Roy Miller's Blog, page 251
March 9, 2017
Movie Alert: ‘Boss Baby’
Back in 2010, when the picture book The Boss Baby (S&S/Beach Lane) was published, author-illustrator Marla Frazee had no inclination that Alec Baldwin would one day voice her character on the big screen. But an animated film loosely based on Frazee’s picture book arrives in movie theaters on March 31. And, yes, Alec Baldwin—who, incidentally, is also portraying the current POTUS on Saturday Night Live—provides the voice for the titular character.
Frazee’s book imagines a family’s newborn baby as a tiny boss with a briefcase and a suit who dictates everything that goes on in the household —a metaphor that may resonate with new parents who find that the arrival of an infant is a bit like a hostile takeover. Since publication the book has more than 200,000 copies in print; in 2016, Frazee followed with a sequel, The Bossier Baby, which introduces Boss Baby’s infant sister. The film—which in addition to Baldwin features the voices of Jimmy Kimmel, Lisa Kudrow, and Tobey Maguire—greatly expands upon the premise of the original book. Tim Templeton (Maguire) narrates the story, looking back on his childhood growing up in the shadow of his baby brother, the Boss Baby (Alec Baldwin). The DreamWorks film introduces a plotline involving the CEO of Puppy Co., Francis E. Francis, played by Steve Buscemi. Francis hatches a nefarious plot against Boss Baby, which necessitates that Boss Baby and Tim join forces to protect their family and the world.
Who’s the Boss?
Last year, Frazee spoke with PW about having her 32-page picture book adapted to the screen. She described how, when her picture book was first optioned, she didn’t count on the movie coming to fruition, since so many books are optioned that never get made. With the movie now a reality, we recently spoke again with Frazee about the experience. “The perfect geniuses happened to fall in love with Boss Baby and see its potential as a movie,” she said. “They, in turn, lovingly handed it off to larger and larger teams of brilliant, creative people.” Frazee’s Boss Baby character on the page may seem a far cry from the animated, Baldwin-voiced character on screen, but the author sees a strong connection: “Where my book and their story intersect is interesting to me. There’s a definite affinity between my baby and the character in the film.”
Not only is Frazee’s character starring on the screen, but in new book formats as well. Simon Spotlight has released several movie tie-in editions aimed at readers of different age ranges: two board books, a Boss Baby junior novelization, and a leveled reader. Additionally, a burst labeling the book as the inspiration for the film has been added to the original picture book’s paperback edition.
For Frazee, seeing Boss Baby grow up and star in a movie took a little adjusting. While Frazee has paid close attention to the film-making process, she believes that, as with raising any child, there comes a time to let go. “I’ve been privy to this process, but my big job was to mind my own business. Not Boss Baby’s. All moms must learn to do this eventually.” That being said, she certainly plans to be a proud mother at Boss Baby’s premiere.
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Elena Ferrante’s Naples Novels to Make Their Way to TV
Some of the novels published under the pseudonym Elena Ferrante.
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Gabriel Bouys/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
PARIS — The Italian director Saverio Costanzo has signed on to direct and to help write a 32-part television series based on the four Neapolitan novels by the author who publishes under the pseudonym Elena Ferrante.
The novels, published between 2012 and 2014, have developed a cult international following. They are “My Brilliant Friend,” “The Story of a New Name,” “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay” and “The Story of the Lost Child,” and trace the lives of two friends, Elena and Lila, from their childhoods in postwar Naples to the present.
Mr. Costanzo, best known for “Private” and “Hungry Hearts” (which co-starred Adam Driver), said in a telephone interview that the biggest challenge to adapting the novels for television was how “to convey the same emotions as the books in a cinematographic way.”
He added that he was writing the script with the Italian writers Francesco Piccolo and Laura Paolucci, and that Ms. Ferrante was also expected to contribute to the screenplay. (He expects to communicate with the author via email.)
The series will be filmed in Italy in Italian. The first season will cover the first book, with eight episodes of 50 minutes each. Filming is expected to begin in Naples this year and the first season is expected to air in the fall of 2018.
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A spokeswoman for Wildside, an Italian producer making the series with Fandango, confirmed that talks were in the final stages with a major American producer, as well as with the RAI state broadcaster. Wildside also co-produced Paolo Sorrentino’s “The Young Pope,” starring Jude Law as the first American pope, a coproduction with HBO, Canal+ and Sky.
Last fall, an Italian investigative journalist said financial records indicated that the Italian literary translator Anita Raja was behind Ms. Ferrante’s books, prompting an international outcry among the novelist’s protective fans. Ms. Raja has previously denied she was the author.
Mr. Costanzo said he wasn’t interested in the author’s true identity. “It’s her literary reality that counts,” he said. “I’m one of those people who don’t care who she is.”
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The Barrowfields | Literary Hub
The following is from Phillip Lewis’s novel, The Barrowfields. Lewis was born and raised in the mountains of North Carolina. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Norman Adrian Wiggins School of Law, where he served as editor in chief of the Campbell Law Review. He now lives in Charlotte as a lawyer.
4
In my father’s childhood, during the emerging spring when the dogwoods were blooming white and gold in the long blue mountains, his father would drive the family down a meager dirt road over and around the wooded hills to the farmer’s market and back. At the apex of one of the hills, the woods cleared away to the west and the hillside fell into a great valley and climbed steeply up again to reveal the stone-gray face of Ben Hennom, an ancient mountain worn smooth and dark by the weathers of time. On a high shoulder of the mountain, half hidden by a row of wraithlike trees as old as time itself, sat an immense house of black iron and glass. During the day, it was an odd architectural curiosity. Due to a subtle trick of the mountain’s folding ridges, it seemed always to be in shadow, even when the sun blazed in a cloudless sky above it. From morning to night, it was cloaked in a slowly swirling mist as thick as smoke from a fire. At night, it brooded in darkness like an ember-eyed bird of prey on the edge of the mountain. Never before had a house been built like it, and never would another be built. The children would scramble to the windows of the car to marvel in awed silence at the great and mysterious structure.
