paper trail

Diane di Prima, 1934–2020; Jacqueline Rose on authoritarianism and pleasure

Jacqueline Rose

Poet Diane di Prima, author of Revolutionary Letters and many other books, has died.

On October 16, Delhi Police assaulted Ahan Penkar, a journalist on staff at The Caravan, at a police station while he was reporting on the alleged murder and rape of a fourteen-year-old girl. Now, Amitava Kumar—author of many books, most recently Every Day I Write the Book—has responded to the attack with a poem.

For the New York Review of Books’ special election issue, Jacqueline Rose dwells on “The Pleasures of Authoritarianism”: “No point . . . asking how bad it can get, how far they are willing to go, or how on earth they can get away with it all. Going too far is the point. The transgression is the draw and the appeal—transgression always carries a sexual tremor even when it is not manifestly about sex.”

New York Times writers Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns have sold a book about the upcoming election to Simon & Schuster. The publisher claimed that the book, currently untitled, will be “the definitive assessment of the 2020 election as a turning point in American politics and the most complete account of the Trump-Biden campaign and its consequences.”

Tonight at 8 PM eastern time, NYPL Live will host a virtual event in the The Harry Belafonte Black Liberation Speaker Series titled “Malcolm X, the Facts and Fictions,” which will feature a conversation between Tamara Payne (who co-authored The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X with her father, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Les Payne), Violet S. Payne, and the Reverend Calvin Butts.