Books and Literature

Subterms

    More stories

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      In ‘Tom Stoppard,’ Hermione Lee Takes On a New Challenge: a Living Subject

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyIn ‘Tom Stoppard,’ Hermione Lee Takes On a New Challenge: a Living SubjectThe acclaimed biographer’s life of the widely admired playwright and screenwriter follows her works about Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton and others.The biographer Hermione Lee, whose new life of Tom Stoppard will be published on Feb. 23.Credit…Jamie MuirFeb. 13, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETEvery other year, at a botanical garden in the Chelsea neighborhood of London, the playwright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard throws a lavish, all-day party for his many friends and their families. There are bands, puppets, jugglers, stilt-walkers, staggering amounts of food and drink. Among the hundreds attending in 2013 were the biographer Hermione Lee, who was at the time also the very busy president of Oxford’s Wolfson College, and her friend Julian Barnes, the novelist. As they were leaving, Barnes recalled recently, Stoppard ambled up and asked Lee if she had any interest in writing his life.“Why me?” she said, taken aback.“Because I want it to be read,” he replied.That Stoppard wanted a biography at all was a surprise. He used to be hostile to the whole idea. In his play “Indian Ink,” a character calls biography “the worst possible excuse for getting people wrong,” and in “The Invention of Love,” Stoppard has Oscar Wilde describe biography as “the mesh through which our real life escapes.”Stoppard came around, Lee thinks, because he knew a biography was probably going to get written anyway, and because at the time he asked her he was entering into what she calls the “tidying up” phase of his life — approaching 80, moving house, beginning a new marriage. And in choosing Lee, though she is too modest to say so, he wasn’t taking any chances. Lee’s “Tom Stoppard: A Life” came out in England last October (Alfred A. Knopf will publish it here on Feb. 23), and at the time Stefan Collini wrote in The Guardian, “It seems unfair that a man of such outrageous gifts should also have been allowed to magic up the perfect biographer to write his life.”Lee, or to be formal, Dame Hermione (she was awarded the title in 2013 for “services to literary scholarship”) is a leading member of that generation of British writers — it also includes Richard Holmes, Michael Holroyd, Jenny Uglow and Claire Tomalin — who have brought an infusion of style and imagination to the art of literary biography. She is probably most famous for her 1997 life of Virginia Woolf, which upended much of the received wisdom about Woolf and demonstrated that there was much more to say than that she was a depressive in a cardigan wading into a river. In similar fashion, her 2007 biography of Edith Wharton rescued Wharton from her snobbish, old-fashioned reputation and reimagined her as a modern.Lee said yes to Stoppard, of course. How do you say no to someone so famous for charm? And then, as she recalled over Zoom last fall from her house in Oxford, she immediately thought to herself, “Oh my God, what have I done?”The playwright Tom Stoppard in New York, 1967.Credit…William E. Sauro/The New York Times Stoppard outside of New York’s Lincoln Center Theater, 2018.Credit…Daniel Dorsa for The New York TimesLee, who turns 73 later this month, did not set out to become a biographer. She grew up in London in a house filled with music and books, and became a “culture hound,” she once told The Paris Review, the kind of teenager who would rather listen to Bartok than Elvis. She read all the time, but mostly novels, and had little or no interest in the lives of the people who wrote them.When her dreams of being an actress didn’t pan out, she became an academic, studying at Oxford, where she eventually became the first woman in the prestigious role of Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature. In the 1980s, though, she became uncomfortable with what was happening to the teaching of literature. “I think I was very ill-equipped to take on structuralism and deconstruction and French critical theory,” she explained. “I didn’t really buy the death of the author, and I think I went toward biography, perhaps not terribly consciously, as a sort of resistance.”Lee’s previous subjects — besides Woolf and Wharton, she also wrote about Willa Cather and Penelope Fitzgerald — were all novelists, all female and all dead. Stoppard, obviously, was none of those things. He was also someone both fortunate and beloved, with hundreds and hundreds of friends and admirers, all protective of him. “She always has a natural and healthy anxiety,” Barnes said. “‘Can I do it?’ But this time I think there was also: ‘Will he like it?’”Lee was not a theater person. But she was an avid playgoer, at least, and had acted a bit when she was young. So she felt reasonably confident about handling that part of Stoppard’s life, though in the end writing about the plays themselves required a tremendous amount of homework. Nor was Stoppard’s being male something she worried a lot about. “Maybe I should have,” she said, “but I didn’t feel that in writing about a man I was entering into some strange, uncharted territory.”By far the hardest part of writing the life of Stoppard, she said, was that Stoppard, now 83, was still living it. How do you end such a book? She originally thought she might conclude with Stoppard’s 80th birthday, in July 2017. But in 2020, he finished “Leopoldstadt,” a series of three plays that are his most personal and emotional, touching on his Jewish heritage, and practically as soon as it opened the run was ended — for the time being, anyway — by the coronavirus. So instead, Lee’s book ends with a vanishing — Stoppard’s recollection of a famous outdoor production of “The Tempest” in which Ariel seems to run across water and then disappears into the dark.Lee worked on the book for seven years, interviewing not just Stoppard but more than 100 of his friends and colleagues. “I’m sure there were times when he said, ‘Oh, the hell with this,’ and ‘Crikey, she’s being thorough — she’s excavating my whole life,’” she said. “I think what happens is you don’t see it coming, really. You agree to be interviewed and you’re obliging about material and all that, but what you don’t imagine is that this person is going to be talking to practically everyone you know, and that inevitably every one of those people will ring you up and tell you.” Only when Lee was well along in her research did