James C. Goodale, the so-called “father of reporters’ privilege” and the author of a new book called Fighting for the Press (CUNY Journalism Press, 255 pp., $20), was in his office at the Debevoise & Plimpton law firm, where he’s a partner, comparing Barack Obama to Richard M. Nixon.
“Nixon and Agnew were like Read More
Born in 1915, Saul Bellow published his first novel, Dangling Man, in 1944. He would go on to write 18 books of fiction (14 novels, four story collections) which between them would win him the Pulitzer Prize (Humboldt’s Gift, 1975), a record-setting three National Book Awards (The Adventures of Augie March, 1953; Herzog, Read More
André Aciman would seem a prototypical ambassador of learned neither-here-nor-thereness, an Alexandrian Jew whose output as a novelist of nostalgia rivals his stature as a scholar of Proust. But if his well-received 1994 memoir Out of Egypt stood apart as a personal-political lament, Harvard Square, a semiautobiographical work of fiction, deals with an altogether different sort of longing.
In 2007, The New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl gave a talk at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in which he said that the hosting city was “a great place to be, if you have a particular reason.” He went on to call Chicago one of the “great receptor cities of the world” for all the artistic talent it sends to other places, maybe not realizing he had opened up old wounds inflicted by another New Yorker writer nearly 55 years earlier when the late A.J. Liebling proclaimed Chicago the “Second City,” behind Mr. Liebling’s hometown of New York. The most recent New York media potshot at Chicago was by Rachel Shteir, an ex-New Yorker and current Chicagoan, in a recent New York Times Book Review piece, “Chicago Manuals.” Ms. Shteir, who claimed not to be “some latter-day A.J. Liebling” in her attack on the city she has called home for the last 13 years, pointed out Chicago’s many faults, from rampant gun violence to the nation’s second-highest combined sales tax and the clear lines of segregation that zip through its neighborhoods. (Ms. Shteir’s review generated titanic reaction from the media in Chicago, all of it wounded, which pretty much proved her point; she wrote about the experience for the Observer.) I left Chicago over a decade ago, but I still recognize these problems in my beloved hometown. And yet I wondered what city doesn’t have a laundry list of specific failings.
Thomas Dyja, a Chicago native, doesn’t set out to change the view of contemporary Chicago with his latest book, The Third Coast. Instead, the book charts “When Chicago Built the American Dream” through a detailed look at postwar Chicago and how the Second City changed the course of America for good.
The march of people into an art fair on opening day is always a little funereal. The collectors are straight-faced—they mean business—and others are bracing themselves for a day spent in the confines of a convention center with its sterile fluorescent lighting.
At Paris Photo, which held its first American edition at Paramount Studios in Los Angeles last week, the mood was nothing short of giddy. Walking through the labyrinthine alleys of Paramount was simultaneously familiar and unrecognizable. The giant screen painted like the sky sitting in the parking lot seemed to lift the veil on a few open-air scenes from cinematic history. And the New York back lot—adorned with fake subway kiosks, fake brownstones and fake walk-ups with fake fire escapes—almost made me feel right at home, except that the kiosks didn’t lead to anywhere but a brick wall and the upper floors of the brownstones didn’t exist beyond the building facades. Dealers had settled inside, creating impromptu businesses that made the fair feel like a stroll through an under-construction gallery district.
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Last Wednesday, U.S. Congressman Joe Barton, speaking before a House subcommittee that aims to fast-track construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, swatted down, with his Bible, any hope that climate change is a man-made phenomenon.
“I would point out that if you are a believer in the Bible, one would have to say the Great Flood was an example of climate change,” Mr. Barton explained. “That certainly wasn’t because mankind had overdeveloped hydrocarbon energy.”
Meanwhile, in Kentucky, the state’s Tourism Board has tax-incentivized the construction of a $155 million Noah’s Ark-based theme park. Evangelical Christians offered assurance that the park will feature a “full-size” Biblical Ark, built to specifications. State Democrats promised that the park will produce 900 permanent jobs. A commissioner in rural Grant County, Ky., where the park is under construction, paraphrased both sides: “With every ark there is a rainbow, and at the end of this rainbow is a pot of gold.”
“I guess I felt—and now feel—as though I was 19 when I wrote it,” Renata Adler said of her first novel Speedboat. “And maybe still am. And by Pitch Dark, I was maybe 19-and-a-half.”
In fact, Ms. Adler, a slight, bespectacled woman who was seated across from me a few weeks ago at a café near Grand Central, was turning 38 when Speedboat was published in 1976. Pitch Dark came out seven years later. Both, long out of print, have just been reissued by NYRB Classics, but not before other writers drummed up interest about Ms. Adler’s work. The National Book Critics Circle campaigned for Speedboat to be reissued, and David Shields, whose 2010 book Reality Hunger helped introduce a new generation of readers to Ms. Adler’s debut, wrote in an email to me, “A crucial part of the performance of her literary persona—in Speedboat and Pitch Dark and elsewhere—is how resolutely un-nice she is while remaining deeply civilized.”
In person, she’s friendly, occasionally pausing mid-thought, hooking her left thumb into the black belt of her blue jeans while she chooses her next words. On the page, she is calm, observant and logical; she is funny, with an eye for the ridiculous; she is rigorous and intelligent. And she is unabashedly honest. Read More
Once upon a time, in a world before the Department of Sanitation, New York City’s streets flowed with raw sewage. Slaughterhouses and farms dumped animal waste in the drinking water, and the number of yellow fever-driven deaths and exiles stretched into the tens of thousands. By the 1850s, New Yorkers were up to their necks in an accumulation of rot and bodies that became known as “corporation pudding.”
That’s the cautionary tale behind a new book out this month, Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks With the Sanitation Workers of New York City, in which author Robin Nagle reminds readers that we ought to be a little more appreciative of the men and women who clean up after us, lest we tempt such a fate—or, God forbid, have to deal with our own trash. Read More
The Canadian poet and classics scholar Anne Carson began her 1998 “novel in verse” Autobiography of Red with the line “He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.” That is a perfect sentence. Its built-in double take is typical of Carson’s straight-faced comedy. Red Doc> (Knopf, 192 pp., $24.95), Ms. Carson’s new “sequel” to Autobiography, begins like this:
goodlooking boy wasn’t he / yes / blond /
yes / I do vaguely
/ you never liked
him / bit of a
rebel / so you
said / he’s the
one wore lizard
pants and
No, there aren’t any words missing, nothing to orient you—just this weirdly spaced dialogue. So Anne Carson might be a little crazy. I’ve suspected this for some time, but her new book confirms it. Not that I’m complaining. Read More
A few weeks back, when I called the author Rachel Kushner in Los Angeles with the number her publicist gave me, and the voice came on the other line saying “I’m sorry but the number you are trying to reach has been disconnected,” the first thing I thought—after noting that it’s an overly apologetic man Read More
