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Marvin Kitman, Satirist Whose Main Target Was TV, Dies at 93
by Eliana Willis 29 June 2023, 18:53
He twitted the networks for 35 years as a critic at Newsday. He also audited George Washington’s wartime expense account and wrote a biography of Bill O’Reilly.Marvin Kitman, who survived longer as a television reviewer than most of the programs he mirthfully critiqued, and who as a satirist and amateur historian audaciously, if belatedly, audited George Washington’s Revolutionary War expense account, died on Thursday at the Actors Fund Home in Englewood, N.J. He was 93.His son, Jamie Kitman, said the cause was cancer.Mr. Kitman joined the leftist but anti-Soviet magazine The New Leader as a TV critic in 1967, only after the magazine’s editor agreed that he could reveal in his first column that he had never regularly watched television.He began writing a syndicated column for the Long Island daily newspaper Newsday on Dec. 7, 1969 — “a day that will live in infamy,” he said, “as far as the TV industry is concerned.”Over 35 years he churned out 5,786 columns, championing groundbreaking shows like “All in the Family,” “Seinfeld” and “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” while mercilessly panning others. He branded the 1980 debut of the sixth season of “Saturday Night Live” “offensive and raunchy” and wrote of “Kentucky Woman,” a 1983 TV movie starring Cheryl Ladd, the former “Charlie’s Angels” star: “Cheryl Ladd as a coal miner was a very moving television experience. It made me want to convert to nuclear power.”In 1982, Mr. Kitman was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. His last column was published on April 1, 2005. (“Newsday gave me a tryout,” he wrote, “and after 35 years we decided it wasn’t working out.”)He also wrote a number of books. The most notable was probably “George Washington’s Expense Account” (1970), for which he was listed as Washington’s co-author under the name Marvin Kitman, Pfc. (Ret.)A work of nonfiction and not satire, it included a facsimile of Washington’s ledger itemizing cases of Madeira for personal use and military outlays for his army’s frequent, if occasionally strategic, advances to the rear.One commentator wrote that in “George Washington’s Expense Account” — a work of nonfiction, not satire — Mr. Kitman straddled “the line that divides verity from travesty.”An article about the book in The New York Times said that Mr. Kitman’s interpretation straddled “the line that divides verity from travesty” — not unlike Washington himself, who “at times struggled mightily over whether a certain expense was public or private” and “usually resolved the issue in favor of himself.”The historian Robin W. Winks, writing in The Times Book Review, declared that the book was a vehicle for Washington’s famous cherry tree to inflict its revenge. As evidence of Mr. Kitman’s prodigious research into Washington’s intemperance, he cited a mention that the general had gained 28 pounds during the war, which lasted more than seven years.Washington magnanimously rejected the $6,000 annual salary offered by Congress (the equivalent of about $1.7 million in today’s dollars over eight years). Instead, Mr. Kitman wrote, the commander in chief sought reimbursement for $480,000 in expenses (about $17 million today).Mr. Kitman also wrote about Washington in “The Making of the Prefident 1789” (1989), which exposed the political machinations behind Washington’s nonpartisan election — and incidentally, with the unorthodox spelling of its title, satirized the writing style of the era.His first book was the audaciously titled “The Number One Best Seller: The True Adventures of Marvin Kitman,” published in 1966. His last was “Gullible’s Travels: A Comical History of the Trump Era,” published in 2020.One of the liberal Mr. Kitman’s more surprising works was “The Man Who Would Not Shut Up: The Rise of Bill O’Reilly” (2007), which Jacob Heilbrunn, reviewing it for The Times, pronounced “a mash note” to Mr. O’Reilly, noting that Mr. Kitman saw the pugnacious conservative culture warrior as “a potent (and welcome) antidote to the pap served up for decades by the television industry.”Still, Mr. Heilbrunn wrote, the book ultimately revealed that Mr. O’Reilly’s work was less about conservative ideas than about “parading his seething personal resentments in order to become the very thing he purports to despise: a celebrity.”Mr. Kitman in 1964, when he ran for president in the New Hampshire Republican primary under the banner “I would rather be president than write.” He did not win.courtesy of Marvin KitmanPublishers Weekly wrote that it was “difficult to imagine a better researched or less biased work about such a divisive figure as O’Reilly.”Mr. Kitman was no stranger to the political arena himself. He briefly ran for president in the New Hampshire Republican primary in 1964 under the banner “I would rather be president than write.”When his delegate was reported to have received 638 votes in the primary, more than half as many as went to the perennial candidate Harold Stassen, Mr. Kitman demanded a recount. “There was some kind of fraud in my getting so many,” he complained.Had his mock campaign in 1964 actually succeeded, he could have faced the Democratic incumbent, President Lyndon B. Johnson, whose press secretary was Bill Moyers — who, as Newsday’s publisher in 1969, recruited Mr. Kitman.“I hired Marvin,” Mr. Moyers said in an email, “because we needed his wit, without which a media critic is a warrior without a sword.”“In the early days of television — the ’50s and ’60s — he thought the sure way to coax television to fulfill its cultural and creative possibilities was through satire,” Mr. Moyers added. “How could the big moguls in their plush counting houses high above Manhattan not read a guy who wrote that ‘on the TV screen pure drivel tends to drive out ordinary drivel’?”Marvin Kitman was born on Nov, 24, 1929, in Pittsburgh to Jewish immigrants from Russia. His family moved to New York in the 1930s. His father, Myer, was an inspector and clerk for Western Union. His mother, Rose (Kaufman) Kitman, worked at a glider factory in Brooklyn during World War II.