The Brooklyn Rail
Critical Perspectives on Art, Politics and Culture
February 2006
Books
Molly Peacock with David Varno
by David VarnoBooks
Poet Molly Peacock is back in town, to perform her one-woman poetry show for one week in February at Urban Stages. The Shimmering Verge is about the line between ordinary existence and the heightened state of reality inside a poem. Humorous, moving, and sexy, the stand-up monologue uses Peacock’s best-known poems about her family, her spirituality, her marriage, and urban life. Always excited to bringing poetry to the public, Peacock was one of the creators of the Poetry in Motion program on New York City’s subways and buses. The show is part of Portraits, a touring festival of one-woman theatre programs, and plays together with Nona, featuring cartoonist Victoria Roberts.
Prose Culture
by Hirsh SawhneyBooks
Literary fiction by young women is dominated by Zadies and Jhumpas, voices lauded as fresh because of their chic hybridity. In a twist of our times, the writing of Heather McGowan, a white Ivy Leaguer, might be more innovative and iconoclastic than many contemporary writers who allegedly transgress literary convention. For this Brooklyn-based playwright and novelist, it does not take a multicultural cast of characters, graphic sex or a context overwrought by contemporary fixtures to tell a tale that is relevant and original.
Poetry: Spicing Up Political Poetry
by Anju Mary PaulBooks
Three months after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, Palestinian-American Suheir Hammad performed her poem “First Writing Since”during the debut episode of the HBO series Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry.
Art: A Time to Remember
by Ellen PearlmanBooks
In October 1975, New York, hopelessly mired in bankruptcy, got down on bended knee and in uncharacteristic humility, begged the Feds for help. Ron Nessen, Gerald Ford’s press secretary, snidely countered by comparing the city to a drug abusing child—“You don’t give her a hundred dollars a day to support her habit”—leading to the now-infamous Daily News headline: “Ford To City: Drop Dead.” The financial crisis left a burnt-out, graffiti’ed, messed-up, drug-infested, weed-strewn city with barely functioning ratty, clattering subways. But, on the bright side, there were lots and lots of boarded-up, abandoned buildings, and the artists swooped in and partied like there was no tomorrow.
Essays: The Perfect Postmodernist
by Alexander NazaryanBooks
There is pretty much nothing in common between the porn starlet Stephanie Swift, who earned the Best Actress (Video) distinction at the 1998 Adult Video News Awards, and the Maine Lobster Festival, to which seafood enthusiasts make an annual pilgrimage. For that matter, there is no discernible connection between Joseph Frank’s exhaustive biography of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and The John Ziegler Show, a conservative talk radio program that airs in Southern California, except that both of them—along with pornographers and lobsters and an impressive array of other phenomena—come under the scrutiny of David Foster Wallace in his thoroughly engaging new non-fiction collection, Consider the Lobster.
