Author: GR

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‘Lou Reed: The King of New York’ by Will Hermes

…Hermes, a superb writer, does poetic justice to the complicated life of his difficult subject. As Hermes details, a raft of current singers claim debt to Reed, from Courtney Barnett and St. Vincent to Sharon Van Etten and Kurt Vile, as well as creatives in television, art, and fashion. Hermes offers a fresh and deep immersion in Reed’s world in all of its weird and wonderful, curmudgeonly glory, from Andy Warhol’s Factory and the Velvet Underground to days and nights of rock ’n’ roll decadence and his final moments surrounded by family and friends. Reed was influenced by many people over the years, including Delmore Schwartz and Bob Dylan, but none more so than his third wife, multimedia artist Laurie Anderson, who is a big part of this powerful story, this biographical magnum opus. Read more

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‘Julia’ by Sandra Newman is a Feminist Retelling of 1984

Though Newman sticks with the worldbuilding Orwell planned in 1949, not adding post-’84 developments like smartphones, home assistants, or the internet (though these actually do seem to play the surveillance role that Orwell assigned to the telescreens), she embroiders the edges of the original WWII-flavored vision with myriad amusing flourishes (and if you remember anything about 1984, you remember that amusing is not one of the adjectives that comes to mind). For example, though Julia is still a mechanic, working on the machines of Fiction, her first job at the Ministry of Truth was producing porno novels for proles, e.g., Inner Party Sinners: ‘My Telescreen is Broken, Comrade!’ Read more

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China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future

This conviction of history’s importance is driving a national movement of underground historians that has slowly taken shape over the past 20 years. I call these people historians as a shorthand for a broad array of China’s brightest minds: university professors, independent filmmakers, underground magazine publishers, novelists, artists and journalists. Some might be thought of as dissidents, but most have one foot inside the system, where they continue to hold jobs, own property and raise families. All of them risk their careers, their futures and prison to publish clandestine journals, banned books and independent documentary films. Read more

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How WPA State Guides Fused the Essential and the Eccentric

New Jersey is a typical entry in the FWP’s American Guides series, published during the late 1930s and early ’40s. The series comprises shaggy biographies of all the then 48 states; pick one at random and you’ll find a smorgasbord of history, legends, jokes, industrial data, social analysis, epitaphs, old letters, old newspaper clippings, old diaries, ghost stories, dubious tales, and half-forgotten anecdotes. You’ll find handsome line illustrations alongside photographs of houses and monuments and people at work. You’ll find scattered, subtle reports on how people were sustaining themselves through the Depression and how New Deal policies were reshaping the country. You’ll find a little practical advice for travelers and a lot of information whose purpose is more obscure. You’ll find a guidebook that seems, itself, to have wandered off and gotten lost. Read more

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