To jaded Us Weekly readers of the early twenty-first century, it’s still a shock to the system to look back on what a walking, talking, singing scandal Maria Callas was, and how this Greek dramatic soprano raised in Queens fed the paparazzi machine of the 1950s and ’60s. But tabloids and newsmagazines alike fawned over […]
When you walk into the center of Edith Grossman’s foyer, you’re not sure which of the six white-walled rooms of this classic high-ceilinged Upper West Side ground-floor apartment, with their ubiquitous wooden bookshelves, tall and short, to rake your eyes over first. As we stood in place for a while chatting by the entrance, I […]
It’s easy to miss, since the rue Princesse is a small street off the main tourist beat, but most people who come here know what they are looking for. At the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the section of the Latin Quarter traditionally favored by writers, artists, and students, just a short walk from the Luxembourg Gardens, the hanging sign reads village voice: anglo-american bookshop. The narrow window and door frames are painted Greek-island blue.
Photographs of the novelist Kingsley Amis, taken between his fiftieth birthday in April 1972 and his death in October 1995, sometimes show a resplendent sheen on his forehead, nose, and cheeks. This is what some people call “sweat alcohol,” a common problem among heavy drinkers of shorts and beer. On both of the occasions on which I had the pleasure to meet this funny and distinguished man, he drank whisky throughout lunch and by the afternoon was wearing that slightly bewildered, slightly aggressive, slightly penitent expression known as the “Scotch gaze,” a look familiar to all who have walked the
Confession: When I got a galley of Jennifer 8. Lee’s new book about the history of Chinese food in America, I immediately flipped to the back, hoping to find my name in the index. And by “my name,” I mean, of course, the name of “my” Chinese restaurant in upper Manhattan, the one where my parents often took my sister and me on Sunday nights for dinner when we were young. Like Lee, I grew up in New York, and without really meaning to, I’d devised a test of her authority the instant The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (Twelve, $25) hit
Over the last decade, at least, authors have come out against bioethics, depression, capitalism, love, Christianity, common sense, Freud, and consolation, among any number of other subjects. Blame it on Susan Sontag. The polemical muscle of her 1964 essay “Against Interpretation” gave license to an essayistic discourse that, in announcing outright its position, is far more assertive than the open-ended, digressive ruminations of, say, Montaigne (“On cannibals,” “On repentance”) or the amused musings of Charles Lamb (“On the Inconveniences Resulting from Being Hanged”). Few agitators have wielded the polemical pen as well as Sontag, though, and in recent years, the
As CIA books go, Hugh Wilford’s The Mighty Wurlitzer does not give the agency the feel of a lethal fun house full of wild and crazy guys that is its indelible reputation. Not that the book is devoid of incidents of frightening nonsense:
The progression of Alfred Kazin from working-class boy out of the Jewish tenements of Brooklyn’s Brownsville to center of the New York literary world is about as close as you can get to a feel-good story of the intellectual life. Born in 1915 to an itinerant painter and his stout wife, she Orthodox, he an orthodox socialist, the young Kazin overcame his stutter and took to books, devouring Blake and Shelley and discovering the nineteenth-century American masters who would become his lifelong passion. A radical but not a joiner in the ’30s, Kazin looked “to literature for strong social argument,
Irving Howe once called Bernard Malamud “the most enigmatic, even mysterious of American Jewish writers.” In his empathic, exhaustively researched Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life, Philip Davis seeks to shed new light on Malamud’s career. The first scholar to be granted access to the Malamud archives (which include notebooks, journals, memoirs, drafts of novels and stories, and correspondence housed at the Library of Congress and the University of Texas, Austin), Davis offers an intimate portrait of Malamud’s various “lives,” from Brooklyn-born immigrant’s son to Jewish-American literary celebrity. By drawing on the archive, Bernard Malamud hovers near the primal sources of
What could be hoped for, and what lost, when the discoveries of physics and the applications of engineering worked to change culture, politics, the economy, communications, social life and perception itself? This is not the place to enlarge on such general historical debates. I am only interested in the tone they sometimes gave to the photographic depiction of the human face.
