In 1968, Len Deighton stood outside his Georgian terrace home and watched as workers removed a window so that a 200-pound unit could be hoisted inside with a crane. The machine was IBM’s MTST, and with its help, Deighton would write the first novel on a word processor.
Has a novel ever been more aptly titled than J. M. Ledgard’s Submergence? From the opening pages, we’re reminded relentlessly that “submergence,” “submersion,” “sinking,” “diving,” and “descent” are very much what this painstakingly crafted book is about. It’s a thematic obsession that ties together philosophical synopses, historical anecdotes, essayistic meditations, two central characters, and three interwoven plots. Submergence is plainly a novel of grand ambitions—a brooding, atmospheric spy tale that wants to say something about science, religion, and destiny. Unfortunately, it too often confuses mantra with meaning. Repeating “the depths” over and over again can be mesmerizing, but it doesn’t
Lucie Blackman in 1998. You may remember the case: On a Saturday in July 2000, Lucie Blackman, a twenty-one-year-old British woman who had been working as a bar hostess in Tokyo, disappeared. Her remains were found seven months later, by which time her killer had been arrested. His trial did not end until nearly six […]
Southern cooking guru Craig Claiborne. Memo to the Powers That Be: When I die, I would like to be transported immediately, and in perpetuity, to the picnic that Craig Claiborne held on Gardiners Island, just off East Hampton, Long Island, on August 1, 1965. I will live there in a state of perfect bliss, feasting […]
Along with global warming and the environment, food has become one of the foremost political issues in America, especially among educated, well-heeled liberals. The emerging sensitive-foodie ethos hinges on a heightened awareness of those “starving children in Africa” whom our mothers invoked in order to make us eat our brussels sprouts—but adherents of the rawer, […]
Americans who have lived abroad know that the rest of the world is mildly obsessed with the CIA. I live in Istanbul, and early on I learned that many Turks believe CIA agents can pull off everything from September 11 to the election of Islamists; what’s more, they suspect I might be a spy, too. In this view of the world, some foreign influence is always responsible for something, some outside group is always “fomenting chaos” somewhere, some lethal CIA squad is always making it look like the leftists bombed the rightists by bombing the rightists themselves. At first, to
When the young Samuel Coleridge discovered The Arabian Nights’ Entertainment in 1798, the book so impressed him that he became, he wrote, “haunted by spectres.” His father, aghast at the effect the Nights was having, torched the child’s copy of the tales. But they’d already worked their spell. Coleridge credits the book with turning him into a dreamer, indisposed to all bodily activity, “fretful, and inordinately passionate.”
Robert Adams, Eden, Colorado, 1968, gelatin silver print, 5 15/16 x 5 9/16″. Near the beginning of the third volume of photographer Robert Adams’s The Place We Live, a compilation containing nearly four hundred tritone plates (about half reproduced at full size), published to accompany a major traveling exhibition of Adams’s work (currently in Los […]
Frankfurt School favorite Charlie Chaplin. Any student of silent cinema, critical theory, and the Frankfurt School, or film aesthetics and the avant-garde, will surely at one point or another have come into contact with the work of Miriam Hansen. Her groundbreaking study Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (1991) inspired a generation of […]
There are two man-made objects visible from space. One is the Great Wall of China. The other is a newer addition: a massive garbage dump at Fresh Kills, New York, home to fifty years’ worth of New York City’s trash.
Author of The Soviet Novel, a classic analysis of socialist-realist fiction of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, and a professor of Slavic literature at Yale, Katerina Clark here reads the text of High Stalinism. In Moscow, the Fourth Rome—a series of linked essays following an adroitly plotted historical narrative—she recounts a scandalous episode in art history, while making a significant contribution to the understanding of 1930s European political culture and providing a lucid guide to the late-’30s period of mainly Soviet collective mania.
I know how to sharpen pencils. I shove them into the electric pencil sharpener suction-cupped onto a corner of my desk. It growls so satisfyingly and provides a kind of smoke break for a nonsmoker—a perfect bit of procrastination. Some days I am committed to sharpening every pencil I can find before starting work—even though I do most of my work with a fountain pen.
Gil Scott-Heron, 2010. Years before he died last May at age 62, the legendary poet, novelist, and musician Gil Scott-Heron had been working on a memoir. Canongate Books, his publisher in Britain, announced plans to publish the book nearly a decade ago, and on the Canongate website there is a spectral recording from the early […]
When Daniel Levin Becker was sixteen, he made a mixtape that included only songs and artists whose names did not contain the letter e. Soon after, he read Georges Perec’s La Disparition, a novel written entirely without the offending vowel. Levin Becker spent a good part of his formative years “making the numbers and letters on license plates into mathematically true statements,” so he was heartened to discover that he was “not alone in appreciating naturally occurring palindromes, or knowing a shorter sentence with all the letters in the alphabet than The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,
WHAT DOES NOT INITIALLY MEET THE EYE in Richard Mosse’s vivid photographs of cotton-candy hillsides, vamping child soldiers, and rose-hued rebels is the violence of their setting: the war-torn Kivu region of eastern Congo. Located near the border of Rwanda, Kivu has been ground zero for many of the worst atrocities of a civil war […]
LAST SEPTEMBER, shortly before the Whitechapel Gallery mounted an exhibition of Wilhelm Sasnal’s work, Phaidon’s website posted a list of songs the Polish artist listens to while painting. Many of the tracks are ominously monotone, uniform in mood, sound, or structure—there’s no resolution, no cure for what ails. Even Elvis’s “Blue Moon,” second on Sasnal’s […]
Herb Ritts, Richard Gere—Poolside (detail), 1982. Courtesy and © the Herb Ritts Foundation, Los Angeles SWIMMING POOLS. MOVIE STARS. The Clampetts found them when they moved to Beverly. Hills, that is. And they are what you find in this portable summer-between-covers collection of SoCal pool photos that feature the likes of Rock Hudson, Marilyn Monroe, […]
Christa Parravani, Charlie, 2004. I felt super proud of myself when I made it all the way to page 3, technically page 1, of Christa Parravani’s memoir her before I Googled “christa parravani.” Parravani, as she immediately reveals in the book, is a photographer whose identical twin sister is dead. But I wanted to know: […]
Yasmine Chatila, Bathroom Girl II (detail), 2007–2008. Rushdie had the Ayatollah, Job had God, and James Lasdun has Nasreen—at least that’s what he calls her in Give Me Everything You Have (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25)—the former creative-writing student who harassed him for five years and is apparently still at it. As Lasdun remarks mordantly, […]
Laura Kurgan, New York, September 11, 2001, Four Days Later, 2001, digital print from Ikonos satellite data. On December 24, 1968, Apollo 8 emerged from its fourth lunar cycle on the first manned mission to another celestial body. “Oh, my God,” cried astronaut Frank Borman as the spacecraft emerged from the moon’s dark side. “Look […]
