Page 2 - Issue 45 News Today

Reading after Twitter. Criticism as nitpicking. Jessica Kariisa listens to Wizkid. Art and cows in a time of war. Mother memoirs and father fiction. Victoria Uren on Joanna Hogg, Gabriel Winant on J. D. Vance.

In the late ’90s there was this trend toward blob cars that was probably seen as very ugly at the time, but now represents an infinitely more beautiful path lost to the auto industry by the late ’00s. Now all we have are cars that are soft and hard at the same time, like the swole AF backend coders we all apparently want to be.

Kairos, the god of fortunate moments, is supposed to have a lock of hair on his forehead, which is the only way of grasping hold of him. Because once the god has slipped past on his winged feet, the back of his head is sleek and hairless, nowhere to grab hold of. Was it a fortunate moment, then, when she, just 19, first met Hans?

Solenoid’s parasites take us well over the horizon marked out by any kind of realism. In one of Cărtărescu’s odder fantasias, his narrator comes to know a librarian with a messianic vocation: to find a way to communicate with the subject of his obsession, the world of mites, on whose astonishing variety, beauty, and omnipresence at the edges of our attention he soliloquizes at length.

Female silence animates many of Hogg’s dramas, which follow women whose problems manifest as failures of expression: women with suppressed desires, thwarted ambitions, or a reluctance (sometimes approaching inability) to say what they mean. Hogg’s own biography featured a long period of what might be thought of as creative silence: after graduating from film school in the mid-’80s, she spent nearly two decades directing music videos and television episodes.

Vance’s form of far-right politics is so ominous because it responds in a primal, perverted way to something actual. We are caught under a heap of wreckage, an accumulation of social and historical trauma that we are largely without means of getting out of. Millions are dead, and millions more permanently sick, from a pandemic that everyone now pretends didn’t happen, and even more vigorously pretends is not still happening.

For the first time in my life I would be an official roadie. I wasn’t merely in charge of the driving: I would also help build and dismantle, lift and position, carry and fetch — armed with duct tape and a Swiss Army knife. My writing would be full of self-mockery and rich with funny observations about my wife. Moreover, having experienced the splendor of the gig, my dispatch would be transformed, alchemically, into an essay that contained a series of pointed, even revolutionary, observa...

One way of reading the AKP’s progress is as a two-step process of privatization. In its first two terms, the AKP government privatized a large portion of Turkey’s state assets; since then, it has moved to make the state itself the private property of one man and his friends. The first phase — standard neoliberalism — won the AKP applause from the Western establishment, which is now aghast at the second phase, which looks more like Putin than Thatcher. 

When she’s in a state of panic, my mother bargains with the Lord and imposes fioretti on herself: no eating sweets, no going to the movies, no reading magazines, no listening to Rai Radio 3, for weeks, months, years. These days she can’t go to the hairdresser’s or watch TV. Sometimes the combination is no Radio 3 and no sweets. Or no coffee and no new shoes. She mixes them, matches them — it depends.