Stoppard trust her with what became her two most crucial sources: the almost weekly letters he wrote to his mother until her death, in 1996, and a journal he kept for his son Ed.Hermione Lee worked on her new biography of Tom Stoppard for seven years, interviewing not just Stoppard but more than 100 of his friends and colleagues.Credit…Tom PilstonLee is sure that when Stoppard finally read the book, he inwardly groaned. Because there was so much to read — 834 pages, including notes — and because there were things that must have embarrassed him and that he wished had been left out. But he asked for only one change: that she not reveal the name of an actor who had been fired from the revival of one of his plays. “I was very impressed by that,” Lee said of Stoppard’s minimal demand. “And of course I agreed.”Most of Lee’s biographies have a shape related to their subject. Her life of Woolf is Woolfian, formally experimental and arranged thematically rather than chronologically. It begins with a question asked by Woolf herself: “My God, how does one write a biography?” Her biography of Wharton resembles a Wharton novel, with a lot of richly furnished rooms: the French room, the Italian room, the Henry James room. And her life of Penelope Fitzgerald is shorter and sparer than the others — like Fitzgerald, who was elusive and a little mysterious, a great writer of concealment.Lee’s life of Stoppard starts with a chapter called “First Acts,” and is divided into five parts. But in the beginning it reads less like a play than a boy’s adventure story, with 2-year-old Tomas Straussler fleeing with his parents and brother from their native Czechoslovakia to Singapore in 1939. When that city falls to the Japanese, they flee again, this time to India, with the father dying on the way, and remain there until 1945, when Mrs. Straussler meets and marries Major Kenneth Stoppard. A year later, the family is living in Nottinghamshire and, overnight, Tomas has become an Englishman — the luckiest thing, he always said, that ever happened to him.Lee’s 97-year-old father read that part of the book before he died and told her that it wasn’t written in her usual style. “He was always my sternest critic,” she said, and added, laughing, “I could never work out whether this was a compliment or a criticism. The plan, anyway, was that I really wanted this part to come along and whoosh. You get on the journey and away you go.”The rest of the book describes a life of extraordinary busyness, with Stoppard not just writing (and rewriting and rewriting) his plays but serving on committees, plunging himself into the politics of Eastern Europe, working for Hollywood — and not just on the movies we know as his, like “Shakespeare in Love” and “Empire of the Sun.” He also did work — uncredited but handsomely paid — on such unlikely projects as “The Bourne Ultimatum,” “Sleepy Hollow” and “102 Dalmatians.” There are stretches in the book when he takes the Concorde back and forth across the Atlantic as if it were a cab.To judge from the British reviews, some readers picked up “Tom Stoppard: A Life” just for the gossip: the parties; the friends; the hobnobbing with the likes of Prince Charles, Princess Margaret, the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, Mick Jagger and David Bowie; the three marriages; the love affairs, including a not-so-secret one with Sinead Cusack, the wife of Jeremy Irons. There were others who skipped that stuff and wanted to read instead all about the influence of Isaiah Berlin on “The Coast of Utopia.”“I suppose I always felt it was a sort of double narrative,” Lee said. “I’d rather be boring than faulty. I could well imagine people saying, ‘Do you really have to go on about the plays at such length?’ I wanted to make people feel they were reading the plays as they were reading the book, as it were, or watching them again. I was also trying to do a service to myself, getting these plays clear in my head and trying to understand how they worked in his life at the time.”Over the years, Lee has thought a lot about biography, and even about how much, paradoxically, she would resist the idea of anyone writing her life. In her brief book “Biography: A Very Short Introduction,” a sort of biography of biography, she argues that in some ways the form has evolved less than we think, and that the same questions keep coming up about the responsibilities and limitations of the form. “I’m perfectly aware that there are many things we can’t know,” she said. “I’m sure in Tom’s case there are one or two affairs that I don’t know about, that nobody knows about. And maybe nobody ever will know. I like that, actually.”She added that she already had a new subject in mind — “just a glint in my eye, though, and too soon to be talking about it.” But she did volunteer three clues. Not a man. Not a playwright. And, yes, dead.Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      Jean-Claude Carrière, 89, Dies; Prolific Writer of Screenplays and More

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyJean-Claude Carrière, 89, Dies; Prolific Writer of Screenplays and MoreHe was a favorite of Luis Buñuel and other top filmmakers. He also had a fruitful collaboration with the stage director Peter Brook.Jean-Claude Carrière in 1999. He had more than 150 film and television writing credits and also wrote books and plays.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFeb. 11, 2021Jean-Claude Carrière, an author, playwright and screenwriter who collaborated with the director Luis Buñuel on a string of important films and went on to work on scores of other movies, among them Philip Kaufman’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” (1988), died on Monday at his home in Paris. He was 89.The death was confirmed by his daughter Kiara Carrière. No cause was given.Mr. Carrière had barely started in the movie business when he met Buñuel, the Spanish-born director, in 1963 (although he had already won a short-subject Oscar for a 1962 comedy he made with Pierre Étaix, “Happy Anniversary”).“At the time, he was looking for a young French screenwriter who knew the French countryside well,” Mr. Carrière recalled in a 1983 interview with the writer Jason Weiss.“I was a beginner,” he said. “I had gone to Cannes, and he was seeing various screenwriters there. I had lunch with him, we got along well, and three weeks later he chose me and I left for Madrid. Since then I haven’t stopped.”His first project with Buñuel was “Diary of a Chambermaid” (1964), for which the two adapted the Octave Mirbeau novel of the same name. Mr. Carrière continued to work with Buñuel for the rest of the director’s career, including on his last feature, “That Obscure Object of Desire,” in 1977. (Buñuel died in 1983.)Fernando Rey and Carole Bouquet in a scene from the 1977 film “That Obscure Object of Desire,” the last of Mr. Carrière’s many collaborations with Luis Buñuel.