June 2008 Archives
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Gallery
Split Second
Barbara Probst’s diptych and triptych photos, taken at the same time from different cameras and points of view, offer multiple versions of a split second.
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Reading
The Osage Rose
Tom Holm, Native American scholar at the University of Arizona, fashions his debut novel in post-Great War Oklahoma, where oil exploration and exploitation were seriously at play. Ex-cop J.D....
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Reading
One Minute to Midnight
In Churchillian terms, this was Kennedy’s finest moment. By most accounts, his handling of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was a judicious and even-handed bit of brinksmanship. Of course it...
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Reading
The Temple of the Wild Geese & Bamboo Dolls of Echizen
Tsutomu Mizukami, who died in 2004, was a prolific writer who produced all manner of books—novels, detective stories, biographies, and plays. The Temple of Wild Geese is partly autobiographical; like...
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Reading
Small Lives
Pierre Michon’s Small Lives was first published in French in 1984, and is now being republished by Archiplelago Books, a small press out of Brooklyn that specializes in “publishing excellent...
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Reading
The Pathseeker
For some years Melville House has published the Art of the Novella series, which is now supplanted by the Contemporary Art of the Novella series, of which Nobel laureate Imre...
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Reading
10 Bad Dates with De Niro
This odd compendium of lists ends its 450 pages with Graham Fuller’s “Ten Christmas Movies to Save Us from Satan’s Power” (Fuller apologizes for leaving off Terry Zweigoff’s...
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Reading
The History of Human Rights
On the face of it, human rights is not exactly the most exciting topic, but in this historical survey (apparently the only comprehensive study of its kind), Micheline Ishay has...
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Reading
America Between the Wars From 11/9 to 9/11
This book’s subtitle (“The Misunderstood Years Between the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Start of the War on Terror”) aptly synopsizes its content, focusing on the 12 years...
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Reading
Democracy’s Prisoner
The Eugene V. Debs story is a moving, albeit instructive one, though he likely will never be given his due as one of the great figures of American history. Jailed...
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Reading
Beyond the Hoax
Physicist Alan Sokal is famous for his 1996 Social Text article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” written as a parody of postmodernism (it is included in...
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Reading
The Comanche Empire
There is some quibbling regarding the use of the word “empire” in Pekka Hämäläinen’s fascinating new history of the powerful and unrecognized Comanche tribe of the...
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Reading
Stop Me If You’ve Heard This
Jim Holt, who writes for a number of smart publications—The New York Times, The New Yorker, Slate, Lingua Franca, and then some—tries to answer the question, “What’s...
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Reading
House of Wits
A family that includes William and Henry and Alice James is an obvious motherlode of story, information, and speculation—all that remains is for Paul Fisher to build a coherent,...
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Reading
The Song of Everlasting Sorrow
The latest opus from Wang Anyi (Baotown) is set in post-World War II Shanghai, and traces the survival of ghetto girl Wang Qiyao, who is deeply impressed with the incandescence...
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Reading
America America
Iowa Writer’s Workshop guru Ethan Canin (Carry Me Across the Water) has a number of well-regarded books under his belt, most notably his story collection The Palace Thief. His...
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Reading
What Margot Livesey’s Been Reading
Margot Livesey—whose newest opus, House on Fortune Street, you should include in your to-be-read list—writes: When I was almost five my father married my stepmother and we began...
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Of Recent Note
Ways We’re Saving Money
As the price of everything hikes higher and higher, thrift is fast becoming an essential life skill. The TMN readers and writers tell us how they’re beating the high cost of living.
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Watching
Video Digest: June 27, 2008
June is the gayest time of the year, thanks to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (L.G.B.T.) pride celebrations happening throughout the month. This June is extra-special because...
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Personal Essays
Mr. Can’t Fix It
To the unhandy, a broken appliance offers an opportunity to prove one’s mettle—and finally break the plastic wrap on that toolbox. A stay-at-home dad calls in reinforcements.
