Kurt Vonnegut / Playboy Interview

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KURT VONNEGUT: PLAYBOY INTERVIEW (1973)

by David Standish

By 1962, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., had been writing novels for ten years; three had been published—Player Piano, The Sirens of Titan and Mother Night—and nobody had ever heard of him. He didn’t count. Player Piano had been haphazardly reviewed when it was published in 1952, because it was a first novel; and had been as haphazardly dismissed when the reviewers found out that it looked a lot like science fiction—which is to say, trash. In 1959, “The Sirens of Titan” came out as a paperback original, with a screaming space-opera cover—and didn’t get a single review. Ditto Mother Night, in 1962, which carried a cover blurb implying that it was part of the Kiss My Whip school of writing.
In the 11 years since, he’s written four more novels—Cat’s Cradle, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions, just published. His books are now reviewed in the lead slot of the Sunday Times book section; Slaughterhouse-Five rode the best-seller lists for more than three months and was nominated for a National Book Award; Breakfast of Champions was grabbed by three book clubs long before it came out; those early novels that the critics wouldn’t touch with a stick are now being taught in colleges all over the place; a book of original essays about him called “The Vonnegut Statement” just appeared; the number of Ph.D. dissertations considering his work is up to six so far, and you can practically hear the typewriters clacking in graduate schools everywhere: “The Ambivalent Relationship of Zen and Bokononism in ‘Cat’s Cradle’: An Approach.” And so on.

Kingsley Amis / The Old Devils / Review

THE OLD DEVILS

by Kingsley Amis

Introduction by John Banville

Age has done everything except mellow the characters in Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils, which turns its humane and ironic gaze on a group of Welsh married couples who have been spending their golden years—when “all of a sudden the evening starts starting after breakfast”—nattering, complaining, reminiscing, and, above all, drinking. This more or less orderly social world is thrown off-kilter, however, when two old friends unexpectedly return from England: Alun Weaver, now a celebrated man of Welsh letters, and his entrancing wife, Rhiannon. Long-dormant rivalries and romances are rudely awakened, as life at the Bible and Crown, the local pub, is changed irrevocably.

Brave New World: The Rise of Mass Man

by Laurence Brander
November 11, 2019


Huxley’s preoccupation with and concern about the increasing prosperity and numbers of the proletariat found expression in Brave New World, writes Laurence Brander. Huxley felt the masses had grown more menacing with population increases, according to Brander, and he wrote the novel at a time when it seemed mankind could not recover from the problems of war, depression, and explosive technological progress. Brander has also written books on George Orwell, E.M. Forster, and W. Somerset Maugham.

Michelle Rodriguez

Michelle Rodriguez Says Liam Neeson Can’t Be Racist Because of the Way He Kissed Viola Davis in ‘Widows’

DAVE MCNARY
FEBRUARY 7, 2019 10:08AM PT

Michelle Rodriguez attested that her “Widows” co-star Liam Neeson is not a racist because of how he kissed Viola Davis during the movie.

The actress came to Neeson’s defense Wednesday night at the amfAR gala in the wake of Neeson’s racially charged comments that he wanted to kill a “black bastard” to avenge a friend who had been raped. The actor later apologized and contended that his comments were taken out of context.

“It’s all f—in’ bulls—. Liam Neeson is not a racist,” Rodriguez told Vanity Fair at the New York event. “Dude, have you watched ‘Widows’? His tongue was so far down Viola Davis’s throat. You can’t call him a racist ever. Racists don’t make out with the race that they hate, especially in the way he does with his tongue — so deep down her throat. I don’t care how good of an actor you are. It’s all bulls—. Ignore it. He’s not a racist. He’s a loving man. It’s all lies.”

Davis and Rodriguez co-star in “Widows,” a thriller that sees the women attempt a heist in order to pay back a crime boss after their criminal husbands are killed. Neeson played the husband of Davis’ character.

Lionsgate scrubbed Tuesday night’s red carpet for the New York City premiere of Neeson’s upcoming film “Cold Pursuit” in the wake of the controversy. The film opens on Friday with Neeson portraying a Colorado snow-plower seeking revenge when his son is murdered.

