Patti Smith Photography Exhibition

Exhibition at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford from 21 Oct. 19 Feb.

Photographs by Patti Smith. Left: Roberto Bolaño’s chair. Right: Arthur Rimbaud’s utensils.

Photographs by Patti Smith. Left: Virginia Woolf’s bed. Right: Susan Sontag’s grave in Montparnasse Cemetery.

A. O. Scott of the New York Times interviews Patti Smith about her music, her award-winning memoir, Just Kids, and a forthcoming photography exhibition. It's well worth a look: 'Smith said she often organizes her tours around excursions in search of that kind of memorial beauty, seeking out places associated with the writers and artists she admires and with whom she feels a kinship that transcends mortality. The photographs in the Hartford show — black-and-white silver gelatin prints made from Polaroid negatives, small and square and in soft focus — are culled from a collection that documents hundreds of encounters with worldly effects transformed into sacred relics. A fork and a spoon that belonged to Arthur Rimbaud, the French symbolist poet who has been one of Smith’s touchstones forever. Mapplethorpe’s bedroom slippers and the tambourine he made for Smith. A chair that belonged to the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño. William S. Burroughs’s bandanna. A replica of a life mask cast from the features of William Blake.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Patti Smith on Virginia Woolf

Arthur Rimbaud, The Poems

Matthew Bell on the 'libertine linguist'

Matthew Bell of The Independent discusses Arthur Rimbaud, and a new collection of his poetry: 'He was the archetypal Romantic figure, a drunken libertine who inspired artists from Picasso to Bob Dylan. But Arthur Rimbaud was more than a poetic pin-up. A new anthology of the French 19th-century poet's work will include five previously unseen verses written in Latin, which show him to have been a gifted classicist.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Lydia Davis reviews Rimbaud's Illuminations
• Review: Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations

Review: Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations

John Ashbury's new translation of Rimbaud's poetry

In The Independent, Michael Glover reviews John Ashbery's new translation of Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations: 'Thief, teenage master-poet, gun-runner in Africa, attempted murderer: the short life and sensational achievements of Arthur Rimbaud fascinate us. When I finished re-reading Carcanet's parallel-text edition of his cycle of visionary poems in prose, in its new translation by John Ashbery, my head was full of words by those whom Rimbaud so palpably influenced, from Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row" to John Lennon's "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and "I Am the Walrus". It struck me that there was no real distance between Dylan, Lennon and Rimbaud.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Lydia Davis reviews Rimbaud's Illuminations

Lydia Davis reviews Rimbaud's Illuminations

New translation from John Ashbery

Writer and translator Lydia Davis reviews John Ashbery's new translation of Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations: [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Marcel Proust: Which Translation?
• Lydia Davis on very short stories

Susan Sontag on Simone Weil

An excerpt from Against Interpretation

Mark Thwaite at ReadySteadyBook quotes Susan Sontag on Simone Weil:

The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilization are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois; they are writers who are repetitive, obsessive, and impolite, who impress by force—not simply by their tone of personal authority and by their intellectual ardor, but by the sense of acute personal and intellectual extremity. The bigots, the hysterics, the destroyers of the self—these are the writers who bear witness to the fearful polite time in which we live. It is mostly a matter of tone: it is hardly possible to give credence to ideas uttered in the impersonal tones of sanity. There are certain eras which are too complex, too deafened by contradictory historical and intellectual experiences, to hear the voice of sanity. Sanity becomes compromise, evasion, a lie. Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. The truths we respect are those born of affliction. We measure truth in terms of the cost to the writer in suffering—rather than by the standard of an objective truth to which a writer's words correspond. Each of our truths must have a martyr.

What revolted the mature Goethe in the young Kleist, who submitted his work to the elder statesman of German letters "on the knees of his heart"—the morbid, the hysterical, the sense of the unhealthy, the enormous indulgence in suffering out of which Kliest's plays and tales were mined—is just what we value today. Today Kleist gives pleasure, Goethe is to some a duty. In the same way, such writers as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Genet—and Simone Weil—have their authority with us because of their air of unhealthiness. Their unhealthiness is their soundness, and is what carries conviction. [Read More]

Susan Sontag, 'Simone Weil'
in Against Interpretation and Other Essays