Innholdsfortegnelse for June 20, 2013 i The New York Review of Books

1. After Andy Warhol died in February 1987, his will directed that a foundation should be set up in his name, funded with proceeds from the sale of some 95,000 pictures, prints, sculptures, drawings, and photographs left in his estate. As well as creating and endowing the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts provides financial support to artists and scholars, galleries, publications, and educational projects. Warhol’s bequest made no provision for the authentication of his artwork. But in 1994 the foundation initiated work on a multivolume catalogue raisonné of Warhol’s art, in part because the project would “contribute to the stabilization of the market for Warhol works over time, thus having a direct benefit to the Foundation’s longterm goal of converting its Warhol…

The Gun Report a blog by Joe Nocera at nocera.blogs.nytimes.com The Last Gun: How Changes in the Gun Industry Are Killing Americans and What It Will Take to Stop It by Tom Diaz New Press, 319 pp., $26.95 Gun Guys: A Road Trip by Dan Baum Knopf, 338 pp., $26.95 1. On April 17, 2013, as parents of children gunned down in the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School looked on, the Senate rejected a bill to close loopholes in the federal law that requires background checks of gun purchasers. Background checks, most of which take only minutes to complete, are designed to bar sales to several categories of persons, such as felons, fugitives, drug addicts, people adjudicated as mentally incompetent, and perpetrators of domestic violence. Current law…

Here Lies Love a musical by David Byrne, with music by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, directed by Alex Timbers Public Theater, New York City, through June 30, 2013 Turning the life and times of Imelda Marcos into a piece of musical theater set in a disco is almost too obvious. She was, after all, a disco queen herself, dancing the nights away under mirror balls installed in her various palaces and town houses, with her entourage of louche international socialites and B-movie actors who often looked like George Hamilton, including George Hamilton himself. The problem with the idea is that nothing on stage can ever be quite as zany as the Filipino first lady’s real life. And yet the musician David Byrne’s imagining of Imelda’s inner landscape mostly works…

Perhaps no other composer in history sought to combine such obviously incompatible elements in his works. The qualities that make Richard Wagner’s supporters so enthusiastic are often the same ones that repel his opponents, such as his tendency toward extremes in every aspect of composition. Although he stretched the limits of harmony and operatic form to the breaking point, the realization of his musical concepts always remained exceedingly economical. Paradoxically, this very economy defines the incomparable dimension of his structures. Perhaps he found it necessary to make especially frugal use of certain individual elements in order to make the effect of the Gesamtkunstwerk—the total work of art—even greater and more unexpected. A good example of Wagner’s economy can be found at the beginning of the first act of Die Walküre,…

Letters, 1941–1985 by Italo Calvino, selected and with an introduction by Michael Wood and translated from the Italian by Martin McLaughlin Princeton University Press, 619 pp., $39.50 If you don’t count Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino (1923–1985) is the postwar Italian prose writer who has had the largest and most enduring impact outside his own country. (As a sign of this, it’s worth noting that this is the tenth consideration of his work to appear in these pages since 1970.) Calvino’s refined, gently pessimistic, humane irony rode the wave of the deconstruction of realistic fiction the way the more programmatic French nouveau roman and OULIPO writers could not, gently unmasking narratorial trade secrets and reminding readers of the self-reflexive nature of the fictional game, while continuing to deliver appetizing fabulist delights.…

To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure by Henry Petroski Belknap Press/ Harvard University Press, 410 pp., $27.95 Throughout my adult life, I’ve crossed the Crown Point Bridge connecting Vermont with the Adirondacks across Lake Champlain. Built in 1929, it was one of the first continuous truss road bridges constructed in the US. Then governor Franklin Roosevelt addressed the celebration, which drew 50,000 farmers and their families from both sides of the lake; the new span heralded a “wedding after more than 150 years” between the two states, he said, and added that he was sure there “would be no divorce.” Airplanes crisscrossed the sky overhead, and according to the New York Times correspondent, one pilot “risked his neck in a sudden swoop beneath the arched roadway of the bridge, with less…

