Word: heroes
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Reading it now, with the burden of hindsight, one sees that Infinite Jest is ominously infested with suicides, including that of the hero's father, who cooks his own head in a microwave. But back then, Wallace seemed invulnerable. How could a man who had put such crowds of people on the page--Wallace's ear for dialogue was unmatched in contemporary fiction--truly be lonely? Once you've gone inside the mind of a critically burned toddler, as Wallace did in his short story "Incarnations of Burned Children," what horrors can't you face? When he accepted a professorship...
...that his ideal relationship includes “two or three special women.” Di Pasquale actually seems to develop an interesting rapport with himself, alternately expressing admiration, consternation, and even surprise at his own answers. The interview is prefaced by an introduction to our hero written by (drumroll, please) Matt di Pasquale, which tells us that Matt had “virtually flawless grades and SAT scores” and “scored fives on ten Advanced Placement Exams,” among other things. Harvard has seen its fair share of new and sensational publications...
...they needed the complicity, passive or active, of the "good Germans." That notion spurred Taylor's excellent 1981 play, with Alan Howard as Halder, a liberal professor who is made complicit in the atrocities of the regime through promotions, seduction and his own laissez-faire cowardice. Casting a flinty hero type like Mortensen in the role of a moral weakling seems inspired, but the movie isn't. Its attention to period detail and emotional nuance is lax, plodding, lacking either the grinding power of inevitability or a brief, fierce glint of Halder's conflicted conscience. As he is sucked into...
...artifacts of a vanished epoch, will probably be relegated to what Trotsky dubbed “the dustbin of history.” The standard by which he will ultimately be judged is his character and political commitment. Thus it is critical that we temper our paeans to this hero of the gulag with a sober analysis of his legacy both as an advocate and as a human being. There is no doubt that Solzhenitsyn’s novels played a dramatic role in disabusing the left of its residual romanticism for the Bolsheviks. But as Theodore Dalrymple observed...
...Question of Class I finished Mike Murphy's article "A Working-Class Hero?" feeling more disconnected from my own "class" than I ever did from Barack Obama [Sept. 1]. Yes, I am white, and yes, I spent years in a factory. But I've never had a beer during a lunch break (it probably would have got me fired), I have no problem with young executives, I actually like endive salad, and while driving my pickup truck, I listen to National Public Radio. I have no problem with a presidential candidate being perceived as élitist and would not vote...