By Bergotte The series has moved, so far, through poets who held clear philosophical positions: Homer’s unflinching mortality, Ovid’s philosophy of change, Dante’s architecture of love. William Shakespeare holds no clear philosophical position. He holds all of them. He is the writer who most completely refused the consolation of a settled view, who gave theContinue reading “The Human Condition According to Shakespeare”
Category Archives: Blog
The Secret History
Essay · Literature & Ideas Beauty Will Save Us, or It Will Destroy Us First Donna Tartt published The Secret History in 1991, at twenty-eight, and it arrived as something the literary culture had not quite seen before: a novel that was simultaneously a page-turner and a meditation on moral philosophy, that took seriously bothContinue reading “The Secret History”
The Beatles
Essay · Music & Ideas Four Men and the Thing They Were Saying The Beatles did not set out to have a message. They set out to make girls scream, to get out of Liverpool, to be bigger than Elvis, and they achieved all three with a speed and a completeness that left them, byContinue reading “The Beatles”
Nobody Home: Cindy Sherman and the Self That Isn’t There
She has been a clown, a centrefold, a society matron, a fairy-tale victim, a film noir ingénue, a Renaissance duchess, a party guest, a disaster. She has never, in fifty years of making photographs, been herself. This is not evasion. It is the most radical position in contemporary art. By Bergotte There is no portraitContinue reading “Nobody Home: Cindy Sherman and the Self That Isn’t There”
Carrie Fisher
Essay · Literature & Lives The Princess Who Wrote Her Way Out Carrie Fisher was a movie star who became a writer, which is the reverse of the usual trajectory and considerably the more interesting one. The writing she produced — the novels, the memoirs, the one-woman shows, the screenplay work, the wit deployed inContinue reading “Carrie Fisher”
Debbie Reynolds
Essay · Film & Lives The Girl Who Outlasted Everything Debbie Reynolds was not the most critically celebrated actress of her generation, nor the most artistically adventurous, nor the one the serious film culture tended to reach for when it needed an example of Hollywood at its best. She was something rarer and in someContinue reading “Debbie Reynolds”
Albert King
Essay · Music & Lives The Velvet Bulldozer Albert King was six feet four inches tall and played a right-handed guitar upside down and left-handed, without a pick, bending strings that were already fighting him — strung the wrong way, the tension reversed, producing a sound so specific and so irreducible that no one whoContinue reading “Albert King”
Design Mood Board
Fashion Mood Board
The Human Condition According to Dante
By Bergotte No work of literature begins more universally than the Divine Comedy. Not with a king or a war or a cosmogony, but with a man — any man, every man — who has lost his way in the middle of his life. Dante Alighieri wrote the greatest poem of the Middle Ages andContinue reading “The Human Condition According to Dante”
My World of Interiors 