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Oedipal Wrecks

Michael Mason, 26 March 1992

Fates Worse than Death 
by Kurt Vonnegut.
Cape, 240 pp., £14.99, October 1991, 0 224 02918 5
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... crisis at this period. Even if we take his word for it that Breakfast of Champions, despite its black themes, betokened recovery, and a psychic breakfasting, by Vonnegut the man, it is evident that Vonnegut the novelist was not at ease. He puts himself into the story – which is an oddity in his fiction – and has himself saying: ‘this is a very bad ...
Djuna Barnes 
by Philip Herring.
Viking, 416 pp., £20, May 1996, 0 670 84969 3
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... Village with sundry trendies and their visitors – Alfred Stieglitz, Edna St Vincent Millay, Eugene O’Neill and Marcel Duchamp, among others. She was connected with the Provincetown Players and the Little Review. She had affairs with decadents of both sexes, she wrote about their lives and their haunts in newspapers and published interviews with ...

This Condensery

August Kleinzahler: In Praise of Lorine Niedecker, 5 June 2003

Collected Works 
by Lorine Niedecker, edited by Jenny Penberthy.
California, 471 pp., £29.95, May 2002, 0 520 22433 7
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Collected Studies in the Use of English 
by Kenneth Cox.
Agenda, 270 pp., £12, September 2001, 9780902400696
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New Goose 
by Lorine Niedecker, edited by Jenny Penberthy.
Listening Chamber, 98 pp., $10, January 2002, 0 9639321 6 0
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... so unreliable and bewildering as to be next to useless. Niedecker spent nearly all of her life on Black Hawk Island, three miles from Fort Atkinson, a town in the rich dairy country of south-central Wisconsin with a population of around eight thousand. The state capital, Madison, is 34 miles north-west and Milwaukee about 60 miles ...

Nothing to Do with Me

Gaby Wood: Henri Cartier-Bresson, 5 June 2014

Henri Cartier-Bresson 
Pompidou Centre, until 8 June 2015Show More
‘Voir est un tout’: Entretiens et conversations 1951-98 
by Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Centre Pompidou, 176 pp., €19.90, January 2014, 978 2 84426 639 2
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Henri Cartier-Bresson: Here and Now 
edited by Clément Chéroux.
Thames and Hudson, 400 pp., £45, March 2014, 978 0 500 54430 3
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... them in a biscuit tin to his father for safekeeping. There were the three years he spent in the Black Forest as a prisoner of war, and the attempts he made to escape. (The third was successful.) There was the aftermath of occupation, and the Liberation he recorded as a sequence of razed buildings, wrecked lives and ghostly rooms. In 1947, two things ...

Retro-Selfies

Iain Sinclair: Ferlinghetti, 17 December 2015

I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career: The Selected Correspondence of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, 1955–97 
edited by Bill Morgan.
City Lights, 284 pp., £11.83, July 2015, 978 0 87286 678 2
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Writing across the Landscape: Travel Journals 1960-2010 
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, edited by Giada Diano and Matthew Gleeson.
Liveright, 464 pp., £22.99, October 2015, 978 1 63149 001 9
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... virgin territory. The space had once been a community art venture called King Ubu, operated by the Black Mountain poet Robert Duncan and his collagist partner Jess Collins. Duncan, removing his clothes at the conclusion of his verse play Faust Foutu, in order to demonstrate the meaning of nakedness, anticipated by a decade or so the Ginsberg party trick that ...

The Blindfolded Archer

Donald MacKenzie: The stochastic dynamics of market prices, 4 August 2005

The (Mis)behaviour of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin and Reward 
by Benoit Mandelbrot and Richard Hudson.
Profile, 328 pp., £9.99, September 2005, 1 86197 790 5
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... or up to, a given future date. As I described in the LRB on 13 April 2000, the economists Fischer Black, Myron Scholes and Robert Merton drew on the log-normal distribution (and on a number of other assumptions about market conditions) to reduce the complicated problem of understanding the prices of options to a relatively simple differential equation. The ...

Give your mom a gun

Geoff Mann: America’s Favourite Gun, 7 March 2024

American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15 
by Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson.
Farrar, Straus, 473 pp., £25, September 2023, 978 0 374 10385 9
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Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture and Control in Cold War America 
by Andrew C. McKevitt.
North Carolina, 319 pp., £24.95, November 2023, 978 1 4696 7724 8
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... protect the barrel, attachments for flashlights and other accoutrements. Originally, the AR-15 was black – hence its Vietnam-era nickname, ‘black rifle’ – but now it comes in a variety of colours and designs, from ‘polished lime’ to Stars-and-Stripes to Hello Kitty. It has been called the ‘Barbie doll of ...

Like a Dog

Elizabeth Lowry: J.M. Coetzee, 14 October 1999

Disgrace 
by J.M. Coetzee.
Secker, 220 pp., £14.99, July 1999, 0 436 20489 4
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The Lives of Animals 
by J.M. Coetzee.
Princeton, 127 pp., £12.50, May 1999, 0 691 00443 9
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... a Cape Town academic, reaches a similar conclusion when his daughter Lucy is gang-raped by three black men at her isolated homestead in the Eastern Cape. ‘But why did they hate me so?’ Lucy asks. ‘I had never set eyes on them.’ ‘It was history speaking through them,’ her father replies. ‘A history of wrong. Think of it that way, if it helps. It ...

