The enigma of Joseph Heller
Blake Bailey admires aspects of Tracy Daugherty’s Joseph Heller biography but “can’t help thinking wistfully of what might have been” without the pressure to finish by Catch-22’s 50th anniversary.
Blake Bailey admires aspects of Tracy Daugherty’s Joseph Heller biography but “can’t help thinking wistfully of what might have been” without the pressure to finish by Catch-22’s 50th anniversary.
“If you only knew how fucking silly you look with that herring in your hand!” — Arthur Rimbaud to Paul Verlaine, from Enid Starkie’s account of the demise of their tempestuous relationship.
The Whitney’s Lyonel Feininger show is full of delights: the little comic faces, the tiny village of rough-carved wooden houses and people, the eerie and magnificent evocation of twilight. For me the standout was “Newspaper Readers (1909),” above, which shows that getting your news on the run isn’t anything new. That’s exactly how I stare at my phone on the . . .
My Riff on the rhetorical gambits of David Foster Wallace — and the Internet — appeared in the weekend’s New York Times Magazine. On Facebook, Alexander Chee described the piece this way: “I loved David Foster Wallace. I loathed editing him out of my students — and myself. Maud Newton on how David Foster Wallace made a David Foster Wallace . . .