Sven Birkerts has been named the new director of the Bennington Writing Seminars. The man has an awesome intelligence and a quiet, thoughtful nature. He was the person I was most scared would ask me a question after my graduate lecture. And of course, he did. All I could do was nod my head to his comment about Saul Bellow, who I'd briefly referenced in my lecture and say yes, you're right, yes.

Here's one of my favorite passages from his book Readings:

It is better, more rewarding, to study the grasshopper on the windowsill with full attention than to stand half-distractedly before a painting by Paul Klee or Botticelli. Attention completes the inner circuit, and completing that circuit is everything–at least if we care about the idea of an integral subjective self.
As it happens, reading is one of the very few things that you can only really do with full attentiveness.