April 2010 Archives
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Iconography
House of No Mirth
My sense of the fin-de-siècle years in American pop culture and the decades leading up to them is that the reactionary ‘70s were followed by an era of escalating...
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Surveys
Gaming Confidence
MIKE Deri Smith summarizes recent news, studies, and gaffes concerning overconfidence, from competitive running to the N.F.L. draft, even socialist firemen.
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Back in the Day
That Was Then and Now
There is something odd about a quintessentially American book having been written by a Frenchman, an oddity perhaps compounded by being one of the most unread well-known titles in American...
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New Finds
One Is the Loneliest Number
As I write this, the honorable literary organization PEN is holding its Sixth Annual World Voices Festival of International Literature, which is a thing of wonder and joy if you...
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Of Recent Note
Travel Tips We Learned the Hard Way
As we carve out weekends for summer vacations and welcome loved ones home from across the volcanic ash-strewn pond, our staff and readers share their hard-earned trip advice.
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Back in the Day
Wind Is Risin’
The assassination-history business in the U.S., while not a thriving enterprise, does provide an occasional narrative from a decidedly warped point of view—though of the successful presidential assassinations,...
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Back in the Day
Uncle Sam’s Birds and Bees
Sex education has always seemed like a counterintuitive enterprise to me—which doesn’t reduce its importance in a culture which, at the least, broadcasts mixed messages about sexuality and...
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Rare Medium
Bad News for Good News
Besides the malcontents and know-nothings who are apt to bleat out various accusations about some media conspiracy (failing even to understand the distinction between media and journalism), for the most...
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Poetry
Feeding the World
I suspect there are not many collections (if any) like The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris of Words Without Borders). Gathered within its...
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Bookbag
What the World Needs Now
Just what the world needed, another award and another award show. Denis Loy Johnson, of Melville House Publishing, who is a shrewd and savvy fellow and outspoken journalist (and who...
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Current Reads
Stories for Real Readers
Though throughout my reading life I would occasionally read short fiction, it wasn’t until I spoke with writer/Florida State University creative writing program head honcho Mark Winegardner that...
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Lunch Poems
Kentucky Derby
A new poem about jockeys, ponies, and golden eggs filled with candy, and how quickly races are won when you’re drinking.
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Back in the Day
There Was a Time
Before compact discs, before cassette tapes, before eight-track tapes, there was a playback medium called the long-playing record. It was a 12-inch disc (there were also seven-inch discs called “singles”)...
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Gallery
Bird Watching
Paula McCartney’s portraits of fake birds in real landscapes are not digitally enhanced, but they do trick the eye.
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Iconography
The Bridge to Somewhere
Given the subject—Barack Obama—and the author—Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and New Yorker editor David Remnick—it makes sense that Remnick’s new tome, The Bridge (Knopf), would receive...
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The Non-Expert
Thy Neighbor’s Wisteria
Experts answer what they know. The Non-Expert answers anything. When a reader asks about housewarming gifts, we see Armageddon in the neighborhood.
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Genre Genre Genre
Beats a Full House
I am not au courant with the latest taxonomical view of what was (and still is, I suppose) at one point referred to as the “graphic novel.” Though that rubric...
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Spoofs & Satire
Glorious Emergency Status Report
By now, the financial crisis has touched nearly every corner of the population. But only recently has the Order of the Blood of Thoth felt the pinch.
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Genre Genre Genre
Dutch Treat
If you are not an accidental reader of this whatchamacallit then you are the type of person who is well aware of the new HBO series Treme (which you probably...
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Announcements
Travel Tips You Learned the Hard Way
The good part about all the horror stories brought back from traveling is that there's usually a lesson to be learned. (Don't overpack your luggage with the creaky zipper. Do...
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Mi, Mi, Mi, Mi
The Dead Don’t Speak
I suppose I ought not be surprised that entertainment business big macher Jerry Weintraub’s book, When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead: Useful Stories from a...
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The Golem Blog
Here Lies the Elephant Bird
Running across a story about a shrimp-like creature that survived where few thought anything could live, the Golem recalls the time he hunted the Aepyornis.
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New Finds
Change Agents
One wonders what it takes to staunch the hemorrhaging of originality from cultural conversation—in this case, the overuse of Yadda-Yadda-Nation this or Blah-Blah-Planet that? The clichéd title being...
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Coffee Table Gallery
Off the Wall
Siglio Press’s publication of Torture of Women, created by renowned (feminist) artist Nancy Spero, who died in 2009, is the reiteration in well-designed and printed book form of her 1976 creation. ...
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Profiles
Careful, the Doors Are Closing
Last month’s suicide attacks in Moscow shocked anyone who studied Dzhanet Abdullayeva’s photo. But it wasn’t her baby face or cold blood that impressed our writer. It was her choice of metro stations.
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Apropos of Nothing
Happiness Is?
The notion of considering the happiness of the citizenry is not a particularly novel one (think Jeremy Bentham), though the burgeoning of happiness research appears to be a growth industry....
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Gallery
The Twitter Issue
Twitter’s not just the next step in online communication or social networking, according to Francesco Masci—it’s the next step in civilization.
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Serious Fun
Homer Again
One might view tinkering with the Homeric epics a foolish endeavor or a brave effort—in any case, it is not a project lacking in ambition. Young Zachary Mason’s...
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Poetry
The Postman Rings Twice
Perhaps it is inevitable that a giant like the Nobel laureate and Chilean poet Pablo Neruda suffers posthumous paper cuts at the hands of academic scolds such as Ilan Stavans ...