It was brought into existence in 1918 by a vice president of the J. Reynolds Tobacco Company in Winston-Salem who no doubt wanted to escape the oppressive summer heat of the Piedmont and found relief in the high elevations of Old Buckram. He bought the hundred acres surrounding the house for next to nothing—at that time land was inexpensive and plentiful—but on the structure he spared no expense and gave little regard to prevailing attitudes on architectural taste. The house was designed floor to ceiling by the man’s brother-in-law, who was a full architect and half an occultist. To say he had a penchant for the macabre is an understatement. As a younger man, not more than a year out of Princeton, he had traveled to Palenque by virtue of the generosity of his wealthy father. The purpose of the trip was to derive inspiration for his nascent career, for he was far from satisfied with the unimaginative state of American design in the south. After a frightful encounter with a large black bird that pecked at him viciously and tried to take his eyes, he came down with a horrid fever that shook his body for weeks. He nearly died before leaving Mexico and was never the same thereafter. A dark cast had taken his soul. Upon returning home, he commenced work on what would simultaneously be his first and last creation and his magnum opus: the great house on the hill. The fever returned and his last breath turned to vapor in the cold mountain air before he could see his drawings brought to life—but yet it would be built.
The house saw little use or occupation for decades, and in 1963 it was sold in a dilapidated state to an eccentric hotelier named Kaeron who envisioned it as a recherché bed-and-breakfast that would give his wife something to do to pass the time other than wait for him to come home in the evenings. When that went the way of all bad ideas, he and his wife moved in and lived there with their three children, Mary, Tebah, and Abigail. They built a gate at the bottom of the hill and slowly disappeared from public life. Later the house and grounds fell back into disrepair, and it was whispered in town that the hotelier had an exotic disease for which there was no cure. Then someone noticed that all the lights in the house had been turned on and were never turned off, day or night. As the weeks passed, the lights went out one by one. Eventually someone called the police, the gate was scaled, and the premises were searched. No one appeared to be home. When the fifth mortgage payment didn’t arrive, the bank sent someone out to inquire. After knocking and looking in all the windows, the man who lost the bet kicked through a pane of glass and went inside. The house was completely furnished and in order, as if company were expected. He called out, but no one answered. After a terrifying exploration through the cold and darkling fortress, he ran out of the house and called the police.
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The detective assigned to the case wrote in his initial report: “Something horrible has happened here. I can’t tell exactly what. It’s strange. Two adults are dead. The three children are missing. No indication of their whereabouts. Cause of death for the parents is undetermined (analysis pending), but could have been self-inflicted, either voluntarily or involuntarily (under duress). Excavation of the grounds to begin this week.” And then three weeks later: “Children found today. Buried face-up in a pit in the woods behind the house. Lined up (not piled in). Multiple broken bones apparent.” A supplemental report indicated the cause of death for the children was drowning. The police were never able to put together a coherent explanation of how or why the killings occurred.
Five years later the bank still owned the house and no prospects for its sale had materialized. That was the state of things when my parents returned to Old Buckram, Eleonore great with child, and moved into the cramped little farmhouse at the end of the dirt road with Helton and Maddy. They took up residence in a room that was just large enough for a sagging twin bed and a small desk, upon which my father placed his typewriter. Before six months had passed, the desk was removed and replaced with a mildewing hand-me-down crib from the attic that was vigorously cleaned, painted, and structurally reinforced. My parents named me Henry, after my father.
Because there wasn’t room elsewhere, my father’s desk and typewriter were both unceremoniously relegated to the back porch, where all of Maddy’s painted ceramics were stockpiled on dusty shelves. For hours, then, in the lowering night while the house slept, my father would sit outside by lamplight, surrounded and besieged by fluttering white moths and what might have been items for sale at a roadside flea market, and try to write.
Upon their arrival in North Carolina, after finding no teaching jobs within a hundred miles that were of interest to him, my father commenced a brief legal career with one of the two law offices in town. A lawyer’s salary is rarely as exorbitant as many people think it is, and this is especially true for lawyers whose practice consists in part of “dirt law,” particularly in the more rural parts of the state. There were months when it seemed he was barely breaking even. Most of the work he did was for folks who couldn’t pay. So in order to augment the income he was making from mundane real-estate closings and simple criminal matters, he used his crushing intellect and took a few complex malpractice cases on a contingent-fee basis, pursuant to which he was entitled by agreement to receive a third of any recovery. The first three cases cost him money and nearly got him fired. The fourth one settled before trial for just over three million dollars. His first thought was, Now we can get Eleonore a horse. Shortly after collecting his hard-earned fee, he reluctantly accepted a position on the board of the Old Buckram Bank to serve as an adviser. It was in this latter capacity that he learned the great house on the hill was for sale and could be acquired for far less than market value. He ascended the steep gravel driveway for the first time exactly four and a half hours after this propitious discovery and beheld in proximity what he had hitherto only seen from a distance. He was amazed at what he saw. The house towered black and malefic into the gray of the cindered sky and it terrified him. It was a monstrous gothic skeleton. From the courtyard looking to the east he could see the few town lights of Old Buckram, and to the southwest the aged mountains of the Blue Ridge could be seen blue and distant. He pushed open the leaden front doors and wandered wide-eyed into a mausoleum of a foyer that greeted him with curtains of cobwebs and a cadre of scurrying mice. Slowly he was drawn into the core of the house, where he discovered a great wood-paneled library on the second floor with high windows and endless shelves running up to the vaulted ceilings above. Books lined the walls and were piled in every corner. He was instantly determined to make the house his own, no matter the cost. Here, I can write, he thought.
Far below the crags and a vertiginous decline, the property accompanying the house leveled as it neared the road, and a black barn as old as the mountain hid in a grove of birch and black oak. At least thirty acres of this lowland area had been cleared and fenced, although the fence was down in more places than it was up. That night Henry went home to Helton and Maddy’s and said to Eleonore, “We’re moving, and we’re getting a horse. I want to name it Annabel Lee.” It took them less than a day to move in and the rest of their lives to leave.
5
If all the wood had been stained and polished to a high, elegant gloss, the interior of the house would have been opulent beyond imagining. With eyes half-closed, you could look and see what the maddened architect had intended, although the structure could bear that likeness no more.
The scowling face of the house looked east toward the rising sun. The first room entered from the front through a massive oaken door was the aforementioned foyer, tiled in somber slate and more than twice the size of the Baltimore apartment. Arched hallways ran off in all directions, and a sweeping staircase with steps the color of venous blood curled asymmetrically up and out of sight. To the right, through a succession of doorways, was at first a dour sitting room (forever unused), a dining room with space enough for fifty people, and a smoking room, drab and drear. We didn’t use it in this way, but plainly this was its purpose in the former life of the house, as evidenced by two waist-high granite obelisks, the pyramidic tops of which could be removed so that spent cigars and cigarettes could be placed in the canisters inside.