Selected Poems by Anthony Hecht, edited by J.D. McClatchy Knopf, 272 pp., $21.00 (paper) The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht edited and with an introduction by Jonathan F.S. Post Johns Hopkins University Press, 365 pp., $35.00 1. Anthony Hecht, more than any other American poet of the past half-century, wrote as a champion of traditional forms and elevated syntax. Formal verse, in his eyes, embodied the dignity and grandeur of law itself. He titled one of his books of criticism The Hidden Law (1993), another On the Laws of the Poetic Art (1995). The laws that governed poems were for him the symbols of universal moral law, and equally demanding. Hecht wrote of the A book of essays about him is titled The Burdens of Formality, a title that points…

The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity by Robert Louis Wilken Yale University Press, 388 pp., $35.00 Trent: What Happened at the Council by John W. O’Malley Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 335 pp., $27.95 If an anthropologist from the star system Sirius were to teleport to earth to conduct a field study of Christianity, where would she go? A Greek monastery on Mount Athos, a papal mass in St. Peter’s, a convent hospital for the destitute in Calcutta, a snake-handling service in the Appalachians, a Quaker meeting? The figure of Jesus of Nazareth lies somewhere behind them all, but it would be hard to say exactly how, or what else they might be deemed to have in common. And if our extraterrestial anthropologist should decide to turn historian,…

“Shit has its own integrity.” The Wise Hack at the Writers’ Table in the MGM commissary used regularly to affirm this axiom for the benefit of us alien integers from the world of Quality Lit. It was plain to him (if not to the front office) that since we had come to Hollywood only to make money, our pictures would entirely lack the one basic homely ingredient that spells boffo world-wide grosses. The Wise Hack was not far wrong. He knew that the sort of exuberant badness which so often achieves perfect popularity cannot be faked even though, as he was quick to admit, no one ever lost a penny underestimating the intelligence of the American public. He was cynical (so were we); yet he also truly believed that children…

After the troubling revelations of the May 8 Senate hearing on Benghazi, much remains unclear about the attack that killed four Americans last September. Were the killers aiming to prove the incompetence of American power? Or was the assault directed more specifically against CIA operations? How did the White House, the State Department, and the CIA all agree to say so early and wrongly that the attack could have been the spontaneous action of a crowd infuriated by an anti-Muslim video? Why did the administration delete from its talking points the mention of five similar attacks in Libya, and the fact that al-Qaeda-linked forces were known to be active in the vicinity? One thing is clear. The Benghazi killings were an indirect but predictable consequence of the NATO intervention that…

Albrecht Dürer: Master Drawings, Watercolors, and Prints from the Albertina an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., March 24–June 9, 2013 Catalog of the exhibition by Andrew Robison and Klaus Albrecht Schröder National Gallery of Art/DelMonico, 315 pp., $75.00; $40.00 (paper) In the summer of 1494, soon after his engagement, Albrecht Dürer made a startlingly intimate drawing of his fiancée, Agnes Frey. One might have expected a twenty-three-year-old to depict his betrothed as a source of love, or comfort, or well-being, all the more since her substantial dowry would soon launch his independent career. Instead, Albrecht showed Agnes twisted up in a knot of anxious introversion. She looks withdrawn and preoccupied, and the circles under her heavy-lidded eyes may even make one think she has been crying.…

He Died with His Eyes Open by Derek Raymond, with an introduction by James Sallis Melville House, 211 pp., $14.95 (paper) I Was Dora Suarez by Derek Raymond Melville House, 202 pp., $14.95 (paper) Minimalism in fiction is rarely conjoined with outbursts of passionate lyricism, and still more rarely do novels about crime and detectives carry out a philosophical quest. Derek Raymond’s much-admired “Factory” novels are bold and intriguing hybrids: as with the two novels under review (first and fourth in the series of five all now published by Melville House), they are idiosyncratic police procedurals narrated by an unnamed Detective Sergeant of the London Metropolitan Police who so identifies with the victims of his investigations that he becomes involved in their (imagined) lives and is drawn, often at great…

Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century by Christian Caryl Basic Books, 407 pp., $28.99 We have lived through an Age of Astonishment, and have now come out on the other side, still a little bewildered about how we got here. Never before have so many savants—economists, political scientists, diplomats, sociologists, and commentators alike—been quite so stunned by the turn of events. In 1789 and in 1848, the intelligentsia had a pretty good idea what might be coming, even if the actual scale of the mayhem exhilarated or dismayed them. But in 1979 and 1989, onlookers and indeed some of the leading participants were utterly surprised by what happened. This was not the trahison but the ébahissement des clercs. As Christian Caryl makes clear in his book…

