Author: Richard Kostelanetz (Richard Kostelanetz)

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Letter From Calexico Report From California’s Berlin

Calexico is a North American town of roughly 16,000 situated directly on the Mexican border, 120 miles southeast of San Diego, in the warm and sunny Imperial Valley, where agriculture will always be the most abundant business; but Calexico differs from other towns along that extended border in being the suburb of a Mexican city,...

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Ask Dr. Grants

How do I get a grant? You first must get an application. Forget about those grants for which you cannot apply, such as MacArthur Fellowships, which are essentially designed for people already known, which is to say celebrities, or incipient celebrities. Once you get the application, read its guidelines carefully to make sure you qualify...

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“I Keek It, I Vin It”

Two decades ago, the general managers of professional football teams discovered that the highly specialized jobs of placekicking could be done by sometime soccer players, most of them born and raised abroad. The placekicker, we remember, is often called upon to deliver a field goal whose three points, especially in the game’s concluding moments, can...

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The Herd of Independent Minds

“The bookful blockhead . . . [w]ith his own tongue still edifies his ears, / And always listening to himself appears.” —Alexander Pope Behind Stephen Berg’s Singular Voices, a new anthology of contemporary native poets writing about their own work, is the voice-theory of poetry, which holds that a poet is valuable not for his...

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The Truest Polyartist

It need hardly be said again that Laszlo Moholy-Nagy was one of Modernism’s primary figures, whose art, writing, and life remain for many a continuing inspiration. He was a polyartist, a true polyartist, who made consequential contributions to the traditions of several nonadjacent arts—painting, book design, artistic machinery, and photography—amidst lesser achievements in film, theater...

Comment: Subversion at the NEH?
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Comment: Subversion at the NEH?

In 1983, the Berlin Senat awarded my German partner and myself a “low-budget” grant to produce a short documentary film about the Great Jewish Cemetery of Berlin (that was founded in 1880 and has over I 10,000 graves). Entitled Bin Verlorenes Berlin,this film suggests that the cemetery itself is the principal surviving relic of the...