Life keeps hurtling forward, bursting forth. It’s spring in California, the jasmine’s come in and the streaky roses. It’s been raining hard all morning; just now it stopped abruptly. Lyn writes in My Life, “she observed that detail minutely, as if it were botanical. As if words could unite an ardent intellect with the external material world.” This is Lyn, vitally observing, drawing it all into relation, the mind and the world, botanical, passionate. Making words hold life, making words as life. “Such that art is inseparable from the search for reality,” she writes.
Brodsky, reconstituted
There is a peculiar phenomenon at work in contemporary Moscow, notes Mikhail Iampolski in his 2018 book Park of Culture: Culture and Violence in Today's Moscow: a discomfiting correlation — or perhaps more precisely, a consent, a complicity — between the rise of arts and style culture in Moscow (which, when not funded directly by the Moscow Department of Culture, is often in some way enabled by it) and a parallel rise both in