Posts From Author: Blog
Amerika the Beautiful
Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence Bryan Burrough Penguin, 2015; 608pp “We will burn and loot and destroy. We are the incubation of your mother’s nightmare.” — John Jacobs of Weatherman “The challenge for me… is to explain to people today why this all didn’t seem as insane then as it does now.” — Bryan Burrough Five hundred pages into Bryan Burrough‘s engrossing account of America’s recent radical past, we encounter one of his revolutionary subjects standing alone in the shower saying his own name, over and over, “to remind himself who he really was”. It may have been because Raymond Luc Levasseur, who led the United Freedom Front, had amassed so many aliases (more than a dozen) that his memory was in genuine need of a jogging. But the moment also feels touched by wider existential concerns. Time and again, veterans of the radical underground, many of whose stories are told in Burrough’s book for the first time, describe the miasma of collective madness that took hold of them and convinced them of the need to blow up buildings, rob banks, and murder police officers. There are some shocking moments, when theory […]
Read MoreThe Eyes Have It: The Danish Girl as Book and Movie
The Danish Girl David Ebershoff Penguin, 2015 (originally published 2000); 304pp The Danish Girl Directed by Tom Hooper UK/US/Belgium, 2015; 119 minutes The eyes have it. In the recent, Academy Award-winning film version of The Danish Girl, Eddie Redmayne’s dazzled, oceanic gaze — coyly averted, abruptly direct — tells a whole story of its own. As Lili, the real-life female alter ego of artist Einar Wegener, he’s unable to look Ben Whishaw’s Henrik in the face for fear of being revealed; with his wife, Gerda (Alicia Vikander), he can say more with a discreet eye-roll or quiver than he can with words. His eyes have an overflowing, revelatory, vulnerable quality — at times it’s like he’s naked. Redmayne, it would seem, has read David Ebershoff‘s novel very closely. First published in 2000, The Danish Girl has deservedly become a classic of trans literature for the sensitivity and perspicuity of its treatment. Although he doesn’t shy from the anatomical realities of the trans experience, Ebershoff’s greatest contribution to the genre is his depiction of Einar’s interior life. And from the very first chapter, Einar seeks respite from the difficulty of being behind his eyelids. Greta (as she’s known in the book) has asked him to put on a pair of women’s […]
Read MoreMargo Jefferson’s “Negroland: A Memoir”
Negroland: A Memoir Margo Jefferson Pantheon Books, 2015; 256pp If an authentic life is what you seek, you’re basically doomed to phoniness: this is the paradox that makes “authenticity” one of those words that should only ever appear flanked by inverted commas. The desire to be “authentic” necessitates the sort of reflection that destabilizes both subject and object; neurosis, perhaps despair, that way lies. This is the inciting conundrum in Margo Jefferson’s excellent Negroland, a memoir in name but a project vastly more complex and ambitious in execution. Jefferson was raised in a well-to-do Chicago family in the 1950s and ’60s, the second daughter of a physician and a social worker-turned-socialite. She learned the piano, she took ballet lessons, she read Little Women and sang Gilbert & Sullivan. In the late ’60s and ’70s, she discovered Black Power and feminism. She became a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, writing for the New York Times, Newsweek, Vogue. She’s had a Guggenheim Fellowship, she teaches at Columbia, she’s widely revered. Her short book On Michael Jackson, published before the singer’s death, is a luminous, empathetic re-reading of the man and his work. Yet Jefferson’s also been troubled by doubt, self-hatred, and suicidal thoughts. She’s spent terrible minutes with her head in the oven pledging one day […]
Read MoreWe’ll Always Have Paris
Bettyville: A Memoir George Hodgman Penguin Publishing Group, 2015; 288pp In the sub-genre of literature about the poisoned relationships between mothers and their gay sons, George Hodgman‘s Bettyville is an instant classic. Constantly funny, occasionally pointed, it is distinguished particularly by its warmth and its author’s uncommon empathy. At its heart, Bettyville is a carefully calibrated understanding of (rather than attack on) how other people live. George Hodgman was an editor at Simon & Schuster and Vanity Fair before he upped sticks from his New York City life and moved back to Paris, Missouri, to look after his ninety-year-old mother. Betty Hodgman had lived for many years in Paris in almost total ignorance of her son’s life, relationships, and struggles. Returning to Missouri unlocks all kinds of memories for George, which he sprinkles into accounts of his new daily life with his mother. Betty, despite retaining a sharp, reprimanding tongue, has begun to exhibit signs of dementia and becomes increasingly though reluctantly dependent on him (“Clearly I am, in her mind, the Joan Crawford of elder care”). Around the edges of this picture live the folks back home — Hodgman relations, high-school friends and foes, the congregation at Betty’s church — and a stray dog that George toys […]
Read MoreI Want To Believe
