J. J. Sullivan finds most of Nicholson Baker’s new essay collection agreeable and praises many of the essays, admiring Baker’s ability to “snatch little impressions in the chopsticks of his prose.” But what to make of Baker’s argument about pacifism and World War II?
This past weekend, just before the hurricane, I attended In Re Books, a conference about law and the future of the book convened by James Grimmelmann at the New York Law School. Playing the role of Luddite intruder among the futurologists, I gave a talk about the hazard that digitization may pose to research and preservation. Though there were a few librarians, leaders of nonprofits, and even writers present, most of my fellow conference attendees were lawyers who specialize in copyright, and I discovered that copyright lawyers see the world rather differently than do the writer-editor types with whom I
Like many others—though not the weather forecasters or the political authorities—I underestimated the scope of the storm. Now that at least thirty-eight people are dead, thousands have been driven from their homes, and millions are without power, the election campaign looks like something of a side show. But the fact remains that voting will go ahead next Tuesday, and the politicking continues, albeit in a different manner.
If you studied the liberal arts in an American college anytime after 1980, you were likely exposed to what is universally called Theory. Perhaps you still possess some recognizable talismans: that copy of The Foucault Reader, with the master’s bald head and piercing eyes emblematic of pure intellection; A Thousand Plateaus with its Escher-lite line-drawing promising the thrills of disorientation; the stark, sickly-gray spine of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics; a stack of little Semiotext(e) volumes bought over time from the now-defunct video rental place. Maybe they still carry a faint whiff of rebellion or awakening, or (at least) late-adolescent disaffection. Maybe
Britain’s Pearson and Germany’s Bertelsmann plan to merge their publishers Penguin and Random House, aiming to gain the upper hand in their relationship with Amazon and Apple, the leaders in the ebook revolution. Education and media publisher Pearson said on Monday the joint venture – which will bring under one roof fantasy novelist Terry Pratchett, “Fifty Shades of Grey” author EL James and 2012 Nobel prize winner Mo Yan – would be named Penguin Random House.
Britain’s Pearson and Germany’s Bertelsmann plan to merge their publishers Penguin and Random House, aiming to gain the upper hand in their relationship with Amazon and Apple, the leaders in the ebook revolution. Education and media publisher Pearson said on Monday the joint venture – which will bring under one roof fantasy novelist Terry Pratchett, “Fifty Shades of Grey” author EL James and 2012 Nobel prize winner Mo Yan – would be named Penguin Random House.
Gloucester, Massachusetts, is a tough town of 28,000 people, squeezed between a rocky coast and a huge tract of scrub pine and boulders called Dogtown Common. Local widows used to live in Dogtown, along with the forgotten and the homeless, while the rest of the community spread out along the shore. Today, a third of all jobs in Gloucester are fishing related, and the waterfront bars-the Crow’s Nest, the Mariners Pub, the Old Timer’s Tavern-are dark little places that are unmistakably not for tourists.
Fifty-one years ago, Andy Warhol co-opted a panel of Ernie Bushmiller’s comic strip Nancy. Ever since, the strip’s squat, spike-haired protagonist has beguiled artists, theorists, pranksters, essayists, and cartoonists as a patron saint of dorky innocence. But despite decades of meta-Nancy secondary texts, this month marks the initial installment of the first-ever comprehensive reprinting of Bushmiller’s peak period (1943–59), with Nancy Is Happy (Fantagraphics, $25).
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the years he most assiduously kept a diary, the actor Richard Burton (1925-84) had the following pet names for his wife, Elizabeth Taylor: Lumpy, Booby, Old Fatty, Shumdit, Cantank, Old Snapshot and the Baby. She sometimes called him, who knows why, Darling Nose and Drife.
