Blog / The Next Best Thing

Even a Number

July 6, 2019 - By Erri De Luca

Danilo De Marco is a photographer who still works with film, in black and white, and then goes into the darkroom to develop and print, under the glow of a red light bulb. He says digitalization erases the texture of his images.

One of his recent exhibitions in Udine displayed a collection of the oversized-format faces of aging partisans. Those that reached the age to become grandparents carry history carved into the map of their expressions.

Danilo has me read a letter he got in response to this exhibition, written by a young woman, thirty years old. Her grandfather had been a partisan, but she didn’t manage in time to get the stories directly from him.

Amid the oversized faces in the exhibition hall, she writes, she felt she was among family—a niece who...

The No Nobel

October 7, 2018 - By Michael Thurston

For many of us with literary interests, the end of October’s first week coincides not only with the beginning of baseball playoffs but also with the announcement of the Nobel Prize for Literature. The weeks preceding the announcement see statements of preference and prediction, and the oddsmakers at Ladbroke’s even handicap the prize. Cognoscenti gather (really) to compare notes: Atwood’s up over last year, Murakami’s looking good, and Adonis’s stock seems to have dropped for some reason. Once the winner has been named, the fun takes a different form, with arguments over the writer’s quality (“Jelinek? Really?”) or qualification (“Dylan?!”), or the pleasure of discovering the work of someone you’d not heard of (Mo Yan,...

Pinsky at the Poetry Center

April 3, 2018 - By Michael Thurston

Some unfortunates among you might know Robert Pinsky from one of two contexts. Perhaps you caught the Simpsons episode in which Lisa masquerades as a precocious college student, an episode in which Robert Pinsky, as “Robert Pinsky,” makes a memorable appearance. Where Jasper Johns, in his guest shot on the show, gets only the word “Yoink!” and where Thomas Pynchon gets only a brief self-referential line, Pinsky gets an enthusiastic introduction as “the Tony Danza of the AB stanza,” gets to read part of “Impossible to Tell,” gets cheered on by shirtless students with Basho’s name spelled out on their chests, and gets to ask, as his final line, whether Lisa has put in for the pizza.

More likely, because this is a...

Listening to Mary

March 13, 2018 - By Jim Hicks

Early on, in the 1985 film that arguably inaugurated Jean-Luc Godard's late-period work, we watch, for much longer than we expect to, a single person on a crowded sidewalk. Our view, or that of the camera, is from a nearby rooftop—surveillance in an etymological sense. At a certain point as I recall, the voiceover comments: “If you look at anyone closely enough, or long enough, you'll be more or less certain that the person under observation is insane.” (When I first saw this film, I myself was living in Paris, and remember thinking, “Anyone? Or do they have to be French?”) In a documentary film by Wim Wenders a few years earlier—a sequence of monologues by various famous directors at...

The Next Best Thing: Christine Vachon

October 20, 2017 - By Alexandra Keller

Editor’s Note: This post inaugurates a new MR blog series, where we share online introductions given at guest appearances by some of our favorite speakers, writers, artists, and thinkers. Intros are, by definition, ephemeral, but that doesn’t mean they always should be. You’ve all heard great ones, the sort that don’t try to one-up the main event, yet somehow quickly manage to inform, evoke, and celebrate the person you’ve come to hear. With “The Next Best Thing,” of course, you’ll just be reading; you’ll have to wait for another occasion for actual star-gazing. But at least you’ll know who to come out and see, the next time they’re in town.

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