The exterior walls of this room were floor-to-ceiling glass, matching a similar room on the southeastern corner of the house. From this point of vantage looking toward town, the old dirt Avernus Road was intermittently visible, winding over the hillside opposite—the same road my father’s family traveled on the way to the farmer’s market so many years before.
Behind the smoking room was an open chamber we called the Painted Parlour. In a well-intentioned yet futile attempt to bring some much-needed cheer to the otherwise cadaverous ambience, one wall had been painted olive green; the second wall, paprika; the third, canary; and the fourth, lavender. The mixture of colors was arresting. Eggshell picture-frame molding ran high along the top of the walls and tried without success to tie the room together. Bleak pictures depicting despairing winter scenes in the mountains hung on the walls in bizarre contrast to the tsunamis of color. In each corner was a high-backed armchair, colored and striped vertically in opposition to the walls joining behind it. Father continually threatened to whitewash the whole affair, but Mother found it charming, and so it remained.
A small door in the southern wall of the Painted Parlour gave entrance to a corridor which, at its end, climbed three steps and opened at last into a sprawling room in the exact geometric center of the house. This was the Great Room. It was half the size of a modern gymnasium and, with its dark woods and baroque carvings, instantly gave the impression of an old English cathedral. Along one wall was a burnished oak bar with a set of six silver stools. Behind the bar were dozens of bottles of every kind of consumable spirit you can imagine, along with tumblers, wine glasses, mixers, and the like. Next to the bar on a recessed surface sat a glittering phonograph with a speaker of the cornucopia variety. Opposite were four arabesque planters the size of Volkswagens and painted Aztec oranges and blues. The room was heated by four stone fireplaces with mantels of carved wood.
At one end of the Great Room sat a goliath of a square grand piano. Originally built in 1889 by Henry F. Miller and J. H. Gib- son of Boston, it was later painstakingly restored piece by delicate piece by Fendom Bower, the eccentric owner of Old Buckram’s one music store who made a living selling rebuilt instruments and tuning the few local pianos. Whether by design or by happenstance, the piano, when played, would fill every room in the never-ending house with sound.
A most remarkable feature of the house was a giant elliptical opening in the ceiling of the Great Room that spanned thirty feet by the major axis, twenty by the minor. Through this vast portal the room was open from the ground floor all the way to the ornate iron-and-glass roof three stories above—similar in some manner to a rotunda except that instead of a pleasing parabolic dome on top, it was all oblique angles and irregular vertices. Thus, one could stand at the bar and, while waiting for a drink, look up and watch a waxing crescent moon in a field of stars pass by far overhead.
Immediately above the Great Room and orbiting the elliptical aperture was the famous library. It was this room that my father had seen on his first visit to the house, and that which had brought him there. It was indeed the dark heart of the dwelling. One could reach the library by a spare spiral staircase that climbed up from the Great Room, as well as by the Dali-esque stairway from the foyer.
The walls of the library were bookshelves twelve feet high, with gothic windows of stained glass and wide-set ledges in each wall of shelves. Between the windows were four doors standing alone, one in each of the four bookshelfed walls, and positioned at the four points of a cross. Each door opened to a hallway that led down to a series of bedrooms. At the southern end of the library was an apsis containing a simple sitting area with leather chairs and a small rolling bookcase that had at one time belonged to a clergyman. A door at the base of the apsis led to my parents’ room.
An iron railing with patterns of irreducible complexity ran unbroken around the oblong chasm in the floor. If you were to get lost in a book whilst strolling about, this barrier would keep you from accidentally plunging headlong and surprised into the Great Room below.
On the third floor of the house, more modest in dimension than the floors below, were several smaller rooms of cold, creaking wood connected by narrow passages and hidden stairways that ran arterially about in an altogether mystifying fashion. Offset among these was a simple glass observatory facing east, with a small reflecting telescope mounted on a brass swivel in the floor. After being sent to bed on the rare nights my parents had company, I often made my way from my bedroom up the back staircase to the observatory, where for a time I would lie on the floor, unseen, peering down through the library into the Great Room, as my parents entertained and bright voices and laughter drifted up and played auditory tricks with the ornamental glass architecture. Then I would turn to the telescope and spend hours on end searching with amazement all the illimitable wonders of the night sky. Fond memories, indeed.
And yet despite all the foolhardy extravagance and excess, there was inescapably an emptiness, a bleak chill, and a hostility to the house that could never be ignored or forgotten. No matter what efforts were undertaken in the way of decoration and the quaint placing of personal effects, the house had a way of communicating its chronic malaise. There were far corners and hallways that refused to be illuminated. There were rooms that couldn’t be heated, and wintry drafts from no identifiable source that numbed your feet and breathed a cold and unwelcome omen down your neck. There were closets the tops of which always harbored imperturbable spiders with thick irrational webs, and in all seasons chittering black bats, excited by the tethered moon, circled high on the chimney spires at twilight.
In the full context of this haunted estate, let’s go back now to the second floor and walk around the library together. You hold on to the railing and let it slide through your fingers, a faint trace of rust accreting on your fingertips and in the palm of your hand. Looking at the towering shelves, you think, How many books can this hold? Could I read that many books in a lifetime? As we walk around, we come to a small hallway in the corner of the room that breaks off into darkness. You didn’t see it at first; it’s almost hidden from sight. When I show it to you, you see that it leads to a small cubical chamber, a prison almost, inside of which is a desk, a chair, and a lamp. This was my father’s space. It was here that he would sit and write, and where all his hours vanished.
From THE BARROWFIELDS . Used with permission of Hogarth. Copyright © 2017 by Phillip Lewis.
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Meet an Intergalactic Spider in ‘Spaceman of Bohemia’
The cloud was unbudging, and therefore unnerving. Then it started to consume itself. Someone had to investigate. The Czech Republic is the first country to offer a human to hoover up particle samples. So away Jakub goes, seeking honor for his country and redemption of his family name. Before the Velvet Revolution, his father had been a member of the Communist Party’s secret police.
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Jaroslav Kalfar
Credit
Grace Ann Leadbeater
“Your father was a collaborator, a criminal, a symbol of what haunts the nation to this day,” says the senator who recruits Jakub for the journey. “As his son, you are the movement forward, away from the history of our shame.”
But solitary space travel — eight months in Jakub’s case; four out and four back — is not without its problems. It is hell on his marriage, for instance. Thirteen weeks into his voyage, Jakub’s wife, Lenka, leaves him, occasioning a major reckoning with his motives for undertaking such a dangerous mission. (It also gives him many excuses to drain his stash of whiskey. Deep space is no place to experience marital strife.)