The French iconoclast Guy Debord tends to be known in America—if he is known at all—for two things, both of which peaked in the student movements of 1968, when he was thirty-six. Debord was a founder of the Situationist International, an underground organization whose roots lay in Dada and cultural Marxism and whose whimsical slogans, creative defiance, and cryptic prose attracted dreamers on both sides of the pond. He was also a curmudgeon. His 1967 book, The Society of the Spectacle (the other thing he’s known for), was the high point in a lifetime of faultfinding, paranoia, and alienation. In
“I am frightened of everything except for writing,” Jerome Charyn admits during our afternoon kaffeeklatsch in his West Village apartment in December. He’s just returned from a semester in Paris, where he spends half the year teaching film theory at the American University. At seventy, his elegant one-bedroom is furnished with piles of books, which makes sense for an award-winning, prolific author of fiction and nonfiction, as well as of film scripts and plays. But Charyn, born and raised in working-class neighborhoods in the Bronx during the ’40s, owned only a stack of comic books and a single volume of
It would seem to be a novel stunt: A working music critic, versed in historically vested value systems and steeped in subcultural arcana, stoops to listen to a colossal pop star and pledges to dissect the cult she inspires. The scenario only ripens when the pop star in question is Céline Dion, an enigma who tends to be critically regarded with a mix of contempt and confusion when critically regarded at all.
Yeats’s swans. The owl of Athena. Keats’s nightingale. The hoopoe of King Solomon. Dickinson’s bobolink. The birds of gods and poets inhabit The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature, offering a way into the question Jonathan Rosen, a devoted birder in increasingly damaged habitats, wants to answer. It’s the one posed by Frost’s ovenbird: “What to make of a diminished thing?”
In May 1982, the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar and his third wife, Carol Dunlop, embarked on a curious expedition. With their trusty VW camper van, dubbed Fafner after Wagner’s dragon, they set out to drive from Paris to Marseille, intending to discover the other thruway, the parallel path hidden in plain sight, along the autoroute. The better to gain access to that imagined place, the couple established some rules: They would not once leave the highway; they would explore each rest stop, at a rate of two a day; they would take detailed notes on their findings; and, like Marco
Have you ever watched what happens when a sword slices through reams of paper? Or a fish is put into water? What does it look like when centrifugal force pops a man out of his shirt? Yuichi Yokoyama wants to show you. Concerned with phenomena rather than character and narrative, his comics resemble the output of a drafting machine: sequences that present multiple views of an object in action and look like exploded product diagrams. Yokoyama seems to enjoy the resulting images as much for the strange shapes that are generated as for what they reveal.
In 1941, while residing in Santa Monica, Thomas Mann mused, “What today is the meaning of foreign, the meaning of homeland? . . . When the homeland becomes foreign, the foreign becomes the homeland.” He lived in California for fourteen years before returning to Europe in 1952, his version of the American dream crushed, writes Joseph Horowitz, by the cold war, McCarthyism, and the Golden State’s “artificial paradise.” Mann’s poignant question—and declarative response—is central to Artists in Exile, Horowitz’s erudite if sometimes exhausting survey of European refugee artists in America during the first half of the twentieth century.
Women writers have notoriously been absent from the Beat canon. Although memoirs by Joyce Johnson, Hettie Jones, and Diane di Prima, as well as recent academic studies, have challenged this omission, women have been underrated and underrepresented in the movement’s largely male roster. Reissuing Bonnie Bremser’s Troia: Mexican Memoirs after nearly forty years out of print, the Dalkey Archive Press assists in the recovery of one of these protofeminist writers who depicted women as agents, not objects, of Beat culture. Born Brenda Frazer in Washington, DC, in 1939, Bremser is a second-generation Beat writer; Troia is a lost classic of
POET AND COMPOSER DICK HIGGINS founded Something Else Press in 1963 to publish the experimental writing and manifestos of the artists, authors, and musicians he knew in connection with the New School in New York City. In 1966–67, he issued a batch of pamphlets, most only sixteen pages in length, that featured concrete poems, undoable […]
In Words to Be Looked At, art historian Liz Kotz takes on the monumental task of chronicling the use of language in 1960s Conceptual art. She charts its development from John Cage’s scored representations of time and chanced sound through various incarnations, including John Ashbery’s “poetics of collage,” Vito Acconci’s action poems, Joseph Kosuth’s equivalencies of text and object, and Lawrence Weiner’s literal writings on the wall. The trail culminates in Andy Warhol’s 1968 a: a novel, a purported day-in-the-life account transcribed directly from tape to page, complete with every dumb observation, garbled bit of gossip, er, and ahem.
