In Beijing, the news that Chinese writer Mo Yan will win the Nobel Prize was greeted with elation. Simultaneously, a storm of controversy welled. Did this writer deserve the prize? And should a prize of this magnitude go to a writer who is “inside the system” of an authoritarian government that imprisons other writers?
In 1948, his first year of teaching at Black Mountain College, John Cage gave a lecture on Erik Satie, at the time a little-known French composer. To make his point about Satie’s significance, Cage weighed him against a composer who needed no introduction. “Beethoven was in error,” he said, “and his influence, which has been as extensive as it is lamentable, has been deadening to the art of music.” All that could be said of the German composer is that his legacy was to “practically shipwreck the art on an island of decadence.” In Indeterminacy, Cage recounted Satie’s remark that
In Self-Control, a novel by the Norwegian writer Stig Sæterbakken, an aging creature of habit named Andreas Felt goes on a rampage. At least he thinks its a rampage. To others, his behavior amounts to a number of small if calculated attacks on social politesse. Vying for the attention of his daughter Marit over the course of a lunch date, Andreas casually (and untruthfully) mentions his impending divorce from her mother. Returning to work, he vehemently upbraids the head of the company. Later, he humiliates a boorish family friend named Hans-Jacob over dinner and grossly over-tips a waitress.
When Anis Rushdie read his son’s novel Midnight’s Children for the first time in 1980, he became convinced that Ahmed Sinai, the drunken father in the book, was a satirical portrait of himself. A family row ensued. Rushdie fils did not deny that Sinai was based on his father—“In my young, pissed-off way,” he would later tell The Paris Review, “I responded that I’d left all the nasty stuff out”—but he objected to his father’s wounded reaction and thought it revealed a crude understanding of how novels worked. “My father had studied literature at Cambridge so I expected him to
IN A RECENT TIME magazine profile, the renowned German artist Gerhard Richter confessed his admiration for John Cage, particularly the composer’s famous dictum on poetry, “I have nothing to say and I’m saying it.” Cage substituted silence for actual notes, and Richter, in recent works of epic reproduction, substitutes multiplication for brushstrokes. Nowhere is this more in evidence than the artist’s book Patterns, a dizzyingly intense exploration of one of his works, 1990’s Abstract Painting (724-4). Richter digitally divided an image of that artwork a dozen times (then split those divisions in 2, then 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128,
In 1999, on the eve of the massively hyped release of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, J. Hoberman, at the time the lead film critic at the Village Voice, used the occasion to ponder George Lucas’s enormous influence on the movies. Hoberman’s reflections were fraught with unease: Rather than carrying on cinema’s function—perhaps even its duty—of preserving a photographic relationship to real events and performances, Lucas had initiated cinema’s move into the digital realm, where any image could be endlessly manipulated or even invented from whole cloth. “Infinitely malleable, digital imaging does not share photography’s indexical relationship to
Whenever I take a bath, I am faced with a question: To read or not to read? Of course, bringing printed matter near water is always a risk. But the reward—a transcendent moment of absorption in both liquid and text—is usually too large to forgo. And so, I have ruined numerous books and magazines, from issue after issue of the Economist to my grandfather’s first edition of Architecture without Architects.
In The Fun Stuff, James Wood once again shows us that his criticism always grows from the same seed: his remarkable ability to tell us exactly what makes a writer’s style idiosyncratic.
At the end of an interview with Jonathan Rosen conducted in 1994, V.S. Naipual says, “Do you think I’ve wasted a bit of myself talking to you?” Rosen hedges, saying that’s not how he’d put it. Naipaul says, “You’ll cherish it?” It is nasty and ungracious. It is also true. And this—the willingness to say something awful and true—is the reason why I want to hear Naipaul describe the world. He is more honest than most of us dare to be.
