What a busy year it has been! Still, I've completed two tasks I had set myself and am now at work on two more.

First, I completed an essay on Rilke's Elegies and Sonnets, to appear in a volume on Literature and Culture in 1922, edited by Jean-Michel Rabatë. It's not always easy to write on a topic that has been written on so much--including by me! I did have some exciting new ideas, however, notably about Rilke's relation to Goethe's poetry and how it informs the Duino Elegies.

Second, I finished the essay on Grünbein and classical antiquity. This essay is in German...

The documentary on Sebald that I mentioned in a previous entry, Grant Gee's "Patience," is discussed in a New York Times article on the New York Film festival. A reflection on Sebald's book Die Ringe des Saturn, the film is "both an essay in interpretation and an attempt to replicate the writer’s distinctive, elusive sensibility in a visual medium," the Times notes. It aims to be "tries to be both descriptive and immersive, explaining its subject even as it reproduces aspects of his style." I can't wait to see this film. For the complete NYT article, see...