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The Non-Expert
The Answer, My Friend
Experts answer what they know. The Non-Expert answers anything. To help a reader determine which Dylan album is best, we arrive at every possible solution. Introducing “Your Best Bob Dylan Album Calculator.”
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Writing About Writers
Dirty Laundry
Though I am not convinced that most writers’ lives are particularly interesting, there is no dearth of biographies of writers nor is the supply of new offerings dwindling. There is...
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Notes From the Balcony
Room for a View
New York’s empty balconies need filling. Our writer inaugurates a new series about urban-gardening warfare and southeastern-facing frustration.
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Apropos of Nothing
New Orleans on My Mind
In my world, the build-up and anticipation for David Simon’s crew’s new creation Treme was hypertensive, culminating with the airing of the first episode on Sunday last. Perhaps...
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Profiles
A Distribution of Chairs
As India considers saving seats for women in the government’s upper tier, a tour of the country’s rural east shows how quotas have turned women into local politicians.
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Writing About Writers
Tinkers Redux
My personal ambivalence regarding artistic awards and other swimsuit contests (e.g., the Oscars, Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Nobel) is summed up by Pulitzer-winner Gail Caldwell’s observation “that...
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Apropos of Nothing
The Gutenberg Galaxy
Dwight Garner, who is a devoted book person, reader, and a columnist for the New York Times, has assembled and annotated a compendium of 300 book ballyhoos, entitled Read Me: A...
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New Finds
Distress in Westport
I know novelist Cathleen Schine (The New Yorkers) to be a talented and amusing writer, but somehow I have never been attracted to her stories. Her new novel, The Three...
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New York, New York
Meeting Joe Franklin
Joe Franklin is a New York institution, having interviewed untold celebrities and been (jokingly) accused of rape by Sarah Silverman.
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Writing About Writers
Conversations With Poets
Pearl London was a beloved teacher and writer at the New School. In 1970, she started to invite guests to her seminar that over 25 years became called “Works in Progress.” Guests...
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Gallery
Hypermarket
French photographer Denis Darzacq’s reminds us of the freedom that escaping materialism brings, even when we are left to wonder: Are these figures floating or falling?
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Current Reads
Texas Is No. 1
Texas is the punch line to a lot of gallows humor about the American criminal justice system, and my recent note on attorney David Dow’s book, The Autobiography of...
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Coffee Table Gallery
Norman Rockwell’s Evil Twin
For lack of a better metaphor, suffice it to say that visits from my UPS driver and his delivery brethren make almost every day like Christmas at my address. But...
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The Non-Expert
The Analyst’s Cookbook
Experts answer what they know. The Non-Expert answers anything. We help a reader ferret out the truth about which foods are good to eat, and which ward off bullets.
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Back in the Day
The Supremes
Even avid students of American governance and civic-minded people may fall a little short in their understanding of the least accessible branch of the United States national government—I am...
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Opinions
About Time
Britain’s national superhero has alternately worn a scarf, a leather jacket, and lots of question marks. No longer.
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Poetry
Russian Haiku
Not to worry, I am not going to go crazy on this poetry thing (I don’t think). But I couldn’t get past Russian-born Vera Pavlova’s slender volume,...
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The Golem Blog
No Blog Is an Island
After a friend comments on the antisocial nature of this blog, The Golem ruminates on the true purpose of blogging, and whether “first” is more meaningful than previously thought.
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Poetry
National Welding Month
The fact that April is designated National Poetry Month (by what governing body escapes me, though I would not be surprised to learn that the pack of scoundrels in our...
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Rare Medium
Talking the Talk and Walking the Walk
Though I am not an (religiously) observant Jew, I am appreciative and simpatico with various myths and legends and teachings of my people. And I am especially thankful that the...
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New Finds
Writer on the Brink
Such are the caprices of the book world that the intersection of art and commerce occasionally produces interesting distractions and ambiences (sic). Given the Darwinian forces (natural selection?) at play...
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New York, New York
Get Hyphenated
Branding a Brooklyn subway station is greater than a typographic concern. Weaving a brief history of the dash in America, the Czech Republic, and John Wayne’s poetry.
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Back Matter
In the Beginning
If it were not for the New York Times’s critic’s resounding advocacy of Ron Rash’s writing, I would most certainly be quibbling with the opening statement: “Ron...
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Current Reads
The Seventh Day
There is an odd reversal of polarities when the notion of resting and setting aside a period of time for a kind of imposed tranquility is considered utopian. But of...
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Apropos of Nothing
What You Don’t Know About Male Brains
No surprise that we live in a world full of junk science, unhelpful self-help, and freakish social sciences—which makes culling the valuable from the vapid somewhat perilous. Not that...
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Lunch Poems
Platelet Count Descending
A new poem by the author of Chronic, in which Lady Sings the Blues is intoned, sung, spoken, and hollered.
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Current Reads
What Is It Good For?
In spite of a conscientious indifference in the more reactionary and confused quarters of the American polity, that pesky Vietnam thing still lingers in the ether, foreshadowing and resonating and...
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Mi, Mi, Mi, Mi
When I’m 64
As it is a birthday of sorts (there is a story here, but you will have to wait for the publication of my memoir-in-progress, Just Talking: How to Have Fun...
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Spoofs & Satire
Paul Is Death
While the most popular Beatles rumor turned out to be false, making the case for an even more dramatic revelation.