“Some parents send their kids to Switzerland ‘for finishing,’” Mr. Kitman often said. “Mine brought me to Brooklyn.”After graduating from Brooklyn Technical High School, he attended the City College of New York. He parents hoped he would become a draftsman but he discovered a facility for writing when he worked on the student newspaper. He graduated in 1953 with a bachelor’s degree in English.Mr. Kitman began writing a syndicated TV column for the Long Island daily newspaper Newsday on Dec. 7, 1969 — “a day that will live in infamy,” he said, “as far as the TV industry is concerned.”In 1951, Mr. Kitman married Carolyne Sibushnick, who later became a photographer. In addition to his son, she survives him, along with their daughters, Suzy Kitman and A.J. Knight, and three grandchildren.After being drafted into the Army, Mr. Kitman served as a sportswriter on the base newspaper at Fort Dix in New Jersey from 1953 to 1955. He then moved to Leonia, N.J., where he worked as a freelance writer, writing a column for a horse racing tout sheet and consumer advocacy articles for the underground humor magazine The Realist.He was a founding editor, with Victor Navasky, of the satirical magazine Monocle, and a staff writer for The Saturday Evening Post.He later appeared on TV as a critic for WPIX and WNEW (now WNYW) in New York. He found himself no less disillusioned with broadcast television after working in the medium himself than he had been when writing about it. Particularly dispiriting was his experience helping to create and write a short-lived CBS sitcom titled “Ball Four” with the former major league pitcher Jim Bouton (who also starred, as a fictionalized version of himself) and the sportswriter Vic Ziegel, based on Mr. Bouton’s book of the same name.“It was the constant rewriting at night, how everyone was always so exhausted,” he recalled to The Record of Bergen County, N.J., in 2013, “and the input from the executives — all they knew about writing was the alphabet.”He went on to write for The Huffington Post and in 2013 began his own blog at marvinkitman.com, in which he expounded Marshall McLuhan-like on the anthropological impact of television. “Our kidneys had changed,” he wrote. “We had to go to the bathroom more often, like during the commercial breaks.”Resorting to his accustomed modesty, Mr. Kitman, tongue planted firmly in cheek, also soliloquized on his bona fides as a constructive critic rather than a chronic kvetch.“Thirty-five years of telling the commercial networks they were steering into an iceberg is the reason they are not being threatened today by cable, Netflix and everybody else streaming on hand-held devices, including the electric toothbrush. (Have you ever tried watching TV on it?),” he wrote in 2013.“The dinosaurs,” he added, “are dancing as fast as they can into the La Brea Tar Pits in L.A. and no longer need my help.” More
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‘Umberto Eco’ Review: Remembering a Literary Explorer
by Aurelia Butler 29 June 2023, 17:13
A new documentary delves into the infectious curiosity and passions of the Italian scholar and author of “The Name of the Rose.”“To be intellectually curious is to be alive,” Umberto Eco once said. The Italian thinker, who died in 2016, was a professor, a novelist — who wrote, most notably and at one time inescapably, “The Name of the Rose” — a semiotician, a columnist and a connoisseur of arcana. He also conveyed a twinkling sense of fun around reading and thinking about the world and literature, a notion that erudition could be not just edifying but entertaining.“Umberto Eco: A Library of the World” celebrates the man and his many bookshelves, but it’s his symbolic appeal that comes across above all. Davide Ferrario’s documentary front-loads the physicality of books, with drooling pans of libraries from Turin, Italy, to Tianjin, China, before easing into Eco’s eclectic interests, with clips of him dispensing aperçus and quips about memory and the noise of modernity.Eco’s passion for the literary canon is clear, but we hear more about his wanderings through his favorite oddities, such as Athanasius Kircher, a 17th-century Jesuit scholar who wrote sprawling and sometimes wrongheaded treatises. Well-intentioned dramatic readings from Eco’s writings are punctuated with fond anecdotes from his children and a grandson that burnish the image of Eco as the extravagant scholar. His love of arcana supplies an outward eccentricity that seems to interest the film more than his semiotic work or political commentary (in which he was a critic of Silvio Berlusconi since the 1990s).Eco’s 1980 debut novel, “The Name of the Rose,” a murder mystery set in a 14th-century monastery, became a surprise runaway success. Eco neatly describes the appeal of such detective-style investigation as being essentially spiritual, asking, who is behind all this?; he’d continue with more esoteric adventures like “Foucault’s Pendulum” (1988). Throughout his work, the frisson of fiction and its assorted deceptions attracted Eco, from speculative travelogues to the phenomenon of lying.Viewers (and readers) of a certain age may come away wondering whether Eco’s profile has faded somewhat. Ferrario’s documentary presents a figure who feels more firmly European than international, not to mention old-fashioned. (He was definitely a guy who liked to explain his scorn for his cellphone.) But exploring fictional worlds with Eco for a guide remains a diverting and often enlightening pursuit.Umberto Eco: A Library of the WorldNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters. More
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A Queer Revolutionary Classic Book, Now Onstage With Music
by Aurelia Butler 29 June 2023, 16:27
Philip Venables and Ted Huffman’s latest work adapts a utopian, fantasy cult favorite by Larry Mitchell.Many operas in the standard repertoire are based on fairy tales and fantasy. But few of those describe a global queer-feminist revolution, and fewer still have main characters whose names begin with “Warren” and end with an unusual moniker for a genital appendage.Both can be found in “The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions,” a new piece of music theater by the composer Philip Venables and the writer-director Ted Huffman. After premiering at the Manchester International Festival on Thursday, it will travel, with its original roster of 15 performers, to the Aix-en-Provence Festival in early July, then elsewhere, including NYU Skirball in New York this fall.Venables and Huffman’s two previous collaborations — the operas “4.48 Psychosis,” based on Sarah Kane’s play about mental illness and suicide, and “Denis & Katya,” about teenage lovers in Russia who died in a 2016 livestreamed standoff with Russian police — have won them acclaim as artists who find beauty at the extremes of form and subject matter.Their new show, freely adapted from a gay liberation fantasy novel of the same name that was self-published by the activist Larry Mitchell in 1977, is both a continuation of that broader project and, as Venables said dryly in a video interview, “a tonal shift.”The piece, like the novel, covers thousands of years of human