Showing posts with label review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label review. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Last Words | Charles Simic
Last Words
Charles Simic
The first instance of capital punishment on record in America was the shooting in colonial Virginia of George Kendall, accused of plotting to betray the British to the Spanish. If he had any parting quips, they were not written down. We have to wait for the execution of two Quakers, Marmaduke Stevenson and William Robinson, fifty years later, on October 27, 1659, for an account of the last words of the condemned. As one would expect, the two men, who were convicted and hung for disobeying banishment from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, reaffirmed their faith in God and reminded the spectators to mind the light that shone within them. Since then, as Last Words of the Executed, an enthralling book by Robert K. Elder, amply documents, there have been over sixteen thousand executions in this country and a vast record of final pronouncements taken from prison records, eyewitness statements, newspaper accounts, period diaries and written statements. Some of these are credibly attributable to the executed while others are of questionable origin or indisputably redacted.
Why this enormous interest in the final thoughts of men and women who were often guilty of committing horrific crimes? It must be the same morbid curiosity that brought huge crowds of Americans to public executions in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Many considered these grim occasions so much fun they brought their families along. The spectators didn’t mind if the hanging they were watching was botched and the condemned struggled choking for a long while at the end of the rope, or if his body dropped headless to the ground, and greeted such horrors with “rude jests” and “rabid laughter.” They expected, as part of the program, to hear a public admission of guilt, expression of remorse, appeal for forgiveness from God and the assembled, and a warning about the evils of booze and company of loose women. They were rarely disappointed…….
Sunday, May 30, 2010
The Norman Conquests
Even in his grave, Norman Mailer is providing gossip, with memoirs this year by his widow, his cook, and one of his mistresses. Yet despite the sea of women in Mailer’s life—six wives and countless lovers—his great literary handicap was the failure to learn from them.
June 2010
Mailer with his sixth wife, Norris, in New York City, 1980
By Ron Galella.
What an active afterlife Norman Mailer has led! He’s left us behind and yet here he buzzes, a prodigious gossip item from beyond the grave. A writer who never stopped making news—from the age of 25, when his best-selling novel The Naked and the Dead captured the first beachhead of postwar American fiction, until his death at the age of 84 in 2007, when the critical ruckus over his final novel, The Castle in the Forest (a metaphysical proctology probe of the incipient evil of Adolf Hitler), shook the branches yet again—Mailer was too warrior-minded to let his words do all the talking. His fists and penis also played principal roles. Perhaps the most highly publicized American author of the modern era, the inheritor of Hemingway’s heavyweight-division machismo and cult of experience (taste that salty sea air, inhale that tarty perfume!), he punched his way through the paper walls of print to test himself on stage and screen (as scriptwriter, actor, and director), in the TV studio (behaving like a wrathful thundercloud in his infamous face-off with Gore Vidal on The Dick Cavett Show), on the feminist battlefield (“I’m not going to sit here and listen to you harridans harangue me,” he barked in the 1979 documentary Town Bloody Hall), at the political racetrack (he ran for mayor of New York in 1969), and inside the boxing ring (sparring with José Torres on The Dick Cavett Show). Violence attended a life driving forward along the knife edge of one’s nerves. Mailer made shock headlines for stabbing his second wife, Adele Morales, at a party after she called him a “faggot,” and for co-sponsoring the release of prisoner Jack Henry Abbott, who, shortly after parole, stabbed a waiter to death in the East Village. By the time Mailer’s life neared its end, however, the fevers he had aroused had mostly burned off, dissipating into the winter sky, his hair and reputation glinting with statesman-like silver. More modesty entered his manner, yet the scale of his intentions remained overarching. Unlike some novelists as they enter the wind-down phase, Mailer didn’t miniaturize his ambitions in his senior years, aiming instead high and wide with mammoths such as Harlot’s Ghost, Oswald’s Tale, and the first installment of the Hitler prose epic, The Castle in the Forest, conceived as a Thomas Mann-ish seven-volume swan song. He intended to go out the way he came in: big.
Read more: The Norman Conquests | Culture | Vanity Fair
Monday, April 19, 2010
Technologies of the Imagination: A review of Tilism-e Hoshruba in translation
From:
by Bilal Tanweer
HOSHRUBA—The Land & the Tilism (Book One)
By Muhammad Husain Jah
Translated with Introduction and Notes by Musharraf Ali Farooqi
516 pages, Urdu Project
ISBN: 978-0978069551
Price: US $25
[This tale] has consumed whole generations of readers before you. And like all great tales, it is still hungry—ravenous, in fact—for more. You may not return from this campaign. Or come back so hardened you may never look at stories in quite the same way again.
It might seem an exaggeration, but here are the facts: this yarn was spun by two generations of storytellers and it is spread over eight thousand pages in its original Urdu language. At the height of its popularity in North India, it attracted legions of followers all the way from the aristocratic class down to the ordinary folk of the bazaar. In other words: this is a bloody carnival of a book, and everyone is invited.