VARIETY

Gwendoline Christie on Playing the ‘Complete Opposite’ of Brienne of Tarth

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Gwendoline Christie plays a character quite different from Brienne of Tarth in “Top of the Lake: China Girl.”CreditSundanceTV/See-Saw Films

Gwendoline Christie on Playing the ‘Complete Opposite’ of Brienne of Tarth

By JENNIFER VINEYARD

SEPT. 6, 2017

If Jane Campion’s first season of the crime drama “Top of the Lake” seemed remote and somber to some, the second season, “Top of the Lake: China Girl” has more of a sense of humor, even when delving into the darker recesses of life. (In this case, migrant sex workers, institutionalized misogyny, mental illness and more.) In the second season, which begins Sunday on Sundance, Elisabeth Moss’s detective Robin Griffin, who returns home to Australia after time in New Zealand, is assigned an overeager assistant, played by “Game of Thrones” star Gwendoline Christie.

Elisabeth Moss / An Ode to Mad Men's Peggy Olson / TV's Most Relatable Feminist

The Evolution of Peggy Olson 

(Mad Men Supercut)

An Ode to Mad Men's Peggy Olson: TV's Most Relatable Feminist

Eliana Dockterman
Mar 10, 2014

Over the last five seasons of Mad Men, we have watched Elisabeth Moss' Peggy Olson go from apologizing to Don Draper to sitting in his chair. Surprised by her initial success as a copywriter, Peggy slowly grew into her talent, eventually realizing that Don's approval wasn't everything and demanding that she be respected for her work. More than any other character on the show, Peggy has grown and changed, and on April 13—when the seventh and final season premieres—she will adjust to finally being in a position of real power.

Philip K. Dick / The Most Brilliant Sci-Fi Mind on Any Planet

Philip K. Dick

THE MOST BRILLIANT SCI-FI MIND ON ANY PLANET: PHILIP K. DICK

Burgling the Most Brilliant Sci-Fi Mind on Earth—It Is Earth, Isn’t It?

by Paul Williams

Rolling Stone, November 6, 1975

Paul Williams, founder of ‘Crawdaddy’ and author of ‘Das Energi’ and ‘Outlaw Blues,’ has been correspond­ing with Philip K. Dick for over seven years. In a recent letter Dick admitted to Williams: “Ever since the police lost interest in me, there’s been nothing to live for.”

PHILIP K. DICK’S ANDROIDS: VICTIMIZED VICTIMIZERS

by Aaron Barlow

Late in his career, in the essay “Man, Android and Machine,’’ Philip K. Dick said the android is “a thing somehow generated to deceive us in a cruel way, to cause us to think it to be one of ourselves.”¹ This is merely a description: unsure of the exact nature of the android, Dick could attain no definition. Even a clear dividing line between android and human proved impossible. Though the dangers of deception are clearly depicted in his fiction, Dick’s androids are its instruments no more often than are men. Each can be a constant enemy, or an inconstant friend. Both human and android may be means to someone else’s end. Like a man, an android sometimes proves to be something more than this. Each can be a victim, harmed by the deceit as surely as the deceived. To be truly victimized, a being must have a life beyond its utilization. Dick’s androids often have this life, just as his humans do.

Philip K. Dick / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

By Phillip K. Dick

TO MAREN AUGUSTA BERGRUD AUGUST 10, 1923 — JUNE 14, 1967

AND STILL I DREAM HE TREADS THE LAWN,
WALKING GHOSTLY IN THE DEW,

PIERCED BY MY GLAD SINGING THROUGH.

Yeats

AUCKLAND

A TURTLE WHICH EXPLORER CAPTAIN COOK GAVE TO THE KING OF TONGA IN 1777 DIED YESTERDAY. IT WAS NEARLY 200 YEARS OLD.
THE ANIMAL, CALLED TU’IMALILA, DIED AT THE ROYAL PALACE GROUND IN THE TONGAN CAPITAL OF NUKU, ALOFA.
THE PEOPLE OF TONGA REGARDED THE ANIMAL AS A CHIEF AND SPECIAL KEEPERS WERE APPOINTED TO LOOK AFTER IT. IT WAS BLINDED IN A BUSH FIRE A FEW YEARS AGO.
TONGA RADIO SAID TU’IMALILA’S CARCASS WOULD BE SENT TO THE AUCKLAND MUSEUM IN NEW ZEALAND.

