Norman Rockwell was an unhappy and enervated man who became iconic by painting scenes of happy, energetic people. He developed a style that became synonymous with idyllic visions of America. At Page-Turner, Lee Siegel reads Deborah Solmon’s American Mirror, a new biography of Rockwell that acknowledges the painter’s contradictions without “mocking or scolding” him for the gulf between his life and his art.
Master of Happy Scenes
Illustrating the Cave
TED-Ed illustrates Plato’s allegory of the cave in this fun video.
Keith Gessen Arrested
n+1 co-editor Keith Gessen was arrested in the midst of today’s Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. This video depicts part of the scene; he is the first seated man to be pulled away by police. This video depicts him making a statement (in handcuffs) at the 5:05 mark. (via)
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Viva the Memoir!
Deb Olin Unferth’s memoir Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War hits shelves today. To celebrate the genre, she’s curated a special section in this month’s Guernica, with selections by Joshua Cohen and Rozalia Jovanovic, and forthcoming pieces by Porochista Khakpour and Clancy Martin.
A Great Career
Back in May, our own Sonya Chung reviewed All That Is, the first novel in 35 years by A Sport and a Pastime author James Salter. For another viewpoint (courtesy of the LRB), check out James Meek’s assessment of the book alongside Salter’s Collected Stories.
The Trouble With Memoirs
“If you didn’t feel you were discovering something as you wrote your memoir, don’t publish it. Instead hit the delete key, and then go congratulate yourself for having lived a perfectly good, undistinguished life. There’s no shame in that.” Neil Genzlinger at the New York Times lays some ground rules for those compelled to write memoirs.
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Some New Releases: Kingsolver, Pynchon, Plath
Today arrives Barbara Kingsolver’s latest, Lacuna, “an epic journey from the Mexico City of artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo to the America of Pearl Harbor, FDR, and J. Edgar Hoover.” Also out are a couple more of those nifty “Olive Editions” from HarperCollins, this time of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Update: There’s a new edition of Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation too.
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