Word: nationalism
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...Republic, and then The Nation, Manny built his caviar reputation. By now he was in New York, pursuing his three careers, befriending the right people in the Abstract Expressionist world and in magazine criticism. (Can't say whether he also hobnobbed with the top carpenters.) Like an assiduous upward-achiever, he was trying to get noticed; he didn't succeed enough to suit him. Even in his late collages, Manny was craving the attention of the art-critical establishment. A scrap on his painting Batiquitos reads: "Heaven to be noticed by Roberta Smith or [Adam] Gopnik...
...more complicated friendships was with James Agee, who reviewed movies for The Nation and Time, had contributed the text to the Dust Bowl picture-poem Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and would go on to write the novel A Death in the Family and the African Queen screenplay with John Huston. (He also worked vagrantly with Manny on a never-completed script.) Agee was the alcoholic Episcopalian golden boy to Manny's cranky Jewish mensch, and that may have stoked jealousy and resentment. How was Manny to know that Agee, however lauded in his time (he died...
...five-month stretch in 1949-50, Manny was employed as Time's Cinema critic. After The Nation and The New Republic, a Time stint meant a sharp raise in pay (he was hired at an annual salary of $8,500, a hefty sum back then) but a likely loss in status among the intellectuals whose favor he craved. He may have thought his work for the magazine was beneath his standard; Negative Space includes no Time reviews. I had guessed that the gig was painful, that editors rewrote his copy into Time-speak, with its backward-running sentences, space-saving...
...sidelines. Throughout the Games, stories trickled out of jailed dissidents, banned websites and curiously empty protest zones. Then, as though summoned by some kind of karmic force, the Olympics produced a parable for the Chinese. Like a one-man play on the perils of over-training and stifling national pressure, China's star hurdler Liu Xiang arrived in the Bird's Nest to run his first qualifying race - and then decided that it was all too much. The athlete who was supposed to be the face of China's Olympics turned his back to the crowds and limped...
...Chinese were obsessed with medals. At the Closing Ceremony, as the athletes flowed into the stadium, the medalists were ushered in first. It was a situation at odds with the egalitarian, celebratory mood but very much in line with a results-obsessed nation whose mission was to impress and, by impressing, to dominate. The athletes, unused to being distinguished from their teammates, appeared to be flummoxed, unsure of how to occupy the vast amount of space in the center of the Bird's Nest. Even during the pop interludes, the athletic participants were subdued, choosing to stand or sit rather...