Thirteen years ago I wrote about Intimacy, Hanif Kureishi’s gritty divorce novel/memoir, and gratuitously (certainly a little too vigorously) contrasted it to the other popular divorce memoir on the shelves then, Breakup by Catherine Texier. Kureishi’s book was raw, impeccable, fearless. Texier’s book was a catharsis, uncouth, a cry of pain. Now that I have some divorce of my own under my belt, I have a clearer understanding of the divergent approaches. Divorce—or rather its particular combination of grief, agony, fear, and shame—is word chaos. It hurls writers back into the primordial ooze. Some writers freeze up. Other writers gush,
Born in Chicago in 1888 (the same year as T. S. Eliot), Raymond Chandler, an only child, was brought up by his divorced Irish mother, to whom, according to biographer Tom Williams, he was devoted to an “unhealthy” degree and with whom he lived into his thirties. As a boy, he moved from the American Midwest back to Ireland, before attending Dulwich College in London, where he wore a school uniform and studied the classics. After leaving Dulwich, he spent a year in Paris and Germany, perfecting his French and learning German well enough to pass as a native. Once
In the year and half since Tunisians and Egyptians overthrew their autocrats, sparking popular uprisings in Libya, Syria, Yemen and Bahrain, the hopeful but otherwise unforeseen Arab spring has produced a bumper crop of new media experts. Amid this political culture of misplaced punditry, Fawaz Gerges is a welcome contrast, and a voice of dissent. His answer to the question posed on the cover of his book Obama and the Middle East is a forecast of decline: “We are witnessing the beginning of the end of America’s moment in the Middle East. Illegal and unjust wars have not only been
When his first short-story collection, Drown, was published in 1996, Junot Díaz was hailed as a writer who spoke to his readers from a world, and in a voice, that had never before appeared on the page. No one else had conveyed, with quite such immediacy, the experience of Dominican-Americans inhabiting two countries and two cultures without feeling entirely at home in either. No one had made us so acutely aware of the fact that, for a large segment of our population, immigration is not a singular event but a way of life involving travel to and from the homeland,
George McGovern, the United States senator who won the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 1972 as an opponent of the war in Vietnam and a champion of liberal causes, and who was then trounced by President Richard M. Nixon in the general election, died early Sunday in Sioux Falls, S.D. He was 90.
Recent news from the department of feminist provocateurs, Russian division:
In 2009, David Nutt, a neuropsychopharmacologist who served as chair of Britain’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), published a paper in a medical journal that offered a provocative thesis: horseback riding, he wrote, was more dangerous than taking ecstasy. Examining the two activities across a range of metrics, Nutt estimated that every 10,000th ecstasy pill leads to an “adverse event,” while a rider is injured every 350th episode.
The first novel that Hilary Mantel wrote was about the French Revolution. It did not start out as a novel, exactly, nor did she start out as a novelist. It was 1975, and she was twenty-three, living in Manchester and selling dresses in a department store. She had realized that she didn’t have the money to finish her legal training, and, after a year working in a geriatric hospital, that she didn’t want to be a social worker. She was bored with selling dresses; she had started taking books about the French Revolution out of the library, one after another.
Perhaps the most confounding thing about this uneven novel is its prominent blurb from David Foster Wallace, who calls the book “a bold, funny, mordant, and deeply intelligent debut.” This might not be worth bringing up if That’s Not a Feeling wasn’t so clearly an attempted foray into Infinite Jest territory. Both novels are concerned, at least partially, with the tangled inner lives of young people; and both are interested in the ideas surrounding therapy, the misguided ideologies of institutions, and what it means to be unwell and to get better. Yet while Wallace wrote a book about a tennis
To those who met them in Japanese-occupied Manchukuo in 1935, the Swiss businessman Charles Emile Martin and his American partner, Cy Oggins, must have seemed an enigmatic pair. Oggins was a distinguished-looking man with craggy features, well-made suits, and a penchant for silver-topped walking sticks. He seemed to know a great deal about Oriental antiquities, and sometimes described himself as an art dealer. Martin was more discreet, preferring plain neckties and gabardine overcoats, though his wife Elsa was fond of elegant handbags and furs. Both men were polyglots, with a wide if vague range of European connections. Working in concert
In the 1600s, French philosopher René Descartes split the world into two kinds of stuff: material stuff subject to the laws of physics and immaterial stuff that operates according to some other set of rules. He argued that the human body is material but the mind is immaterial, relegating it to what the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle famously called “a ghost in the machine.” But even Descartes, years after articulating his theory of the mind-body divide, amended it to suggest that the physical brain might act as an intermediary between the two. In his revised theory, the “spirits” of the
