A City
Novelness: A Conversation with Kate Briggs (summer 2023; published by Granta)
NOVELNESS Kate Briggs: Lisa, we first met almost a decade ago, teaching writing together at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. We used to meet first thing at Gare du Nord to get on the 6 a.m.-ish train from Paris to Rotterdam. At that time I was working
Notes, Murmurations: On Notebooks, Coleridge, Kathleen Coburn, Composition across Time (a lecture given in October 2024 at Vancouver Island University)
What I wanted when I began to write is what I still want: a freedom-sensation that could return. I thought poetry could be that thing. With my companions, we called it “that thing”, not daring to define or limit its recognition. It’s less the nominative than the returning part
On Insomnia
Begin with insomnia. On the night of July 7 or rather in the early morning of the 8th, insomnia intrudes thoroughly and suddenly after decades of voluptuous, nourishing sleep with its accompanying dreams. My two great sustaining talents exit, and like a wilful, opaque animal insomnia takes their place. I
A smile, recited
Reading book two of the Life of Rancé in the bath this evening, with quiet joy I recognized a small sentence that Roland Barthes once cited in his essay on Chateaubriand’s last book. Some months previously I had read Barthes’beautiful preface with such attentive enthusiasm that although I
Insta Readings
An Archive, 2019-2024 (thumbnail sketches of books being read, composed on the fly as Instagram captions Sur le style de Flaubert, Marcel Proust. Editions Sillage, Paris 2014 To talk about style, Proust focuses closely on the use of the past perfect tense, and on the way Flaubert uses prepositions and
Agnes Varda / Lisa Robertson Interview January 4, 2012, Paris
Agnes Varda and I met in late afternoon at her studio on the Rue Daguerre, the place she has so thoroughly occupied with her life and her creativity for 61 years. The rooms were small, filled with plants, images, activity, ringing telephones, young assistants, stacks of papers and videos and
dust draft
“this dusty floor the uneasy sea” Virginia Woolf We’re all of us the fallen material of some dream or another. Whose dreams dreamt us? Like the houses built from the fallen materials of old walls crumbled, and the walls built of the fallen material of razed houses or long
"the political"
Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason "... for Benjamin "the political" was always overdetermined and never had an autonomous existence. It was deployed in a network of metaphors and myths, in a plurality of languages which held together its extreme moments of violence and the "complementary world" of
Coming soon
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