Joan Didion : The Center Will Not Hold

Julian Wasser; Joan Didion, 1968

The long-awaited documentary about her life makes clear: She has escaped the demands so often placed on other authors.

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means,” Joan Didion confessed in 1976. “What I want and what I fear.” The writer was in one way taking preemptive credit — or, depending on your point of view, accepting the preemptive blame—for the explosion of personal essay-writing that, fueled by the internet and its egotism, would later become known as the first-person industrial complex. Didion, with her faith in the moral worth of introspection—her conviction that understanding oneself operates on a continuum with the understanding of everything else—helped to inspire a generation of writers to remain, via acts of performative journaling, on nodding terms with the people they used to be. Read more..

When Alberto Giacometti met Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett and Alberto Giacometti in 1961

Judith Wilkinson has written an interesting account of Samuel Beckett‘s friendship with the Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti. In a recent piece published on the Tate website, she describes how they came to know one another:

“At the time of Giacometti and Beckett’s first meeting, Beckett was living at a modest artists’ hotel in Paris called Hôtel Libéria. Located down a narrow alleyway, Giacometti’s studio (and home) was a mere twenty-minute walk from Beckett’s accommodation. The two would meet late at night, when they had finished work, in one of the Parisian cafés, such as Café Flore, Le Dôme or La Coupole, to drink and socialise. The cafés were the central hub of French cultural and intellectual life during the period, and other notable artists and thinkers, such as philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Genet, as well as painters Jean-Paul Riopelle, Joan Mitchell and Bram van Velde also visited these establishments.

The pair would often leave the cafés in the early hours of the morning to embark on long walks around the city together. During their nocturnal rambles, they frequently discussed each other’s work, although Giacometti is believed to have dominated these conversations with his anxieties concerning his artworks. Beckett and Giacometti’s nights routinely concluded with a visit to a brothel – the favourite being the legendary Sphinx located behind Montparnasse train station.” 

Read the full article here. 

Sam Hunt at 70: Lines for another year

Sam Hunt is larger than life and lately, at the ripe old age of 70, he’s become increasingly preoccupied with death – namely his own.

Arguably New Zealand’s greatest living poet (for now at least, mortality being what it is), Hunt is the stuff of clichés; it’s impossible not to reach for expressions like “national treasure” or “cultural icon” when trying to describe him, because that’s just what he is.

Hunt was born in Castor Bay, on Auckland’s North Shore in 1946 – 13 years ahead of the harbour bridge – and it was clear from an early age that he would be a poet; he wrote his first precocious poem at the age of seven. Since then, he has written hundreds of poems, possibly thousands, but who’s counting? Certainly not Hunt. Read more...

The First Known Printed Bookplate

Unknown artist, bookplate for Hilprand Brandenburg of Biberach, woodcut, black printing ink, and hand colouring on paper (Germany, 1480). Bookplate is in Jacobus de Voragine’s Sermones quadragesimales (Bopfingen, Württemberg, 1408), on view in The Art of Ownership at the Rosenbach Museum and Library. 

The first known bibliophile to adorn his collection with the personal touch of a bookplate is Hilprand Brandenburg of Biberach. The 1480 woodcut print, on view in The Art of Ownership: Bookplates and Book Collectors from 1480 to the Present at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, depicts an angel holding a shield emblazoned with an ox. Details of the seraphic wings are hand-colored in red and green, with the angel’s cloak, flowing as if in flight, given a rosy hue. The Rosenbach states that this is the “oldest known printed bookplate in the western world.” Read more...

Hera Lindsay Bird: I prefer poetry that allows room for ugliness and error

Hera Lindsay Bird has been the fastest selling, and the most popular book of poetry VUP, has ever published.

It’s a midwinter Monday night and Hera Lindsay Bird – New Zealand’s most exciting young poet – is tucked up in bed in pyjamas and a robe her boyfriend calls “too Laura Ashley for human consumption”.

Her first book of poetry – a provocative, raunchy bestseller – was published in July by Victoria University Press and a reprint has already been ordered.

The self-titled book has catapulted the 28-year-old from a respected but anonymous graduate writer to semi-cult status, and she is well aware that her life and work are now inextricably bound together. She’s also pretty OK with that. Read more...

Purchase Hera's book here.