Reading it, you immediately think of Borges’ remark on The Thousand and One Nights: “one feels like getting lost in [it], one knows entering that book one can forget one’s own poor human fate; one can enter a world, a world made of archetypal figures but also of individuals.”
That sums it up, really. Except, during the course of this narrative, our poor fate is in the hands of five tricksters, who are the heroes of the tale: they are spies, assassins, chameleons, and commandoes all rolled into one and their tricks usually involve elaborate plots to overcome the astounding magic of enemy sorcerers. But they aren’t your regular Bond-style smart guys; they are much flatter – types, as Borges puts it. And that’s how the narrative also goes: focused entirely on action and rooted firmly in absolute notions of good and evil, beauty and ugliness, love and loyalty, it lacks every nuance of psychology or empathy with the ‘other’ that you may think of. It is a tumbling, rollicking war machine that lusts after the triumph of good and will settle for nothing less than a thorough devastation of evil that is the enchanted Land of Hoshruba and its ruler, Emperor Sorcerer Afrasiyab.
In a delightful introduction to the volume, the first of twenty-four that will be published over the course of the next eight years, the translator, Musharraf Ali Farooqi, carefully constructs an imagined account of how this mighty and fabulous tale might have come into being.
During the mid-nineteenth century in Lucknow, India, where oral storytelling was still a viable career ……..Read more
Thursday, November 5, 2009
FT.com / Books / Essays - Grime and punishment
By John Thornhill
Published: October 30 2009 23:33 | Last updated: October 30 2009 23:33
The Sacred Book of the Werewolf
By Victor Pelevin
Trans by Andrew Bromfield
Faber £8.99
FT Bookshop price: £7.19The Good Angel of Death
By Andrey Kurkov
Trans by A Bromfield
Harvill Secker £12.99
FT Bookshop price: £10.39One More Year
By Sana Krasikov
Portobello £10.99
FT Bookshop price: £8.79She Lover of Death
By Boris Akunin
Trans by A Bromfield
Weidenfeld & Nicholson, £16.99
FT Bookshop price: £13.59
The death of Russian literature has been declared many times. Russian poetry was supposed to have perished tragically early, interred with the body of Alexander Pushkin in 1837 following his fateful duel. Then along came Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva, an astonishing quartet of poets who revived and reinvented the genre in an explosion of creativity in the early 20th century.
Epic Russian novels, meanwhile, were pronounced dead after Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy. But in describing the brutalities of the second world war and the gulag, Vasily Grossman and Alexander Solzhenitsyn proved worthy heirs of those 19th-century masters.
Once again it has become fashionable to argue that Russian fiction is over, buried under the rubble of the former Soviet Union. Critics have decreed that no classic works of Russian literature have emerged in the past 18 years.
That may be true, but green shoots are now pushing through the fallen masonry. Four new Russian novels reveal flashes of fabulous writing, at times reminiscent of the wild imaginings of Mikhail Bulgakov, the dystopic visions of Yevgeny Zamyatin or the gentle humanity of Anton Chekhov. Russian literature has long ago left Socialist Realism panting behind – now it is striding out in the company of Capitalist Surrealism.
Saturday, May 2, 2009
2009 Hugo Award Nominations
Anticipation, the 67th World Science Fiction Convention, has announced the ballot for the 2009 Hugo Awards. The announcement on the Anticipation web site includes links to some of the nominees’ web sites, including free downloads of selected nominees.
Best Novel
(639 Ballots)
- Anathem by Neal Stephenson (Morrow; Atlantic UK)
- The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins; Bloomsbury UK)
- Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (Tor Teen; HarperVoyager UK)
- Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross (Ace; Orbit UK)
- Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi (Tor)
Best Novella
(337 Ballots)
- “The Erdmann Nexus” by Nancy Kress (Asimov’s Oct/Nov 2008)
- “The Political Prisoner” by Charles Coleman Finlay (F&SF Aug 2008)
- “The Tear” by Ian McDonald (Galactic Empires)
- “True Names” by Benjamin Rosenbaum & Cory Doctorow (Fast Forward 2)
- “Truth” by Robert Reed (Asimov’s Oct/Nov 2008)
Best Novelette
(373 Ballots)
- “Alastair Baffle’s Emporium of Wonders” by Mike Resnick (Asimov’s Jan 2008)
- “The Gambler” by Paolo Bacigalupi (Fast Forward 2)
- “Pride and Prometheus” by John Kessel (F&SF Jan 2008)
- “The Ray-Gun: A Love Story” by James Alan Gardner (Asimov’s Feb 2008)
- “Shoggoths in Bloom” by Elizabeth Bear (Asimov’s Mar 2008)
Best Short Story
(448 Ballots)
- “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss” by Kij Johnson (Asimov’s Jul 2008)
- “Article of Faith” by Mike Resnick (Baen’s Universe Oct 2008)
- “Evil Robot Monkey” by Mary Robinette Kowal (The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume Two)
- “Exhalation” by Ted Chiang (Eclipse Two)
- “From Babel’s Fall’n Glory We Fled” by Michael Swanwick (Asimov’s Feb 2008)
Saturday, April 11, 2009
The Mad Ones
Illustration by Ed Piskor; from “The Beats”
THE BEATS
A Graphic History
Text by Harvey Pekar and others.
