Word: criticism
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More than a half-century ago, in the shadow of Stalin and Auschwitz, the critic Lionel Trilling spoke of "the fatuity that does not know the evil of the world." The other night in Boston, a group of American college students declared that 9/11 and all that has followed are "media hype." Such sinister obtuseness is not typical of their age group, even on college campuses. Still, anytime before Sept. 11, most 19- or 20-year-old students, if asked to name the most dramatic-traumatic public event of their lives, invariably remembered the explosion of the Challenger. Evil...
...GLORY OF LIVING "He's mean," says the young girl of the man who has kidnapped her. "He is?" replies the man's abused teenage wife and partner in crime. No social critic could express with more eloquence or economy the plight of the white-trash couple Rebecca Gilman chronicles in her deadpan, slice-of-lowlife drama. This 1997 play, having its New York premiere in a fine production directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman and starring Anna Paquin, is a stunner...
...ELAINE STRITCH AT LIBERTY Do we really need another one-woman show in which a crusty Broadway trouper recounts her show-biz war stories while belting out Sondheim and Berlin standards? Yes, if she has enlisted as artful a collaborator as New Yorker theater critic John Lahr and can still perform, at age 76, with as much energy, wit and seen-it-all gumption as Elaine Stritch...
DIED. W.G. SEBALD, 57, German-born writer and literary critic; in a car accident; in Norwich, England. The author of such novels as The Emigrants and the just published Austerlitz, about a boy raised by Christians during World War II who later discovers that he is Jewish, Sebald wove intricate, shifting narratives often described as historic metaphors. In praising his work, Los Angeles Times critic Michael Andre Bernstein wrote, "History is a nightmare into which Sebald's characters and his books as a whole are trying to awaken...
...taught at the University of Nevada since 1992. It's a freebooting and democratic city where people with funny resumes fit right in. Whatever else he is--lucid hipster, tenured iconoclast and barbarian at the gates of art-world convention--Hickey, 62, is the only American art critic of consequence who used to play guitar for a country-and-western band. He is also proof that MacArthur Foundation "genius grants," like the one he was awarded this year, go to some shaggy characters, the kind who like low-rider cars and chain-smoke as a reminder of more intense pleasures...