September 2011
2 posts
J.M. Coetzee on Musil: The Man with Many... →
From the earliest notebooks, Musil displays a concern with erotic feeling and the relations between the erotic and the ethical. The education of the senses through a refining of erotic life seems to him to hold the best promise of bringing humankind to a higher ethical plane. He deplores the rigid sexual roles that bourgeois society has laid down for women and men. “Whole countries of the...
August 2011
1 post
1 tag
April 2011
1 post
Defeating the Irremediable Solitude of the Guest:... →
José Luis Guerin discusses his recent film Guest, based around the year-long itinerary of the director visiting many film festivals and cultures.
March 2011
2 posts
Capitalism's Dismal Future →
Apart from the patently nonreality-based dissent of its Republican members, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission could hardly have expected the report it issued in January to arouse much excitement. After a year and a half of research and the testimony of academics and other economic experts, it came up with no more than the already conventional wisdom that the economic downturn that burst into...
October 2010
3 posts
Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954) →
Hitchcock had an unusually large set constructed to represent the interior courtyard of a New York City apartment complex in a lower middle-class neighborhood. The array of characters visible to the peeping Jeffries exteriorize the tensions and dynamics of his sexual fantasies. They are known to us by the names he assigns them: Miss Torso, a scantily dressed dancer...
On J. G. Ballard: Whisky and Soda Man →
Crash, Ballard’s most controversial and second most famous book, explores the idea that there is ‘a strong connection between sexuality and the car crash, a fusion largely driven by the cult of celebrity’: just think of James Dean, Grace Kelly, Mark Bolan, President Kennedy (‘a special kind of car crash’) or Princess Diana. In 1970, shortly before he began writing the novel, Ballard decided...
September 2010
26 posts
Michael Wood on Marlon Brando →
These are the qualities that run through many Brando films, from A Streetcar Named Desire on: until he turns into a patriarch himself in The Godfather and a rambling sage in Apocalypse Now. And these are the qualities Bertolucci picks up in Last Tango in Paris and rests the whole movie on. He certainly can’t rest it on the sulky Maria Schneider, who makes a great belated image of the 1960s but...
So long, Lalitha. On Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom" →
End para, double-space. Isn’t that just how it should have gone between Frédéric Moreau and Madame Arnoux? It’s the ending that Freedom deserves, since the book is, among other things, possibly the most lachrymose novel of modern times. There are, in its 560 pages, 26 separate instances of weeping, not counting the many blinked-back tears or suppressed sobs or ‘Tiny pearls of tear … clinging to...
More Thomas Bernhard →
Bernhard’s parallel career as a playwright began in 1970, as did his long collaboration with the director Claus Peymann, who directed Bernhard’s first full-length play, A Party for Boris, at Hamburg’s Schauspielhaus. A number of prestigious Austrian theaters soon adopted this play for their own programs. Popular interest in Bernhard’s...
10 Banned Graphic Novels And The Shocking Reasons... →
Each year, the American Library Association’s (ALA) Office for Intellectual Freedom receives hundreds of reports on book challenges, which are formal written requests to remove a book from a library or classroom because of an objection to the book’s content.
“Not every book is right for each reader, but we should have the right to think for ourselves and allow others to do...
¡Ay, Carmela! (Carlos Saura, 1990) →
Carlos Saura’s “Ay, Carmela!” is the gently stirring story of Carmela’s political awakening once she, Paulino and Gustavete (Gabino Diego), the mute boy who is their third wheel, fall into enemy hands. With a nod to the humor of Ernst Lubitsch’s “To Be or Not to Be,” Mr. Saura’s new film, which opens today at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, tells of ...
Get a Real Degree →
The central claims of The Programme Era are beyond dispute: the creative writing programme has exercised the single most determining influence on postwar American literary production, and any convincing interpretation of the literary works themselves has to take its role into account. (In a series of inspired readings, McGurl demonstrates that the plantation in Beloved, the mental ward in One...
