Tanenhaus elegantly argues that the American conservatism might be at low ebb, but that should not be expected to last. Nor should liberals (as prone to premature gloating as their rivals) even want it to happen.
The Death of Conservatism.. For Now would have been a more apt title for Sam Tanenhaus' book, but any editor worth their salt would have lopped that dangling ellipse of prevarication right off. It has the zing and jab of the political potboilers that increasingly crowd the bestseller lists and display tables at airport newsstands. But the boldly declarative title doesn't do justice to the nuanced argument that lies behind. This is a book that…]]>Those who suffer from epilepsy, their families and friends, can only throw light at this neuro-spectre, as Fiennes does, showing us Richard in all his damaged Richardness, a man who truly haunted a castle.
On New Year’s Day 1987, my brother had a grand mal seizure. He was 16-years-old and no history of prior illness. In the emergency room, the doctor on call took one look at my unconscious brother’s long hair and announced the seizure drug-induced. My sister and I managed to disabuse him of this notion, and then the real fear set in. When an otherwise healthy teenager suddenly has a grand mal seizure, the worst assumptions…]]>Marvel's recent republication of The Clone Saga lights a way in this economic downturn: that old gems can be mined once more. Why not republish the hidden treasure that was Slingers?
With the economy in as bad a shape as it is, it is nearly impossible to look around and find something that is not affected in some way, even comic books. It seems like series are getting relaunched to boost sales, or worse yet, cancelled more frequently now than ever. There are lots of new series on the stands, but only as limited series, and if these limited series sell well enough, then maybe they…]]>Sabatini’s book exudes an authenticity and warmth that can’t come from an author’s imagination alone, but from a lifetime of listening and observing.
The Boy Next Door is an exceedingly pleasant book. It is so accommodating, so good-natured, so eager to please -- winsome, really -- that, although your interest may wax and wane, you will read all 416 pages to the very end. Irene Sabatini’s prose is straight-forward and uncomplicated; her sentences have an airiness that lifts them right off the page. What you read is what you get. And what you get is two endearing love…]]>Using Ben in Leaving Las Vegas as a gauge to measure myself against, my life wasn’t anywhere close to as bad as it could be, but people who thought they had better control of their drinking than me still fuck their lives right up, so....
In May of 2001, I was 21, I’d dropped out of college a couple months earlier, and I was spending all my time and money on whiskey. I was a fuckin' mess: I’d broken up with a wonderful girlfriend; tried and failed to get her back; was still wrapped up with another ex who served as the enabler from hell; was powerfully infatuated with yet another woman; and because of my self-involved, self-centered, and self-propagated…]]>A brooding, melancholy variation on the theme of Mary Shelley's classic novel.
The Seattle Times (MCT) -- British author Peter Ackroyd, a one-man encyclopedia of British history, language and culture, has written 31 books of fiction, biography, cultural criticism and poetry, many of them prizewinners. I suspect Ackroyd of writing books in his sleep — or maybe he doesn't sleep. His latest, The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein, is a brooding, melancholy variation on the theme of Mary Shelley's classic novel. It will enhance your knowledge of the original version, and it may…]]>Nicholson Baker writes from his enthusiasms, which are many and ever changing. Among other things, his books have focused on sex, John Updike, public libraries, and pacifism and World War II. His latest, The Anthologist, is his love letter to poetry.
Nicholson Baker has enjoyed one of the oddest careers as a writer in recent memory. Trained as a musician (a bassoonist!) and composer, he turned to writing in the '80s. His long short story, "Playing Trombone", published in the Atlantic Monthly (March, 1982), was a brilliant, funny, and fantastical description of life in a symphony orchestra. His first novel, The Mezzanine, took place on an escalator, and his second, Room Temperature, was about a father's…]]>British photojournalist Clive Limpkin has a unique view of modern India in 100 illustrated essays from "Army" to "Zebu".
Clive Limpkin had his doubts about India before his first visit there in 2005: as a British photojournalist most of what he’d seen and heard about India involved poverty, begging, and garbage. But the occasion was a surprise birthday party for a friend in Mumbai and his wife was eager to go so they packed their bags and headed off for the world’s most populous democracy. Awakening in a bungalow in Kerala after an exhausting…]]>With the recent passing of Bruce Wayne, can the Batman character escape the tragedy of Bruce Wayne's life that originally birthed it?