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Space travel is also hard on Jakub psychologically. At roughly the same moment that his wife leaves, a monstrous, hairy spider appears on the spaceship. For a while, we assume that it’s a hallucination, a companion spun from Jakub’s lonely imagination. (His state-appointed psychologist had warned him about such things. “I need to sleep you off,” Jakub tells the spider. “Like a stomachache.”) But soon, we begin to suspect: Perhaps this creature is real?
Here it becomes clear that Kalfar has much larger aims with “Spaceman of Bohemia” than to write a spry, madcap work of speculative fiction. The giant spider has ready access to Jakub’s unconscious, and ransacks it repeatedly, releasing a cascade of defining memories: of Jakub’s falling in love with his wife; of his parents’ deaths when he was 10; of watching his grandparents endure humiliation and hardship to raise him. The spaceman becomes the most far-flung analysand in the solar system.
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Many of these memories are inseparable from the history of the Czech Republic, and the book becomes, as much as anything, a rumination on that history, both recent and distant. Among Jakub’s most painful recollections are those of his family’s participation in the brutal workings of the state. (I won’t reveal his father’s specific role, but it’s one of the book’s most involving and satisfyingly realized story lines.)
The desperate desire to become his father’s opposite, we slowly see, is what has propelled Jakub into space. He believed he was the biological carrier of his father’s curse — “the last remnant of Cain’s sperm” — which meant he had no choice, really, but to lead a life of spectacular repentance. A psychoanalyst might say his fate was overdetermined.
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Kalfar has an exhilarating flair for imagery. (“What good am I, a thin purse of brittle bones and spoiling meat?” Jakub wonders to himself after his parents die.) He writes boisterously and mordantly, like a philosophy grad student who’s had one too many vodka tonics at the faculty Christmas wingding.
This is generally a good thing, though it can also mean periodic forays into pretentiousness. In raking through the contents of Jakub’s mind, the spider makes a study of human beings more generally — the pain of our individuality comes as quite a shock — and some of its observations about “humanry” can be self-satisfied, grating; the book is just sturdy enough to withstand its most irritating declamations without collapse.
The fate of Jakub’s marriage, the spider, the voyage into space — they all get their moments, but not all of them get their proper due; at the very end, there are philosophy and more soliloquizing where resolutions ought to be. That such speechifying can be forgiven says something about Kalfar’s wild imagination, his ingenuity, his heart.
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Endings are just so very hard. Kalfar, if I had to guess, is from the E. L. Doctorow school of writing: You let your characters guide you. (“You never see further than your headlights,” Doctorow once told The Paris Review, “but you can make the whole trip that way.”) The problem is that headlights in deep space don’t really work. Unless the light bounces off something, it simply gets swallowed up in the dark.
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March 8, 2017
Alice Neel: How to Persevere and Live the Artist’s Life
“Alice loved a wretch. She loved the wretch in the hero and the hero in the wretch. She saw that in all of us, I think.” –Ginny Neel
“The self, we have it like an albatross around the neck.”
–Alice Neel
In the winter of 1931, a 30-year-old painter named Alice Neel was strapped with restraints to a thin mattress in Philadelphia’s orthopedic hospital. Institutionalized by her parents, Neel was raving, incontinent, and suicidal. She would become, arguably, the greatest American portraitist of the 20th century, but was now forbidden by doctors to draw or make art of any kind. Art, the medical establishment believed, was too unsettling for a lovely young blonde like Alice Neel. She was instructed to sew instead.
Neel hated sewing.
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She was kept to a strict institutional schedule like a prisoner: awakened for 5 am breakfast, to be eaten with a rubber fork, followed by long days in barred rooms where she was ever watched by some figure of authority. Quite literally maddening for any artist, whose job it is to be observer, not observed.
But Neel needed watching. Released from the hospital, she strode into her parents’ kitchen her first night home and stuck her head in their oven. Her brother found her there not quite dead in the morning (first thinking it was his mother’s legs flung across the linoleum). While her father complained about the coming gas bill, Neel was bundled back to the suicide ward. There she tried swallowing shards of broken glass, then throwing herself down a laundry chute, then auto-asphyxiation by stocking. Nothing worked. “I couldn’t pull long enough or hard enough,” she said. “You cannot commit suicide unless you—in a moment of frenzy—you do something irrevocable.”
She never did, at least not in the sense of suicide. Neel’s irrevocable act was to paint and never stop.
It was as a grad student in New York that I first saw one of Neel’s paintings, a portrait of Andy Warhol. Immediately I adored her. Portraiture is, I confess, my favorite art form, and Neel was an alchemist of the soul. She portrayed things somehow only she could see: the psychology and spirit, the vital essence, of her sitters.
I kept looking from Warhol on the wall to the nearly empty gallery, hoping to catch someone’s eye and ask, Are you seeing what I’m seeing? Neel had captured something no other painting or photo or album cover of the infamous Pop artist had come close to. Andy Warhol, a pale and vulnerable man in all his fragile humanity.
Remarkably, she was just as good when turning that all-seeing eye on herself. She lived long enough to capture one of the most knowing takes on aging ever made, up there with Rembrandt in its cold-eyed view of the sagging self. Eighty years old in this painting, made in 1980, the master portraitist has turned her unsparing scrutiny upon her own still-formidable self. Her fluffy white grandma updo—incongruous on a nude, to say the least—rhymes with the bright white rag dangling from her left hand. Meant for dabbing paint, according to some commentators, the rag is also a flag of surrender. But surrender to what? I expect they mean surrender to aging and the decline of the flesh. But what about the fact that after five decades of dedicated portraiture, this was Neel’s first real self-portrait? That after cajoling dozens of sitters—men, women, and children—to doff their duds, she at last joins them. She has surrendered to her own inspection at long last, there on the same blue-striped loveseat upon which so many others sat for her. Here, finally, Neel sits for herself.
She’s a tough customer. Paula Modersohn-Becker pioneered the nude self-portrait—a brave and revolutionary act—but it was as a woman in bloom, of youth and artistic vigor and motherhood, adhering to more conventional standards of beauty. Neel has nothing left to own with pride. Her body is a fallen landscape of battles gone by, her broad, distended belly rests across flaccid thighs while large, fleshy breasts dangle almost as low. Neel gave birth to four children, and it shows.
