A few readers of Chris Kraus’s groundbreaking epistolary novel I Love Dick have expressed concern that publishing it was unfair to cultural critic Dick Hebdige, her sometime crush and the book’s unwilling subject. It should come as some comfort to those people (and, who knows, perhaps even to Hebdige himself) that the delightful Kevin Bacon is likely to play Dick in Jill Soloway’s upcoming TV version.
Bill Cosby’s lawyers are pressing New York magazine to release all unpublished material from the interviews for its cover story on his many accusers.
In the latest issue of Harper’s, Elaine Blair very gently dispatches John D’Agata—and David Shields, for good measure.
At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Elizabeth Schambelan reads Donald Trump and our current moment via Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies, a thousand-page “psycho-political investigation of authoritarian manhood in extremis.”
A note on the often-porous line between media and politics: BuzzFeed tells us that Trump’s campaign last year paid Sebastian Gorka, Breitbart’s national security editor and a frequent guest on Fox News, as a policy consultant; Gorka’s wife Katherine, also affiliated with Breitbart, advises Ted Cruz on national security. (Mr. Gorka, BuzzFeed also notes, is said to have tried to go through airport security with a handgun earlier this year.) Moving closer to the center aisle, it seems that CNN for a long time nursed hopes of hiring Trump’s daughter Ivanka.
Meanwhile, the New York Observer’s restaurant critic, after the paper’s endorsement of Trump (whose son-in-law-to-be owns it), felt moved to resign his cushy post: “It’s not quite falling on my sword,” he writes, “more like leaning gently on a butter knife.” The prospect of continuing to write for the Observer, even about “crudités and deconstructed borscht,” had grown too much. And Jennifer Ashley Wright, another Observer writer, has announced that she is tiring of some of its contents, too: “Now, you can defend statements about female journalists being skanks by saying, ‘It’s provocative!’,” she notes, but “most people reach an age at which their actions should provoke a response other than outraged wonder—and most publications do, as well.”
