Category: the doings of friends

Mrs. Erami, it turns out, is one of the more dramatic products of the generational upheaval in Iranian attitudes toward sex. A conservative Muslim, she was not sympathetic, some years before her encounter with Mahdavi, when her gay son came out of the closet. Her husband threw him out of the house. When their unmarried daughter announced that she had a boyfriend, Mrs. Erami slapped her and called her a prostitute. The daughter left home that day, never to return. And so the Eramis lost both of their children over their unwillingness to accept sexual behavior that had become the norm not only globally but even within many circles inside Iran. A year later Mrs. Erami's husband died, leaving his wife entirely alone and flooded with regret. That was when she devoted herself to sex education reform, both as a teacher and as a campaigner within Iran's education ministry.

The head of India's right-wing Shiv Sena group, which was founded in 1966 and based in Bombay, Thackeray would be essentially parodic if he weren't so murderous. He was until recently focused on starting an India-based rival to McDonald's, "Shiv Vada-pav," with a fried potato burger as its main attraction. And it was through his initiative that the city was renamed "Mumbai," after the city's patron goddess Mumbadevi—which, the nationalists argued, returned the city to its Hindu past. In reality, the Sena had overwritten history with a fantasy: Bombay was originally a Portuguese (Bom-baim), and then English (Bombay), trading port. The notion that it has a particularly Hindu past to return to is false.

In his manic periods, the philosopher compulsively seduced younger, more attractive women and brought them home to ‘show’ his wife. The actual murder took place when he was giving Hélène a ‘neck massage’ – on the front of her neck. The great Marxist pressed his thumbs ‘into the hollow at the top of Hélène’s breastbone and then, still pressing, slowly moved them both . . . up towards her ears’, squeezing so hard that he felt pain in his forearms. He noticed this pain before he noticed his wife’s glazed eyes and protruding tongue.

In The Future Lasts a Long Time, Althusser breezes through Hélène’s monstrous childhood in less than two pages, but returns again and again to the scene of his own symbolic ‘rape’ by his mother, which occurred after he began having wet dreams, and consisted of his mother pointing at his sheets and announcing: ‘Now you are a man, my son.’ Such passages alternate with confessions, self-recriminations, Freudian self-analyses and sentences like ‘I know you are waiting for me to talk about philosophy, politics, my position within the Party, and my books,’ creating an impression of parodic egotism.

The guys I play hockey with, a number of whom are bankers, know about the crisis. ‘We could start farming,’ one of them suggested a while ago as we sat in the locker room after another loss to our rivals.

‘I have a balcony. We can raise a goat.’

‘Or mushrooms. We could grow psychedelic mushrooms.’

‘No, the FSB controls that market. The minute you came out with your mushrooms they’d be visiting you.’

‘Gentlemen!’ Our captain wanted us to get back to business. ‘There is a financial crisis. But we are also in a hockey crisis.’

‘We’re better off with a goat,’ the first banker continued. ‘It will give you milk – and progeny!’

Stewart's lyricism is fashioned from two materials: Old Testament fire and brimstone–a pervasive climate of environmental tempests and spiritual tests–and the incantations of names. The latter found their fullest expression in his most famous work, Names on the Land. Released three years before Fire, the book is a history of American place-names that retraces the paths of conquistadors, pilgrims, frontiersmen and merchants across the Lower 48. (A reissue added chapters on Alaska and Hawaii.) A ramble through the book's index reveals the land's rhythms and curiosities: Puget Sound, Pulaski, Pumly Tar, Punxsutawney, Purgatoire, Putah Creek, Putin, Puu. Toby's Creek, Todd's Corner, Togo, Tokio, Tokio River, Toledo, Tolo, Tolono, Tolstoi, Tomato Creek, Tomball, Tombstone. Bird-in-Hand, Deal, Fertility, Intercourse. Stewart was a poet, but he was a tough guy, too, like Mailer. Unlike Mailer, though, who fueled his machismo with flights of scotch, Stewart was a rugged survivalist, a social conservative who measured testosterone in miles hiked.

What patterns could be found in the shifting night skies? What did it look like on the other side of the world, and who lived there? Could man find a way to fly? Could the dead be brought back to life? What was life, anyway? These were imaginative as well as empirical questions. To solve them required inspiration and originality, the traits celebrated by Romantic writers and thinkers. The Romantic scientists bridled at the “purely mechanistic universe” described by Newtonian physics. Like their poetic counterparts, they believed in an “infinite, mysterious Nature.”

Both came from cultures that had been violently uprooted and dislocated; both were exiled, their lives threatened; both found refuge eventually in the United States—and became outspoken critics of this country. Both fought the regimes they opposed with words and the application of counternarrative. Both wrote famous accusatory tomes—Orientalism (1978), The Gulag Archipelago (1973)—that, through the sheer accrual of evidence, fundamentally altered the worlds they described.

Most interesting of all, both lived to see their political projects succeed to a degree they could never have anticipated. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991; Israel acknowledged the existence of the Palestinian people, and their right to a state, in the 1993 Oslo Accords. And both writers were, immediately and thoroughly, critical of what had once seemed their fondest wishes: While the West celebrated the Yeltsin regime, Solzhenitsyn warned that it was in irresponsible free fall; at almost the same moment, Said denounced Oslo as “a Palestinian Versailles.” Both, sadly, were right.

The players of the Game made explicit the workings of a new sexual economy, one that was always implicit in the old, but was mediated by illusions that, it turns out, did more than merely obscure. We had disaggregated community, love, sex, and the family to allow a new protocol of maximum efficiency to establish itself.