Her cheeks are ruddy to almost red, from age or New York weather or a lifetime of hard living, while between those same cheeks, above and below downturned lips, her skin is ghastly green. That green patch is instantly familiar, maybe even a quotation, from Matisse’s famous portrait of his wife from 1905, The Green Stripe. Neel shares Amélie Matisse’s upswept hair, arching eyebrows, pursed lips, and a trio of solid colors arrayed behind her. It’s as if Neel is hooting at her Fauvist friend from the other end of the century, shouting, “Screw abstraction, Hank, we won after all!”
If this painting waves any flag it’s that of portraiture still alive and kicking even after the artists and critics and art historians who “mattered” all believed it stone cold and long buried.
Neel’s high-flown brows are familiar to anyone who’s ever peered into a mirror putting on mascara, an indication of careful attention. Neel must have done this painting by looking in a mirror. For one thing, she disliked working from photographs, desiring the pulse of personhood and emotion beneath real flesh. But also, here she holds her paintbrush in the right hand and Neel was left-handed.
She wears glasses in a nod to old age and honest scrutiny and even waning sexual allure. To quote her contemporary, Dorothy Parker: “Men seldom make passes / At girls who wear glasses.” Or to quote feminist art historian (and Neel subject) Linda Nochlin, eyeglasses “are hardly part of the traditional apparatus of the nude.” Neel is being both scrupulous and poking a little fun: Here ya go, male gaze, enjoy.
Unlike Rembrandt’s weary personal testaments to the ravages of time, there’s no sense that Neel feels sorry for herself. What many might consider a ruin of a body is just realism at work, a fact like any other. Though painted in an age when finding something that might still épater le bourgeois was almost impossible, a naked old woman was pretty damned shocking.
“Frightful, isn’t it?” Neel cackled to critic Ted Castle. “I love it. At least it shows a certain revolt against everything decent.” No one ever revolted more consistently than Alice Neel.
*
While there’s often some charming mystery to writing about artists of the past, holes in knowledge we can (however unconsciously) fill with our own hopes or ideals, when writing about artists close to us in time, there’s the problem of knowing too much: every cough and letter, every lover and seaside sojourn and trip to the corner store. What, then, with a life like Alice Neel’s, which spanned eight decades, one husband, three fathers of four children, who knows how many lovers and significant friends? There is nothing to do but spin the reel on high speed and hold on tight:
Raised in working-class Pennsylvania, Neel put herself through art school; graduated 1925, married a Cuban painter named Carlos Enríquez that same year; moved to Havana, where she was embraced by the Cuban avant-garde, got politically radicalized, had her first show and her first baby, a girl named Santillana; 1927 relocated to New York City, where Santillana died of diphtheria just before her first birthday; the following year had a second daughter, Isabetta, whom Carlos took to meet his parents, then abandoned in Havana while he went on to Paris so that Neel lost two children in less than two years, as well as a husband.
“At first all I did was paint, day and night,” Neel said. She worked in a manic state for months until collapsing with what she called “Freud’s classic hysteria,” but might also be called guilt: “You see, I had always had this awful dichotomy. I loved Isabetta, of course I did. But I wanted to paint.” The firestorm of sorrow, giddiness, and shame finally engulfed her.
How she ended up in a suicide ward and how she got out and how she found success at last all had the same source: “I was neurotic. Art saved me.”
Neel made it out after convincing a social worker she was “a famous artist,” then met a Spanish Civil War fighter and heroin addict named Kenneth Doolittle and moved into his place in Greenwich Village; two years later he burned more than three hundred of her watercolors and slashed over fifty oils; Neel moved in briefly with well-off Harvard grad John Rothschild (her lifelong friend and probable lover), before hooking up with a Puerto Rican nightclub singer named Jose Negron; they had a baby boy called Richard and when he was three months old, Negron abandoned them both in Spanish Harlem; two years later Neel had another son, Hartley, with left-wing filmmaker Sam Brody.
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Significantly, both Neel’s sons carry her last name. Through everything, she painted and parented and did what she had to do to survive.
Neel was resourceful, whether it meant working as an easel painter for the WPA, shoplifting, or scaring up welfare, food stamps, or full scholarships for her sons. The Rudolf Steiner School is right next door to the Institute of Fine Arts. I used to pass the Steiner kids on the sidewalk and wonder how those little bohemians found their way to the Upper East Side. But then, how did I? Later, I sent both my children to the same kind of school in San Francisco and taught art history to high school students there for years. Art in Steiner schools is the linchpin of the curriculum, whether the class is English, history, math, or physics. In a sense, Neel sent her kids to her own version of parochial school, one that held art as the holy of holies.
Neel was adept at getting what she wanted, but it took a couple of decades of painting friends and neighbors in Spanish Harlem before she realized a little networking wouldn’t kill her. With a nudge from her therapist, Neel starting asking art world folks in power to take a seat. Shades of shrewd Adélaïde Labille-Guiard.
Neel started in 1960 with poet and newly appointed Museum of Modern Art curator Frank O’Hara. As an art-maker himself and a gay man, maybe he seemed nearer Neel’s regular milieu of outcasts. But Neel depicts O’Hara in perfect profile, a rare formal position for her (though he wears a rumpled gray crewneck) that calls to mind Roman emperors on coins or Renaissance profile portraits. Quite specifically, O’Hara here recalls Piero della Francesca’s Duke of Urbino, who could be looking right back at the MOMA curator across five centuries. Painting O’Hara in profile emphasizes his “strong” nose and jutting chin, as does della Francesca’s Urbino portrait. Both are men of power, though where the Duke of Urbino’s structured red cap is almost crownlike, O’Hara leans back into a spray of purple lilacs. O’Hara’s open, staring eyes are as startlingly blue as a movie star’s (Paul Newman’s spring to mind; O’Hara liked a good movie-star reference), while behind him hangs a formless shadow, a kind of dark double portrait. That shadow looms large for us, knowing that just four years later O’Hara would be dead at age 40, struck by a jeep on the beach at Fire Island.
Maybe Neel intuited O’Hara’s dark near-future, or maybe she was anticipating her own. What worked for Labille-Guiard flopped for Neel. Though O’Hara showed and reviewed many figurative artists in the next few years, he never included Neel in any exhibition, and he never wrote about her work.
Same thing with Henry Geldzahler, curator of 20th-century art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose portrait Neel painted in 1967. But when she asked him to include her in a career-making show—New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940–1970—two years later, Geldzahler sneered, “Oh, so you want to be a professional.” He did not include Neel in the exhibition.