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Listening
African Scream Contest
In Africa, they’re just getting around to publishing essential psychedelic compilations that should have been out eons ago. Few know a name outside of Fela Kuti or King Sunny...
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Listening
3rd Planet
I really wanted to love bluegrass; I really did. It helped me think I didn’t actually avoid country music, just commercial country music. Or electric country music (or some...
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Listening
The Secrets of Iceland
From what I can tell, Iceland is on a breakneck pace to make it seem like a place called “Iceland” is a sun-drenched adventure land. They don’t use gasoline,...
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Listening
No Pause
Kids seem to love these mash-ups. It appeals to their dual desires of flaunting copyright laws and hearing lots of songs all at once. It’s a short-attention-span, intellectual-property-law jamboree....
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Listening
Better
The legend is true: The infamous, ill-fated, Guns N’ Roses album Chinese Democracy has been leaked after 14 years of recording and scads of record-company dollars down the four-track. I had...
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Gallery
Topologies
Photographer Edgar Martins seeks out banal settings, takes his time, and without any post-production trickery exposes what you missed, say, the last time you landed at JFK.
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James P. Morse
Todd Osborn
Hometown: Wayne, Mich. Occupation: Music producer, tinkerer I love the short video Ghostly posted about you. One unexpected bit shows you polishing off a plane. I’ve been flying for...
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Wordsworth
Out of Arm’s Way
Lyrics in music rarely get the scrutiny and attention they deserve. With an ear for meaning, Orr Shtuhl dives deep into the unsettling content of Islands’ latest album.
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Listening
White Winter Hymnal
Hailing from Seattle and signed to the cred-dispensing Sub Pop label, Fleet Foxes not only has a really cute name that’s fun to say, they have current and former...
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Listening
Dr. Carter
At the tender age of 15, Lil Wayne was already becoming something of a trump card in Cash Money’s hand, and Wayne’s Hot Boys group produced some of the...
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Listening
Ghost Town (Pt. 1)
Only recently was I clued in to Parts & Labor, a Brooklyn-based noise-pop outfit playing at this summer’s Siren Festival at Coney Island. Luckily I heard about the group just...
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Listening
Good Enough
I’m a sucker for a good cover, and this week’s honorable mention goes to the Acorn, a Canadian group that recently contributed a cover of Cyndi Lauper’s “...
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Listening
Go for the Exit
After calling Guided by Voices quits just four short years ago, Bob Pollard, the quits-caller, has released about eight solo albums, plus various EPs and albums with side projects (e...
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Op-Ed
Someone’s in the Kitchen With Ignatius J. Reilly
Ever since she left Little House on the Prairie behind and was forced, when she grew too old for books with pictures, to conjure up storybook settings, our writer has been placing the fiction she reads in the homes she knows.
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Reading
A Conservative History of the American Left
Daniel Flynn (Intellectual Morons, Why the Left Hates America) pulls no punches in his survey of left-wing schemes, personalities, agendas, and movements. In spite of a clearly stated bias, he...
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Reading
Dear American Airlines
A man is marooned at O’Hare Airport on the way to his daughter’s wedding, which he will now miss. He begins to compose a letter asking for a...
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Reading
Lush Life
Except for what I consider an unfortunate title choice (once having heard various versions—Nat Cole, Johnny Hartmann—of Billy Strayhorn’s masterpiece) that casts an odd shadow, this is...
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Reading
Sea Change
It is immediately apparent (as it should be) that this slim volume of poems is handsomely and thoughtfully designed. A nice choice of colors and type for the dust jacket...
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Reading
The Crowd Sounds Happy
Nicholas Dawidoff’s previous memoir, The Fly Swatter: How My Grandfather Made His Way in the World, told of Professor Alexander Gershenkron’s illustrious and much-traveled life. In his newest...
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Reading
Underground America
Novelist Peter Orner (The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo) edits the third volume in McSweeney’s Voices of Witness series, an oral history collection of undocumented immigrants. No doubt they...