Art by Ed Piskor and others.
Edited by Paul Buhle
199 pp. Hill & Wang.
$22 By JOHN LELAND
Published: April 10, 2009
The writers of the Beat Generation had the good fortune to give themselves a name and to write extensively about their lives, in novels like Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” and William Burroughs’s “Junkie,” in poems like Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and, later, in memoirs like Joyce Johnson’s “Minor Characters” and Hettie Jones’s “How I Became Hettie Jones.” Jones once said they couldn’t be a generation because they could all fit in her living room, but in the popular imagination they were much more than the sum of their body parts or writings. They were a brand.
When the country still considered literary writers and poets important public figures, these were literary writers and poets who came with luridly colorful lives, 
“The Beats” moves this mythology into the comics realm, where it finds a nice fit. In the introduction, Harvey Pekar and the lefty historian Paul
Buhle write that the book has “no pretension to the depth of coverage and literary interpretation presented by hundreds of scholarly books in many languages,” adding that “no one claims this treatment to be definitive. But it is new, and it is vital.”
The pages that follow, mostly written by Pekar and illustrated by his frequent collaborator Ed Piskor, live up to both of those claims, while also living down to the caveats. “The Beats” is plainly celebratory. The writers and artists don’t try to untangle the Beats’ hazy history — which is often drawn from works of fiction — or to examine their writings. There are almost no quotations.
Friday, April 10, 2009
Robert Silverberg's Dying Inside
Michael Dirda in The Washington Post:
Now widely regarded as Robert Silverberg's masterpiece, "Dying Inside," first published in 1972, has just been reissued in a handsome trade paperback with a new preface by its author, one of science fiction's most distinguished writers. Yet this book is hardly what most people think of as science fiction. As a character, Selig has more in common with Philip Roth's Portnoy than with the more typical superwarriors of, say, Robert Heinlein's "Starship Troopers." Instead, Silverberg's novel offers an eerily evocative picture of New York life in the late 1950s and '60s: a time of bisexual professors, swinging singles, Black Power, psychedelic drugs and all-round social and political upheaval. Given Selig's bookishness, the novel is also suffused with buried quotations from T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Lewis Carroll, Shakespeare and many other literary eminences.
Above all, though, "Dying Inside" is a pleasure to read, full of that dry humor so common to melancholic intellectuals. Selig's taste in music, we learn, runs to "pretty austere stuff, thorny, inaccessible: Schoenberg, late Beethoven, Mahler, Berg, the Bartok quartets, Bach passacaglias. Nothing that you'd be likely to whistle after one hearing." At one time he contemplates writing a novel about -- what else? -- alienation in modern life.
More here.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Scents and sensibility
Jonathan Meades
Published 02 October 2008
Perfumes: the Guide
Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez
Profile Books, 384pp, £20
Luca Turin is a biophysicist and a street fighter in scientific academe. He has been a whistleblower on neurophysiological experimental malpractice and is the proponent of an olfactory theory which, while initially denounced as rogue science, is now increasingly acknowledged as the new orthodoxy. He is also a consultant "nose" to the perfume industry, though one who is sufficiently bolshie to bite the hands that have fed him: this is always a good sign.
His wife, Tania Sanchez, is described as a "perfume collector and expert, and a journalist". I guess I might describe myself in the same way, though the "expert" component is a loose fit. Still, there are 34 perfumes in my house as I write this, ranging from regional obscurities such as Écume d'Arcachon and Sent Bon de Bayonne to classics: Jicky, Mouchoir de Monsieur and Pour un Homme - all three of which meet with Turinia's endorsement.
I cannot tell you how much that means to me, for this highly excitable couple have set themselves up as The Measure, The Ultimate Arbiters. They aspire to be perfume's Parker, Pevsner, Pudlo. And, yes, they absolutely adore alliteration. It constellates in their oeuvre along with outré simile, hyperbole, quasi-synaesthesiac prose, in-jokes, arcane scholarship, unwitting mock-heroism, tireless exuberance, and a self-referential hermeticism that sites perfume at the very centre of the world.