history, telling the story of the rise of an imperialist capitalist patriarchy called Ramrod; the resistance to that patriarchy by the sexual and racial Others it has created; and its eventual defeat by a revolutionary queer coalition.Katherine Goforth, front left, with Eric Lamb in rehearsal for the show, which will travel to NYU Skirball this fall.Tristram Kenton“There are two important things to remember about the coming revolutions,” this fairy tale reads, on the page and onstage. “The first is that we will get our [expletive] kicked. The second is that we will win.”Over the show’s 90 minutes, Rosie Elnile’s deceptively simple, bare stage becomes a model of this improvisatory, revolutionary utopia. Everything you hear, you see: The 15 performers play a largely memorized score on a mixed ensemble of baroque and modern instruments. A harpsichord, a theorbo and a viola da gamba sound alongside an upright piano and an electric organ.The result is a romp through history that’s both joyous and politically serious. “These stories of oppression and resistance are performed with and for each other,” Venables said, “as part of our processing of and resistance to oppression.” And the piece proposes and enacts the destruction of what it calls “the men’s categories” — the classifications of race, gender, expertise and taste that, it argues, stop the global majority from becoming free.“We all, at some stage in a utopia, want to get past identity politics to this universalism,” Venables said.The actor-choreographer Yandass, who narrates large portions of the show, said in a video interview that the show’s form echoes its politics: “Everyone is multiskilled in so many ways. I would imagine that’s how the utopia that’s dreamed of in this piece would be, everyone having different talents, having to rely on each other for cues, engaging in real teamwork.”The actor-choreographer Yandass, who narrates portions of the show.Tristram KentonWhen Mitchell wrote his book, he was inspired by Lavender Hill, a gay commune that he was a founding member of in Ithaca, N.Y. Such communes, which rejected both straight society and a gay movement that they saw as consumerist and assimilationist, peppered late 1970s and early 1980s America. They were places filled with political theorizing, collective cultural expression, and folk and baroque music. “Carl later gave the visiting harpsichordist a copy of ‘Eros and Civilization,’” reads a representative quote from a diary of life at a mid-1970s commune in the gay liberation journal RFD.Activists — many of whom, like Mitchell, settled on the word “faggot” to imply a gender-expansive, sex-positive and politically radical gay subjectivity — believed that collective movement had the power to change the world, and that folk and baroque dances were forms infused with political radicalism.In a video interview, Venables called this a “politics of pleasure and joy and play and community,” one he has sought to express in a musical style in which “form and genre are a way of putting on costumes and telling stories, with folk and baroque music references having to do with community music making, social gatherings and social rituals.”One aria, for example, starts as a duet between the soprano Mariamielle Lamagat and the harpist Joy Smith, before the gambist Jacob Garside joins in — on glockenspiel, and wearing a multicolored evening gown — helping to initiate a transformation of the tune into a swinging bossa nova, and eventually an accordion-accompanied shanty.Kit Green said that the production gives the sense “that we are a part of something bigger.”Tristram KentonThe book that inspired all this — despite, or perhaps because of, how rooted it is in its specific political moment — has had a recent revival. After years of being out of print, with copies and PDFs circulating among gay artists and activists like samizdat, it was republished in 2018.“I had questions about how Ted wanted to stage it because it felt uncomfortable doing some halcyon utopian thing set in the 1970s,” said Kit Green, one of the show’s narrators. “He is doing it in a way, though, where we are not part of the book. We’re telling it; there’s a distance. We’re on this massive time continuum, and when things feel hopeless, this sense that time rolls on, that we are a part of something bigger, feels different and exciting. We need that revolutionary zeal — but what does it mean now? We should all be asking that question.”As the performers gathered onstage during a dress rehearsal this week, Yshani Perinpanayagam — the music director, as well as a member of the cast — said: “There have been so many beautiful moments of connection today on- and off-set. If something doesn’t go as expected, just yes/and it. Go with it.”In the show, feats of technical bravado — in one early scene, Garside plays complex music on gamba while lying on his back on a blanket being dragged across the stage — are paired with simpler collective actions, like an aria accompanied both by the trained violin playing of Conor Gricmanis, as well as by much of the cast playing on the open strings of violins, a simple echoing of harmonies. Perinpanayagam gives some cues, but mostly the musicians play without a conductor.From left, Kerry Bursey, Collin Shay, Conor Gricmanis and Yshani Perinpanayagam in rehearsal.Tristram Kenton“We wanted to make it feel like a community onstage, to try to break down some of the hierarchies and traditional relationships that different art forms have onstage, especially classical music stages,” Huffman said in a video interview. “Asking everyone onstage to participate in everything is not a spirit of amateurism but of willingness to test one’s creativity, of finding beauty in simple things.”The challenge of the score, the flutist Eric Lamb said, is in “the physicality, the movement.” He added that he hoped audiences would “witness this love and understanding of 15 people onstage who inhabit various spaces within the queer community holding each other up and caring for each other.”These artists believe that the revolutions the piece aims to incite are both current and urgent. “Everything that I’d thought about my life made sense,” Yandass said, describing reading the book for the first time. “This is how I should have been living. I felt called out in terms of not sticking to my queerness, not sticking to my being. It helped me understand my thinking and my instincts.”Green mentioned the final section — in which the performers scream, “And the third revolution engulfs us all!” — and added, “I had a proper feeling of ‘Let’s do this! Let’s go out and start it!’” More
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Will Children Save Us at the End of the World?
