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Staff Picks: Harvey Pekar, Henry Luce, Lost Critics
By
The Paris Review
July 23, 2010
This Week’s Reading
What we’ve been reading this week.
I was keen to catch a glimpse of what is being called the “
last comic
” of Harvey Pekar, which is a collaboration with Tara Seibel, a Cleveland cartoonist and graphic designer. Seibel’s story of her final moment with Pekar is comforting in its ordinariness: she dropped him off at the public library, where he had parked his car. —
Thessaly La Force
Jackson Lears’ marvelous
review
of Alan Brinkley’s less-marvelous
dual biography
of Henry Luce and Time, Inc. The book has been a strange mirror for reviewers: when
The New Yorker
handled the book, it did so as a
shadow portrait of Eustace Tilley
; when
The New York Times
did, it became a book about the
challenges facing newspapermen in the digital era
. But Lears sees something bigger than himself reflected in the story of Luce and his mid-century behemoth. “Few men have more fully embodied the tense alliance between the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” he writes. “He preached a civil religion for an emerging affluent society.” —
David Wallace-Wells
It’s douche bag, not douchebag,
according
to a former
New York Magazine
copy editor. But my favorite testimony from the trenches is still
this Q&A with
The New Yorker
‘s Mary Norris
. Some tidbits: she will always regret making Oliver Sacks spell sulfur the American way (instead of sulpher); there’s a staff writer who consistently spells annihilate with one “n”; and even the best are confused by the difference between “lie” and “lay.” —
T. L.
Also, the ever-serious Jeffrey Rosen on the
punishing frivolity
of life on the Internet; theologian David B. Hart on
theologician Marilynne Robinson
; and a charming
Esquire
feature
on gamesmanship and
The Price Is Right
. —
D. W. W.
For my sins I’ve been reading Seymour Krim’s 1970 collection
Shake it for the World
. Krim was what used to be called an “underground” critic. He wrote for the
Voice
and the
New American Review
; I read him to remember how dead that world is now. Half this collection is a sustained rant against James Jones and Norman Mailer (“… now this hip young literary snatch was carrying on about
Barbary Shore
in a way that would have offended Mailer himself. I lost my trick of the evening because of the stone I turned to after this Mailer-infected preacherette thrust him at me like the sacrament . . . ” etc., etc., etc.) Nowadays I suppose he’d be a blogger, like the rest of us. Every once in a while, though, Krim gets off a zinger. For instance when the
New Yorker
theater critic John McCarten calls
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf
“a vulgar mishmash.” Writes Krim: “What Irishman is kidding what Jew?” One misses that kind of thing, a little. —
Lorin Stein
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