Friday, May 30, 2008
Saturday, May 3, 2008
A Confederacy of Dunces
| Ignatius Comes of Age | ||
| Heather Heilman | ||
| tulanian@tulane.edu | ||
| Photography By Kenneth Harrison | ||
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But by the spring of 1963 something had changed. In his letters, he describes himself as content, relaxed and stable. He was productively at work on a novel. "Some of it, I think, is really very funny," he wrote of his work-in-progress. Later, as the time of his discharge from the Army approached, he wrote, "About the thing I am writing I have one conviction: it is entertaining and publishable, and I have more than a degree of faith in it." The working title of the novel was Ignatius Reilly, but we know it as A Confederacy of Dunces. It was published in 1980, 11 years after the author's suicide, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981. Tulane English professor Dale Edmonds identifies four quintessential literary works set in New Orleans: The novel is set in New Orleans in the early 1960s. Ignatius "graduated smart" from a certain uptown university, but has since managed to avoid gainful employment. He lives at home with his mother and spends his time reading the Roman philosopher Boethius, filling up numerous Big Chief tablets with "a lengthy indictment against our century," and talking back to Hollywood musicals at the Prytania Theater. But cruel Fortuna conspires against him, and his mother sends him out to look for a job. In his search for employment he encounters a cast of only-in-New-Orleans characters, from Irish Channel Yats to the strippers, pornographers and homosexual bon vivants of the French Quarter. 
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In 1963, Sgt. John Kennedy Toole (A&S '58) was stationed at the U.S. Army Training Center at Fort Buchanan, Puerto Rico, where overeducated draftees with expired student deferments taught English to Puerto Rican recruits. Toole had arrived in Puerto Rico in November of 1961. He did not enjoy his first year at Fort Buchanan. In letters home, he complained that everything there started late and that "nothing on this island can seemingly be subdued or rational or orderly," an astonishing gripe for a native of New Orleans. He described his students as "somewhat like characters from a Puerto Rican version of Grapes of Wrath." The rainy season depressed him. He was heartbroken when he lost his Tulane class ring. He was homesick and drinking too much. 
Kate Chopin's The Awakening, Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, and A Confederacy of Dunces--a motley group of books despite their common setting. Confederacy is the most peculiar of the four, a chaotic account of the misadventures of obese, slovenly, delusional, pretentious, obnoxious, hunting-cap-wearing Ignatius J. Reilly. But that string of adjectives barely begins to describe him. He's a character who resists quick description--he's someone the reader has to experience directly. Sunday, March 30, 2008
Are you sitting uncomfortably?
The bourgeoisie get it in the neck on both sides of the Channel in Yasmina Reza's latest class act
Susannah Clapp
Sunday March 30, 2008
The Observer
God of Carnage Gielgud, London W1 & Théâtre Antoine, Paris
Even when things go wrong for Yasmina Reza, they produce a theatrical frisson (she's French). Two-thirds of the way through the first night of her new play, the lights dipped suddenly (the cast carried on so blinklessly that the twilight could have been taken for part of the story) and a Porlocky person emerged from the wings to announce an electrical failure. Was this postmodernism? We were, after all, watching the work of a continental author. Then Cameron Mackintosh (theatre owner) and David Pugh (producer) appeared to say that after a pause the Show Would Go On. So there were cheers and clapping and Blitz spirit, and the enjoyable sense that a story had been born and a premiere turned into an event. People love it when something collapses in the theatre - though perhaps they love it more when they aren't paying for their seats.
Reza is a phenomenon, a phénomène, a Phänomen, a fenómeno. Her plays have been translated into 35 languages; the most famous, Art, ran in London for six years, with more than 20 different casts, starting with Tom Courtenay, Albert Finney and Ken Stott, and going on to include Jack Dee and The League of Gentlemen. Last year (in pre-Carla Bruni days), Reza wrote a best-seller about Nicolas Sarkozy in which she managed to be both sugary and sharp.
Now her new play, God of Carnage, first seen in Zurich, is being staged on both sides of what used to be the Channel and is now the Tunnel. At the Théâtre Antoine in Paris, in a production directed by the playwright, Isabelle Huppert is as intricate on stage as on screen: she's that extraordinary thing, an alluring study of affectation; her constantly working hands and facial expressions seem to be engaged in a tango. In Shaftesbury Avenue, a line-up of Reza-sharp actors - Ralph Fiennes, Tamsin Greig, Janet McTeer and Ken Stott - guarantees and justifies full houses.
As always with Reza, everything hangs on the casting. She's a writer for the stage not the page: a creator of vessels for actors to fill. Performers of her work will have to look hard for an unforgettable pungent phrase (has anyone ever said: only Yasmina Reza could have put it like that?), but not at all hard for singular theatrical shocks, shrewd circumstantial detail and soliloquies that give them a moment in the sun with a big central subject.
