Brilliant interview with Rachel Kushner in Guernica. Discussed: register, range, realism, Roberto Bolaño, violent histories, Proust, Robert Altman, sentences.
There is no single formula. An invisible integument that gives the sentence wholeness and musicality, sometimes. But other times, the formula is almost purely one of context. And yet other times, of sheer precision of meaning.
Kevin Breathnach is the literary editor of Totally Dublin. His criticism also features in The Irish Times, The Stinging Fly, The Quarterly Conversation and 3:AM Magazine. He is also a fine essayist; we’d especially recommend This is Not the Deal (on the fine print), Stalker/Zona, and Pont Blank (on modernist photographic tradition), all in The New Inquiry. For gorse, Kevin turns his gaze to the artist portraits of Henri Cartier-Bresson.
By Rimbaud.
I
You’re not serious, when you’re seventeen.
– One fine evening, tired of beers and lemonade,
The noisy cafés with their dazzling gleam!
– You walk the lime-trees’ green on the Parade.
The lime-trees smell so fine on fine June evenings!
The air’s so sweet sometimes you close your eyes:
The wind is full of sounds – the town’s nearby –
Blows the smell of beer, and the scent of vines…
The New Inquiry on Futurist dining.
In a room whose walls are lined with aluminum, nimble waiters flit past diners, spritzing the air with perfume. A Wagner opera blares from a phonograph somewhere hidden. On each table sit four plates, each containing a small morsel. A quarter of a fennel bulb occupies the first, a single olive the second, the third holds a minute pile of candied fruit, and the fourth, a “tactile device” of red damask, velvet, and sandpaper, which the diners fondle as they eat.
