America has had its famous lawmen and its hero detectives, real and somewhat less so: Wyatt Earp, Dick Tracy, Allan Pinkerton, Hawkshaw, and, above all, J. Edgar Hoover. From 1924 to his death in 1972, Hoover ran the FBI and its predecessor, the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation. When he died, his name was as well known as that of any movie star, sports hero, or president.
Adding to his mind-altering oeuvre, which already includes poems, a novel, and works of criticism on subjects like Andy Warhol, Jackie O, and gay men’s penchant for opera, Wayne Koestenbaum delivers a coup d’état with Hotel Theory, a palimpsest of postmodern detritus presented in two parallel texts. On the left side of the page, “Hotel Theory,” Koestenbaum’s phenomenological study of hotels, provides the mental framework for the reader to act as a Bachelardian cosmonaut in the Lana Turner and Liberace dime novel “Hotel Women” on the right. Hotel Theory showcases Koestenbaum’s inflections via innumerable analogies to literature and art, and
Almost twenty-five years ago, Jean-Luc Nancy published The Inoperative Community, a work that tries to avoid the mystical authoritarianism of communitarianism without falling into the lonely oppressiveness of individualism. The book confirmed Nancy’s place as a philosopher who would continue a productive deconstruction without ever pretending to resolve a philosophical problem, establish an identity, or build a foundation. Nancy’s version of deconstruction has been more tactile, engaged with flesh and material, than that of many other of its followers. But like his more abstract colleagues, he has never wanted to reduce the ambiguities that he seems to think are faithful
In 1896, in a text that anticipated Borges’s merger of the essay and the short story, Paul Valéry introduced readers to a character he called Monsieur Teste. This was the modernist hero as creature of pure intellect, capable of an almost inhuman intensity of self-conscious lucidity. Through a “frightening discipline,” M. Teste had “[set] his pleasures to killing his pleasures.” He had not withdrawn from social life entirely. But while living in the world, he was not of it—a mind preparing itself to tear up everything and begin anew. “What,” asks the puzzled narrator, “had he done with his personality?”
“You never knew what you were drinking or who you’d wake up with. . . . We wore wishbone diaphragms that weren’t always reliable. There was a woman doctor who handled abortions for our crowd. She would take a vacation at Christmastime to rest up for the rush after New Year’s Eve.”
Elsa Schiaparelli begins her memoir by comparing Saint Peter’s Basilica and Piazza in Rome to the claws of an enormous crab, thereby revealing the protean, anthropomorphizing imagination for which the designer was revered in 1930s Paris. Like Picasso, this short, magnetic, dark-haired Mediterranean woman captivated prewar society with her creative ferocity. A New Yorker cartoon from 1939 portrays a shopgirl showing a futuristic ball gown to a stodgily dressed older woman: “Why should Madam be afraid? Schiaparelli isn’t.”
In the graphic novel Exit Wounds, Israeli taxi driver Koby Franco finds himself on a reluctant quest to discover the fate of his estranged father after being contacted by a young female soldier who believes the elder Franco has died in a suicide bombing. Nothing is quite as it seems in this offbeat romantic comedy from Rutu Modan, one of the best artists to emerge from the vibrant Tel Aviv cartooning scene of the past decade. The story of her first booklength work moves along at a brisk clip, urged on by a series of small but jolting revelations, starting
Anne Fadiman is a specialist in what she stubbornly calls the familiar essay, a genre that reached its prime in the early nineteenth century. Most readers and writers today are acquainted with its cousin, the personal essay. Fadiman’s word choice, then, acts as a small protest. Personal, she notes in the preface to At Large and At Small, has increasingly come to mean “confessional,” and Fadiman is not one for theatrics. Critical doesn’t quite do it either, because so often what she writes involves personal experience. In the end, Fadiman practices the familiar through a series of wide-ranging, minutely observed
In Rebecca Solnit’s River of Shadows (2003), the life of Eadweard Muybridge initiates an expansive meditation on technology, the motion-picture industry, Leland Stanford, Silicon Valley, and, ultimately, the Western landscape. It is terrain that Solnit likewise seeks in her other books, among them Savage Dreams, Wanderlust, and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. So it is unsurprising that in her agile, impassioned collection of essays, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics, Solnit returns to familiar ground—the California earth blasted away by the devastating hydraulic mining of the gold rush, and Nevada’s dry, alkaline lake beds, home to Burning
As its subtitle indicates, Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England, 1600–1770 is about the dirtiness, clamor, and odor of seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury urban England. It is also about dentistry, furniture, food, hygiene, houses, sewage, and hair. Framed as an investigation of “how people were made to feel uncomfortable by other people” in London, Oxford, Bath, and Manchester, Emily Cockayne’s book succeeds in bringing the overlooked and sometimes downright disgusting details of the period to life without, unfortunately, ever revealing what the upshot of such discomfort might have been. Divided into eight main parts—“Ugly,” “Itchy,” “Mouldy,” “Noisy,” “Grotty,” “Busy,” “Dirty,”
