Staff writer NYer, RS, NYT, books As Nature Made Him, Becoming a Neurosurgeon, This Is the Voice, novels About the Author, Undone; keys/singing The Sequoias.
Joined January 2015
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Listening to the Red Scare election post mortem and can hear, in @dash_eats voice, her stunned realization that Anna isn’t that smart.
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Voters, en masse, just decisively rejected this kind of racist, paranoid bullshit across the country—even in the deepest (formerly) red states. When do Fox’s ratings crater enough for them to recognize this and change their tune?
Johnson: The point of these kinds of wars is we're going to fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here, right? But we're having to fight them here. We're fighting jihadists in the senate and in the house
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I have a Master’s in Eng Lit and consume a lot of UK media, but I’d never heard the term “God-botherer” before. Unimprovable (a word I got from the late Martin Amis, incidentally).
1/ Russell Brand's reinvention of himself as a right-wing conspiracy theorist & born-again God-botherer was partly because there are rich pickings among the terminally credulous, particularly in the US.
But it was also a strategic move designed to enable him to pose as...
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Yes, that was an amusing ending after the annihilating review that preceded it—complete with the made-up “penis with a thesaurus” crack he attributed to a (nonexistent) “female friend.” With fans like that… And yes, he had definitely read everything Updike had written. Closely.
But DFW didn’t disavow Updike. He spends like a full page of his Toward the End of Time review saying “I know this is a really negative review, but I’m a big Updike fan and have read everything he’s written”
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I interviewed Franzen when the Corrections was published. I asked if he was an Updike guy. He absurdly shook his head “no” and made a face. He and DFW, strenuous imitators of JU, for some reason had to disavow even liking or approving of his writing. Silly and sophomoric.
Here’s why you drop $250 on a photo facsimile of Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby. You get to see him change “immaculate” to the unforgettable “effeminate” and you see him cut the limp “to speak crudely” from one of the novel’s best sentences. And there are such treasures on every page!
I should have given this link to buy—and they don’t just have Fitzgerald. lessaintsperes.fr
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John Colapinto retweeted
Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller photographed in 1956. He was obsessed with her at this time, writing letters of an extremely sexual nature. One billet doux read: “I will kiss you and hold you close to me and sensational things will then happen. All sorts of slides, rollings, pitchings, rambunctiousness of every kind. And then I will sigh. And when you rest your head on my shoulder, then slowly I will get HUNGRY.”
What a great scene. Funny and touching. And I can easily believe that Orson would have related to Ed.
Vincent D’Onofrio was pissed when he found out his Orson Welles cameo in Ed Wood had been dubbed over by Maurice LaMarche (the voice of The Brain from Animaniacs).
He didn’t stay mad; he channelled it into Five Minutes, Mr Welles, winning acclaim for his performance as Orson.
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I’ll never forget her review of this unbelievable turkey of a movie. It was absolutely the moment everyone knew she had jumped the shark
The box-office failure of BLOW OUT was, I think, a tragedy for De Palma and for John Travolta—it’s just about the best work each of them has ever done. But it probably served as a warning to some of the people who might have wanted to do something politically sophisticated.
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I remember when Trump gave this almost exact same speech.
Mark Carney, "In the heart of Germany, above Weimar, there is a wooded ridge called Ettusberg. And for decades, Goethe walked, thought, and wrote there. An oak on that ridge came to bear his name, a living monument to the highest ideals of European culture"
"As the 20th century turned dark, that same oak became trapped behind the barbed wire of Buchenwald. A silent witness to humanity's deepest moral failure. Goethe understood that ideals must be fought for, that values do not defend themselves."
"Indeed, at the end of Faust, the old man's last vision is of a free people on free ground. Nödvg, Värdjän, Siegfreiheit. Wie das Leben, de taklik si eroban mus"
"Freedom and life must be earned every single day"
"Every day"
"Every day, not once in 1945 or 1956 or 1989. Every day, including this one."
My take: 1945, 1956 and 1989 are not distant history lessons: they mark Europe’s liberation from fascism, Hungary’s uprising against Soviet rule, and the fall of the Iron Curtain. Carney’s point is that freedom is never something Europe simply achieved and banked forever - it is a choice, a responsibility and, when necessary, a struggle renewed by every generation.