True Believers Kurt Andersen Random House, 2012; 464pp “My publishers signed me up a year ago to write a book, but not this book,” writes Karen Hollander at the start of Kurt Andersen‘s gripping True Believers. “Let me cut to the chase,” she goes on: “I once set out to commit a spectacular murder, and people died.” This “secret episode of 1960s berserkery and lost innocence” is the ostensible subject of Andersen’s novel and what gives it its compulsively thrillerish readability. Hollander, a famous lawyer and one-time Supreme Court shoo-in, was party to an act of radical violence in 1968 that has somehow remained a secret in the forty-six years since; as she reaches the end of her career, she feels compelled “to disinter the truth”, to let the sunshine in. But this is where Andersen’s secondary subject, which gives the book its philosophical heft, comes in: how structures of fantasy, the doubtfulness of memory, and the irreducible subjectivity of experience challenge, even efface, any stable notion of truth. Part satire, part social history, True Believers asks some big questions — what does it mean to be American? what role might utilitarianism play in political violence? — and reminds us that mania, however well motivated, is still madness. Karen is a […]
Read MoreThe Lusitania’s Last Voyage
Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania Erik Larson Crown Publishing, 2015; 448pp In six heart-stopping pages in the middle of Dead Wake, Erik Larson appears to suspend time in order to watch the deadly torpedo launched from German submarine U-20 shoot through the sea toward the doomed ocean liner Lusitania. In fact, the torpedo was only moving at about five miles per hour (reader, I can run faster), and its slow approach gave many of the ship’s passengers time to register both its vicious beauty and its coming intersection with their own fates. Initially, Larson tells us, “A number of officers raised binoculars and speculated that the object might indeed be a buoy, or a porpoise, or a fragment of drifting debris. No one expressed concern.” As it moved closer, though, its true nature became apparent and many panicked. Not Connecticut salesman James Brooks: He saw the body of the torpedo moving well ahead of the wake, through water he described as being “a beautiful green.” The torpedo “was covered with a silvery phosphorescence, you might term it, which was caused by the air escaping from the motors.” He said, “It was a beautiful sight.” In these six pages, we see the glint […]
Read MoreA Game of Thrones
Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped Garry Kasparov PublicAffairs, 2015; 320pp “Garry Kasparov, Russian human rights activist and former world chess champion” is how the author of this new and ferocious critique of the Putin regime would like to be introduced. Certainly not “Garry Kasparov, former Russian presidential candidate”, because, as he points out, cuttingly, a few pages later, “You can’t have real candidates without real democracy.” Since his retirement from chess in 2005, Kasparov has become one of the best-known critics of and protesters against the rise and rise of Vladimir Putin. Putin’s Russia, in his view, “is clearly the biggest and most dangerous threat facing the world today”. In Winter Is Coming, with its seriocomic titular reference to Game of Thrones, Kasparov has produced both a devastating account of missed opportunities in the rise of a dictator and a rhetorically powerful case for how and why he must be stopped. Winter Is Coming is an act of clear polemical thinking. Kasparov’s central thesis is that foreign-policy failures in the West — “appeasement by many other names” — have enabled the fall of nascent democracy and the ascent of new tyranny […]
Read MoreA Decent Read
A Decent Ride Irvine Welsh Doubleday, 2016; 368pp “Drivin a taxi is the best joab ah’ve hud in ma puff,” remarks “Juice” Terry Lawson early on in Irvine Welsh‘s new novel, A Decent Ride. But this is not an ode to honest labor: “It’s best in August,” he continues, “wi aw the snobby tourist rides in the toon, but this time’s barry n aw, cause the festive period’s roond the corner n fanny are stoatin aboot rat-arsed.” Yes, after a darkly racy stopover in Miami for his last book, The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins, Welsh is back in the familiarly grimy Edinburgh streets of his best-known work, including Trainspotting and Glue, the 2001 novel which first introduced the world to the charming Terry. Welsh’s characters, here as elsewhere, are rogues, braggarts, scofflaws and villains; their lives are fuelled by booze, drugs, casual sex, and crime. But despite the ubiquitous indecency, Welsh’s work has always been driven by a fierce social conscience and a compassion for this particular world that’s absent in most other contemporary media. A Decent Ride, which refers both to Terry’s job as a taxi driver and his enthusiasm for sex, is in the end a rather more decent book than it first appears. There’s […]
Read MoreSell/Buy/Date
Sell/Buy/Date Written and performed by Sarah Jones Directed by Carolyn Cantor Playing at New York Live Arts until January 16 Note: This article concerns the workshop production of Sell/Buy/Date staged in New York in January 2016 A woman with a barcode tattooed on her ass. That was the image that stuck with me after Sarah Jones finally broke character and used her own voice to thank Friday night’s audience for attending this special workshop production of her exceptional one-woman show. Sell/Buy/Date is a humorous look at an unfunny subject — the sex industry’s capacity for exploitation — and it will be fascinating to see how the show develops during the course of its run at New York Live Arts and the months before of its world premiere later this year. Sell/Buy/Date is a work of speculative fiction. Set roughly a hundred years from now, the play explores potential developments in the relationship between sex and technology, and their effects on human interaction and psychology. Jones is a professor using “bio-empathetic resonant technology” (BERT) to teach her students about the sex industry of the past, a sort of VR that provides an alibi for Jones to adopt a series of personae who can tell us the imagined future-history of the twenty-first century. One […]
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