Batman holds a place in the popular mind so strongly, it might seem that the character emerged out of the mythological ether of the Olympians without beginning or end; never born and never to die. Like Baudrillard’s simulacra, it is easy when considering icons such as Batman to forget that they are the products of human imagination and therefore not mere copies of, in this case, the archetypal that have no existence apart from their…]]>Reminiscent, in all the best ways, of Neil Gaiman and Kurt Vonnegut’s finest works, Matt Wagner’s opening salvo of his new Vertigo series shows the world still has need for the archetypes inherent in Wagner’s Parsifal.
You know this? Wagner’s Parsifal. A young man is brought to the site of the Holy Grail, but he doesn’t quite get it. So he wanders around acquiring wisdom and experience until he becomes king of the knights. I hear this every night before I go to bed. Well, parts of it. The damn thing’s five hours long or somethin’. Ain’t it beautiful? But even so, for me, it’s tarnished. When Adolf Hitler made a…]]>One can’t help but draw a parallel between McCorkle’s work and the stories of A. M. Homes – just without the controversy or big gross-out that Homes reaches for.
Jill McCorkle is hardly a household name, but she has made a name for herself in literary circles. The author of five novels and four short story collections, McCorkle is an accomplished writer who has won the New England Book Award, the John Dos Passos Prize for Excellence in Literature, and the North Carolina Award for Literature. She teaches the writing craft at North Carolina State University and has been published in literary magazines both…]]>Heavy on history but with enough action to give aerodynamic lift, Lamb’s prose exemplifies and occasionally transcends the pulp genre.
His name may find scant recognition today, but among pulp hounds Harold Lamb holds a mythic standing. He wrote scores of historically meticulous, action laden short stories and novellas for Adventure Magazine in the '20s and '30s. It was work that defied the stock plots and chopped prose often associated with pulp. What distinguished Lamb’s tales, in addition to their careful setup and pure visceral thrills, was a Middle Eastern setting and the balanced take…]]>In the world of "edgy" young adult fiction, there's a tendency to either bury real world consequences, or exploit the darker material for all it's worth. But where does that leave the young readers grappling with the content?
Few of us are immune to the sensation that is Stephenie Meyer. She dominates the bestseller lists, reduces teenage girls to catatonic wrecks, and has the entire literary world talking. Readers choose labels such as “Team Edward” or “Team Jacob” with the aggression of soldiers preparing for battle. Even I, a snob with a natural aversion to the subgenre of supernatural fiction, could not deny the sudden rise of the enigma that was Twilight. Journalists…]]>Neither fiction nor fact, Nader's sprawling novel is another venue for the same political ideas we've heard, not an opportunity for creativity.
Imagine this: as the United States government botches Hurricane Katrina relief efforts, billionaire Warren Buffet watches his TV and decides that as one of the country's wealthiest citizens, it is probably a good idea for him to step in and take over. He knows he cannot do it alone, so he schedules a Hawaiian retreat for a group of his "super-rich" cohorts and convinces them, over lavish buffets and hour-long silent meditations, that they can…]]>Film adaptations from black masterpieces -- and the Chitlin Circuit -- are rejuvenating America's Black Arts Movement.
When it was announced that Tyler Perry would direct the screen version of Ntozake Shange's seminal black womanist work For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, there was a collective moan of pain from black women all over America. Though I feel their pain, some of the sentiment's expressed over the blogosphere were sadly lacking in any form of analysis that connected the dots between the Black Arts Movement which…]]>Ultraviolet is a unique, informative and thought-provoking experience. And if I stare at these pages long enough, maybe they'll start to move.
The far-out heart of Ultraviolet lies in its posters: R. Crumb's famous Keep on Truckin' and Stoned Again, Stanislaw Zagorski's mind-bending Fly Carefully, George F. Goode's Jungle Princess, and Tom Gatz' Acid Queen, among many others. The book features 69 posters (heh), all produced between 1967 and 1972 (apparently--a few don't have years attributed to them), and covering a wide range of subjects, all of them groovy. Every page evokes nostalgia, perhaps a flashback, and…]]>The ACT-I-VATE collective makes a successful transition from webcomics to print.
The movement of comics from print to web has been swift. Computer archiving of comics has been going on for years, and one can fairly easily download scanned complete collections of a series and read it on a computer screen through a comics viewing application. Today, the battle over which iPhone comic reader application will become industry standard is being fought, and Marvel has been experimenting with 'motion comics', almost cartoon videos of non-moving characters…]]>Paul Auster is a spellbinding storyteller, sometimes thanks to, and other times in spite of, his post-modern narrative trickery.
A surreal scene in Paul Auster’s unsettling and compelling new novel, Invisible, depicts a group of 50 or so black men and women, slave descendants living on a tiny Trinidadian island called Quillia, chipping away in the merciless sun with hammer and chisel as they reduce a field of rocks to gravel. Far above these Sisyphean laborers, in a large stone house overlooking the ocean and hewn, perhaps, from the very same rock, dwells a…]]>To paraphrase Nietzsche, when fighting monsters one should be careful not to become one, but that’s a major reason why many people fish: to slay the proverbial dragon.