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The slings and arrows of Neel’s professional life were legion. She might have become bitter, but mostly she just kept working. And yet. “I’m not against abstraction,” she said. “What I can’t stand is that the abstractionists pushed all the other pushcarts off the street.” Still, she stuck to her guns, which meant the figurative in all forms.
According to curator Jeremy Lewison, “Many of her best portraits of the period were of gay men and gay couples.” Neel painted O’Hara and Geldzahler, men who might have helped her who happened to be gay, and others, such as critics (and couple) David Bourdon and Gregory Battcock and that saintly (as in Saint Sebastian, or some other tortured soul) portrait of Pop artist Andy Warhol, pale and shirtless in a corset, both from 1970.
But I think her best painting of that year is the dual portrait of gay couple Jackie Curtis and Ritta Redd. Though Jackie is in drag on the right (and listed first in the title, which is as disorienting as their presentation and gender-neutral first names), Ritta, on the left, dressed in a boyish striped shirt and jeans, is the softer, more “feminine” of the two.
Both were part of Warhol’s Factory, and Curtis was a glam “Warhol superstar,” but neither had any power in the art world, or the wider world, for that matter. Neel just wanted to paint them. Curtis is done up with blue eye shadow, red nail polish, a smart 1950s-era skirt-and-blouse ensemble, and dark stockings (with a small hole where his right, polished big toe pokes through), but this is no Diane Arbus freak show. The men are as dignified as any Neel sitters, and clearly lovers. Curtis’s right knee juts at an awkward angle toward us so that his lower leg presses against Redd’s. It’s a tender gesture of togetherness. There is a whiff of poignancy, even longing, in Neel’s depiction of their shared affection. It’s especially lovely considering homosexuality was not just an outlaw “lifestyle” then, but quite literally illegal. Being gay meant being seen as at best immoral and quite likely insane (homosexuality was on the American Psychiatric Association’s list of mental disorders until 1973).
Not that Neel gave a shit about any of it, not morality or social opprobrium or even legality. Her sons remember FBI agents descending on the apartment at the height of the Red Scare with a thick dossier on Neel’s communist sympathies. Rather than quake or cajole, Neel admired “these two Irish boys” and immediately invited them to sit for her “in their trench coats.” The FBI men declined and quickly exited. Posterity weeps at the loss.
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The rise of feminism was at last the perfect storm to raise Neel’s battered boat. Here after all was a woman artist, in the thick of the New York art world for decades, who had been callously overlooked. She’d always been egalitarian in her approach to her subjects: working-class men and women of all races, mothers of all kinds, fine artists of every sex and race, pregnant women, curators and art historians, nudes of all ages, gay men and transvestites, the glory of humanity at every point on the way station of the century, and through it all she’d stuck to her own style, never swayed by theory or fashion. Feminists in the 1970s took up Neel’s cause with vigor, though Neel refused to spout a party line. “I much preferred men to women,” she shrugged. Her contemporaries rightly scoffed at Neel’s feminist branding. Painter May Stevens has said, “She wasn’t a feminist; she was an Alice Neelist.”
Regardless, the movement served Neel well. In 1970, TIME magazine asked her to create their cover on Kate Millett, the Columbia grad student whose dissertation, published as Sexual Politics, was an unlikely bestseller. Last of a dying breed, Neel of course wanted to paint from the living model, but Millett refused. Like a lead singer worried about pissing off her bandmates, she didn’t want to break ranks with the sisterhood by taking the limelight. Never one to pass up on opportunity, Neel settled for a photograph.
By painting the cover for TIME, Neel reached a bigger audience than any contemporary artist could ever dream of, and the portrait of Millett is one of her best-known works. It is, unabashedly, icon-making. Staring, unsmiling, mannish and intense, with her dark hair and white men’s shirt, Millett reminds me most of Robert Mapplethorpe’s famous cover image of Patti Smith on the album Horses a few years later. Both are working-class hotties in crisp white shirts, conveying seriousness of purpose alongside a sexy androgynous glamor. Quite a feat. Perhaps Mapplethorpe had taken note.
Mapplethorpe photographed Neel herself not long before she died of cancer in 1984. It’s a haunting picture, deliberately so. Neel knew she was dying and told Mapplethorpe she wanted to know what she’d look like dead. So she closed her eyes and opened her mouth, in imitation of innumerable 19th-century photographs of the recently deceased. The result is transcendent, like Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Theresa, a moment of piercing rapture and possible pain.
Neel depicted the human in all of us, including herself, the deformed, deranged, beautiful wretches that we are. “I tried to reflect innocently,” Neel once said of her work. She was wickedly good at it.
From Broad Strokes: 15 Women Who Made Art and Made History (in That Order) by Bridget Quinn, illustrations by Lisa Congdon. Published by Chronicle Books 2017.
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Harlequin Launches Hanover Square Press
Harlequin has announced the upcoming launch of Hanover Square Press, a new imprint publishing general fiction, narrative history, journalism, and memoir starting in January 2018. The imprint will be led by editorial director Peter Joseph, a former executive editor of the Thomas Dunne Books imprint at St. Martin's Press.
“Our aim is to reach a broad audience of readers who value engrossing, original stories that feature little-known facts, unique perspectives and unusual experiences,” Joseph said in a statement. “These are books that will keep people up all night reading, and that they will want to talk about the next day.”
Inaugural titles include two as-yet-unnamed collaborative works of narrative nonfiction by ABC News chief legal analyst Dan Abrams and author David Fisher. These book focus, HQN said, on lesser-known but groundbreaking American court cases. Other books to be published by the imprint in 2018 are Neil Olson's Francisco de Goya–inspired literary mystery The Black Painting, a debut thriller by Daily Mail First Novel Competition winner Amy Lloyd entitled Red River, and a currently untitled military novel by former Israel Defense Forces paratrooper Steven Hartov.
“The launch of Hanover Square Press represents the capstone of the yearlong development of our trade publishing program,” Harlequin executive v-p of global publishing and strategy Loriana Sacilotto said in a statement. “We are excited to be publishing such a rich array of editorial and offering opportunities for talented writers of every type.”
Hanover Square is the third new imprint Harlequin has introduced over the past year, including Park Row and Graydon House Books. The press takes its name from New York's Hanover Square, once known as “Printing House Square” due to the high number of printers, publishers, and booksellers that operated around it during the 18th and early 19th centuries.