“Quite often the screenwriter has to guess what exactly the film is that the director wants to make,” Mr. Carrière told Interview magazine in 2015. “Sometimes the director doesn’t even know himself. You have to help him find the right thing. That was the case with Buñuel. At the beginning, he was looking around in many different directions, and finally when we went the right way, we felt it.”Mr. Carrière also collaborated with other top filmmakers, including Jacques Deray (on the 1969 movie “The Swimming Pool” and more) and Louis Malle (on the 1967 film “The Thief of Paris” and others). In the 1970s one of his greatest successes was as a writer of Volker Schlondorff’s “The Tin Drum” (1979), which was adapted from the Günter Grass novel about a boy who, in the midst of the gathering chaos that led to World War II, decides not to grow up; it won the Oscar for best foreign-language film.In the 1980s he wrote or co-wrote the screenplays for Daniel Vigne’s “The Return of Martin Guerre” (1982), Andrzej Wajda’s “Danton” (1983), Milos Forman’s “Valmont” (1989) and numerous other movies. Among the most recent of his more than 150 film and television credits were “The Artist and the Model,” a 2012 drama directed by Fernando Trueba, and “At Eternity’s Gate,” a 2018 film about Vincent van Gogh directed by Julian Schnabel.In 2014 Mr. Carrière received an honorary Oscar for his body of work. The citation said that his “elegantly crafted screenplays elevate the art of screenwriting to the level of literature.”The prolific Mr. Carrière also wrote books and plays, often collaborating with the stage director Peter Brook. His interests knew no bounds.With Mr. Brook he created “The Mahabharata,” a nine-hour stage version of the Sanskrit epic, which was staged at the Avignon Theater Festival in France in 1985 and then made into a film. He once wrote a book with the Dalai Lama (“The Power of Buddhism,” 1996). He wrote a novel called “Please, Mr. Einstein” that, as Dennis Overbye wrote in a 2006 review in The New York Times, “touches down lightly and charmingly on some of the thorniest philosophical consequences of Einstein’s genius and, by extension, the scientific preoccupations of the 20th century — the nature of reality, the fate of causality, the comprehensibility of nature, the limits of the mind.”His was deliberately ever curious.“People say I am very dispersed,” he told The Guardian in 1994. “But I say that to pass from one subject to another, from one country to another, is what keeps me alive, keeps me alert.”A scene from Buñuel’s “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972), one of three films for which Mr. Carrière was nominated for a writing Oscar.Credit…Rialto Pictures/StudiocanalJean-Claude Carrière was born on Sept. 17, 1931, in Colombières-sur-Orb in southern France, into a family of vintners. As World War II was ending in 1945, his father, who had a heart condition that was making it difficult for him to work the land, took a job at a cousin’s cafe near Paris. There Jean-Claude had access to better schools and could indulge more fully in the passion for writing that had, as he put it, “imposed itself on me” since he was a young boy.In his mid-20s he published a novel, “Le Lézard.” It caught the attention of the comic actor and director Jacques Tati, who provided Mr. Carrière with a sort of backward entry into his career: Mr. Tati hired him to write novels based on some of his movies. He also introduced him to the process of making and editing a film.He and Mr. Étaix jointly wrote and directed “Happy Anniversary,” a comic short about a couple trying to celebrate their anniversary. Mr. Carrière was surprised by the Oscar.“I came to the office and the producer was jumping out of joy: ‘We have the Oscar! We have the Oscar!,’” he told Interview. “I asked, ‘But what is the Oscar?’ I didn’t know.”His family background benefited him in his fateful meeting with Buñuel the next year.“The first question he asked me when we sat down together at the table — and it’s not a light or frivolous question; the way he looked at me I sensed that it was a deep and important question — was, ‘Do you drink wine?’” he told Mr. Weiss.“A negative response would have definitely disqualified me,” he continued. “So I said, ‘Not only do I drink wine, but I produce it. I’m from a family of vintners.’”Their bond thus sealed, Buñuel and Mr. Carrière went on to collaborate not only on “Diary of a Chambermaid” but also on “Belle de Jour” (1967), “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972) and other films.In 1971 Mr. Carrière was among the writers on Mr. Forman’s “Taking Off,” a comedy about parents searching for a runaway daughter that received good notices. The same was not true of the next Carrière-Forman partnership, a Broadway production of Mr. Carrière’s two-character play “The Little Black Book,” with Mr. Forman directing. When it opened in April 1972, Clive Barnes, reviewing in The Times, called it “a foolish little play without either wit or humanity.” It closed after seven performances.Mr. Carrière in 2001. He received an honorary Oscar in 2014 for his “elegantly crafted screenplays,” which the citation said “elevate the art of screenwriting to the level of literature.”Credit…Jean-Pierre Muller/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHis only other Broadway effort was better received. It was “La Tragedie de Carmen,” which he, Marius Constant and Mr. Brook adapted from the Bizet opera, with Mr. Brook directing. It opened in November 1983 and ran for 187 performances.Mr. Carrière was nominated for writing Oscars for “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” “That Obscure Object of Desire” and “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”Information on survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Brook once explained what made Mr. Carrière such an in-demand writer, whether the job was creating original material, adapting a novel or opera, or reining in an epic poem.“Like a great actor, or a great cameraman, he adapts himself to different people he works with,” Mr. Brook told The Times in 1988. “He’s open to all shifts caused by the material changing, and yet he brings to it a very powerful and consistent point of view.”Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting from Paris.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

      Working in TV, Jen Silverman Wrote a Novel. About Theater.

