Beyonce, like Diana Ross before her, knows of the many women performers who have preceded her own arrival on the public stage, and has offered compliments to them: and Beyonce is trying to place herself in a flattering locale within that tradition and that ambition involves manners and methods dangerous, enriching, exciting, and easy to misunderstand.
Masculine, Nurturing: Ben Harper’s Both Sides of the Gun
In a song co-written with Danny Kalb, “More Than Sorry,” Ben Harper sings “Goodbye hasn’t been so good to me” and “We all think that we’re right” and “Too many people say goodbye before they say hello,” and concludes, “What…
A review of Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann
I think of German writers – unlike Musil or Joseph Roth, both of Austria – as hard and gnarly with long involved sentences and a gloomy outlook. Kehlmann’s lightness of touch is exceptional. He is a quietly witty writer with…
The Ordinary Lives of Intelligent People: Belle and Sebastian’s If You’re Feeling Sinister
Boredom and pleasure and violence seem the boundaries of the experiences described in several songs. A girl in “If You’re Feeling Sinister” is described thusly: “She was into S&M and bible studies.” (It is to laugh—or weep: the contradictions are less immoral than merely telling: and they tell of contradictory human impulses so strong that each aspect cannot destroy the other but may reinforce somehow the other.)
A review of Everybody Loves Somebody by Joanna Scott
Scott has written a splendid book. It’s clever, fairly glitters with cleverness, but it also better than that, and is a book that will appeal to every perceptive reader. Reviewed by Bob Williams Everybody Loves Somebody by Joanna Scott Back…
A review of Decreation by Anne Carson
But it is the close interconnections in the book (after another section of relatively autonomous poems) that pose major fascinations for the reader as she makes connections of times and places, bringing together in harmony ideas and persons that are…
Fresh Vision, New Sounds: Bright Eyes’ Digital Ash in a Digital Urn
Does one affirm, then move toward, truth over lie, love over hate, and life over death? (How to make these—and other—choices dynamic, vivid? Present them in art—in books, dance, film, music, painting, and theater. How to emphasize that dualities such as life and death are deeply bound? Explore philosophy.)
A review of Girl in Landscape by Jonathan Lethem
Much of the book depends on the ability of several of the characters to shape-shift and Pella especially spends much of the novel as a small animal ubiquitous on the planet and known as household deer, shy creatures that haunt…
A review of Glass Poems by Justin Lowe
Glass Poems is an expansive movement and the persona of the poet is liberally dispersed throughout, rather than directly attained through the writing. While this involves a long search for the reader, it is also what makes this kind of work…
A review of The Seven Deadly Chess Sins by Jonathan Rowson
Will The Seven Deadly Chess Sins – a book that doesn’t directly concern itself with tactics or strategy, opening variations or theoretical endings – make you a better chess player? My answer would be yes. It cannot help but give you a…