May-June 2009
LYDIA LOPOKOVA is not a name that comes to mind when one thinks of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, which is celebrating the 100th anniversary of its founding this year. Bloomsbury Ballerina, a superb new biography by British dance critic Judith Mackrell, should help remedy this situation.
MoreI interviewed Cooper face-to-face at the Sundance Film Festival last January.
More… People in this part of Sub-Saharan Africa have some access to the Internet and young “gay” men visit websites where they are learning what it’s like to be homosexual in Western societies. Young gay men here are aware of the legalization of homosexual unions, and its related debates, in Europe and the U.S.
MoreMY COPY of Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation is forty years old and was published by Dell for 95¢. It was a time when literary criticism could be sold as a mass market paperback. A photo of Sontag takes up most of the cover. She is young and pretty, the skunk-like swatch of white not yet streaking her helmet of hair. She is wearing a jacket that covers her to her chin, and yet there is nothing doughty about her.
MoreAndy Warhol is signing his latest book of Polaroids at a large bookstore in Manhattan, hundreds of fans pressing around the table. A young man at the edge of the crowd walks slowly behind the table, arm-length from Warhol, adroitly snatches his wig, tosses it to an accomplice waiting near the door. Both run out into the anonymous streets of New York.
MoreWHEN the incomparable James Purdy passed away in March on Friday the 13, 2009, at the prodigious age of 94, he had been pretty much out of the publishing mainstream for nearly two decades. One of his last short stories, “Reaching Rose,” published in the 2004 collection Moe’s Villa and Other Stories, was a remarkable piece of semi-confessional fiction about a lonely bar fly coming to terms with his own mortality:
MoreDESPITE President Obama’s lifting of the ban on prohibiting abortion information and services overseas, the issue is not settled. In the past fifteen years, right-wing groups unleashed a vast, many-pronged “culture war” to manipulate sexual anxieties and dictate what goes on in America’s bedrooms.
MoreLATE IN EVELYN WAUGH’S Brideshead Revisited (1945), narrator Charles Ryder finds himself trapped in a loveless marriage and still in love with a married woman, Lady Julia Mottram, whose physical likeness to her brother Sebastian is what Charles has been drawn to all along.
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Reviews of Truman Capote? Enfant Terrible, Undercurrents: Queer Culture and Postcolonial Hong Kong, Cuban Zarzuela: Performing Race and Gender on Havana’s Lyric Stage, and Shuck by Daniel Allen Cox.
MoreTHIS BOOK began, like many good ideas, as a conversation. During a public administration conference in Washington, D.C., Kenneth Oldfield, a straight, white, married emeritus professor in Illinois, and Richard Greggory Johnson III, a gay African-American assistant professor in Vermont “with dreadlocks to die for,” began talking about the ways in which academia, for all its professed liberalism, routinely fails to confront its own prejudice against working-class people, especially those within its ranks.
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