by Aurelia Butler 29 June 2023, 15:40
A wave of recent and forthcoming TV series, books and movies meditate on how young people might fare during an apocalyptic event — with varying degrees of optimism.The noxious orange smoke that descended over New York this month reminded me of a parlor game I used to play with my husband: Would we have what it takes to survive the apocalypse? We abruptly stopped enjoying this thought experiment in March 2020 and when I had a child the next year, I became even less tolerant of blithely considering the end of the world. But now, suddenly, versions of our game are everywhere, in a new and near-unavoidable genre: stories that revisit our pandemic trauma via even worse — but plausible! — scenarios. Making these works doubly poignant, many of them have children at their center.Mackenzie Davis in the series “Station Eleven” (2021-22).Ian Watson/HBO MaxThere’s “Station Eleven,” the 2014 novel by Emily St. John Mandel about the aftermath of a swine flu, which was turned into a much-discussed 2021 HBO Max series, in which an 8-year-old girl manages to survive with the help of a stranger turned surrogate parent. “The Last of Us,” HBO’s video game adaptation, which debuted in January, features a zombie-fungus pandemic; a seemingly immune teenage girl is humanity’s one hope. “Leave the World Behind,” Rumaan Alam’s 2020 novel — soon to be a movie — about a bourgeois family vacation gone very bad, features a vague but menacing threat of apocalypse. Also loosely belonging to this category are the shows “Yellowjackets” (2021-present) — a girls’ soccer team turns to cannibalism after a plane crash — and “Class of ’07” (2023) — a school reunion coincides with a climate apocalypse — and the new-to-Netflix 2019 Icelandic movie “Woman at War” (a renegade activist tries to stop the destruction of the environment and adopt a child).These stories are, in various ways, about how and whether our children can survive the mess that we’ve left them — and what it will cost them to do so. In “Station Eleven,” post-pans (children who were born after the pandemic) are both beacons of optimism and conscripted killers deployed by a self-styled prophet who hopes to erase anyone who holds on to the trauma of the past. And in “The Last of Us,” Ellie, the young girl with possible immunity (played by the actor Bella Ramsey), is forced to kill to survive, and to grapple with whether it’s worth sacrificing her own life in the search for a cure.The anxieties that these works explore — about planetary destruction and what we did to enable it — are, evidence suggests, affecting the desire of some to have children at all, either because of fear for their future or a belief that not procreating will help stave off the worst. But following the children in these fictions, who didn’t create the conditions of their suffering, isn’t just a devastating guilt trip. Almost all these stories also frame children as our best hope, as we so often do in real life. Children, we need to believe, are resilient and ingenious in ways that adults aren’t. In these stories, when the phones stop working and Amazon stops delivering, it’s children, less set in their ways, who can rebuild and imagine something different. They’re our victims but also our saviors.W. W. Norton & Company, via Associated PressNowhere is this more explicit than in Lydia Millet’s 2020 novel, “A Children’s Bible,” in which a group of middle-aged college friends rent an old mansion for a summer reunion. When a superstorm sets off a chain of events that erodes society, the parents drink and take ecstasy but the kids — teens — remain clearheaded. They care for a baby, grow food and plan for an unrecognizable future. This fantasy of a youth-led solution is both hopeful, Millet implies, and a deplorable shirking of responsibility. (It recalls somewhat Greta Thunberg’s rebuke of grown-ups: “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic.”) Its price, these works suggest, is a childhood robbed of innocence. In the rare moments when kids are allowed to be kids in these narratives, there is always a sense of foreboding; for every romp through an abandoned shopping mall, there’s a zombie lying in wait in a Halloween store. “Is this really all they had to worry about?” Ellie asks Joel, her companion in “The Last of Us” (played by Pedro Pascal), about the teenage girls who lived before the fungus hit. “Boys. Movies. Deciding which shirt goes with which skirt.”Mahershala Ali, Myha’la Herrold, Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke in the forthcoming movie “Leave the World Behind.”JoJo Whilden/NetflixThis current crop of postapocalyptic stories isn’t the first to feature children prominently. Cormac McCarthy’s novel “The Road,” published in 2006, early in the so-called war on terror, followed a father and son after civilization had been leveled by an unnamed flash from the sky. (“Are we still the good guys?” the son asks the father as they ignore others’ pain in their struggle to survive.) The movie “Children of Men,” released the same year, imagines a world so destroyed that most humans have lost the ability to reproduce — and hope lies with the only pregnant woman. Of course, one reason these fictions foreground children is that a world without them is the most doomed world of all. It’s no accident that some of the earliest near-apocalypse stories — the biblical flood, the one in the ancient Mesopotamian poem “The Epic of Gilgamesh” — imagined that the world was saved by bringing the “seed of all living creatures,” as the latter work puts it, onto a boat.But maybe more than any particular fear of a civilization-ending calamity, these fictions are most useful for helping us work through an unavoidable, terrifying truth on an individual level. That the world, in whatever state it descends to or remains in, will go on without us after our death, and unless tragedy strikes, our children will live in it without us. It’s not comforting to imagine, but it can be illuminating. They will navigate things we can’t imagine, but — just maybe — they’ll do better than we did, even without our help. More
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Samantha Irby Says It’s OK to Hate Your Body
by Eliana Willis 18 June 2023, 09:00
As far as descriptions of writers go, “humorist” has an old-fashioned, almost quaint ring to it, the literary equivalent of haberdasher or lamplighter. But across four book-length collections — the newest is the best seller “Quietly Hostile” — Samantha Irby has always brought scabrously honest, never pat and, it must be said, operatically scatological vivacity […] More
