The black-faced, red-lipped servant of Sinterklaas – often more beloved by regular folks than the goody-goody St. Nick himself, it must be said – has been the subject of controversy in the Netherlands off and on for decades. But this year, following the suggestion by a black UNESCO official that the character should be abolished, the issue has become “an existential revolt not seen in Dutch society since the murder of Pim Fortuyn.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Patti Smith Remembers Lou Reed
“A complicated man, he encouraged our efforts, then turned and provoked me like a Machiavellian schoolboy. I would try to steer clear of him, but, catlike, he would suddenly reappear, and disarm me with some Delmore Schwartz line about love or courage. I didn’t understand his erratic behavior or the intensity of his moods, which shifted, like his speech patterns, from speedy to laconic. But I understood his devotion to poetry and the transporting quality of his performances.”
In Search Of A Lost Fats Waller Musical
John McWhorter: “A Broadway show about a whorehouse in Martinique with music by Fats Waller sounds intriguing. Until recently, however, Early to Bed was largely a lost musical. As someone who has always liked both theatre music and old jazz, I always wondered why.”
The Novel Is Not Dead, People
Sam Sacks: “The death of the novel [is] a doomsday pronouncement so commonly invoked that it often seems more like a reflex than a reasoned argument. … This tendency to project one’s own cynicism onto the books that failed to magically prevent it has become a little too frequent these days, and it needs challenging.”
But Is Literary Style Dying In Today’s Border-Crossing World?
Tim Parks: “Style, then, involves a meeting between arrangements inside the prose and expectations outside it. You can’t have a strong style without a community of readers able to recognize and appreciate its departures from the common usages they know. … Style is predicated on a strict relation to a specific readership and the more that readership is diluted or extended, particularly if it includes foreign-language readers, the more difficult it is for a text of any stylistic density to be successful.”
Philosophy And Global Warming
“What does human existence mean against 100,000 years of climate change? What does one life mean in the face of species death or the collapse of global civilization? How do we make meaningful choices in the shadow of our inevitable end? These questions have no logical or empirical answers. They are philosophical problems par excellence.”
Why Art Forgery Isn’t Necessarily A Terrible Thing
Blake Gopnik: “While forgery is very clearly an economic crime, it may not always be an artistic or aesthetic one. Forgers can even be an art lover’s friend. Sometimes, they give us works that great artists simply didn’t get around to making. If a fake is good enough to fool experts, then it’s good enough to give the rest of us pleasure, even insight.”
Why Art Forgery Is Necessarily A Bad Thing
Peter Schjeldahl: “Wonders Gopnik, ‘Why not think of that picture as the sublime masterwork that Rothko happened not to have gotten around to?’ Well, because it’s not a ‘work’ at all but a pastiche whose one and only intention is to deceive.”
Before We Wait For Godot, How Do We Pronounce It?
“Maybe Godot never appears because everyone is mispronouncing his name.” There’s more argument than one might expect over whether English-speaking actors should say god-OH or GOD-oh. (Why doesn’t anyone suggest GO-doe?)
The New Yorker Reviews Virgin America’s Flight Safety Video
Richard Brody: “What’s fascinating, at first, is the mere idea; then, the whimsical tone (the electronic nun-sense, the snark about ‘the .001 percent of you who have never operated a seat belt before – really?!?’). But as the video progresses, it offers remarkable signs of the cinematic unconscious – or a subtly brazen audacity – at work.”