Diagram mapping eye movements while observing a painting. From “Ways of Seeing,” Cabinet magazine (summer 2008). On January 30, approximately 180 people overfilled an auditorium in the New York Public Library to witness an event titled (after Musil, in part) “Cabinet on Trial: A Magazine of No Qualities?” Forty-five issues into Cabinet’s run, which began […]
T he first inkling of William Styron’s interest in the rebel slave leader Nat Turner, which evolved into the prolix, vision-packed novel The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), surfaces in a letter to his literary agent in 1952. Styron asked Elizabeth McKee to look out for a copy of The Southampton Insurrection by William S. Drewry (1900). “It’s the only full account I know of the Nat Turner rebellion, and I’d like to read it.”
I am forty-four years old, and I have lived through a startling transformation in the status of gay men and women in the United States. Around the time I was born, homosexual acts were illegal in every state but Illinois. Lesbians and gays were barred from serving in the federal government. There were no openly gay politicians. A few closeted homosexuals occupied positions of power, but they tended to make things more miserable for their kind.
The Gawker writer Hamilton Nolan recently took memoirists to task with his piece “Journalism is not Narcissism,” which bluntly argued that “journalism is not about you” in the very first paragraph. While Nolan’s piece focused on writers “who decide to base their careers on stories about themselves” by writing essays that are “confessional as attention-grabber,” there is a whole other sort of nonfiction that was ignored in the piece, a kind of personal and reflective reporting that elevates the work above the sort of confessional that Nolan critiques. A perfect example of that style is found reading a memoir like
Craig Morgan Teicher’s third book, To Keep Love Blurry, name-checks only one of mid-century American poetry’s big-name Roberts: the now-unfashionable Lowell. Like Lowell, Teicher meticulously probes the intersections of writing poetry and living life. He can be lacerating, as was Lowell, in his depiction of himself as a father and husband. But Teicher’s poems also obsessively chart a kind of epistemological and existential anxiety, often in the manner of another mid-century Robert: Creeley, who once enjoined, “So keep on tracking—life.” When Teicher is at his best, he “tracks life” in a compelling and singular way. His long poems “Layoff,” “On
“I was a beatnik, and then I was a hippie, and before that I was a bohemian,” a sky-high Dennis Hopper confided to Merv Griffin on television one night in 1971, in a clip you can see on YouTube. On the opposite couch, Willie Mays uncomfortably refilled his glass of water and James Brolin sneered—Hopper certainly didn’t belong to their worlds.
Practically the opposite of a tell-all, J. G. Ballard’s memoir, Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, suggests that this is an author who said all he wanted to say in his fiction. First published in the UK in 2008, a year before his death from cancer at the age of seventy-eight, the genial and reflective Miracles of Life adds little to what faithful readers will have already gleaned about the workings of his mind and the contours of his life from various interviews, his provocative science fiction, and most of all from his two autobiographical novels, Empire of the Sun
No one was ever more suitably named, at birth and by marriage, than Constance Wilde. Her first name conveys her near-endless loyalty to her irresponsible, genius husband, Oscar. Even after the worst of humiliations—after he had taken up with the pretty young Lord Alfred Douglas and been sent to prison for the affair—she could still write in a letter, “What a tragedy for him who is so gifted!”
If you’re reading this, it’s a safe bet you read magazines. Technically, you may even be reading one now—though I’m not sure if bookforum.com really qualifies. The “.com” might denote precisely what isn’t Bookforum. I’m typing onto a computer screen; you’re reading from one. No trees have been killed. Are we in a magazine? I’m asking because I don’t honestly know.
Dave Bry is sorry. For several years, mostly for the New York website The Awl, he’s reached back into a sordid, New Jersey/New York past, unearthing misdeeds big and small. If you imagined each of these stories as a moral sustenance, Bry has for years now been serving up dark and funny snacks. Assembled rather expertly for his book Public Apology, they now qualify as something more satisfying, like a turkey dinner on how (not) to live.
The new face of boardroom feminism, of course, is Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg. Now, it’s nearly impossible to dislike Sandberg, or to be unimpressed by her wry candor and the indisputable truth of her message. Her new book, Lean In, is a disarmingly self-deprecating career-management advice manual that doubles as a feminist manifesto.