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Cormac McCarthy Movies: Stream These 5 Film Adaptations
by Aurelia Butler 14 June 2023, 17:33
The Coens and Ridley Scott are among the directors who took big swings at the novelist’s work. The distinctive writer left his mark on the big screen.By turns terse, poetic and baroque, able to find the essence of human nature in the bleakest of circumstances, Cormac McCarthy, who died Tuesday, was widely considered to be one of the greatest novelists of his generation. His writing, with its Western landscapes, noir-inflected dialogue and biblical inclinations, proved to be catnip to filmmakers, including the Coen brothers, Ridley Scott and Billy Bob Thornton. Here is a look at how this most distinctive of writers left his mark on the big screen.‘All the Pretty Horses’ (2000)Rent or buy it on most major platforms.Probably the gentlest of McCarthy’s Border Trilogy novels, this film adaptation tells the story of John Grady Cole, a young man who high-tails it across the border to Mexico, where he falls in love with a wealthy rancher’s daughter (Penélope Cruz), runs afoul of her family and the law, and navigates the horrors of prison life. Yes, this is gentle by McCarthy standards. Matt Damon, riding the success of “Good Will Hunting” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” plays Cole as a sensitive lad dumbstruck by love. Cruz, a native of Spain, does her best as a south-of-the-border lass. Thornton directs with lyrical respect for the source material, if not a whole lot of grit or imagination.‘No Country for Old Men’ (2007)Rent or buy it on most major platforms.The Coen brothers return to the Texas noir roots of their first feature, “Blood Simple,” for the most successful McCarthy adaptation to date. It won Oscars for best picture, directing and screenwriting, as well as Javier Bardem’s supporting turn as one of McCarthy’s nihilistic villains, an implacable killing machine who speaks in riddles and engages his prey in fatal rhetorical jousts. But the heart of the movie, about a briefcase full of money and the in-over-his-head opportunist (Josh Brolin) who pilfers it, is Tommy Lee Jones as a small-town sheriff who wants out of the game, which seems to get more sinister and incomprehensible by the minute. He is the old man of the title and the author’s surrogate, a poetic soul just trying to wait it out until it’s all over.‘The Road’ (2009)Stream it on Tubi, Vudu and Freevee.The novel that brought McCarthy’s world to a wide audience (and won a 2007 Pulitzer Prize), “The Road” redeems a postapocalyptic hellscape with the pure love of a father (played by Viggo Mortensen with heartbreaking intensity) for his young son (Kodi Smit-McPhee, already a young actor of uncommon instincts). It’s a gray land of digitally enhanced wreckage, peopled by cannibals and other desperate survivors played by the likes of Robert Duvall, Michael K. Williams and, in a brief but indelible and terrifying performance, Garret Dillahunt. John Hillcoat directs like he means it. “The Road” is up there with “No Country” as one of the purest visual distillations of McCarthy’s prose.‘The Sunset Limited’ (2011)Stream it on Max.Sometimes McCarthy likes to take a couple of characters, wind them up and just let them riff on what it all means. His 2022 novel, “Stella Maris,” fits this bill, as does this HBO film version of McCarthy’s play “The Sunset Limited,” about a God-fearing ex-con called Black (Samuel L. Jackson) and the secular humanities professor, called White (Tommy Lee Jones), whom Black saves from jumping in front of a subway train. Confined to Black’s apartment, they thrust and parry, Black offering a brand of streetwise divinity, White stewing in his own suicidal juices. Both actors clearly relish the opportunity to speak McCarthy’s dialogue, and who could blame them? This is some of Jackson’s best work, allowing him to return to his theater roots with a high-wire act of philosophy and feeling. Jones’s direction is workmanlike, but that’s all this material really needs.‘The Counselor’ (2013)Rent or buy it on most major platforms.Ridley Scott directs the only original screenplay on McCarthy’s résumé, an unfairly maligned and misunderstood blast of criminal nihilism that carries the noir direction of “No Country” to its apotheosis. Michael Fassbender plays a glib lawyer whose taste for the finer things gets him in deep with a Mexican cartel. Other players come and go, including Brad Pitt, Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Bruno Ganz and Cameron Diaz, who has an amorous encounter with a luxury car that you will never unsee. This is McCarthy and Scott having infectious fun with humanity’s dark side, including two bravura murder scenes notable for their cruelty and creativity. More
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Cormac McCarthy, Author of ‘The Road’ and ‘No Country for Old Men,’ Dead at 89
by Aurelia Butler 13 June 2023, 21:16
“All the Pretty Horses,” “The Road” and “No Country for Old Men” were among his acclaimed books that explore a bleak world of violence and outsiders.Cormac McCarthy, the formidable and reclusive writer of Appalachia and the American Southwest, whose raggedly ornate early novels about misfits and grotesques gave way to the lush taciturnity of “All the Pretty Horses” and the apocalyptic minimalism of “The Road,” died on Tuesday at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 89. Knopf, his publisher, said in a statement that his son John had confirmed the death. Mr. McCarthy’s fiction took a dark view of the human condition and was often macabre. He decorated his novels with scalpings, beheadings, arson, rape, incest, necrophilia and cannibalism. “There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,” he told The New York Times magazine in 1992 in a rare interview. “I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea.”His characters were outsiders, like him. He lived quietly and determinately outside the literary mainstream. While not quite as reclusive as Thomas Pynchon, Mr. McCarthy gave no readings and no blurbs for the jackets of other writers’ books. He never committed journalism or taught writing. He granted only a handful of interviews.The mainstream, however, eventually came to him. “All the Pretty Horses,” a reflective western that cut against the grain of his previous work, won a National Book Award in 1992, and “The Road” won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007. Both were made into films, as was Mr. McCarthy’s “No Country for Old Men,” which won the Academy Award for best picture in 2008.Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh in the 2007 film adaptation of “No Country for Old Men,” which won the Academy Award for best picture.Richard Foreman/Miramax Films and Paramount VantageThat film, directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, gave the world the indelible image of Javier Bardem as Mr. McCarthy’s nihilistic hit man Anton Chigurh, dispatching his victims with a pneumatic bolt gun meant for cattle.Mr. McCarthy had in recent years been discussed as a potential winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The critic Harold Bloom named him one of the four major American novelists of his time, alongside Philip Roth, Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon, and called Mr. McCarthy’s novel “Blood Meridian” (1985), a bad dream of a Western, “the greatest single book since Faulkner’s ‘As I Lay Dying.’”Saul Bellow noted Mr. McCarthy’s “absolutely overpowering use of language, his life-giving and death-dealing sentences.”Acclaim for Mr. McCarthy’s work was not universal, however. Some critics found his novels portentous and self-consciously masculine. There are few notable women in his work.Writing in The New Yorker in 2005, James Wood praised Mr. McCarthy as “a colossally gifted writer” and “one of the great hams of American prose, who delights in producing a histrionic rhetoric that brilliantly ventriloquizes the King James Bible, Shakespearean and Jacobean tragedy, Melville, Conrad, and Faulkner.”But Mr. Wood accused Mr. McCarthy of writing sentences that sometimes veered “close to nonsense,” of “appearing to relish the violence he so lavishly records,” and of being hostile to intellectual consciousness.The language and tone of Mr. McCarthy’s novels changed markedly over the decades. Among academics and Mr. McCarthy’s legion of obsessive readers, the essential question about his oeuvre has long been: What’s better, early McCarthy or late?Mr. McCarthy in 1965 when he published his first novel, “The Orchard Keeper.” It was a bleak fable set in the Appalachian South.Joe BlackwellHis first four novels — “The Orchard Keeper” (1965), “Outer Dark” (1968), “Child of God” (1973) and “Suttree” (1979) — are bleak fables, set in the Appalachian South, related in tangled prose that owes an acknowledged debt to William Faulkner. Indeed, the editor of Mr. McCarthy’s first five books, Albert Erskine, of Random House, had been Faulkner’s last editor.These early novels could be carnivalesque in their humor. In “Suttree,” for example, one character has carnal relations with the entirety of a farmer’s watermelon field. The farmer sues, alleging bestiality, but the man later brags, “My lawyer told em a watermelon wasnt no beast.”Mr. McCarthy’s later period began in earnest with “All the Pretty Horses,” the first volume in his Border Trilogy, which includes the novels “The Crossing” (1994) and “Cities of the Plain” (1998). These novels put on display his powerful and intuitive sense of the American landscape. His prose was now rich but austere, shorn of most punctuation. It owed more to Hemingway than to Faulkner. The location in his fiction had shifted as well, to the desert Southwest.The elegiac quality of “All the Pretty Horses,” with its existential cowboys, surprised some of his admirers. One of Mr. McCarthy’s friends, the novelist Leslie Garrett, was quoted as remarking about it, “Cormac finally has succeeded in writing a book that won’t offend anybody.”“All the Pretty Horses” attracted a vast audience, and was made into a film in 2000 starring Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz. It was not merely Mr. McCarthy’s first best seller; it was his first novel to sell many copies at all. None of his previous books had by then sold more than 5,000 copies in hardcover.“All the Pretty Horses,” a reflective Western, won a National Book Award in 1992 and was adapted for film in 2000.Matt Damon in a scene from the 2000 film “All the Pretty Horses.” The book was Mr. McCarthy’s first best seller.Van Redin/Columbia – TriStar, via Getty ImagesEarly Life in TennesseeHe was born Charles McCarthy on July 20, 1933, in Providence, R.I., the third of six children and the oldest son born to Charles J. and the Gladys (McGrail) McCarthy. Within a few years the family moved to Knoxville, Tenn., where Mr. McCarthy’s father, who had graduated from Yale Law School, worked as a lawyer for the Tennessee Valley Authority.According to one account, Mr. McCarthy adopted the name Cormac, a family nickname, to avoid associations with Charlie McCarthy, the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s dummy. By another account, given on a website devoted to Mr. McCarthy, he renamed himself Cormac after an Irish king. Still another has it that Mr. McCarthy’s family had legally changed his name to the Gaelic equivalent of “son of Charles.”The McCarthy family was affluent for Knoxville, its large white house staffed with maids. The young Mr. McCarthy was drawn, however, to the city’s seedier side. “I felt earlier on I wasn’t going to be a respectable citizen,” he told the Times Magazine. “I hated school from the day I set foot in it.”He attended Knoxville’s Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee, where he studied physics and engineering in 1951 and 1952. He joined the Air Force in 1953 and served four years, several of them stationed in Alaska. To quell his boredom, he said, “I read a lot of books very quickly.”Mr. McCarthy returned to the University of Tennessee from 1957 to 1959. He learned that he had a knack for language, he once said, after a professor asked him read a collection of 18th-century essays and repunctuate them for a textbook. He began to publish short stories in the student literary magazine. He never graduated, however, and he moved to Chicago, where he worked in an auto-parts warehouse while writing his first novel.He sent the manuscript of that novel, “The Orchard Keeper,” to Random House, he said, because “it was the only publisher I’d heard of.”Reviewing “The Orchard Keeper” in The Times in 1965, Orville Prescott called it “impressive” but noted that Mr. McCarthy deployed “so many of Faulkner’s literary devices and mannerisms that he half-submerges his own talents beneath a flood of imitation.”Mr. McCarthy wrote for many years in relative obscurity and privation. After his first marriage, to a fellow University of Tennessee student named Lee Holleman, ended in divorce, he married Anne DeLisle, an English pop singer, in 1966. The couple lived for nearly eight years in a dairy barn outside Knoxville.