Nelson Henricks

“Small Rain”, Gath Greenwell, 306 pages (2024) - In the essay “On Being Ill” (1926), Virginia Woolf wrote about the poverty of language when it comes to sickness and disease. Almost one hundred years later, Greenwell responds with a whole book dedicated to a life-threatening condition that lands his narrator in the hospital. But it’s not just about that. He examines the Covid pandemic and a nation dividing, interpersonal intimacy in coupledom, and the therapeutic power of art—in this case poetry—when confronting lifechanging events. I raced through the first 200 pages and then hit a block and dropped it for a couple months. I’m not sure why. Maybe because I am doing so much reading for my teaching practice. It’s very different from Greenwell’s previous books, but nonetheless worth checking out. Purchased at @theredwheelbarrowbookstore

“Something Close to Music”, John Ashbery, 180 pages (2022) – Again, in the mindset of searching for small, lightweight books to read on the metro. You may recall I spent a few months last year chipping away at the Ashbery poetry anthology “Notes from the Air” (2007). I didn’t know—or had forgotten—that he also did art writing. This book interweaves his poetry and art reviews with music playlists; the latter were compiled by the book’s editor, Jeffrey Lependorf, I think. So there is a nod toward sensory crossover: music and poetry and painting, three sisters who dance with one another, as Mónica de la Torre fantasizes in the volume’s introduction. The reviews are mainly culled from exhibition catalogues, so it’s nice to have them all in one place here. The book also tuned me in to the idea that Ashbery was fundamentally a surrealist, which is an interesting perspective from which to approach his poetry. I didn’t get a chance to listen to the playlists, but the selections are intriguing. Purchased at @davidzwirnerbooks in Paris. #johnashbery

“The Gender of Sound”, Anne Carson, 37 pages (2025) – I bought this without realizing that it was an excerpt from “Glass, Irony, and God” (1992), which I read before I met Carson at a drunken Christmas Eve party organized by my friend Laurel Woodcock. The dinner involved a broken oven, an under-cooked turkey, and several bottles of red wine imbibed on an empty stomach in an apartment strangely devoid of furniture. This was when Carson was a local professor, struggling away in the classics program at a little dive called McGill. I remember we had a slurred conversation about translation. Anyway, this text emerges from her psychoanalytic feminist reading of the voice in Aristophanes, Homer, Aristotle and others. I bought it because it was small and I could read it on the metro in Paris, which I ended up *not* doing because I got too wrapped up in people watching. Shrug! It was good to be reminded of this text as I move into discussing voice with my students next week. Purchased at @shakespeareandcoparis #annecarson #thegenderofsound #glassironyandgod

“O Agente Secreto (The Secret Agent)”, Kleber Mendonça Filho, 161 minutes (2025) — I’m behind on my movie postings but this was good. Pierre & I saw it in a cinema in Paris on Christmas Eve, kind of a spontaneous decision. There are a couple scenes that could be cut—maybe the film could be 15 minutes shorter—and there were a couple of weird edits, but otherwise a captivating film. The narrative has an amazing funnel effect which really draws you in. Don’t worry if you don’t understand anything for the first hour and 15 minutes. It all gels eventually.

“On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry”, William H. Gass, 91 pages (1976) – I found my way to this via Brian Dillon’s “Essayism” (2017). This book isn’t about ‘blue’ in the forensic way that Michel Pastoureau scrutinizes and unfolds a colour. Instead it is concerned with modalities of blueness that haunt language: sexuality (blue movies), swearing (a blue streak), sadness (blue moods), and ultimately, the significance of colour as a visual marker in art. In all of these instances, Gass maps the gap between the real and representation, the work that language does in bridging that chasm, and the tricky work of writers (and artists) in fulfilling our indigo obligations to art. Purchased at @shakespeareandcoparis #williamhgass