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeBake: Maximalist BrowniesListen: To Pink SweatsGrow: RosesUnwind: With Ambience VideosAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWorking in TV, Jen Silverman Wrote a Novel. About Theater.“We Play Ourselves” finds a struggling playwright exiled to Los Angeles and obsessing over New York. Then she meets the manipulative filmmaker next door.“The book began as a love letter to the theater,” Jen Silverman said of her debut novel. “But it’s a love letter where you know the dark side.”Credit…Zackary Canepari for The New York TimesFeb. 10, 2021“Theater only feels like an accomplishment if you’re part of the cult,” a character in Jen Silverman’s new novel, “We Play Ourselves,” says. “The rest of the world thinks we’re all wasting our best years.”The book’s flailing heroine, Cass, an emerging playwright, flees New York after a disastrous opening night. At loose ends in Los Angeles, she drifts toward an unscrupulous filmmaker and the teenage girls in her orbit. Like much of Silverman’s writing, the book balances what Silverman’s colleague, the showrunner Lauren Morelli, praised as a “razor-sharp absurdism alongside a deep reverence for humanity.”Silverman (“The Moors,” “Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties”) started the novel in 2018, having temporarily moved to Los Angeles for a stint in Morelli’s “Tales of the City” writers’ room. Most days, she would arrive at her office an hour or two early and sit at her desk, trying to translate theater’s ephemerality into prose. She thinks she could only write the novel, her first, because theater felt so distant, which acted as a kind of deprogramming.“The book began as a love letter to the theater,” she said during a recent video call. “But it’s a love letter where you know the dark side. It’s not an idealized love.”Dana Delany, left, and Chaunté Wayans in Silverman’s “Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties,” which had an Off Broadway run in 2018.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn addition to plays, teleplays and now novels, Silverman also writes poems, essays and short stories. (She denies being prolific, which is funny.) Across genres, her style is mutable, her word choice precise, her interest piqued by tales of transformation and how people do and don’t resist it. The director Mike Donahue, a frequent collaborator, said that he admires her work because he never knows the form it will take. “It’s always an entirely new world to try to crack and a new language to understand,” he said.Speaking from the Upper Manhattan apartment that she shares with her partner, the set designer Dane Laffrey, Silverman discussed art, autobiography and what it means for the book to arrive in a world without theater. “It’s hard because I want so desperately to be back in a theater,” she said. “But when I think about hearing somebody three rows behind me cough, like, I feel this cold panic.” These are edited excerpts from the conversation.How’s your pandemic going?It’s the best pandemic I’ve ever had. I’ve been working on the book. I got galleys for it in April. It felt a little crazy, because the world was on fire and I’m trying to decide between a semicolon and a comma. And I’ve been reading a lot. That’s saving my sanity. Maybe.How did this book come about?I had been writing a different book. But something about being in L.A. and being plunged into a different medium, I longed for theater, like in a visceral, full-body way. And I found that when I would sit down to write, I would just start writing about theater. I ended up calling my editor and saying, “I’m writing a completely different novel. I hope that’s OK.”Do you think that people outside the theater understand theater?What everybody understands is the desire to be transported outside yourself, the desire to experience something larger than you, the desire to be deeply moved. Everybody wants to feel magic in their lives.How autobiographical is the novel?The part that feels really aligned with my personal experience is the way that theater became something so much larger than a career, that it took the place of a spiritual life. Cass longs for it and needs it in a way that was a really personal, active thing for me. But there are a lot of divergences and one of them is Cass’s hunger for visibility and acknowledgment and her desire to be famous. Attention makes me really nervous, to be honest. So I found it really interesting to follow a character who desperately wants to be a public figure and whose sense of self is constructed around what is being said about her.Silverman started the book while working in the writers’ room for the Netflix reboot of “Tales of the City.”Credit…Zackary Canepari for The New York TimesYou’ve written an intense opening night scene. What are opening nights like for you?Like a particular ritual or ceremony that we’ve all agreed to participate in. From the gathering of the crowds to the party. Then there’s a judgment that’s going to come down and what will that judgment be? Depending on whether you’re a writer who reads reviews, that judgment can feel different, but it’s like running a gauntlet.Are the parties fun at least?I’m shy. Crowds scare me. I was not cut out for like a life of extroverts. I try to bring a friend who is an extrovert, and then just watch them thrive in this company of humans.Do you read reviews?I’ve gone back and forth. There was a time when I was like, “I’m not going to read reviews.” Then I was like, “No, there’s a lot to learn, I don’t have to agree with it. But I should learn.” At this point, there are a set of critics that I find really smart, thoughtful, nuanced, complex. I don’t always agree with them. They don’t always say good things about me. But I always want to know what they’re saying.In the novel, the theater world is rife with professional jealousy. Is that your experience?The arts economy in the U.S. is defined by scarcity, because we don’t have government funding. Institutions don’t have a lot of support beyond ticket sales. If you are a woman, queer, an artist of color, it’s very clear that there is a slot and the people who are your community, your collaborators, your family, are