Tony Judt (1948–2010) →
Tony Judt was a very public intellectual but a very private man. He had a rich, close family life. In the last months of his illness, his wife, Jennifer Homans, and their sons, Daniel and Nicholas, set up for him a screensaver slide show on his desktop monitor. Besides happy moments from family holidays, it showed a lot of mountains (particularly the Alps) and railway stations—trains and ...
Knowledge vs. Pedantry →
Like most people of your kind, you assume too much: regarding both what I wrote and what you are qualified to infer. “Inchoate” means: “Just begun, incipient; in an initial or early stage; hence elementary, imperfect, undeveloped, immature” (OED). And that is just what I meant—the words begin to form but do not complete. If I had meant to say that they were “chaotic” I would have said so.
At...
Christian Witkin Celebrity Portraits →
New York City based Photographer Christian Witkin, was born in Manchester, England, to an American father and Dutch mother. He lived in Amsterdam until 1984, when at age 17 he moved to America to pursue his education at Syracuse University and graduated with a B.A. in Fine Art and Photography.
In the summer of 1993, Witkin launched his professional career, and since, has photographed...
“Invisible”, de Paul Auster →
Juego entre la realidad y la fantasía, el argumento se desliza por la frágil y delicada línea que separa ambos, y que, conforme avanzamos en la lectura, se torna más complejo pues la realidad que el libro pretende mostrar se va ocultando, transformando en “invisible”, aunque esto sucede, paradójicamente, mientras se nos van ofreciendo más y más datos con el fin de que la “verdadera”...
Diálogo con Ricardo Piglia →
Como cambia una novela según uno la localiza. Al ubicarla en un pueblo empieza a producir una serie de efectos distintos a los que suceden cuando la trama ocurre en la ciudad. Imagina que hiciera un cuento basado en esta conversación. Si sucediera en la ciudad quizá tras la charla te irías a un lugar de Barcelona y te pierdas, mientras que si fuera un diálogo rural nos encontraríamos en el...
Words Without Borders (August 2010): Writing from... →
This month we’re touring the beguiling literary landscape of Hungary, guided by guest editor and translator extraordinaire Judith Sollosy. The comic János Háy eavesdrops on the end of an affair. Celebrated Roma writer Magda Szécsi distills the essence of Gypsy culture, while veteran Péter Esterházy shows a boy the way of the world. The great Sándor Tar dispatches a crippled man and his...
The novels of Paul Auster →
Although there are things to admire in Auster’s fiction, the prose is never one of them. (Most of the secondhand cadences in my parody—about drinking to drown his sorrows, or the prostitute’s eyes being too hard and having seen too much—are taken verbatim from Auster’s previous work.) “Leviathan” (1992), for instance, is supposedly narrated by an American novelist, a stand-in for Paul Auster...
Houellebecq, la possibilité d'un plagiat →
Michel Houellebecq a toujours aimé truffer ses romans de longues descriptions encyclopédiques de personnalités, de lieux ou de concepts scientifiques. Son dernier roman, l’excellent La carte et le territoire, à paraître mercredi 8 septembre, n’y coupe pas et l’écrivain se lance dans de fastidieuses digressions sur la mouche domestique ou la ville de Beauvais. Ça ressemble...
This Woman Is Dangerous: On Patricia Highsmith →
Highsmith lived all her life by her pen and typewriter (an Olympia manual), starting off by producing copy for comics and later turning out a steady stream of suspense and horror stories, many of which appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Her novels never became popular in the US. Here she might sell only four thousand copies of, say, Edith’s Diary (1977)—and ten times that number in...
"Roman Polanski: The Cinema of a Cultural... →
As I stated in the introduction, one of Mazierska’s main contributions to the study of Polanski is to directly tackle the question of autobiography, which she refers to with an implicitly Foucauldian phrase, “The Autobiographical Effect” (p. 7). In this first chapter, Mazierska presents the various reasons why Polanski’s biography and cinematic work have been so entangled, including both his...
