• print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2008

    Gary Panter is a difficult artist to pin down. He’s a cartoonist, best known for his buzz-cut everyman, Jimbo. He performs light shows, makes puppets, constructs tiny cardboard architectural models, and writes and draws an animated Internet show. He’s done illustration work and album art. He’s even been a production designer, creating much of the surreal set for Pee-wee’s Playhouse (the job earned him three Emmy Awards), and an interior designer, for a children’s playroom in Philippe Starck’s Paramount Hotel in New York. But this two-volume monograph makes the case for his paintings.

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  • print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2008

    Formalist art critics used to say that the life of an artist was irrelevant to an understanding of his or her work,” Calvin Tomkins writes in the preface to Lives of the Artists, a collection of New Yorker profiles published over the past ten or so years. “In my experience, the lives of contemporary artists are so integral to what they make that the two cannot be considered in isolation.” For critics of a certain generation—me, for instance—educated by art historians more inclined to mapping Lacan’s L Schema than outlining an artist’s formative years, Tomkins’s statement is like a grenade.

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  • print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2008

    Memoirs proliferate like kudzu,” wrote Randy Cohen in a recent issue of the New York Times Magazine. A quick perusal of the next week’s book review confirmed his assertion: memoirs of a drunken dad, of eating in China, of marriage to a Maori, and of the death of a child. Memoirs that chronicle divorce, widowhood, spiritual quests, and the renovation of charming properties in Tuscany and the south of France fairly explode from bookstore windows; Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle has been ensconced on the best-seller list for more than 128 weeks—and counting. Memoirs, it seems, are us.

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  • print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2008

    This probably isn’t a good time to fall in love with the English. Their economy—subject to an even more inflated property market than ours—is poised for a fall. Their boozy, clever, and always-for-hire Hitchens-style newspaper hacks are starting to wear thin. And with just about the worst diet in the EU and an unquenchable thirst for our trashiest cultural exports (from Bret Easton Ellis to Desperate Housewives), it’s not always easy telling them apart from, well, us.

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  • print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2008

    When asked why she had decided to give red hair to her famous heroine, Anne Shirley (better known as Anne of Green Gables to legions of little girls the world over), author Maud Montgomery replied, “I didn’t. It was red.” The question of whether Anne, the passionate orphan with a temper and a penchant for puffy sleeves, really sprang fully formed from her creator’s head—Athena to Montgomery’s Zeus—is the driving force behind Irene Gammel’s new book, Looking for Anne of Green Gables, published in time for the first novel’s centenary. Gammel dismantles that legend both exhaustively and lovingly (as befits

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  • print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2008

    For three years, Peter Trachtenberg traveled around the world seeking out people in anguish. He looked for those whose suffering transcended “garden-variety sorrow”: Sri Lankan children orphaned by the tsunami; twin girls with a rare genetic disease that made their skin continually blister; Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who drowned her five children in the bathtub. With The Book of Calamities, he attempts to categorize and comprehend their suffering, which he defines as the “experience of chaos,” a “staticky primal layer of experience that is beyond the reach of language.”

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  • print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2008

    The borders of NATO member nations were once hair triggers for nuclear war with the Soviets. But in the post-cold-war era, NATO appears more like a geopolitical relic than a key piece in the apocalyptic endgame between superpowers. Still, the alliance remains a vast and powerful one, and as is always the case with things military, there exists a heroically proportioned bureaucracy. Artist Suzanne Treister makes canny use of one of its elements, the classification system of NATO’s Maintenance and Supply Agency, for her watercolors. The agency has a designated code for an entire world of military and nonmilitary material,

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  • print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2008

    It’s best not to struggle too much while reading Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Julian Barnes’s chew on death, religion, family, writing, and memory, among other things. Ideas, arguments, quotations, and anecdotes pursue one another across the pages, dogleg, vanish, and resurface. Signposts and footholds are scarce, and there are no chapter breaks or headings. No matter: Barnes is the most companionable of tour guides, quipping and joshing, recounting family stories, citing nineteenth-century French writers, and asking would-you-rather questions like a parlor gamester.

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2009

    This is it?” I asked myself several times as I made my way through Susan Sontag’s diaries. By the end, I’d stopped carping; in fact, I had the feeling they had exploded in my hands. Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947–1963, edited by Sontag’s son, David Rieff, is the first in a three-volume selection from the writer’s private papers, covering her prefame years, up to the age of thirty. The entries are generally short and frequently trivial (though not uninteresting)—movies seen, books to buy, lists of words and terms to learn, not all of them recondite:

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2009

    For those who object to the rise of pornography studies as an academic subfield or balk at paying astronomical tuition so their kids can watch people boink on-screen for course credit, Linda Williams is the one to blame. Her landmark 1989 study Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” was the first book to take porn seriously as a film genre, treating the subject with scholarly and theoretical sophistication while deftly evading the tedious pro-porn versus anti-porn arguments of the day. Now the canonical text in the field it initiated, Hard Core propelled a generation of porn