Fishermen come in various shapes and sizes, especially in popular culture. Traditionally, they’ve been depicted in literature and film in ways that typically accentuate their positive characteristics. However, one of the more atypical depictions worthy of investigation is that of the fisherman-monster. Book: The Compleat Angler Author: Izaak Walton Publisher: BiblioLife Publication date: 2009-01 Length: 408 pages Format: Hardcover Price: $27.99 Image: http://www.popmatters.com/images/misc_art/j/justice-compleatangler-cove.jpgThe English writer Izaak Walton was mostly responsible for establishing the cultural prototype…]]>No matter the vercity of the tale, The Haunting in Connecticut has just enough creep quotient to keep me engaged, especially since I grew up a few miles from the house.
With Halloween around the corner, I've begun filling up my Netflix queue with scary movies of the haunted house variety, i.e., Poltergeist, The Amityville Horror, and The Exorcist. As part of my scare fest, I recently re-watched The Haunting in Connecticut, not only because it's of the haunted house variety, but because I grew up in the town where the house is. In 1988, rumors about a haunted house across the street from the local…]]>Freeland dreams of a New York that once was and never can be again, a city of pleasures now buried under strata of concrete, commerce, and neglect.
It is easy to tell the difference between a book that is written with genuine passion, and one that is written to fulfill a contract, or build a curriculum vitae, or fatten a wallet. Automats, Taxi Dances, and Vaudeville: Excavating Manhattan’s Lost Places of Leisure fits firmly into the former category, as is apparent from its very first pages when the author, David Freeland, recounts a recurring dream: Although some details change, the basic situation…]]>From a balcony overlooking the flood of New Orleans to 'The Bubble' laundromat, where the city's characters come to wash it all out, award-winning author Barb Johnson talks with PopMatters 20 Questions.
“Except for the stink and the heat and the mosquitoes, it was beautiful at night. Like being out in the country,” says Barb Johnson of living on her balcony post-hurricane Katrina and working on her collection of short stories, More of This World or Maybe Another (Harper Collins, October) often by the light of a headlamp. None of the stories is about the hurricane, though. They are, instead, about the often chaotic lives of a…]]>This demands a rare thing from today’s readers: an undivided, well-cultivated attention span. For those up to the task in this world of twittering, tweeting texts, the rewards are many.
At 675 pages, The Children’s Book demands a rare thing from today’s readers: an undivided, well-cultivated attention span. For those up to the task in this world of twittering, tweeting texts, the rewards are many. For those no longer able to sit themselves down with a good book, and I mean a book, dammit, not some computerized booklike object or a fancy telephone the size of a card deck, well, friend, the loss is yours.…]]>Like many non-graphic memoirs that have received loads of attention and landed their composers appearances on Oprah, Small’s Stitches recounts an extremely harrowing tale of childhood.
Just when you thought memoir comics were finally waning in popularity, along comes David Small’s Stitches. Its release has already seen a lot of press, especially since it’s the artist’s first foray into the graphic novel medium (he has however, published numerous children’s books, some Caldecott medal-winning). Why all of the attention? What’s the hubbub about? Well, like many non-graphic memoirs that have received loads of attention and landed their composers appearances on Oprah, Small’s…]]>Sub Pop's first lens on the grunge scene offers an early look at the signs of flannel to come, and the distinctive regional imprints on the sounds that followed punk.
"I'm looking for something no one seems to have." Before anyone heard singer Mark Arm spit-spray the microphone on Sub Pop's first Mudhoney EP, photographer Michael Lavine was in Seattle, looking for something that no one in town seemed to have—no super-fuzz, no flannel fetishes. What he found and photographed in late-'80s Seattle—images that make up the best portion of Grunge, Lavine's second book—were groups of plainclothes punks searching the horizons of the Pacific Northwest…]]>Patrick Huber's counter-narrative of Piedmont country music's complicated origins and characteristics deserves to be the dominant one.
Thanks to critics as wide-ranging as Elijah Wald and Richard Middleton, recognizing the blues -- even in its most down-home varieties -- as a strain of modernism is a familiar move by now. But old-time country music is still frequently imagined as a primitive product springing from folkloric, face-to-face encounters, even when delivered through commercial recordings. Taking a cue from a line in Bill Malone's standard on the subject, "Country Music USA", Patrick Huber's Linthead…]]>This book should be essential reading to students in Iran and across the world who need a manual on student activism.
