But much of the time she felt good. . . . It was as if the conflagration of her bouts with Karim had cast a special light on everything, a dawn light after a life lived in twilight. It was as if she had been born deficient and only now been gifted the missing sense.
If Kenneth Goldsmith were writing this column—well, for starters, he wouldn’t write it; he’d turn in a piece of found art that had nothing to do with anybody’s book collection, or he’d transcribe our conversation, with all the ums and uhs (mostly mine—he’s on the Oscar Wilde end of the articulateness spectrum), or he’d plagiarize […]
Ron Hansen is an outlaw among outlaws—and not just because his first two novels, Desperadoes (1979), about the Dalton Gang, and the pen/Faulkner-nominated The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (1983), reimagined the Wild West. As a practicing Jesuit (he serves as deacon in his San Jose congregation) who embraces his faith, he is a lone rider in a largely secular literary world, integrating themes of morality, grace, suffering, redemption, and resurrection into his work while respecting the fiction writer’s oath of withholding judgment. In fact, not until the best-selling Mariette in Ecstasy (1991) did he dare
Thirty-five years ago, Stephen Shore set out from Manhattan on a road trip to photograph America. In addition to taking photos that would begin to form his series Uncommon Places, he recorded the details of what would become a near-legendary journey. On the anniversary this summer of the six-week expedition, Phaidon is publishing A Road Trip Journal ($250), a limited-edition facsimile of Shore’s documentation, photographic and otherwise. (The press has also just released an engaging and thorough survey book on the photographer as part of its Contemporary Artists monograph series.) The work featured in this new volume was made with
A film professor I had in college, a hard-core Jesuit who swore by Doris Day, had convinced himself that she was the greatest actress in Hollywood history. The reasoning went something like this: She 1) was conversant in all genres, 2) was an accomplished actress, singer, and dancer, and 3) projected a complex persona that was demure but with an undercurrent of feline menace. It annoyed me to no end. For any young and precious cineast, Day was not a subject for serious inquiry, as were, say, the Nouvelle Vague and Buster Keaton. But everyone who took that class—the History
In form, Human Smoke is unique. Nicholson Baker seeks to tell the story of the origins of World War II through a chronological sequence of several hundred vignettes, as if one were to screen Gone with the Wind through a series of uncaptioned snapshots. Yet however impressionistic Baker’s technique may seem, he is pursuing an ambitious and sweeping reinterpretation of his subject: He evidently regards the “good war” as bad, a colossal mistake. In other words, Baker is tilting against the most deeply settled and ardently embraced piece of conventional wisdom in the current armory of American myth. His prime
Is Tintin literature? It’s a good question, and one that launches novelist Tom McCarthy’s book-length study of the Belgian artist Hergé’s masterwork, the adventures of the boy reporter with the comma-shaped hairdo. The French have already made up their minds about Tintin’s literary merit: McCarthy’s bibliography lists works by the playwright and academic Jean-Marie Apostolidès and the psychoanalyst Serge Tisseron, as well as the philosopher Michel Serres’s multivolume Hermès, a chapter of which is devoted to Hergé’s 1963 album, The Castafiore Emerald. (One might add to this list Thomas Sertillanges’s odd La Vie quotidienne à Moulinsart, which considers Tintin less
In general, we don’t enjoy hearing about other people’s illnesses. If you say, “How are you?” to an acquaintance or a new friend, you want to get back a pat “Fine,” not some lengthy disquisition on the latest ache or pain. The exception to this rule occurs when both people have something wrong with them: In that case, a person is willing to listen for a while so that he can later work off his own complaints. (The late Gardner Botsford called such encounters among his old-men circle of friends “organ recitals.”)
