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When we say that we love a writer’s work, we are always stretching the truth: what we really mean is that we love about half of it. Sometimes rather more than half, sometimes rather less.
In his new book of essays, Sweet Heaven When I Die, Jeff Sharlet recounts a tête-à-tête between writers William Hogeland and Greil Marcus over the subject of Dock Boggs, a folk singer-turned-coal miner who was rediscovered and canonized during the 1960s folk revival. Marcus described Boggs as "a seer" and "the prophet of his own life." Hogeland responded that "prophecy and darkness are the products of the critic's own romantic inclinations," and not due to any inherently noble splendor in Boggs's journey through the violence and deprivation of southwestern Virginia's coal country.
Hogeland's
I first became interested in novels by and about poets roughly three years ago. I was working on what would become my first novel, The Gospel of Anarchy (about an anarchist collective–cum–Christian mystery cult), and spending a lot of time thinking about Harold Bloom’s notion that “all religion is a kind of spilled poetry, bad and good.” This profound and pithy little fragment, which itself might have spilled from Kafka’s aphorisms, appears in his nonfiction book The American Religion, and eventually I came to understand it as the “secret epigraph” to my novel.
May 14, 2011, was a horrendous day for Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then head of the International Monetary Fund and leading contender to unseat Nicolas Sarkozy as president of France in the April 2012 elections. Waking up in the presidential suite of the Sofitel New York hotel that morning, he was supposed to be soon enroute to Paris and then to Berlin where he had a meeting the following day with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. He could not have known that by late afternoon he would, instead, be imprisoned in New York on a charge of sexual assault. He would then be indicted by a grand jury on
IF THERE WERE A JOB APPLICATION for America’s archetypal “outsider artist,” James Castle could check almost all the appropriate boxes: Deaf, illiterate, untrained, and undiscovered until he reached his fifties, he lived his entire life (he died in 1977) on a farm in Idaho. There he employed ink made from spit and soot to draw on discarded packages, as well as bits of string to fashion cardboard constructions. His use of cast-off materials might have been inspired by Dadaist art if Castle had known about Marcel Duchamp, or really about anything beyond his immediate surroundings. As it
“How do you feel about representing New York at our literary festival here in Frankfurt?” asked the voice on the phone in halting, German-inflected English. The voice belonged to Wolfram, the organizer of the festival. “Writers from other cities are also invited,” he said, ticking off the names of authors who would be embodying the spirits of Paris, Vienna, Rio de Janeiro, Barcelona, and Luanda, the capital of Angola. “We call the festival Metropolitan. We are in our second year. I am thinking this will be very important.”
Despite the challenge of conversing by cell phone in a language in
In 1941, M. F. K. Fisher famously considered the oyster. To her many thoughts on how, when, where, and why to eat it, she added this little excursion into its amorous dimensions: “The love-life of an oyster is a curious one, dependent on the vagaries of temperature and the tides,” she mused. “The love-life of a man has also been called curious, and part of it has long depended on the mysterious powers of this bi-valved mollusc.” And that was pretty much the definitive word on oysters, sex, and love. Many other people have commented on and dissected and discussed the matter since, but never
First, just let the product specifications sink in: Marilyn Monroe (Taschen), by Norman Mailer and Bert Stern, costs a thousand dollars. It pairs ninety-three thousand words Mailer wrote about Monroe in 1973 with more than a hundred shots from Stern’s 1962 four-day photo session with the doomed actress, snapped six weeks before her death.
Who would pay this kind of money for a glorified photo book? A person who wants to own a weighty, flashy object made specifically to call attention to itself (and to the tastes of the person who purchased it). And I must confess at the outset that I am not
BETWEEN 1958 AND 1966, Ernest Cole made photographs from inside the belly of the beast that imprisoned him and his fellow black South Africans. When his first and only photo book, House of Bondage, was published in 1967, Cole knew that if he stayed in his own country, he’d be arrested. He escaped, traveling through Africa and Europe before eventually settling in New York, where he died in 1990 of pancreatic cancer—half crazy, penniless, and alone. In this collection of more than one hundred photographs from South Africa—many reproduced from prints Cole made for a 1970 exhibition in Stockholm—we
IN THE THIRTY YEARS since artist Francesca Woodman committed suicide, her reputation as a photographer has steadily grown alongside her mythic status as a kind of tragic heroine. Her self-portraits are widely imitated by young female art students eager to insert their own bodies into elusive narratives. The somewhat extravagant publication of Francesca Woodman’s Notebook is sure to fan the flames of Woodmania even further. A slender volume packaged in a precious, powder-blue cardboard box, it is a finely produced reprint of a turn-of-the-century composition book that the artist found
God bless Caitlin Flanagan. Without her, who else would give voice to the sorts of anxieties that make upper-middle-class women break out in hives? Whether she’s wringing her hands over the prevalence of sexless marriages, the costs of overscheduled children, the depravity of hookup culture, or the advantages of stay-at-home mothering, Flanagan is never afraid to take a sharpened stick to the hornets’ nest, just to see what trouble she might stir up. Curiously, though, once the hornets are circling, mad as hell, and everyone is shrieking and running for cover, Flanagan is already safe
Some years ago, while I was interviewing a cordial octogenarian for my biography of André Breton—often called, to his disgust, the “Pope of Surrealism”—my interviewee suddenly leaned across the table and threatened to give me “a sound thrashing” if I used the abhorred word pope in my book. I did include the term, of course, but not without trepidation—a fear that had little to do with the outrage of vengeful codgers and everything to do with disappointing those whose trust I’d spent years courting. It’s a quandary for any biographer, particularly when writing about a figure who still inflames