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Posts From Author: Month: June 2015

Summertime Blues

We don’t believe in fate at the House of SpeakEasy but there was something of the pathetic fallacy in last week’s show, Summertime Blues, falling as it did at the start of a gloomily tropical week in New York City. Fortunately, we had all the right ingredients to dispel any seasonal mooning. Our spring/summer finale featured Sarah Lewis, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Irvine Welsh, Laura Michelle Kelly, Edward Hirsch, and Steven Pinker, plus a whole lotta painting, philosophy, burger-flipping, poetry, and first dates. Sarah Lewis, first up, took us back into the past. Her grandfather, Shadrach Emmanuel Lee, a bassist who played with Lionel Hampton and Count Basie, turned to the arts in high school, when he “asked his teacher where African-Americans were in the history books. And his teacher had told him,” Lewis continued, “that we had done nothing to merit inclusion. For his repeated insistence on asking that question, he was expelled from high school.” “He certainly is not alone in being inspired on to creative heights through the adversity borne by the foundations of his own life. My grandfather inspired me to consider this phenomenon more closely. I was so inspired that I wrote an entire book about it, entitled The Rise.” (Read our review of The Rise here). “At the end of […]

To Be Frank

Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage Barney Frank Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015; 400pp “In 1954, I was a fairly normal fourteen-year-old, enjoying sports, unhealthy food, and loud music,” writes Barney Frank at the start of his zippy, witty memoir. “But even then I realized that there were two ways in which I was different from the other guys: I was attracted to the idea of serving in government and I was attracted to the other guys.” These two tendencies — towards public service, towards men — are the organizing principles of Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage, which traces the activist Congressman’s career from his childhood in New Jersey through his thirty-two-year career representing Massachusetts in the House of Representatives. Along the way, we witness Frank’s efforts on behalf of the LGBT community during the AIDS crisis, we hear the true story of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, and we see the financial crisis from the perspective of the man who lent his name to the biggest finance reform act in living memory. The yardstick for Frank’s half-century of service is the contrast between the America of his youth and the […]

Curtain Call: Summertime Blues

Hey, so it hit ninety degrees this week in New York City. That’s right: the sort of temperatures that mean you have to wear two, maybe three outfits a day. After six months of winter, sure, you think, why not? Until you get on the subway. Or have to move quickly between two different places in midtown. Or start to genuinely consider buying an e-reader because carrying Henry James around in this inferno is just like way too much. Do you have the Summertime Blues? We’ve got the cure. Join us at City Winery NYC on Monday, June 15, for another Seriously Entertaining lineup of writing talent. Wanna meet them first? Read on, amigos. (And don’t forget to buy tickets.) Ian McEwan has called her “a rare find among contemporary novelists: she has intellectual muscle as well as a tender emotional reach.” She’s a philosopher and a novelist. In her novels The Mind-Body Problem and Properties of Light, she borrowed concepts from philosophy and quantum physics to explore our basic instincts. Her books on theology, as well as philosophers like Plato, Spinoza, and Gödel, have earned her a large and devoted following. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein and her husband, Steven Pinker, will be our first “Seriously Entertaining couple”. Read: […]

Plato at the Googleplex: Review

Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein Knopf Doubleday / Vintage, 2014; 480pp “Just accept the one preposterous premise that Plato could turn up in twenty-first-century America, an author on a book tour, and everything else, I hope, makes sense.” That’s the preposterous but brilliant premise of Rebecca Newberger Goldstein‘s latest book, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away, a witty and stimulating tour of Ancient Greece interspersed with “out of time” Platonic dialogues with a right-wing talk-show host, an agony aunt, the 92nd Street Y, and staff at the Google campus in Mountain View, California. Remember that bit in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure when Socrates, Beethoven, Joan of Arc et al go wild in a shopping mall? It’s sort of like that, only with a much more rigorous approach to textuality. It’s also a fierce defence of the practice of philosophy today, at a time when many scientists and other “philosophy-jeerers” would have you believe that philosophy is just a stop-gap, a method of generating questions that will later be answered by science, and has no inherent value in itself. Goldstein intersperses these witty imaginings with historical context for the thinking that her Plato puts […]

Review: Gabriel – A Poem, by Edward Hirsch

Gabriel: A Poem by Edward Hirsch Knopf Doubleday, 2014; 96pp A Poet’s Glossary by Edward Hirsch Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014; 736pp How To Read a Poem and Fall in Love With Poetry by Edward Hirsch Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999; 368pp “Many of the very greatest poems seem as if they were written in blood,” Edward Hirsch once wrote. So it is with his magnificent, harrowing Gabriel (2014), a book-length poem that anatomizes Hirsch’s grief over the death in 2011, at the age of twenty-two, of his son. Gabriel is an elegy, a confession, a howl. It’s a poem steeped in literary history but also fluent in contemporary idiom and reference (the poem’s epigraph comes from a Blink-182 song). Reviewing it feels intrusive — like reviewing a eulogy. Yet I also imagine that Hirsch, always a passionate advocate for “a participatory poetics”, understood that in publishing such a personal work, each new reader would, in a sense, encounter Gabriel alive once more; the creative act of reading would have a resurrective aspect. In How To Read a Poem and Fall in Love With Poetry (1999), he wrote that “The lyric poem seeks to mesmerize time. It crosses frontiers and outwits the temporal. It seeks to defy death, coming […]