" Oswald is probably best known for her last book, “Memorial,” an extraordinarily free reinterpretation of the Iliad. (At public readings of “Memorial,” she recites it from memory, in homage to the orality of the original. I was lucky enough to witness this in London. The effect is rhapsodic, spellbinding.) Oswald does indeed have a classical power: she’s at once a grand elegist and a close celebrant of life, a rhetorician and a playful contemporary—a writer who can describe Hector dying in battle but can also depict how he “used to nip home deafened by weapons / To stand in full armour by the doorway / Like a man rushing in leaving his motorbike running.” At the heart of her new book is a long poem titled “Tithonus,” after one of Eos’s lovers from Greek mythology. It is a minutely detailed, ravishing, and rapturously observant account of the English countryside waking up at dawn—what Oswald calls “46 Minutes in the Life of the Dawn.” Slowly, the light builds and the stars disappear and the woods awaken to the birds: “as soon as dawn one star then / suddenly none then blue then pale / and the whole apparition only / ever known backwards already too / late now almost gone.” I’m sometimes reminded of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Edward Thomas, but the tutelary spirit seems to be Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves,” and that novel’s patient italicized passages (written from the point of view of the author) about sunlight building and spreading across the English landscape. (“The day waves yellow with all its crops” is one of my very favorite sentences from Woolf’s novel, and one that Oswald might easily have written herself.) This poet is, for me, a perpetual inspiration."

"Male camaraderie, male love, is a difficult subject to show on film. What does it mean to have one of your best friends pass away? When that unit dies, how do you deal with it? I’m not a married man but I’m sure that when I’m married and have kids I’ll see Husbands in a new light. It’s regular guys trying to make sense of this life, having a good time while they’re doing it; running from their own lives and trying to distract themselves with hookers and gambling and drinking, and they all have families to go back to. They just don’t wanna leave the party. It’s male camaraderie at its most loving and brutal: these guys are terrible to each other, but they’d do anything for each other, and that kind of friendship, those values, mean a lot to me. The way they shot the film, the way they lost funding — there’re these wild stories of how to make a movie that you care about. They lost financing. As the story goes, they put the last bit of money — and they’re half way through the film, they’ve been shooting for six months — they put all the money to throw a party. They got dancers and girls and piano players and I think there was like an elephant, and they invited all these studio heads to come to this party sequence that they were filming — and when they studio saw the scene they said, “This movie’s huge, it’s wild, we’ll cover the rest of the film.” They got the rest of the financing. The scene’s not in the movie — it was never planned to be. So that spirit still excites me. The camaraderie feels familiar."

"Records is a big one for me. When I first moved to New York in 2000, I tried to see him play any time he was playing. Some of my favorite shows I've ever seen were a couple of Marclays performances, solo or with DJ Trio. This record embodies the spirit of those live performances He's another absolute hero of mine – if you haven't seen him perform you should. He played on a Late Night show as this kind of novelty. And this was in 1980. As DJing is, it's just re-contextualising sound, music. But he does it with such a keen ear and there's a point to why he mixes certain things. He destroys the records by putting tape over them. As interesting and as funny as that is but musically, the results he gets from this are really, really exciting. His shows were some of the most exciting shows. I saw him play at a club in New York called Tonic, that closed down years ago, where a lot of new music was played. I saw him play in 2002, when it was him in what was known as DJ Trio which is 3 DJs, playing in the collage-y nature of what he was doing. And it was so mind-blowing. So I was obsessed with him. He was a guy that I had no shame fanboying out with. I'd see him out on the street and I'd go "Hi Christian!" He's a major artist – he did this piece called The Clock, which is toured all over the world. What's that big gallery in London right now? White Cube. He now has installations all over the world for his video art."