Sherry Chandler » Saturday morning on the NYTimes Book Page
Saturday morning on the NYTimes Book Page
Prosecution had sympathy but jury found against:
JT LeRoy, the authorial “other” whom the writer Laura Albert employed as her alter ego and self-protective proxy in the world, was found yesterday by a jury in Manhattan to be not just a fictional creation, but a fraud.
More on this ever-fascinating story here.
Meanwhile, I’ll opine that our country has turned sort of vampiric, feeding on other people’s pain, which is what sets us all up to be suckers for this kind of story. If I really wanted to strecth that analogy, I’d say it’s sort of our version of the Roman coliseum.
Tina Brown’s Couples
Why these couples? Why H. G. Wells and Rebecca West; Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry; Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim and John Francis (Earl) Russell; Vanessa Bell and Clive Bell; Lady Ottoline Morrell and Philip Morrell; Radclyffe Hall and Lady Una Troubridge; Vera Brittain and George Gordon Catlin? All were literary or artistic figures, famous in their time (some still are in ours). All had the useful (to the rest of us) habit of writing everything down. They did their thinking aloud on paper — in urgent, dashed-off notes, carefully hoarded correspondence, diary entries, hand-delivered notes and unsent emotional manifestos. All of it was “eyes only,” so to speak, but time has declassified it. The result is YouTube in a time capsule.
Pagels and King do an excellent job explaining why, according to the author of this renegade gospel, mainstream Christianity has gotten it so wrong for so long. Along the way they introduce us to, among other things, a goddess named Barbelo (for some Gnostics, a divine mother figure who often symbolized heaven) and try to make sense of teachings that to most readers today will seem like nutty musings on numerology, cosmology, astrology and eschatology. On the perennial question of death and the afterlife, Pagels and King explain that whereas other early Christians affirmed the doctrine of bodily resurrection, the Christians to whom this gospel is addressed believed in the immortal spirit. Here the body is suspect. Jesus is not reborn in the flesh but simply appears. The eternal life he offers is lived in the spirit alone, and it is won more through Jesus’ teachings than through his sacrifice on the cross.
I read this book with a great deal of pleasure. It seemed to me that Pagels and King don’t make an argument one way or another; they just explain what the argument is. The reviewer sees it differently and has his reservations. Anyway I wouldn’t really recommend this book for beach reading.
Body of Work:
Poetry and death have been seen around town for quite some time. Among all the literary musings on death, the most affecting and surprising, it strikes me, are by the poet who daily confronts it. To the fine essays of the poet and undertaker Thomas Lynch must be added this gleaming, humane work by the poet Christine Montross, written during, and about, her first year of medical school. (She matriculated at Brown University when she was 28 and is now a resident in psychiatry there.)
…
Montross’s response is to break down in tears, and the oncologist quickly steps in front of her to take over the discussion. On the one hand, she realizes that it “should not be the responsibility of sick patients to bear the burden of unease.” As doctors in training, she writes, “we are reshaping the ways in which we react — in fact we are suppressing universal reactions of fear and grief and horror.” The danger is that one will go too far and suppress all emotion. “I do not wish,” Montross writes, “to hear ‘stroke’ and think of the distribution of vessels to the brain and the territories they serve instead of my grandmother’s now-curled left hand and stooped walk.”
And, last but not least, not from the NYTimes Book Page, Lance Mannion on poets and the truth:
I like the poem better when I think that it’s made up. When I suspect it’s the truth—Glück’s version of the truth—it feels like a lie.
I think that Glück has a streak of perversity in her that allows her to “remember” the past in ways that appeal to her vanity. I think she is vain about being gloomy and withdrawn, vain about being a person who responds to affection and emotional claims upon her by going cold and turning mean.
I think she is nursing a grudge that has no cause but her own self-loathing.
I think she is a female, poetic Dr House.
You know why I think this?
Because I have read other poems by her in which she presents herself as just this kind of person.
I didn’t pick the most coherent part of the Mannion argument here. You can get that by reading his whole post, which is fun. But I like comparing Louise Glück to Gregory House, one of my favorite tv characters, and so I chose to put that part of the post here.
(One little side note: one reason why I think Hugh Laurie is so successful as House is that that whole House world is about as silly as Bertie Wooster’s.)
Update: Also not from the NYTimes Book Page but from Juan Cole’s Informed Comment:
Al-Hayat says that the Iraqi legislature issued a statement on the knighting by Queen Elizabeth II of author Salman Rushdie: “At a time when we call for a dialogue of religions and civilizations, and work to combat terrorism in all its forms and wherever it exists, we express our amazement and our regret that the Queen of England has honored a person who has insulted Islam and millions of its adherents.”
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