November 14, 2012 Arts & Culture Secret Doctrines By Ezra Glinter Theosophy Hall of the United Lodge of Theosophists on East Seventy-Second Street in Manhattan is one of those strange, wonderful, time-warp spaces you can find all over the city, if you know where to look. From threadbare armchairs in the lobby to a library of occult books in the basement, it’s the kind of place that hasn’t changed in decades. It could be a museum, if someone hung a velvet rope. I was at the ULT on a recent Wednesday evening to attend the weekly study group on The Key to Theosophy, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. My interest had been piqued by a new biography, Madame Blavatsky: The Mother of Modern Spirituality, by Gary Lachman, who (for those interested in such trivia), was the bassist for Blondie before reinventing himself as a writer on occult topics. A man in a brown sweater vest and a silver-haired woman wearing gold-rimmed glasses led the discussion from a semi-circular stage that, under pink and purple lighting, looked like an old-fashioned science fiction set. With the ancient furnishings, solemn proceedings, and casual talk of 1,500-year reincarnation cycles, the scene was delightfully weird. Read More
November 14, 2012 On the Shelf The Word of the Year, and Other News By Sadie Stein Oxford American Dictionaries have chosen the word of the year: GIF. The rationale? “The GIF, a compressed file format for images that can be used to create simple, looping animations, turned twenty-five this year, but like so many other relics of the 80s, it has never been trendier.” The NYPL celebrates the pick thusly. Biographers falling for their subjects: an occupational hazard? “Any biography of a living, breathing and active figure who’s still at the height of his powers is going to have to strike a delicate balance between access and objectivity … It can be very tricky, and it requires real finesse.” Speaking of: the ten grumpiest authors in literary history.
November 13, 2012 In Memoriam Jack Gilbert, 1925–2012 By Sadie Stein “Being alive is so extraordinary I don’t know why people limit it to riches, pride, security—all of those things life is built on. People miss so much because they want money and comfort and pride, a house and a job to pay for the house. And they have to get a car. You can’t see anything from a car. It’s moving too fast. People take vacations. That’s their reward—the vacation. Why not the life?” —The Art of Poetry No. 91
November 13, 2012 Look The Dream Life of Grete Stern By Sadie Stein Today, Whitney Otto, author of Eight Girls Taking Pictures, has a slideshow on the Huffington Post drawing our attention to inspirational female photographers the viewer may not know. We were delighted to see Grete Stern featured. As Otto explains, Grete Stern was born in Germany to a Jewish family, and in Weimar Berlin, she and Ellen Auerbach had a photography studio called ringl + pit that specialized in advertising. She emigrated to Buenos Aires in 1935. From 1948 to 1950, Stern was hired by a womens’ magazine to “illustrate” the dreams that readers of the magazine (mostly Argentine housewives) submitted. She made 150 photomontages, called Suenos (dreams), that comprise perhaps the most brilliant and telling psychological document ever made of the inner lives of women of that era. The following images are from LesGouExposiciones. Pause Play Play Prev | Next See more here.
November 13, 2012 Arts & Culture In Which Philip Roth Announces His Retirement (in English) By Nelly Kaprielian Last month our friends at the French cultural magazine Les Inrockuptibles reported that Philip Roth has called it a day, and the world took notice. Here is the full interview with Nelly Kaprielian, in English. —Lorin Stein Out of all your novels, Nemesis seems to be the one where you lay out most clearly your own vision of existence. That’s true. I think everything in life is a matter of luck. I don’t believe in psychoanalysis, or in a subconscious that guides our choices. All we have is the good luck or the bad luck to meet certain people who will be either good or bad for us. My first wife, for example, turned out to be a criminal—she was always stealing, lying, and so forth—and it’s not as if I chose her for that reason. I hate criminals. But there you are, I had the bad luck to marry a bad person. Psychoanalysts will tell you that I chose her unconsciously—I don’t believe in that, though in a certain way this isn’t far from my own view, which is that, in the face of life, we are innocents. There is a certain innocence in each of us in the way we deal with our lives. Nemesis belongs to a group of four novels entitled “Nemeses” (including Everyman, Indignation, and The Humbling). How are they connected? Each one deals with the subject of death from a different point of view. In each of these books, the protagonist has to face his “nemesis,” a word one hears a lot in the United States, and which could be defined as doom, or misfortune, a force that he can’t overcome and that chooses him as its victim. Read More
November 13, 2012 On the Shelf A Man Finds Twenty Grand in a Book, and Other News By Sadie Stein A Massachusetts Good Samaritan found twenty thousand dollars hidden in the pages of a used book and is now trying to find the rightful owner. The real question: Why would an artist reinterpret Smiths titles as the covers of Penguin paperbacks? Reactions from around the world to Philip Roth’s retirement. A list of other notable literary retirements. And speaking of retirements, Salman Rushdie and John le Carré have ended their long-running feud.