also being positioned as your competitors. I don’t think that is good for the arts. I don’t think that is good for the culture.Still, the book makes theater seem very sexy. Is it?It can be. What interests me is that it’s a really intimate place. No matter your role, you are performing essentially a mind meld in a really rarefied, intensified environment. Some of my closest friends, people who are family, are people I met doing shows.Cass has a nemesis in Tara-Jean, a younger playwright. And she falls for a TV star and an elegant director. Are these based on real people? Did you worry that readers would think so?I did have a moment of real anxiety about it. It is very much fiction. I had theater friends read it. A few of them actually called me after and they were like, “I didn’t know you knew this person.” But each of them had a different person. I’ve heard five different theories for who Tara-Jean is.What does it mean to have this novel arrive in a world largely without theater?I have no idea. I thought it was a different world that the novel was going to be entering. For myself, I have dreams almost every other night about theater. Sometimes it’s my play; most of the time it’s somebody else’s play. Sometimes the dream is really good. And sometimes, I have this feeling of like, “Wait a minute, aren’t we in a pandemic? Where’s my mask?” But because my longing for theater is such a big part of my life, I’ve been really enjoying reading about theater. I hope that this book can be that for other people.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Beyond ‘Black Panther’: Afrofuturism Is Booming in Comics

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBeyond ‘Black Panther’: Afrofuturism Is Booming in ComicsA bumper crop of graphic novels and comic books melds African culture and science fiction, with influences as wide-ranging as space travel, Caribbean folklore and Janelle Monáe.“Hardears,” set on a mythical version of Barbados, is among the titles coming from Megascope this year.Credit…Abrams BooksFeb. 7, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETWhen Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, it struck the author and illustrator John Jennings as so unprecedented, such a break from American history, that it was like an event from some far-flung future.“Before then, the only time you would see a president who was Black was in a science-fiction movie,” he said in a phone interview last month. Jennings compared it to the sorts of imaginative leaps one finds in the most forward-thinking works categorized as “Afrofuturist.”This year, fans of Afrofuturism will see a bumper crop of comics and graphic novels, including the first offerings of a new imprint devoted to Black speculative fiction and reissues of Afrofuturist titles from comic-book houses like DC and Dark Horse.Afrofuturism, whether in novels, films or music, imagines worlds and futures where the African diaspora and sci-fi intersect. The term was coined by the writer Mark Dery in 1993 and has since been applied to the novels of Octavia Butler (“Kindred”), the musical stylings of the jazz composer Sun Ra and more recently films such as “Get Out” and “Black Panther,” which presented a gorgeously rendered vision of the technologically advanced, vibranium-powered nation of Wakanda.“Afrofuturism isn’t new,” said Ytasha L. Womack, a cultural critic and the author of “Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture,” a primer and history of the movement and aesthetic. “But the plethora of comics and graphic novels that are available is certainly a new experience.”Graphic novels published in January included “After the Rain,” an adaptation of a short story by the Nigerian-American author Nnedi Okorafor, and “Infinitum,” a tale of African kings and space battles by the New York-based artist Tim Fielder.For “Infinitum,” released by the HarperCollins imprint Amistad, the artist Tim Fielder created Aja Oba, an African king cursed with eternal life. Credit…Harper CollinsThis month marks the long-awaited return of the “Black Panther” comics written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, which the National Book Award-winning author began in 2016, as well as the latest installment of “Far Sector,” a series written by N.K. Jemisin and inspired by the actor and musician Janelle Monáe, about the first Black woman to become a member of the intergalactic Green Lantern Corps.Even older works are getting new looks. Black superheroes from the ’90s-era comic company Milestone — including Icon, a space alien who crash lands on Earth in 1839 and takes the form of an African-American man — are finding new readers on DC Universe Infinite, a subscription service that launched in January. Meanwhile, the Oregon-based publisher Dark Horse plans to release the comics of the Nigerian-born writer Roye Okupe, who previously self-published them, including his Afrofuturistic series “E.X.O.,” a superhero tale set in 2025 Nigeria.Comics are particularly well suited for Afrofuturism, Womack said. Many Afrofuturistic narratives are nonlinear, something that comics, with their ability to move and stack panels to play with notions of time, can convey. Comic artists can also employ visual elements such as images from the Black Arts Movement, or figures from Yoruba and Igbo mythology, in ways that aren’t available to prose writers.“Afrofuturism is constantly moving into the future and back into the past, even with the visual references they’re making,” Womack said.John Jennings is the founder and curator of Megascope, a publishing imprint “dedicated to showcasing speculative works by and about people of color.”Credit…Jamil Baldwin for The New York Times“After the Rain” marks the launch of Megascope, an imprint of the publisher Abrams “dedicated to showcasing speculative works by and about people of color.” Its advisory board includes the scholar and author Henry Louis Gates Jr.