The cliché goes that the cold war ended with barely a shot being fired. More precisely, it ended because barely a shot was fired.
Victor Pelevin profile
At Russia Beyond Valeria Paikova profiles Victor Pelevin, Russia's most mysterious modern writer.
Apparently, he really does qualify as reclusive: "No one knows where Pelevin lives, where he goes or what he eats for breakfast".
Several Pelevin titles are under review at the complete review:
Le Carré realised that artful complexity, creative bafflement and surprising revelation are at the core of the serious espionage novel, and these aspects are nowhere better exemplified than in Schoolboy. It’s not a perfect novel – as ever, le Carré has his own idiosyncratic writerly flaws mixed in with his overall mastery of the detail and the considerable moving parts of the plot – but Schoolboy does show him at the height of his powers. It’s a very ambitious, dense and confident novel, and the fact that it’s never been filmed is a telling, backhanded tribute to its scale and heft.
Jonathan Franzen Q & A
Jonathan Franzen has a new novel out -- Crossroads --, the first in a trilogy, no less, and so the publicity machine has revved up, including now with Merve Emre's Q & A with the author at Vulture, Jonathan Franzen Thinks People Can Change.
Among much else he once again bangs the drum for Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children:
I have written about it, and I have remained confounded that it is not universally regarded as canonical. It’s Christina Stead’s great novel from the mid-20th century. It has three world-class characters. Most novelists don’t produce any world-class characters. There are three in that one book. It seems to me an undeniably feminist text; I don’t understand why it’s not canonical in women’s studies programs.
I haven't seen Crossroads yet but I do hope eventually to come by a copy and cover it; I do have a pile of Stead's novel, including The Man Who Loved Children, and should get around to covering that at some point, too.
The Deepest Escape Tunnel Underneath the Berlin Wall
Europe won’t become a military power. What’s more, it shouldn’t
The continent should play to its strengths, from sanctions and diplomacy to soft power
Anyone trying to sound weighty about European defence has to recite a set of traditional mantras. The speaker ritually mocks Europeans as naive vegetarians who need to understand that they live in a carnivorous world where the US won’t defend them any more.
Robert Kagan famously wrote that Europe doesn’t have a hammer so it doesn’t want anything to look like a nail. In fact, though, Europe’s weakness has helped defuse tensions. Imagine how the world looks from Moscow or Beijing, says Dan Plesch of London’s Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy: they see an almighty US military abetted by hostile little neighbours snapping at their heels. When Russia scans Europe and sees (at the risk of overdoing the phallic metaphor) a rusty hammer hanging in the cobwebbed shed, that’s relaxing. The cliché goes that the cold war ended with barely a shot being fired. More precisely, it ended because barely a shot was fired. A western attack could have entrenched Soviet military power. Today, the hawk dream of deterring Russia by sending many more western troops to the Baltics could prompt terrifying escalation.
Uh Oh – A Looming Book Shortage?
Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop launches new ‘DTF’ female ‘sexual desire’ booster.
The pressure to stay relevant has driven Playboy executives craz
“I am here.” “Missing man in Turkey accidentally joins his own search party before realising he was the person they were looking for.”
. LaBoissiere podcast chatted with me. And Noah interviews Jason Crawford about Roots of Progress(written).
Newscientist: Marie Antoinette's Censored Love Letters Have Been Read Using X-Rays
“The other side of that is – I was telling someone the other day – if Paul hadn’t been in the band, we’d probably have made two albums because we were lazy boogers.
“But Paul’s a workaholic. John and I would be sitting in the garden taking in the color green from the tree, and the phone would ring, and we would know, ‘Hey lads, you want to come in? Let’s go in the studio!’
“So I’ve told Paul this, he knows this story, we made three times more music than we ever would without him because he’s the workaholic and he loves to get going. Once we got there, we loved it, of course, but, ‘Oh no, not again!'”
There you go, that is a very simple and correct theory of The Beatles. I don’t care if you like “I am the Walrus” more than “Penny Lane.”
And via Bill Benzon, here is the new The Journal of Beatles Studies. And here is my earlier post Paul McCartney as Management Study.
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