Reuters, 1966

ONE

A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard. Surprised — it always surprised him to find himself awake without prior notice — he rose from the bed, stood up in his multicolored pajamas, and stretched. Now, in her bed, his wife Iran opened her gray, unmerry eyes, blinked, then groaned and shut her eyes again.

 

Last Things by Jenny Offill review – the wonders of imagination

The reissued debut novel from the author of Dept. of Speculation is a skilful dance between child and adult worlds

Emily Rhodes
Fri 1 Jul 2016 16.55 BST

I

n Jenny Offill’s first novel, reissued after the success of 2014’s Dept. of Speculation, we enter the world of eight-year-old Grace, full of childhood’s many strangenesses and questions. Why is twilight called that? What do bats eat? How can we conquer the darkness of nightmares? Her mother’s explanations are intriguingly imaginative: “twi” rhymes with sky and is a code word for blue; bats drink the blood of sleeping things; send the darkness of nightmares to your enemy by saying the Lord’s Prayer backwards then “Hag. Good Hag”. Grace’s mother is an ornithologist, and her father a scientist, so the wonders of imagination mingle with those of science, as we learn, for instance, that some ants keep aphids the way we keep cows, milking them for their honeydew and building them shelters like barns. While Offill beautifully portrays Grace’s burgeoning understanding, she points readers towards darker troubles – crucially, her mother’s restless unhappiness. Last Things is a skilful dance between child and adult worlds, as Offill steps from playfulness to poignancy, cruelty to kindness, wonder to piercing disappointment.

THE GUARDIAN

City on Fire author Garth Risk Hallber / 'I'm pure outsider'

‘New York always seemed to me like the greatest expression of what human beings could do’ … Garth Risk Hallberg. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

City on Fire author Garth Risk Hallberg: 'I'm pure outsider'

Garth Risk Hallberg sat in a room for six years writing a 900-page novel that he thought was unpublishable. Now he’s the most hyped writer of the year

Alex Clark
Tuesday 27 October 2015 18.01 GMT

W

hen we first meet, it’s early morning, and Garth Risk Hallberg has disembarked from a transatlantic flight only hours before. Nonetheless, he’s so fresh-faced and perky that I feel faintly embarrassed for ordering a super-strength coffee. He is obliging, serious, discursive – the very model of a publishing-friendly contemporary author. The other end of the day yields quite a different view: Hallberg leading the dancing in an industrial-chic basement nightclub in Shoreditch, T-shirt drenched in sweat, doing a slightly modernised punk pogo to Patti Smith and the Ramones. This is decidedly more old-school.

There Was Still Love by Favel Parrett / Review by Georgia Rose Phillips

 

There Was Still Love 

by Favel Parrett

REVIEW BY GEORGIA ROSE PHILLIPS

The much anticipated There Was Still Love is Favel Parrett’s third novel. It continues her legacy of writing moving fiction in her sparse but sentimental prose with a keen eye for cataloguing the intricacies of domestic life. This resplendent novel grapples with the personal ramifications of political upheavals as it tells a story inspired by the lives of Parrett’s Czechoslovakian grandparents, Mitzi and Bill, and their exile in Melbourne. The story is predominantly told through the perspectives of two grandchildren, Ludek and Liska, which imbues the novel with a child-like sensitivity.

Il Maestro By Martin Scorsese / Federico Fellini and the lost magic of cinema

Il Maestro

By Martin Scorsese

Federico Fellini and the lost magic of cinema

EXT. 8TH STREET—LATE AFTERNOON (C. 1959).

CAMERA IN NONSTOP MOTION is on the shoulder of a young man, late teens, intently walking west on a busy Greenwich Village thoroughfare.

Under one arm, he’s carrying books. In his other hand, a copy of The Village Voice.

He walks quickly, past men in coats and hats, women with scarves over their heads pushing collapsible shopping carts, couples holding hands, and poets and hustlers and musicians and winos, past drugstores, liquor stores, delis, apartment buildings.

