Brooklyn is hardly virgin territory for novels or short
stories; if anything, the borough bristles with fiction. There is, of course,
Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943),
and The Williamsburg Trilogy (1961),
by Daniel Fuchs. More recently, we have Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn (2009), which
portrays the borough as a port of call for an immigrant who instead of taking
the chartered path to life in America, however arduous, opts to go back home to
Ireland. Norman Mailer made Brooklyn part of his domestic and, in 1951′s Barbary Shore (admittedly not
his most memorable work) literary domain. The stories collected in Sam
Lipsyte’s The Fun Parts (2013), devise a lingo for the subcultures that have
sprung up in the chic, hothouse corners of the borough. Thomas Wolfe’s story Only The Dead Know Brooklyn (1925), makes a bold claim that is false on the
face of it, since it’s clear that Jonathan Lethem knows a few things about the
place, as he showed in Motherless Brooklyn (1999), Fortress of Solitude (2003),
and glancingly, in Dissident
Gardens (2013), which, strictly speaking, focuses more on Queens.
Wednesday, October 30, 2013
Sunday, October 27, 2013
lou reed lou reed
NY Times 10/28/13
"Lou Reed, Rock ’n’ Roll Pioneer, Dies at 71"
lou reed lou reed
you'd given your best
long ago
the kinda best
than which no better
Friday, October 25, 2013
His Soapbox Was The Brillo Box: Arthur Danto, 1/1/1924 –10/25/ 2013
first appeared in the artsfuse.org
Arthur Danto died on Friday, October 25, age 89, after
having, over his long career as a writer, critic and educator, worked out a
distinctive take on contemporary art and aesthetics, one he often termed
Duchampian. By that he meant there was more to visual art than what immediately
hit the eye, more than what resulted, as Duchamp put it, in "retinal
flutter." Art was unavoidably involved with concepts, meanings, questions.
None were more intriguing for Danto over the long haul than the question, as
Duchamp posed it in his readymades, of what distinguished pieces of art from
like pieces, a bicycle wheel or upside-down urinal, for example, as deployed by
Duchamp, from the ordinary item.
Saturday, October 19, 2013
Vo Nguyen Giap: Military Mastermind, or "Marginalized Hero"?
So far as Vietnam goes, the fog of war — as Errol Morris called it,
in his documentary about former Secretary of
Defense Robert S. McNamara — is particularly
dense and durable. Far from dissipating over time, it continues to obscure our
understanding of the war in Vietnam and of how, and by whom, the vastly
outgunned Vietnamese were marshaled to defeat the United States in that
terrible conflict.
Thursday, October 10, 2013
Polonius compares the Tea Party to the Bolsheviks
If I lived on Mars — or in the past or the future — the
specter of global capitalism being brought to the brink by a Leninist clique of
right wing republicans would be — counterfactually speaking, of course — utterly
hilarious.
Vladimir always said "better fewer but better".
Wednesday, October 9, 2013
Polonius about globalization
a scenario, a counter history, a video game:
the gov. shutdown continues. the fascist cum bolshevik tea
party even refuses to raise the debt ceiling for a day or two, enough time for
a serious shit storm, a killer asteroid ripping through american and global
economy.
Wednesday, October 2, 2013
Polonius speaks — about the Middle East
Polonius speaks — about the Middle East
Reading Robin Wright's,
"Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World"
(2011).
Wright's a veteran, deeply informed author and correspondent
about the Islamic world. The theme of her most recent book is that: "A
decade after the 9/11 terrorism spectaculars, the Islamic world is now in the
throes of a counter-jihad. The new struggle pits Muslims against their
brethren. Its goal is to rout extremism in its many forms, from the deviant
doctrine launched by Osama bin laden to the rigid rule of Iran's
theocrats."
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