To blame the Internet for editors’ and publishers’ lack of imagination isn’t fair. It’s only half the story. If magazines and newspapers were publishing writers worth reading, and who were writing original and unexpected things, and giving them enough space to do it, people would read them. Instead, they publish toadies.

How did museums become looters? To Waxman, a former culture reporter for The Washington Post and The New York Times, the problem is part of a larger battle about history, in which “once-colonized nations” are seeking to reclaim the “tangible symbols” of national identity from the “great cultural shrines of the West.

Woolf found it difficult to keep her distance from servants, to give orders in a way that established her authority over them (she hated the "measured sweetness" with which servants were supposed to be addressed). [Nellie] Boxall, who worked for Woolf for eighteen years, was an excellent but temperamental cook, and they fought regularly, their rows leaving Woolf surprisingly unsettled and vulnerable. "She doesn't care for me, or for anything," Woolf once complained in her diary, as if talking about a school friend or a lover. She schemed for years to let Boxall go, rehearsing the scene in her mind but losing courage at the last minute, or being won over by Boxall's attempts at peacemaking. Boxall gave and retracted notice dozens of times. She was high-strung and insecure: the parallels with Woolf's disposition are hard to miss.

My parents' friends were amateur bee-keepers, gardeners, cabinetmakers, guitarists, and our more immediate neighbours likewise seemed to be making things up as they went along. One had a field full of junk cars, many children and a drinking problem; he was always driving off the road. Another ran the local airfield and kept a mountain lion for a pet; when he and his wife divorced later on, she married an arms dealer and moved to Istanbul.

There was nothing else I knew—we didn't have a TV—but even so I could tell our life was new and rare and unsponsored by tradition. . . . Everything was improvisation, with the thrill and risk the word implies. . . . And life up Salt Creek acquired a real enough frontier air on at least those occasions when a pack rat ventured out from the wall in the living room and my father picked up his .22 rifle to shoot it, a practice that could be unsettling to guests but which mostly impressed me as a display of good aim.

There is simply no way to write about [history-making events] in real time without revealing a huge amount about yourself. And the intimate bond this creates with readers is unlike the bond that the The Times, say, develops with its readers through the same events. Alone in front of a computer, at any moment, are two people: a blogger and a reader. The proximity is palpable, the moment human—whatever authority a blogger has is derived not from the institution he works for but from the humanness he conveys. This is writing with emotion not just under but always breaking through the surface. It renders a writer and a reader not just connected but linked in a visceral, personal way. The only term that really describes this is friendship. And it is a relatively new thing to write for thousands and thousands of friends.

Asked whether his painting and his criticism had things in common, he answered, "The brutal fact is that they're exactly the same thing." He did not accept the idea there was a difference between artists and critics. ("I get a laugh from artists who ridicule critics as parasites or artists manqués—such a horrible joke.") In fact, his prose equals the subjects he wrote about and often surpasses them. While this may be true of some film critics writing today, saying their prose equals the subjects they write about is not a compliment.

Tonight, he puts on "Ain't Too Proud To Beg" and starts singing along, and before long is thinking about the ridiculousness of the idea that begging Liz would do any good at all. As if life was anything like a Motown song. And at the part where Ruffin sings about a crying man being "half a man, with no sense of pride," Bill can't sing along anymore. Ruffin is hitting way too many high notes to be nearly as upset as he claims, and Bill begins to get furious at the record. It feels like some kind of cruel facsimile of pain. The way the other four Temptations buoy Ruffin at every turn, he's not alone, not by a long shot; his buddies have his back, and he's still dancing. Bill thinks that maybe The Big Chill had it right, and that "Ain't Too Proud To Beg" is simply a way to make doing the dishes more enjoyable. He tries not to think about how he is now older than the Kevin Kline and Glenn Close characters.

Beneath the Now We Know Better is a whiff of Doesn’t That Look Good. The drinking, the cigarettes, the opportunity to slap your children! The actresses are beautiful, the Brilliantine in the men’s hair catches the light, and everyone and everything is photographed as if in stills for a fashion spread. The show’s ‘1950s’ is a strange period that seems to stretch from the end of World War Two to 1960, the year the action begins. The less you think about the plot the more you are free to luxuriate in the low sofas and Eames chairs, the gunmetal desks and geometric ceiling tiles and shiny IBM typewriters. Not to mention the lush costuming: party dresses, skinny brown ties, angora cardigans, vivid blue suits and ruffled peignoirs, captured in the pure dark hues and wide lighting ranges that Technicolor never committed to film.

Sooner or later, though, unless you watch the whole series with the sound off, you will have to face up to the story.

A front-desk attendant agreed to put a call through to Fahey's room. From subsequent reading, I gather that at this time Fahey was making the weekly rent by scavenging and reselling rare classical-music LPs, for which he must have developed an extraordinary eye, the profit margins being almost imperceptible. I pictured him prone on the bed, gray-bearded and possibly naked, his overabundant corpus spread out like something that only got up to eat: that’s how interviewers discovered him, in the few profiles I’d read. He was hampered at this point by decades of addiction and the bad heart that would kill him two years later, but even before all that he’d been famously cranky, so it was strange to find him ramblingly familiar from the moment he picked up the phone. A friend of his to whom I later described this conversation said, "Of course he was nice—you didn’t want to talk about him."

Fahey asked for fifteen minutes to get his "beatbox" hooked up and locate the tape with the song on it. I called him back at the appointed time.

"Man," he said, "I can't tell what she’s saying there. It's definitely not 'boutonniere.'"

"No guesses?"

"Nah."

We switched to another mystery word, a couple of verses on: Wiley sings, "My mother told me, just before she died/Lord, [precious?] daughter, don’t you be so wild."

"Shit, I don’t have any fucking idea," Fahey said. "It doesn't really matter, anyway. They always just said any old shit.