March 2010 Archives
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New Finds
Hors d’Oeuvres With Wittgenstein
Having succumbed to the old-fashioned precept that a liberal education was useful for more than vocational guidance and career enhancement, I chose to study philosophy as an undergraduate, more specifically...
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Of Recent Note
Preferred Patio Beverages
As the weather warms and we retreat to our patios, roofdecks, and lanais, our thirst increases. Our staff and readers share their favorite outdoor drinks.
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Iconography
Sounds of Silence
Avante-garde composer John Cage's composition 4’33” created at the midpoint of the twentieth century, was conceived of without a single musical note. In his monograph No Such Thing as Silence: John...
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Iconography
The Dark Side
Had friend David Meggesey, author of the highly regarded Out of Their League (selected by Sports Illustrated in 2002 as one of the top 100 sports books ever written) and former NFL...
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Surveys
Water Fight!
Around the world, water stirs up unexpected conflicts. Here’s a dip into the latest headlines, and finds that beyond the haves and the have-nots are the want-mores and the take-yours.
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Mi, Mi, Mi, Mi
Big Cheese
OK, I admit that I am blind to the allure of books about food, chefs, or most of what seems to excite the foodie partisans of the reading world. I...
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Rare Medium
Our Favorite African War
Brit foreign correspondent Rob Crilly (currently covering East Africa for The Irish Times), having covered wars in Darfur, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, has spent five years in...
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Iconography
A Lop Bam Boom!
David Kirby (The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems), who is a poet by profession (as in calling, not career), put together an extended hagiographic essay on the...
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Confab
Who Knows?
Arguably there are two sure-fire subjects that will get you a book contract: the current (everlasting) educational crisis and depression. And if you are a discerning reader (which, for the...
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Current Reads
Day in the Life
James Hynes (Kings of Infinite Space) is another on a long list of novelists who I have been meaning to read based on excellent and well-rendered notices and a scanning...
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The Non-Expert
Mixed vs. Medley
Experts answer what they know. The Non-Expert answers anything. This week, we do absolutely nothing to assist a reader while coining a new phrase.
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Opinions
Standard & Poor
Accountability in education is here to stay—but you try creating tests that equally suit Texans and Hawaiians.
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Iconography
My Kinda Town
These days geography has devolved to a chauvinism and regional rivalry not quite as virulent as evidenced in the Balkans and former Yugoslavia. Much of this can be laid at...
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Genre Genre Genre
Heroes and Villains
Dan Simmons (The Terror) is not only a prolific writer, but his books transverse a multiplicity of genres. His previous opus, The Drood, featured a Charles Dickens charged with defending...
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Lunch Poems
Leveling Up
An invokation of Super Mario Brothers, Buddhists, and the customers at your local Starbucks.
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Back in the Day
The Souls of White Folk
Behind what some readers might consider an audacious, tongue-in-chic title lies a fairly simple thesis about racial taxonomy and historical invention. Historian Nell Irvin Painter’s (Southern History Across the...
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Iconography
The Producer
If you are attuned to such things, you might note that occasionally the Academy Awards honor one of the motion-picture industry’s faceless, behind-the-scenes people known as producers with an...
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Serious Fun
Counting Back the Years
Two (excellent) reasons to read Francis Wheen’s at times hilarious, other times scary Strange Days Indeed: The 1970’s: The Golden Age of Paranoia (Public Affairs) are Wheen’s mordant...
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The Golem Blog
Serving Someone
Even a being formed out of clay a thousand years ago has to make a living in today’s world. The Golem returns, and reveals an array of especially odd jobs.
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Announcements
What is your favorite patio beverage?
With the recent springlike weather, we are spending as much time as possible on terraces, and we can only hope your weekends also involve porches, decks, patios, and the lovely,...
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Mi, Mi, Mi, Mi
Another National Treasure
Another phrase I am hearing bandied about with some frequency is “national treasure”—I was just listening to Alison Krauss introduce the Fairfield Four as such, and recently Viking Press’...
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Current Reads
New McPhee
The phrase “must read” seems to have afflicted the literary critical machinery—which, if it is a barrier to the usual chirpy prose and even worse smarmy pronouncements, may be...
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Spoofs & Satire
Go Climb a Tree
When all you want is get away from it all, just grab a branch, hoist yourself up, and leave your troubles below.
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Bookbag
Manguel on Reading
To tell the truth, I find many books on reading far too precious. I mean why do I want to read about reading when I can just read?—which I...
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Back in the Day
Dummies’ Guides for U.S.
Right about now you may be experiencing a distinct feeling of dread and anxiety as you realize that whatever grasp you had of the fundamental principles of governance as expressed...
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Spoofs & Satire
Judicial Sensibilities
When the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and the president get into a tiff, could the nation’s highest court fall to pieces?
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The Coffee Table
By the Book
There is in the life of the collector a dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and order. Naturally, his existence is tied to many other things as well: to...
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Iconography
No Eyes on the Prize
There are some people who believe Alfred Nobel and Joseph Pulitzer are better known for the prizes that bear their names than their places in history. Such an optimistic claim...
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Apropos of Nothing
Double Dutch
Like many Americans, despite a nagging sense of better judgment and the guilt that follows from ignoring that judgment, I succumbed to unseen societal forces and purchased one of those...
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New York, New York
Persephone in the Park
Spring is popping up all around New York City, but those crocuses have a dark history. Explaining the Pagan past of what’s growing on 87th Street.
