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Archives
January 30th, 2009
Morning but what was happening? Where were the children and their somnolent post-sunrise protests as my wife prepared them for the halls of Oak Elementary? Had I not become accustomed to pulling the covers and drowning in a half-conscious lullaby of clinking dishes and discouraged intimidation over missed bus rides and future discipline? Why was my wife not rushing through the house with a barbaric urgency, complaining about perceived tardiness, issuing me a list of endeavors to ruin my saintly frolic with the morning? Come to think of it, why was I still in bed? Why had the previously dependable alarm clock not kept its half of our agreement? Who can you trust to rescue you from the dark hours if not your lifetime-warranty appliances? Read More
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January 27th, 2009
The America our new president inherits bears an uncanny resemblance to our old enemy, the Soviet Union—right before it went under. Our country's paranoia and stubbornness have secured us indifferent allies and intractable commitments. Not only is there Afghanistan—still Afghanistan—where we fight the same enemy we once created to bleed the Russians, but just to show that we can do everything twice as much, twice as well, as anybody else, we've added Iraq. And as we export our defective version of democracy to the Middle East, in Latin America, our own "near abroad," our efforts have raised resistance to American influence to new levels. The Chileans, the Argentines, the Bolivians—they were pioneers, they privatized everything, and look at them now. Our satellites are dropping from their orbits! But what is to be done? As Colin Powell once said: "We do deserts, we don't do mountains." Read More
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January 19th, 2009
I.
The first time I heard of the poet Elizabeth Alexander was in December 2008, when the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies announced that she had been chosen to compose and read a poem for Barack Obama's inauguration. National Public Radio reported the story on All Things Considered, and host Melissa Block invited Alexander onto the air to read a poem. So it was that, while listening to National Public Radio, which is my habit in the evenings, while lying prostrate on the floor of my office, which is my habit while I listen to National Public Radio, I tried to decide what to make of Elizabeth Alexander.
She seemed to me a master of the American poetic singsong.
Read More
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January 14th, 2009
Introducing n+1 Research Branch Pamphlet No.2, What We Should Have Known: Two Discussions
I learned of Harold Pinter's death from CNN over Christmas day dim sum at the very crowded Golden Unicorn in Chinatown. The setting was un-Pinteresque. Pinter was not interested in multi-cultural mélange; his characters were, if not English, of unknown origin, uprooted and opaque. He did not like crowded rooms, preferring spare and mostly empty spaces. He detested a racket. From the Editor . . . Welcome to N1BR, the online book review of n+1 magazine. We're pleased to present our first issue of new critics taking on new literature. This
issue features Gideon Lewis-Kraus on a study of Richard Rorty, Charles
Petersen on Marilynne Robinson, Molly Young on Hugh Hefner and Playboy,
and Saul Austerlitz on Tony Judt and perceptions of Israel. In the
future, we look forward to bringing you more ambitious criticism on a
wide range of subjects, including the best and most interesting books
from independent and academic presses. We also promise to run one non-review each issue: this time, an account of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel contest by Darryl Lorenzo Wellington. Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. April 2008. Go into the magazine section of any bookstore and you'll
find professional writers' "trade" journals, imploring your attention
with unassailable advice. The headlines blazon: Top Ten Tips to Writing
Success, Be a Good Writer in One Month, How to Sell Your Novel. I don't
know how many such magazines exist, but it's more than you'd think. In
any issue of the typical writers' journal you'll find exhaustive
listings of contests, awards, grant opportunities, and residency
opportunities. You'll find a feature on a veteran novelist, or a first
novelist in the early blush of success (this could be you …). And
you'll find tips. Contest listings have an obvious value. But tips? Tips
are not even information: they're suggestions, approaches, repackaged
common sense. Tips make no guarantees, and they have no conceivable
end. And so these magazines are crammed with tips. They love tips. They
swamp their readership with tips. The joy, or the misery, of tips is
their endless repetition.
Read More Tony Judt. Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century. You would be forgiven, upon reading the panoply of negative reviews of Tony Judt's Reappraisals,
for thinking that Judt's latest book was a book-length screed, a Kassam
rocket of scorn and derision directed at the state of Israel. Imagine
your surprise when on cracking the spine of Reappraisals you
find all of three essays, out of twenty-four, dedicated to Israel and
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—one of which is primarily about the
life and work of Edward Said, himself neither exclusively nor
principally concerned with Israel. The gap between the perceived and
actual subjects of Judt's work is startling. In fact the book deals
mostly with the shameful intellectual history of European Communism,
western and eastern versions. It expresses Judt's desire to form a new
leftist canon purged of communist influences, yearnings, and ideas. Yet the critics are not wholly wrong that Israel, too, is part of
the puzzle.
Read More Marilynne Robinson. Home. Christianity is the science of forgiveness. So many
critics speak of religion as if it were without content, one branch as
crazy as the other, at best merely different brands of ineffective
analgesic for the afterlife, whose specific worldly demands more often
cover for intolerance than rise to an even basic level of morality. But
reading Marilynne Robinson, you see how intensely this-worldly religion
can be as well as how impoverished much of today's moral conversation
appears in comparison with the Christian rhetoric of forgiveness. Here
is one example, from Robinson's new novel, Home:
Robinson's work has long stood for me as the best
repudiation of Nietzsche's famous remark: "The Christian resolve to
find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad." Her new
novel, a story of prodigal sons and Lear-like fathers, at times as
beautiful as anything she has ever written, makes this defense even
stronger. Home returns to the same people, place, and even the same time as Robinson's previous novel, Gilead. Not a sequel, rather a companion or counterpart, Home
tells the same story of 1950s Iowa family life, its scene shifted only
a few miles from the dreary old home of John Ames, the dying
Congregationalist minister of Gilead, to that of his best
friend, Presbyterian pastor Robert Boughton.
Read More Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds. Steven Watts. Mr. Playboy: Hugh Hefner and the American Dream. The Complete Centerfolds is a coffee-table book compiling every Playboy
centerfold published from the magazine's inception in 1953 until 2007.
Six short essays preface the decades, but there is no other text. As
you might expect, the pleasures of the book are instant and visual. My
favorite Playboy centerfold is Miss September 1983, dressed for a
college football game in striped socks and a tartan scarf. She has a
flask, a fuzzy wool cap, and a team pennant. Her neo-Gothic surroundings
are meant, I think, to evoke Yale. A single branch of ivy cascades next
to her, and a textbook lies abandoned at her feet. She is naked. It
sounds funny in writing, but somehow there's nothing funny about the
photograph, or about any of the photographs in The Complete Centerfolds. Is laughter an anti-aphrodisiac? The first thing that
strikes the casual reader is the anatomical variety among bunnies.
Nipples, for one thing. Some are as big as cupcakes, others are the
size of a penny. They are occasionally erect and come in a range of
colors as varied as drugstore lipsticks. Pubic hair is another delight
to behold, appearing first in 1971 and thriving until 1997. Gauzy
coronas of pubic hair, technicolor dreampubes of every shade. You
forget how assertive a healthy growth of hair can look. It comes as a
pleasant shock in the midst of a creamy-smooth expanse.
Read More 
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January 13th, 2009
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January 13th, 2009
Penguin Press. April 2008.
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January 13th, 2009
Farrar, Straus and Giroux. September 2008.
There is a saying that to understand is to forgive, but
that is an error, so Papa used to say. You must forgive in order to
understand. Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the
possibility of understanding. … If you forgive, he would say, you may
indeed still not understand, but you will be ready to understand, and
that is the posture of grace.
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January 13th, 2009
Chronicle Books. October 2008.
Wiley. October 2008.+ + +