It's no surprise (and not just because the title tips you off) that God of Carnage - in which two middle-class couples meet to discuss and heal a spat between their sons - turns on the idea that adults are no more evolved than kids, that the bourgeoisie, groomed and courteous on the surface, are beastly underneath. It would take a really radical playwright to speak up for the middle classes, and Yasmina Reza is the opposite of that. The central image of her play is a tinkling irony: a pet hamster, hated by one of the dads, is dumped in the gutter where it proves as unable to cope with life outside as it was with life in a cage: the creature is neither wild nor tame.
Reza's disgruntled quartet are hamster-like. The most visceral of their deeds may look alarming in a sitting room, but they boil down to no more than angry rearrangements of décor. These are, nevertheless, acts of exposure. The clafoutis-baking mother who goes on about Darfur (Janet McTeer is majestic and ridiculous in an embroidered skirt and sincerely-deep voice) dismantles her peaceful, understanding profile when she hurls her guest's handbag across the room.
Tamsin Greig, a second wife in a too-smart suit, comes on with little-girl tilts of the head and wispy voice, and ends by shredding dozens of expensive Hockney-style tulips and plunging her husband's mobile into a vase. Thank God Debbie in The Archers has gone back to her suspicious-sounding lover in Hungary: the stage has gained a sly and slinky actor.
She's astute, is Reza. Her dialogue is often fraudulent (McTeer announces that she has no sense of humour - the one thing to which no one ever admits) but it's also sprinkled with legal-like wit (was one boy 'armed' or merely 'furnished' with a stick?). Her often languorous action is punctuated by sure-fire devices: you can't fail to impress with mobile-phone jokes in the theatre - nor with projectile vomit.
The very faintness of the characterisation is a spur to actors, to show what they can do. A lot, as it happens. Fiennes radiates contempt (his mouth and legs are always open) as a shark-faced lawyer who, wrapped up in defending a dodgy medicine, is like an MP in a sex scandal, compelled to spend time with his family. Stott is the most patronised character, and the most powerful: genial, raging and disappointed.
In Paris, the action takes place in front of a concrete wall split by a huge crack; there are animal howls as the lights go down at the end of the evening. Matthew Warchus's London production is less savage: Mark Thompson's scarlet set is
not riven, but wrinkled with tiny fissures; there is no baying. Reza gets something of a makeover in London, where Christopher Hampton's terrific idiomatic translation turns every insult into an elegant joke: the playwright, who worries that British audiences laugh at her plays (she thinks of them as tragedies), may not like that.
Thanks to Nahal
Sunday, February 24, 2008
The Nerve and the Will
back in May 2007, during a post on Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I promised a post on schnabel's other two movies.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a film directed by Julian Schnabel
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death
by Jean-Dominique Bauby, translated from the French by Jeremy Leggatt
Vintage, 132 pp., $12.95 (paper)
C.V.J.: Nicknames of Maitre D's & Other Excerpts from Life
by Julian Schnabel
Random House, 222 pp. (1987)
For those of us who have followed Julian Schnabel's larger-than-life career as an artist for nearly thirty years, watching his new movie The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a doubly extraordinary experience. It is a film that presents a nightmarish and almost unbearable medical case history that has been handled with humor, a lyrical deftness, and a remarkable absence of sentimentality; and if you have more than a passing sense of Schnabel the person and his work as a painter, your mind is running at the same time on a parallel track, one full of amazement and almost disbelief that, with no apparent training in theater arts or the directing of actors, or even a feeling for photography, he has turned himself into a sometime moviemaker—this is his third film—of such drive and sensitivity. The movie is about a patient's transformation of himself as he lies in a hospital bed; and it has been made by someone who, with a perhaps related kind of strength, is similarly extending himself.
Like Basquiat, Schnabel's 1996 film about the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Before Night Falls, of 2000, about the exiled Cuban poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is first and foremost a crisp, craftsmanly piece of work, stylish to the degree that the material calls for it and always driven by the needs of the story. Each of the movies, furthermore, is about an actual person of real accomplishment who came to an untimely death.
Before Night Falls, though, was a huge step forward. It, too, presents a person making his way through a distinct social milieu, in this case Castro's
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Notes on Susan
A review
By Eliot Weinberger
At the Same Time: Essays & Speeches
by Susan Sontag, edited by Paolo Dilonardo and Anne Jump, with a foreword by David Rieff
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 235 pp., $23.00
Susan Sontag was that unimaginable thing, a celebrity literary critic. Most readers of The New York Review probably would have been able to recognize her on the street, as they would not, say, George Steiner. An icon of braininess, she even developed, like Einstein, a trademark hairdo: an imperious white stripe, reminiscent of Indira Gandhi, as though she were declaring a cultural Emergency. Most readers probably know a few bits about her life, as they do not of any other critic: the girl Susan Rosenblatt—Sontag was her stepfather—in her junior high class in Arizona, with Kant, not a comic book, hidden behind her textbook. Her teenaged marriage to Philip Rieff that was her entry into highbrow society. ("My greatest dream was to grow up and come to New York and write for Partisan Review and be read by 5,000 people.") Her trip to Hanoi in 1968. The mini-skirted babe in the frumpy Upper West Side crowd and her years as the only woman on the panel. The front-page news in 1982 when, after years of supporting various Marxist revolutions, she declared that communism was "fascism with a human face." Her months in Sarajevo in 1993, as the bombs fell, bravely or foolishly attempting to put on a production of Waiting for Godot. Her struggle with cancer. Her long relationship with the glamour photographer Annie Leibovitz. We even know—from Leibovitz's grotesque "A Photographer's Life" exhibition and book—what Sontag looked like in the last days of her life and after her death.