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Reading
Outlaw Journalist
Hunter Thompson was sufficiently talented, charismatic, whacked, imaginative, and much more to warrant countless books. Credited with inventing gonzo journalism (as Gabriel García Márquez is with magical realism,...
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Reading
Fidelity
Like a handful of other writers (Elmore Leonard, Jim Harrison, Alan Furst, Colin Harrison, Philip Roth, Margot Livesey, and Richard Price), Thomas Perry regularly writes immensely readable novels, which in...
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Reading
Franklin & Lucy
It’s amazing to me how this story is still tiptoed around many years later. From the publisher: “Joseph E. Persico explores F.D.R.’s romance with Lucy Rutherfurd,...
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Reading
McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern No. 27
If you are unaware of McSweeney’s I’d ask you where you have been, but I realize its big, big world with lots of stuff to distract us. Anyway,...
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Reading
We Would Have Played for Nothing
Can you imagine today’s sports stars expressing the title’s sentiments? Former Major League Baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent assembles a riveting cast of stars of what may arguably called...
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Reading
No Way Home
I am almost always enchanted by exile and expatriate memoirs of Cuba—from Renaldo Arenas’s Before Night Falls (made into a great film by Julian Schnabel) to Alma Guillermoprieto’...
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Reading
The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories
John Kessel (Good News From Outer Space, Corrupting Dr. Nice) is well regarded and noted in the speculative fiction world, extolled for humor and a crafty imagination. This anthology of 15...
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Reading
Glimmertrain, Summer 2008
Many of you will no doubt recall that during the ‘60s, Oregon was a much-extolled destination for people seeking what was then (and perhaps now) considered a decent life. So...
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Reading
What Alan Gurganis’s Been Reading
Tim Russert, in case you missed the news, has died. As he was a TV journalist, it behooves the U.S. news engine to dwell on and parse every aspect...
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Gallery
Falling to Earth
The self-portraits of Chinese performance artist and photographer Li Wei tend to astound; his relationship with gravity is not exactly predictable. Using mirrors, cables, wires and other tools, the artist produces sublime surprises.
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Spoofs & Satire
M4W: Surrogate Mother
About us: A childless couple who pines for the pitter-patter of little feet around the house. About you: Fertile, with an athletic build, and maybe a tattoo.
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Watching
Video Digest: June 13, 2008
When the need arises to indulge in the felicity of unbounded domesticity, not everyone is up to the task. Some of us weren’t raised by kings and/or queens...
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Personal Essays
Regular Guys
University communities are often divided by townie and out-of-towner, and never the twain shall date. A story of town and gown, and lawnmower mania.
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Announcements
Ways We’re Saving Money
Hail! Another Of Recent Note is upon us, and we’re inviting you to take part. This month’s assignment is: “Ways We’re Saving Money” The economy is doomed,...
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Profiles
Emails From My Father
Emails have about as much room for nuance as Post-It notes, and less staying power. But sometimes they’re pure poetry.
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Listening
A Truer Top 40
We all know the Billboard Top 100 is a sham; it’s a meaningless list of vacuous posers and pitch-shifted payola. The bands, singers, and studios that make it to the...
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Personal Essays
Memorare
While AIDS is still a major killer around the world, it has become a manageable condition for most HIV-positive Americans. Bearing witness to a time when the mortal threat was closer to home.
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Reading
State of Exile
Self-exiled in the early ‘70s (in response to a military coup when her work was banned and her life threatened) Uruguayan writer Christina Peri Rossi wrote these poems during her...
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Reading
Say You’re One of Them
Nigerian writer Uwem Akpan also happens to be a Jesuit priest with an MFA from the University of Michigan. His stories have won prizes and been published in The New...
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Reading
The Finder
I have been a devotee of former Harper’s editor Colin Harrison’s (The Havana Room) writing from his first novel (of six), and he rarely disappoints. His grasp of...