“Afrofuturism is the catchall,” Jennings, the imprint’s founder and curator, said. “It’s really Black speculative fiction. But that’s sort of a mouthful. I just don’t want people to think that Megascope is only Afrofuturist. We’re dropping horror books, crime fiction, historical fiction.”Okorafor, the author of the imprint’s leadoff title, “After the Rain,” considers her work “Africanfuturism,” a term she coined to describe a subcategory of science fiction similar to Afrofuturism, but more deeply rooted in African culture and history than in the African-American experience. “Nnedi is a very hot author right now,” Jennings said, “so I thought it would be a great kickoff.”In April, the imprint will publish “Hardears,” a fantasy-adventure story set on Jouvert Island, a version of Barbados populated by mythical creatures — giant “moongazers” and shape-shifting “soucouyants” — drawn from Caribbean folklore. “Black Star,” a cat-and-mouse tale of two astronauts stranded on a desolate planet, comes out in May.“After the Rain,” adapted from a short story by Nnedi Okorafor, was published in January.Credit…Abrams BooksA professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California at Riverside, Jennings has devoted much of his career to Afrofuturism, writing scholarly works about it and leading panels devoted to Afrofuturist comics. He has worked with the artist Stacey Robinson, as the duo “Black Kirby,” to reimagine the work of the Marvel artist Jack Kirby through an African-American lens: for example, “The Unkillable Buck,” based on “The Incredible Hulk.”To Jennings, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was an Afrofuturist. “The mountaintop that Dr. King spoke about does not exist in this universe,” Jennings said. “It’s an imaginary construct of what the future could be.”For “Infinitum,” released by the HarperCollins imprint Amistad, Fielder created Aja Oba, a powerful African king cursed with eternal life. Oba travels from Africa to the United States and beyond, witnessing Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps, the rise of American slavery, the civil rights movement and (spoiler alert) the death of our solar system.Despite the fleet of spaceships on the cover, much of Fielder’s narrative is set in history. “Afrofuturists do not have the privilege, like general futurists, of just looking forward constantly,” Fielder said. “There’s so much of our work that was ignored, discarded or destroyed that, as an Afrofuturist, I’m forced to work on projects that are based in the past.”“Black Star,” a cat-and-mouse tale of two astronauts stranded on a desolate planet, comes out in May.Credit…Abrams BooksFielder’s immortal hero is also a response to the longstanding cinematic trope of Black men dying before the final credits roll. One of his strongest childhood memories was watching the Black hero’s untimely end in the 1968 horror movie “Night of the Living Dead.” “The white guys are all losing it, and it’s the one brother who keeps his wits about him,” he said. “And then he’s killed. I never forgot that.”“Infinitum” has a distinctly cinematic feel — Fielder’s influences include the “Star Wars” artist Ralph McQuarrie — and the shared references and influences between comic books and movies are likely to continue. After Coates restarts (and ends, after three issues) his run on “Black Panther,” Marvel Studios is expected to release “Black Panther II,” while over at Disney, producers are working with the comic-book company Kugali on “Iwaju,” an animated series set in a futuristic Lagos.Perhaps more than anything, Afrofuturist comics are a means of staking a racially inclusive claim on a multitude of futures. “And just because it’s about a Black subject doesn’t mean it’s just for Black people,” Jennings said. “I love Daredevil, but Marvel would never say: ‘Oh, you know what? This is just for white, poor Irish-American people.’ These stories are for everyone.”Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 138 Shares149 Views

      in Television

      Can an Abuser Make Amends? ‘The Color Purple’ Points the Way

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storycritic’s notebookCan an Abuser Make Amends? ‘The Color Purple’ Points the WayAfter #MeToo, as movies and TV grapple with issues of rape, revenge and restorative justice, a survivor reconsiders a male character at a crossroads.In the movie adaptation of “The Color Purple,” Celie, center, played by Whoopi Goldberg, escapes an abusive relationship and finds a better life with Shug (Margaret Avery) and Squeak (Rae Dawn Chong.)Credit…Warner Bros.Feb. 5, 2021Updated 6:28 p.m. ETRevenge is at the heart of “Promising Young Woman.” Not only does the film open with its main character Cassie (Carey Mulligan) targeting men who take advantage of inebriated women, but we soon realize that she does so in service of a larger goal: avenging the rape, and eventual suicide, of her best friend, Nina. Even though she ultimately appears to get justice, this result is far from gratifying. Rather, it is a sobering reminder that because most rape victims will never see their assailants held accountable in their lifetime, revenge, or at least the fantasy of it, is all that is left.To me, the movie is an example of how the #MeToo movement has influenced representations of sexual assault onscreen. Works like Hannah Gadsby’s Netflix special “Nanette” and Michaela Coel’s breakout HBO show “I May Destroy You” center the voices of rape survivors, while movies like “The Assistant” and “Promising Young Woman” show the perspective of friends or female bystanders who also suffer as secondary victims of sexual assault. Unfortunately, even as the embrace of these points-of-view represents progress, these narratives also reflect a real-world legal system that repeatedly denies or delays justice to rape victims.Arabella (Michaela Coel) and Zain (Karan Gill) in a scene from HBO’s “I May Destroy You.”Credit…HBOAs both a critic and as a feminist activist, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this dilemma. And over the past two years I have been working on the book “In Search of The Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece,” about Alice Walker’s groundbreaking novel that prioritized the vantage point of a rape and domestic abuse survivor named Celie. Through the redemptive arc of its antagonist, Albert, “The Color Purple,” from 1982, paved the way for today’s debates about atonement, rehabilitation and forgiveness. It anticipates the extralegal practice of