Let us say that you are a Mexican reporter working for peanuts at a local television station somewhere in the provinces—the state of Durango, for example—and that one day you get a friendly invitation from a powerful drug-trafficking group. Imagine that it is the Zetas, and that thanks to their efforts in your city several dozen people have recently perished in various unspeakable ways, while justice turned a blind eye. Among the dead is one of your colleagues. Now consider the invitation, which is to a press conference to be held punctually on the following Friday, at a not particularly
Tom Wolfe’s new novel, Back to Blood, opens with a bravura prologue that seems to promise the sharp-witted, delightfully overblown Tom Wolfe novel we’ve been awaiting. A Yalie and Wolfe stand-in named Edward T. Topping IV (“White Anglo-Saxon Protestant to the maximum, to the point of satire”) has just moved from respectable Chicago to steamy South Florida to take over as editor in chief of the Miami Herald. On a night out with his equally WASPy wife, Mac, the couple gets slapped in their prim-and-proper faces by their newly adopted fire-blooded city. Topping and Mac have just found a parking
The grotesque is central to much of Spanish novelist Ramón del Valle-Inclán’s work. After witnessing horrifying political violence in Latin America and his native Spain in the early years of the 20th century, Valle-Inclán developed the style he called esperpento, which sought to bring out “the comic side of the tragedy of life.” In works of esperpento, reality is contorted until actors come to physically resemble the unwholesomeness of their actions. Evil isn’t so banal when seen though Valle-Inclán’s eyes. Valle-Inclán set the standard for his invented genre with Tyrant Banderas, a novel about an absolute dictator who blows his
Frenchman Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), a diminutive queer alcoholic raised on Rabelais and steeped in Symbolism, could be called the John the Baptist of modernism. While most of modernism’s inspirational figures are better known than Jarry, he influenced nearly all of them to varying degrees: Filippo Marinetti, Tristan Tzara, André Breton, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Max Ernst, Henri Rousseau, Antonin Artaud, Guillaume Apollinaire, Erik Satie, André Gide, Eugène Ionesco, Boris Vian, Raymond Queneau, Jean Genet, Jacques Prévert, and especially Marcel Duchamp were all disciples. And if their explicit affiliation was less clear, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Flann O’Brien, Jorge Luis Borges,
American history is the history of fitful enthusiasms. “On canal boats” in the nineteenth century, Gilbert Seldes records mysteriously in the history of American fanaticism that he published in 1928, which has been reissued by NYRB Classics, “bed-linen was promiscuous.” There were fads in fashion: “Men … wore the enormous cravats which had been introduced by George the Third to hide the swelling on his neck.” Fads in food: “Carrots were scarcely used and the tomato was known as the ‘love apple’ and considered poisonous”; and a little later, “[b]roccoli had been introduced and the tomato accepted.” Fads in propriety:
Former President of Iraq Saddam Hussein’s first appearance in the historical record occurs in 1959, as a Central Intelligence Agency-sponsored would-be assassin of Iraqi Prime Minister Abd al-Karim Qasim. Years later, Hussein, after becoming Iraq’s president in 1979, would commit a number of the same missteps that finally led to Qasim’s downfall: threatening Kuwaiti sovereignty, alienating Iraq from its Arab neighbors, and not making the country’s oil reserves more accessible to Western nations. Hussein missed (literally: he was one of the triggermen) in his attempt to kill Qasim. But after Iraq’s Baath Party overthrew Qasim in 1963 (again with CIA
Near the end of Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood recalls how her mother, mortified by Esther’s recent stay at an asylum, recommended they simply carry on as if nothing—the fits, the hallucinations, the suicide attempt—had ever happened. “Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind of snow, should numb and cover them,” Esther thinks. “But they were part of me. They were my landscape.”
Life, as depicted in the pages of Marvel Comics, is full of heroes and villains. Reading Sean Howe’s new behind-the-scenes history of the venerable publishing house that brought you Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Avengers, and others, you begin to appreciate why. For although Marvel Comics: The Untold Story is a spirited account of a group of creative misfits taking on a staid industry giant, DC, and triumphing, it’s also the familiar tale of management prevailing over labor, of the suits crushing the talent. It’s the story, in other words, of how the villains won.
Barack Hussein Obama was re-elected president of the United States on Tuesday, overcoming powerful economic headwinds, a lock-step resistance to his agenda by Republicans in Congress and an unprecedented torrent of advertising as a divided nation voted to give him more time.
The Occupy protests of 2011 successfully transformed the issue of income inequality from an under-acknowledged condition into a national problem. This is a victory that has eluded labor unions, progressive activists, and liberal Democrats for over forty years. It is an admirable and, in some ways, very inspiring achievement, given the slapdash, decentralized, and rambling nature of the Occupy encampments.
Teresa Sharp is fifty-three years old and has lived in a modest single-family house on Millsdale Street, in a suburb of Cincinnati, for nearly thirty-three years. A lifelong Democrat, she has voted in every Presidential election since she turned eighteen. So she was agitated when an official summons from the Hamilton County Board of Elections arrived in the mail last month. Hamilton County, which includes Cincinnati, is one of the most populous regions of the most fiercely contested state in the 2012 election. No Republican candidate has ever won the Presidency without carrying Ohio, and recent polls show Barack Obama