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Reading
The Book of Chameleons
Portuguese novelist JoséEduardo Agualuso is introduced to English-speaking Americans with this crime story set in Angola, where Felix Ventura trades in manufacturing pasts for customers requiring a nobler lineage....
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Reading
Factory of Tears
If you can point to the globe and find Belarus, more power to you. Poet Valzhyna Mort is a Belarusian cultural nationalist, well-regarded and -awarded in Europe. She now lives...
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Reading
The House on Fortune Street
Amazingly, I am always catching the impressive Margot Livesey’s (Banishing Verona) novels on the run. Or as excerpts in The New Yorker. Or something like that. I mention this...
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Reading
Senselessness
Honduran novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya (El asco, La diabla en el espejo), author of eight novels, five collections of short fiction, and one book of essays, and currently a teacher...
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Reading
Worshipping Walt
Considering the novelty and power of Walt Whitman’s liberating appeal to a broad swath of society, it is not surprising that he awakened and engendered strong devotion from a...
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Reading
Dreaming Up America
Author and filmmaker Russell Banks (The Reserve, The Sweet Hereafter, Affliction), who has 16 well-crafted novels under his belt, ventures into nonfiction with this meditation on the origins of America. Banks...
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Reading
Gore VIdal Interview
I have found Gore Vidal variously incisive, opaque, riveting, infuriating, brilliant, prescient, amusing, and just plain entertaining. Thus, this interview was so very satisfying (as well as edifying).
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Reading
More Than It Hurts You
New York University professor Darin Strauss’s (The Real McCoy) new novel sets aside his past interest in limning American history for a story set in contemporary America, more specifically...
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Reading
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
David Wroblewski’s debut novel opens with mute Edgar Sawtelle living with his family in remote northern Wisconsin. The idyll is upset by Edgar’s father’s death and young...
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Reading
The Lost Dog
Novelist Michelle de Kretser (The Hamilton Case), who lives in Australia, focuses her third novel (which won both the Christina Stead Prize for fiction and Book of the Year in...
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Reading
The Political Mind
George Lakoff, who is involved in something called cognitive linguistics purports to explain the science behind our political decision-making and, more to the point for Lakoff, how to put that...
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Reading
The Colfax Massacre
When I was in public school, Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, Rosewood, 20th-century lynchings, American concentration camps, and numerous other dark and ugly episodes in American history were ignored or glossed...
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Gallery
Phone Sex Operators
So much of commerce now is blind: online shopping, tech support in Bangalore. The phone-sex industry, though, thrives on being faceless and intensely personal at the same time.
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Fred Benenson
Justin H. Miller
Hometown: The O.C. Occupation: Record label guru and DJ What was your favorite gig? Probably seeing LCD Soundsystem at Randall’s Island last year. Standing on stage and seeing 20,000...
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Profiles
Jello Biafra and the Politics of Punk
Having spent a quarter-century pushing Americans to face the music, the former Dead Kennedys vocalist sits down to tell his thoughts on Obama, political parties, and participatory democracy.
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Watching
Video Digest: June 6, 2008
Identity theft has become a crime epidemic—so how is it that 10 years ago, the phrase had yet to be coined? The internet and the rise of online banking are...
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Announcements
Introducing Our Summer 2008 Interns
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome our Summer 2008 interns, who by right of even being interns in the first place are more of overachievers than we ever were. Do the old...
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Personal Essays
Unexplained Phenomena Associated With Suede
The universe has odd ways of tying fates to fabrics, destinies to a swatch. Just when he and his girlfriend were moving north, a writer recalls an odd series of events all relating to a single material.
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Listening
Toe Jam
Unstoppable artist, scenester, and icon of music David Byrne has just revealed his new art project, a building that is an instrument you can play. Of course to him it’...
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Listening
Gobbledigook
Non-English singing, orchestrally driven, howling, post-rock giants are rarely considered for the whole “hits of the summer” racket so inevitable in news media this time of year, but I think...