restorative justice, a remedy that is intended to heal victims as well as prevent the accused from reoffending by having them accept full responsibility for their actions, while also engaging in a consensual, reparative process with their victims.When I began my research on “The Color Purple,” a story that I first read at 15, I knew that I would focus on Celie’s relationships with her sister, Nettie, her bawdy blues woman lover Shug and the defiant Sofia. Those are the Black female characters that I have turned to as I struggled with my own sexual assault as a teenager in the 1990s, the ones I highlighted to my students as a young college professor in the early 2000s, the ones I find renewed inspiration in today.But what I did not expect to find was how much my middle-aged self would be drawn to Albert, the figure Celie fearfully refers to as M______ (Mister) for most of her life. Celie is forced by Pa — who has raped and impregnated her and given away her two children — to marry Albert, a much older widower. When Celie joins Albert’s family, he continually beats her as she raises his children and tends to his house. It is only over time that we realize how broken he is, defeated both by Jim Crow and his domineering father, who prevented him from marrying his life’s love, Shug. In other words, while his rage is never justified, the novel seeks to understand its origins, giving it a powerful story line that was often initially overlooked by the novel’s biggest detractors.Though “The Color Purple” earned Walker a National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the novel also generated much criticism, mostly from well-known Black male writers and community activists who were offended by the depiction of abuse by Pa and Albert and by Celie healing from that violence in a romantic relationship with Shug. By the time the movie debuted in 1985, Walker and the filmmakers were ill-prepared to defend themselves against accusations that the movie reproduced vicious stereotypes about African-American men. Such condemnations overlooked the healing made possible by Albert’s own desire to make amends.After Celie discovers that Albert has been hiding Nettie’s letters from her for decades, she leaves with Shug, and curses Albert.Soon Albert’s life — his farm, his home, his family — fall apart, forcing him to make a critical decision: either crumble or find a way to reconcile with Celie. And so he rises to the occasion, and begins the long journey of repairing his relationships with his son and grandchildren, and in time, Celie and her children.Celie (Goldberg) rebels against the abusive Albert (Danny Glover) on a day she prepares to leave him. Credit…Warner Bros.Albert’s arc, however, was far more abbreviated in the Oscar-nominated movie, in which he was indelibly played by Danny Glover. But even with his limited transformation onscreen, I see Albert anew when I watch the movie now.Glover imbued his character with such charisma, dignity and depth that Albert is neither pure villain nor a blameless victim. Instead, he is a Black man at a crossroads and thus has the opportunity to reimagine what paths of masculinity lie ahead.But Walker’s vision of Albert was realized in the musical adaptation that premiered on Broadway in 2005 and even more fully in a revival in 2015 with Isaiah Johnson in the role. In that version, Albert’s breakdown is even more totalizing, making his turnaround all the more meaningful, and memorable.“Albert gets his redemption and he does something,” said John Doyle, the director of the Tony-winning revival. “He does things for the children of the community and maybe that’s all a little through a pink gauze. But there’s something wonderful about that.”These days as we, on college campuses, in the halls of Congress, or in our homes, argue about how best to forgive or punish those who have harmed others, we often miss a crucial aspect of the debate that might help us move forward.A scene from the Broadway musical adaptation of “The Color Purple” in 2015; from left: Jennifer Hudson as Shug, Cynthia Erivo as Celie, Isaiah Johnson as Mister/Albert and Kyle Scatliffe as Harpo.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHow does one actually atone for violence they inflict on others?Given pervasive racial bias in the criminal justice system, it makes sense that Black women, like Walker, have imagined accountability outside of the courtroom. Among recent #MeToo narratives, “I May Destroy You,” created by the Black British artist Coel, gestures to restorative justice through the relationship between Arabella (Coel) and fellow writer Zain (Karan Gill). After he removes his condom without her consent during sex, Zain is later able to earn her begrudging trust by helping her complete her book, which in turn leads to her journey of self-acceptance and rebirth.But then Zain revives his own writing career under a pseudonym. Albert embarks on the much more arduous path of acknowledging his violence and all the harm that he caused.And in the final moments of “The Color Purple” onstage, his hard work leads to him standing together with his family. He is not a hero — that status belongs to Celie, Shug and Sofia — but he still gives us a reason to hope.Because most survivors of violence will never hear an apology or benefit from such restitution, Albert remains one of the more elusive and exceptional characters in American culture, a figure that can teach us all to take accountability for our actions, and to find redemption along the way.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Mike Nichols’ Captures a Star-Studded Life That Shuttled Between Broadway and Hollywood

