February 9th, 2010
Louise Erdrich fans rejoice! Her new novel “Shadow Tag” is out and it’s receiving a nice review by Leah Hager Cohen of The New York Times.
“Shadow Tag” is, as its publisher declares, unlike any other Louise Erdrich novel. That isn’t to say it’s devoid of the Native American themes that permeate her many previous books. Both Irene and her husband, Gil, are of Indian heritage. Raised by a white mother, Gil clings to his paternal “mishmash of Klamath and Cree and landless Montana Chippewa.” Irene also grew up with a single mother, in her case a political activist who “dragged her to everything Ojibwe.” Their shared culture closely informs both their careers. Gil, an artist, paints portraits of his wife, often in “cruel” or “humiliating” poses evocative of the history of whites’ mistreatment of Indians. (“She appeared raped, dismembered, dying of smallpox in graphic medical detail.”) Indeed, Gil envisions the series — which has become both famous and lucrative, and which he’s named after his wife: “America 1,” “America 2” and so on — as representing “the iconic suffering of a people.” Irene is a historian. Or she would be if she hadn’t stalled partway through her Ph.D. thesis on Louis Riel, “the depressed métis patriot.” When the novel begins, she’s at work on a new study, of George Catlin, “the 19th-century painter of Native Americana,” whose subjects, she reminds herself, “would sicken and die soon after” he finished their portraits. (read more)
February 8th, 2010
“Perhaps we should talk about fucking. Fucking and writing, fucking and talking, fucking and thinking, fucking and whatever else it is that fucking goes with…”
Jami Attenberg’s third book, The Melting Season, will be published soon by Riverhead books. It’s the trenchant, frank, poignant, tender, and, dare I say, heartwarming (one of my favorite qualities) story of a Nebraskan woman nicknamed Moonie who leaves her husband, takes a bag full of his money and drives away, heading west, toward a series of adventures, both decadent and wholesome, that surprise the reader as much as Moonie herself.
Fittingly, Jami is about to drive cross-country on a self-generated book tour, with boxes of books in the backseat instead of a suitcase full of money, and lots of fans and friends along the way to host, support, and toast her. You can find her tour dates here.
So, on the brink of her departure, I was glad to have an opportunity to ask Jami some questions. Stephen Elliott challenged us to come up with some topics not usually covered in writer interviews, so we did our best to perk things up with some bookish sex talk. (more here)
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February 5th, 2010
An exceptional article by former Flatmancrooked editor, James Kaelan. The child pictured is an exceptionally enthusiastic soccer fan.
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The great English broadcaster Ray Hudson once said of the great Argentine footballer Juan Román Riquelme, “Look at him, so languid, look at him walking. He’s like a big, beautiful zombie, Riquelme. He just strolls around…like smoke off a cigarette.” Hudson values hyperbole over precision—or at least succumbs to the former—for he suffers from a sort of fanatic epilepsy when he works. Hudson told me, “When that spotlight’s on you, and you’re calling a game, you’re in the moment, instantaneous, and the selection of words, phrases, and anecdotes are improvised. There’s very little time for actual thought. There’s very little time for reflection on what you’re actually going to say.” And Hudson’s quips, spontaneous and unedited, have gained him a reputation as one of the most notorious announcers in all of sports.
Hudson made his career first as a soccer player—for Newcastle United in England, and later for various teams in the defunct North American Soccer League. But he is best known for announcing the modern game for GolTV. Commentary for a soccer match, more so than in any other sport, is like the musical accompaniment to ballet. Therefore as a broadcaster, Hudson is comparable to the conductor of an orchestra playing in the pit beneath a stage of dancers; he adds context and emotion to the drama. No wonder, then, that he often likens footballers to beautiful women. “I’m telling you man,” Hudson once said of FC Barcelona’s seventeen-year-old striker, Bojan Krkic, “this kid could be the best thing on two legs since Sophia Loren.” (read more here)
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February 3rd, 2010
Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times on Don DeLillo’s new novella, “Point Omega”:
“Like many of Mr. DeLillo’s earlier books, “Omega” is preoccupied with death and dread and paranoia, and like many of those books, it has an ingenious architecture that gains resonance in retrospect. But even its clever structural engineering can’t make up for the author’s uncharacteristically simplistic portrait of its hero: a pompous intellectual who shamelessly justifies sending thousands of young soldiers off to die in an unnecessary war with abstract, philosophical arguments, but who suddenly comes to know the meaning of death and loss firsthand when his beloved daughter abruptly disappears.” (read more)
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January 28th, 2010
A MODEST PROPOSAL
By Ron Rosenbaum
It’s rare that one is able to solve two profoundly troubling societal problems with one quick fix, but I feel I’ve done it! Well, in a metaphorical, Swiftian, satirical “Modest Proposal” way. I suspect that most Slate readers will be aware that Jonathan Swift’s 18th-century “Modest Proposal” to solve the Irish famine by encouraging starving parents to eat their children was meant as satire, right? Because when I ran my own modest
proposal by a journalist friend, she took it a little too seriously, and heatedly informed me, “That’s the worst idea I ever heard!” That’s sort of the point! When things are bad, the only way to make the situation crystal-clear is to show how difficult it would be to come up with an idea that is ludicrously worse.