During the 2003 Adorno centenary, something remarkable happened in Germany. The entire nation reached out to embrace this renegade Marxist philosopher in ways that were truly surprising. Throughout the country, Adorno “festivals” took place—apotheoses of the public celebrations advocated in Rousseauesque “civil religion.” In Frankfurt-am-Main, where Adorno taught and where he remains something of a legend, there is now an Adorno-Platz that features, instead of the customary bust, his writing desk, bizarrely encased in glass. A plethora of public exhibitions tracing his life and thought were mounted. Concerts featuring his musical compositions—most of which resemble Vienna School pastiches—were widely staged
On August 8, 1969, President Richard M. Nixon gave the first speech outlining his domestic program. Its centerpiece was legislation proposing a federal income floor of sixteen hundred dollars for every American family—in today’s money, almost ten thousand dollars. In this, Nixon’s perpetually active political antennae were failing him; seven months earlier, Gallup had asked its sample, “Would you favor or oppose such a plan?” and 62 percent were against it. But the idea of a “guaranteed minimum income” then commanded such great assent in all the best policy-intellectual circles that this Republican president, elected with the solid support of
Though the cultural history of the United States in the first half of the twentieth century is in large part a tale of immigrants, Robert Frank’s rise to prominence as a quintessentially American photographer and his creation of one of the best-known photographic accounts of American life is in many ways a story unto itself. Following in the tradition of Walker Evans and the FSA photojournalists, this Swiss native journeyed throughout the country with his Leica camera in 1955 and 1956. The resulting portfolio of eighty-three photographs presents far more than a sociological portrait of the postwar nation. As fellow
Late this winter, a minor media furor rose up around the tirelessly debated question of ultimate culpability for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Dallas district attorney Craig Watkins announced at a press conference that he had discovered a cache of documents and effects deposited in a safe decades ago by one of his predecessors, Henry Wade, that seemed to open new avenues of controversy in the who-shot-JFK industry. One especially sensational find—labeled a potential “smoking gun” in breathless cable-news coverage—was a transcript suggesting that Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby had openly plotted to kill the president on
In 1982, smack in the middle of cold-war angst, Semiotext(e) founder Sylvère Lotringer interviewed architect and philosopher Paul Virilio about nuclear war and technology. Their densely layered dialogue was published the following year as Pure War, which introduced Virilio’s thinking to the United States. Last year, the pair met to reevaluate their earlier arguments, and the reissue of Pure War includes this new conversation and a fresh introduction.
If two mirrors are turned face-to-face, each will reflect the other’s reflection of itself, and so on. Thus is generated (at least in theory) an image that resembles a tunnel going on forever—albeit to nowhere in particular. In practice, of course, there are limits to just how far this regress reaches. The mirrors have to be absolutely parallel, and any distortions on their surfaces ruin the effect. But even a glimpse of this virtual abyss can be sublime. Either that or queasy-making.
Earlier this decade, Jeff Sharlet moved in with a group of men in a Christian community called Ivanwald. Together, they lived in a nondescript house in suburban Washington, DC, that was run by a group that called itself the Family. On the surface, the place seemed harmless enough—blending the camaraderie of segregated male domains (the locker room, the frat house) with more sober elements of spiritual retreat (Bible study, rigid self-denial, and structured work). Sharlet, who is the coauthor of a book on fringe American religious experience, Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible (2004), writes, “I had no thought of
“An outbreak, like a story, should have a coherent plot.” That comment, from a well-known virologist, could easily serve as epigram or foil to Contagious, Priscilla Wald’s critique of the stories that the media and the medical profession have constructed about disease outbreaks from typhoid to HIV/aids to Ebola.
One-third of the way into Japan scholar Donald Keene’s slim, modest memoir, he recounts the predicament faced by his Japanese professor at Columbia University in the years following World War II. The professor was depressed by Japan’s defeat, Keene writes, “but he probably would have been equally depressed if America had lost the war. . . . His was the tragedy that anyone who loves two countries may experience.”
The preeminent story of our time will not be the occupation of Iraq or the war on terror, but the shift of economic, technological, and geopolitical power to the East—specifically, China. Newspaper editors have coined a name for this story—“the rise of China”—but that’s not quite right. China isn’t rising the way the United States rose from a scattering of rustic colonies to a global superpower in two centuries, or the way Japan rose from an isolated island to the world’s second-largest economy in little more than half that time. Home to 1.3 billion people, with a history measured in
A lawyer by training and a writer by necessity, Raja Shehadeh has, since the early ’80s, argued cases of Palestinian land ownership in Israeli courts and written extensively on the legal aspects of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. He has also produced five volumes of prose about Palestinian life, of which Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine (2001) is the best known to American readers. Part memoir, part family chronicle, the book is an emotionally fraught intergenerational narrative about growing up in the shadow of the Palestinian Nakba of 1948.
A chance remark serving as catalyst for a profound journey of self-discovery sounds more becoming of postmodernist author Paul Auster than historical novelist Amin Maalouf. Yet the Lebanese writer of such acclaimed novels as Leo Africanus (1986), The Rock of Tanios (1993), and Balthasar’s Odyssey (2000) took inspiration for his latest book from an unexpected question about a Cuban Maalouf, and Origins, a memoir-cum–family history, is the product of the author’s plunge into his Orthodox/Catholic/Protestant clan’s recent past.
