“Originally I intended to write a book about Harpo’s relation to history and literature,” remarks Wayne Koestenbaum on the first page of his fittingly zany, aphoristic, and meandering study of the great mime of Marx Brothers fame. “A tiny chapter on Harpo and Hegel. A tiny chapter on Harpo and Marx. A tiny chapter on […]
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It is a Romantic delusion to suppose that writers are likely to have something of interest to say about race relations, nuclear weapons or economic crisis simply by virtue of being writers. There is no reason to assume that a pair of distinguished novelists such as Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee should be any wiser about the state of the world than a physicist or a brain surgeon, as this exchange of letters between them depressingly confirms.
Superbly translated by Martin McLaughlin, these letters place Calvino in the larger frame of 20th-century Italy and provide a showcase for his refined and civil voice. His widow, the Argentinian Chichita Calvino, has been careful to exclude all personal and love letters, as Calvino was jealous of his privacy. I must confess a personal interest. In 1983, as a callow 22-year-old, I wrote to Calvino requesting an interview in Rome. To my amazement, he agreed. In his flat near the Pantheon he leafed through the many pages of questions I presented. “Troppo, troppo, too many,” he said.
There’s something confusing about the consensus around Alice Munro. It has to do with the way her critics begin by asserting her goodness, her greatness, her majorness or her bestness, and then quickly adopt a defensive tone, instructing us in ways of seeing as virtues the many things about her writing that might be considered shortcomings. So she writes only short stories, but the stories are richer than most novels. Over a career now in its sixth decade, she’s rehearsed the same themes again and again, but that’s because she’s a master of variation. She has preternatural powers of sympathy
What ethically challenged billionaire would not welcome the journalistic cosseting of Ben Mezrich? With each new book, Mr. Mezrich becomes increasingly adept at how to use his kid gloves. He is expert at making up conversations he did not hear, sexing up parties he did not attend, pumping up the thrills of getting rich quick and playing down the legal liabilities of characters who may have done a teeny bit of innocent law-bending or moral compromising on their ways to the top.
MICE LIVE IN OUR WALLS but do not trouble our kitchen. We are pleased but cannot understand why they do not come into our kitchen where we have traps set, as they come into the kitchens of our neighbors. Although we are pleased, we are also upset, because the mice behave as though there were something wrong with our kitchen. What makes this even more puzzling is that our house is much less tidy than the houses of our neighbors.
No one could have predicted on March 10, 2011, that the imminent Tōhoku earthquake, at magnitude 9.0, would be the greatest to hit Japan, or foreseen the giant tsunami that struck the Japanese coast minutes later. But that does not mean the subsequent meltdown of three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station was unavoidable. The plant was built to withstand a big earthquake and survive a moderately sized tsunami, but a panoply of engineering errors—too-short sea walls, backup diesel generators installed in locations likely to flood, pools overcrowded with spent fuel rods, and a main control room insufficiently
In her account of her years in Teach for America, the lesson Michelle Rhee wants to impart is that success in the classroom takes time to achieve and depends mainly on discipline and toughness. In her first year she failed miserably: she was a nervous wreck who couldn’t control her classroom. But on the first day of her second year, she writes, she took a new approach: “I wore my game face. No smiles, no joy; I was all thin lips and flinty glares.” She describes making her students line up and walk into the classroom four times, until they
Vladimir Nabokov was eighteen when the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 made his wealthy family’s continued residence in Petrograd (as St. Petersburg was renamed at the start of World War I) impossible. They fled first to the Crimea and then, in 1919, to London. The following year they settled in Berlin, where in 1922 Nabokov’s father was assassinated, more by accident than design, by extreme right-wing Russian monarchists: they were attempting to kill another Russian émigré politician, Paul Milyukov. V.D. Nabokov bravely seized and disarmed one of the gunmen, and pinned him down, but was then shot three times by
Charles Jackson barely ever wrote a piece of fiction. The vast majority of his output—five novels or collections in the decade beginning 1944, and one final novel fourteen years later (“99 percent of this novel is lubricious trash,” read the Kirkus review)—was thinly disguised fact. His first, and by far his best-known, work was The Lost Weekend; it was essentially his homosexual alcoholic’s diary artfully made fiction. It made headlines for its depiction of alcoholism; the homosexual component got far less attention, likely because of the distorted Freudian fever gripping the nation, in which alcoholism and homosexuality (or “latent homosexuality”)
In the fun-house mirror of the present, the contours of the twentieth century have assumed a strange symmetry. It begins and ends with imperialism. The century opens with the West plundering the Rest, until one Asian nation, Japan, joins the action and becomes an empire itself. In the century’s last decade, the pattern repeats: the forces of liberal capitalism are again as dominant as ever, only this time China is the apt pupil of Western rapacity. The way historians speak of the present in terms of “imperialism,” ”anti-imperialism” and “the rise of Asia” makes the burst of decolonization after World
David Sedaris doesn’t write like a writer. He writes like someone who writes for a living. That’s a different thing, and not necessarily a bad one: Mr. Sedaris can be the life of your two-person party if you turn to his essays for quick, easy diversion and nothing more. But only a man with column space to fill would devote the first eight pages of a book to the experience of having dental work done in France.
