Posts From Author: Month: April 2016
Jon Ronson: In Search of the Genuinely New
“I suppose, being tweedy and owl-like, I just don’t look like the sort of person who normally hangs around extreme porn shoots.” This is a sentence in Jon Ronson‘s excellent book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. In his pursuit of a taxonomy of shame, Ronson finds himself on the set of a porn movie produced by the website Public Disgrace. The plot of the movie is scant: a woman is dragged into a bar, stripped, electrocuted, covered in beer, fucked. Every now and then, Ronson writes, “needing to ensure that I was accurately chronicling the minutiae of it,” he may have drifted into shot. “I just hope a few subscribers out there happen to find the image of a tweedy, owl-like journalist at an orgy stimulating, although I understand that this would be a niche quirk.” To read the rest of this interview, please head to the Literary Hub.
Read MoreThe Jazz of Physics: Exclusive Excerpt
The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe Stephon Alexander Basic Books, 2016; 272pp Early on in his mind-blowing new book, The Jazz of Physics, Stephon Alexander extols the virtue of analogical reasoning in theoretical physics. Fellow lay-readers of the quantum may well agree when I assert that this indeed might be the only way for many students of the theoretical to approach concepts like string theory. Alexander proves an excellent guide, revealing how the music of jazz musicians, first among them John Coltrane, have developed, in their work, a musical-imaginative extension of the theories proposed by Einstein and Pythagoras. In this exclusive excerpt, Alexander reveals the origins of his twin obsessions — jazz and physics — the guardian angels of his surprising, revelatory new book. Daniel Kaplan had been a trained master composer and a jazz baritone sax player and later was drafted to serve in the Korean War. During the war, he worked on radar technology. Consequently, Kaplan caught the physics bug and upon his return, pursued graduate studies in physics, while still playing his saxophone and composing. He would be the person that would solidify my passion to become a physicist. Kaplan was the chair […]
Read MoreRevolution Begins At Home
Fun Home Book and lyrics by Lisa Kron Music by Jeanine Tesori Based on Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) by Alison Bechdel Broadway’s on a roll right now, and it’s thanks in no small part to the Public Theater. If the groundbreaking Hamilton, a sell-out success at the Public in 2015, doesn’t win Best Musical at this year’s Tonys, hats will surely be eaten. And Hamilton would make it two in a row for the Public, which also championed the breakthrough hit Fun Home. As well as taking home Best Musical last year, the show picked up awards for Best Book and Best Original Score for Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori. The House of SpeakEasy is delighted to be welcoming Kron back to the Public on April 19 to talk about, among other things, her role in the creation of this extraordinary musical. The show is based on the genre-defying “family tragicomic” by Alison Bechdel, which was published in 2006 and made many of that year’s best books lists. A graphic novel, a memoir, a work of literary criticism (tackling Proust and Joyce, no less), and a landmark in LGBTQ literature, Fun Home tells the story of Bechdel’s childhood in a small Pennsylvania town and her coming out as a lesbian at […]
Read MoreAmerika the Beautiful
Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence Bryan Burrough Penguin, 2015; 608pp “We will burn and loot and destroy. We are the incubation of your mother’s nightmare.” — John Jacobs of Weatherman “The challenge for me… is to explain to people today why this all didn’t seem as insane then as it does now.” — Bryan Burrough Five hundred pages into Bryan Burrough‘s engrossing account of America’s recent radical past, we encounter one of his revolutionary subjects standing alone in the shower saying his own name, over and over, “to remind himself who he really was”. It may have been because Raymond Luc Levasseur, who led the United Freedom Front, had amassed so many aliases (more than a dozen) that his memory was in genuine need of a jogging. But the moment also feels touched by wider existential concerns. Time and again, veterans of the radical underground, many of whose stories are told in Burrough’s book for the first time, describe the miasma of collective madness that took hold of them and convinced them of the need to blow up buildings, rob banks, and murder police officers. There are some shocking moments, when theory […]
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