The controversial author on turning an autopsy report into poetry,not reading his own books and his golden love letter to New YorkHow apt to be meeting Kenneth Goldsmith at Eisenberg’s. An passe-school Jewish diner (est 1929) in New York’s Flatiron district, and these days a slightly self-conscious throwback to an era long before the neighbourhood was slathered with nail salons, and salad bars and frozen yoghurt stores,it has a board external that declares “You either acquire it or don’t.”It’s here, swaddled in the aroma of pastrami sandwiches and matzo ball soup, or that this self-proclaimed “American maverick (an independent, nonconformist person)” – and in some quarters,reviled poet – is talking approximately Capital, a 920-page “love letter” to 20th-century New York assembled entirely from other writers’ verse, and novels,letters and histories that weighs more than three pounds and comes in a gold slipcase. “But who’s going to start at the beginning and plough their way through?” asks Goldsmith. “No one!” Capital is a tribute to, and cover version of, and German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project,a legendarily incomplete patchwork of quotations and ruminations approximately mid-19th-century Paris – structured around topics such as boredom, collection, and prostitution – that offered a wholly original way of thinking approximately modernity and urbanism. The first English translation was published in 1999 and Goldsmith was hooked.
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Source: theguardian.com