Before David Letterman banned him, the filmmaker Harmony Korine made three memorable appearances on CBS’s Late Show. On his first visit—in 1995, when he was 22—Korine came to promote Larry Clark’s Kids, for which he’d written the screenplay. When Letterman asked how one turns a script into a movie, a fidgety Korine, his voice cracking, replied, “Oh, I’m not sure.” The audience laughed, then broke into applause. He delighted them again in 1997, returning in a suit and V-neck sweater to plug his directorial debut, Gummo. (Letterman: “You’ve assembled a series of very striking, vivid, disturbing impressions.” Korine: “Yeah, well,
In his new memoir, Attempting Normal, comedian Marc Maron describes several of his more arduous experiences, from eating extra spicy chicken to rescuing feral kittens to bedding down-and-out prostitutes (only twice; he’s “not a hooker guy”). Maron’s comedic persona, which he has honed for the past thirty years, is both hostile and hypersensitive, and listening to him on stage or on his critically acclaimed podcast WTF can feel like eavesdropping on a therapy session. Airing painful personal history might not help him work through his issues (“if your life is disintegrating, saying so publicly doesn’t necessarily reverse the rot”) but
Aesthetics is, at its best and at its origins, a form of hunting. Not only a hunt for the beautiful and the sublime, but also for the ensnarement and identification of subtle experiences, ambivalent impressions, and novel sensations. If beauty and truth represent the big game—the promise of freedom, happiness, and peace on earth—the minor aesthetic categories are smaller, but still significant, quarry. Even in the eighteenth century, in the writing of Edmund Burke and Richard Payne Knight, Friedrich Schiller and Schlegel, the philosophy of taste often revolved around the marginal categories of the pretty, the ugly, and the picturesque.
Of all the things one can portray in a movie, marriage is surely not the most titillating. It can’t possibly hold a candle to sex or violence—or some lurid combination of the two—and is an equally tough sell against horror, slapstick, sci-fi, romance, or the western. “Embrace happy marriage in real life,” director Frank Capra once remarked, “but keep away from it onscreen.” And yet there have been a great number of films, from the silent era until today, that have defied Capra’s warning and compellingly depicted one of the world’s most enduring institutions. (Capra himself offered a fiendish satire
There is no question that David Bowie changed the way many people looked, in the 1970s, 1980s, even 1990s. He set styles. Fashion designers—Alexander McQueen, Yamamoto Kansai, Dries van Noten, Jean Paul Gaultier, et al.—were inspired by him. Bowie’s extraordinary stage costumes, from Kabuki-like bodysuits to Weimar-era drag, are legendary. Young people all over the world tried to dress like him, look like him, move like him—alas, with rather variable results.
The Yacoubian Building, a 2002 novel by Alaa Al Aswany, weighs heavily on my time in Cairo, informs everything I see here, an unsentimental picture of an exigent, corrupted people. I pass the actual apartment house downtown, less grand than I imagined, occupied in the novel by several strata of Cairo life: a wealthy wheeler-dealer, a rising politician, a closeted gay newspaper editor, the poor who occupy a shantytown of windowless “iron rooms” on the roof, each of the rooms two by two meters square. The tragic beat of events turns monotonous, but the book is politically provocative, a devastating
In the summer of 2011, when David Graeber heard rumors of a mobilization against Wall Street, he was hopeful but wary. Graeber is an anthropologist by trade, and a radical by inclination, which means that he spends a lot of time at political demonstrations, scrutinizing other demonstrators. When he wandered down to Bowling Green, in the financial district, on August 2nd, he noticed a few people who appeared to be the leaders, equipped with signs and megaphones.