No one has done the voice inside the head, ever present as we dice and chop life’s minutiae into apposite syllables— that “murmur, now precise as the headwaiter’s”—so accurately as Samuel Beckett. He remains the master of depicting mental paralysis, registering with circular syntax (there is always another but, yet, perhaps, or) the provisional, self-consuming logic that mires the soul at the starting line. Beckett achieved a kind of apotheosis of this style in three novels—Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable—all composed in the late ’40s while he was living in France. In these works, as in much of his
“Predictably—and understandably— more pressing problems than saving dirt usually carry the day,” writes David R. Montgomery. But as his new book, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, details, we are losing the brown stuff far, far too quickly. Unlike maritime dead zones and radical climate change, cases in which we have little historical knowledge on which to draw, we do have some sense of what happens to civilizations that abuse and lose their dirt. The book’s conclusion takes little comfort in history: “Unless more immediate disasters do us in, how we address the twin problems of soil degradation and accelerated erosion
As a young man growing up in Omaha, Kurt Andersen dreamed of moving east. His parents were big readers; his mother was an amateur Willa Cather scholar who gave talks on the Nebraska novelist at women’s groups and book clubs. Andersen wrote for his junior high school paper, and at fifteen he discovered Emerson and Thoreau. His eldest sister went to graduate school in Chicago, which suggested to him the possibility of an academic career. When Andersen got to Harvard and started writing for the Lampoon, he began thinking about the life of a writer instead. “George Plimpton was hanging
It may be an odd thing to do, but whenever I’m in another country, I always go to as many bookstores as I can, even when the language is Greek to me. I love seeing the differences in how books are made and promoted, the variations in cover designs and trim sizes and colors. Although I realize I’m looking through rose-colored glasses, there seems inevitably to be a cheeriness in window displays and a pleasant languor in browsing that, at least on the surface, are lacking at home. In the process of visiting sundry foreign bookstores, some places have become
The true pleasure of reading any book on rock ’n’ roll comes less in the descriptions of the music—I’ve long felt that rock bios need to be packaged with a CD, to reinforce or introduce the aural ideas presented—than in the personal excesses, the wantonness, the luxury and degradation, for lack of a better phrase. The gold standard of the genre, Peter Guralnick’s magisterial two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, Last Train to Memphis (1994) and Careless Love (1999), fairly wallows in Presley’s enthusiasms for things that aren’t healthy or kind, like a steady stream of amphetamines, and his revulsion at
“Any mosaic that has survived from the sixth century is treasured,” the authors of Dynamic Splendor aver, in great understatement. What the marvelous two-volume monograph plunders is more than treasure, of course—for it tells in remarkable detail the story of the mosaics in the basilica of Eufrasius at Porecˇ, in the former Yugoslavia. Only Ravenna rivals Porecˇ as an extant example of early–Middle Ages church architecture, and the first volume of Dynamic Splendor wastes no space in describing everything about this two-thousand-year-old Croatian site, from its geographic setting and ecclesiastical significance to the philosophy of restoration in the nineteenth century.
Like a guidance counselor who got his teaching certificate in Bayreuth, Mike Kelley has for years labored at his own Ring cycle of sorts—Educational Complex—but with vampiric thespians and peppy spirit leaders as ersatz Wotans and Frickas. In 2005, New York’s Gagosian Gallery mounted the fun-house installation of Day Is Done. The creepy anthropological tour of the perversejust- under-the-surface cultures of donkey-basketball competitions and Youth for Christ nativity plays was ecstatically brought to life in a Gesamtkunstwerk of photography, sculpture, costume, sound, and video based on the faithful reenactment and fanciful reimagination of period yearbook shots. Now, the catalogue documenting
Glaswegian-turned-Londoner Andrew O’Hagan made a name for himself as the deputy editor of the London Review of Books before publishing his nonfiction debut, The Missing, in 1995. In this profound inquiry into the worlds of the vanished— runaways, abductees, murder victims—O’Hagan wove together journalism, family history, and memoir (the project was sparked by curiosity about his grandfather’s disappearance during World War II). Fiction always draws O’Hagan back to Scotland: His first two novels, Our Fathers (1999) and Personality (2003), are multigenerational family sagas. Our Fathers takes the reader to Glasgow and Ayrshire and brings together a dying master builder and