At thirty, she had indeed become a regular contributor to Partisan Review, as well as The New York Review. At thirty-three, she collected her essays into Against Interpretation (1966), surely the best-known book of cul-tural criticism of its time, a dizzying, intimidating, simultaneous celebration of asceticism (Simone Weil) and absurdism (Eugène Ionesco), suicidal suffering (Cesare Pavese), physical self-loathing (Michel Leiris) and physical delight (Norman O. Brown), the criminal (Jean Genet) and the transgendered (Jack Smith), the minimal (Nathalie Sarraute) and the maximal (happenings, Marat/Sade), the films New York intellectuals were talking about (Godard, Resnais, Bresson) and the films French intellectuals were talking about (The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond). The book ended with a declaration of a "new sensibility," first proclaimed in the pages of Mademoiselle magazine, most of which sounded like the manifestos of a half-century before:
Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility. And the means for practicing art have been radically extended.... Painters no longer feel themselves confined to canvas and paint, but employ hair, photographs, wax, sand, bicycle tires, their own toothbrushes and socks. Musicians have reached beyond the sounds of the traditional instruments to use tampered instruments and (usually on tape) synthetic sounds and industrial noises.
The new sensibility is rooted in "new sensations such as speed," the new crowds of people, and the proliferation of material things. It blurs the distinction between high and low art, refuses to be sentimental, views the artwork as an object and not an "individual personal expression," and does not believe it should be a vehicle for meaning or moral judgment. "The new sensibility understands art as the extension of life."
Against Interpretation was a bombshell partially because, cloaked in a familiar and unthreatening critical discourse, it finally brought the tenets of Dadaism and Futurism and Surreal-ism to Riverside Drive, where the modern had been Joycean and Eliotic, a territory patrolled by New Critical, Freudian, and Marxist exegetes. What was missing in the book was any sense that Sontag was raising the revolutionary banner in a very tiny kingdom. When, in a famous sentence—the entire last section of her title essay—she declared, "In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art," the first-person plural reflected how isolated that kingdom was. It was already forty years after the first Surrealist manifesto or, closer to home, seven or eight years after "Howl" or On the Road. "We" could have taken the subway downtown.
Against Interpretation also contained, of course, "Notes on 'Camp'," which remained Sontag's best-known shorter essay, and the one cited in nearly all the obituaries. It has dated badly, especially as the word "camp" (let alone "to camp") has long since reverted to its summer leisure connotations, and its subtleties,Read more
Friday, July 20, 2007
Mister I Think
by James O'Connor
Zbigniew Herbert, translated by Alissa Valles, Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott, The Collected Poems 1956-1998 (Ecco Press, 2007)
Until this year, Zbigniew Herbert was hardly known, if at all, by English-speaking readers. An excellent selection of his Selected Poems, translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott in 1968 and reprinted in 1986, was almost impossible to find. We can be grateful that Ecco Press has brought out a long-overdue edition of Herbert’s Collected Poems, which include the Milosz-Scott translations with new translations by Alissa Valles. Herbert, who won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 1995, is a titan of not only Polish poetry, but of twentieth-century European poetry. His celebrated alter ego, Mr. Cogito, ranks as the one of the most original characters in modern poetry. Mr Cogito first appeared in 1974 and Herbert added poems by or about him in every book until his last in 1998.
The name of the alter ego derives from Descartes’ famous line: “Cogito ergo sum.” (“I think, therefore, I am.”) Mr. Cogito is ironic, droll, humble, self-deprecating, stubborn, valiant and philosophical. Many of the Mr. Cogito poems treat grand philosophical and metaphysical themes with a down-to-earth, no-nonsense attitude that is at once hilarious and profound; such poems include, among others, “Mr. Cogito Reflects on Suffering,” “Mr. Cogito on Virtue,” “Mr. Cogito and Pure Thought,” “Mr. Cogito’s Reflections on Redemption,” “Mr. Cogito and the Imagination,” and “Mr. Cogito Tells of the Temptation of Spinoza.” And then there are the less lofty titles, equally witty, like “Mr. Cogito Reads the Newspaper,” “Mr. Cogito Bemoans the Pettiness of Dreams,” “Mr. Cogito’s Late Autumn Poem for Women’s Magazines,” “Mr. Cogito’s Adventures with Music,” and my own personal favorite, “Mr. Cogito’s Eschatological Premonitions.”
