Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Holiday reading on nybooks.com: Poems by Osip Mandelstam, Elise Partridge, and C.K. Williams, plus Christian Caryl on Star Wars, Tim Parks on David Shields’s War is Beautiful, Adam Kirsch on Paul Scheerbart, and Simon Head on Bernie Sanders.

From ‘Voronezh Notebooks’ Osip Mandelstam When the goldfinch, in his airy confection, Suddenly gets angry, begins to quake, His spite sets off his scholar’s robes, Shows to advantage his cute black cap.   And he slanders the hundred bars, Curses the sticks and perches of his prison … (translated from the Russian by Andrew Davis)   ADVERTISEMENT   X, a C.V. Elise Partridge I stand, legs astride, a colossus— or dancer in fifth position, wide port de bras. Polymorph strayed into English, sometimes pronounced like Americans’ z, in French I’m often silent; in Pirahã the   glottal stop; a fricative in Somali …   Dear Reader C.K. Williams Dear reader dearest inscrutable listener inscrutably harking or regrettably more likely not harking except in that chamber in me that posits you with me every moment I’m speaking or trying to speak Dear reader who may or may not be with me I still remember how once you weren’t here at all …   In the Review’s January 14 issue: Gordon Wood on Hamilton and history, Sarah Helm on ISIS in Gaza, Joan Acocella on Brodsky/Baryshnikov, Jed Perl on Picasso and Rodin,Avishai Margalit on Ben-Gurion, two uncollected poems by T.S. Eliot, and much more   ADVERTISEMENT   My Star Wars Christian Caryl I can still remember how the initial moments of Star Wars bowled us over: the slow, vanishing-point text crawl that gave way to the descent, from the top of the frame, of the impossibly enormous imperial star cruiser. The opening amounted to a sort of visual manifesto.   Pretty Violence Tim Parks It’s hard to deny, as you leaf through the photos in David Shields’s War is Beautiful, that they do indeed very deliberately aestheticize their subjects, and hence anaesthetize the viewer.   The Strange Paradise of Paul Scheerbart Adam Kirsch Scheerbart often reads like an apocalyptic mystic out of the Middle Ages who was somehow transported to the age of railroads and telegraphs.   The Governance of China An International Conference Hong Kong, January 15–16, 2016 With John Burns, Grete Brochmann, Jerome Cohen, Richard Hu, Fu Hualing, He Weifang, Hu Yong, Liu Yu, Li Zhaojie, Joseph Chan, Perry Link, Pan Wei, Sonny Lo, Andrew Nathan, Orville Schell, Robert Silvers, Wang Hui, Wang Zhenmin, Yuen-Ying Chan, Xiao Geng, Pun Ngai, and Willy Wo-lap Lam   Bernie Sanders: The Quiet Revolt Simon Head Sanders is unusual because he brings together three kinds of radicalism, each with very different roots.