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10 Ways First-Time Writers Can Get Noticed on Social Media
The changing literary and book publishing landscape makes it difficult for new authors to breakout. A plethora of new distribution formats, especially focused on self-publishing, opens up brand new avenues for writers to get noticed, but also makes it incredibly easy to get lost in the sea of content. Unless you have a pre-existing social platform or public profile that extends beyond the world of books, “discoverability” can be a very elusive thing and it can be nearly impossible to get noticed on social media.
That said, there are many ways first-time authors can leverage social media to build their online presence and gain momentum in their careers. Here are my top 10 insights:
This guest post is by Emily Sweet. Sweet is the Executive Director of Brand Development and Client Initiatives at Park Literary & Media. Among other things, she advises PLM clients on how to find their voice on social media, create an online presence, and develop a consistent brand strategy.
She’s a former lawyer who now works with Nicholas Sparks, Emily Giffin, Debbie Macomber, Janice Y.K. Lee, Taylor Jenkins Reid, and many others.
For more information on Park Literary & Media, as well as the authors they represent, visit parkliterary.com or find them @parkliterarymedia on Instagram and @parkliterary on Twitter.
1. Choose the platform that works for you
Are you Twitter or Instagram? Are you Snapchat or Pinterest? When first starting out, it can be tempting to sign up for every platform under the sun. And while it’s a good idea to at least reserve your handle (preventing someone else from taking it), you probably shouldn’t start posting away everywhere. What platform do you like and feels most instinctual to you? Do you want to share pithy quotes? Then choose Twitter. Are you out of storage space because of all the photos you’ve taken on your phone? Then choose Instagram. Do you have pages and pages of inspiration for your characters? Then put it all on Pinterest and invite your readers to find extra content there.
2. Make all of your social media handles consistent
This may seem intuitive, but it’s important. You want followers to easily find you. And, unfortunately, this can be more difficult than it seems as well, because some handles may already be taken. So chose one where you can be consistent.
3. Don’t use the same content across all platforms
It can be tempting to link all of your accounts together and post one thing at one time, but try to resist that temptation. Each social media platform has its own community and set of rules. For one thing, if people follow you on multiple platforms, they’re going to know that you’re just being lazy. And that concern aside, often times certain things won’t translate across platforms (tagging, for example, is hard to do when platforms are linked). But most importantly, each platform should have its own voice, which should be developed and honed.
[Here Are 7 Reasons Writing a Novel Makes You a Badass]
4. Develop a strong voice
Your content should reflect who you are as a writer. Share ideas and insights that distinguish you from other authors and public figures. Always remember who you’re talking to – your audience and who they consist of – and think about your “brand” (see number 6 for more on branding).
5. Post consistently
Post consistently and often. At this point, most platforms reward you for activity, i.e., there are algorithms that will naturally boost more popular posts, but consistency helps as well. It will also encourage people to follow and engage with you.
6. Focus on your brand, but don’t fall into the “ABS” (Always Be Selling) trap
Social media is a chance to get to know and really engage with your readers. If they like your writing, they’ll want to know when your book is coming out… but they want to engage in different ways too. No one likes being asked to buy something every time they see you.
Get everything you need to know about using Facebook, Twitter,
Pinterest and more to enhance your writing career (and platform)
by ordering Social Media For Writers: Marketing Strategies for
Building Your Audience and Selling Books.
7. Interact with your followers to get noticed on social media
Don’t forget to go back and comment on comments. This is the whole benefit of social media! You can talk to your followers in real time and build a relationship with them.
8. Interact with other authors
Authors can be a hugely supportive community. Just as you would reach out to other authors for blurbs, reach out and engage on social media as well.
[Want to Be a Writer? It’s Time to Act Like a Writer (must read for all writers)]
9. Make sure all of your posts are tagged
Hashtags help drive engagement and help grow your fan base. Tagging helps lead people back to your page that may not have otherwise seen it.
10. Be careful
It’s easy to forget that you’re becoming a public figure if you’ve spent most of your life being private. But now simple posts are subject to scrutiny, so just watch your intention and tone. You don’t want something taken out of context, or to turn people off from your writing. All publicity is definitely NOT good publicity.
Check Out These Great Upcoming Writers’ Conferences:
Thanks for visiting The Writer’s Dig blog. For more great writing advice, click here.
Brian A. Klems is the editor of this blog, online editor of Writer’s Digest and author of the popular gift book Oh Boy, You’re Having a Girl: A Dad’s Survival Guide to Raising Daughters.
Follow Brian on Twitter: @BrianKlems
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Family of ‘Make Way for Ducklings’ author donates Maine island
DEER ISLE, Maine (AP) — The family of the author of such classics as “Blueberries for Sal” has donated a Maine island featured in one of his books to a conservation organization.
The Portland Press Herald reports that the Nature Conservancy announced Monday that the family of writer and illustrator Robert McCloskey had donated the Outer Scott Island in Penobscot Bay, off Deer Isle.
McCloskey wrote the award-winning “One Morning in Maine,” which featured the 6.2-acre island in the story. His family donated a conservation easement on the property to the Nature Conservancy in 1974. The family has now transferred ownership to the organization.
The conservancy will manage the island according to the restrictions outlined in the conservation easement from 1974.
McCloskey also wrote “Make Way for Ducklings.” He died in 2003 at 88.
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Information from: Portland Press Herald, http://www.pressherald.com
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Talking Trumpism: A New Political Journal Enters the Fray
“We in America no longer have any idea what the future should be, much less how to build it together,” he said.
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That’s big talk for a quarterly with an initial print run of 300 copies and whose first issue mixes articles on economics and international affairs with more abstract offerings like a disquisition on Hegel and work. But the history of modern conservatism is paved with journals whose influence belied their small circulations, including The Public Interest, which became the chief organ of neoconservatism in the 1970s and ’80s, and National Affairs, founded in 2009 to promote “reform conservatism.”
In an interview, Mr. Krein semi-jokingly described the journal as aiming to appeal to fans of both Foreign Affairs and the Slovenian Marxist provocateur Slavoj Zizek. More seriously, he said, the magazine seeks to fill the void left by a conservative intellectual establishment more focused on opposing Mr. Trump than on grappling with the rejection of globalism and free-market dogma that propelled his victory.
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Anne-Marie Slaughter, the president and chief executive of the left-leaning think tank New America, and Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur and Trump supporter, at the Harvard Club, where American Affairs was unveiled.
Credit
Benjamin Norman for The New York Times
“A lot of people on the right are looking back and seeing an agenda that is a complete failure, presided over by a bunch of nonentities,” he said. “It’s a joke.”