On the other hand, as they say in cheesy movies, “Sounds crazy, but it just might work!”
So: My modest proposal to solve America’s “intelligence” failures is to fire the entire CIA and our other many tragically inept intelligence agencies and outsource all intelligence operations to investigative reporters downsized by the collapse of the newspaper business. Thereby improving our “intelligence capability” (it can’t possibly get worse!) and giving a paycheck to some worthy and skilled investigative types—yes, some sketchy, crazed, paranoid (but in a colorful, obsessive, yet often highly effective way) reporters who once made the journalism profession proud, exciting, and useful, not boring stenography for the power elites.
How bad are things in U.S. intelligence? I refer you to a Jan. 20 Reuters report on the Congressional investigation into the failure to “connect the dots” on the Christmas bomber: the guy who—as just about everybody in the world except U.S. intelligence knew—was trying to blow up a plane. Why? (read more here)
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January 25th, 2010
“Ray of the Star opens with two nods in the direction of French writer Georges Perec. The first, a quotation from his 1967 novel A Man Asleep, serves as entry to the story: Now you must learn how to last. A man named Harry has suffered the unexpected deaths of some people, likely family members, about whom he cares very much. The narrative jumps ahead an unspecified amount of time to Harry abandoning his home, his job, everything. He’s running away from everything with nowhere to go. Like the protagonist of A Man Asleep, this is a man realizing he no longer knows how to live—all that is left now is learning how to last.” (read more)
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Bye Steve Owen |
January 21st, 2010
Tom Ford’s directorial debut, A Single Man, is notable not only for Colin Firth’s subtle portrayal of a man struggling to live on after the sudden death of his longtime partner, but for how Ford employs the motif of silence to buffer his film’s inherently sentimental subject matter. For example, in the film’s most overt portrayal of emotion, Ford cuts the sound as a distraught George (Firth), a reserved British intellectual, bursts into a grief-filled torrent of tears. In the typical melodrama, every sob and wail would be lingered over — with swelling music no less — but here Ford buffers the expected cinematic excess by having the viewer experience the loss of a loved one through an auditory loss. In an essentially realist film that focuses on human relationships, silence allows Ford to evoke authentic emotion while avoiding one of the great problems, indeed, paradoxes of realism: how to realistically portray human experience without succumbing to sentimentality. After all, real life is messy; people cry and wail.
Instead of violent emotion, A Single Man achieves its effects more subtly like Pixar’s Up, by imbuing everyday objects with powerful emotional, sensual associations. In the car crash that killed Jim, for example, the two terriers they had raised together, surrogate children, also died. Later in the film, as George plans suicide, he reexperiences this lost love bond through the scent of toast and butter on another terrier’s fur. As George lingers in this quiet reunion, his reluctance to end the moment suggests the power of the commonplace in our lives, of how certain textures and smells recall the irretrievable objects of our past.
The theme of silence which resonates subtly throughout A Single Man, of course, is also a reminder of the real tragedy of George’s loss: that his grief has been censored by a society which demands his invisibility. He is not allowed the benefit of condolence and ritual by participating in Jim’s funeral; he is excluded and denied the status of an official “family member.” His last sixteen years with his partner have been omitted from the record. Through this erasure by uncontrollable external forces, as demonstrated by the repeated metaphor of a man quietly drowning in the ocean, the film suggests, especially in George’s final moments, that suffering is most extreme when experienced in silence.
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