“We lived in total poverty,” Ms. DeLisle once said. “We were bathing in the lake.” She added: “Someone would call up and offer him $2,000 to come speak at a university about his books. And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week.”Mr. McCarthy’s second novel, “Outer Dark,” was about a woman who bears her brother’s baby; he leaves it in the woods to die. Guy Davenport, writing in The Times Book Review in 1968, praised its language as “compounded of Appalachian phrases as plain and as functional as an ax.”His third novel, “Child of God,” was about a cave-dwelling mass murderer and necrophiliac. Reviewing it at length in The New Yorker, the author and child psychiatrist Robert Coles called Mr. McCarthy a “novelist of religious feeling” and likened him to the classical Greek dramatists.Mr. McCarthy moved to El Paso in 1976 after separating from Ms. DeLisle. The couple later divorced. The settings of his novels soon changed as well.His last of his early novels to be set in the South, “Suttree” (1979), was his most autobiographical. It is set among the fringe characters who populated Knoxville’s waterfront, a milieu he knew intimately. “I was always attracted to people who enjoyed a perilous lifestyle,” Mr. McCarthy once said.Mr. McCarthy in 1979, the year “Suttree” was published. In the book, one character has carnal relations with the entirety of a farmer’s watermelon field.Dan MooreSome saw the novel as a farewell to his raucous old life. He stopped drinking before the novel was published. “The friends I do have are simply those who quit drinking,” he said. “If there is an occupational hazard to writing, it’s drinking.”Mr. McCarthy was briefly living in a motel in Knoxville when he learned, in 1981, that he had won a MacArthur fellowship. (In praise of his many mailing addresses, he commented: “Three moves is as good as a fire.”)‘A Legion of Horribles’The MacArthur money gave him the time to write “Blood Meridian,” which many critics feel is his finest book. A surreal and blood-drenched anti-western about a gang of scalp hunters and outlaws in Texas and Mexico, the book features among its central characters a crazed, hairless, brilliant, seven-foot tall albino judge who put many readers in mind of Melville’s Captain Ahab.The book delineated what he called “a legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners.”After the retirement of Mr. Erskine, his longtime editor, Mr. McCarthy moved from Random House to Alfred A. Knopf and acquired a new editor, Gary Fisketjon, who also worked with Raymond Carver, Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff, among other writers. It was before the release of “All the Pretty Horses” in 1992 that Mr. McCarthy agreed to talk to The Times Magazine for his first major interview.The author of the article, Richard B. Woodward, noted at the time that Mr. McCarthy “cuts his own hair, eats his meals off a hot plate or in cafeterias and does his wash at the Laundromat.”In that interview, Mr. McCarthy named the “good writers” as Melville, Dostoyevsky and Faulkner, a list that omitted writers who, as he put it, don’t “deal with issues of life and death.” About Proust and Henry James, he commented: “I don’t understand them. To me, that’s not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange.”“All the Pretty Horses” is a gritty but often romantic narrative about a young man named John Grady Cole who, evicted in 1950 from the Texas ranch where he grew up, heads for Mexico on horseback along with his best friend. The book sold nearly 200,000 copies within six months.The next two books in the Border Trilogy also sold well, although some critics were not as taken with them. “It’s axiomatic in publishing,” Mr. Fisketjon said in a 1995 interview, “that the thrill of discovery is followed by a backlash.”Mr. McCarthy for many years maintained an office at the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit scientific research center founded in 1984 by the particle physicist Murray Gell-Mann and others. He moved from El Paso to live nearby. He enjoyed the company of scientists and sometimes volunteered to help copy-edit science books, shearing them of things like exclamation points and semicolons, which he found extraneous.“People ask me, ‘Why are you interested in physics?’,” he was quoted as saying in a 2007 Rolling Stone profile. “But why would you not be? To me, the most curious thing of all is incuriosity.” He would drive to the institute after dropping John, his young son, off at school.Mr. McCarthy published his stripped-down existential thriller “No Country For Old Men” in 2005. The next year he published “The Road,” a grueling novel about a father and son’s struggle to survive in a postapocalyptic landscape.“The Road” a grueling novel about a father and son’s struggle to survive in a post-apocalyptic landscape, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007.The novel is dedicated to his son.“I think about John all the time and what the world’s going to be like,” Mr. McCarthy told Rolling Stone. “If the family situation was different, I could see taking John and going to New Zealand. It’s a civilized place. ”In the same interview, Mr. McCarthy said he had never voted: “Poets shouldn’t vote.”Writing Till the EndMr. McCarthy sold his archives, 98 boxes of letters, drafts, notes and unpublished work, to Texas State University in 2008 for $2 million. A year later, the Olivetti typewriter on which he’d written each of his novels sold at auction for $254,500. He immediately began working on a new Olivetti, the same model, purchased for less than $20.The Olivetti manual typewriter on which Mr. McCarthy typed all of his novels from 1958 to 2009, the year it sold at auction for $254,500.Christie’s, via Associated PressIn 2012, Mr. McCarthy wrote a screenplay, “The Counselor,” about a lawyer in the Southwest who falls into the drug business. Ridley Scott adapted it for a film in 2013 starring Michael Fassbender and Cameron Diaz.Mr. McCarthy was married for a third time, to Jennifer Winkley, in 1998, when he was 64 and she was 32. The marriage ended in divorce in 2006. In addition to his son John, from Mr. McCarthy’s third marriage, he is survived by another son, Chase, from his first marriage; two sisters, Barbara Ann McCooe and Maryellen Jaques; a brother, Dennis; and two grandchildren. His first wife, Ms. Holleman, died in 2009.Late in 2022, Mr. McCarthy released a pair of ambitious linked novels, “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris,” to mostly adulatory reviews. “The Passenger” is about a racecar driver turned salvage diver named Bobby Western — he somewhat resembles Mr. McCarthy in his taciturnity, his Knoxville childhood and his fondness