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  • Arts & Culture

    Business as Usual

    By
    Well-known businesswoman Alice B. Toklas

    Well-known businesswoman Alice B. Toklas.

    Much has been made in recent days of Wikipedia’s decision to place certain authors under the rubric “American Women Novelists,” rather than merely “American Novelists”—the sort of thing which, in my retail days, I might have referred to as “a strong choice.”

    Perhaps less controversial, but I would argue just as peculiar, is their designation of a lady who would today have been 136. In the alphabetized list of notable birthdays for April 30 one may find the following: “Alice B. Toklas, American businesswoman.”

     

     

  • Arts & Culture

    Falling Men: On Don DeLillo and Terror

    By

    Some terrorist attacks become cultural obsessions, while others are forgotten completely. There were three bombings in New York City in 1975, none of which I’ve ever heard talked about, each of which would probably shut down the city if it happened now. In January, Puerto Rican separatists set off dynamite in Fraunces Tavern in downtown Manhattan, killing four businessmen—the same number of fatalities, incidentally, that led us to close the airspace over Boston last week. In April, four separate bombs went off in midtown Manhattan on one afternoon, damaging a diner and the offices of several finance firms. The worst one came in late December, when a package of dynamite exploded in the baggage-claim area at LaGuardia Airport, killing eleven.

    These were underground disturbances, moments of disorder that helped warp the culture, even if they weren’t absorbed or even remembered. In 1975, Don DeLillo was thirty-nine, living in the city, possibly beginning work on Players, his fifth novel and his first about terrorism. Long before it became obvious, DeLillo argued that terrorists and gunmen have rearranged our sense of reality. He has become better appreciated as the world has come to resemble his work, incrementally, with every new telegenic catastrophe, every bombing and mass shooting. Throughout DeLillo’s work we encounter young men who plot violence to escape the plotlessness of their own lives. He has done more than any writer since Dostoevsky to explain them. Read More