Brendan Bernhard

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Going Postal

Brendan Bernhard
In the fall of 1949, V.S. Naipaul left his native Trinidad to go to Oxford University on a government scholarship. He was 18 years old and wanted to be a writer. His father, Seepersad Naipaul, a journalist at the Trinidad Guardian, also wanted to be a writer -- which is......
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Up Above the World

Brendan Bernhard
AP/Wide World"I LIVE IN BED," PAUL BOWLES TOLD ME, SHUFFLING slowly with the aid of a cane down the dark passage that led to his bedroom. He'd never met me before in his life, had never heard of the magazine I claimed to be writing for, didn't know if I......
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The Nice New Norton Simon

Brendan Bernhard
The Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena could hang its paintings in an army barracks, stick its sculptures out on the firing range, and its collection would still be better than the Getty’s, no matter how long the waiting list is to get up the hill. But these being economic boom......

Perhaps These Are Not Poetic Times At All

Brendan Bernhard
Photo by Virginia Lee HunterPOETS CAN BE DIVIDED INTO TWO CATEGORIES: those who fall about laughing when the subject of book sales is broached; and those who, brows furrowed, earnestly assure you that more and more people are becoming interested in poetry. My own preference, I'll admit, is for poets......
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The Ecstatic Life

Brendan Bernhard
Photo by Valeria GuglielmiLIKE HIS MENTOR JOHN BERGER, GEOFF DYER IS AN ODD HYBRID of novelist, critic, memoirist, historian and prose poet. Of the seven books he has published, three have been novels (The Colour of Memory, The Search, Paris Trance), one has been a history of World War I......

Making Money

Brendan Bernhard
Photo by Brendan BernhardBOGGS WAS RUNNING LATE AGAIN, AND NEW YORKER writer Lawrence Weschler -- bearded, professorial, wearing a jacket and tie over a white shirt patterned with so many tiny squares it could have doubled as graph paper -- was nervously scanning Venice Boulevard for a glimpse of the......

Talking Paris Hotel-Room Blues

Brendan Bernhard
Photo: AP/Wide WorldI AM ALONE IN A HOTEL ROOM IN Paris. Tomorrow I will be somewhere else. Outside, the wind is blowing. Rain is falling into the courtyard and shutters are banging. I keep the thin pink curtains drawn. There's a light above the mirror over the washbasin, two lights......
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Briefly Noted

Brendan Bernhard
Photo by Warner MunroeONE REASON WHY PEOPLE, IN THOSE RARE MOMENTS when they aren't on cell phones themselves, so dislike people who are, is the painful obviousness of the phone-talk. Just the other day, at a branch of Borders, a young woman sailed through the door, slim black electronic magic......
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Ask the Auden Expert

Brendan Bernhard
FOR A CERTAIN KIND OF PERSON WHO CAME OF age in the 1930s, the English poet W.H. Auden played a role similar to the one Bob Dylan would play in the 1960s, if for a far smaller audience. Which is to say, he was not just "the voice of a......
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Global Entropy

Brendan Bernhard
ONE OF THE NICE THINGS ABOUT BEING UNHAPPY IS you can do it anywhere. Whatever, French cult hero Michel Houellebecq's debut novel, shows you how to do it in France while smoking four packs of cigarettes a day and working in the computer industry. The Pollen Room, Swiss-German cult heroine......