Every generation in every country has its moment, the point at which the anguish, brutality or challenge of life comes down from the heavens and causes us to question our reality. For the generation preceding mine, it was the Vietnam War. For many of my American peers, it was watching the Challenger explosion in 1986. For my students, it was the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. But for me, living as I was at…]]>When the author of a sitcom-styled novel about Mexican heritage cannot resist mentioning the modern-day carnage, then it's fair to assume that the murders have become a significant part of the national identity.
A valuable lesson was learned on the treacherous road that led to the creation of this month’s column, a journey that began as a review of Amigoland, the debut novel by Oscar Casares, and ended with the vow that I shall never again attempt to understand Mexico, not through literature and history and scholars, nor through the field and clinical data compiled by sociologists and ethnologists. The Mexican psyche and character is a slippery beast…]]>PopMatters celebrates its birthday this week with a series of essays on cultural changes over our 10-year lifespan. Today: Mark Reynolds on "The Long and Short of Long-Form Journalism" and Nikki Tranter on "Exit from Nowheresville: My 10 Years with PopMatters".
Edited by Evan Sawdey and Produced by Patrick Schabe and Sarah Zupko It is this very week that PopMatters passes a milestone and celebrates our 10th Anniversary in existence: ten years of interviews, reviews, thorough features, and smart, analytical cultural commentary. From all walks of life with a wide sampling of global perspectives, PopMatters writers have spent the last ten years picking apart just about every aspect of popular culture and how it fits in…]]>In this book, E. L. Doctorow is like a great magician trying to make a monumental illusion out of a street corner shell game, just to prove that he can.
The historical Homer and Langley Collyer were New York eccentrics who lived in a brownstone in Harlem in the first half of the 20th century. Born of a wealthy family, they never had to work, grew increasingly isolated and neurotic, turned into prodigious packrats, eventually becoming mildly famous for dying, in 1947, among 130 tons of rubbish they had amassed. The lives of these two brothers sounds like thin matter for a 200 page novel,…]]>In the comics industry, the hit-driven economy was already decimated in the early ‘90s. It is in this way that comics' recent history becomes a roadmap for the navigations that await the major genre of the popular culture mainstream.
He'll leave me alone and in return I'll stay quiet. -- Frank Miller The Dark Knight Returns Hushmoney It is truly strange watching the Bonus Features disc to 2005's Batman Begins all these many years after. Truly strange because, viewing the assembled footage and various documentaries on this disc now, opens a vista on how very much meaning there was to the making this film. Engineers had built The Tumbler, the 21st century Batmobile, in…]]>Cerebus: Latter Days is the most difficult read in the Cerebus saga. So why is it so compelling? Pure, insane ambition.
Cerebus: Latter Days is the most difficult read in the Cerebus saga. So why is it so compelling? Pure, insane ambition. There are the usual parodies, finely observed drawings, and inventive layouts, but Dave Sim distinguishes himself here. For starters, there’s the abduction of Cerebus by the Three Stooges. And then a commentary on the Book of Genesis as told by Cerebus to Woody Allen. Todd McFarlane, comic creator and co-founder of Image Comics, even…]]>Nash offers a study of kamishibai's influence on modern manga, and how Japanese comics differ from American ones (as well as answering a common question: "What's with the wide eyes?").
This beautiful book traces the history and development, rise and fall of kamishibai, a form of storytelling that was once phenomenally popular in Japan and now has all but vanished. "Just as bonsai create a miniature forest, kamishibai is a microcosm of 20th-century Japanese history. Kamishibai is not only the story of a lost medium, but a cross-sectional look into the cultural mindset of a people who experienced the worldwide Depression of the 1930s, imperialist…]]>Fact or fiction, this is a dream come true for any punk rocker.
Punk Rock and Trailer Parks is about the music scene in Akron, Ohio in 1979, where punk rock is booming. Early on, one of the characters lays the groundwork for understanding the setting by saying this: “It started a few years ago… with Devo… So they make it big. Then some other Akron bands get signed. Rubber City Rebels… Tin Huey… Chrissie Hynde pops up with the Pretenders. Suddenly… Akron is this breeding ground for…]]>This follow-up to The Time Traveler's Wife netted the author a cool $5 million. Was the money worth it?
Audrey Niffenegger is not in a very enviable position. After all, how does one top a book as powerful and emotionally engaging as her debut novel from six years ago, The Time Traveler’s Wife, a book that Niffenegger’s subsequent offerings will probably always be compared to? Forget about the mediocre movie adaptation of said book that came out this year; if one could take a time machine and travel back to 2003 and review the…]]>