Page 14 - Rt Critic News Today

The Rail chats with the NYPL’s connection between people and film.

Karen Valby, a writer living in Austin, Texas, befriended Lydia Abarca—and five of her fellow DTH members (and friends), Gayle McKinney-Griffith, Sheila Rohan, Karlya Shelton-Benjamin, and Marcia Sells—and listened as they recounted their incredible time spent at DTH and beyond. The result is The Swans of Harlem, a group biography that tells the story of these pioneering Black ballerinas and their fifty-year sisterhood.

To a reader who has followed this author as long as I have, the text seems a culmination of his efforts to date, and I was glad the Rail gave me the opportunity to discuss it with him. We exchanged the following emails, lightly edited, while he was on the West Coast for research.

Near the beginning of his defense of Poetry, Shelley defines the poem as an exemplary social site, which should “constitute pleasure in sensation, virtue in sentiment, beauty in art, truth in reasoning, and love in the intercourse of kind.” A successful poem should establish a necessary balance of Truth, Virtue, Beauty, Love, and Pleasure.

Collage informs much of the work of the experimental filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek (1927–1984) whose work is gathered in a galloping and gregarious survey at Magenta Plains.

In The Never End I find a highly intelligent deep dive into the “empty consumerism, income inequality and monopoly capitalism” that followed the empty utopian promise of 1960s America. Readers will find in Reed a lone hero who guides them to reconsider the legacy of Animal Farm and Orwell as its writer.

This month Archipelago Books publishes a collection of stories, For Now, It is Night, from Kashmiri writer Hari Krishna Kaul. Each story in the collection is punctuated with details of Kashmiri Hindu life. The sensations of reading Kaul are akin to those felt when watching the masters of slow-paced cinema, like Bresson or Bela Tarr. As in a Tarr film, the point is not to extrapolate a larger meaning from a roadside encounter or a simple transaction; the point is to immerse oneself in the details...

German artist Albert Oehlen began painting as a teenager and has continued working throughout the decades, moving from figuration to abstraction in a manner that makes the distinction less meaningful than it is for most painters. Oehlen’s interest in artificiality and the formal processes of layering and of experimentation underlie his recent work.

Adam Strauss lives in San Diego, CA. He has a microchap titled Postcard Of/Itself out with Tilted House Press, and a microchap titled Oil Paint Takes Forever To Dry forthcoming with Carrion Bloom Books. As well, poems of his appear in: Apartment, Ballast, Fence, New American Writing, Prelude, and Volt.

The revolutionary events that followed the military revolt of April 25, 1974 in Portugal are rather misunderstood today. However, at the time they aroused strong interest and influenced the political strategies of left forces throughout Europe and even in the United States.