Lawrence Jackson (1)

Carla Blumenkrantz is a funny guy, and she has really zazzed up “The Intellectual Situation” feature in this mag. This issue it’s about “dead white magazines,” and their hilarious attempts to make sense of the internet. Here’s Harper’s publisher Rick MacArthur, in what CB calls a “complete mischaracterization of the nature of daily existence”: “To the extent that commercial newspapers and magazines are advertising catalogs—with writing wrapped around them—they are vastly more effective in purveying commercial messages because with paper, you can’t help bumping into the ads on the way to reading the article in between …. At some point you’ve got to turn off the computer or your iPad, but the mail and the brochures and printed matter just keep coming.”

Then also there is an article on Anders Behring Breivik that kept me in a constant state of slightly weepy distress, memoir semifiction from Lawrence Jackson (I like when people take you deep into another time and place that is like but unlike the same six neoliberal prestige lifeworlds we keep getting fed us, like Baltimore in the summer of ’89 instead of LA ’92) and Kristi Dombek (Williamsburg ’13, but she gets away with it), and then infojournalism from Nikil Saval on China’s eighties and their betrayed promise (as analogous to America’s sixties and theirs), and lesser things.… (más)

A truly excellent and wonderfully detailed biography of a brillant man with a fascinating and inspiring life. I read this before I read The Invisible Man and the parallels bewteen Ellision and his main character as they overcome poverty in the deep south are many. Ellision's life parallels many of the critical themes of African American history and the author does an admirable job and integrating his life in the zeitgeist. The biography stops as Ellision's genius is recognized and a part 2 detailing the elder literary statesman has been promised. I eagerly await its publication.… (más)