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Listening
Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?
Zooey Deschanel & M. Ward (or She & Him) have a good thing going, and they’ve just announced a summer tour to share it with the likes of us here on...
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Listening
Little Bit
What is with all the incredible Swedish music coming out lately? I mean, is it the longer winters? The sunlit nights of summer? The blondes everywhere? Whatever the cause, the...
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Listening
Bo Diddley
Everyone who cares must have heard about the passing of Bo Diddley by now, and, quite understandably, he’s currently the most popular artist at the Hype Machine. As has...
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Consoles I Have Known
Tilt
A look back to the dot-com boom years when money grew on trees, dreams were cast, and happiness could be delivered via Urbanfetch.
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In Hindsight
Cleaning Up
In May, things got messy. Really messy. Garbage everywhere, and cities and states struggled to figure out a place to stow the trash.
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Reading
The Battle of the Labyrinth
My 10-year-old son Cuba has read all three prior Percy Jackson novels (The Lightning Thief, The Sea of Monsters, The Titan’s Curse) and attests to the entertainment quotient of...
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Reading
The Enchantress of Florence
With the exception of The Jaguar Smile, a slim monograph from the ‘80s about a trip to war-torn Nicaragua, Salman Rushdie’s literary gifts have never quite appealed to me....
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Reading
Steer Toward Rock
Fae Myanne Ng, who was last heard from in 1994 with her novel Bone—short stories in smart magazines like Harper’s excepted—sets her new story in ‘60s San Francisco,...
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Reading
Standing Up to the Madness
If ever a paean to grassroots activism were needed, this would seem to be a time. As Bill Moyers expresses: Amy Goodman doesn’t practice trickle-down journalism. She goes where...
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Reading
The Last Lecture
One of America’s lesser-attended afflictions is an appetite for advice and counsel from anyone adopting the mien and attitude of expertise. Which of course makes for a steady stream...
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Reading
Our Secret Discipline
Modern poetic titan William Butler Yeats no doubt deserves scholarly analysis and exegesis; based on Helen Vendler’s stature and reputation at Harvard, her study of Yeats’s techniques and...
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Reading
Renewing America’s Food Traditions
In case it has escaped you, there are foodstuffs that are endangered by the toxicity of post-industrialism. In any case, among other contributions of this book are a list of...
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Reading
The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media
Walter Benjamin’s most famous essay is anthologized here (version two of four) along with 40 or so other ruminations on media, some well known, others obscure, and some presented in...
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Reading
The Age of Reagan
Sean Wilentz, who has among other things weighed in on the Bush presidency’s place in history, offers up a clear-headed historian’s assessment—or should I say reassessment—of...
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Reading
The Power of the Zoot
Odd attire exhibited by youth—tattoos, piercings, and buttock-cleavage trousers—are nothing new. Think tie-dye, sandals, and Native American jewelry, or jeans, T-shirts, and leather jackets with pointy shoes. What...
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Reading
Strange Bedfellows
It is about time a serious scholar, in this case University of Iowa American Studies mentor and former nightclub comic Russell Peterson, examines this rise in attention and credibility attributed...
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Reading
Havanas in Camelot
Here is a posthumous collection of 14 of Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist William Styron’s (Sophie’s Choice, The Confessions of Nat Turner) essays: The title piece treats his relationship with John...
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Reading
Everything Is Cinema
I dimly remember seeing Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend on a twin bill with a Laurel and Hardy short—I think Nixon was president—and I suspect there was a kind...
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Reading
Drawing Words and Writing Pictures
Much-heralded artist Jessica Abel and husband Matt Madden assemble a 15-lesson curriculum for creating comics (or if you will, graphic novels). She is a busy bee, also releasing two other...
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Reading
The Dawn Patrol
I suspect that Don Winslow will never write a book that grabbed me as much as his epic thriller The Power of the Dog, but that won’t stop me...