The last show I saw in Paris was “Jacques-Louis David” at the Louvre. Ironically, I’ve never been a huge fan of French painters, but I’ve always enjoyed Ingres, Poussin, and David. This is kind of a greatest-hits show, with a lot of strong minor works also holding space. I check provenance a lot. Most of the works came from the collection of the Louvre, but I was heartened to see a painting from le Musée de la civilization in Québec and a drawing from the National Gallery in Ottawa. The curators really cast the net wide. One surprise was learning there are three versions of “The Death of Marat” (1793). The original is in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels, the Louvre has a copy, and I forget which institution has the third one. (If you check the inscription on the wooden box, you can distinguish one version from another.) The Napoleon paintings in which he has his hand tucked in his jacket are the origin of this cultural cliché. Also fascinating is the unfinished “Tennis Court Oath” painting The show runs until January 26, 2026. @museelouvre

“Bubble Gum Stadium”, Jalen Eutsey, 41 pages (2025) — Jalen Eutsey was one of the summer residents at La Cité Internationale des arts in Paris, and it’s hard for me to disassociate that season with these poems. There’s a lot of sports and sun here, but it’s tinged with a certain darkness. He also gave a reading last summer, and I could hear his voice every time I dipped into this. Purchased from the author (and signed too). @jaleneutsey @buttonpoetry

I visited the kooky Musée Marmottan Monet today, and was very taken by the exhibition “The Empire of Sleep” which features—you guessed it—images of sleeping people. I’ve long been fascinated by sleepers, and sleeping is my favorite thing to do. The exhibition breaks down the sleepy thematic into several sections: the ambiguous relationship between sleep and death, eroticism, sleepwalkers and hypnotists, religious symbolism, and dreams. I describe the museum as ‘kooky’, because the collection is fairly broad: from illuminated manuscripts to a vaguely napoleonic permanent collection, to a large collection of paintings by Monet (gifted by his last surviving family member). See the final images for some Giverny-era Monets that collapse into abstraction. I love Monet and I can’t believe I waited so long to visit here. @museemarmottanmonet_

Some fun and sassy work on view at the Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne in the group show “Forever Young” [images 1-7] and in “Voyez-vous ça!”, the solo exhibition by Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux [images 8-16]. There’s a lot to be said for maximalism, humour, sloppiness, camp, and the aesthetics of poverty. It’s a fresh and energetic antidote to conservative, market-driven production elsewhere. (I especially enjoyed the remake of Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” in slide 5 by @jordan_roger_barre ) On view until January 3. @macval.musee

Some images of the “Kandinsky” show at Philharmonie de Paris. Especially interested in the color-music correspondences and references to synaethesia featured in the show, including color organs, Kandinsky’s stage designs, and other references to time-based media. Bonus round: Kandinsky’s eye glasses. Exhibition continues until February 1, 2026. @philharmoniedeparis

“My Meteorite”, Harry Dodge, 321 pages (2020) – My partner Pierre will abandon books he doesn’t like after 100 pages, but I forced myself to read this until the end, and it was only when I reached the last 15 pages that I started to enjoy myself. A couple of people I respect recommended this book, but I did not like it at all. I won’t go into detail about why. Suffice it to say, when you get ‘The Ick’ about something, it’s hard to shake. “My Meteorite” received solid reviews everywhere and was widely appreciated, so clearly the problem is with me. Purchased at @librairiedrawnandquarterly

“Doppelganger”, Naomi Klein, 399 pages (2023) – A few friends recommended this book to me, but I found it hard to get into, probably because of what was going on in my personal life: dismantling my home, packing my belongings into boxes, locking everything up in storage, and traveling overseas for six months. I started reading this back in March, and I didn’t finish it until August. Call me distracted. Part of the problem was that I didn’t find many new ideas in this book. It seemed like I’d heard a lot of this before. That said, Klein’s concept of “diagonalism”—the places where the right and left coincide (the anti-vax movement, for example)—is a novel and useful idea. Klein attempts to go beyond the left/political binary and invent new definitions. This is important work. Chapter 14, on Palestine and Israel, is also essential reading and somewhat prophetic, given that her book was published just before the October 7 attacks. Purchased at @paragraphebookstore