Poor Stephen

James Fox, 23 July 1987

An Affair of State: The Profumo Case and the Framing of Stephen Ward 
by Phillip Knightley and Caroline Kennedy.
Cape, 268 pp., £12.95, May 1987, 0 224 02347 0
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Honeytrap: The Secret Worlds of Stephen Ward 
by Anthony Summers and Stephen Dorril.
Weidenfeld, 264 pp., £12.95, May 1987, 0 297 79122 2
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... for War, had the affair with Christine Keeler at Ward’s flat. Keeler was also consorting with Eugene Ivanov, the vodka-loving Soviet Naval Attaché, who was having great success in London society and who was also a friend of Ward. Profumo denied the liaison in the House of Commons, admitted it three months later and resigned. Incredible rumours of sex ...

The man who wrote for the ‘Figaro’

John Sturrock, 25 June 1992

Selected Letters: Vol. III, 1910-1917 
by Marcel Proust, edited by Philip Kolb, translated by Terence Kilmartin.
HarperCollins, 434 pp., £35, January 1992, 0 00 215541 9
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Correspondance de Marcel Proust: Tome XVIII, 191 
edited by Philip Kolb.
Plon, 657 pp., frs 290, September 1990, 2 259 02187 5
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Correspondance de Marcel Proust: Tome XIX, 1920 
edited by Philip Kolb.
Plon, 857 pp., frs 350, May 1991, 2 259 02389 4
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Correspondance de Marcel Proust: Tome XX, 1921 
edited by Philip Kolb.
Plon, 713 pp., frs 350, April 1992, 2 259 02433 5
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... that his letters would eventually become so many ‘arrows returned against him’. But this black thought did not slow him down, because the iller and more unvisitable he became the more letters he wrote: the later volumes in Kolb’s series are fatter by many pages than the earlier ones. In theory, Proust told Jacques Rivière (in a letter), he was un ...

w00t

Christopher Tayler: The Fabulous Elif Batuman, 17 February 2011

The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them 
by Elif Batuman.
Granta, 296 pp., £16.99, April 2011, 978 1 84708 313 5
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... have recognised her Russians, starting with the first one she met, her violin teacher: Maxim wore black turtlenecks, played a mellow-toned, orange-coloured violin, and produced an impression of being deeply absorbed by considerations and calculations beyond the normal range of human cognition. Towards the end of one lesson, for example, he told me that he had ...

Showboating

John Upton: George Carman, 9 May 2002

No Ordinary Man: A Life of George Carman 
by Dominic Carman.
Hodder, 331 pp., £18.99, January 2002, 0 340 82098 5
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... an auctioneer, and Evelyn, a seamstress turned dress-shop owner. Evelyn was Irish; Albert a former Black and Tan. Carman despised his father and doted on his perfectionist mother, who thought the world of him. They shared an obsession with cleanliness and most of all with success. In response to sustained pressure from Evelyn to come first in everything he ...

Water on the Brain

Dinah Birch: Spurious Ghosts, 30 November 2023

‘The Virgin of the Seven Daggers’ and Other Stories 
by Vernon Lee, edited by Aaron Worth.
Oxford, 352 pp., £7.99, September 2022, 978 0 19 883754 1
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... father. Eventually the family settled in Florence, largely because Lee’s half-brother, the poet Eugene Lee-Hamilton, was struck by paralysis in 1873, and became bed-bound. A measure of stability was good for the teenage Lee, and she soon saw Italy as her home. She was precociously learned and astonishingly productive, publishing over her lifetime a stream ...

Baghdad’s Ruling Cliques

Keith Kyle, 15 August 1991

The Iraqi Revolution of 1958: The Old Social Classes Revisited 
edited by Robert Fernea and William Roger Louis.
Tauris, 232 pp., £35, May 1991, 1 85043 318 6
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Instant Empire: Saddam Hussein’s Ambition for Iraq 
by Simon Henderson.
Mercury House, 271 pp., £8.99, June 1991, 1 56279 007 2
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Saddam Hussein: A Political Biography 
by Efraim Karsh and Inari Rautsi.
Brassey, 307 pp., £17.95, April 1991, 0 08 041326 9
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The Gulf Between Us: The Gulf War and Beyond 
edited by Victoria Brittain.
Virago, 186 pp., £5.99, June 1991, 1 85381 386 9
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Under Siege in Kuwait: A Survivor’s Story 
by Jadranka Porter.
Gollancz, 250 pp., £4.99, July 1991, 9780575051850
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... the chapter on the military operation itself by two retired (and liberal) American Rear-Admirals, Eugene Carroll and Gene La Rocque, of the Washington Centre for Defence Information, and the brilliant summary of ‘Iraqi Political Dynamics’ by Faleh’ Abd Al-Jabar. There is also a most moving evocation, in various Arab voices, orchestrated by Fadia ...

Erasures

Mark Ford: Donald Justice, 16 November 2006

Collected Poems 
by Donald Justice.
Anvil, 289 pp., £15, June 2006, 0 85646 386 8
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... home town): And one of them put his blade into the earth To lift a few clods of dirt, the black marl of Miami, And scattered the dirt, and spat, Turning away abruptly, out of respect. Justice was not prolific; like Elizabeth Bishop, with whom he has much in common, he devoted his life to the perfection of a small body of deceptively modest poems. His ...

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