Herbert lived through the Nazi occupation of 1941 and the Soviet occupations of 1939 and 1944 and was an active member of Poland’s underground resistance. Decades later, after marshal law was declared in Poland in 1981, Herbert supported the underground opposition to communism and was an important figure in the Solidarity movement. His poems are political, but only indirectly so. There are no place names, no naming of tragic events or villains. There is only a nearly constant call to compassion:
in order to revive the dead
and maintain the covenant
Mr Cogito’s imagination
moves like a pendulum
it runs with great precision
from suffering to suffering
If Herbert is a political poet, he’s political in the way Don Quixote is political. He doesn’t make us more aware. He makes us more human. Herbert himself recognizes Mr. Cogito might be a progeny of Don Quixote when Mr. Cogito reflects on his own two legs and calls the left one “Sancho Panza” and the right one “the wandering knight.”
The voice is romantic and stoic, an unlikely combination, and despite the horrors of the Nazi fascism and Soviet totalitarianism witnessed by his creator, Mr. Cogito stubbornly—and faithfully—celebrates life. In “Prayer of the Traveler Mr. Cogito,” the quixotic Mr. Cogito prays, “I thank you Lord for creating the world beautiful and various and if this is Your seduction I am seduced for good and past all forgiveness.”
Mr. Cogito thinks of blood and hell and redemption and torture and never loses his sense of urgency or his sense of humor. I will end this homage to Herbert and his magnificent alter ego by quoting “The Envoy of Mr. Cogito” as, quite frankly, Mr. Cogito should have the last word:
beware however of overweening pride
examine your fool’s face in the mirror
repeat: I was called—was there no one better
than I
beware of dryness of heart love the
morning spring
the bird with an unknown name
the winter oak
the light on the wall the splendor of the sky
they do not need your warm breath
they are there to say: no one will console you
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
The Dangerous Book for Boys
Boys Will Be...
...pleased by this garden of earthly delights.
by Roger Kimball
06/25/2007, Volume 012, Issue 39
...pleased by this garden of earthly delights.
by Roger Kimball
06/25/2007, Volume 012, Issue 39
The Dangerous Book for Boys
by Conn Iggulden and Hal Iggulden
HarperCollins, 288 pp., $24.95
I wouldn't be at all surprised if The Dangerous Book for Boys were banned by zealous school groups, social workers, and other moral busybodies. I first encountered this admirable work when it was published in London last year. I liked its retro look--the lettering and typography of the cover recalls an earlier, more swashbuckling era--and I thought at first it must be a reprint. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that a book containing instructions on how to make catapults, how to hunt and cook a rabbit, how to play poker, how to make a waterbomb, was published today, the high noon of nannydom.
The first chapter, "Essential Gear" ("Essential Kit" in the English edition), lists a Swiss Army knife, for God's sake, not to mention matches and a magnifying glass, "For general interest. Can also be used to start fires." Probably, the book would have to be checked with the rest of your luggage at the airport: If you can't bring a bottle of water on the airplane, how do you suppose a book advocating knives and incendiary devices is going to go over? Why, even the title is a provocation. The tort lawyers must be salivating over the word "dangerous," and I can only assume that the horrible grinding noise you hear is from Title IX fanatics congregating to protest the appearance of a book designed for the exclusive enjoyment of boys.
And speaking of "boys," have you noticed how unprogressive the word sounds in today's English? It is almost as retrograde as "girls," a word that I knew was on the way out when an academic couple I know proudly announced that they had just presented the world with a "baby woman."
No, I did not make that up, and even after due allowances are made for the fact that the couple were, after all, academics and therefore peculiarly susceptible to such p.c. deformations, it's clear that something fundamental is happening in our society. Some speak about the "feminization" of America and Europe. Scholars like Christina Hoff Sommers have reported on the "war against boys." A public school near where I live gets high marks for "academic excellence," but I note that they allow only 15 minutes of recess a day for kindergarteners and first graders. Result: By 2 P.M. the boys are ready to explode. That turns out to be a solvable problem, though, because a little Ritalin with the (whole grain) cornflakes does wonders to keep Johnny from acting up.
In a recent interview, Conn Iggulden, speaking about his collaboration with his brother in writing The Dangerous Book for Boys, dilated on this campaign against the boy-like side of boyhood. "They need to fall off things occasionally," Iggulden said, "or . . . they'll take worse risks on their own. If we do away with challenging playgrounds and cancel school trips for fear of being sued, we don't end up with safer boys--we end up with them walking on train tracks." Quite right. The Dangerous Book for Boys is alive with such salubrious challenges. Its epigraph, a 1903 letter from an army surgeon to the young Prince of Wales, advises, "The best motto for a long march is 'Don't grumble. Plug on.'" How antique that stiff-upper-lippery sounds to our ears!
