This book, which was featured on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, comes recommended by some famous Big Thinkers. It is written by well-regarded professors (one of them the chairman of the Harvard philosophy department). This made me rub my eyes with astonishment as I read the book itself, so inept and shallow is it.
My dear Rosa,
“Modigliani should have been the father of a family. He was kind, constant, correct, and considerate: a bourgeois Jew.” The English painter C.R.W. Nevinson, who rendered this verdict, knew full well that these were not the first adjectives that would spring to most people’s minds to describe Amedeo Modigliani.
In 1990, as the culture wars that had already maimed Robert Mapplethorpe and David Wojnarowicz (not, as recent events at the National Portrait Gallery made clear, for the last time) were hitting a fevered crescendo, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts vetoed four performance grants. One of the nixed awards was for Karen Finley, a New York–based performance artist whose works often involved nudity and foodstuffs in dynamic interaction. She and her fellow refuseniks sued, finally losing in the Supreme Court in 1998.
Ronald Reagan dominated his era as no president had since Roosevelt and as no president has again. Today, he’s endlessly lionized as the man who pulled the country out of its economic death spiral and won the cold war for the free world. Is it possible to produce a useful political history of the 1980s while writing the decade’s central political figure out of it? Two new books more or less do just that, by consigning Reagan to the margins of the main story—one by design and the other coincidentally. For casual students of the political history of the late
We haven’t always put a high premium on originality in writing. Alexander Pope defined “true wit” as “Nature to advantage dress’d, / What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d”; in other words, the best poet makes memorable lines out of what everybody already knows. It was the Romantics, in the nineteenth century, who made the expression of original personal experience the highest value. They gave us the idea that the poet should say something new, and that the poem should bear the authentic stamp of its maker: (copyright) Shelley, and no one else.
One of the things I’ve always noticed about movies about writers is that nobody knows what writing actually looks like. Usually the author is shown failing to write, balling up pieces of paper and throwing them in the wastebasket. I remember a movie about Lillian Hellman where she actually threw her typewriter out the window. I think language is the problem. Since our tools are the same ones most people use (language, a computer), there’s a suspicion we might be doing nothing (except maybe being crazy—remember Jack Nicholson’s character in The Shining), and then a book appears like a secret
The most surprising thing about Donald Rumsfeld’s memoir, Known and Unknown, is that a lot of it is boring. How could that be? Donald Rumsfeld was not boring; his life was not boring; the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were and are not boring. What other contemporary public figure attained brief sex-symbol status at the age of sixty-nine, drew mad vitriol from hippies and hawks alike, and had lawsuits filed against them on everything from habeas corpus to torture to sexual harassment in the military, even as poets, novelists, and comics riffed passionately on their words and lives? Yet Rumsfeld
For a certain swath of American female thirty-somethings, the literary thriller comes with an odd set of associations. In addition to the windswept heaths of Wuthering Heights and Manderley, such books will likely conjure the pine-lined hiking trails of New Mexico, the fiercely policed social boundaries of classrooms and high school cafeterias, and beachy redoubts where teenagers would do well to avoid slippery black rocks.
When T.C. Boyle swaggered onto the literary scene in the 1980s, brandishing flamboyantly bizarre short stories in one hand and wildly satirical novels like Water Music and Budding Prospects in the other, the exuberance of his sentences was often more impressive than the depth of his characterizations.
In Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer, there is murder, but more important, there is the pretentious, erudite, and dryly funny writer who tells us about it.
“One of the secrets of life during wartime,” writes Annia Ciezadlo in Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War (Free Press, $26), her chronicle of eating in Baghdad in the months after the 2003 invasion of Iraq and in Beirut during the 2006 war with Israel, “is that your senses become unnaturally sharp, more attuned to pleasure in all its forms. Colors are brighter, more saturated. Smells are stronger. Sounds make you jump. Music makes you cry for no reason. And food? You will never forget how it tastes.” In the days after a nasty outbreak of
One of literature’s most seductive questions was asked by the Hungarian novelist Sandor Marai in “Embers,” his exquisite novel of friendship and betrayal, published in Budapest in 1942, but not translated into English until 2001, 12 years after his death. “Do you want it to be the way it used to be?” a woman asks a man. “Yes,” he responds.“Exactly the same. The way it was last time.” This exchange occurs not between lovers but between a 91-year-old servant and the 75-year-old general she nursed as a baby, in whose household she has remained. The general wants her to set
James Gleick’s first chapter has the title “Drums That Talk.” It explains the concept of information by looking at a simple example. The example is a drum language used in a part of the Democratic Republic of Congo where the human language is Kele. European explorers had been aware for a long time that the irregular rhythms of African drums were carrying mysterious messages through the jungle. Explorers would arrive at villages where no European had been before and find that the village elders were already prepared to meet them.
“The people who go to fights don’t just go to see some guy win,” W.C. Heinz wrote in 1951, “but they go to see some guy get licked, too.” Which is, in a line, the problem with fighting. In most sports, you’re judged by what you do; in true spectator sports, like mixed martial arts and boxing, you’re judged by how impressively you do it.
It would be impossible for me to write dispassionately about Bobby Fischer even if I were to try. I was born the year he achieved a perfect score at the US Championship in 1963, eleven wins with no losses or draws. He was only twenty at that point but it had been obvious for years that he was destined to become a legendary figure. His book My 60 Memorable Games was one of my earliest and most treasured chess possessions.
Want to write a breakout first novel? The conventional wisdom says ingratiate yourself (Everything Is Illuminated), grab the reader by the lapels (The Lovely Bones), or put on an antic show (Special Topics in Calamity Physics). Teju Cole’s disquietingly powerful debut Open City does none of the above. It’s light on plot. It’s exquisitely written, but quiet; the sentences don’t call attention to themselves. The narrator, a Nigerian psychiatry student, is emotionally distant, ruminative, and intellectual.
In early 2008, Joyce Carol Oates gave a talk called “The Writer’s (Secret) Life: Woundedness, Rejection, and Inspiration,” about how writers go about transmuting painful life experiences into art. At the heart of her speech was a quote from Hemingway, which Oates found so profound that she cited it twice. “From things that have happened . . . and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if
The history of French literature is rich in villainy, calumny, and public enemies. Francois Villon was a noted thief, and his famous call to universal fraternity (“Oh my human brothers”) was composed while he awaited hanging. The Marquis de Sade was jailed by five successive regimes for everything from poisoning a prostitute to inciting political unrest (the day before the storming of the Bastille where he was held prisoner, he stood on the ramparts of the fortress screaming, “Kill all the guards!” before getting so worked up he started yelling, “Kill all the prisoners!”). Lautréamont wrote about shooting shipwreck survivors
It is tempting at first to dismiss Donald as a mere literary guerrilla action, a publication-day ambush by two clever writers whose narrative voice, to their credit, may sound more authentically like Donald Rumsfeld than the former defense secretary’s memoir.
