhibited, are now seeing the light of day at the Knoedler Project Space in a show entitled Saul Leiter, Paintings, curated by Carrie Springer and Marella Consolini.

Max Pitegoff and Travess Smalley: Abstract Abstract

With a connoisseurship for their own strange idea of the totem, and with a sometimes magical sense of kind, the recent collaborations between Travess Smalley and Max Pitegoff have hatched the digital egg of the Computer Age into wonderfully varied species of computer-kitsch-abstractions.

Rudy Burckhardt: New York, N. Why? 1937–1940

In 1934 two young men, one Swiss, the other born in Shanghai then raised in Vienna and schooled in America, meet in Basel, Switzerland. Their business: Edwin Denby, a dance critic and poet, needs a photographer for a passport picture.

Poetry Roundup

The Landscapist: Selected Poems; Roberto Bolaño, The Romantic Dogs; Thomas Lux, God Particles; Connie Voisine, Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream; Bob Holman, BOX.

FICTION: A Liberating Trap

Like any interesting enterprise, Robert Kelly’s The Book from the Sky, a pataphysical novel with the ostensible feel of a made-for-TV sci-fi movie, is iffy. “I’m on my way back,” the preface begins; “I was one of the first they took away. It wasn’t from New Mexico or any desert though I was there later. All of them, your Roswell and your lake of Hali and your Gobi, don’t worry.”

DOUGLAS DUNN: Sky Eye and Cleave at Danspace, St. Mark's Church

Enthusiasm, in its Greek root, refers to an inspiration from deep in the bowels, animating the body with an energy that is as biological as it is spiritual. Douglas Dunn is a wry enthusiast: he choreographs with the vital genius that devotes itself to a love for life being life.

Rain Train Transcript Cube

Throughout The School of Hard Knocks/Root Culture’s Not About Romanian Cinema: Poonarc (an acronym for: “Page out of order not about Romanian cinema”) at Danspace Project in June, I made out the sounds of a train (which actually were, I would find, the sounds of writing on a blackboard), and rain.

In Conversation

Simon Pettet

On a blustery winter’s night in the middle of January the likes of which can make you wonder, given the shocking stillness of all else, whether or not the wind is all there is that’s in motion, I staggered out of my place on Meserole Street, and took the L train in from Brooklyn into Manhattan to see a poet whose work I had recently been reading with considerable admiration.