When Hugo Chávez took office as Venezuelan president in 1999, his appeal in the country seemed almost universal. Even many of the old petro-state’s entrenched beneficiaries, the elites with their flats in Paris, London, New York and Miami, welcomed a fresh face to shake up an ossified political system. The poor identified with his dark skin, folksy manner and confidence in speaking truth to power. Here, it seemed, was a leader with the vision, social commitment and broad base to break down the structural barriers that had marginalised so many.
Several crocodiles make appearances in The Rainbow Troops. They are presented without much fanfare, as they pose just one of the everyday dangers of living poor in an Indonesian swamp. When a crocodile blocks his way, Lintang, the unlikely star of his ten-student, one-room schoolhouse, simply hacks a new route to class. He is well-trained in the art of making do—although just barely. When his bicycle chain snaps, he pawns his father’s wedding ring to repair it. His classmates hope the chain will hold, since Lintang’s family has nothing else to pawn, and the bike is his only means of
In Stieg Larsson’s best-selling Millennium series, a disaffected teenaged rape survivor, Lisbeth Salander, kicks ass and takes names. Readers and critics hailed Larsson’s creation as groundbreaking. To pick just one representative case, Michiko Kakutani, in her review of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, calls Salander “one of the most original characters in a thriller to come along in a while: . . . the vulnerable victim turned vigilante; a willfully antisocial girl.” One would think the critics had never seen a woman in pants before, let alone one who can hold her own against the patriarchy.
Lakewood Church senior pastor Joel Osteen’s second book, Become a Better You, reportedly made him $13 million; his latest, I Declare (FaithWords, $22), is now on USA Today’s best-seller list. Osteen came to lead the country’s most mega megachurch by selling a feel-good message about the relationship between positive thinking and a life well lived. “Explosive blessings,” Osteen tells his congregation, come to those who “speak victory.” Osteen fans, who include Oprah Winfrey, Hulk Hogan, and Cher, are instructed to “develop a habit of happiness.” And while some critics quibble with the pastor’s parroting of the prosperity gospel, and others
Emily Bazelon’s intelligent, rigorous Sticks and Stones charts the experiences of a few bullied children and synthesizes the scholarship on how to contain or prevent such harm. She focuses primarily on the stories of three kids: an African-American girl, Monique McClain, who became the target of a few girls at her school in Connecticut, went through a depression and finally switched schools and found happiness; a gay boy in upstate New York, Jacob Lasher, who struggled against prejudice but also enjoyed being a provocateur; and Phoebe Prince, an Irish girl transplanted to a town in Massachusetts, who was bullied atrociously
Former General David Petraeus, now retired from the United States Army and unemployed, had been a professional soldier for thirty years before he commanded troops in combat. The year was 2003, the place southern Iraq. The war to overthrow Saddam Hussein was only a few days old when Petraeus concluded that the scrambling retreat of the Iraqi army was not going to be the whole of the story.
Dan Slater’s parents met through Contact, Inc., a matchmaking service that debuted in 1965 and went defunct soon after—though not before the two college students paid $4 each and filled out Contact’s 100-question personality test. A rented mainframe computer nicknamed Eros tallied up their responses and concluded they were well-suited. And thus a Harvard boy got introduced to a Mount Holyoke girl.
Jim Crace’s new novel, set in an unspecified part of rural England during an unspecified time that might be the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, begins with two pillars of smoke – an appropriately biblical turn. One of these announces that, somewhere within the boundaries of the tiny village where Harvest is set, new settlers have arrived: the law “gives the right of settlement and cedes a portion of our share to any vagrants who might succeed in putting up four vulgar walls and sending up some smoke before we catch them doing it”. The other column of smoke
One person’s sonic heaven is the next person’s purgatory. When is sound enjoyable? When is it an irritation? When is it actually dangerous? These are some of the themes of Mike Goldsmith’s Discord: The Story of Noise, an enjoyable history of “sound out of place.” Mr. Goldsmith, a longtime researcher in acoustics, covers the scientific history of noise—especially how to measure and contain it—as well as its cultural aspects.