The Soundtrack of My Life by Clive Davis, with Anthony DeCurtis Simon and Schuster, 586 pp., $30.00 Hitmaker by Tommy Mottola Grand Central, 389 pp., $27.99 Clive Davis, the mogul of moguls of pop music through the past half-century, published a relatively fluent and interesting memoir called Clive—in 1974. In 335 pages it carried him from his (not too) humble beginnings to the traumatic moment when he was fired, without warning or mercy, from his top job at Columbia Records, which he had carried to the heights of the industry. (The first casualty of his abrupt departure, after he was escorted out of the corporate building by security guards, was that Columbia suits scotched the deal he had painstakingly crafted to keep Bob Dylan with the company. They lived to…

The Fourth Dimension of a Poem and Other Essays by M.H. Abrams, with a foreword by Harold Bloom Norton, 240 pp., $25.95 Hour One During the days I spent in Cornell’s philosophy department as a graduate student in the late 1940s, I thought poorly of English departments, and believed myself, concerning literature, beyond instruction. However, after the first humbling year among the mathematically minded, I needed some relief. My fellow students were firecrackers. Their bursts of stardom lit the intellectual landscape. I was the damp fuse one lights and then impatiently waits for. There was a class on Psychology and Lit that came recommended. So, in my armored costume of a smartass, I came to the first meeting of this class in time to hear its youthful leader, M.H. Abrams,*…

Arc of Empire: America’s Wars in Asia from the Philippines to Vietnam by Michael H. Hunt and Steven I. Levine University of North Carolina Press, 340 pp., $35.00 Michael Hunt and Steven Levine write, “We came of age, amid the ferment of the 1960s, deeply concerned with the Vietnam War. Hunt lived in Vietnam early in that decade...Levine was an activist in the antiwar and civil rights movements.” Now retired, the two were colleagues at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where they taught courses on Asian revolutions and US foreign policy. The broad outlines and many of the details in the Hunt and Levine study will be known to readers who remember or were active in the Sixties and early Seventies. This is not a criticism; Hunt and…

To the Editors: Since Mr. O’Hagan quotes me as saying that I enjoyed working for Margaret Thatcher [NYR, May 23], perhaps you will allow me to reply to him. Margaret Thatcher brought an end to a bad era in British life when governments allowed trade unions to dictate policy. She ended the time when the state intervened as a matter of course to determine economic affairs. By standing up to General Galtieri in the Falklands, she not only liberated the Falkland islanders but helped to bring democracy to Argentina. She supported the settlement in Zimbabwe which had been achieved by Lord Carrington. She was unique among British prime ministers to be on excellent terms with both the president of the US and the supreme leadership in what was then the…

Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers by Janet Malcolm Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 298 pp., $27.00 In “Good Pictures,” an essay about Diane Arbus in Forty-One False Starts, Janet Malcolm’s latest collection, we witness a wonderful outburst of Malcolmian irritation. The prompt is Revelations, a giant volume of Arbus’s photographs, published to coincide with a retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Malcolm is appalled by the book. She believes it contains too many inferior photographs and too much text. Worst of all, she writes, it mingles text and photographs in such a way that there is no peaceful space in which to contemplate the photographs by themselves. Her indictment of the book’s bloated contents, lousy design, and sloppy editing continues at some length, before reaching…

Fortunately, the €1.5 billion investment will probably not be found, but if it is, the City Council of Venice will be giving permission in July for an 820-foot-high skyscraper (130 feet taller than the Tour Montparnasse in Paris) to be built on the mainland behind Venice, about six miles from St. Mark’s Square. The mayor, Giorgio Orsoni, assures us that the building will not spoil the skyline of Venice, but The Art Newspaper, of which I am the founding editor, published a photomontage based on calculations of what it would look like from the Lido, the strip of land opposite St. Mark’s Square separating the lagoon from the Adriatic. The skyscraper looms up, two thirds the height of the campanile of St. Mark’s, and would ruin the iconic (appropriate use…

