If you were born after 1970, I think it is nearly impossible to imagine how it felt to open up The New York Times Magazine on a Sunday morning in January 1971 to discover “What it Means to be a Homosexual,” a deeply personal and beautifully written piece in defense of homosexuality.
Tereska Torrès will be probably be remembered as the world’s first lesbian pulp novelist, though as Torrès was always the first to point out, she had no intention of earning that reputation. Born in Paris in 1920, Torrès served with the Free French forces in London during the Second World War and fictionalized her experience in the 1950 novel Women’s Barracks. Though she went on to write fourteen more books before her death last week, Women’s Barracks became a cult classic for its campy homoeroticism and since its publication has sold over 4 million copies in the US alone. (“If
Ever since The Iliad and The Odyssey were ascribed to Homer, the blind poet has served as a metaphor for the ability to catch sight of things beyond mere appearance. Robert Duncan, born in 1919, belonged to this tribe of seers. At the age of 3, he slipped in the snow in Yosemite while wearing sunglasses against the glare; they shattered, and the injury resulted in strabismus—a condition in which the eyes cannot focus on the same object.
‘There is a visibility so tenuous, so different, or so discomfited that it is easy to miss,’ Lisa Cohen observes in All We Know, and, contrariwise, ‘a visibility so simple, so precise, or so extreme that it, too, is obscure.’ Why do we see what we see? Why do we fail to see what others see? Can we see things before they are ready to be seen? Can we see things before we are ready to see them? Such questions lie at the heart of Cohen’s strikingly elegant and assured biographical study of three now almost forgotten lesbian women: the
On the plane, something odd but also vaguely magical-seeming happened: namely, nobody knew what time it was. Right before we landed, the flight attendant made an announcement, in English and Spanish, that although daylight saving time recently went into effect in the States, the island didn’t observe that custom. As a result, we had caught up — our time had passed into sync with Cuban time. You will not need to change your watches. Then, moments later, she came on again and apologized. She had been wrong, she said.
A naive beguilement rather than sly irony frames Rushdie’s accounts of hanging out with such very famous people as Jerry Seinfeld and Calista Flockhart. Madonna, narrowly missed at Tina Brown’s immortal launch party for Talk magazine, is finally encountered at Vanity Fair’s Oscars bash in the company of Zadie Smith. At lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Warren Beatty confesses that Padma Lakshmi, Rushdie’s fourth wife, is so beautiful that it makes him “want to faint”. And William Styron’s genitalia are unexpectedly on display one convivial evening at Martha’s Vineyard.
Draw it with your eyes closed: the art of the assignment, a book edited by the arts journal Paper Monument, is an informal investigation into the ambiguous task of teaching art in the wake of postmodernism. In it, the editors ask contributors to answer one or both of two seemingly straightforward questions: to write about the best or most memorable assignment they have ever received or about one they have given.
There is a chapter in The End of Men, Hanna Rosin’s compelling, provocative, but occasionally misleading new book, about what she calls the “new wave of female violence.” In it, she charts how women, in keeping with their increasing social prominence, are becoming more aggressive and even homicidal, and less likely to be victimized. It’s an example, she suggests, of her book’s broader subject—the way changing gender dynamics are remaking us in ways that once seemed inconceivable, upending the sexual hierarchy that’s prevailed for almost all of recorded human history.
During the height of the Belle Epoque, while comfortably ensconced in his palace in Brussels, King Leopold II of Belgium perpetrated a series of shadowy maneuvers that succeeded in making him the sole owner and master of an area almost 10,000 miles away: the Congo river, the land surrounding, and the people who lived there. Through Leopold never personally set foot in Africa, his merchants and gendarmes stripped the land of ivory, mahogany, and rubber; kidnapped, mutilated, and lynched local populations; and left about ten million dead over the span of twenty years.
