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When we say that we love a writer’s work, we are always stretching the truth: what we really mean is that we love about half of it. Sometimes rather more than half, sometimes rather less.
In his new book of essays, Sweet Heaven When I Die, Jeff Sharlet recounts a tête-à-tête between writers William Hogeland and Greil Marcus over the subject of Dock Boggs, a folk singer-turned-coal miner who was rediscovered and canonized during the 1960s folk revival. Marcus described Boggs as "a seer" and "the prophet of his own life." Hogeland responded that "prophecy and darkness are the products of the critic's own romantic inclinations," and not due to any inherently noble splendor in Boggs's journey through the violence and deprivation of southwestern Virginia's coal country.
Hogeland's
I first became interested in novels by and about poets roughly three years ago. I was working on what would become my first novel, The Gospel of Anarchy (about an anarchist collective–cum–Christian mystery cult), and spending a lot of time thinking about Harold Bloom’s notion that “all religion is a kind of spilled poetry, bad and good.” This profound and pithy little fragment, which itself might have spilled from Kafka’s aphorisms, appears in his nonfiction book The American Religion, and eventually I came to understand it as the “secret epigraph” to my novel.
May 14, 2011, was a horrendous day for Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then head of the International Monetary Fund and leading contender to unseat Nicolas Sarkozy as president of France in the April 2012 elections. Waking up in the presidential suite of the Sofitel New York hotel that morning, he was supposed to be soon enroute to Paris and then to Berlin where he had a meeting the following day with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. He could not have known that by late afternoon he would, instead, be imprisoned in New York on a charge of sexual assault. He would then be indicted by a grand jury on
God bless Caitlin Flanagan. Without her, who else would give voice to the sorts of anxieties that make upper-middle-class women break out in hives? Whether she’s wringing her hands over the prevalence of sexless marriages, the costs of overscheduled children, the depravity of hookup culture, or the advantages of stay-at-home mothering, Flanagan is never afraid to take a sharpened stick to the hornets’ nest, just to see what trouble she might stir up. Curiously, though, once the hornets are circling, mad as hell, and everyone is shrieking and running for cover, Flanagan is already safe
Some years ago, while I was interviewing a cordial octogenarian for my biography of André Breton—often called, to his disgust, the “Pope of Surrealism”—my interviewee suddenly leaned across the table and threatened to give me “a sound thrashing” if I used the abhorred word pope in my book. I did include the term, of course, but not without trepidation—a fear that had little to do with the outrage of vengeful codgers and everything to do with disappointing those whose trust I’d spent years courting. It’s a quandary for any biographer, particularly when writing about a figure who still inflames
The problem for feminist artists of the past few decades isn’t that their work is absent from museums. It’s that their art isn’t usually where one hopes or expects to find it: in the main galleries of major institutions. However, archives, libraries, and artists’ files richly document art by women—a by-product of these artists’ marginalization from the halls of Great Art, which caused many feminist artists to adopt ephemeral, mass-distributed forms. As testimony to this process, the Martha Wilson Sourcebook, a collection of texts selected by Wilson and reproduced from her archives,
The word crusade has coursed through American political debate from the beginning, with all manner of leaders—Thomas Jefferson to William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown to Wendell Willkie and FDR, Dwight Eisenhower to John McCain—adopting it as a de facto slogan. And it seems that each time a political figure characterizes a new reform as a crusade, the word’s meaning grows more tepid, more distorted, and more palatable, suggesting only an intense campaign rooted in moral righteousness. Perhaps this common usage is what sparked George W. Bush’s terrible gaffe on September 16, 2001, only
We Americans love our icons of individuality—Henry David Thoreau, the Lone Ranger, Carrie Bradshaw—almost as much as we wish all the single people would just settle down and get married. As sociologist Eric Klinenberg writes in Going Solo, “Americans have never fully embraced individualism, and we remain deeply skeptical of its excesses.” Nevertheless, we’d better start getting OK with it—because, as Klinenberg shows, this country is getting more single by the minute. The facts are astonishing. “The majority of all American adults are single,” he writes. “The typical American will spend
For much of the past century or so, Mexico has existed out of context.
The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ran the country for seven decades, enforced a powerful state of critical amnesia. Newspapers reported news with no background to the story at all. The lives of the powerful weren’t discussed, unless they fell from official favor.
Lately, however, that’s all been changing. Critical biographies of the country’s leaders are published, and read, in a way that was unthinkable as recently as the mid-1990s. Newspaper columnists—Raymundo Riva Palacio, Sergio Sarmiento, Luis
In his chatty and astute new memoir, musician and super-producer Nile Rodgers recounts the inspiration for one of his most enduring songs. In 1979, he was in a crowded dive bar’s bathroom with a couple of Diana Ross impersonators when he wondered, “What would it be like if Diana celebrated her status among gay men in a song?” Rodgers, who was the core of the disco band Chic along with bassist Bernard Edwards, realized that the Motown diva could speak to her gay fans with a knowing wink—and the Ross classic “I’m Coming Out” was born.
As Rodgers narrates his story, anecdotes like this
Like Malcolm Gladwell, Michael Lewis has made his career reporting on outliers. Lewis has delivered bracing accounts of investment bankers whose doomsday predictions went ignored until they came to pass, of teenagers who harnessed the power of Internet message boards to undermine the stock market, and of low-budget baseball teams that used unorthodox statistics to compete with richer clubs.
Also like Gladwell, Lewis is a fast read: His explanations of thorny financial processes are surprisingly compelling, his characters entertaining, and even when we know things aren’t going to