I thought about the small group of friends and mentors who have helped me to explore the darker corners of the soul through poetry, which is one of the functions of the lyric. Or, to put it another way, I thought about how friendship has helped me speak to both the pleasures and pains that constitute a life…

Read Henri Cole’s Paris Diary, Part VI: http://nyr.kr/XJQvll

(Source: newyorker.com)

Hendrik Hertzberg bids adieu to the International Herald Tribune: http://nyr.kr/XLWxkU

“I decided that 340 euros was too much to pay for a taxidermied bird…”

Henri Cole’s Paris diary, part V: http://nyr.kr/YpraMd

(Source: newyorker.com)

Paris, the “capital of the nineteenth century,” as Walter Benjamin called it, was meant to be painted. Its streetscapes, with their exquisite filigree and ornamental splendor, seem to be art itself, an ethereal creation that’s as wondrous and enduring as nature. The city’s lines and details seem to have been conceived as the very brushstrokes in which they’re captured. The great paintings of Paris keep its industrial vigor on the margins, whereas New York, the capital of the twentieth century, wears its working energy on the outside…

Yet, even if the walls of the Met’s Bellows exhibit weren’t festooned with quotations from the artist attesting to his ambition to fill his canvasses with the raw energies of life and finding them exemplified on the streets of New York, the paintings themselves provide ample proof that the city offered him a unique subject—one with which he wrangled mightily…

Continue reading Richard Brody on George Bellows’s paintings of New York, on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through February 18th: http://nyr.kr/WKIGOn

But even if no one is ever convicted of pulling the trigger that day in Paris, the murders are an important moment in Kurdish-Turkish relations, carrying the issue across oceans, and clarifying a few key components along the way.

Jenna Krajeski on the murder of three Kurdish women in women in Paris: http://nyr.kr/YqxucE

Photograph: Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty

(Source: newyorker.com)

(Source: newyorker.com)

Pondering the flowers this week—with their complex shadings of blue—in all the flower shops of Paris, I have been reminded of how short life is but also of how tough and durable we are as humans…

Henri Cole’s Paris Diary, Part III: http://nyr.kr/SaHHnp

From The Clippings File: Richard Brody discusses Godard’s film “Breathless,” and Jean Seberg: http://nyr.kr/QF2zWP

(Source: newyorker.com)

 No one seems ready to accept that the Parisian bookseller who, for thirty years, provided English speaking readers with the newest literary books, and the most exciting readings by authors— Allen Ginsberg, Raymond Carver, Susan Sontag, and Marilynne Robinson, to name a few (Michael Ondaatje, who will read from his latest book “The Cat’s Table” at end of this week, will be the last in this illustrious company)—will simply retire. No one, that is, but Hellier herself.

 The Village Voice Bookshop, on the Rue Princesse in Paris, announced that it will go out of business on July 31st. Livia Manera attends the farewell party: http://nyr.kr/KDZcGK

In the fifties, the Swedish photographer Christer Strömholm moved to Place Blanche, Paris, and began documenting the lives of his friends—the transsexual prostitutes of the neighborhood’s red-light district. From street walks at night to everyday life in hotel rooms, Strömholm followed their struggles and their triumphs. “These are images of people whose lives I shared and whom I think I understood. These are images of women—biologically born as men—that we call ‘transsexuals,’ ” Strömholm wrote in his book of the series, published in 1983. His photographs, he wrote, “are about insecurity. A portrayal of those living a different life in the big city of Paris, of people who endured the roughness of the streets.” Click-through for a selection of images from “Les Amies de Place Blanche.” The series is on exhibit at I.C.P. through September 2nd: http://nyr.kr/McXwJH