The deluge of praise heaped on Joan Didion’s Blue Nights has been excessive, bordering on sycophantic. The New York Times has run three pieces about the book (a daily review, a Sunday review, and an essay about Didion as a “polarizing force”). The Los Angeles Review of Books ran a whole [...]
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According to her biographer, Jean Strouse, Alice James knew she would be judged a failure: “She was not socially useful, particularly virtuous, or even happy.” Yet she wanted her life to mean something, even if it was that she was the most successful of the James family invalids. “When I am gone pray don’t [...]
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I. Critical Distances
An intimate affair, America’s coming of age happened in 1915. There was no party or fanfare, just Van Wyck Brooks’s essay, “America’s Coming of Age,” the first consequential look at the previous century of American literature and therefore the first significant work of Americanist criticism. Curiously, the [...]
Continued →My review of Nathaniel Philbrick’s book is up at The Rumpus.
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Arthur Krystal is a suspicious sort of man, the kind you can imagine checking each piece of fruit for bruises and blemishes before buying a single plum. He is also the kind of man who watches Vladimir Nabokov and Lionel Trilling being interviewed on YouTube, and becomes outraged when he sees Nabokov is: “turning [...]
Continued →David Lodge must be sleeping better, eating with gusto, laughing louder at Jim Crace‘s jokes, and generally looking, say, five years younger and ten pounds (is that a stone?) lighter these days. Why? He has escaped the worst fate for a writer known to modern literary kind, in a most [...]
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Forget Elia Kazan. When it comes to naming names in 1950s America no one was more ruthless than Dwight Macdonald, and he was at his most hostile in “Masscult & Midcult” (1960). This essay—jeremiad, really—is Macdonald’s crusade against what he deems “Midcult,” or middlebrow culture. As Louis Menand puts it in his [...]
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The Rock Star as Hero
It is easy to forget that the Velvet Underground’s career was short: four albums over four years, from 1965-9, and their association with both Andy Warhol and Nico did not last past the first one. Throughout their existence, their chart positions were mediocre and album sales negligible. Their impact [...]
Continued →My tell-all account of studying under the fantastic and woefully underappreciated Richard Poirier is in the October issue of The Believer (teaser only at the link—go buy the issue!). To give a flavor of the piece, their always great “Discussed” list:
Grad-School Lingua Franca, Fiery Jeremiads,T. S. Eliot’s Romantic Troubles, Pernicious [...]
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In his book Humiliation Wayne Koestenbaum “aims to pile up humiliations,” his own and others’, public and private, sexual, racial, anti-Semitic, class-based, professional, scatological, emotional and physical. In less than 200 pages there is no aspect of humiliation left untouched, from the Biblical (“[Mary] was a Jewish mother”) [...]
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A blog by Lisa Levy about dead critics, a few live critics, and the nature of critical inquiry
