In a preview from the next issue of Bookforum, Jeff Sharlet writes about “imperial joking” and the November 13 attacks in Paris.
And on n+1’s website, Pankaj Mishra powerfully echoes Susan Sontag’s plea from September 2001: “Let’s by all means grieve together, but let’s not be stupid together.”
The writer Claire Vaye Watkins has an essay (originally a lecture) on literary misogyny, pandering, and “punching up.”
The artist and actress Adele Mailer (née Morales) died on Sunday, age ninety. A New York Times obituary quotes from her memoir: “I decided I was going to be that beautiful temptress who ate men alive, flossed her teeth and spit out the bones, wearing an endless supply of costumes by Frederick’s of Hollywood.” It also notes, of the infamous night in 1960 when her then husband Norman Mailer stabbed her with a penknife at a party, that “Some guests recalled that the point of no return came when she told her husband that he was not as good as Dostoyevsky.”
As we move into the holiday season, everybody’s doing what they can. Glenn Greenwald is trying to make CNN better . . .
. . . And Donald Trump is doing his bit for poetry. (Plus, he even seems to be trying to ensure that you won’t have to see so much Trump in the press.)
Journalists may get to see themselves represented at the movies and on high-end TV almost as often as cops or doctors, but the humble book publisher must take what he or she can get.
You may have missed this heartfelt tribute to one of the internet’s most devoted David Foster Wallace fans, the redditor jeremy1122: “Eventually, he comes to expose the weird insulation and monomania of reading itself—a motif worthy of a Jorge Luis Borges or Enrique Vila-Matas.”