Michael Chabon split his career in two with 2000’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Before then he was a Respected Young Novelist whose widely praised, commercially robust The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys mined the academic-bohemian nexus in the city where Chabon attended college. He also published two volumes of short stories, many of which initially appeared in The New Yorker. “Naturalistic,” Chabon came to call this mode, especially in short-story form; stories of “disappointment, misfortune, loss, hard enlightenment, moments of bleak grace. Divorce; death; illness; violence, random and domestic; divorce; bad faith; deception and
Poor Mitt. He became the Republican candidate for president by default, as the least worst choice from a pack of bizarre characters seemingly drawn from reality TV shows or Thomas Pynchon novels, but he’s not finding much love, even at his own coronation. Only 27 per cent of Americans think that he’s a ‘likeable’ guy. (Obama gets 61 per cent.) On television he projects a strange combination of self-satisfaction and an uneasiness about dealing with others who might doubt his unerring rectitude. The only well-known anecdotes about his bland life of acquiring wealth are both cruel: leading a pack of
José Saramago’s work is often thought of as allegorical or subversively political. The Portuguese novelist, playwright, and poet had an instinct for stories that belittled political sentimentality, framing the grandiosity of dreams within the vulnerability of the dreamer. From Baltasar and Blimunda’s tragic lovers drowning in a swamp of political corruption to absurd militarization in response to a mysterious epidemic in Blindness, Saramago’s work reveals the parallel fragility of authority and idealism. The Lives of Things is a collection of six early short stories from the Nobel Prize winner, a poetic encapsulation of Saramago’s extraordinary talent as a skeptical inquirer
According to the website of Found magazine, which was started by Davy Rothbart in 2001, the publication accepts “anything that gives a glimpse into someone else’s life.” The only condition is that the material has been, well, found—in the street, in an old book, on the windshield of a car, wherever. The result is a hodge-podge of to-do lists, old photographs, love letters, notes of apology, and children’s homework assignments. Ordinary as they may be, the finds tend to be unintentionally hilarious or poignant, and often both.
“Prescription drugs kill more people a year than traffic accidents – and that doesn’t count traffic accidents caused by prescription drugs” writes Martha Rosenberg, a cartoonist and freelance writer. Her Born with a Junk Food Deficiency follows the grand tradition of American muck-raking, which goes back at least as far as Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle, published in 1906, which exposed the horrors in the slaughterhouses of Chicago: sausage containing rat dung and mould, and workers who fell into vats of lard and were never fully retrieved.
The amateur writer of women’s erotica may be forgiven for thinking, as she pushes her manuscript upon Siren Publishing, Ellora’s Cave, and Carnal Desires, that she has finally entered a freewheeling realm of sexual exploration, an oasis of untrammeled erotic fantasy. She may continue under this impression as she scans the retail horizon, landing upon titles like Tall, Dark and Dominant, Male Android Companion, Two Men in Her Tub. But she is bound to be disabused when she stumbles upon the Guidelines for Submission, written always in that tone of world-weary prophylactic disappointment, and learns precisely what is not welcome.
Bohemia, as we know, is the definitive post-industrial industry. It germinated locally in New York’s West Village in the 50s and 60s, was unleashed as a productive force by the rezoning of SoHo in the 70s, and then swept through the Village, Alphabet City and Williamsburg in the 80s and 90s. A global pattern, this steady advance of a middle-class avant-garde has transformed cities nationwide. Horrified by the rural and disaffected towards suburbia, these pilgrims’ capacity to capitalize on urban decay is what accounts for their relative freedom. More to the point, they love to write about it. Enter the
Colm Tóibín is a member of a small club of nearly household-name book reviewers. Of these, each is recognized for a distinctive approach. Daniel Mendelsohn is praised for his loping, rueful analyses of contemporary culture. James Wood and Martin Amis are famous for their close readings, with Amis being more insistent on the importance of the cleverly constructed sentence. Jenny Diski is renowned for taking down intellectual imposters, and Zadie Smith makes her arguments about aesthetics seem urgent and personal.
While abstract ideas of “power” and “politics” are catnip to contemporary literary figures, the actual exercise of political power in the American electoral process tends to be their analytic kryptonite. But things were not ever thus. Michael Szalay’s fascinating new book, Hip Figures, reminds us of a time, not long ago, when literary intellectuals set great store by mainstream political parties, and vice versa. Szalay’s book focuses on the postwar era—a high-water mark, he contends, for the mutual influence of mainstream politics and American fiction. “In the decades following the Second World War,” he writes, “during the heyday of the
To most of the country, Detroit is characterized more by the people who left than by those who stayed. Detroiters like to joke that everyone returns eventually, but over the past fifty years, the city’s population has lost more than a million people, leaving it at a third of what it was at its peak at the end of the 1950s. Detroit is in a constant state of physical flux: At any point, that house on the corner might become a victim of the arson that is as ubiquitous in the city as Ford sedans and GM trucks. A local
I feel I need to forget what I know about Eileen Myles in order to review her new book of poems, Snowflake/Different Streets. In 2012 it’s almost impossible to separate the experience of reading her books from the popular mythology that derives from her career as East Village bon vivant, openly female write-in candidate for president, and feminist lesbian icon. This is, of course, the problem with fame, even of the underground sort — it mediates our experience of an artist’s work, which is always already saturated with what we know about them.
