Mark Greif

I remember my own first exposure to the Velvet Underground. As a music-avid pre-teenager in the mid-1980s, I was listening to a Boston commercial radio station which still had the last of the city’s famous independent DJs, a man named Charles Laquidara, who played what he liked from vinyl LPs and was always looking to impress the mass audience. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘After the break, I’m going to play a song by the Velvet Underground. But here’s the thing. It’s seven minutes long. And – it’s called “Heroin”.’

At an early point in his career, probably no later than 1930, Walt Disney lost the ability to draw what he wanted his cartoon characters to look like or his animations to do. So he began to act his cartoons out. In story meetings with his growing staff of animators – some of whom he had trained in Los Angeles at his studio on Hyperion Avenue, others whom he’d poached from the great New York studios – Disney would get up, according to Neal Gabler’s new biography, enter his trance, and suddenly transform himself uninhibitedly into Mickey or Donald or an owl or an old hunting dog.

Don DeLillo’s new novel makes a direct but counterintuitive approach to the destruction of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. It is anti-sentimental: constructed in short episodes, it prohibits sympathy or tears. It is anti-grandiose: it retreats from the big pronouncements its peripheral characters try to make about terrorism, America, the West, the Middle East. It is...

In 1955, Ralph Ellison took part in a roundtable discussion on the subject ‘What’s Wrong with the American Novel?’ I came across the transcript recently and it opened my eyes. The first speakers twitter along, blaming readers for the novel’s decline. Then Ellison speaks up, and blames one party only: ‘There has been a failure of writers.’ He indicts himself, along with the novelists and publishers sitting beside him. The others try to continue with their original lines of thought, but end up answering him instead. They lack the wit to prove him wrong. You feel Ellison’s tremendous intelligence; a certain haughtiness; and even, maybe, an undercurrent of anger, to which so many observers testified: ‘a continuous effort . . . to keep a lid on the volcanic parts of his personality’, as the writer Jervis Anderson once put it. ‘Don’t do violence to what I am saying,’ he warns one of the participants, a bit violently.

Mad Men is an unpleasant little entry in the genre of Now We Know Better. We watch and know better about male chauvinism, homophobia, anti-semitism, workplace harassment, housewives’ depression, nutrition and smoking. We wait for the show’s advertising men or their secretaries and wives to make another gaffe for us to snigger over. ‘Have we ever hired any Jews?’ – ‘Not on my watch.’