"C" by Tom McCarthy →
Like McCarthy, I used to get exasperated by the self-impoverished narrowness of mainstream British so-called ‘literary’ literature, its obsession with Amises and McEwans, its deliberate ignorance of so much else; after a while, I realised this was not a literary but a cultic matter, to do with fertility rites and myths of social renewal. I remember that in the early 1980s on Channel 4 there...
August 2010
33 posts
La Stanza del Figlio (Nanni Moretti, 2001) →
Giovanni (Moretti) esercita la sua attività in uno studio arredato sobriamente; sullo stesso pianerottolo c’è l’appartamento in cui vivono la moglie Paola (Morante) e i due figli. Tanti i pazienti del medico che si alternano sullo schermo, interpretati da Tony Bertorelli, Silvio Orlando, Stefano Accorsi, Luisa De Santis, Dario Cantarelli, Eleonora ...
No Name or Too Many? On Javier Marías →
With every creak of this seesaw rhetoric, all the way up to that faux-profound conclusion, the specific words matter less and less. This is a kind of frictionless eloquence that does indeed recall Don Quixote, his inexhaustible orations on chivalric lore. And once again, that Marías is aware of what he’s doing, as signaled by any number of self-referential passages (“Get to the...
Oliver Twist (Roman Polanski, 2005) →
So it’s no surprise (at least to me) that his “Oliver Twist” is altogether remarkable, a near-masterpiece. In a way, it’s as personal a film as “The Pianist,” and I would guess for the same reason: It taps into his own memories of childhood abandonment. (His parents were deported from Krakow’s Jewish ghetto to Nazi concentration camps). Polanski has...
Tom McCarthy in The Economist →
TOM MCCARTHY’S 2005 debut, “Remainder”, managed what the jackets of so many first novels promise: a fresh and—in this case—unsettling take on contemporary life. It is about a brain-damaged man who marshals millions of pounds and a troupe of actors, consiglieres and forensic experts to reconstruct a memory. It is an intentionally confusing and difficult book that manages to...
Fingers (James Toback, 1978) →
“Fingers” marks the directional debut of the screenwriter James Toback (“The Gambler”), who exhibits a fatal fascination with Jimmy’s every petulant quirk. Mr. Toback, having created a character whose intrinsic charm plus 50 cents would only barely get him onto the subway, seems incapable of putting his hero in any kind of dramatic perspective, and he is...
Eye wired open →
Spence damaged his eye as a child after mishandling a gun, and had been legally blind in his right eye for years. After several operations, doctors eventually advised him to remove it.
”As soon as I knew the eye was coming out, I thought about the camera and I started making the calls,” Spence, now 36, says.
His first calls were to Australia, known for its research into bionics,...
Frantic (Roman Polanski, 1988) →
Emmanuelle Seigner is perfectly cast as the nervous, slightly untrustworthy, charismatic white rabbit whom Walker is compelled to pursue in order to find his missing wife (she would subsequently marry Polanski and bear him two children). Polanski films Paris as a strangely ordinary, almost impenetrable city, both in contrast and in tandem to the inexplicable overwhelming events surrounding...
Don DeLillo →
DeLillo’s career has seen highs and lows—after the publication of Underworld in 1997 it has sunk into a disquietingly lengthy trough—and if we had only his two or three worst novels, his critics might almost be right. At first, Point Omega has the disheartening feel of having been written by a technically proficient and uninspired imitator of DeLillo’s work. Some critics have tried to see the...
My Left Foot (Jim Sheridan, 1989) →
Originally released in 1989, My Left Foot tells the story of Christy Brown’s search for that way out. That escape would come when the boy one day took a piece of chalk from his sister with this left foot and began scrawling a single word on the floor of their humble Dublin home: ‘mother’. From that moment on an unexpected artistic and creative force would slowly be released into the world. ...
The Scale Of Evil →
Columbia University professor Michael Stone knows evil. He’s a forensic psychologist — the type of expert that provides testimony on the mental state of accused murderers when a declaration of insanity can mean the difference between life and death row.
Inspired by the structure of Dante’s circles of hell, Stone has created his own 22-point “Gradations of Evil”...