A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust by Mary Fulbrook Oxford University Press, 421 pp., $34.95 Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying: The Secret World War II Transcripts of German POWs by Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer, translated from the German by Jefferson Chase Knopf, 437 pp., $30.50 Growing consciousness of the Holocaust in both academic scholarship and society in general became evident in the late 1970s and intensified in the 1980s. Initially, important research focused on the different roles of Hitler, Nazi ideology, and the structure of the dictatorship in shaping the decision-making process that led to the Holocaust. Research also concentrated on the complicity of various professions and institutions in the Third Reich, and particularly on the SS. Still lacking was careful empirical study of…

Brueghel: Gemälde von Jan Brueghel d. Ä. [Brueghel: The Paintings of Jan Brueghel the Elder] an exhibition at the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, March 22–June 16, 2013 Catalog of the exhibition edited by Mirjam Neumeister. Munich: Hirmer, 447 pp., €49.90 Karel van Mander (1548–1606), the renowned biographer of the Netherlandish painters, concludes his life of Pieter Brueghel the Elder—the famous “Peasant Brueghel,” circa 1530–1569—with these sentences: Both father and sons worked in Antwerp, at that time the most important artistic center north of the Alps. It had a thriving art market and flourishing publishing houses that did an especially brisk business in engravings based on the works of the elder Brueghel. Nowhere else was the connection between early capitalism and the trade in images so efficiently organized. It was an era…

Isaiah Berlin: The Journey of a Jewish Liberal by Arie M. Dubnov Palgrave Macmillan, 316 pp., $40.00 A marvelous raconteur famed for his opulent intellect and brilliant wit, Isaiah Berlin could easily give the impression of being an intellectual dilettante. He often endorsed such criticism self-mockingly; asked by his biographer about the source of his serene well-being, he replied that he was happy because he was superficial. In a letter to a close friend he presents a very different self-image: This truth became the basis of a liberalism deviating sharply from the Anglo-American tradition. What the philosopher John Gray has termed Berlin’s “tragic liberalism” inspired his seminal Four Essays on Liberty, directed against the faith (common to liberal and radical doctrines founded on European Enlightenment optimism) that all rational goals…

The Devil in History: Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century by Vladimir Tismaneanu University of California Press, 320 pp., $34.95 The twentieth century undoubtedly will mainly be remembered for producing totalitarian politics. Italian Fascism was the first to give this name to the phenomenon, even though Mussolini’s movement was the least “total” of the regimes upon which the name has since been bestowed. While Mussolini wanted concentration of all power in his dictatorship, his movement was mainly concerned with Italian national causes and imperial ambitions, and Italy’s international prestige. It did not put forward a doctrine of millenarian international expectations or promise the transformation of Italians—or of human society itself. That was what Nazism and Leninism did, which set them off from their contemporaries and from the…

On May 20, in a 3–2 decision, the Constitutional Court of Guatemala, the country’s highest tribunal, annulled a portion of the trial of the former dictator General Efraín Ríos Montt and vacated the trial court verdict, issued ten days earlier, holding that Ríos Montt was guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity. The decision of the Constitutional Court was based on an alleged violation of due process by the three judges who conducted the trial. That violation involved Ríos Montt’s dismissal of his entire defense team on the first day of the trial on March 19 and the trial court’s brief expulsion of his newly appointed defense counsel, leaving him unrepresented by counsel of his choice for a few hours. This action of the trial court had been addressed in…

To the Editors: In his interesting review of a new production of Euripides’ Herakles [NYR, May 23] Daniel Mendelsohn places considerable emphasis on Aristotle’s supposed concept of a dramatic katastrophe. Unfortunately the term katastrophe appears nowhere at all in Aristotle’s Poetics (nor elsewhere in his writings). Shouldn’t a classically trained critic of Mendelsohn’s standing be more careful with “canonical” texts? Stephen Halliwell Professor of Greek University of St. Andrews St. Andrews, Fife, Scotland Daniel Mendelsohn replies: The answer to Stephen Halliwell’s rhetorical question is (of course) Yes! The professor, who is too modest to identify himself as our preeminent scholar of the Poetics, is right to make this clarification about the Greek term katastrophe, and I am grateful to him for doing so in such a generous way. As he…