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBooks of The Times‘Mike Nichols’ Captures a Star-Studded Life That Shuttled Between Broadway and HollywoodJan. 25, 2021Updated 2:45 p.m. ETAmazonApple BooksBarnes and NobleBooks-A-MillionBookshopIndieboundWhen you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.When the writer and director Mike Nichols was young, he had an allergic reaction to a whooping cough vaccine. The result was a complete and lifelong inability to grow hair. One way to read Mark Harris’s crisp new biography, “Mike Nichols: A Life,” is as a tender comedy about a man and his wigs.He got his first set (hair, eyebrows) before he went to college. It was dismal. Nichols attended the University of Chicago, where Susan Sontag was also a student. One reason they didn’t date, Harris writes, is that “she was thrown off by his wig.”Nichols moved to Manhattan to make it as a comedian. A friend said that she would enter his tiny apartment and “the smell of acetone” — wig-glue remover — “would just hit you in the face.”Nichols found fame in his mid-20s. His improvisational comedy routines with Elaine May, whom he’d met in Chicago, were fresh and irresistible. They took their act to Broadway in 1960, where Nichols met Richard Burton. Through Burton, he would get to know Elizabeth Taylor.On the set of “Cleopatra,” Taylor asked the production’s hairstyle designer, “Do you do personal wigs? Because I have a dear friend who’s a comic in New York, and he wears one of the worst wigs I’ve ever seen.” Before long, Nichols’s toupees were unrivaled.“It takes me three hours every morning to become Mike Nichols,” he told the actor George Segal. He had a sense of humor about it all. He would tell how his son, Max, crawled into bed beside him and, seeing only the back of his head, screamed, “Where’s Daddy’s face?”I’ve gone on too long about hair and the lack of it. But growing up bald was, Nichols’s brother said, “the defining aspect of his childhood.”Nichols’s gift as a director was his ability to locate and lightly tug on the details that make a character. If he’d made a movie of his own life, the wig scenes would have been superb — satirical and melancholy. He might have set a bathroom-mirror montage to the Beatles’ early cover of “Lend Me Your Comb.”His awkwardness made him watchful. He became a student of human behavior. When he finally got the chance to direct, it was as if he’d been preparing to do so his entire life.Nichols’s first two films were “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “The Graduate” — the first furious, daring and adult, the second zeitgeist-defining. He directed four consecutive hit plays at nearly the same moment. Oscars, Tony Awards and a landslide of wealth followed.He made up for his time as an outsider with a vengeance. He collected Arabian horses and Picassos and began friendships with Jacqueline Kennedy, Leonard Bernstein and Richard Avedon. He was a cocky princeling who became a master of what Kenneth Clark liked to call the “swimgloat,” a way of moving through elite society as if on a barge made of silver and silk.Nichols was born Michael Igor Peschkowsky (or Igor Michael, it’s unclear) in Berlin in 1931. His father, a doctor, was a Russian Jew who changed the family name to Nichols after the family emigrated to the United States in the late 1930s. The family had some money, and Nichols’s father’s patients in New York included the pianist Vladimir Horowitz. Nichols attended good schools in Manhattan, including Dalton.Mark Harris, whose new book is “Mike Nichols: A Life.”Credit…David A. HarrisAt the University of Chicago he became an omnivorous reader and watcher of films. His wit was withering; people were terrified of him. May’s wit was even more devastating. They were made for each other. They were never really a romantic couple, Harris writes, though early on they may have slept together once or twice.Harris is the author of two previous books, “Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood” and “Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War.” He’s also a longtime entertainment reporter with a gift for scene-setting.He’s at his best in “Mike Nichols: A Life” when he takes you inside a production. His chapters on the making of three films in particular — “The Graduate,” “Silkwood” and “Angels in America” — are miraculous: shrewd, tight, intimate and funny. You sense he could turn each one into a book.Nichols was an actor’s director. He was avuncular, a charmer, wide in his human sympathies. He tried to find what an actor needed and to provide it. He could place a well-buffed fingernail on a tick that wanted to be a tock. But he had a steely side.He fired Gene Hackman during week one on “The Graduate.” Hackman was playing Mr. Robinson and it wasn’t working, in part because, at 37, he looked too young for the role.Sacrificing someone early could be a motivator for the remaining cast, he learned. He fired Mandy Patinkin early in the filming of “Heartburn,” and brought in Jack Nicholson to play Meryl Streep’s faithless husband.One reason the chapter on Nichols’s film of Tony Kushner’s play “Angels in America” is so rich is that Harris, who is married to Kushner, had access to the playwright’s diary.Nichols turned to projects like “Angels in America” to shore up his serious side. But in everything he did, he found the funny. He knew instinctively that tragedy appeals mainly to the emotions while comedy taps the mind.Nichols presided over a lot of muck, expensive flops like “The Day of the Dolphin,” with George C. Scott; “The Fortune,” with Nicholson and Warren Beatty; and “What Planet Are You From?” with Garry Shandling. Reading Harris’s accounts of making these films is like watching a cook strain his stock down the disposal.Nichols’s Broadway flops included a production of “Waiting for Godot” with Steve Martin and Robin Williams. His failures rattled him. He battled depression (one of his vanity license plates read “ANOMIE”) and had suicidal urges after being placed on Halcion, a benzodiazepine. He had, Harris writes, “an almost punitive need to prove his detractors wrong.”He had a manic side. He snorted his share of cocaine and, for a while in the 1980s, used crack. You imagine him on the latter, racing back and forth from film set to Broadway as if through a set of constantly swinging cat doors.Harris details his subject’s many collaborations with Streep, and with Nora Ephron. Nichols was married four times. His final marriage, to Diane Sawyer, was the one that lasted.Nichols was a hard man to get to know, and I’m not sure we understand him much better at the end of “Mike Nichols: A Life.” He was a man in perpetual motion, and Harris chases him with patience, clarity and care.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More