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2009

    John Hillcoat is trying to ignore the pressure. Although the Aussie filmmaker admits that the opportunity to bring a Cormac McCarthy novel to the screen was “a dream come true,” he didn’t quite expect that audience anticipation would reach such a fever pitch. When he agreed to helm The Road in 2006, Hillcoat was coming off the critical success of the moody outback western The Proposition (2005). That effort attracted the attention of producer Nick Wechsler (Quills, We Own the Night), who had bought the film rights to McCarthy’s postapocalyptic drama in advance of publication. McCarthy is one of Hillcoat’s

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2009

    Timothy Ryback, a lithe, affable fifty-four-year-old, originally from Michigan, is in his favorite Paris haunt, the dark upstairs library of the bookstore Shakespeare & Company, on the rue de la Bûcherie. A haven for serendipity—Ryback pulls down a volume at random and it turns out to be a history of the Bodley Head press, his publisher in Britain—the store is also a peculiarly American testament to a belief in literature and its endurance. Founded in 1951, by an American expat, George Whitman, it revived the name of the legendary store opened in 1919 by Sylvia Beach, who published the first

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2009

    David Rhodes was still a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1971 when Atlantic–Little, Brown editor Joseph Kanon bought his first novel, The Last Fair Deal Going Down, a fantastical, dark tale of two Iowa cities, launching a prolific literary career. Two more novels appeared in quick succession: The Easter House (1974), which earned Rhodes comparisons to Sherwood Anderson, and Rock Island Line (1975), which John Gardner cited as an exemplar of the form in On Becoming a Novelist. In 1972, the writer settled into a quiet life in a century-old farmhouse in the southern Wisconsin town of Wonewoc

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2009

    The conjunction of warm water and flesh, the flesh being one’s own or that of others, inevitably has at least a splash of the erotic. After all, when we call an encounter or relationship steamy, it harks back to the ancient connection between the bathhouse and sex. Stew originally referred to the medieval bathhouse and its moist heat; by extension, via the sexual high jinks, often commercial, that took place there, the word bathhouse came to mean a house of prostitution.

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2009

    For all the history made in Barack Obama’s successful presidential run, the final Election Day ballot was about us, not him. We voted, stared into the face of American racism, and made our choice. As the African-American comic Paul Mooney said, this was the first national election that forced whites to enter the voting booth and confront race—something that blacks, Mooney noted, have been doing ever since they could vote.

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2009

    The Civil War was by far the bloodiest war in American history. The Union and Confederate armies suffered more than 620,000 fatalities— roughly equivalent to the American dead of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War put together. Among all combatants, the death rate was six times that of World War II; among Southerners, three times that of Northerners. Noncombatants, too, were swept up in this first modern, total war: An estimated fifty thousand civilians died. The numbers can be fleshed out with images

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2009

    The picture “dissolves to life—and I enter a passageway of a street,” cobbled with lava, and the lunchtime air full of a “savage drum-roll of descending grilles” over one storefront after another. So in the opening pages of her 1970 novel, The Bay of Noon, Shirley Hazzard sends her young narrator on a walk through the historic center of Naples. Jenny Unsworth has come to Italy to work as a translator for nato, but she has no particular interest in the place; she wants merely to be out of England. The war stands a decade in the past, yet the

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2009

    The word patriarchy is often fodder for crude caricature in today’s debates about gender politics. On the one hand, it furnishes a ready touchstone for feminist academics—an all-purpose indictment of gender injustices, past and present—as any glance across women’s-studies sections in academic-press catalogues will quickly confirm. On the other, it serves as a no-less-convenient rhetorical cudgel for antifeminist writers (and, for that matter, bloggers, cable talk-show hosts, et al.) keen to dismiss or deride the sweep of feminist thought; in this usage, it doubles as a winking, half-ironic way of suggesting that, no, we don’t really live in anything so

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2009

    For much of the past eight years, many liberal intellectuals have seemed less inclined to support blue-collar Americans in their struggles than to look askance at their presumed political, consumer, and cultural preferences. Why did so many white working-class voters support George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004? Why do so many moderate-income Americans not only shop at Wal-Mart but embrace it as a model of enterprise—even though it drives down wages and benefits for both its own workers and those at its suppliers worldwide? And why does so much popular culture, from Fox News to talk radio, reflect a

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2009

    Seven years after the tragedy of September 11, the world has not seen an act of terrorism to match it. That’s at least some comfort, when one considers that Osama bin Laden remains at large, that suicide attacks by his sympathizers have become commonplace in countries where they were once unheard-of, and that more than four thousand US soldiers have lost their lives in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, which continue with little abatement in Islamist recruiting efforts and no end in sight.

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