In an op-ed in the New York Times, writer Philip Gourevitch supports President Obama’s decision to not release the remaining photographs taken at Abu Ghraib prison on the grounds that it would merely incite more violence towards Americans. Gourevitch, editor of the Paris Review and author of several very affecting books of nonfiction bearing witness… [Read more…]
March 26, 2009
Tomorrow you will be innocently driving in your car, or eating your lunch in the park, or you will open a supply closet at work and suddenly be confronted by an image (on a billboard, on the t-shirt of a passer-by, on a hand drawn sign) that offends you. It offends you because the image… [Read more…]
March 3, 2009
From Didion’s essay “In Hollywood”: Here in the grand casino no one needs capital. One needs only this truly beautiful story. Or maybe if no truly beautiful story comes to mind one needs $500 to go halves on a $1000 option for someone else’s truly beautiful but (face it) three-year-old “property” only until the deal;… [Read more…]
March 3, 2009
Consider for a moment the body of work a writer leaves behind. Got it? See it there on the library shelf, the spines toward you? Depending on how prolific the writer was it takes up maybe four or five inches or maybe fourteen, or entire sections, like Shakespeare or Dostoevsky. Standing there looking at it… [Read more…]
February 28, 2009
Yesterday I spent the morning in bed reading Joy Williams’ review of Flannery: A Life in the NYTBR and Charles McGrath’s preview of the new Cheever biography in the NYT Magazine. Here’s my meta-review: William’s review is meant to come off as a stylized homage–a kinetically-paced list of curios, trivia and back-handed compliments–but it comes… [Read more…]
February 23, 2009
One of things that I have to constantly guard against when reading either Flannery or Cheever is sentimentality. O’Connor was very wary of it, seeing it as the gateway to much evil–an “arrival a mock state of innocence,” which “strongly suggests its opposite.” She saw compassion as sentimentality’s kissing cousin: “In the absence of faith… [Read more…]
February 16, 2009
So I’m on self-imposed deadline to write a review-essay on the forthcoming biographies of John Cheever and Flannery O’Connor, by Blake Bailey and Brad Gooch, respectively. Both biographies have one-word titles (“Cheever” and “Flannery”) followed by “A Life”. Not very clever, but I guess when you’re as well-known as these two you can go simple.… [Read more…]
January 25, 2009
I just read a blog post on Jacket Copy, a book blog on the LA Times Web site, that discusses a fan letter sent by Walker Percy to Bruce Springsteen and the interview Springsteen did with Percy’s nephew years later. This is a must-read for Springsteen, Percy and O’Connor fans.
January 9, 2009
Here’s a little gem from Jaques Maritain’s 1962 book Art and Scholasticism: …[T[he modern world, which had promised the artist everything, soon will scarcely leave him even the bare means of subsistence. Founded on the two unnatural principles of the fecundity of money and the finality of the useful, multiplying needs and sevitude without the possibility of… [Read more…]
January 8, 2009
Walter Benjamin quoted in Susan Sontag’s On Photography (a life-altering book, by the way): [The camera] is not incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish-heap without transfiguring it. Not to mention a river dam or an electric cable factory: in front of these, photography can only say, ‘How beautiful.’ . . . It has… [Read more…]
May 24, 2009
0