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View the complete exhibition on the gallery website here

Jonathan Steinberg, Bismarck: A Life

            In “Bismarck: A Life,” Jonathan Steinberg has produced a masterful biography of a mercurial figure, Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck, almost certainly the most important diplomatic figure of the second half of the 19^th century.  Steinberg shows how Bismarck went from a “shallow country squire” (p.2) to the man who, between 1862 and 1890, unified the disparate German kingdoms, duchies and fiefdoms into the most powerful country on the European continent.  In stitching together modern Germany, Bismarck put the pieces in place for the new powerhouse to lead Europe into two murderous 20^th century wars, then transform itself late in the century into what Timothy Garton Ash recently termed “about as solid a liberal bourgeois democracy as you can find on earth. . . civilized, free, prosperous, law abiding, moderate and cautious” (“The New German Question,” New York Review of Books…

I am reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and I came across this:

Quite a bit of reading went on at the International Sanatorium Berghof, both in the common lounging areas and on private balconies – this was particularly true of newcomers and short-termers, since residents of many months or even years had long since learned how to ravage time without diverting or employing their minds, had become virtuosi at putting time behind them, and declared openly that only clumsy bunglers in the art needed a book to hang on to. At most they might leave a book lying on their lap or within reach on a table – that sufficed for them to find their reading needs taken care of. The sanatorium library was a polyglot affair with many illustrated works – an expanded version of the sort of thing that serves to entertain patients in a dentist’s…

This tribute was originally given at Case Western Reserve University on Friday, August 30th, several hours after learning that Seamus Heaney had passed that morning. 

Poets have a particular way of greeting one another, and it seems to always involve the same question. You’ll hear it at every AWP conference, every poetry reading, and every shady bar where poets have a tendency to gather.

Who do you read?

It’s a variation of the question we’ve been asked to consider today, and that variation makes for a ridiculous question. First of all, the tense of that question is strange – Who DO you read –  and second it ignores the fact that any poet or devoted reader of poetry is at all times reading everything that we can get our hands on.

Or at least we should be.

But no matter who asks the question, I always start with Seamus Heaney…

Berlin archives everything

I travelled from the German Literary Archive in Marbach to the archives of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin two weeks ago, making it an August buried in carbon copies, contracts with amendments scrawled on them, occasionally angry letters, random bills and ominous pronouncements from the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit. Archival work is not what I feel trained to do; I started my life in books as a close reader of texts, and that’s still where I feel my skills lie. For Sebald’s Bachelors, I moved beyond text to theory, but for this next project, I am moving beyond text to paratexts and into the dark terrain of biography: trawling through reams of correspondence to try and discover the origins and careers of individual texts.
Every author’s archive is different; Sebald’s is notoriously neatly curated, others are completely exhaustive, others thin and reticent, others random, with…