for New Orleans and its nightlife — who sees things he should not see. Before long he is pursued not only by G-men but, it can seem, also by all the ghosts of the 20th century. It’s a novel of ideas — about mathematics, the nature of knowledge, the importance of fast cars — that slips into pretentiousness at times but also contains flatulence jokes.The title of the second novel, “Stella Maris,” refers to a psychiatric hospital in Black River Falls, Wis. That is where 20-year-old Alicia Western, a doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, has checked herself in because she’s been hallucinating. Central among her visions is the Thalidomide Kid, a shambolic dwarf with flippers and a bent sense of humor. Alicia is carrying a plastic bag stuffed with $40,000, which she tries to give away to the receptionist. Alicia also happens to be Bobby’s sister. Their father was a physicist on the Manhattan Project.Shortly before Mr. McCarthy’s death, it was announced that he had been at work on a screenplay for a film adaptation of “Blood Meridian,” to be directed by John Hillcoat, who directed the film of Mr. McCarthy’s “The Road.”In 2007, Mr. McCarthy took part in one of the most unlikely cultural collisions of the new century when he agreed to be interviewed on daytime television by Oprah Winfrey. She had chosen “The Road” for her book club.He seemed uncomfortable in the spotlight. “I don’t think it’s good for your head,” he told Ms. Winfrey about being interviewed. “You spend a lot of time thinking about how to write a book, you probably shouldn’t be talking about it. You probably should be doing it.”Alex Traub More
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Book Review: ‘Wannabe,’ by Aisha Harris
by Aurelia Butler 12 June 2023, 09:02
In her essay collection “Wannabe,” Aisha Harris argues that Black critics can both appreciate, and demand more from, shifts in popular culture.WANNABE: Reckonings With the Pop Culture That Shapes Me, by Aisha HarrisBeing a Black critic in a time of exceptional art made by Black people has immense rewards and myriad risks. “Wannabe,” the debut essay collection from Aisha Harris, a co-host of NPR’s “Pop Culture Happy Hour,” is at its best when engaging with those risks and the thorny questions of her profession. In what ways does identity inform a critic’s work? And should it?Harris can laugh about the demands of endorsing positive representations of Blackness, no matter how trite (“When encountering Black art out in the wild, be on the lookout for Black Girl Magic, Black Love, Black Excellence and the direct involvement of Common and/or John Legend”). She cheekily pushes Issa Rae’s now-famous awards show proclamation — “I’m rooting for everybody Black” — to its most absurd extent: “It’s only right we take her at her literal word and support all Black artists and art, no matter how questionable, incompetent or just plain offensive they might be.” But when a podcast listener chastises Harris for finding the Will Smith movie “King Richard” middling, she roars back. “I don’t want to ‘just be happy’ about ‘King Richard,’” she insists. “I want interiority and surprise and characters who feel as though they have a reason to exist beyond retelling history.”It’s complicated, though. Harris recounts conflictedness about being disappointed by “A Wrinkle in Time,” which was directed by Ava DuVernay, whose film career was firmly on the rise. Harris, who wrote movie reviews for Slate and is a former editor at The New York Times, worried that a lukewarm piece could mean it would “be decades before another studio handed a movie of this stature to a woman of color.” Looking back, she arrived at a place that was “true to my own reactions to the movie without being scathing.”“Wannabe” is a blend of memoir and cultural analysis, framed as “reckonings with the pop culture that shapes me.” Harris flaunts a wide range of references, moving easily between decades and arenas. She makes smart use of Roger Ebert on Fellini, revisits “Key & Peele” sketches and dissects bell hooks’s analysis of the experimental film hero Stan Brakhage. The book is especially effective when its author leans on her personal experience. Harris grew up in Connecticut, in “predominantly white and suburban circles,” and she tenderly illustrates the trials of growing up “The Black Friend” in white environments.“These Black Friends,” Harris offers, “were a reminder of my isolation and the fact that I often felt as if I was a blip on the radar of the many white peers I attempted to befriend.”Harris braids her personal pain with incisive critiques of the trope and its limitations, constructing internal monologues for famous pop culture examples, like Gabrielle Union’s Katie in “She’s All That” and Lamorne Morris’s Winston in “New Girl.” She deftly connects the rise of the personal brand and the toxic cultures of online fandom (“The overpersonalization of pop culture begets acrimony and pathological obsession”); confronts her decision to not have kids through the prism of “The Brady Bunch” and Judd Apatow’s “Knocked Up”; and quotes from her own LiveJournal about a hurtful memory involving an oft-forgotten scene in Tina Fey’s “Mean Girls.”Still, for all its range, “Wannabe” contains occasions that demand more rigorous engagement. Contending with Dave Chappelle’s thorny legacy is limited to an aside: “While I recognize that present-day Dave Chappelle suffers from transphobic diarrhea of the mouth,” Harris writes, “I cannot pretend as though some of his old jokes no longer slap.” (She goes on to quote several of them.)And the recency of the pop references in “Wannabe” is both a strength and a weakness, and risks dating the book.The groundbreaking success of Disney’s “Encanto” and the multiple Oscar winner “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is likely to matter for a long time; Warner Bros. Discovery’s cancellation of the “Batgirl” film or the Harper’s letter on “Justice and Open Debate” might lose potency for the reader not engaged with the mostly-online #discourse.But enlisting movies and TV to explain the world is Harris’s expertise, arriving at “inadvertent self-formation by way of popular culture.” For readers already inclined to read culture to understand themselves, “Wannabe” is a compelling affirmation that they’re looking in the right place.Elamin Abdelmahmoud is a podcaster and the author of “Son of Elsewhere: A Memoir in Pieces,” a New York Times Notable Book in 2022.WANNABE: Reckonings With the Pop Culture That Shapes Me | By Aisha Harris | 280 pp. | HarperOne | $29.99 More

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