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Opinions
Carolina Blues
A year after winning the championship, the University of North Carolina’s men’s basketball team is suffering its worst season in recent history. A New York-based Tar Heel laments.
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Coffee Table Gallery
Where We Are
Before the literary landscape became littered with all types of annuals entitled Best American This or That, or simply Best Blah Blah Blah 20__, I would look forward to what I...
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Genre Genre Genre
Heads You Lose
I suppose it was inevitable that once Caleb Carr (The Alienist) wrote a so-called historical fiction using a real historical figure—in that case, Theodore Roosevelt, from when he was...
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Rare Medium
The Big Trouble
If my recall is correct, I have only spoken to Michael Lewis (Moneyball, The Blind Side) twice. It seems like more—probably because his books and his journalism (New York...
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Poetry
Remembering the Dead
North African expatriate writer Tahar Ben Jelloun (The Blinding Absence of Light) is well-regarded in his adopted home of France (awarded a Prix Goncourt in 1987) and around the world, having...
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The Non-Expert
Are Your Cats Really Adorable or Just Regular Adorable?
Experts answer what they know. The Non-Expert answers anything. This week we show you the 50 questions on this year’s census you didn’t see coming.
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Iconography
Mr. Clutch
Although I have soured on professional sports (because as we all know, money changes everything), my memories of various experiences remain vividly cherished (sitting in the Wrigley Field bleachers as...
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New Finds
Exactly, Watson!
Though I tend to have difficulty in talking with the concision this space requires about story collections—not that you need to know my problems—in some ways that mirrors...
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Interviews
A Conversation With Philip Graham
As lightbulbs are to the moon, first stories are to finished books. John Warmer chats with the writer Philip Graham, his former professor, about finding topics, developing mentors, and reaching readers.
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Apropos of Nothing
The Story’s the Thing
I feel compelled to correct an oversight—a lapse in my steady gaze at the flora and fauna of the current literary terrain. Though some might argue that literature and...
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New Finds
Scarface
Robert Jackson Bennett’s novel Mr. Shivers (Orbit) made its way into the scrum of books that have taken over the room where I sleep. I am not aware of...
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Coffee Table Gallery
Movable Books
In case you are wondering, the pop-up book has been around for centuries, more often referred to as a movable book. There was a wave of popularity in the U...
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Spoofs & Satire
Melancholy Whores’ Memories of Gabriel García Márquez
All the magical realism in the world won’t make you good in bed, or so recall the Nobel Prize winner’s escorts.
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Genre Genre Genre
Ya Gotta Have Friends
The late and lamented Boston writer George V. Higgins wrote nearly 30 books, most of them pretty good. But none was better than The Friends of Eddie Coyle (Picador), which is...
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Back in the Day
Black Is Black
The factual platform for Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America is the appalling reality that the United States “is...
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New Finds
Call Him Ishmael
Of our planet’s largest species I understand why the whale receives more attention than the elephant. The Megaptera Novaeangliae, after all, has Herman Melville to once and forever create...
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Genre Genre Genre
Finlandia
Having read a number of crime stories by Scandanavian writers (Peter Høeg, Henning Mankell, Jo Nesbo), I am wondering what the fuss is about, and moreover what the components...
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New York, New York
The Higher Line
When the new High Line Park opened last summer, New Yorkers lined up to be disappointed. A recent transplant finds it full of miracles.
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Opinions
Twitter and the Void
What kind of sound does a single tweet make? Our writer considers the reasons she left Twitter, and what it would take to bring other lapsed Tweeters back online.
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Mi, Mi, Mi, Mi
Like Your Back Ain’t Got No Bone
Though I am certain a regular diet from the overflowing stream of brain science would result in unconscious mimicry of various symptoms, I have continued to find neurologist Oliver Sacks’...
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Back in the Day
Is It Good for the Jews?
The relationship of the Israelites to capitalism is, of course, the stuff of ethnic mythology and racial slander—Jews are both the sniveling Fagin-like shylocks controlling the world’s economy...
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New Finds
Oh, Canada
A number of Canadian authors of my acquaintance—Gil Adamson, Wayne Johnstonand, Michael Ondaatje—have sung the praises of Newfoundlandian writer Lisa Moore (Alligator). Now comes her second novel, February ...
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Of Recent Note
Favorite American Presidents
Often, our most revered presidents earn our appreciation more for their chutzpah than their politics. Recovering from Presidents Day hangovers, our staff and readers share their favorite commanders-in-chief.
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Iconography
Bayonne Barney
These days bookstore shelves are littered with biographies of defrocked, repentant (and repulsive), scandal-laden politicians, not to mention the sorry batch of whatcha-ma-call-its by their current and former wives, courtesans,...
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Spoofs & Satire
She Ordered Sausage
After his job is jeopardized by unwanted advances toward a co-worker, a writer revises a porn script while undergoing harassment-prevention training.
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Reader Letters
A Question of Genetics
Dear editor, Nell Boeschenstein’s excellent article, “Out of the Brainland and Into the Heartland,” was very interesting and “down to earth” reporting on Mr. Jefferson and his Monticello. However,...
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Gallery
Little Beasts
The impish, chaotic boys in Maximilian Toth’s paintings are Maurice Sendak’s Max, the neighborhood playground prince, and your nephew who pretends kitchen utensils are guns.