Continue reading the main story
So far, the right is definitely reading. Matthew Continetti of The Washington Free Beacon, in an article reposted by National Review, called the first issue “lively and thought-provoking and at times deeply insightful.” Ross Douthat of The New York Times, a strong critic of Mr. Trump, noted the journal in a recent column, though he called the ideas on offer “not quite as daring as I had hoped.”
Over on the left, Jeet Heer of The New Republic was less appreciative. High-toned discussion of “civic friendship” and “covenantal nationalism,” Mr. Heer said, effectively “whitewashes” Mr. Trump’s “racial demagoguery” and authoritarianism and “aims to hoodwink elite conservatives into believing that Trump is just like them.”
Continue reading the main story
Mr. Krein says the point is exactly the opposite. “Trump is not like them, and that’s what makes him attractive — at least on a policy basis,” he said.
He continued: “There has to be a sense of a distinct political community. I don’t think it has to be ethnic or racial, but there has to be a distinct American citizenship that matters.”
Mr. Krein grew up in Eureka, S.D., and studied political philosophy at Harvard with the noted conservative scholar Harvey C. Mansfield before going into finance, working at Bank of America, the Blackstone Group and smaller firms. (He now works full-time on the journal.)
Continue reading the main story
He’s also a skilled connector, as the crowd at the Harvard Club attested. The main event was a discussion of globalization between Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur and Trump supporter, and Anne-Marie Slaughter, the president and chief executive of the left-leaning think tank New America. (Mr. Krein said he met Mr. Thiel several years ago though a reading group dedicated to the philosopher Leo Strauss.)
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During the cocktail hour, Mr. Thiel chatted with the philanthropist and Trump donor Rebekah Mercer, while writers and editors from The Washington Free Beacon, First Things, National Review, The American Conservative and other mostly right-of-center outlets worked the room.
Photo
Stacks of American Affairs journals.Credit
Benjamin Norman for The New York Times
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William Kristol of The Weekly Standard, a staunch Never-Trumper, summed up the crowd as “a mix of normal people who come to conservative events, some interesting people who are distinctively Trumpian and a few lunatics.”
And himself? “I’m representing the deep state,” Mr. Kristol joked.
The journalist Michael Lind, a member of the magazine’s advisory board (and a former conservative turned advocate of “liberal nationalism”), credited Mr. Krein with “trying to scramble the categories of left, right and center.”
Continue reading the main story
“We’ve already seen a partisan realignment,” Mr. Lind said. “What we’re now seeing is an intellectual realignment, as both parties’ intellectuals try to catch up with their bases.”
American Affairs grew out of The Journal of American Greatness, a pseudonymously written blog that Mr. Krein — a sometime contributor to The Weekly Standard — and others started last spring, out of frustration that no outlet wanted to publish their long, learned, Trump-tolerant essays. (It abruptly shut down in June, declaring that what began as an “inside joke” had started being taken too seriously; another offshoot, American Greatness, set up shop in July.)
The site is most famous for publishing Publius Decius Mus, the pseudonymous author of the incendiary pro-Trump essay “The Flight 93 Election,” who was unmasked last month as Michael Anton, who is now a senior staff member at the National Security Council. Mr. Krein, who wrote as Plautus, said his own favorite contributions included “The Red Album,” a satire of “#NeverTrump paranoia” modeled paragraph-by-paragraph on Joan Didion’s classic essay “The White Album.”
The first issue of American Affairs is similarly eclectic, if more squarely in the policy journal tradition. Mr. Anton wrote a critique of “the liberal international order,” and the economist David P. Goldman, better known for his columns under the pen name Spengler, contributed a chart-heavy essay on technology and the United States. Mr. Krein’s essay on James Burnham’s critique of the “managerial elite” takes whacks at both parties.
The second issue, Mr. Krein said, will include more surprises, mixing newcomers with some prominent names one wouldn’t expect to see there. As for the biggest name in American politics, Mr. Krein said the magazine took no “intellectual cues” from President Trump.
Continue reading the main story
“These are our ideas,” he said. “We hope there’s some overlap, but we aren’t going to sit around cheerleading the administration.”
Continue reading the main story
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Women’s history month promotion sees bookshop ‘silence men’s voices’ | Books
A bookshop in Ohio has made a graphic illustration of the position of female writers by leaving only books by women visible to its customers. The change, made to mark women’s history month, has provoked an angry reaction in some quarters, with accusations of sexism and censorship.
Eight members of staff at Loganberry Books in Cleveland turned the spines and covers of books by men to face the wall in the shop’s 10,000-title fiction section. Harriett Logan, the bookstore’s founder and owner, told the website Heat Street the intention was to illustrate how women’s voices were drowned out.
“In essence [we are] not just highlighting the disparity but bringing more focus to the women’s books now, because they’re the only ones legible on the shelf,” she told the online magazine. She added that although she had conceived the display to make a point, when completed it had an even stronger impact than she had expected.
A sign in front of the display says: “Illustrating the fiction gender gap … we’ve silenced male authors, leaving works of women in view.” Loganberry is a feminist bookshop that retails new, used and with an emphasis on women’s history and literature. The move is intended to be a conspicuous illustration of the current representation of women in print.
The shop has divided opinion online. Novelist Susan Petrone tweeted: “If @loganberrybooks had just done another display for #WomensHistoryMonth, nobody would be talking about gender disparities,” while thriller writer Joe Hill, son of Stephen King, tweeted: “Wouldn’t it be interesting to try this with your own TBR pile for a while? Might try it with mine.”
However, not all reactions were positive, with complaints that Logan should be running a “men’s history month” to balance the promotion, and that the display was not about women’s voices, but about “hating men”. Editor and writing coach John Ettorre tweeted: “Simply unbelievable. Promoting women’s voices by symbolically silencing men’s. By an independent bookstore! Shame on you, Harriett.” He added: “Did they settle on this path after deciding burning books by men was just too over the top? I’m stunned.”
Logan responded to Ettorre’s comments by inviting him to the shop. “Come visit,” she tweeted back. “It is quite striking – eye opening. and, obviously, temporary.”
Some complained the move was a form of censorship that “insulted customers” and made it difficult for them to find an item. “This dumb broad is why so many women-run businesses go belly up,” one poster replied to a comment on Heat Street about the practicality of the display.
But another commenter gave short shrift to the naysayers: “Get over it. It’s almost like those ‘art’ pieces where they organized books by binding colors in a bookstore, except this does make a point – and the books are still there … The question will be [whether] the publicity keeps sales at or above average for this time of year – if not, I doubt it will be repeated.”
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