Via FROM ME TO YOU “Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.”- – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 5
BOOKS: Mark Twain Vs. The Book Of Mormon
THE NEW YORKER: Scholarly opinion on {Mormonism founder Joseph] Smith now tends to divide between those who think that he knew he was making it up and those who think that he sincerely believed in his own visions—though the truth is that, as Melville’s “Confidence Man” reminds us, the line between the seer and the scamster wasn’t clearly marked in early-nineteenth-century America. Mark Twain read the Book of Mormon and, knowing what Smith would have read, not to mention knowing about frontier fakery, came to conclusions about both the sources of its prose and the sequence of its composition. MORE […]
BOOKS: Q&A w/ Jim Knipfel, Ex-Slackjawed Local
BY MIKE WALSH Jim Knipfel came to Philadelphia in the late 80s with no job prospects, little ambition, and zero professional writing experience. But he did have a wicked sense of humor and a mocking distaste for everything held sacred in modern day America, and he soon found a way to leverage that nihilism into a column he wrote for six years for the now-defunct Welcomat (which morphed into the Philadelphia Weekly) called Slackjaw. By the early 90s he’d moved to the Big Apple and the column started running the New York Press and it would continue to do […]
TRUTH DIGGER: Q&A With Christopher Hedges, Author, Journalist, American Who Tells The Truth
Christopher Lynn Hedges (born September 18, 1956) is an American journalist, author, and war correspondent specializing in American and Middle Eastern politics and societies.[1] His most recent book, which he wrote with the cartoonist Joe Sacco, is “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt” (2012). Hedges and Sacco, who illustrated the book, reported from the poorest pockets in the United States including the Pine Ridge Indian reservation in South Dakota, Camden, New Jersey, the coal fields of southern West Virginia, the nation’s produce fields and in the last chapter from the Occupy encampment in Zuccotti Park.[2] Hedges is also known as […]
BOOKS: Q&A With Daily Show Writer Kevin Bleyer, Fearless Re-Framer Of The U.S. Constitution
BY JONATHAN VALANIA The Constitution may be a remarkable schematic of human rights in a liberal democracy but it’s a terrible piece of comedy. Seriously, I didn’t laugh once. And what the world needs now, besides love-sweet-love, is funny. Kevin Bleyer has a pretty impressive resume in The Funny: humorous commentaries on NPR’s All Things considered; staff writer for Bill Maher and Dennis Miller; joke writer for President Obama’s White House Correspondence Dinner speeches; three Emmys and more than a 1000 broadcast hours of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart under his belt as a staff writer. One day he […]
BOOKS: The Illuminatus Vs. Atlas Shrugged
[via JMR HIGGS]
Q&A: M. Doughty, Former Soul Coughing Frontman, Ex-Junkie, Acclaimed Author & Recovering Genius
Photo by Deborah Lopez BY JONATHAN VALANIA “If heroin still made me feel like I did the first time, and kept making me that way forever — kept working — I might’ve quite happily accepted a desolate, marginal life and death,” writes Mike Doughty, aka M. Doughty, former frontman for the dearly departed Soul Coughing, in the introduction to The Book of Drugs, his wickedly funny recently-published memoir. Although he is loathe to admit it, Soul Coughing was easily the most fascinating, innovative and sonically-subversive American band to come along since Devo. Future generations of scientists may well conclude that […]
THERE BE MONSTERS: The Dark Side Of Sendak
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Where The Wild Things Are creator Maurice Sendak is, in many ways, the dark side Doppelganger of Dr. Seuss and taken together they represent the twin titans of 20th Century children’s literature. If Dr. Seuss’ work vibes like a drug-free acid trip for children aged 8 to 80, then Sendak’s oeuvre is, to extend the metaphor, like Vicodin for the soul, numbing tender-aged psyches from the pain of growing up in a desultory world of de-saturated colors and unrelieved melancholia where adults do monstrous things to each other, and sometimes to children, too. There were two formative […]
BOOKS: Interview With The Vampire Chronicler
[Artwork by ANITA KUNZ] BY JONATHAN VALANIA In advance of Anne Rice‘s reading at the Free Library tomorrow night to promote the publication of Wolf Gift, her 33rd novel, we got the doyenne of high goth on the horn for an in-depth Q&A. Discussed: Why her mother named her Howard; How to kill a werewolf. Why she regrets ever using the word ‘vampire’; the interior lives of zombies. Why she returned to the Catholic Church after years of ardent atheism. Why she then turned her back on the Catholic Church and Christianity itself, but still believes in God. The future […]
Q&A: With Online Privacy Expert Lori Andrews
The take away from I Know Who You Are And Saw What You Did is this: As an Internet user your rights are exactly none. Actually, that’s not true, you do have the right not to use it. But assuming you have waived that right, know that you are being watched, probed and profiled, your footprints are being tracked from your front door to the furthest reaches of the digital ether and back. They know who you are and what you did. Somewhere there is a file being kept on you. They know a thousand things about you. Preferences, locations, […]
REWIND 2011: BEST OF Q&A: The Year In Questions And Answers
THE TESTIFIER [Illustrations by ALEX FINE] BY JONATHAN VALANIA In advance of her recent reading at the Free Library to promote her new book Reimagining Equality: Stories Of Race, Gender And Finding A Home, we present a conversation with Anita Hill, professor of social policy, law, and women’s studies at Brandeis University. Discussed: The fantasia of a Post-Racial America; the mendacity, narcissism and hypocrisy of Clarence Thomas and Herman Cain; the right wing’s racializing the blame for the 2008 financial crisis; how she passed the lie detector test Clarence Thomas refused to take; the emancipation of her grandfather from slavery; […]
BOOKS: Hedy Lamarr Vs. The Nazi U-Boats
[Illustraton by Illustration by David Plunkert] THE NEW YORK TIMES: That a glamorous movie star whose day job involved hours of makeup calls and dress fittings would spend her off hours designing sophisticated weapons systems is one of the great curiosities of Hollywood history. Lamarr, however, not only possessed a head for abstract spatial relationships, but she also had been in her former life a fly on the wall during meetings and technical discussions between her munitions-manufacturer husband and his clients, some of them Nazi officials. Disturbed by news reports of innocents killed at sea by U-boats, she was determined […]
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A MIDDLE-AGED MAN: A Q&A With Cartoonist Dan Clowes
EDITOR’S NOTE: To mark the occasion of yet another swell New Yorker cover by Mr. Clowes, we are re-running our interview with him from last spring. Enjoy. BY JONATHAN VALANIA Daniel Clowes’ 30-plus-year career as a cartoonist/graphic novelist/screenwriter has seen some remarkable reversals of fortune. Back in the mid-80s, when Clowes was fresh out of Pratt and looking to take the graphic design/illustration world by storm, he couldn’t get art directors to return his phone calls. These days, post-Ghost World, the New Yorker and The New York Times plead with him to return their calls. When not busy cranking out […]