Monthly Archives: March 2011

Finding Zabel Yessayan–and losing her

Zabel Yessayan–the mere utterance of the name echoes with what Marc Nichanian describes, in Western Armenian, as հմայք, whose closest English equivalent would be allure. Nichanian’s chapter on Yessayan in his Writers of Disaster makes for a devastating reading–her tumultuous … Continue reading

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A Venice Bookstore

Alex Majolis/Magnum From the current issue of the New York Review of Books

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From my files: Review of “The Swallows of Kabul,” by Yasmina Khadra

The recent success of the film Of Gods and Men, which is set in Algeria in the 1990s when the country was gripped by a civil war between an Islamist insurgency and the government, prompted me to re-read a review-essay … Continue reading

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The “other LA”…

…the one you encounter at every turn of the eyes or the car (mostly the car), the one which confirms all the reservations that you’ve carried with you all these years.  It, too, is the result of geography as are … Continue reading

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In Los Angeles, with geography and its shadows

It’s always like this in LA, at least for those of us coming from the East Coast and arriving in early evening or at night, our attitudes toward LA intact and resistant to even the hint of revision, or modification: … Continue reading

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Untitled

There’s a photograph of the poet Joseph Brodsky, on which I stumbled by pure accident some weeks ago, as I was trying to banish the afternoon blues from my day.  I had just finished Brodsky’s homage to Venice, Watermark, which … Continue reading

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From my Files: Paradjanov’s Home of the Imagination

~~Over the years, I have penned some half a dozen pieces of writing about Sergei Paradjanov, the great Soviet-era film-maker, collage artist, and political trouble-maker and renegade. Below is a review I wrote for artsMedia, a Boston news magazine which … Continue reading

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