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”
Category Archives: Biography
Frank Bowling
Essay · Art & Lives The Painter Who Crossed Every Ocean Frank Bowling arrived in London from British Guiana in 1953 with no art education and a desire to be a poet, and became, across the following seven decades, one of the most significant painters working in the English language — a phrase that wouldContinue reading “Frank Bowling”
Sam Neill, Actor of Watchful Intelligence Who Roamed From Dinosaurs to Deep Drama, Dies at 78
By Bergotte Sam Neill, the New Zealand-born actor whose long, restless career carried him from the art houses of the Australian New Wave to the teeth of a Tyrannosaurus rex in “Jurassic Park,” and who brought a dry, watchful intelligence to nearly every part he played, died on Monday in Sydney, Australia. He was 78.Continue reading “Sam Neill, Actor of Watchful Intelligence Who Roamed From Dinosaurs to Deep Drama, Dies at 78”
Tove Ditlevsen
Essay · Literature & Lives The Copenhagen Trilogy and the Cost of Seeing Clearly Tove Ditlevsen wrote about the interior lives of women — their desires, their loneliness, their addiction, their marriages, their children, their slow suffocation inside the arrangements that society had made for them — with a directness and a formal precision thatContinue reading “Tove Ditlevsen”
Nel Mezzo del Cammin: Dante and the Journey That Is the Argument
He was thirty-five years old, exiled from his city, stripped of everything that had defined him, when he began the most ambitious poem in the Western tradition. He set it in the middle of his own life because the middle of a life is where the crisis comes — when the path forward is noContinue reading “Nel Mezzo del Cammin: Dante and the Journey That Is the Argument”
The Human Condition According to Ovid
By Bergotte If Homer is the poet of what we lose, Ovid is the poet of what we become. Writing at the height of Roman civilisation and dying at its edge — exiled, cold, forgotten on the shore of the Black Sea — Publius Ovidius Naso produced a body of work that is dazzling, troubling,Continue reading “The Human Condition According to Ovid”
Bret Easton Ellis
Essay · Literature & Ideas The Novelist Who Refused to Flinch Bret Easton Ellis published his first novel at twenty-one and his most notorious at twenty-six, and spent the following three decades being misread by people who wanted him to be either a moralist or a monster, when he was in fact something rarer andContinue reading “Bret Easton Ellis”
The Culture Now: Sudan
The world’s largest displacement crisis has scattered Sudanese artists across three continents — and, from Cairo to Nairobi to Aberdeen, they have kept working Sudan rarely leads a news cycle, which is itself part of the story. Since war broke out between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces on 15 AprilContinue reading “The Culture Now: Sudan”
Courtney Love
Essay · Music & Culture The Mess That Was Also the Method Courtney Love arrived in the early 1990s indie scene like something the scene had not known it was missing: a woman who wanted to be enormous, who was not prepared to be grateful for whatever space was made available to her, and whoContinue reading “Courtney Love”
The Culture Now: Palestine
Across Gaza, the West Bank and a scattered diaspora, the past five years have produced an unusually intense body of work — made, in large part, out of catastrophe A note on scope before anything else: “Palestinian culture” today is made across more places than any single capital could hold — Gaza, the West BankContinue reading “The Culture Now: Palestine”
My World of Interiors 