The book includes instructions on making "The Greatest Paper Plane in the World." Did you know that many schools have outlawed paper airplanes? Might strike a child in the eye, don't you know. And of course, that's only the beginning of what many schools outlaw. The game of tag is verboten almost everywhere, ....
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Bush's Amazing Achievement
Review
By Jonathan Freedland
Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic
by Chalmers Johnson
Metropolitan, 354 pp., $26.00
Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower
by Zbigniew Brzezinski
Basic, 234 pp., $26.95
Statecraft and How to Restore America
by Dennis Ross
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 384 pp., $25.00
1.
One of the few foreign policy achievements of the Bush administration has been the creation of a near consensus among those who study international affairs, a shared view that stretches, however improbably, from Noam Chomsky to Brent Scowcroft, from the antiwar protesters on the streets of San Francisco to the well-upholstered office of former secretary of state James Baker. This new consensus holds that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a calamity, that the presidency of George W. Bush has reduced America's standing in the world and made the United States less, not more, secure, leaving its enemies emboldened and its friends alienated. Paid-up members of the nation's foreign policy establishment, those who have held some of the most senior offices in the land, speak in a language once confined to the T-shirts of placard-wielding demonstrators. They rail against deception and dishonesty, imperialism and corruption. The only dispute between them is over the size and depth of the hole into which Bush has led the country he pledged to serve.
Last December's Baker-Hamilton report, drawn up by a bipartisan panel of ten Washington eminences with perhaps a couple of centuries of national security experience between them and not a radical bone in their collective body, described the mess the Bush team had left in Iraq as "grave and deteriorating." The seventy-nine recommendations they made amounted to a demand that the administration repudiate its entire policy and start again. In the words of former congressman Lee Hamilton, James Baker's co-chair and a rock-solid establishment figure, "Our ship of state has hit rough waters. It must now chart a new way forward."[1]
So it comes as less of a surprise than once it might have to see Dennis Ross and Zbigniew Brzezinski—two further fixtures of the national security elite—step forward to slam the administration in terms that would, in an earlier era, have seemed uncouth for men of their rank. Neither Ross, who served as Middle East envoy for both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, nor Brzezinski, a conservative Democrat and cold war hawk, could be dismissed as Nation-reading, Howard Dean types. Yet in withering new books they both eviscerate the Bush record, writing in the tone of exasperated elders who handed over the family business to a new generation, only to see their successors drive the firm into bankruptcy. Both books offer rescue plans for a US foreign policy they consider to be in tatters.
Accordingly, their arguments are less striking than the fact that it is Ross and Brzezinski who are making them. Those who have been listening to theantiwar movement since 2002 will nod along at this assessment of the Iraq adventure:
It is hard to exaggerate the Bush administration's fundamental miscalculations on Iraq, including but not limited to unrealistic policy objectives; fundamental intelligence failures; catastrophically poor understanding of what would characterize the post-Saddam period, and completely unrealistic planning as a result; denial of the existence of an insurgency for several months; and the absence of a consistent explanation to the American people or the international community about the reasons for the war.
Small wonder that after nearly four years of warfare, Iraq has been a disaster, costing thousands of lives, requiring the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars, stretching our forces and reserve system to the breaking point, and becoming a magnet for terrorists and hostility toward the United States throughout the Muslim world.
But they should marvel that it comes from Dennis Ross, a loyal former lieutenant of Baker's who writes glowingly of Bush père and who was as comfortable in a Republican administration as a Democratic one. If they do not, then it is only because Chuck Hagel, Gordon Smith, Scowcroft, and even the late Gerald Ford have made Republican attacks on the Bush record since 2001 seem normal.
Similarly, a sentence like this has been uttered in European chancelleries every week for five years:
The Iraq War in all its aspects has turned into a calamity—in the way it was internally decided, externally promoted, and has been conducted—and it has already stamped the Bush presidency as a historical failure.
Yet that verdict comes not from some Venusian in Paris or Berlin but from Brzezinksi, that hardheaded Martian creature of Washington. Lest there be any doubt, the former national security adviser to Jimmy Carter issues a report card on the three presidencies since the end of the cold war. George H.W. Bush gets a B, praised for his calm management of the expiration of the Soviet Union and the united international front he constructed for his own desert confrontation with Saddam. Clinton manages a C, credited for effective championing of globalization and oversight of NATO enlargement, but debited for allowing too many important matters, especially nuclear proliferation, to drift. Bush's son is slapped with an unambiguous F.
That verdict is rooted in the administration's invasion.....
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