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        Pete Atkin >> Words >> Clive James in "The Atlantic" magazine
        
(Message started by: Kevin Cryan on Today at 17:50)

Title: Clive James in "The Atlantic" magazine
Post by Kevin Cryan on Today at 17:50

The influential American film critic Pauline Kael (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauline_Kael) died in September 2001. A selection of her essays on cinema, The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Age-Movies-Selected-Writings-Pauline/dp/1598531093), edited by Sanford Schwartz, was published in America late last year.

In his review of this collection for last month's issue of ^theAtlantic (http://www.theatlantic.com/), Clive James reminds those of us who started our adoring how Kael wrote about film and films, and then became disenchanted because we found some of her judgments downright eccentric, that “thinking the world of her was the proper way to think, and that one’s original judgment of her prose was accurate”:

Quote:

..her film criticism, though not stylish in the usual sense, was a triumph of a thoughtful manner. What a woman, although possibly in some respects a bit batty.

Read on… (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/09/a-critic-and-a-poet/309070/1/)

Kevin Cryan

Title: Re: Clive James in "The Atlantic" magazine
Post by Kevin Cryan on 15.10.12 at 18:28

Black Inc Publishing (http://www.blackincbooks.com/), which publishes some of Australia's finest writers and poets, including Les Murray, Alice Pung, Simon Leys, Nicolas Rothwell and Amanda Lohrey, has chosen this essay to be included in its anthology Best Australian Essays 2012. (http://bestaustralianwriting.com.au/essays-2012)

Quote:

The Best Australian Essays 2012 presents the country’s most eloquent voices at the peak of their powers.

Kevin Cryan

http://www.penguin.com.au/covers/catalog/9781863955799.jpg

Penguin Books Australia (http://www.penguin.com.au/products/9781863955799/best-australian-essays-2012)

Title: Re: Clive James in "The Atlantic" magazine
Post by Kevin Cryan on 04.01.13 at 11:21

Essay January/February 2013 ATLANTIC MAGAZINE

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Comeback Artist (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/01/the-comeback-artist/309183/)
The Baroque sculptor’s audience has finally come around to his way of seeing the world.
By CLIVE JAMES

In the Borghese Gallery, in Rome, when you first see Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Apollo catch up with Daphne, you would swear that her flesh is turning into a tree, although both she and the tree are made of marble. An interlocking mosaic of carbonate crystals has become the medium for a metamorphosis, a tour de force of drama, like almost everything Bernini did. As a sculptor and setter of scenes, he made Rome the pace-setting city of Europe in the 17th century, the age of the Baroque. Materializing out of the marble, his popes, kings, horses, and women set the style for an era.

Then neoclassicism took over, and his renown was eclipsed for more than 200 years. The Fountain of the Four Rivers, with the most marvelous of all his horses, was still there in the Piazza Navona to delight all foreign visitors, but somehow their delight did not build him a reputation for genius....read on (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/01/the-comeback-artist/309183/)
__________________________
Bernini: His Life and His Rome (http://www.amazon.com/Bernini-His-Life-Rome/dp/0226538524)
By Franco Mormando
Chicago
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Kevin Cryan