Scorsese / Shutter Island

POSTERS & TAPAS

Martin Scorsese

SHUTTER ISLAND

The day I met Jake LaMotta, 'greatest middleweight that ever lived', at his favourite restaurant in New York

It’s late September 1997 and Mark Collings, rookie boxing reporter, blags an interview with his hero for Esquire magazine

Mark Collings

Sunday 21 May 2017

I met Jake LaMotta at his favourite restaurant, La Maganette, on the corner of 50th and 3rd in Manhattan, two weeks after the death of Princess Diana in 1997. It was one of those molten hot late summer New York days, but I had a wool suit and tie on. Beforehand I’d read a quote from LaMotta that said, “If you are somebody, you dress like somebody,” so I had decided to wear my only suit. I was drinking ice-cold Coca-Cola, trying to stop myself from sweating, when Jake arrived. “He’s just a baby!” he said to his son Jake Jr, gesturing towards me. I was 25, but looked younger than my age.

Jake LaMotta / Gallery

Vikki and Jake LaMotta

Jake LaMotta

GALERÍA

Jack LaMotta

Robert De Niro and Jack LaMotta

Jack LaMotta and Robert De Niro

Robert De Niro and Jack La Motta

Poster / Raging Bull

Posters

RAGING BULL

‘I made it as if this was the end of my life’: Scorsese on Raging Bull at 40

 

At a Tribeca film festival event, the director and his star Robert De Niro discussed the legacy of the greatest boxing movie ever made

Charles Bramesco

Monday 21 June 2021

In Martin Scorsese’s 1980 magnum opus, Raging Bull, the self-destructive boxer Jake LaMotta goes from the greatest to a washed-up parody of himself, clinging to his memories of the good ol’ days. For the director and star Robert De Niro, looking back on the film from the present day could have been tempting fate, a couple of ageing men reminiscing about their younger years via a movie illustrating the hazards of just that.

 

Raging Bull at 40: Scorsese's brutal boxing saga still bruises

Robert De Niro’s Oscar-winning performance as Jake LaMotta remains chilling yet it’s a defiant refusal to soften a deeply unlikable lead character that hits hardest

Guy Lodge
Friday 13 November 2020

T

here is a tendency among audiences – including, sometimes, even the best of critics – to judge movies by how much we warm to their characters. An “unlikable protagonist” surfaces again and again in reviews as a strike against a film: a problem, certainly, in a romantic comedy where you’d rather throttle both leads than applaud their happy ending.

Jake LaMotta

Jake LaMotta: a flawed character alchemised by Raging Bull into a mythical figure

 

LaMotta was immortalised on screen by Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, but their brilliant 1980 movie remade boxing history in the process

Peter Bradshaw

Thursday 21 September 2017

“Now, sometimes, at night, when I think back, I feel like I’m looking at an old black-and-white movie of myself. Why it should be black-and-white, I don’t know, but it is. Not a good movie, either, jerky, with gaps in it, a string of poorly lit sequences, some of them with no beginning and no end.”

Jake LaMotta

Jake LaMotta, former boxer whose life was subject of Raging Bull, dies aged 95

Bryan Armen Graham

Wed 20 September 2017

 

Jake LaMotta, the Bronx boxer who captured the world middleweight championship in 1949 and whose turbulent life was later the subject of the 1980 film Raging Bull, died on Tuesday because of complications from pneumonia. He was 95.

 

Artist Claerwen James, aged three months, with father Clive. Photograph: Martin Pope

Interview

'He returned to what he really was': Clive James's daughter on his poetic farewell

Artist Claerwen James on growing up with an extraordinary father – and how she bonded with him in his final months when they compiled an anthology of his favourite verse

Rachel Cooke
Sunday 27 September 2020

T

en months before his death last year at the age of 80, Clive James underwent an eight-hour operation to remove a tumour on his face. Already very frail – he had been suffering from leukaemia for a decade – afterwards it took him almost a week to emerge fully into consciousness. “And even then, he was foggy,” says his daughter, the artist Claerwen James. “He couldn’t really see, which meant he couldn’t really read – and that had never been the case before.” For her father, this was not a small thing, whatever the size of his other problems. Words were his life raft.